Watery, itchy eyes; sinus drainage; sneezing/coughing. I either have the worst allergies of my life, or I have a cold. If I'm having bad allergies, how did they get this bad? Is it time for me to consider moving to the desert? If I have a cold, "Friend" Ken gave it to me. I told him two weeks ago when he was coughing in my car that if he got me sick I was going to be very angry at him, and I am a man of my word. Better hope it's allergies, Ken.

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: friends illness ken walter

Because Cam asked for it: here's CeCe's new playmate, Cydney!

Cyd is pushing five months and, as you can see, she is still a fluffy puppy with a personality to match. I'd've mentioned her sooner, but I was supposed to be keeping her a secret so that Mom didn't get too mad at her sister for helping her ex-husband get another dog. Oops.

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: caminade cece cydney dad dogs family friends kelley mom poodles

Comments (2) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: comic strip havanese strip poodle strip

Justice League America #81, October 1993

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Permalink | Tags: comic books wonder woman

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