Pale Beside Deuteronomy

My kind of smartass Gen Xer … exactly my age … great song.

Movies Watched -- Mildred Pierce (1945)

109 minute running time…. Joan Crawford is beautiful and talented, no doubt about it (won an Oscar for this part after all) … I read this book (by James M. Cain) when I was a kid and liked it … I was less thrilled with the movie, but I can see why many, including Farr, consider it a classic. Not worthy of my Top 500, green go rating though.

This is moral blackmail, sir.

Movies Watched -- Bad Seed (1956)

129 minute running time so a half hour too long … stage play made into a movie … kind of dumb … 1950s middle class fears, I guess … weird ending, complying with the code? End it with an Act of God. Not recommended, though Farr liked it.

They don't put little girls in the electric chair. [esp. Cindy Brady]

Some Old Man in the Sky

Did I embed this song before? Can’t remember. Spaced it, dude. Great song. Fairy tales of space and time.

Movies Watched -- The Gold Rush (1925)

69 minute running time … version from 1950s with added narration from Chaplin, which I could have done without, might have preferred it as a silent picture, but this is classic Chaplin, cute stuff … sweet smart comedy … like all of his work, it’s a must see, green go. Farr also a fan of the Little Tramp.

Cliffhanger

Movies Watched -- Husbands (1970)

142 minute running time so at least an hour too long … self-indulgent Cassavetes, I couldn’t get into it at all. Unbearable even on fast forward. Vincent Canby correctly wasn’t thrilled with it. Definitely not a John Farr recommendation (heterosexual buddy movie after all), so I don’t know why it was in the queue, but it was a waste of a borrow.

See: John Cassavetes Made Awful Movies

John Hamm, er, Cassavetes

My Zippo Armor Collection, Part I

Here’s part I of my Zippo Armor collection, with my notes below. The top two rows are early Zippo Armors, with “Shilly Shally” (A1) being the earliest. You can see the evolution as they experimented with attaching a gem stone (“Stellar Performance” (A4) and “Opalescence” (B4)), or doing epoxy inlays (“Blood Stone,” (B1) “Marble Pillars,” (B2) and “Heartfelt Trinity” (B5)), or went for a “rugged look” with Black Ice coating (“Cave Dwelling” (B3)). Row C demonstrates how design became more conventional with simpler patterns following the Great Financial Crisis.

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A1: No. 20437, Shilly Shally, J 03

A2: No. 20771, Carved Columns w/Black Nickel, G 04

A3: No. 20757, Carved Elegance, C 04

A4: No. 20892, Stellar Performance, I 04

A5: No. 20958, Latitude, A 05

B1: No. 21198, Blood Stone, I 05

B2: No. 20992, Marble Pillars, L 05

B3: No. 21201, Cave Dwelling, D 06

B4: No. 21199, Opalescence, G 06

B5: No. 24199, Heartfelt Trinity, H 07

C1: No. 24953, Carved Border, F 10

C2: No. 24952, Elegance, C 12

C3: No. 28366, (TR?) Carved Border, H 12

C4: No. 28835, Globes, E 16

C5: No. 28637, Carved Chrome Diamond, J 16

Stock Du Jour, Fri. May 29, 2020, ADAP

Adaptimmune Therapeutics (ADAP) was the stock du jour, doing 365,000 trades and $1.18BB in volume. IB had shares but I paid 2.17 cents at the brookie to borrow it since I’m never shorting again at IB. I didn’t make any money in ADAP, it was very tricky — I should have gotten long it but I don’t trust those lunchtime breakouts, esp. when it hasn’t tested higher time frame support.

A ton of stuff was in play as is always the case these days and I played PHIO, SNOA, NAK, and PRTY as well, spreading myself pretty thin. Mis-sized my SNOA bet badly and it was a small win instead of a big one.

His Zealotry Knew No Bounds

From James Lardner’s interview on Booknotes:

“David Burnham pointed out to me that both of these key instigators Serpico and Durk were on the outs, you might say. They were not the standard cut of police officer. Serpico was Italian American. There were a lot more Italian Americans in the police department than there were Jewish Americans. But still, both were a minority.”

Strum

From Nadine Cohodas’s interview on Booknotes:

“… by that time the senator was nearly 68 years old and Nancy Moore was about 22 and a half, a 44-year age difference. We may have come a long way but, you know, for a politician who was hoping to survive, there was good reason to believe you might alienate a lot of people and just look kind of odd doing this. Do I dare say wacky? And that it just was not a very smart political thing to do.

But, as history has shown, it has not turned out to be that at all, and, indeed, in 1978 having a young, attractive wife and four very cute children who ran around or drove around the state in the Strom truck with t-shirts that said ‘Vote for my daddy’ was a wonderful thing to blunt Pug Ravenel's appeal -- young, handsome, 40 years old. And there was another picture in there during that campaign of Senator Thurmond sliding down a fire station pole at his son Strom Jr.'s sixth birthday, again to show he was plenty vigorous and could, if you will, keep up with the times.”