A very merry unbirthday to you!
An evening pause: Truly Walt Disney’s most frenetic and surreal animated films.
Twinkle twinkle little bat,
How I wonder what you’re at.
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea tray in the sky.
A nightly pause from the news to give the reader/viewer a bit of classic entertainment.
An evening pause: Truly Walt Disney’s most frenetic and surreal animated films.
Twinkle twinkle little bat,
How I wonder what you’re at.
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea tray in the sky.
An evening pause: In honor of the 35th anniversary today of the premiere of Star Wars in 1977, a beautiful and silly rendition by the Piano Guys.
For those who were not alive in the 1960s and 1970s, it is hard to explain the impact of Star Wars. For more than twenty years, science fiction fans had dreamed of seeing a really good space opera science fiction film on the big screen. Sadly, we saw disappointment after disappointment instead. Except for Forbidden Planet (1956) and television’s Star Trek in the 1960s, practically every science fiction film about space exploration told childish stories that made no sense.
And then came Star Wars.
An evening pause: As you giggle at this, be forewarned: seventy years from now what you consider sane will be considered just as absurd.
An evening pause: “The monkey mocks me with each flip.”
Only those who have explored deeply into the avant-garde French film world will truly understand this classic.
An evening pause: Though this video is about Switzerland, its philosophy jives perfectly with the events that took place on this day, April 19, at Lexington and Concord in 1775.
An evening pause: This Rod McKuen song, “Jean,” performed here live by him on the Johnny Cash Show on February 4, 1970, was originally the title song for the wonderful movie The Prime of the Miss Jean Brodie (1969), starring Maggie Smith.
An evening pause: The Purdue Society of Professional Engineers team set a new record last week for longest ever Rube Goldberg machine, taking 300 steps to flawlessly blow up and then pop a balloon.
An evening pause: From frigid Russia, some Russians put on the Ritz.
An evening pause: The finale of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Just before the song begins, Candide says this:
We will not think noble, because we are not noble. We will not live in perfect harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We can only promise to do our best, and to live out our lives. Dear God, that is all we can promise in truth. Marry me, Cunegonde.
An evening pause: A very talented actor once told me that a great deal of all comedy is based on contrast, on juxtaposing extreme opposites in unexpected ways.
An evening pause: The central sequence from the 1979 movie, The Black Stallion, when the shipwrecked boy Alec succeeds in taming the shipwrecked Arabian horse. The combination of Carmine Coppola’s music and Caleb Deschanel’s photography in this sequence is unmatched.