Michael Hopcroft

Putting on a Santy Claus hat and a coat, in an effort to steal it.

If Godzilla wants to be paid not to burn down your city this week, you find a way to pay him.

So will the Niners do what Jim Kern accused the Cleveland Indians of doing back in the late 1970s: "When [the team] finds out you have any talent, the first thing they do is trade you for three guys who don't."

It reminds me of one of my favorite late-night movies growing up, the classic French comedy/satire The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, in which a duel for control of an espionage operation hinges of the surveillance of a randomly-chosen airline passenger. it's a perfect send-up of (and antidote to) Cold War/Watergate paranoia which struck a chord with American art-house audiences.

Who should stay away from Twitter?
 
Pretty much everybody...

Mom invited me for Christmas dinner at her "retirement community" (actually rent-supported apartments -- but she loves it there) and I accepted. We're going to do the family holiday party either on Boxing Day or a little after that.
 
We've already exchanged our gifts -- Mom gets a copy of the original Going in Style with George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg. My present was shirts from Burlington Coat Factory, which I got to select.

If you are a musician in an orchestra, you know what the gestures mean. It's not just calisthenics -- they are telling you something, even if that something is helping someone in the orchestra is having trouble keeping up.
 
Of course, the real work of the conductor is in the intense rehearsals required to prevent such occurrences, as well as to put the orchestra's stamp on the work. It's very hard work and very demanding.
 
Putting your stamp on includes managing the soloist in a concerto (of which there is one in every program). One time, for example, Leonard Bernstein was preparing for a concert where Glenn Gould was playing the solo part in a Brahms piano concerto. Now both had their ideas on how the work should be played, and both were stubborn as donkeys. Eventually, Bernstein was forced to relent and gave a short speech to the audience on the dispute and what they were apart to hear. Actually, they were very good friends off the stage, but both were also supreme artists and Gould had a deserved reputation as being difficult for conductors to manage.

Oh, it's worse than that. "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is something Bill Cosby would have said to reassure his victims -- he even gives "the Mouse" (the female voice) a roofie, which is already having an effect as it goes on ("Say, what's in that drink?") So it's not just harassment -- it's rape.
 
The question of why anyone ever found the Chipmunks funny (whose records were made by speeding up human singers who sang very slowly -- normalizing the tempo to match the other tracks but driving the pitch way up) is as great a mystery as the hula-hoop Alvin craved. (Now that I think about it, it's an early example of the capabilities of the then-new technology of multi-track recording. As much as they may have cringed at the content, musicians and producers were definitely paying attention.)
 
If you need a remedy for some of the kitsch of the holiday, I present Malinda Kathleen Reese, master of mistranslation.
 
 

The year is 1987, and NASA launches the last of America's deep space probes...

"Agent Blackadder reminds me of a young woman I autopsied once."
"When'd she die?"
"Oh, gosh, in Hollywood. Let's see, it's got to be at least 20 years ago. She was an assistant film editor and the film editor's wife caught them in flagrante delicto--"
"This one, Ducky. When did this one die?"

I haven't seen a Deadpool movie, but a PG-13 Deadpool movie is not a Deadpool movie.

They did, and it was one of the most gutwrenching shows of the series.  The whole series was on netflix a few years and I watched them all.  Great stuff.  Suchet is Poirot like Jeremy Brett is Sherlock Holmes.  Perfectly cast, perfectly portrayed.  At least some of the series is on Amazon Prime right now.

Bill Maher is a professional ass. More politely, he is the sort of comedian/pundit for whom the line between joke, commentary, and the deliberately incendiary blur. He is best known for shows on ABC and HBO where he eventually went off the leash and took a few steps too far (then cried victimization when the inevitable consequences followed).
 
The question of which arts forms are important, which should be important, and what choice of important art forms means for a society -- that is a question best left to its own thread.

Paint him red and attach him to Ian McKellen's jacket.

I don't remember whether Lee himself wrote it, but one Spider-Man story became partly responsible for smashing the authority of the Comics Code. After the comic panic of the 1950s (inspired by the book The Seduction of the Innocents, which in turn was based on fatally flawed research that was eventually thoroughly discredited) comics were bared from covering many real-life phenomena and required to always have endings where "crime does not pay". It was enforced by a self-appointed Authority who acted as censors and barred distribution to the main outlets for comics (mainly drugstores and supermarkets, and later convenience stores) of books that did not meet their standard. Underground comics (by artists like R. Crumb) were underground because they had to be distributed by other means and were thus far less profitable.
 
Then Stan Lee challenged them by writing a classic Spider-Man story in which Peter Parker discovers that one of his friends has become addicted to a drug. Portrayal of drug use was prohibited by the Authority - who wanted to pretend it didn't happen for fear of glamorizing it. (Political and social conservatism was one of the Authority's main drivers, and a partial reason that all cxomic book heroes of the '50s and '60s were still white.) They withdrew their seal from the book, hoping it would dissuade Lee from releasing it.
 
He published it anyway. Having already pioneered realism in character development (Ben Grimm's reactions to becoming the Thing were both rational and heartbreaking, and could not have happened before Lee and Ditko came along.) And despite the hold of the Authority on distribution people bought the book anyway through Marvel's thriving mail-order platform. The story became so famous that it was eventually included in high school textbooks. Rival publisher DC Comics was inspired to one-up Lee by having one of their heroes (Green Arrow's sidekick Speedy) deal with a drug problem. Then there was Tony Stark's hard drinking, which led to very frank stories about alcoholism in the Iron Man series. Comics confronted the real world as opposed to denying it, while still being the escapist entertainment fans craved. It took decades ofr the Comic Code Authority to finally disappear, but as time went on they became less and less relevant -- and the final blow was the advent of specialty comic book retailers.

To me, David Suchet is the quintessential Poirot. If that series did a version of this story, I want to see it. I know he appeared in adaptations of several of the other novels, and of course there is a rich vein of Poirot short stories to look to.
 
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was controversial, as Christie cleverly abandoned one of the central premises of the mystery genre, but it works as a novel outside the genre as well. She had a gift for satire, and the Miss Marple stories, in which the sweet old spinster had "plumbed the depths of human depravity" simply by observing what happens beyond the placid facade of English country life, are often perfect examples. As satire, The Murder of roger Ackroyd is a masterpiece.

In honor of the man's passing...
 

To me, David Suchet is the quintessential Poirot. If that series did a version of this story, I want to see it. I know he appeared in adaptations of several of the other novels, and of course there is a rich vein of Poirot short stories to look to.
 
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was controversial, as Christie cleverly abandoned one of the central premises of the mystery genre, but it works as a novel outside the genre as well. She had a gift for satire, and the Miss Marple stories, in which the sweet old spinster had "plumbed the depths of human depravity" simply by observing what happens beyond the placid facade of English country life, are often perfect examples. As satire, The Murder of roger Ackroyd is a masterpiece.

Steve Rogers just loves the US Olympic teams, but is offended when they cheat.
 
NT: Subtle signs your choice of convention cosplays was at best ill-advised. 

Tony Stark roots for the Yankees -- because Tony Stark owns the Yankees.

Defense in this seasons so far seems to consist less of preventing teams from scoring a lot and more of preventing teams from scoring points when they really need them. I think what everyone is blaming (or crediting, depending on your point of view) is the new "point of emphasis" that discourages the pushing and shoving typical of NBA players fighting for position.
 
Such things rarely last, though, and the sample size is hard to judge anything on. but so far NBA teams are giving away a lot of fries, coffees, and chicken nuggets to their fans. (You pay $200 to take your family to the game and you're happy about a six-piece box of bad nuggets the next day?)
 
On another note, the Lakers have had nothing approaching success so far. As I said earlier, they probably won't know what they have until 30-40 games into the season, but right now they must really regret missing out on Paul George. LBJ has no real #2 option right now, and his game demands one.
 
And Lonzo Ball is getting a rude awakening -- he's gotten a couple of starts due to the Rondo suspension and not done much to inspire Lebron's confidence. Add the ever-present headache of Dad and he could have a much briefer career than anyone expected, at least in LA. No father outside of royal families has done quite so much to sabotage his children's lives for his own gain as LaVar Ball. It's enraging and pitiful. Lonzo has talent -- not at the generational level he has been pushed as -- but his career has been so badly handled that it is affecting his ability to learn how to play with a legend. Note to dads: don;t tell the media that our rookie son who doesn't like to shoot and is still learning to distribute at the NBA level is better than the consensus best player on the planet and expect said best player to take kindly to it. Playing with Lebron is a fantastic opportunity for any young player with serious ambitions, and Lonzo and his dad are blowing it.

Long ago, Einstein (disguised as Robin Hood) was famous for playing electric violin on Desolation Row. Then something went wrong and he was reduced to sniffing drainpipes while reciting the alphabet.
 
I can imagine film studios of the future building "dream cast" movies where any actor who was ever recorded on film, video or audio can be cast in any role in a film. Which would make life hard, if not impossible, for actual actors -- if they can get reliable virtual casts, why use unreliable human beings?
 
 
 
 

The song was adapted into the English-language standard "Beyond the Sea", but the original version is literally about the pleasures of visiting the seaside. Trenet wrote the song during World War II, when France's beaches were pretty much cut off from the public as potential invasion sites. He only bothered to record and release it once the war ended, and it was a huge success.
 
Trenet's legacy is uncomfortable, given his fondness for teenage boys and the compromises he needed to make to continue his career during the occupation of France. But this is a beautiful song anyway. He also wrote the comic song "Boum!" that was featured in The World at War and released when France was anxious about potential war with Germany (as it turned out, it was for good reason).