Author Archive

Tiger Woods, Heath Care and Men in White

So what goes with Health Care debates and the Tiger Woods scandal? This Tiger thing is so silly.

How much do you think one can make by saying you slept with Tiger? You know what…come to think of it…
I slept with Tiger!

Did you sleep with Tiger? I think we should have a national “I admit I slept with Tiger Woods Day”. That way at least this thing will just stop and we can get an actual news story reported. So tomorrow when you get up, get a white t-shirt out of your closet and take a magic marker and write on it, “I Banged Tiger” maybe you’ll get a stimulus check in the mail?

So here’s a little mixing of a star who falls and important health care issues.Clarke Gable plays an up and coming surgeon who’s gets caught up in infidelity. Men in White(1934)

The film is best know for how it handles the topic of abortion and more interestingly the man (Clarke Gable) suffering consequences of the botched procedure. (Dead girlfriend, public humiliation, fiance leaves him).The League of Decency was none to thrilled about this film and cut the daylights out of it as well as determining it was unfit for public viewing. Here’s a great description of the melodrama which has that fall from grace Tiger feel to it.

The Big O and why you should thank Hedy Lamarr for your wireless connection

Happy Monday! Here’s a little something to pick you up or at least to transport you. This little clip just took me somewhere else. I just found it beautiful. The crane shot at the end..(I mean that had to be a crane) made you feel like you were a fly’s soul escaping. Very hypnotic.

And here’s a little Hedy Kiesler (Lamarr) nudity for the evening.

I can’t quite find the orgasm scene. When I dig it up I will definitely post it. This was done before she had fled her husband Friedrich Mandl, an arms manufacturer who was conspiring with the Nazi’s. (This is wacky, because he was apparently half Jewish). She changed her name to Lamarr later.

So get this. This is the coolest thing I have ever heard about a Hollywood actress. So turns out Hedy Lamar, the woman who was famous for the first depiction of a female orgasm on film. (Which again, when I find I promise I will post) was also a co-inventor of a device that we base our current secure military transmissions on.

Or something like that (It is called Spread Spectrum Technology). Basically, we could not have had wireless technology without her. Cool, huh?

Upset over Pandas

China is repoing our pandas! I mean why can’t they just take all our bankers? I mean we don’t need those. I know that apparently there is a lot “talent” on Wall Street that is in danger of extinction, so maybe we can do an exchange. They can take all our “talented” bankers and investors and we can keep the pandas.

Butterstick is gone. AKA Tai Shan.
Oh….the ridiculousness of it all. Repoing pandas. Sad Panda. Seriously. I mean how did that meeting go with Obama? We don’t have any money so take our pandas?
I become very sad about this whole thing and stayed in. My husband went out and I curled up on the couch with a movie I’ve been meaning to watch for awhile. The Match King was fascinating. I wish they showed this movie to those who got Harvard MBA’s. All those people of “talent” who took the panda away. I had never heard of this film, but I’m wondering why these films are not more popular now. I mean this guy, this character Paul Kroll was based on Ivar Kreuger who created the financial model which has been used by Enron and is the basis for most of the international corporate structure we know today. Okay, I gotta ask, why are we not talking more about the fact that the current financial model being used is being based on a famous fraud?
The Match King gives a version of the life of Ivan Kruegar who makes Ken Lay and Bernie Maddoff look like amateurs. The story in the film is that of a man who makes an empire and a monopoly by giving loans off of future earnings and ultimately kills himself when the counterfeit bonds he uses to make a payment on a loan that was due is exposed by the stock market crash. Sound familiar?
What is also fascinating is the obvious sociopath that the character Paul Kroll is. So here’s a film which obviously tells us what we should have been paying attention to all along. Right there under our noses. (I mean if it was on, knew it existed and could find it.) Well now I’m telling you, find this movie and show it to any “talented” business person you know. Hell, buy it for your boss for Christmas. I’m sure it’s available somewhere on DVD. Here’s another interesting fact that they talked about in the movies. Have you ever heard that expression “Three on a match”? You know the one that says that three people shouldn’t share the same match because the third will have bad luck? Well the character Paul Kroll in the movie makes it up to sell more matches!

So what does this have to do with repoing pandas? Well, if we didn’t have so many Paul Kroll’s or Ivan Krueger’s still wandering around messing things up I think we would have more pandas not none.

So if you love pandas, watch this movie. There. .

How to act like a nut job the morning after

Thanks Barbara. Wish I would have seen this before I started dating and making an ass of myself.

Hope you had a great holiday! The Hitler Channel, Casablanca and Conrad Veidt

Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. God, I’m full. So I got to spend the holiday with my parents and my husband. Was fun. At my parents’ house it is a ritual to watch some old movies. Lots of them. My husband is not so tolerant of our addiction so we broke it up with a little Hitler..uh, I mean The History Channel. They had a great series on WWII in HD my Dad recorded. Lots of really interesting footage in color taken by the military and by people in the military. I’m not a huge fan of this kind of stuff but it was very good. Very moving and candid. Ugh…Obama is about to speak about the troop deployment. It’s so terrible what these families have to go thru. Thoughts are with you.

On a lighter note, Casablanca was on (we won’t talk about the exchange between my husband and I when he turned off the TV right before Humphrey Bogart says to Claude Rains “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”).

Here’s a great bit of dialogue that is a bit timely..

Woman: What makes saloonkeepers so snobbish?
Banker: Perhaps if you told him I ran the second largest banking house in Amsterdam.
Carl: Second largest? That wouldn’t impress Rick. The leading banker in Amsterdam is now the pastry chef in our kitchen.
Banker: We have something to look forward to.

Ok that was fun. So now for Conrad Veidt. My mom was reeling over my find  Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others 1919). She was an admirer of Veidt, but now she was fascinated, she saw a whole new level to his performances and how versitile he was. He wasn’t just that tough guy who played evil Nazi’s anymore.

“Did you know he gave his paychecks to the war effort?”, my Dad said. “He hated Nazi’s so much he donated all of his earnings he made from his films to the war effort to fight the Nazi’s.”

I have no idea if this is true but it made sense. I mean they destroyed at least one great film of his that I am aware of. According to Wikipedia he was strongly opposed to the Nazi’s and fled Germany after he married a Jewish woman. I liked him enough when I saw him in the film Anders al die Andern, now I just think he’s seriously cool.

Amazing that he ended up being famous for playing Maj. Strasser the big bad Nazi in Casablanca.

Why else is Conrad Veidt a bad ass? He was the model for the Batman character The Joker!

Take a look at The Man Who Laughs.

What is also interesting about him is how he flourished on the bookends of the Pre-Code era films. He made many films before 1929 and then again in 1938-his death in 1943. During the Pre-Code film era he had Nazi problems. So he is the inverse Pre-Code star.

One Way Passage

The New York Times is reporting the financial distress of the Dubai Sovereign Fund. I gotta say, I’m a little surprised.  About a year ago, I was expecting the financial center of the world to shift from New York to the Middle East or China. I think I’ve been leaning towards China, but I was really expecting the Middle East, especially Dubai to show a bit more longevity.  I’m by no means an economist, but thinking about it now, it makes sense. The growth was too quick. Unsustainable as they like to say. Ok, so what about China? Well…we owe them a serious amount of money.

So they seem to be able to call the shots, right? Well, I guess not? Because somehow and I’m not sure how this all works out…but we are all in the same boat it seems. Somehow…we’re all screwed.

Somehow, we’re all in the movie One Way Passage. Think of An Affair to Remember or Sleepless in Seattle without the happy ending or fabulous reunion. I take that back. This reunion is fantastic.

So a couple meets on a ship and fall in love, but they both are going down. He’s a convict and she’s dying. GREAT STUFF!! After they set up a tradition of glass breaking when they are together and they are torn apart by sickness and prison:

They had agreed to meet again on New Year’s Eve, a month later. At the appointed time and place, a bartender is startled when two glasses on the bar break, then vanish.-Wikipedia

So since the world is it’s own version of One Way Passage there must be a way for us to break the glass. Even if we can’t make it to the party together, we should agree to leave something for the future, even if it is without our presence.

Discovering the Amazon

It has been brought to my attention that I must travel to the Amazon…com that is, in order to purchase the new “it” toy for the season for the tiny ones in my life. Or maybe just my dad. What the hell is the big deal about Mr. Squiggles anyway and what is the difference between a Zhu Zhu and a Furby?

Hamsters? This is very bizarre. So while I’m in the Amazon, I think I’ll make a pit stop and check out a little jungle romance. A Tarzan movie perhaps? These are kid friendly, right? I mean at least they were for kids in the 30s. Or maybe it was just a good film for mom.

So Tarzan the Ape Man, the first in the series of seven is supposed to be the best, before the code went into effect. Just all kinds of wrong. So while you are watching your Mr. Squiggly or whatever it’s name is run and coo around your living room floor, get a little Tarzan time in and watch a couple grown adults act like toy hamsters. At least you can have a mutual experience with your family.

The Cheat or the U.S. Debt Bomb

So I read an article in the Times today about the ”U.S. Debt. Bomb.

“What a good country or a good squirrel should be doing is stashing away nuts for the winter. The United States is not only not saving nuts, it’s eating the ones left over from the last winter.” -WILLIAM H. GROSS

Ok, I’m bummed, how about you? I mean I was so looking forward to going Christmas Shopping on Friday. But that’s not going to happen now because the financial world is going to blow up.

Here’s a chart to depress you further from the New York Times:

Marie Dressler and Oprah Winfrey

So Oprah is going to stop doing the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Ok, it’s not like I sit around the house and watch Oprah every afternoon, and I have to admit I’ve become a bit snotty about her. But that is just because I’ve gotten older and snottier not because I don’t like Oprah and not because I didn’t watch her announcement and cry. I did. Oprah is a strange social compass for me. If Oprah talks about it, it’s fun, enlightening, slightly indulgent, sympathetic, but most of all very very ….normal. Where am I going to turn to in this current media environment to find a rational meeting place. Ellen? Meh. Don’t get me wrong, I like Ellen, but Oprah…

I grew up in the Chicago area. Let me be more accurate. The Chicago broadcasting area. I grew up in Wisconsin. But Oprah, I remember watching her on a show called AM Chicago. I’d watch her when I came home from school. She started conversations about stuff we weren’t supposed to talk about, started dialogues about hatchets that were far from buried and struggled along the way with all of us.

Who will be our cheerleader? Who will stare us in the face and say, “You can do it!”?

Well, while we are trying to figure that out, here’s a bit of comfort. Before Oprah, there was Marie Dressler. You could go to the movies and see someone who was you. Or who you wanted your mother to be. Who bonded with the audiences in such a deep way.

Here’s a excerpt from the blog ” The Well Rounded Mama-Size-Acceptance Warrior, Birth Activist, and One Fierce Mama.”

“She was the top draw at the box office for most of the early 1930s, and the highest-paid star in Hollywood for several years. She was so famous and so popular that she was the cover of Time Magazine in its August 7, 1933 issue.

She was nominated as Best Actress for two years, and won it in 1931, despite being an older woman (in her 60s) in Hollywood, which, as today, worshipped mostly the young and beautiful.

Oh yes, and she was a woman of size.”

I think Oprah would like Marie and Marie would like Oprah. So for those of you out there who need a little guidance and a positive female role model or hell, just a great role model, take a night off, watch a little Oprah and then take a look at “Min and Bill”.

I’m sure Oprah would approve. I guess what I’m saying is, there is no replacement for Oprah, or Marie for that matter. But every once in a while someone comes along that can bring us together and has a unifying entertainment value that transcends religion, race, gender, age and makes us cry whether we want to or not.

So go ahead and be sad. I know I am. But just know, someone will understand us again. I hope.

In honor of Obama's Trip to China

So according to the New York Times is reporting that China is assuming a larger global role. Aparently, Mr. Hu was enjoying his new found ability to push back on American demands. So to cheer up Mr. Obama, here’s a little treat.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen it’s directed by Frank Capra so it’s sure to cheer him up a bit.

Oh, this is a fun one!

Because of the interracial theme of the Chinese bandit and the American missionary woman falling in love, there was a great deal of protest from some groups at the time of the films release. Joseph McBride’s Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success quotes Barbara Stanwyck as saying:

The women’s clubs came out very strongly against it, because the white woman was in love with the yellow man and kissed his hand. So what! I was so shocked [by the reaction]. It never occurred to me, and I don’t think it occurred to Mr. Capra when we were doing it. I accepted it, believed in it, loved it. (McBride, page 281)

Cheer up Mr. Obama! It’s not like Nixon did any better. Kick back and enjoy the show.