What have I watched lately …

The Lives of Others (2006). Liked it.

The Philadelphia Story (1940). Didn’t like it as much the second time.

Second Chorus (1940) – Astaire without Rogers. Forgettable.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Good.

Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (2009). So-so. Had I not seen Blade Runner recently it would have whizzed over my head.

King Kong (1933). Good.

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Bette Davis, as Elizabeth Tudor, has the most peculiar body language; I wonder whether it’s intended to convey old age.

Strange Cargo (1940) is a thrilling escape from Devil’s Island. But wait, contrived circumstances have put a woman among the escapees, so it’s a romance. But wait, one of them is Jesus Christ in plainclothes. The result is a muddle.

The Thief of Bagdad (1940). Good.

The Great Dictator (1940). Good, though the climactic speech is a bit ironic to a libertarian:

You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will!

The false god of statism goes by many names, and one of them is Democracy. We have a better chance of making this life free and beautiful if we refrain from uniting or fighting (or sacrificing, don’t forget sacrificing) behind the next charismatic opportunist. —By the way, why does a Jewish barber spontaneously quote from “the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke”?

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), Hitchcock’s only screwball comedy. The script has its due quota of gags, and there’s nothing wrong with the cast, yet I find the result less funny than some of his thrillers. The rhythm is somehow off.

Dan Alderson once made a map of nearby stars by mounting little colored spheres on threads strung between holes in two sheets of heavy clear plastic.

It occurs to me that, taking the stars in pairs, he could use half as many threads; each would be oblique and therefore longer, but none would be twice as long as the straight threads.

Such a design would be error-prone in execution, and thread is cheap. But I think Dan would chuckle at the suggestion.

This site might disappear for a stupid reason: when my webhost tries to bill my Visa card, something in the chain spits “address verification failure”. I’ve tried variations of my new address (as well as my old address) with no luck. My bank keeps seeing transactions “pending”, as if a restaurant had swiped the card to authorize a sale but not presented the signed slip.

Today I got the first bank statement with my new address, and copied it byte for byte into the web invoice form — with and without the Zipcode extension, with my new and old telephone numbers. Still no joy.

Patrick Henry said in 1775:

It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts.

Was he aware that he conflated two episodes of the Odyssey?

Moving, one rediscovers many miscellaneous old papers. I think I copied this down from a comic skit about spies:

“Would you care to purchase a pair of mittens?” “It depends on the yarn.” “In Italy it is illegal to record the ring of a telephone.” “Which lasts longer, silk or rayon underwear?” “How do you say ‘tooth powder’ in Portuguese?” “Cats are nothing more than effeminate dogs.” “The fireplace has flown south for the winter.” “What do you say to a centipede on opening night? Break four or five legs.”

Looking east from 49°00′08″ N by 122°28′30″ W. After taking the shot, I circumambulated the obelisk, widdershins.

I don’t know which emperor made this primitive earthwork defense against the other.

Does Spanish normally use apostrophes at all?