longchanged

Posted on Wednesday, 2005 May 25 by Anton

Yesterday I received in change an Irish €.02, whose resemblance (in size and color) to US $.01 is striking.

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cinema 1949

Posted on Sunday, 2005 May 22 by Anton

Three Ealing comedies recently became available that I had long wanted to see. Evidently I’m not alone: I waited several weeks for these on Netflix. Alas that the sound on these discs is not as clear as one might hope.

Passport to Pimlico (dir. Henry Cornelius). The next-to-last unexploded bomb left over from the Blitz goes off, revealing a cache of treasure and a royal charter declaring that the neighborhood is sovereign territory of the duchy of Burgundy. Soon the street is swarming with black-marketers and shoppers rejoicing at a loophole in wartime rationing (which was not lifted until 1951 if memory serves). Naturally the Government surround Burgundy with Customs and passport inspectors. The Burgundians retaliate by stopping a train with their own inspectors . . .

Whisky Galore! (dir. Alexander Mackendrick, who later directed The Ladykillers). During the war, an island in the Hebrides runs out of whisky and all is gloom – until a ship carrying fifty thousand cases for export hits a rock nearby. Hijinks ensue. — Gordon Jackson, whom you may remember from Upstairs Downstairs (Hudson the butler) or The Great Escape, here is baby-faced at 25. He had one of those faces that proclaim even in black-and-white that the bearer must have red hair. — Small spoiler: This is the only Ealing film I’ve seen in which lawbreakers (cheating the taxman) get away with it.

A Run For Your Money (dir. Charles Frend). Two Welsh brothers win a prize for their coal-mining excellence: a trip to London, £200 and tickets to a football championship match — but they miss their contact at Paddington and have misadventures. The comedy is low-key by today’s standards.

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it ain’t you either, babe

Posted on Monday, 2005 May 16 by Anton

Every few days I check my HTTP log to see who has linked to me. (It is entertaining sometimes too to see what search keywords led here.) The pleasure of that little chore has long been tainted by spammers; I guess it was December or so when I stopped making a note of the sources of such bogus referrals.

This week, something new and puzzling: referrals ostensibly from two hundred other WordPress blog pages – some of them two years old – that contain neither any reference to ogre.nu nor any conspicuous link to gambling, sex-pills or spamming services.

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it ain’t me, babe!

Posted on Monday, 2005 May 16 by Anton

Some clown is using my address to spam everyone@amherst.edu with what appears to be an account of the bombing of Dresden. Why??

Posted in militaria, spam | 1 Comment

this and that

Posted on Friday, 2005 May 13 by Anton

I’m sneezing up a storm today, and the good old allergy pill hasn’t helped. I do hope it’s not the same virus that afflicted my housemate for two weeks last month.

Who is the center of the movie universe? Kevin Bacon is not even in the top thousand. Rod Steiger has the lowest total path length. But would the result be different if actors were weighted by some measure of prominence (e.g. number of credits)?

It’s annoying to find a crank on our side. Rex Curry has for some time been documenting the sordid history of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, and bully for him; but lately he’s gone a bit nuts in his efforts to demonstrate that the Nazi swastika stands for Socialism, frequently citing sources that, like this, show the word Sieg or Sieg-rune (symbol of victory, appropriate to any flavor of statism) but not Sozialismus; and here he reads a scribbled Adolf as another S-rune (standing for Sozialist, since no other German word begins with S) despite the wiggly remnants of the original letters and the cross-stroke of the f. Rex, a few pieces of unambiguous evidence – which are probably somewhere in among the chaff – would be far more effective than this farrago.

I lived in Los Angeles for three years without ever knowing how to get to the Hollywood Sign. And speaking of views from on high, every time I fly to Chicago (come to think of it, the last time was quite a few years ago) I look for Fermilab, but I’ve never spotted a buffalo.

Aaron Krowne should stick to mathematics rather than writing absurdities like this:

The H1-B program has allowed companies hiring software engineers to pay less for more engineers by running to the government for help.

As if there were no migration in a state of nature! It would be more accurate to say that the Immigration Acts (in which you’ll find the H-1B program) allow skilled natives to get paid more by running to the government to restrict supply. This incidentally reduces the wages of similar workers in other countries, giving foreign employers a price advantage (to the extent that their products are able to enter the market).

Posted in cinema, history, me!me!me!, race | 1 Comment

items from elsewhere

Posted on Monday, 2005 May 09 by Anton

Ron Paul’s remarks on the war, to the House

useful spam-handling plugin for WordPress 1.5

a gag about clashing jargons

Sheldon Richman on the “Minuteman Project”:

. . . this “citizens’ neighborhood watch along our border” looks for foreigners who, by and large, are seeking better, more-productive lives for themselves and their children. The self-appointed American border guards inform the authorities when they find any. This strikes me as most out of keeping with the heritage of a country born in revolution, devoted to individual freedom, and skeptical of political power. The irony is that these Americans claim to be acting in the tradition of the original Minutemen, those brave early Americans who were always ready to engage the British forces during the struggle for independence.

Posted in blogdom, cartoons, humanities, race, security theater | Leave a comment

il n’y a pas d’heure pour les braves!

Posted on Monday, 2005 May 09 by Anton

First day on a new assignment. I set my cheap Chinese alarm clock for 7:00 a.m. Awakened by daylight, I see that the clock says 8:08, and briefly panic; then turn on my telephone, which says 6:29. Evidently the clock zeroed itself about the time I turned in — I must have bumped it in an inappropriate way.

My housemate works near a Sears, and promises to find me a better clock today. But wait, Sears is now K mart . . .

Later: I got one at IKEA. (How do they pronounce that in Sweden, anyway?) It’s made in China but it’s mechanical rather than electronic.

Later still: . . . and it won’t ring without a nudge. Fortunately I woke up at half past six every day this week.

Posted in me!me!me! | 2 Comments