Stalwarts
Selective outrage, unsurprising headline from nypost.com: “Park Slope teacher: School banned my ‘Proud Zionist’ t-shirt but allows ‘BLM’ garb.”
Covid conflict continues. Here’s a fascinating headline from foxnews.com that turns a term used by the left to protect illegals aliens into a different rallying point: “California ‘sanctuary city’ declares itself a Constitutional Republic to fight COVID mandates.” It’s Oroville.
Last night Movies!, channel 5–2 on ota in NYC, ran Walk Softly, Stranger (1950), which re-teams the stars of The Third Man (1949), Joseph Cotten and Valli, although not nearly as memorably as in that classic. It’s the story of a gambler/thief looking to go straight now that he has amassed a small fortune. He returns to his home town and falls for a woman he knew, now beautiful but confined to a wheelchair. Of course, this being film noir, his past catches up to him. It’s interesting but standard, too mild compared to the best works of the genre. In researching the cast, I found three players who deserve mention. Legendary talk show host Jack Paar has a small role, one of his seven acting credits… Salvatore Luigi Puglia was born in Sicily in 1892 and emigrated to America in 1907. He joined an Italian theater group in NYC and was spotted by D.W. Griffitn, which led to a great Hollywood run that spanned 1921-’75 under the name Frank Puglia. He plays the woman’s dad, a successful businessman. His most memorable role is the rug merchant in Casablanca (1942). He was set to play Buonasera in The Godfather (1972), but fell ill. There are 241 titles under his name at IMDb. He made multiple appearances on popular prime time shows, including, naturally, three on The Untouchables. He passed away at 83 in 1975. Bravo, goombah… Jeff Donnell is female, birth name Jean Marie. Her most notable credits came as the wife in 75 episodes of The George Gobel Show, and as mom in Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) and Gidget Goes to Rome (1963). There are 131 titles under her name, career spanning 1942-’87. She too made multiple appearances on TV series. Married four times, she succumbed to a heart attack at 66 in 1988. Here she is:
And here’s Puglia with Joan Taylor and one of Ray Harryhausen's creations in 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957):
This morning I resumed work on the Curious Sicilian short works collection. As I clicked on the Word file, a template came up saying I was unauthorized. At first I assumed it was the work of a hacker. Since other Word files reacted similarly, I believe Microsoft somehow gained entry. I’d been receiving messages for a while about the program having expired. I simply deleted what had been in one of the files and used it for the new stuff. Since those had been used long before the program’s end time, I thought they would be safe — au contraire. I refuse to give that billion dollar firm any money, at least for now. I don’t know if I’ll reach the 200-page target I’ve set for a print book, so it may not even matter in the long run. I’ll be a bit more than halfway there when I finish adding the piece on my skydiving experience, and one on bungee jumping will follow. I have only one more planned after that, and it shouldn’t be more than a couple of pages. There are sites that offer free programs similar to Word, but I’m leery of downloading anything. Meanwhile, since I’d saved the file to my email account, I had an alternative. It opened in what looked an Adobe file. I was able to open that in a format named Zoho. I was unable to save that to my desktop, but able to save it to Google Docs. To my surprise, the format remained intact. In the past, the files condensed. So I will now work in that. It would be great if Amazon accepted a GD to create a print book, but that’s probably asking too much.
Hostile conditions today at the floating book shop: strong cold wind, no sun until late in the session. I spent most of the time in my car, which was about 20 feet from the display. I put out only 20% of the wares, half of them Russian. My thanks to the sweet elderly library volunteers, who delivered a handful of children’s books, and to Occupy Jack, who bought The Bible Code and Bible Code II: The Countdown, both by Michael Drosnin. They should provide inspiration for his incendiary blogs.
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