I just awoke from a dream in which I was having a conversation with Stephen Colbert in his traditional home theater, by which I mean a large white room with stage. I encouraged Colbert, who is currently between jobs, to go into puppetry "to make puppets cool again." He responded: "The Muppets already did that."

That Dream Stephen is a smart guy.

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: colbert report dreams muppets

35/2605. Odd Man Out (1947)
I read that Roman Polanski, Sam Peckinpah, and Gore Vidal considered this to be among their favorite noir movies, but I agree with some of its contemporary critics that after a fantastically engaging start, it loses its way as it staggers (and then crawls) to its unsatisfying (but necessary?) conclusion.

36/2606. Critic's Choice (1963)
Sixties sex comedies are not my bag, baby, and it doesn't help that Bob Hope and Lucille Ball don't really have any sexual chemistry. But it's a mild enough example of the genre to be an inoffensive way to pass an afternoon.

37/2607. Toy Story 4 (2019)
Purposelessness. Abandonment. Loneliness. Death. Toy Story movies go hard and are always worth the effort to watch (though my fingers).

38/2608. Two Weeks with Love (1950)
The A plot of this MGM musical with Jane Powell and Ricardo Montalban is fine, but "little sister" Debbie Reynolds steals every scene she is in, especially singing "Aba Daba Honeymoon."

39/2609. One Battle After Another (2025)
Now that I've seen this, Paul Thomas Anderson's recent Oscar feels more like a career retrospective award. I do not think this is his best work, certainly no better than Licorice Pizza or Inherent Vice. Full disclosure requires I admit that I am no particular fan of Magnolia or Boogie Nights, either, but I agree Anderson is a rare talent and I do not begrudge the industry eventually recognizing it.

For an underground militant revolutionary radio DJ, that's a pretty prominent Coca-Cola can.

More to come.

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: coke movies

As a child of the 70s, I have long considered myself a Star Wars fan, which is why I impulsively decided to follow the link to "The Best Star Wars Trivia Quiz Questions to See How Much You Really Know" at Mental Floss dot com. The quiz has 100 questions, only the first 19 of which are in the category "Classic Trilogy (Episodes IV–VI)." But that's about where my fandom ends, so I figured I'd do pretty well. And I'm happy to report that I did know the name of Han Solo's ship and Luke Skywalker's trainer on Dagobah. But then I got to question 15.

15. What is the Emperor called in The Emperor Strikes Back?

I know I'm getting old, but I don't recall a movie named The Emperor Strikes Back in the "classic trilogy." And I certainly didn't know the answer.

Darth Sidious

Again, I'm old now, but I do remember a Darth Sidious who was the Sith Lord master of Darth Maul and later (after Maul gets cut in half) Darth Tyrannus and later (after Tyrannus gets decapitated) Darth Vader. (As Luke's trainer says of the Sith, "Always two there are. No more, no less." By which he clearly means a top half and a bottom half.) Darth Sidious was the evil alter ego of Sheev Palpatine, the representative of the planet Naboo in the Galactic Senate who manipulated events to rise to Supreme Chancellor before disbanding the Senate and ruling the galaxy as Emperor. So, yeah, Darth Sidious and the Emperor are the same person, but technically speaking, since Sidious wasn't introduced as a character until the fourth Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace, no one called the Emperor that in any of the "classic trilogy" films, especially one that doesn't exist. (Point of fact: the prequels played so coy about Palpatine/Sidious's future as "The Emperor" that I have often wondered if Lucas expected contemporary audiences to be unaware they were all the same person.)

So I call bullshit. But what else should I expect from a piece of Internet clickbait in the post-truth culture in which we now live, where every major technology and media company has turned their content engines over to poorly curated supervised LLMs that "hallucinate" up to half their facts? The fault is clearly mine for expecting reality to live up to my fantasies of living in a more civilized age.

Happy May 4th to those who celebrate.

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: internet movies star wars trivia walter

Today was Henry's 5th birthday. He woke up early to bark at the pest control guy, then took a nap till after noon, had some of Mom's rotisserie chicken, visited with friends, went for a walk of his chosen direction and duration (that was my present to him; I tend to get impatient with all the mailbox sniffing), and had a nice desert licking the peanut butter off my PBJ knife. When they say it's a dog's life, I assume this is what they 're talking about.

Also today, while Mom and I were out on the patio with the poodles, Henry heard Audrey inside bark once asking to join us, so he took it upon himself to walk back to the kitchen door, which is held shut with a spring, and lean on it just enough that Audrey could get out. Then he calmy went back to lounging around the yard with Louis. That's why we often call him "The Good One." He knows what he is.

Fun fact: as a puppy, he was called Shakespeare. If I'd known that when I took him in, I'd still be calling him that. It fits.

Another fact I learned about him last week (from his foster mother) was that he had been adopted out to more families than I had been led to believe before he came to me at six months. He disliked one of them so much, he walked home to his foster family the next day. That doesn't surprise me. He's a very bright and confident boy, and I'm very pleased he has chosen to stick with me for four and a half years.

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: audrey birthdays dogs henry holidays louis poodles

19/2589. Vice Squad (1953)
Another day-in-the-life police procedural with hints of Dirty Harry. Edward G. Robinson plays a police captain willing to play a little dirty if it gets a cop killer off the streets. I liked it very much.

20/2590. The Enchanted Cottage (1945)
You know those movies where the girl who is supposed to be "ugly" just has a bad hair cut? Literally this. To be fair, it's supposed to be a fantasy for romantics, which I am not. But c'mon, try a little harder, Hollywood.

21/2591. Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain (2023)
This does not get great critical reviews, and I get it. Plenty of people claim to love The Enchanted Cottage, and comedy is extra subjective. But this is funny. It's not after an Oscar. The silliness is the point. And I enjoyed it.

22/2592. The More the Merrier (1943)
I'm usually lukewarm on screwball comedies and romantic farces, and I'm especially tepid on Joel McCrea, but Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn are once again as delightful as they were in The Devil and Miss Jones. It's a winner.

23/2593. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (2023)
I repeat once again that I am a sucker for coming-of-age stories, especially ones that feel so relatable to my own era, when I read this book. I'd've liked it even without Rachel McAdams. (But I also did like Rachel McAdams.)

More to come.

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: movies

There is a restaurant a few miles from my house that is built in a literal pit. You can barely see the marquee sign from the road level, and, if you aren't already on the lookout for it, the building might as well be invisible. The property was built many years ago for a now-defunct family dining concept, and in the years since, one business after another has occupied the property for a brief couple of years, gone out of business, and been replaced by another business.

Driving past the building this weekend (and seeing only two cars in the parking lot), I caught myself wondering how much longer it could possibly stay open before it closes and the pattern repeats itself. Then I realized that the current business, a steakhouse, has been in place since 2020. That's six years, actually about average for the lifespan for a restaurant and even more impressive considering the Pandemic and malingering economic concerns.

Should I pretend that I didn't notice its longevity? When it does inevitably close, as all restaurants eventually must, should I still roll my eyes and quip that I was correct that their location doomed them to failure? Do I need to be right so badly that I'll ignore reality to salve my wounded ego? What would that sort of denial accomplish?

The restaurant is a success whether I want to admit it or not.

Let that be a lesson to myself: you need to recognize when you've allowed your biases to corrupt your thinking, because otherwise, in addition to the loneliness of living in your own alternate reality, you also just might stave to death.

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: covid19 morals newnan walter

13/2583. Kitty Foyle (1940)
Ginger Rogers is Kitty Foyle, a muddle-headed girl who falls for the wrong man and continues doubling-down on her bad decision. Ginger is very good even if her character is irritating. (The Wrong Man is played by Dennis Morgan, who I never much care for, so you'll excuse me if I was against him from the beginning.)

14/2584. The Big Combo (1955)
A film noir police procedural is right up my alley. This doesn't disappoint, especially with Lee Van Cleef playing a rat-like heavy in a homosexual-coded relationship with a fellow mobster. Good stuff.

15/2585. The Harder They Fall (2021)
I'm not sure why they unnecessarily borrowed the names of a bunch of real-life Black Wild West characters for what otherwise feels like a Van Peebles Blacksploitation Western. But whatever. It's still a lot of fun (at least until some third act shenanigans aiming for misguided pathos).

16/2586. Greased Lightning (1977)
First off, let me say that there's a briefish Coca-Cola drinking scene in the middle of this very loosely adapted biopic staring Richard Pryor and Beau Bridges, but I did not get a screenshot at the time. I'll try to correct that next time I see it's coming on TCM, which seems to run it about once a year. It sticks pretty hard to the traditional sports movie cliches, so if you like that sort of thing, you'll probably like this.

17/2587. A Letter to Three Wives (1949)
Maybe because Kirk Douglas is in this stylish tale of love and betrayal, it kept reminding me of The Bad and the Beautiful. I liked it, especially Linda Darnell (who was the love interest in Zero Hour!; if you know, you know).

More to come.

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: coke movies

For the last few years, we've had a Jeopardy! page-a-day calendar. This year, Mom opted for a History Channel This Day in History calendar because she got a great price on it... in February. I'm starting to think the price markdown was for more than just the expiration date.

This Day in History for March 5, 1770, was the Boston Massacre. Maybe you've heard of it? It's pretty famous. According to the calendar, British Private Hugh Montgomery "slipped and fell, discharging his musket into the taunting crowd." Though this makes it sound like an accident, eyewitness testimony at the trial indicated that Montgomery shot only after recovering his dropped rifle and regaining his feet. That, plus the fact that he more or less confessed, is surely why Montgomery was one of only two of the eight soldiers found guilty of manslaughter.¹

The calendar also explicitly states that "John Adams and Josiah Quincy Jr.² defended the colonists." Both of those men would like to assure you that they defended the prosecuted soldiers. In point of fact, there were three trials related to the massacre, the first two against soldiers (Rex vs. Preston and Rex v. Wemms et al.) and the third, much lesser known, against colonists (Rex vs. Manwaring et al). There were no defense attorneys in the third trial, so the calendar is flatly wrong.

(Technically, I suppose, so long as we're being pedantic, we should say that there were four trials related to the Boston Massacre, as according to the 1771 summary of the trial published in The Trial of W. Wemms, J. Hartegan, W. McCauley, H. White, M. Killroy, W. Warren, J. Carrol, and H. Montgomery, Soldiers in His Majesty's 29th Regiment of Foot, for the Murder of C. Attucks, S. Gray, H. Maverick, J. Caldwell, and P. Carr, the sole witness for the prosecution at the third trial, Charles Bourgat, was found not credible and was later brought up on charges of perjury. I don't fault the calendar for omitting this fact. But it is a fun bit of Americana legal trivia.)

Now that I've caught This Day In History making these mistakes, I'm doubting the accuracy of everything it tells me. Sure, these may have been honest editorial grammatical errors, but in this day and age where Google's terrible search AI is giving me factually incorrect answers to everything,³ I think it's more important than ever that the people who claim to be authorities in their fields know what they're talking about. Why should I learn facts about history from people who don't know the facts of history? If you can't trust a discount page-a-day calendar, who can you trust?

¹ Montgomery's punishment was having the letter M "for murder" branded on his thumb,⁴ which is very The Scarlet Letter indeed.⁵

² These days, it seems historians usually refer to the father of 15th Harvard University President Josiah Quincy III as Josiah Quincy II. However, when the son published a posthumous biography cobbled together from father's "journals and letters" in 1825, he titled the book Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Junior, of Massachusetts Bay: 1744-1775. And who is the History Channel to argue with a former president of Harvard?

³ DO NOT READ GOOGLE AI RESULTS FOR ANYTHING. Seriously, people, I cannot tell you how unhelpful Google AI responses were in researching this topic, a famous incident in American History that has been extensively researched and documented. The responses were so astonishingly wrong, you're just as likely to get correct responses to queries if you asked the teenager at the window of your local Burger King drive-thru. Which, I suppose, does mean that in all the ways that matter, Google AI successfully passes the Turing Test.

⁴ According to Wikipedia, the "benefit of clergy" defense used to save Montgomery from the gallows was abolished in the United Kingdom 1827 and from United States federal law in 1790, though the possibility exists that it may still be recognized in some state courts. I recommend consulting a lawyer before trying it yourself.

⁵ Though it takes place in the 1640s, The Scarlet Letter was published March 16, 1850. I've already peeked ahead; March 16, the calendar tells me, marks the day in 2006 that the "First Lady of Drag Racing," Shirley "Cha Cha" Muldowney, was inducted into the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame, which at least fits the National Women's History Month theme. Weirdly, despite explicitly mentioning four other Halls of Fame she belongs to, Muldowney's Wikipedia page does not mention this induction, though the Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing which sponsors the IDRHoF does. Why does the calendar endorse this one in particular? I guess that's just another one of history's mysteries.

Comments (2) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: family history john adams mom

Today's hot take: despite what Kellogg's says in their current commercials, milk should not be "ice cold."

"Ice" is a fancy word (from Old English) for frozen water (32°F or colder, although the Old English preferred to measure temperature by testing whether water was solid enough to support their cans of furniture polish). Milk is mostly water, freezing at about 31°F, so there's not a lot of wiggle room between ice cold milk and frozen milk. And frozen milk is lousy (as the Old English can attest; back in their day, frozen milk meant frozen cows). There's a reason no one puts ice cubes in their Rice Krispies. In addition to being too crunchy, they're also too quiet. (No mooing.)

I like milk probably twice as much as the next guy, and yes, of course milk should be stored and served cold, but modern refrigerators are good enough for the job without additional solid-water support. Ice wagons went out of fashion with the Old English.

Which raises the question of what ice has to do with any part of breakfast? Neither bacon, sausage, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans, potatoes, and tea (the traditional English Breakfast) nor porridge and leftovers (the Old English breakfast) are tastier if cold. And no American wants their pancakes, waffles, oatmeal or coffee served cold, much less ice cold. If you ask me, there shouldn't even be ice in a cup of juice. Especially orange juice. Only a monster would put ice in their orange juice.

Maybe the best solution is if everyone could agree from now on to hold all the "ice." If it only manages to make any situation worse, what good is it? If you want to eat a lousy breakfast, that's your prerogative, but keep the "ice" to yourself, you assholes.

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: food rant

Here at Wriphe.com, I don't actually keep track of every movie I watch, just new-to-me movies. I also frequently rewatch old-to-me movies, and sometimes I spot the Pause that Refreshes. These are some of those I spotted in the past year (in chronological order of release):

Bye Bye Birdie (1963)

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

The Sting (1973)

Ghostbusters (1984)

Pee Wee's Big Adventure (1985)

Waiting for Guffman (1996)

Zoolander (2001)

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)

Yes, I know that's not a great screenshot of the original black Coke Zero can, especially considering that the product gets a better showcase when Scott intentionally overturns the Coke Zero that Gideon Graves offers him at the Chaos Theater. However, that black can really didn't photograph well in the dim light of the club. So this is what you get. But by all means, go watch Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to see if you think I made the right choice. I love that film, and so should you.

As always, a complete archive of my Coca-Cola movie screenshots can be found here.

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: coke movies