Variety

Corre! It’s that time of year. Photo from Google Images:

Doesn’t seem possible. Headline from nypost.com: “109 people shot — 19 fatally — in bloody Fourth of July weekend in Chicago.” Maybe The Windy City should change its name to Tombstone. SMH.

Each day I observe befuddled folks gazing at their phones trying to determine which direction to take, so I find this NYP headline amusing: “Some help: Driver gets stranded on mountain after following Google Maps ‘shortcut’.”

From NYP: “Scientists investigate mysterious giant scar stretching across Mars — they are baffled how it even got there.” Round up the usual suspects.

Headline from newsmax.com: “Biden Is Now Deporting More People Than Trump.” And, of course, the mainstream media will ignore what they criticized DT about.

Headline from foxnews.com: “Trump’s team says he will ‘lay out an indictment’ on alleged ‘cover-up’ of Biden’s health.” I don’t like it. Quid Pro Joe’s decline was obvious to anyone paying attention. Why waste time, energy and money that would be best devoted elsewhere?

For some reason a small group of heroin users have chosen to shoot up in lobbies on East 13th.

Last night Movies!, channel 5–2 on OTA in NYC, ran The Siege at Red River (1954), starring Van Johnson, Joanne Dru, Richard Boone and Milburn Stone. It’s a standard western distinguished by impressive outdoor footage shot in Colorado and Utah. It was directed by Rudolph Mate, a Polish immigrant, who was much more successful as a cinematographer. He holds the record for the most consecutive Oscar nominations in that category — five: Foreign Correspondent (1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941), The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Sahara (1943) and Cover Girl (1944). He succumbed to a heart attack at 66 in 1964… NYC-born Edward Cronjager received credit as the cinematographer of The Siege…, one of 137 titles under his name at IMDb. He was nominated for seven Academy Awards: Cimarron (1931), Sun Valley Serenade (1942), To the Shores of Tripoli & The Pied Piper (1943), Heaven Can Wait (1944), Home in Indiana (1945), Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1954). Neither man won an Oscar. Cronjager died at 56 in 1960. He was injured several weeks prior to his death while on the set of a picture when he tried to stop a fight between two stuntmen. His death was listed as natural causes. Here is Mate, followed by Cronjager, photos from GI:

The cloud cover took a lot of the sting out of the humidity at today’s session of the floating book shop. All the business came early. My thanks to the woman who donated a bunch of kids’ books, and to Lynn, who bought The Land of Painted Caves: Earth’s Children, Book Six by Jean Auel; and to the young man who purchased Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie.

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