October Surprises
Great comment by NY Post sports media critic Phil Mushnick in his column today: “So after proudly announcing he spent $175,000 on a gold chain that carries his nickname, Jets rookie left tackle Mekhi Beckton took a knee on the sideline before last week’s game to protest racial injustice…” Kudos.
Here’s a photo from yesterday’s Georgia-Auburn football game. Many in the crowd were not wearing a mask. Although I’m not against forgoing one, I would not and do not put myself in such a situation. Still, I hope those folks are right and showing the way out of the pandemic…
Also on this issue, a headline from Yahoo Sports: “Police kick out entire SMU student section for failing to social distance.”… On the playing field, outside of the continued excellence of Alabama and Clemson, upsets abound.
Canadian TV shows have frequently been ridiculed. One of the ION stations, 31–3 on over the air antennas in NYC, has been running marathons of one on weekends, Murdoch Mysteries. Curious about its origins, I researched it. It’s set in the late 1890’s. It’s been rated by 10,000+ users at IMDb to the tune of 8.1 on a scale of ten. It’s been running since 2008, 207 episodes, and another 20 have been shot in offshoots featuring the same stars: Yannick Bisson and Helene Joy. Although the series has so far failed to pull me in, one cannot help but admire its success. Kudos. Here are the leads:
Also in TV: Last night the Heroes & Icons station, 9–4, ran episode three of season two of Combat!, Masquerade, which featured the great James Coburn as a ruthless Nazi infiltrator. Also making a guest appearance was Norman Alden, a TV mainstay from 1956–2006. There are 250 titles under his name at IMDb, not counting at least 24 series in which he made at least three appearances. He made two on Combat! in different roles. His character is killed by Coburn’s. He passed away at 87 in 2012. I was unable to find a photo of him in the episode in question, but here’s a good one:
Coburn was one of Hollywood’s all-time great supporting players and even had a brief, successful run as a leading man. There are 175 titles under his name at IMDb. He passed away at 74 in 2002. Here he is in character beside a suspicious Sgt. Saunders, played by Vic Morrow, whose world weary look was so perfect for the role:
It was an interesting session of the floating book shop on this gorgeous October day. My thanks to Mr. Conspiracy, aka Steve, who is able to read again after cataract surgery. He bought Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America by Thurston Clarke. That political sound bite is one of the greatest of all time. Given the rest of the title, I assumed the book was published soon after it was uttered. No, it was 2004. I would argue, given that half of America receives some kind of government payout and that we are on the brink of socialism, that the statement has gone unheeded. Moving on, my thanks also to the young man of limited English who overcompensated me for How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life by Epictetus and Anthony Long and a primer on reading that contained a CD. A bit later, a gentleman who is going to paint his apartment brought the first of two loads of his wife’s books in Russian. I’m pretty sure there are more than 100, including at least 15 translations each of Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts. My thanks. I was so preoccupied with how I was going to fit the entire inventory into the old Hyundai that it didn’t even occur to me to take a picture. As I began packing up, I had a great surprise. There stood Bob, who, given his underlying conditions, I feared had been taken by the virus. He was hooked to a device that delivers oxygen to his nostrils. For the first time in ages I had something his grand-daughter, an artist, might like — a pictorial on the work of Morris Louis (Bernstein). Bob continues to dream of interesting someone in the movie business in his screenplay ideas, but has been stymied by the pandemic and his partner’s health struggles. It was so great seeing him.
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