Tom’s World – 28AUG2024 – Statues – 5

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I don’t know the story of this group of statues except that they depict typical young people from an earlier era and are located in the common area of a downtown Pensacola residential area.

 

Admiral John Towers, Naval Aviator number 3. In 1914, then Lt. Towers was ordered to Pensacola to create the first training program for Naval Aviators.

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Obviously a Photoshop composite. This combines heavily modified elements of a bronze statue from the US Naval Air Museum and a scene from St. Michael’s Cemetery in Pensacola. St. Michaels contains graves from the 1700’s when Florida was a Spanish colony.

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Closeup of the Confederate Memorial Monument located in Arlington National Cemetery. I recently read that the storm clouds were gathering around this monument for it’s removal as, I suppose, a National disgrace.

We Don’t Send Servicemen to Your House Anymore

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Today was an amazing experience.  I get my land line and internet service from my cable tv provider.  Yes, yes, I know.  I should have cut the cable years ago.  But I’m lazy and I also like to watch Turner Classic Movies so I never bothered to figure out a streaming stratagem that would save me some real money.  But anyway, I’m still using these clowns.

So, I get home today at about 2pm and I open my laptop and all my open webpages are MIA.  I restart the Wi-Fi and … nada, zippo.  So, I travel down into the bowels of the earth to check out my modem.  And the worst had happened.  It looked totally dead.  Not three lights or two or even one.  No lights.  I performed the sympathetic magic.  I turned off the power and counted to thirty and flicked it back on.  Once again, zippo.  It was truly and utterly dead.

So, I called up the cable company on my emergency phone.  I’ll have to say these guys have absolutely mastered the science of aggravating non-human communication.  The synthetic female voice they’ve selected is Karen incarnate.  And everything she does and says enrages me.  If she asks me a question, it sounds like she’s finished but just as I try to answer, she throws in an unnecessary addendum and talks over my answer.  She’s relatively deaf and even for an AI she’s really quite stupid.  Finally, she exasperated me so badly that I shouted something at her.  At which point she thanked me for being a loyal customer and hung up on me.  I think that’s the first time I’ve been terminated by a machine.  I think I know now how Dave Bowman felt when HAL 9000 terminated his call after refusing to let him back in the space ship.

Eventually I managed to reach a semi-human.  This was slightly less aggravating.  After about fifteen minutes I convinced this customer service professional that the modem had died indeed.  So, I asked if a serviceman could be sent today to replace it.  She started laughing.  “We don’t send servicemen to your house anymore.  We’ll have it delivered and you’ll install it sir.”  It turns out they would ship it the next day and it would arrive in about two more days, depending on the vicissitudes of UPS or FedEx or whoever they send it by.

I objected and said I didn’t want to be without phone or internet for three days.  She countered that I could pick it up at one of their conveniently located storefronts.  I grumbled “Okay, where is it?”  It turns out it was forty-five miles away.  So, I choked back my rage and said, “Fine.”  And she wished me a happy and bountiful day and asked if I agreed that she had solved my problem to my full satisfaction and then reminded me that Big Brother loves me.

So, I schlepped out the door with the defunct modem sitting next to me in the passenger seat and commuted into the wilds of southern New England with the afternoon sun in my eyes and utter contempt for my cable provider in my heart.  By the time I got there I was calmer and as it turned out the folks at the store were much more helpful and friendly than the telephone drones both carbon and silicon based.  And a mere hour after that I was home and I had the internet mostly running.  But my land line is still not working so I’ll have to call them up still again.

It occurs to me that after living my whole life with instant communication as a living breathing reality the service I receive from my communication company has deteriorated by several orders of magnitude.  Back when AT&T was the whole shooting match, I never lost service and if my equipment wasn’t working properly, they sent a competent repairman out who would fix the problem promptly.  They would never send me to the ends of the earth after first torturing me with an artificial human playing twenty questions with me.

This can’t be the way future is supposed to work.  I have to assume that our civilization has been infiltrated by an evil race of space mutants that have a fiendish plan to slowly drive us insane via cable providers.  Well, it’s worked.  I’ve gone around the bend.  I love Big Brother.

Stage Fright (1950) – A Movie Review

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Stage Fright is an Alfred Hitchcock suspense movie.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Jane Wyman is Eve Gill an acting student who is in love with Jonathan Cooper.  Unfortunately, Jonathan is in love with Charlotte Inwood (played by Marlene Dietrich) who unfortunately is married to a man she doesn’t love.  One day Jonathan comes to Eve and asks her for her help.  He tells her that Charlotte came to his apartment in a dress covered in blood and told him that her husband started beating her and in self-defense she killed him with a fireplace poker.  She asked Jonathan to go back to the scene of the crime to get her a clean dress.  But while he was there the maid saw him and called the police.

Jonathan asks Eve to help him hide from the police until he can figure out how to escape from the trap, he has found himself in.  Eve enlists the help of her father “Commodore Gill (played by Alistair Sim) who owns a boat that Jonathan hides on.  Meanwhile Eve goes to Charlotte’s home to see what the police are up to.  While snooping around she meets police detective Wilfred Smith (Michael Wilding) who happens to be working on the case and she proceeds to fall in love with him.  She also manages to insinuate herself into Charlotte’s household by impersonating a relative of Charlotte’s maid and theatrical dresser.  In this role she discovers that Charlotte has no intention of disrupting her life but instead expects Jonathan to flee the country permanently.,

Meanwhile Jonathan sneaks into the theater where Charlotte is playing and confronts her.  She explains that she will not be joining him in permanent exile and he reacts by saying he has the bloody dress and he might give it to the police if he has to.

Finally, Eve and her father arrange for the police to eavesdrop on Charlotte being confronted about the bloody dress in a fake blackmail conversation with Eve.  But in the conversation Charlotte states that even though there is blood on her dress Jonathan murdered her husband in front of her.  Meanwhile Inspector Smith has captured Jonathan at Eve’s home and he has been brought to the theater for questioning.  He breaks loose and Eve helps him hide in the theater basement with her.  While this is going on Smith reveals to Eve’s father that Jonathan is actually a dangerous maniac who has killed before.

While hiding with Eve, Jonathan confesses to Eve that he did indeed murder Charlotte’s husband more or less at her instigation.  He also admits that he previously killed another man, but was cleared based on self-defense grounds.  And then he hinted that he would be executed for this new murder unless he was thought completely insane.  And the only way he could think of convincing a jury of that would be if he killed another person for no reason at all.  Now Eve sensed her personal danger and she tells Jonathan that they must escape the building before the police got down into the basement.  And as he walked through a door ahead of her, she locked it behind him and screamed to the police to capture Jonathan.  Jonathan was now on the stage and trying to escape so the police dropped the heavy fire curtain (actually a heavy metal sheet) to trap him but just as he reached the edge of the stage he tripped and the steel curtain crushed and killed him.

Great Caesar’s ghost, I’m exhausted just reciting that plot.  And I left several subplots and characters out.  There’s Charlotte’s manager that she’s having an affair with and Charlotte’s mother who is estranged from her father and Eve’s friends, one of whom is played by Hitchcock’s daughter, and on and on.  It’s a bit much.  Plus, Dietrich sings several songs and that maybe okay for her French song but the one in English wasn’t so good.  Without a doubt this movie is very odd.  I enjoyed it, maybe because of its oddity, but I tend to doubt most people are like me.  Let’s say this is for Hitchcock fans who like the theatrical.

Au Revoir Lesbian Space Witches of Color

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Over the last decade or so it has become obvious that Hollywood and specifically, Disney is more interested in producing content that adheres to a social justice message than they care about making money.  Examples of this are plentiful.  Every recent installment of the Star Wars movies and their spin-off television series has suffered heavily from this policy.  And recently the fans have reacted to this decision by abandoning the franchise.  And to a greater or lesser degree similar results have been seen in the other Disney entertainment franchises; Indiana Jones, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and even things like the Toy Story movies.  It’s gotten so bad that Disney has been forced to fire directors, cancel series and scale back earnings estimates.  Which is something no CEO wants to do.

I have heard that Hollywood is claiming that they’ve heard the message and they will rededicate themselves to producing entertainment that is actually entertaining to regular people.  Now if that happened, I would be ecstatic.  Seeing Hollywood learn its lesson and focus its significant talents into putting out original and entertaining movies would be phenomenal.

But it won’t happen.

The people who run Hollywood are social justice extremists from the soles of their feet up to their eyebrows.  They would rather see their companies go broke than give up their message.  They will keep pumping out Star Wars movies that feature lesbian space witches of color as the main characters until Disney has to shut down the studio.  The idea that the ticket buying public wanted to see Luke Skywalker rescue Princess Leia with the assistance of Han Solo and that all three were white, sexually normal characters is completely unacceptable to them.  They have the same message as the Harris campaign, “We won’t go back.”

So that means the future of entertainment won’t be Hollywood.  And we’re already seeing the alternatives.  I’ve been informed by one of my grandsons that movies are being made based on the fiction produced by YouTube influencers who write stories based on video games.  So, a space video game has an audience of tens of millions of boys and young men.  And one guy writes a narrative story as an adventure in that game and millions of these gamers read the story and because of this immense popularity a movie studio (Amazon or Netflix) produces a movie from this story.

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.  Eventually that will replace Hollywood nicely.  Someone said to me that this won’t avoid the social justice activists because all the studios are the same.  But there are indications that isn’t true.  A couple of years ago Netflix produced Dave Chappelle’s comedy series that was pretty strongly critical of the transgender agenda.  When Netflix employees protested the series, they were told overtly by Netflix that if their consciences wouldn’t allow them to work for a company that produced the Chappelle series, they should work somewhere else.  And that put an end to the protests.  I suspect that a home will be found for content that has an enormous built-in audience even if there is an extreme shortage of lesbian space witches of color in the script.  Maybe it’ll be Netflix that steps in or maybe it’ll be a new company that an entrepreneur like Musk founds.  But at this point it’ll happen because people are still people and they want to be amused and message fiction isn’t entertaining.  It’s boring so something will have to give way. Au revoir lesbian space witches of color.

02SEP2024 – Quote of the Day

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I will admit that an artist may be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul; but there must be this one magical and unique word. Shakespeare gives us the word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous certainty; but Henry James, no; a hundred times he flutters about it; his whole book is one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken; and for want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze of nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance with them; they pass you in the street, they stop and speak to you, you know how they are dressed, you watch the colour of their eyes.

George Moore