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Today is the feast day of St. Andrew the Apostle. The wikipedia article on him is here.
various and assorted miscellany
On New Year's Day, a dog finds a bone in the Hollywood Hills - and unearths a murder committed more than twenty years earlier. It's a cold case, but for Detective Harry Bosch, it stirs up memories of his childhood as an orphan. He can't let it go. As the investigation takes Bosch deeper into the past, a beautiful rookie cop brings him alive in the present. No official warning can break them apart - or prepare Bosch for the explosions when the case takes a few hard turns. Suddenly all of L.A. is in an uproar, and Bosch, fighting to keep control, is driven to the brink of an unimaginable decision.
A new map of Antarctica displayed last week at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., combines 1,100 digital satellite images into a mosaic with the most geologically accurate, true-color, high-resolution views of the frozen continent now possible.
The map, with a resolution 10 times greater than before, shows features half the size of a basketball court clearly, and is not pure white. It captures the textures and color variations of mountains, valleys and ice rivers and is available to researchers and the public online.
In a blistering, dry summer, the waters of Thornfield Reservior have been depleted, revealing the ruins of the small Yorkshire village that lay at its bottom, bringing with it the unidentified bones of a brutally murdered young woman. Detective Chief Inspector Banks faces a daunting challenge: he must unmask a killer who has escaped detection for half a century. Because the dark secrets of Hobb's End continue to haunt the dedicated policeman even though the town that bred then has died-and long after its former residents have been scattered to far places....or themselves to the grave.
"You don't have a wireless?" I couldn't believe it. We might have been short of food, but surely everyone had a wireless?
"Mr. Kilnsey won't have one in the house. He's rather a strict sort of Methodist, you know. Thinks they're the devil's loudspeaker."
Dziga Vertov directed Soviet Toys in 1924:
Cinema Eye is also from 1924. This is a documentary and promotes the joys of life in Soviet Russia:
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is a Russian experimental documentary:
Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (1931) focuses on the struggles of Soviet miners:
Three Songs About Lenin (1934) celebrates Lenin and his role in shaping the USSR:
Hail to the Lord's Annointed
Hail to the Lord's Anointed,
great David's greater Son!
Hail in the time appointed,
his reign on earth begun!
He comes to break oppression,
to set the captive free;
to take away transgression,
and rule in equity.
He comes with succor speedy
to those who suffer wrong;
to help the poor and needy,
and bid the weak be strong;
to give them songs for sighing,
their darkness turn to light,
whose souls, condemned and dying,
are precious in his sight.
He shall come down like showers
upon the fruitful earth;
love, joy, and hope, like flowers,
spring in his path to birth.
Before him on the mountains,
shall peace, the herald, go,
and righteousness, in fountains,
from hill to valley flow.
To him shall prayer unceasing
and daily vows ascend;
his kingdom still increasing,
a kingdom without end.
The tide of time shall never
his covenant remove;
his name shall stand forever;
that name to us is love.
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Yes - you can now become an official Lord, Lady, Baron or Baroness of Sealand.
Our special pack entitles you to become a Lord, Lady, Baron or Baroness which will give your social status a bit of clout.
The title is not like the classic cliché, "buy Scottish land and get a fake title", these are bona fide titles from a sovereign principality, recognised by the Government of the Principality of Sealand , so you ‘really’ will be a Lord, Lady, Baron or Baroness!
Violent storms often hit Colleton County, North Carolina, but when a local attorney's promiscuous wife is killed, the murder blows the lids off more homes than last year's hurricane. As the victim's numerous lovers-including a handsome cousin of Judge Deborah Knott-scurry for cover stories, the judge begins her own investigation. What she finds is a tangled web of extramarital affairs and secrets linking half the county ... while a massive hurricane rages up the Carolina coast, and a very real human killer prepares to strike again.
When Graciella Rivers steps onto his boat, ex-FBI agent Terrell McCaleb has no idea he's about to come out of retirement. He's recuperating from a heart transplant and avoiding anything stressful. But when Graciella tells him the way her sister Gloria was murdered it leaves Terry no choice. Now the man with the new heart vows to take down a predator without a soul. For Gloria's killer shatters every rule that McCaleb ever learned in his years with the Bureau-as McCaleb gets no more second chances at life...and just one shot at the truth.
"If the Tibetan people want to keep the Dalai Lama system, one of the possibilities I have been considering with my aides is to select the next Dalai Lama while I'm alive," he told Japan's Sankei Shimbun in an interview published Tuesday.
When Jacob Chandler died, he left his home in Morro Bay and all its contents to Benni Harper - the only stipulation being that she had to stay in the house, alone, for two weeks before the inheritance became hers. But Benni has never even heard of Jacob Chandler. Now she has two weeks to follow his scavenger-hunt set of clues to discover whether he is her guardian angel or personal demon. And soon she finds herself setting a course to a time and a place in her own past - a place Benni Harper and Jacob Chandler both knew as home...
not only portraits of famous wrestlers and scenes of their greatest bouts, but also views of wrestlers as celebrities in everyday life, legends and Kabuki plays featuring wrestlers as heroes, and fantasies in which animals or supernatural beings enjoy wrestling just as humans do.
In the fifth book in the series, traditionally built, eminently sensible Precious Ramotswe continues her enterprise at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana, a country that is indeed fortunate.
Still engaged to the estimable Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, Mma Ramotswe understands that he has other concerns, especially a hair-raising request from the ever persuasive Mma Potokwane, matron of the orphan farm. Besides Mma Ramotswe herself has weighty matters on her mind. She has been approached by a wealthy lady to check up on the intentions of several suitors. This may be a difficult case, but it's just the kind of problem Mma Ramotswe likes and she is, as we know, a very intuitive lady.
The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain;
His blood red banner streams afar:
Who follows in His train?
Who best can drink his cup of woe,
Triumphant over pain,
Who patient bears his cross below,
He follows in His train.
I saw "Ikiru" first in 1960 or 1961. I went to the movie because it was playing in a campus film series and only cost a quarter. I sat enveloped in the story of Watanabe for 2 1/2 hours, and wrote about it in a class where the essay topic was Socrates' statement, "the unexamined life is not worth living."' Over the years I have seen "Ikiru" every five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think. And the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us.
Bill Smith is going undercover again as a favor to an old friend who wants him to investigate thievery on the 40-story Manhattan site of Crowell Construction's latest project. His bricklaying is a little rusty, but passable as he checks out the foreman who's under suspicion. A crane operator has disappeared--along with some heavy machinery. But when a well-orchestrated riot causes the foreman's “accidental” death, Smith plunges into a morass of bribery, blackmail and blood looking for answers. With the help of his Chinese-American partner Lydia Chin, he follows a trail of twisted loyalties, old-fashioned greed and organized crime to its heart-stopping conclusion. Murder - with no end in sight.
There's no place colder than a construction site.
An ironworker told me why once, explained the chill that pulls the warmth from your bones while you're working, the wind that blows through steel and concrete carrying the ancient dampness of echoing caves.
He was a welder, used to working the high steel--two hundred feet up and nothing between him and the air above the city but the girder he was on and the harness that, half the time, he didn't wear. He had a leather face and scarred, thick hands. We were sitting over a beer at Shorty's one evening in that time of year when the end of the workday and the start of the night push on each other, when everything feels like it's already too late.
A building going up doesn't live, he said. It grows, like that monster Frankenstein built--hammered, welded, bolted together out of things you bring from other places, things that had their own histories long before they were part of this. It looks like what you want it to be, but it's not. Not yet.
And while it grows, it pulls a little life from each of the men who work on it, making them leave something, something they are, behind.
Then one day, he said, when it's stolen enough life, stored up enough history, it starts to breathe. It begins to live, and living things are warm. You can feel that moment. The deep chill goes, replaced by a cold that's only temperature, no different from anywhere else. It's not a construction site after that. It's a building, the past of its bones and skin part of it, what they are making it what it is, old things in a new place. And the lives of the men who built it giving it life. ?
I don't know if he was right or not. I didn't know him well, and I didn't run across him again. He was getting old, and I was young then. I don't know how much longer he had, or wanted, working the high steel.
But I know there's a bone-chilling cold, and a sense of never being alone in an old and lonely place, on every building site I've ever been on.
Sanshiro Sugato (1943)
No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)
One Wonderful Sunday (1947)
Drunken Angel (1948)
Stray Dog (1949)
Rashomon (1950)
Scandal (1950)
Ikiru (1952)
Seven Samurai (1954)
I live in Fear (1955)
Throne of Blood (1957)
The Hidden Fortress (1958)
The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Yojimbo (1961)
Kagemashu (1980)
Ran (1985)
Dreams (1990)
inspired by Kurosawa:
The Magnificent Seven (1960)
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
Seven Swords (2005)
Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)
has launched a three-month tribute to the director, anchored by a restored version of Rashomon — Kurosawa's legendary study of truth, memory and perspective — along with rarely seen sketches in the director's own hand.Criterion Confessions has a post of Kurosawa-related art. BFI has a centennial article online.
'The Battle of San Pietro'' stands alone in the history of documentary filmmaking. Presenting the battle in the Liri Valley as a costly continuing campaign rather than in retrospect as a strategic victory, it is the only complete record of an infantry battle.