You want us to do what now?…
Fred and Ginger getting ready to bump heads in “The Carioca” in Flying Down To Rio (1933) Released almost 80 years ago this month….
So find eight pianos in a circle and a bunch of extras (some with fruit on their heads), and get out there and try it yourself!
Holiday Spending!
Ok, I hate to be Althousian, but if you do any Christmas Shopping through Amazon, I personally request that you please go to my blog Fluffy Stuffin and make your purchase through my Amazon portal. I finally made $18(!) from a years worth of purchases from various folks. As I am in a huge struggle to merely exist…anything would be greatly appreciated. Your price won’t be worse for using the portal, but I get a small slice. Thank you again, and I apologize for the pleading.
Ok, I’m late, but here I am!
I am a bit late writing this post, but I promised it to Karen! I didn’t really want this to turn into “Ron’s Health Odyssey” and I debated how I wanted to write it. Not too mention that I’ve been going back and forth to the hospital a lot and busy posting my game collection for sale on the BoardGameGeek, but here goes.
After months of relatively ineffectual antibiotic, i’m finally having some luck with occupational therapy treating my leg. it’s the old fashioned way; they’re squeezing my leg like a tube of toothpaste, starting at the foot all the way up to the knee. I stick my leg in the leg Squeezer and lie back and think about Tahiti for an hour. It’s finally shrinking, and it has gone down about 2 inches in diameter in just 3 treatments. I go twice a week, and they’re trying to get me a machine of my own! I would have preferred a KitchenAid stand mixer, but you get what you get in life! There are some minor negative side effects; the skin cracks and bleeds somewhat after the machine, and it itches like mad. i’m also wearing something on it during the day for compression. So I’m getting lighter as well. My OT does lymphatic massage on me to move the fluid through.
I really need my car (or a car, at least) as winter approaches. I also intend to go back to the YMCA to get back in the swing of working out.
I will post more when I get more info about what they will do with me. But for now, let’s celebrate
Love to you all,
Ron
Biopic
In the comments in the “Word of the day” post, Icepick mentions that McArthur’s dad would be a good subject for a movie and I agree! But I nominate Merion C. Cooper for a biopic as well… Former head of RKO, fought in the Russo-Polish War, had an Indiana Jones life of exploring the world, wound up on the deck of the Missouri for the Japanese surrender in WWII (retiring a two-star general), produced several of John Ford’s movies after the war, and early proponent of both Technicolor and Cinerama. He’s most famous for directing King Kong…he has a cameo in it as the guy in the plane who knocks the Big Ape off the brand-spanking-new Empire State Building. I remember from an old TCM documentary that after Kong’s success, they asked him what he liked for the subjects of the next film ( a musical!) and he said, “I like airplanes….and South America.” Thus did RKO make Flying Down to Rio which not only have Fred Astaire in it, but would include as Astaire’s partner…Cooper’s girlfriend! But when he proposed to her, she decided she would be marrying the head of the studio and didn’t want to act anymore. So they gave her part to some dame under contract to RKO….Ginger Rogers. A fascinating life!
Neat-o link about Cooper here.
Just a note…
I have a new post (!) over at End-of-Work.com after a long hiatus. Enjoy!
This….is good to wake up to
I had this the other day…and right now I’d like another one!
The old home town
That great sage of American culture, Beavis, of Beavis and Butthead, summed up what I think should be the approach Detroit takes to its new future: “This sucks. Change it.” I was born and raised in Detroit. I didn’t leave until I was 26, and it’s not like I went that far when I did; Ann Arbor is only about 40 miles west of Detroit. But…Ann Arbor is worlds away from Detroit, in so many ways. The air for one. I didn’t notice how bad it was for most of my life until I moved to a city without enormous factories everywhere. When you live in a place with an actual downtown you can walk on a Saturday night without the ambiance of random gunfire, you notice these things. Hell, I even worked for almost two years for the City of Detroit. Yeah, I got a ton of stories from there, and I’ll regale you with those at some point, but even then, I knew I couldn’t stay.
I could give you all the conventional reasons why you’d leave a Detroit, but, for the most part, those wouldn’t be mine. The reason I was eager to leave was that Detroit was proud to be stuck where it was. It knew it was having huge problems; but it was NOT going to change the way it was doing any thing. That’s not a good attitude to have when things are going well, and an even worse one to have when things are going badly. I knew a fighter pilot who had fought in Vietnam and I asked him what he would do if he spotted an enemy plane “in his six.” (directly behind you) He said, “Anyway you go is better than the way you’re going now.” Detroit seemed to think it could stand being shot at better than it could change course. Why be proud of not changing? That isn’t it exactly, it’s rejection of how you’d perceive yourself in the course of changing. Detroiters (or is it Midwesterners generally? Discuss!) reject what they would perceive as the arrogance of EastCoasters and the flakiness of WestCoasters for a more “reasonable” view of the world. Even if that perception were even vaguely true, it forgets how virtues often degenerate into parodies of themselves. What was once steadfastness becomes calcified stubbornness, well past the point of being “reasonable”. Now they wake up, find themselves billions in the hole and thinking about selling everything that isn’t nailed down, and a lot that is. Maybe some arrogant flakiness would have been better when times were more flush.
Certainly I’ve been reading plenty o’ punditry across the spectrum about the upcoming bankruptcy of my old town; there’s more finger pointing than Uma Thurman on David Carradine at the end of Kill Bill V.2. Megan McArdle has a pretty good summary of them here at her new digs on Bloomberg.
Here’s the funny thing: Detroit will be a leader in an entirely new area for entities of its size, dealing with a humogouse bankruptcy. It’s not that everyone else’s (Chicago? California?) bankruptcy will be identical to Detroit’s, but often the first one through the door will establish patterns for the others. As Detroit goes, so goes the Nation? Geez, I hope not.
Ambiance 