Things I Didn’t Know & More
Headline from newsmax.com: “RFK Assassin Sirhan Sirhan Granted Parole in California.” Although I’m not surprised, I’m saddened. I draw the line at the intentional taking of life. Those who do so should die behind bars.
Also from NM: “Florida, Texas Didn’t Push Masks, They’re Not in Top 20 of COVID Death States.” The virus continues to refuse to behave rationally… Meanwhile, according to another NM article, edited by yours truly: The demand for monoclonal antibody therapies to treat COVID-19 cases has risen dramatically. President Trump, when infected, received a cocktail manufactured by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. It must be administered within a week of infection and costs $1250. I’d pay it.
This NM headline incited laughter: “Man Accused in Capitol Attack Raises Almost $200K in Donations.” Hard to believe what some folks do with their money.
Yet another new term. Snippet from a nypost.com article by Hannah Frishberg: “So-called ‘roaching’ refers to the act of hiding the fact that you’re seeing multiple people from a new romantic partner.” I think Franz Kafka would approve.
Friday night’s movie fix, courtesy of Netflix by mail, was disappointing because the close captioning did not match the film, Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York (2019). I’d never encountered this before. The text was from some sort of political thriller. That being the case, it would not be fair to rate Rainy Day…, as dialogue is always crucial to an Allen work. But I can safely say it’s more of the auteur’s melancholy cynical view of humans (unlike Scorsese’s bleak one), particularly their fickleness. I still hold to the hope that Allen and Quentin Tarantino will film a script by someone else. Each seems to be covering the same ground over and over again. Anyway, 36,000+ users at IMDb have rated Rainy Day…, forging to a consensus of 6.5 on a scale of ten. Typical of Allen’s work, it runs about 90 minutes. It returned $22+ million at the box office on a budget of $25 million, so I imagine it recouped its losses — or came close to it— after DVD sales, rentals and streaming. Here are the leads, Elle Fanning and Timothée Chalamet:
I expected weather to put the kibosh today on the floating book shop. Since it wasn’t raining after I’d hung up the laundry, I decided to take a shot, hoping at least that the woman who promised more art pictorials would show before the rain did. She was returning from 86th Street as I stepped out of the old Hyundai. She came back 20 minutes later with another remarkable cache. That alone had me feeling I’d gotten away with something, but there was more. My thanks to the woman, and also to the gentleman who bought Mystics and Misfits: Meeting God Through St. Francis and Other Unlikely Saints by Christiana N Peterson; and to the young woman who purchased The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw; and to the other who took home pictorials on the work of Toulouse Latrec, Degas, Caravaggio and Stasys Krasauskas, a Lithuanian graphic artist of whom I’d never heard. Here’s an example of his work. I don’t know the title:
The good vibes continued on the drive home. Four great tracks came up on the CD I’d cued: The B52’s Good Stuff had me swaying to its incredible funk. I listened closely to Bjork’s pulsating Human Behavior (“They’re terribly, terribly moody…”), and got misty over Linda Eder’s awesome vocal of Sammy Fain’s I’ll Be Seeing You and the Shangri-Las’ poignant rendition of Shadow Morton’s I Can Never Go Home Anymore. I’m embarrassed to admit I knew nothing of Morton, who also wrote Remember (Walking in the Sand) and co-wrote Leader of the Pack with Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. He passed away at 72 in 2013.
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