A mashup of Spill the Wine by Eric Burdon and War, and the Soviet silent science fiction psychedelic silver screen story Aelita. I dare you to watch it. And I double-dog dare you to say “Soviet silent science fiction psychedelic silver screen story” five times fast without sounding like Daffy Duck.
I’ve actually performed this same job several times. I have not, however, performed it like that. You have two choices, of course: Tough on the back, or tough on the knees. In the long run, it doesn’t matter which you choose, because when you wear one out, you switch to the other one, and wear that out too.
Segal’s Law is one of those aphorisms or adages or sayings or tiresome tropes or something. It avers that a man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
In its purest sense, it’s a warning against the pitfalls of having conflicting information when you have to make up your mind. Conversely, if you’re a devotee of irony, it’s a warning that a single point of information might be comforting, but if it’s wrong you’ll never know it.
I’ve always preferred the Howard brothers take on the question. What if you had three watches?
The internet is like trying to tell time using a crate of watches. There’s so much stuff on it that you can’t possibly use it to glean dispositive information to make up your mind. There’s always another answer available, and ten people publish another one while you’re reading the last, ill-considered opinion or unfactual fact.
People didn’t used to be so confused about simple things. To return to the watch example, timepieces used to be somewhat rarer than they are now. Everything you own tells time now. A hundred years ago, it wasn’t all that unusual to ask a stranger what time it was if you saw them looking at their watch. But in that scenario, you’re just adding another layer to Segal’s Law. You’re trusting another person to tell you the correct time, and relying on a stranger’s watch in the bargain.
So if you have one watch, the watch might be wrong, and you’ll be misinformed. If you have two watches, they’ll no doubt have conflicting information, and you’ll be unsure which to believe. If you ask another person for the time, you’ll have to trust them, and to trust a watch you don’t own.
So what’s a person to do? You can’t trust one watch, and two is an instant committee, which is a recipe for not deciding anything. How about you try no watch at all?
People used to be much more in tune with the natural world. They were more aware of their surroundings. They noticed things like the sun rising and setting. The movement of shadows on the ground or on a wall as the day progresses. They noticed faraway church bells struck at regular hours. The behavior of animals. They knew their neighbors and could predict their comings and goings with a good amount of precision, because people had much more reliable schedules than we do now.
So people with no watch might not know exactly what time it was, but they’d know if their watch was broken. They’d know the difference between two watches wouldn’t matter much in the grand scheme of telling time. They’d sense if a stranger was pulling their leg when he told them the time. They’d simply laugh at the hoary old vaudeville Stooges joke instead of trying to do Stooges math in their heads. Because they knew the fundamental answer to the dilemma of Segal’s Law is to use your judgment when you hear information. People like that, dead and buried, would know that it doesn’t matter what sort of piffle is rampant on the internet, because more or less you already know what time it is, so to speak, and it ain’t that.
I’m allowed to write things in Spanish occasionally, like siete, because I live near Mexico. Mexico, Maine, that is. And Peru, now that I think about it. I’m fairly close to Norway, as well, but I won’t be slinging any Norwegian at you. You’re welcome in advance. Norsk got all them fricatives and flaps and glottal this and retroflex that. Nei takk, venner. Oops, sorry. But I’ll knock it off, I promise, and get down to business. Great Moments in Maine Real Estate coming up!
I can’t help myself. I get to noticing things others don’t. I get to wondering about things maybe I shouldn’t. So you’ll forgive me if I wonder aloud what exactly might be sticking through the wall in the next room.
I’m on (broken) record as identifying Frank Gehry, the architect, as one of the most destructive individuals from the last hundred years or so. You know, the brushy mustache guy needed a big army to wreck most of Europe, but Gehry only needs a pencil and paper to lay waste to the countryside. His big idea, if you can call it that, is that houses, and especially public buildings, should be incredibly complex, expensive, and above all, goofy-looking. Telling expensive jokes in sticks and bricks desolates the landscape, and can’t be reversed easily. And the idea permeates its way down through the architectural floor into the construction groundwater, and the result is a pressure-treated KFC bucket someone is supposed to live in.
I don’t know about you, but when I roll out of bed in the morning, I’m not ready for the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. I can’t memorize a short list of anything, name objects shown in pictures, or copy motions or shapes while performing other tasks until I’ve had a cup of coffee, at least. While there are still pillow lines on my face, and my hair is in a somewhat architectural configuration, I’m not ready for a Mini-Mental State examination. You know, identifying objects in a room, counting backwards, knowing the date, and being able to expound on common facts. I’m not in the mood for Memory Impairments Screen, a Functional Activities Questionnaire, or even putting those oddly shaped blocks into their respective holes in the Shape Sorter thing. So I’m definitely not in the mood for figuring out this assortment of shower knobs, the kind of thing I’d expect to find after teaching the Chief to play basketball. Besides, how many knobs do they need to give you a cold shower?
Interestingly, Wine Rack Full of Skulls is the name of my Pantera tribute band, But I digress.
There is no power on Earth that could keep me from calling this “The Sh*t Chute” if I lived there. Of course, there’s no power on Earth that could get me to live there in the first place, so the point is moot. Still, if the next occupant wants to call it that, I’ll waive copyright on it.
I call this decorating motif the “Instant Divorce.” Because I don’t know about you guys, but I’d say things like, “Are you gonna skin that sheepleg, pilgrim,” or maybe, “Liberty Valance’s the toughest man south of the Picketwire – next to me,” every single time I went through those doors, until my wife couldn’t take it any more.
Well, there you go. It’s a selección bastante buena for you to enjoy. You can vote for your favorite in the comments, but please: no wagering.
You know, they say clothes make the man. Of course almost anyone can purchase a Nirvana wifebeater T shirt with a picture of the Hansons on it. That’s a gimme. But it’s the Nickelodeon socks that really tie the ensemble together.
Norm Abram is retired from both his TV shows now, I think. I haven’t had a lot to do with television for a long time now, so correct me if I’m wrong. He was different than every other TV person who made stuff. He banged on houses with Bob Vila and all his replacements on This Old House, and he made sensible furniture on The New Yankee Workshop on the side. I certainly never saw all of his output, but I never saw him say something stupid. No one would ever say that about me, even if they only met me yesterday. He was always avuncular and productive and sensible on his shows. He never built anything ridiculous that I saw.
The internet is now chock-a-block full of people building stupid stuff, stupidly. This Old House has devolved into nothing more than dreadful homeowners picking out the most expensive things from every list put in front of them, and has long been unwatchable. It wasn’t always thus. The crew used to help homeowners repair and remodel their own houses in a robust but sane fashion. The sweat equity was real, and the results were sensible, if not flashy. The sensible but not flashy ethos is as dead as a Pharaoh now. It’s been decades since I’ve heard of any dwelling of any kind on television construction shows referred to as anything other than a “dream home.” No one is willing to settle for a regular home they might be able to afford, or even build themselves. They’ll live in a shipping container, but not a ranch.
Building a boat in the basement was a pretty common thing back in the day. I did it myself, once, though I never launched it. I got to wondering if it was still “a thing.” A quick scan of YouTub seined a huge trawl of ridiculous boat projects. Dream boats, if you will. All the smaller stuff was people wondering if they could make a silly boat out of the wrong materials.
And then Norm appeared. Look what he made. It’s a modest, useful, intelligent thing, made to last. Just like Norm.
That’s a bit of a rhetorical question, but it’s not an exaggeration. Hollywood obviously doesn’t like the American Revolution, and has signaled its disdain for the whole affair by studiously avoiding the topic for 110 years or so.
Let’s examine the statistics. In the 1910s, there were six movies made about the American Revolution. They had to interrupt the revolution to hold up cards explaining what everyone was saying, of course. But those six movies are the most for any decade since then, with the exception of the 1950s, who tied the score.
After the teens:
1920s: 4
1930s: 4, including Daniel Boone, which is about Indian fighting, not killing Britishers
1940s: 1. No, really; one. With Cary Grant, of all people, in a sort of Peyton Revolutionary Place
1950s: 6 again, none notable really. Daniel Boone is back, with Lon Chaney of all people busting Daniel’s balls with feathers in his hair. Leon Trotsky’s Bessarabian nephew (I’m not making this up, I swear) Samuel Bronston filmed John Paul Jones in Spain of all places, starring Robert Stack of all people, and lost his shirt. Andrew Loog Oldham liked the movie poster, though, and told the bass player in Led Zeppelin, John Baldwin, he’d be hipper if he changed his name to John Paul Jones for some reason.
1960s: Basically none. For a decade where about twenty-zillion movies were made. There was one French-Italian production called La Fayette. I don’t think George Washington was that fond of spaghetti and meatballs, however, or snails for that matter, so I don’t get the connection
1970s: 3, I guess, but only technically. The first, Paths of War, is an Italian comedy of all things. The plot summary shows just how confused Italians can be about any topic you could name:
In 1858 in Italy, in Sicily, Franco and Ciccio defend the Bourbon army to prevent the unification of Italy built by Giuseppe Garibaldi. However, when the troops of Garibaldi defeated the Bourbons, Franco and Ciccio escape, taking refuge in a box, which is delivered in America. In the Far West, Franco and Ciccio find themselves involved in the American War of Independence against the Apache Indians. They, camouflage, disguise themselves first by warlike Americans, and then by Indian holy men, being able to save their skin.
Franco and Ciccio sound like they went to American public schools, with a timeline like that. Anyway, the decade wasn’t done with messin’ with us. There was 1776, a musical comedy about the Revolution, if you can wrap your head around that. In his review, Vincent Canby of the New York Times, said that “the lyrics sound as if they’d been written by someone high on root beer…” I don’t quite know how to approach that observation, so we’ll move on. The only other Revolution movies listed is a videotaped adaptation of a Broadway play shown as a Hallmark Hall of Fame special, so not really a movie. But Christopher Walken is listed as a Hessian in it, which must have been a trip.
1980s: 2. Revolution, starring Al Pacino, is chockablock full of unintentional comedy. Not since Tony Curtis was saying things like Yonder is duh cassel ov my faddah had we been treated to Bronx accents in such unBronxy settings. The only other movie about the Revolution was made by the Brigham Young University School of Fine Arts. Not exactly a David O. Selznick production, there.
1990s: Zero, unless you call The Little Patriot one. I’m not sure if I do, because I can’t find anything about it online, except notes about the director in Danish, which I’m allergic to.
2000s: 3. Mel Gibson starred in a slasher film about the Revolution, The Patriot, and proved there was at least a quarter of a billion dollars in the topic, as long as you brained enough Britishers with a hatchet during the festivities. The other two are so obscure that they might well be slides of someone’s vacation in Maryland.
2010s: 4, I guess. The only one with a link on the Wikiup is listed as an “American Christian historical action-adventure film.” I don’t know how to break it to the Wikiup editors, but everything to do with the United States up until a few years ago was American Christian history. Maybe that’s why Hollywood isn’t interested. The other three movies don’t merit links on the Wiki, but I found a screen cap from one. Enjoy:
These stalwart ’76ers appear to be trying to figure out which end the shooty bits come out of, and what time lunch is served. We’ll leave it at that.
2020s: 1. I think. There’s one listed, called The Battle of Camden, but I can’t find it much about it. Its IMDB file says the Top Cast includes Jezibell Anat, who seems to be a belly dancer. I’m not sure how that would tie in with the Battle of Camden, but it’s no stranger than casting Tony Curtis in The Vikings, is it?
OK, maybe it is.
So let’s compare that with movies about the Civil War. Back to the Wikiup. Hmm. I count 355. That’s a lot. Hell, they list 16 currently being produced.
Let’s try World War I movies to cleanse our palates. Believe me, I’m not going to try to count World War II movies. I don’t have that kind of stamina and an abacus with that many beads. But The Great War? Nobody born after Nixon got de-selected can even tell you what that one was about. I doubt most of the combatants could. But still, I count 202 entries on the Wikiup for WWI.
So Hollywood is very, very interested in wars. It’s interested in every sort of war involving Americans, and plenty that didn’t. But ipso facto they don’t care about the revolutionary war. My opinion might not be science, but it sure is at least some sort of arithmetic.
Perhaps I know why. I was in a used bookstore last year. We buy old hardcover versions of classics, mostly. Not much after the 1930s. Anyway, we were standing at the checkout and the heavy-set woman behind the counter with the owlish glasses and the tats was looking askance at our selections, and picked up one of our Graham Greene books about the Caribbean.
“My daughter just came back from vacation down near there. She said to me, ‘Mom, the money is so much more colorful down there, and has more interesting people on it’.” Then the clerk said to us, “Our money just has boring old dead white guys on it, amirite?”
I looked in my wallet. There was Alexander Hamilton. Ah yes. A bastard orphan born on the island of Nevis, taken in by a merchant who paid his way to New York for an education. He served as an artillery officer in the Revolutionary War, was the aide to General Washington, and was a delegate to the Continental Congress. On his days off from practicing law and writing 51 of the 85 installments of The Federalist Papers, he founded the Bank of New York, which currently has $45.7 trillion in assets somewhere around the place, I imagine it’s hard to remember where you put all that stuff. He was the first Secretary of the Treasury, which is only fair as it was his idea to have one. He helped abolish the international slave trade, and President Adams made him a major general in the army to keep him busy. Then he was shot to death in a duel with the third vice-president of the United States.
Yep. Boring.
Woody Guthrie wrote around about 1,000 song lyrics that never got published or set to music in his lifetime. Woody couldn’t read or write music so there were no notations indicating how he would want them to sound. Bob Dylan said Woody told Bob to go to New York and look up his wife Margie and get the boxes of song lyrics and set them to music, but Dylan said that when he got to the house, only Woody’s son Arlo and the babysitter were home, so he went away empty-handed.
Much later on, Woody’s daughter gave them to Billy Bragg and he set some to music and recorded them with the band Wilco. The album is named after the address on Coney Island where Woody used to live.
If you have any questions about why a guy would write a song titled: Ingrid Bergman, watch the screen test again.
If you’ll walk across my camera
I will flash the world your story
I will pay you more than money, Ingrid Bergman
Not by pennies dimes nor quarters
But with happy sons and daughters
And they’ll sing around Stromboli, Ingrid Bergman
I was getting a little down in the mouth. Low. Put-upon. Weary. But then the Maslach Burnout Inventory hove into view, and made my day a little brighter. It’s based on information from the World Health Organization, so you just know it’s rock solid stuff. They’re batting something like a thousand lately, if my memory doesn’t fail me. Or if my memory doesn’t fail me. I imagine since they’ve cured all the other diseases, they have time to worry if you have too many Post-it notes spangling the frame on your computer monitor.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The test didn’t improve my life one whit. If you’re younger, you may not know that a whit is 3/117ths of a cubit. Never mind that. If you’re feeling Eeoyore-ish, and work has got you down, you’ve just got to put down your iPhone and pick up your pencil and take the test. I did it online, and I feel ever so much better.
I dutifully started filling out the forms. It interrupted me halfway through, and informed me that based on my answers so far, I was an angry mob, and each of us should put down the pitchforks and take the test separately. I assured the imaginary docent that it was just me and the cat in the room, and the cat was pretty mellow except at 7:08 every morning when the bowls are still empty.
I toted up my score, and the little “Scoring Results — Interpretation” section at the end cheered me right up. According to the test, I was legally entitled to commit a three-state killing spree to relax and unwind at the end of a long day. I was “past tense,” if you know what I mean. Your mileage may vary. Your job description might be different than mine. You might only be entitled to mutter imprecations under your breath when the HR lady waddles by.
To give you some idea of the questions, here’s the first of three sections:
If you’re having trouble, I’ll coach you through it. See? Many hands make light work. Your day is brightening already. You’re welcome in advance.
There’s a couple more sections for you to fill out. I’d help you through them, but working with people all day long requires a great deal of effort. Damn. Anybody got an eraser? I gotta fix the second answer.
My sons inform me that they’re still making kids read Shakespeare in high school. I find that odd, because the general level of scholarship in the schools that I’ve observed is so poor. They barely make the kids read any books, and what they do read is trivial at best.
What’s the point of making them read Shakespeare? I’m perfectly happy reading Shaky Bill’s stuff, and do from time to time. But it’s heavy sledding for minds unaccustomed to courtly speech and Elizabethan vocabulary. I suspect that for schools, Shakespeare is like a coffee table book that you buy to impress visitors, but never crack the spine.
Speaking of cracked spines, they should have them watch Richard III, instead of pretending to read and understand it. In this version, Bill and Larry makes something by Stephen King look like The Care Bears.
Shakespeare is the greatest writer the English language ever produced. I’m always on the edge of amazement watching the words float by when they’re delivered by the right actor. Olivier was surely that. His Hamlet has been beaten, but his Henry Vth and Richard III are unexcelled, and probably always will be. When I was looking for this video, I stumbled over Bumbershoot Cumberbund stumbling over it. Every actor for the last fifty years or so thinks alternating between whispering and mumbling makes them more theatrical, and he’s no exception. It makes them something, I’ll admit that. I’m not sure what. Not something good. When you join the FedEx of delivering lines, you can’t just drive by, slow down a little, and toss them out the window onto the lawn. They have to make it all the way to the door. It’s basically your only job, beside making faces. Almost all modern actors just don’t have the chops borne of the kind of training actors used to receive to do the job.
The scene in the video is famous, of course. The opening line, anyway. But it’s the scene after this one in the movie that refrigerates the spine. Olivier, who had to edit the play down to a manageable size, was a consummate pro at it. He made subtle changes, skillful omissions, and even added a few things. The big change is in the next scene. In the original play, the Lady Anne is following behind her father-in-law’s funeral procession, and Richard barges in and starts hitting her up for a date. In Olivier’s version, she’s walking behind her husband’s coffin. The husband Richard has killed. Yikes. And he just launches right into seducing her. It’s the creepiest thing in a play that contains a double child murder, so that’s really saying something.
You can read it if you want to. But if your head isn’t as full of Shakespeare as Olivier’s, it’s better to watch it, and see it literally come alive right in front of you.
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