Someone on the internet said that "mass psychosis formation" had been used in the run-up to the Russian invasion, and posted many pictures that had Blue and Yellow as the dominant colors. We were being trained in advance to take sides!
It's been a project long in the making, if you judge from the 50s Zenith ad above.
We went to see a play on Saturday, in St. Paul. It was written and directed by a friend who is an exceptional actor, and director. He did a movie many years ago that gathered up Natalie and her classmates for a long tracking shot of little Catholic kids, thereby gifting them all with IMDB credits.
It was good! During intermission I went outside for some fresh air, and noted the sights of Seventh, a St. Paul street with a hard history and many new bars and businesses occupying the old commercial building. I was astonished by this barber shop:
It’s as if the last 60 years never happened. There’s an appetite for such a place, no? We’re drawn to them as if by buried instinct.
I suppose it would strain your good will if I kept talking about the trip, so I won’t, except for this. I had four hours to kill in the Boston airport.
I do not recommend having four hours to kill in the Boston airport. But I can’t think of any airport where that applies.
First requirement was a hogshead of coffee, sipped with great care and deliberation so I could burn up some time. That was the objective: do everything slowly and carefully, walk a lot, spend time in the shops examining everything, walk some more, then lavish an entire hour on supper. Here's something I noticed only when I thought about it later:
No TVs.
No Airport CNN.
Middle seat on the flight back home. I'd had the middle seat on the flight out. The curse of the late reservation. It was JetBlue, but was also an American Airlines flight somehow, and you feared that the poison touch of AA would ruin everything. You'd board a JetBlue plane and then the engines would fail, and crews would come by to fix the engines and repaint the fuselage in the AA livery.
Slept fitfully. Woke as we were descending then fell asleep as we made our runway approach, jerking awake when we touched down. No idea what time it really was. Went outside to let the cold air wake me up, and felt somewhat sad and empty.
A sign of a good vacation, perhaps: over too soon. But something else. I felt as if I had traveled back to, oh, 2016 or so.
And it wasn’t 2016 anymore. We'll get to that on Wednesday.
I'm strapped today, so we're going to some leftovers from England.
I hate to think what it replaced.
The street has its own wikipedia page, which says "Berwick Street is a street in the Soho district of the City of Westminster built between 1687 and 1703." Obviously, they didn't stop building.
City of Westminster, it says. I've never been clear on the concept of cities within the City of London.
There's so much of this:
It's not even a particularly graceful example of the genre, and I prefer it to almost anything else.
For example.
Although I'm not opposed it it. Perhaps you need one of these every so often to add some vitality. It certainly moves, and breaks up the architectual harmony, but on the other hand it breaks up the architectural harmony. Sums up the spirit of its era, though, for good and for ill.
Finally: the Tate. Deep, man.
I took fewer pictures this year, but that's okay.
This is the last contest I can find. The decline in this feature was quite steep.
The entrants were annoyed that they'd taken the good ones. What else is there to say? "They go fast at every house! It's the fresh Double-Mellow everybody likes always."
Let the crawl bring you up to speed.
I think we can put to rest the source of a certain series of movies.
We saw the ship explode - surely they were all dead! Well of course not.
Saturn, with its thin atmosphere, normal gravity, and breathable air.
The pursuers call back to the Leader, and his swank office:
The Leader bitches them out for not making sure they’re all dead, so the bad guys head down to Saturn to look for them. That’s basically the next six minutes. Some fist-fights, but alas no one wears hats so they’re not the exciting serial hats-on fist-fights we’ve come to love. Lots of back and forth - Buck’s crew has the bad guys, then the bad guys get the drop, etc.
By the way, this is Saturn.
The captured heroes are returned to Killer Kane’s spaceship, but surprise! The Saturn dudes show up. I love this guy; he sounds like such an American, except for the forced reliance on the NO CONTRACTIONS, THEY ARE ALIENS rule.
Down to another hidden base. Saturn’s got some nice tech.
For its time, it’s every sci-fi lover’s dream, this stuff. I mean, this is Star-Wars level stuff, considering the era.
Buck makes the case for Saturn helping the Earth’s Hidden City, but the council doesn’t want to throw in their lot with . . . rebels.
He got about two sentences out.
Maybe they shouldn’t have sent someone who’d been awake in this era for what, a day or two?
They’re sentenced to imprisonment, but Buck gets a gun and they escape. They’re pursued by EVERYONE including the Zuggs, who are dull orcs; they make it to the bad guys’ ship and take off.
Some fine stormtrooper-style marksmanship there.
Back on Earth . . .
I think the prop department might have used a tad more imagination here.
Anyway, the Earth base can’t contact Buck, because he shot out the radio to avoid being remote-controlled, and now the Earth base thinks the stolen ship is operated by Killer Kane, and he has the entrance code to the base, and naturally has sent ONE SHIP ONLY to destroy them.
And so:
There’s always a bunch of loose support structures up in the attic.
