SansFin

Gorilla My Dreams (1948)

I feel that: Firefly shows clearly the problem which the genre faces: literate science fiction is a very specialized niche market while cheap and cheerful attracts hordes of viewers. Joss Whedon focused on high quality while the programming executives at Fox knew what would attract advertisers. That conflict hastened the demise of what would have been a marginal exercise at best. Watching Ron Glass is a delight at all times. The slight menace he puts into the phrase: "A special helll" will forever bring a smile to me no matter how many times I watch it.

The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans A sudden enemy attack cuts an army scout off from his unit. His flight to evade capture leads him to the isolated hut of a demented wizard. The wizard enchants the scout's sword to improve his chances of returning safely to his army. All is fine and well. Except .... the wizard did not have all of the proper ingredients at hand for the spell and was forced to improvise. The results were imperfect, skewed, a misenchantment. The invulnerability guarantees the sword will kill a warrior every time he draws it but it will not aid him against a second warrior until it is sheathed and drawn again. It makes him immortal but only in the sense that he can not die and offers no protection from illness, having limbs chopped off or aging. The misenchantment means also that he can use the sword a certain number of times before it turns on him. An interesting point of this is that no one is quite sure exactly what that number is. The early works of Lawrence Watt Evans are comfort food. He is in the realm between Terry Pratchett and J. R. R. Tolkien. He did not cram his stories with humour simply for the sake of chuckles and he did not paint intricate and convoluted landscapes. You can cuddle up with his words and simply feel good. This book is one of his best in that regard.

I am quite happy to say that: Firefly (2002–2003) is available now on: TubiTV! The setting is that cowboys, the Chinese and soulless bureaucrats colonized space. It is very dark and very funny. I would never recommend that any person who is not a lover of science fiction begin by watching the first episode. It is very dark and somewhat convoluted and has far less humor than most other episodes. I would like to think that some who do not care for most science fiction will at least give this series a try by watching the episode: Our Mrs. Reynolds. It is a romp and has minimal science fiction for a series set on a tramp spaceship smuggling goods from planet to planet. Ron Glass plays one of the most delightful characters. He is a Shepherd which is a sort of combination monk, missionary and vicar. He is conflicted about living on a ship crewed by criminals. His ability to rise to an occasion is demonstrated when they are preparing to rescue the pilot and the captain. Zoë walks up to him as he is checking a weapon: Zoë: "Preacher, don't the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killin'?" Shepherd Book: "Quite specific. It is, however, somewhat fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps." Only Ron Glass could deliver that line with such aplomb. Summer Glau was a ballerina before moving on to acting. She is here a brain-addled waif of incredible grace and fluidity of movement. She reminds me that sharks also do not have bones. 9.4/10

The idea has recently been put forth that a serial killer could openly present all of the grizzly details of their crimes and yet never be caught if they simply put the confessions in the blog portion above recipes.

For those who do not know of: Gulpo and who do not click links: I believe that it is easy to see how the right side of the image might be stylized to produce the holiday ornament.

My first thought was that it is a stylized version of: "Gulpo - The Fish Who Eats Concepts" https://hivemill.com/products/smbc-gulpo-sticker?_pos=2&_sid=d6d118941&_ss=r

I have seen in the last year three organizations switch from handling their own mail order business to placing it all on: Amazon. There have been claims that the fees are more than offset by cost of local warehousing and the inefficiencies of sometimes fulfilling only a few orders each day. Let us hope TCM's announcement is no more than that.

I apologize in advance that I am posting of videos which most people can never watch because they are exclusive to: Disney+ but it may be that a few here might for other reasons use a free trial offer to the service or who subscribe but never explored all of the crooks and nannies of the site. I am sorry also that my descriptions are so very minimal. They are short videos and it is difficult to say much of them while avoiding spoilers. I would hate to detract from their wonder and innocence. BURN-E (2008) Eight minutes. This is the simple tale of a simple worker droid who simply wishes to do his simple job. Events on a grander scale keep making things complicated. This takes place within: WALL-E (2008) in the vein of: "it is a big ship and much is happening but the main movie can show only what affects the main characters". For the Birds (2000) Four minutes. This is a charmingly tiny morality play showing what may happen if you ridicule and pick on those who are different. Jack-Jack Attack (2005) Five minutes. A teenaged babysitter becomes unglued when a superhero's infant begins to show his powers. This takes place within: The Incredibles (2004). I have read that it was meant to be in that movie but was cut for reasons of time. Presto (2008) Five minutes. A magician's rabbit wishes to be fed. Chaos ensues. Lifted (2006) Five minutes. Imagine a teenager taking his first driving test and having a little accident. Or two. Or twenty. Transpose that to a young alien attempting to abduct a sleeping human while under the watchful eye of a humorless examiner. Disney+ has a wealth of cartoons and shorts in their: Movies->Shorts menu. I urge all who have access to the channel to explore them.

It is recent and it is television but the most wonderful depiction of this that comes first to my mind is: J.K. Simmons in: Counterpart (2017-2019). He plays both a kind, considerate and somewhat naïve low-level bureaucrat and his egotistical, amoral and cunning intelligence operative in a parallel world. I love: Double Indemnity (1944) very much. This is due in part to Walter Neff's transition from a somewhat soulless and unimaginative sales droid into a plotting amoral conspirator chained by frigid lust. Every person has buttons which can be pushed to provoke reactions. His glimpse of her anklet is the equivalent of the mains switch activating Frankenstein.

I have heard that the farmer who fed beans to kids was told: "Whatever bloats your goats."

She was indeed a grand lady. The forum was quite lucky to have her. She is sadly missed.

My motto has become: "Men! You can not live with them, you can not leave their body by the side of the road."

I believe that: Bob Hope and: Bing Crosby made several movies of this type. I am surprised that no one has mentioned them. A newer addition to this genre is: The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (1970). I have not had opportunity to watch it yet but I have read that it is very good. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065957/?ref_=kw_li_tt

I would never suspect you of malicious intent. Your comment reminded me that I was posting for intent other than contributing to the topic of the thread. I feel strongly that asides are a natural and welcome part of any thread but there is a line between interesting tangent and subverting the thread. I wish to never cross that line.

I do apologize. I had noticed a distinct waning of fluency in my spontaneous posts and so my New Year regimen is to write at least an hour each day in an informal but correct manner. I have inflicted these writings on those in several threads here because this is the sole English-only forum which I visit regularly. I will try to find a more appropriate outlet for my meanderings.

I suggested early that we buy a small shipping container so that we could load locally and then have it moved to new location with no fuss. My little fuzzy nixed the idea because he has a fear of such containers and of storage in trailers. Do you know what is a: "pivot irrigation system"? They are a long pipe supported by towers mounted on wheels. One end is anchored in the middle of a field and the wheels are powered to sweep the pipe over the field in a circle. Sprinkler heads on the pipe water the crop. My little fuzzy needed a fulltime day job early in his career and worked as an engineer for a company which manufactured such systems. Sales were seasonal but the company kept full staff year-around by manufacturing their standard models and placing them on semi-trailers. One trailer=one complete system. Each was worth several years' wages for an average person. They noticed one day that some were missing. Investigation showed that the only control was that a truck driver have a single piece of paper to enter the storage yard and could then hook up to and drive out with whatever they wished. Records analysis showed that more than ten percent of their inventory was gone. It was believed to be an: "inside job" because the thefts stopped immediately upon discovery with no public awareness of the situation. The company very nearly went bankrupt and had to divest itself of most office personnel including all of research and development because the banks pulled all loans which had inventory as collateral. They needed years to recover. A major company was renovating a newly-purchased building. The entire electronic infrastructure from telephone system to telex equipment to mainframe computer and terminal system were being removed with intention to determine what should be reinstalled according to a new plan and what should be sold as valuable scrap. The contractor hired for the removal stored the items in trailers on site. They assumed the owning company was moving some of it to a different location to free working space when the containers began disappearing and did not report it. Final analysis showed that nearly a million dollars worth of equipment had been stolen over the course of months. This was in the mid-1970s when that was considered a respectable amount of money. These and other incidents of similar nature gave my little fuzzy an abiding fear of storage systems which might with ease go wandering. I have spoken with the owner/manager of the facility where we have one unit. He has said that most people indicate that they will need storage space for a short time only but that most often becomes years. He has a number of units which have not been opened in more than a decade.

Please do not dis storage units. We made an offer on a house nearly three years ago. We rented a storage unit near it to facilitate the move so that we could take items not immediately needed because we were making many trips to finalize the purchase and wished to make best use of the time. That then fell through. We continued to take goods to that unit when looking for other homes in that area in hopes of reducing the size of the U-Haul truck which we would eventually have to rent. We rented also a storage unit locally because we anticipated that any eventual move would be faster and easier if done from a storage unit with a wide door rather than coping with the tight zig-zag path out of the apartment dozens of times on one day. It allowed us also to stage the goods by immediate need and method by which they can be transported. That storage unit mostly contains items which we did not absolutely need on a daily basis but would need to access at intervals. We have at last found and purchased a house suitable for us. We have now some of our goods with us and some goods in a storage unit four hours north and some goods in a storage unit eight hours southeast. We have only a general idea of what is where. It does not help that we are moving from two-thousand square foot apartment to twelve-hundred square foot house. Storage units are allowing us to determine how much and when to bring our goods into our new home so that we can take time to find best place for each item rather than being in a rush to just jam things where they will fit in order to clear the maze of boxes.

A person's perception of time is linked to available space. Workers in cubicles and executives in corner offices have significantly different experiences with elapsed time. Most people find that time seems to go slower in large rooms. This has a generally relaxing effect. The hub-bub of life seems lessened. People/problems/situations with which you must deal are both literally and metaphorically distanced. A common anecdote is that a house with many small rooms makes people feel as if they are trapped in a rat's maze while a house of the same square footage but few distinct rooms makes people feel as if they are exploring a world. This alteration in time perception is a driving force in the "open floorplan" design craze. The innate sense that much could be happening in such a large space but it is not happening and is not crowded leads to a sense that the world is leaving you alone for a while. This study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29684246/ is interesting as it presents this alteration of time perception as a map onto which waypoints and new routes can be pinned. I find it a better source of information on this matter as it does not focus on one aspect of the effect but treats the entire topic as a whole in order to provide a background for their information. People have long known that perceived time can have little relation to real time. I believe the standard is: "One minute with your hand on a hot stove feels like hours while an hour sitting with a pretty girl feels like a minute."

I find it quite sad that: Vera Vasilyevna Kholodnaya does not truly qualify for this thread. She was quite lovely and graceful. She was a well-loved and much-respected actress in silent movies. She is not of the 1920s because the French foully murdered her in 1919.

I do hope that all here understand that the flippancies of the help do not reflect the views and opinions of the management of this household.

I knew a young man who acted as bodyguard and crowd control for a studio to protect and shelter stars on their way to locations. It was mostly on trains but there were times when they went on buses and subways. It was all by public transportation with taxis or studio cars at each end. He did not go with them when it required flight because the airline would provide security and some other team would pick the stars at the other end.