Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on this date in 1930. He is best known for creating that master of private consulting detectives Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures can be read online -links to the stories are here. The Hound of the Baskervilles is on the list of 100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century as selected by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association's online members. Jeremy Brett is my all-time favorite of the actors who've portrayed the detective. Here's the intro to the episodes of that series:


Here are some clips from Brett's series:


Here's an interview with Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke:


Doyle wrote historical fiction and science fiction as well.

My favorite of his historical fiction is The White Company, which can be read online here.

The Poison Belt, a science fiction tale, was never dramatized that I can find. His The Lost World can be read online here and was made into a movie in 1925:



I watched it a while back. Other movies, radio plays and a TV series have also been based on the tale.

Tales of Terror and Mystery can be read online or listened to compliments of Librivox.

Bibi.org has more links, including links to some one-act radio plays.

And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies. I can say no ill of someone who believes in fairies.

Louis Armstrong

Today is the anniversary of the death in 1971 of Louis Armstrong. There are tribute pages all over the web, including at RedHotJazz, the National Portrait Gallery, Biography.com, PBS' Ken Burns series, the PBS American Masters site, Smithsonian Jazz and NPR. The Louis Armstrong House Museum is in Queens in New York. There is a Facebook fan page.

West End Blues (1928):

This song is on the list of 500 Songs that shaped Rock and Roll from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

Holy Now

Peter Mayer is a folk singer/songwriter.

This is Holy Now, from his Million Year Mind CD:


lyrics are from his site:

When I was a boy, each week
On Sunday, we would go to church
And pay attention to the priest
He would read the holy word
And consecrate the holy bread
And everyone would kneel and bow
Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don’t happen still
But now I can’t keep track
‘Cause everything’s a miracle
Everything, Everything
Everything’s a miracle

Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn’t one

When holy water was rare at best
It barely wet my fingertips
But now I have to hold my breath
Like I’m swimming in a sea of it
It used to be a world half there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

Read a questioning child’s face
And say it’s not a testament
That’d be very hard to say
See another new morning come
And say it’s not a sacrament
I tell you that it can’t be done

This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
It used to be a world half-there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now

HT: Monkey Mind

Happy 4th!

Our usual practice is to go out to the in-laws' house for cook-out and fireworks, but we couldn't stay for the fireworks because of the late start time last night and weren't offered the option of coming to the cook-out if we couldn't stay for the late-night event. So we stayed home this year and had supper and videos in. It was a fine way to spend the evening. And it was completely stress-free.

What a way to celebrate the 4th...

or can I even talk about it now.

The New Way to Tweet

HT: No Silence Here

Robert Mitchum

Today is the anniversary of the death in 1997 of Robert Mitchum, a long-time favorite of mine.

Here are the films I have posts on:

Aerial Gunner (1943)
Border Patrol (1943)
The Locket (1946)
Out of the Past (1947)
Where Danger Lives (1950)
Angel Face (1952)
What a Way to Go! (1964)

FilmReference.com closes by saying, "Although filmgoers have enjoyed this late bloomer's laconic presence for years, the critical and popular consensus has finally caught up with Mitchum's greatness as a screen star." Salon.com says, "Somehow he managed to be both cool and reckless, heroic and vaguely sinister, laconic to the point of inertia, yet still a man of action. And above all, he was tough." TCM and AMCTV have short biographies.

The photo at the top of the post is from Wikipedia.

It's not a "spill"!

"Oops! Let me get a paper towel and wipe that up." "What a mess! That'll take some doing to clean up!" Those are "spills". But this:

Free live streaming by Ustream
is no mere spill. It is an oil volcano, a gusher. But not a spill.

Happy Birthday, Ray Harryhausen!

I hear at Films in Review that today is Ray Harryhausen's birthday. They have an overview of his career so far, which includes this:

To those who may not know, Ray Harryhausen, known primarily for his stop motion special effects, is the auteur of approximately 18 feature films, many of which sprang, initially unscripted, from theme-based drawings created by him years before and put away before being eventually presented to his long-time producer, Charles Schneer. Among these is a small “children’s fantasy”, THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, which was the hit of 1958 and, in historical hindsight, truly changed everything.

The Guardian says, "The revered FX legend celebrated his 90th year at a star-studded BFI celebration. But this was no sycophantic wallow. He's someone who really changed film." The Press Association reports: "Movie veteran Ray Harryhausen is offering his life's work to the National Media Museum."

His official website is here. There are photos of his creations here. FilmReference.com says, "No one who works in science-fiction or fantasy films can escape the influence of Ray Harryhausen, and works as diverse as Flesh Gordon and The Empire Strikes Back draw upon techniques he perfected." Bright Lights Film Journal has an article and interview and says, "Harryhausen has unexpectedly come to rival Hitchcock (with whom he shared a favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann), as the filmmaker exerting the most influence on succeeding generations." Wikipedia has an article on him.

"every Ray Harryhausen animated creature in feature films, presented in chronological order":


I have blog posts on these:

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1954)
It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956))
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
Mysterious Island (1961)
Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
First Men in the Moon (1964)
One Million Years B.C. (1966)

Green, Green Grass of Home

I heard Green, Green Grass of Home on WEVL the other day. Hearing old-time country music reminds me that Daddy always liked country music. I could never stand it. I "get it" more now, but he's not around for me to share that with. Here's the song sung by Porter Wagoner:

Dark Shadows

Today is the anniversary of the 1966 premier of the tv show Dark Shadows. I planned my after-school schedule around this show once I discovered it. I found it after Jonathan Frid joined the cast (episode 211) as everybody's favorite tormented vampire Barnabas Collins.

This is the opening theme:


There is talk of a 2011 film with Johnny Depp in the role Frid created.

Mother-in-law's Tongue

Many people don't believe me when I tell them my Sansevieria blooms every year, but it does. The blooms are about spent for this year, but the picture above is of one of the plants in bloom now on my patio.

Gojira

Not long ago, The Younger Son and I were at Spin Street, and he found Gojira. This is the original 1954 Japanese Toho Studios film that was later edited heavily and released as Godzilla. I had been looking for this locally for years without coming across it, so I bought it even though it was new and not on sale. We watched it tonight. It is directed by Ishirō Honda and stars Takashi Shimura It's much longer than the American version, which stars Raymond Burr.

trailer:

Slate calls it "a remote, primitive thing". Roger Ebert describes it as "a bad film, but with an undeniable urgency." Moria says that, although

The plot of Godzilla is substantially taken from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), plus a little of King Kong (1933) ... it is the ferocity of Inoshiro Honda’s direction and his ability to propel the monster story to the level of metaphor that makes Godzilla an altogether remarkable film.

FilmReference.com says it

actually owes its origin to the long-held desire of special effects man Eiji Tsuburaya to make not a new and potent myth, but rather his own version of King Kong , Hollywood's most impressive monster film to date. In addition, an obvious intertextual influence was the outpouring from Hollywood's "B" producers of similar science fiction films in the American market. This trend was well established when Tsuburaya received the go-ahead from the executives at Toho Studio to make something quite similar.

DVD Talk says,

Gojira is a new kind of implacable atomic enemy: A mobile natural disaster, a typhoon in the form of a firestorm. The film grabbed the Japanese public at a gut level -- revealing a horror that had been living with them intimately for ten years, only they never knew it.

Sarah Orne Jewett

Today is the anniversary of the death in 1909 of author Sarah Orne Jewett. I ran across her book The Country of the Pointed Firs on a sale rack years ago and bought it because the book itself was a beautiful edition. When I read it, I loved it. It seems to be considered her best work. Wikipedia says of it, "The novel can be read as a study of the effects of isolation and hardship experienced by the inhabitants of the decaying fishing villages along the Maine coast." It is not plot-driven or action-filled, and that's the truth. I found the language striking. You can read the book online at several sites.

She was born in South Berwick, Maine, where her home is a museum. The Historic New England site says she "spent much of her life in this stately Georgian residence, owned by her family since 1819." South Berwick has a walking tour ("A visitor to contemporary South Berwick can follow in Sarah's footsteps and see much of the built and natural environment that shaped her life and influenced her writing"). There is a Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project, which "contains the complete, known published works of Sarah Orne Jewett, with the exception of a very small number of hard-to-find items."

Best Space Operas

Space Operas are my favorites, so I am glad to see SF Signal's list from various authors:

Captain Future stories of Edmond Hamilton
Jack McDevitt's Alex Benedict series
Allen Steele's Coyote series
James Blish's Cities in Flight series
Alastair Reynolds' Inhibitor series
Gwyneth Jones's Aleutian trilogy
Stephen Baxter's epic Xeelee Sequence
The Lensman series
The Mote In God's Eye (Niven/Pournelle)
Eon (Bear)
The Forever War (Haldeman)
Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton
Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld
Hellflower series by Eluki bes Shahar
Iain Banks and the Culture novels
Dune, the first three
Asimov's Foundation series
Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish cycle
Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan novels
Lee & Miller's Liaden Universe books
Kristine Smith's Jani Killian books
The Kimbriel Nuala books
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel; Between Planets; Farmer in the Sky (Heinlein)Vernor Vinge - Fire Upon The Deep
David Brin - the Uplift War trilogy
Bruce Sterling - Schismatrix

If I've read appreciable numbers in a series I put it in bold, even if I haven't read them all.

Praying Mantis Rescue

The Daughter and I went to the mall last night, and as we pulled onto the street we noticed a baby praying mantis clinging for dear life to the windshield. I drove slowly, but it became obvious the struggling bug would never last until we got to the mall. I pulled over to the side of the road, and The Daughter got out and let it hop up onto her hand so she could let it out in the bushes. We'd rather have kept it on our patio, but the closest refuge was best in this case.

The photo above is one I see scattered all over the web, sometimes sited as being from Wikipedia.

David O. Selznick

Today is the anniversary of the death in 1965 of film producer David O. Selznick. PBS considers him one of the American Masters. FilmReference.com says, "he should be remembered as one of the Hollywood's greatest independent filmmakers."

Although best known for Gone With the Wind, he also produced Rebecca, The Third Man (uncredited) and A Star is Born (1937), all of which I like better than GWTW.

Summer Solstice

Today is the Summer Solstice, and it's been our practice since the kids were little to watch the sunset and have donuts for supper on this day. Tonight we watched the sun set over the Mississippi River. We haven't always come here, but it's a wonderful spot for it and we've gone downtown and sat in Tom Lee Park for several years now. It's been unseasonably hot lately, but it was pleasant on the river tonight. The Daughter finished her camp counselor gig in time to come with us, but The Elder Son had to work and The Younger Son made other plans before he realized what day it was.

Other years:
2009
2008
2007

MacArthur Park

MacArthur Park may be the most dreadful song ever sung. I can't listen to it without singing along in major dramatic style. The Kids roll their eyes on those rare occasions when we hear it on the radio.

When The Bough Breaks

When The Bough Breaks is the first in the Alex Delaware mystery series by Jonathan Kellerman. It won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. I read it because it was first in a series by a well-respected mystery writer and because it won the Edgar and read it despite the fact that the plot revolves around child endangerment and child abuse. I like the characters and the writing style but not enough to seek out others by this author while I still have so many books in my tbr stack.

from the back of the book:

Dr. Morton Handler practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation. Handler paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness: seven-year-old Melody Quinn.

It's psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware's job to try to unlock the terrible secret buried in Melody's memory. But as the sinister shadows in the girl's mind begin to take shape, Alex discovers that the mystery touches a shocking incident in his own past.

This connection is only the beginning, a single link in a forty-year-old conspiracy. And behind it lies an unspeakable evil that Alex Delaware must expose before it claims another innocent victim: Melody Quinn.