E.R. Torre's Blog, page 162
July 8, 2015
Why do TV Characters all own the same Weird Old Blanket?
So asks -and investigates!- Laura Bradley for Slate magazine:
Why Do TV Characters All Own The Same Weird Old Blanket? A Slate Investigation
I think this is one of those humorous little side things that people with a sharp eye notice about TV shows or movies: There are sometimes props reused or, conversely, set decorators follow certain patterns, which is what appears to be happening with this particular blanket.
A while back there was a humorous story regarding a newspaper that seemed to find its way into many a show/movie:
LOL: The Recurring Prop Newspaper
And while the rug in question doesn’t seem to be the same one used over and over again, it is a curious thing that this particular design/style has been reused.
But I got the biggest kick from one of the comments by Jay Lawson presented below the Slate article. In it she states:
There’s a granny square afghan that shows up all over Dark Shadows, from 1966 onward. I started calling it ‘the ubiquitous afghan’ because that darn thing showed up in everybody’s house: the Old House, the Evans house … all through time and space, that thing showed up everywhere.
Given the cheap budget of the Dark Shadows TV show, I suspect Ms. Lawson was seeing the exact same afghan being repurposed from scene to scene.
It reminded me, in a weird way, of one of the funniest realizations I had when watching something. In this case it was the 1942 Spy Smasher cliffhanger serial. Considered by many to be among the best cliffhanger serials ever made, Spy Smasher was based on a Fawcett Comic book (that publishing company was the home of the original Shazam! Captain Marvel, who himself was featured in what is considered by many to be the best movie serial ever produced) and ran for 12 episodes (roughly 212 minutes in total).
When I watched it, I did so via VHS tape (it was a number of years ago!) and I had the whole thing available to me versus the way it was originally aired all those years ago chapter by chapter. As I watched the serial, I started to pay attention to the various locations used to film on. It soon became clear to me that many of them were reused and, after a while, I formed a general idea of where certain buildings were in relation to others.
Which lead to this: In one of the later episodes of the serial, we see a group of the bad guys hurriedly emerge from a building (one I was quite familiar with by that point), get into their car, and drive off at high speed. After a cut, the bad guys and their vehicle comes to a screeching stop at their destination, which was another building. By this point, I knew that their destination building lay directly across the street from the building they had just emerged from the scene before!
They didn’t need to drive to their new location, all they had to do was cross the street! 
July 7, 2015
Stories of Restaurant Customers…
…Who Weren’t Supposed To Eat That:
http://kitchenette.jezebel.com/stories-of-restaurant-customers-who-werent-supposed-to-1715882612
For the most part, love reading these stories. Many are quite humorous, others quite horrifying. All are told from the point of view of those who work in the restaurants and what their client’s asked for, what they got, and what they ate.
I’ll add a story of my own, though I never worked in a restaurant and therefore offer this from the perspective of a client.
Many years ago, when I was living in South America, my father and I took a co-worker of his for lunch to a restaurant specializing in steaks. It is the only memory I have of going to eat lunch with my father and a co-worker so I guess I must have been out of school at the time and tagging along with him.
This co-worker had recommended the steak restaurant and raved about its food to us. As neither of us had been to this restaurant before that moment, we followed this man’s lead and let him order first.
My father’s co-worker asked for a certain type of steak and added he wanted it “extra grasoso”. What that means is “extra greasy”. Mind you, we are talking the mid to late 1970’s here, well before any concept of “healthy” food.
My father and I, as mentioned, followed the co-worker’s lead and recommendation and asked for the same.
When the meal arrived, it was an impressive enough looking thick, grilled steak. It smelled good and certainly looked good and we cut into it and began the meal.
My very first piece of the steak, it would turn out, had a chunk of fat on it, though I didn’t realize it at that moment. No, I realized it when I took my very first bite of the piece and it was like I hit (pardon the language) a fucking gusher.
My mouth was suddenly filled with a nauseating amount of grease.
There was no way I would take that down so I grabbed my cloth napkin, which thank the Gods was dark red, and pretended to wipe my mouth while spitting the whole nasty thing out. Because of the dark color of the napkin, it was impossible to tell what evil lay within it.
I don’t believe I ate any more of that super greasy steak but recall my father’s co-worker happily -and very quickly!- taking his down. When I looked to my side and at my father’s meal, I noticed he too barely touched any of his steak.
As the years pass, I can’t help but wonder what happened to this man. He was quite young at that time, at least five to ten years younger than my father. Given his atrocious dietary interests, I wonder if he’s still alive or succumbed to some kind of extreme arterial blockage many years before.
Regardless, I can only hope that that restaurant and its “extra greasy” steaks didn’t survive too terribly long, though I have to say this in their defense: They served exactly what was asked for!
Now that’s interesting…
Amanda Hess for Salon.com offers the following article which presents some interesting food for thought:
Why Teenagers Love Making Jokes About 9/11
It’s hard to believe but its been a whooping 14 years since the 9/11 attacks and, therefore, there are many, many youths out there who have absolutely no memory at all of the horrific events of that day in 2001.
What is interesting, and presented in this article, is the gallows humor some teens are engaged in regarding the conspiracy theories. Ms. Hess analyses and tries to come up with the reason why we engage in such morbid humor (it isn’t the first time) and what it may mean.
I think her conclusions are fascinating even as the subject matter remains a truly disturbing one.
Whodathunkit?!
It appears after one year of legal marijuana sales, Washington State has generated an eye-popping $70 million in tax revenues:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/06/washington-marijuana-taxes-70-million_n_7737722.html
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’ve never so much as taken one sampling of any “illicit” substance. I tried smoking cigarettes when I was young and stupid and thought it looked cool but didn’t find it worth pursuing (thank the Gods!).
In High School and College I certainly had illicit drugs within my reach, including marijuana, but I never once was tempted to use them nor cared to. Even today I’m so damn “straight” that I don’t even drink alcoholic beverages.
And yet I fully support legalizing drugs.
No, I certainly don’t want my daughters or relatives exposed to them or, even worse, hooked on them. However, drug use is something that in my opinion has always existed and always will, and like Prohibition in the 1920’s, fighting its use only criminalizes and jails people while allowing shady characters to make a ton of money off it.
So why not do like Washington State and, at the very least, legalize marijuana and then tax its sale? Rather than police action, the tax revenue could at the very least be better spent on education and treatment.
It would appear that the first year of legalization in Washington state has certainly created a tax boon. As Tom Angell, chairman of the advocacy group Marijuana Majority stated in the article:
…these are real dollars that can now be spent on things like schools, healthcare and road repair instead of going straight into the pockets of the drug dealers who controlled the marijuana market prior to legalization
It’s that last part that I think is the key and perhaps the ultimate solution to society’s many problems with illicit drugs.
July 6, 2015
Trailers that ruin movies…
Over on reddit, someone opened up on the topic of Terminator: Genysis having such a spoilery trailer (it revels who the villain of the piece is, something that probably should have come as a surprise to viewers), and asked which other movie trailers gave away too much of the movie they were trying to build up hype for:
When scrolling down on the comments, someone pointed out this link, to…
Mental Floss: 12 Trailers That Spoil The Movies
I was thinking of which trailers I personally found most spoiled the movie they were promoting and the one that to me was the worst in that respect had to be the trailer for another Terminator film, in this case Terminator 2:
I know there are those who really like Terminator 2 and consider it among the best action films ever made. While I enjoy the film, I’ve always felt it wasn’t as good as the original Terminator. Having said that, the above trailer, which was the official trailer for that movie’s release, gives away the movies BIGGEST element: That the Arnold Schwarzenneger machine was the good guy.
The fact is that the first half hour or so of Terminator 2 presents a near identical reprise of the original Terminator, complete with time traveling and acquiring a “target”. Director/writer James Cameron took pains during this segment of the film to NOT give away the fact that this time around the Schwarzenneger Terminator is good. In fact, it appeared he wanted audiences to believe him to be just as bad as he was in the first film, then surprise us when the “target”, a young John Connor, is trapped between what turns out to be (another intended surprise) two Terminators.
But of course, the above trailer gives all that away and all that work on creating suspense and surprise are effectively shot down.
In the end, Terminator 2 was a smash success so the spoilery trailer didn’t do much damage with audiences. Still, I really wish I could have seen the film upon its original release without seeing this trailer. I might well have come away with a higher regard for it and its biggest surprise.
Just plain eerie…
Over at Slate.com is a fascinating article, with some equally fascinating pictures, concerning…
The article is about Seph Lawless, a photographer who has an interest in this subject matter and has released a book with his photographs of abandoned parks.
My favorite picture, from the article, is probably this one (I say probably because there are other almost equally great ones to be found. This picture, by the way, is from the remains of the “Joyland Amusement Park,” Kansas):
There’s something eerie about seeing these childhood amusement centers abandoned and slowly being overrun with vegetation. It’s like something you could find either in a horror novel or some nostalgic tour through memory lane.
If you’re interested, you should check out the other pictures. They’re fasinating.
July 2, 2015
It was just a matter of time…
Dukes of Hazzard Pulled From TV Land Schedule Amid Confederate Flag Controversy
For those who know nothing about the Dukes of Hazzard, it was a comedic/action TV show that aired from 1979 to 1985 and which had the main characters drive around in the car presented below, complete with this gaudy orange paint job:
Your eyes do not deceive you. What you see on the car’s roof is indeed the Confederate Flag. Every single episode of the show’s run featured this vehicle and its colorful paint job and, yes, Confederate Flag. The car itself, by the way, was called the “General Lee”.
I was a big fan of the show for perhaps a season or so waaaaay back when it originally aired and before the formulaic plots bored me away (this all occurred well before the original “Duke” boys were replaced by other actors, a move which likely hastened the show’s eventual cancellation).
At that time I knew very little about U.S. Civil War and, more importantly, post-Civil War History, having lived in South America for several years. Believe it or not, the schools there didn’t care all that much about the U.S. Civil War, preferring for some mysterious reason to spend more time teaching their own history.
July 1, 2015
Sorry for the dearth of posts lately…
It’s been a rough week and time simply didn’t allow me to post. That’s the way it goes when a close relative has health issues and everyone has to scramble.
Regardless, things are looking up now and I finally have a bit of time. So, how about something fun? From TV’s Mythbusters, Jamie and Adam, comes a list of…
9 “Lost” Inventions That Could Come In Handy Today
Interesting that of the 9 listed, two came from Nikolai Tesla. It’s sad to look back and see Mr. Tesla’s life and realize that we had among society one of the more forward thinking individuals of recent memory…and we could have done so much more with him, had we invested even more than we did in his ideas.
Having said that, all the mentioned items are fascinating, and I was depressed to find that Starlite (the second “lost” item listed) is among those lost. I distinctly recall seeing a video years ago on TV showing the incredible properties of Starlite, specifically the demonstration with the egg which is part of the video below…
…and thinking this was a product that would truly revolutionize the world.
Is Starlite indeed lost? The above video states that while the inventor died, his surviving family may well know the formula to the material. One can’t help but wonder if maybe the military -US and British- do as well. Then again, if you hit the link under the word Starlite above, one of the comments produced stated that while the material was very good, it only lasted two weeks or so before decaying/falling off whatever it was painted on. This comment noted the product still needed work to become a more “permanent” paint.
Still, what a wonderful concept, and clearly one that appeared to work!
June 25, 2015
I think they’ve got pretty much all of them…
From Slate.com, a great list (including videos!) of…
The Best Songs About Sweets and Desserts
Some of my favorites?
There are others I enjoy tremendously, but instead of posting them all, you can check them out for yourself.
Before I go, however, let me offer one final song. I think this is the most clever one regarding the topic at hand as George Harrison manages to list just about every individual candy in a box while cleverly noted what will happen when you eat too many sweets…
June 24, 2015
Spidey news…
Call me cynical, call me tired, but I just can’t get all that excited over the “new” casting of Tom Holland for the role of Peter Parker/Spider-Man in film…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/23/tom-holland-spider-man_n_7646812.html
If there’s a superhero franchise that is in real danger of being over-exposed, I believe it to be this one. In very short order we had three films with Tobey Maguire (all of which were hugely financially successful though most audiences panned the third and last film in that series) followed by a re-booting and two films with Andrew Garfield (unfortunately for him and the people behind that two-film set, the second film soured Sony on continueing down that particular pathway).
So now we have a new Spider-Man, one that will somehow cross-over into the Avengers movie while remaining at Sony.
Ho hum.
Don’t get me wrong, there was a time I would have killed to see a high budget Spider-Man film on the screen. But once it finally happened with Tobey Maguire, I found myself curiously unimpressed with the whole venture. Many site his second Spider-Man film to be one of the all time best super-hero films ever made but for some reason it didn’t grab me like so many others and I wound up thinking it was at best only an “ok” feature. And this is coming from a big fan of director Sam Raimi (absolutely love the Evil Dead series!)!!
As for the Garfield iteration, I suspect the lingering bad feelings I had with the Raimi/Maguire Spider-Man films turned me off of the whole re-booting concept. While I applauded the return of the mechanical web shooters (I really didn’t like the Maguire/Raimi concept of “organic” webshooters), seeing yet again a Spider-Man origin story and a new set of “first adventures” of the character felt more like a chore than entertainment.
Before you think my feelings only extend to Spider-Man, know that I had very similar feelings when I finally got to see Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, a film that some critics sang high praises to but for me was a colossal bore…an almost scene for scene/theme for theme remake of Richard Donner’s original Superman but without any of the sense of wonder or fun.
There always exists the danger that audiences might have their “fill” of the superhero genre and this big tent pole features and their equally big investment dollars may finally reach their critical mass.
The superhero genre has had something of a charmed life in recent years despite some bumps in the road, but a couple more “terrible” (in the eyes of audiences) superhero films might just tire audiences of these features and we may *gasp* one day have a summer without a single superhero film.
I know, I know, this is heretic talk, but there you have it.
As with so many things…we’ll see!
