In case anyone out there is keeping track, I just passed 1,000 book titles on my LibraryThing catalog, and I still have several boxes to go. I don’t know whether to be proud at the expanse of my collection, ashamed at the amount of money I’ve spent over the years, or depressed that I’ve read so few of them…
One of Salt Lake’s hidden treasures is this nifty little place called The Organ Loft, a monument to one man’s hobby that his family maintains for the benefit of local film lovers. So the story goes, Lawrence Bray fell in love with the sound of the pipe organs that once provided musical accompaniment for many old-time silent-movie theaters and, beginning in the late 1940s, he started acquiring components of these old organs as they were scrapped out of Salt Lake moviehouses. He assembled them in his uncle’s chicken coop, adding onto the building several times over the years as his instrument grew. Today, that much-enlarged (and improved) chicken coop is The Organ Loft. Owned and operated by Lawrence Bray’s nephew, Larry, it is one of the few venues in this country, and probably in the whole world, where you can see a silent movie in something close to the way our great-grandparents must’ve experienced it.
I shouldn’t say anything, because I know that political entries never bring happiness to anyone, least of all me. But I’ve been reading all about this developing scandal surrounding Representative Mark Foley and his messages to Congressional pages, and I want to make sure I fully understand the situation. So, let’s review:
Courtesy of Evanier, here’s a fun little item for fans of classic cinema: someone has edited all of Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearances in his own movies into a four-minute video clip…
We get a lot of strange weather effects here in the Salt Lake area, presumably because we live at the bottom of a giant bowl that’s enclosed by mountain ranges to the east and west. Incoming storm fronts usually either squeeze through a narrow aperture between the mountains at the south end of the valley, or they blow in from the northwest, across the Great Salt Lake. Once the storms enter the valley, the prevailing winds tend to drive them into one mountain range or the other, where they pile up and expend their energy as they try to climb over the obstacle. And this in turn often generates some spectacularly weird stuff up there in the sky.
FYI, I had some weird Internet problems all weekend, so I was unable to post several political entries that I had in mind as follow-ups to the previous one, or to respond to the comments left on “Disgusted” until this morning. I’m thinking that’s just as well; I really don’t want to continue mulling such an incredibly depressing and dangerous development when there’s so damn little I can do about it personally. At least until election day, when I’ll make my usual futile gesture in the name of good conscience (i.e., voting blue in the most overwhemingly red state in the union; it’s like spitting into the wind, but I’ll do it anyhow).
In the meantime, let us think of more amusing things. Things like a list of the Top 176 Star Wars Lines Improved By Replacing A Word With “Pants”. As you can imagine, many of these have naughty overtones, and a few cross the line into outright tastelessness, but hey, there’s nothing wrong with that, right? Here are a few of my favorite examples:
- “Chewie and me got into a lot of pants more heavily guarded than this.”
(Hmm… talk about taking your friends everywhere with you.)- “I cannot teach him. The boy has no pants.”
(I can see how that might be a distraction.)- “I sense the conflict within you. Let go of your pants!”
(What every teenage boy says to his girlfriend at least once in the course of their relationship. Most often heard at drive-in movie theaters midway through the second feature.)- “I think you just can’t bear to let a gorgeous guy like me out of your pants.”
(Aww, how endearing.)- “Alderaan is peaceful, we have no pants!”
(Ah, yes, Alderaan was a happy place back in the day.)
The number-one item on the list is, predictably, “I find your lack of pants disturbing.”
Indeed we do. Indeed. We do.
My concept of America formed early and was gathered largely from old black-and-white movies, Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, and, yes, Star Trek, which despite all the lip service about a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-species crew projected a largely American (specifically JFK’s “New Frontier” America) sense of identity. And while I never subscribed to the jingoistic “we’re number one” mantra that so many of my classmates seemed to reflexively utter whenever news of some international dispute managed to filter down to our grade-school consciousnesses, I always understood that Americans were the good guys. I may not have quite believed in the concept of American exceptionalism, but I did believe that our country was respected in the world and, more importantly, worthy of respect, not because we were superior human beings who were inherently better than everyone else, but because we chose not to do the kinds of nasty shit that other nations did. Like Captain Kirk choosing to spare the helpless Gorn, who would surely have killed him, the Americans of my understanding struggled to rise above our brutal natures, to find a better, more humane way of doing things.
That meant we didn’t send our own people to Siberia for speaking their minds. We didn’t persecute people because of their religion or lack thereof. We didn’t invade and take over other countries in order to expand our own territory or influence. We tried to help the rest of the world, not just ourselves. We cared if innocent blood was unavoidably shed. And we most certainly did not, under any circumstances, torture people.
Following a link from Scalzi’s AOL Journal brought me to this page, which contained the following list of 25 Signs That, Sadly, You’ve Grown Up:
Interesting… yesterday, I read that a man named Paul Vance, who wrote the obnoxious 1960 novelty tune “Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” had died. Today, however, I see that the report wasn’t true:
In celebration of Star Trek‘s 40th anniversary and relaunch in all-new computer-generated semi-glory, Lileks has applied his humorous cudgel to the less-than-inspiring efforts to keep the franchise alive during the mid-70s. This was the period between the cancellation of the series and its big-screen rebirth in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, when fans really didn’t think the show would ever return and, presumably, they’d take whatever crappy souvenirs of their beloved obsession they could get. I remember seeing most of these ads in my old comic books. They looked pretty lame to me when I was a kid; they look really bad now.