Umbriel

9/18/19

I wish him well. I remember him fondly from the second season of Buck Rogers almost 40 years ago:

9/15/19

A homecoming “shadow cabinet” brings to mind a whole “mirror clique” of kids from the “wrong side of the tracks”. We need to run with this...

9/15/19

And, of course, the nose-picking kid who gets voted Homecoming Groom of the Stool.

9/14/19

That’s quite true with music. I long ago realized that I’d be happier in the long run if I self-rationed good songs, rather than just repeating them like a rat in a Skinner box.

9/14/19

I’ve never quite gotten to that point, because it seemed unnecessary to rewatch when I realized that dropping a line into casual conversation in certain nerdy circles would trigger a reenactment of said scene in its entirety.

9/14/19

I read an “abridged” version back in high school - never felt a need to revisit it - and that part must have been part of the abridgement.

9/14/19

Well, if we’re collecting actors’ brushes with Nazi atrocities, Charles Durning - who played Colonel “Concentration Camp Erhardt” in Brooks’s version - was a survivor of the Malmedy Massacre at the Battle of the Bulge.

9/12/19

“TV’s Michael Gray?!”

9/11/19

‘70s-Scorsese New York seems like such a natural fit for Gotham City that I’m surprised that this seems like the first full-on embrace of it.

9/11/19

There was a blog I followed some years back that supported somebody’s tabletop superhero role-playing campaign. The theme of it all seemed to be that a lot of the player-characters were hero versions of famous villains - a crime-fighting Joker and Penguin were prominent but I believe there were others, Marvel as well…

9/8/19

A “Scots yard” is apparently pretty close to a contemporary American one, so the “Worm of Linton” doesn’t seem especially impressive — Plenty of zoos and Florida backyards have larger constrictor snakes, and I’m sure a fair number of “herpers” keep larger ones at home, without causing all that much harm to crops or…

9/8/19

Can you imagine what the miniatures from 2001 would bring in at auction today if they’d survived?

9/6/19

Having never read the book, I’m curious whether there’s any basis in there for the “rapidly lethal disease with no real symptoms” thing — Is it perhaps referenced by the protagonist/narrator that “she looked more beautiful the nearer death drew”? Or that it was hard to imagine she was actually dying? Or is it all…

9/6/19

It’s one of the MAD parodies I remember most vividly without ever having seen the film — alongside 1973's Love Story-inspired The Way We Were. Something about sappy romances brought out the best in them.

9/6/19

I’m having a hard time thinking of any new group that’s ever been particularly welcome anywhere, historically speaking.

9/6/19

I always associate that song with a curmudgeonly friend of mine, and an exchange when someone heard that he enjoyed it—

9/6/19

It’s arguably the most ‘70s thing in the movie — the idea that apologies are mere bourgeois affectations. Our love is too real to constrain with things like civility and concern for how our actions affect each other, man!

9/6/19

...appearing to relish her role in one of the last great disaster pictures of the 1970s

9/6/19

...appearing to relish her role in one of the last great disaster pictures of the 1970s

9/4/19

I don’t think “sheer volume” describes the output of Peter Benchley. Jaws, The Deep, and The Island are essentially his whole significant output, and only the first of those spawned a chain of sequels.