Added 1 new A* page:Goodies from Christmas!
Now that the great Christmas Eve Netflix outage is over (thank goodness! :O), if you subscribe to their streaming service you've only got a few days left to check out the spaghetti sci-fi Star Wars wannabe train wreck that is Starcrash before it goes away on January 1st. I talked a bit about it last November
and *finally* sat down and watched it with this deadline looming, and man, the writing, acting, and editing are stunningly awful! Don't miss your chance of being able to boast of having survived a screening of this debacle! Not only is there incredibly nonsensical dialogue, and crummy stop-motion animation with light-sabers and David Hasselhoff, but it also features some pseudo science screamers, like firing torpedoes at the big bad guy's fist-shaped space fortress, except that instead of having them oh I don't know maybe just blow the thing up, you have them crash through the station's apparently plate glass windows—not causing any decompression because the concept of space being a vacuum seems to be completely unknown to the film makers—and skid to a stop on the floor—let's not even go into the gravity issue ;P—at which point one of your brave soldiers pops out of the torpedo's hollow body and is immediately gunned down by the bad guy's guards. Galactic prince David Hasselhoff can only watch in frustration as this brilliant attack stratagem of his father's somehow doesn't work out so well!
~~~~~~~
When I was looking up naval uniform and hat reference for the introduction of the Commander in today's comic, I came across a neat page with lots of photos of WWI US Naval uniforms. Check out them fancy dress uniforms!
~~~~~~~
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold is not only quite an interesting article, first published in Esquire in 1966, that documents some of the finer workings of the singer's mind and 75-man personal staff near the peak of Sinatra's power—the writer, Gay Talese, hadn't been able to wrangle his intended interview from the famously tight-lipped star, so instead he followed Sinatra and his coterie around, just observing from as close as he was allowed, and interviewing any staff members he could get—but its final composition sent a shockwave across the journalistic world, as it "became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism — a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction"—although it should be noted that Talese came to dislike the "New Journalism" label, because in the hands of other writers it became something of an excuse for less-than-rigorously faithful reporting.
One incident observed and recorded in the article by Talese was a bar-room run-in between Sinatra and science fiction writer Harlan Ellison; Sinatra, not approving of the younger generation's casual evening attire, objected to Ellison's boots, and Ellison, never one to back down, objected to Sinatra's barbed questions—the end result being that Ellison was able to leave with his pride intact, although an order from Sinatra henceforth banned all those without suit and tie from the premises.
I came across this whole thing because I just watched the Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever," which, although it relies on time travel, has a much more interesting plot than most of the other episodes in the show's first season—and Ellison has the writing credit at the end. Ellison, of course, would find the "fatally inept treatment" of his screenplay—extensive re-writes by other writers having cut various subplots, among other things—enough of an excuse for legal action: he sued CBS Paramount over the episode 42 years later, in 2009.
|
