Tuesday, July 27, 2004

I'm a tease

The last two nights, I have built two big shelving units at my old apartment, but for my new apartment.  On Sunday night, I was sawing outside at midnight by the light of my camping headlamp; however, my safety glasses are my sunglasses.  I must have been quite a strange sight.

Anyway, each of the last two mornings, I have taken the previous night's shelving unit over to the new place.  Like I said, these shelves are big, about 7 feet tall and longer than the bed of my truck.  Now when I drive to my new place, I turn left at the intersection where the Mexican day labors hang out waiting for day labor, and so as I turn onto that street I see about 50 guys on both sides of the street see the lumber sticking out my truck coming at them and start waving to grab my attention.    

Long time, no blog

I've been on the road and moving for most of the last couple of weeks, and so I'll just have to give a thumbnail sketch of what I've been up to:

July 13--Drove to Nashville, tried to find a way around a road closed for an accident and ended up driving around on one-lane gravel roads in the Cherokee National Forest for 45 minutes before returning to where I had started to find that the accident had been cleared.

July 15--Removed shrubs from my parents' yard with my dad. 

July 16--Went to the wedding of some friends who had been best friends for 15 years before finally starting dating six months ago.

July 17--Started a road trip with Boone, always a risky adventure.  Ports of call included the Super Museum in Metropolis, IL; the lowest point in Illinois (the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers); the highest point in Missouri.  Boone forgot his sleeping bag and so he slept in the car to get away from the mosquitos.

July 18--Up early after probably my best night of sleep camping, and we made it to the lowest point in Missouri by 8:30 AM, but then we failed to reach the lowest point in Kentucky (i don't want to talk about it.).  Hit Reelfoot Lake and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Tennessee on the way back.

July 19--Drove back to Chapel Hill.  Added 45 new counties on the trip total.

July 23--Said good-bye to my friend Jeff as I started moving into his apartment.

July 24-26--Painted my new room. 

Monday, July 12, 2004

More Special Actors

I've found a couple of more actors with a greater than 20% Best Picture nomination rate.

Jaye Davidson has been in only two films: The Crying Game (for which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor) and Stargate

Martin Scorsese, the actor, has been credited in 12 films of which three were nominated: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Quiz Show (which he did not direct.)

The Sound of Music is a good source of these actors as 5 of the 7 children were in four or fewer films in total. They were Charmien Carr (only film), Duane Chase (2 films) , Angela Cartwright (4 films, plus the series Lost In Space , Debbie Turner (2 films), and Kym Karath (4 films). The two older children acted more: Heather Menzies was in the classics SSSSSSS and Pihrana, and Nicholas Hammond was TV's "Amazing Spider-Man" as well as TV's Peter Parker.

Saturday, July 10, 2004

John Cazale

Yesterday, I discovered something quite amazing: John Cazale was only in five films before dying of bone cancer in 1978, but all five films received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, and all are in the IMDb Top 250: The Godfather; The Conversation; The Godfather, Part II; Dog Day Afternoon; and The Deer Hunter. Plus, he shows up briefly in The Godfather, Part III, in a flashback to a scene in Part II, but Part III was nominated for best picture, too. An amazing streak. If I ever get around to making a film, I'm definitely going to try to work some file footage of him into it somewhere.

Since finding this out, I've been trying to find out if anyone comes close, but without much luck. I've found that having 1 out of 5 films being nominated for Best Picture is noteworthy. (I've ignored things not elligible for Best Picture, either being made for television or short films or documentaries or they aren't finished yet or were made prior to the Oscars existing or would be elligible for next year's Oscars, plus movies in which the actor was uncredited.) I'm sure there are more.
  • Dominic Monaghan--3 of 4 (the Lord of the Rings films)
  • Billy Boyd--4 of 6 (LOTR and Master and Commander)
  • Babe Ruth--1 of 2 (he plays himself in Pride of the Yankees)
  • Orlando Bloom--3 of 7 (LOTR).
  • Daniel Day-Lewis--5 of 15 (Gangs of New York, My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, A Room With a View, Gandhi)
  • James Dean--1 of 3 (Giant)
  • Harold Russell--1 of 3 (The Best Years of Our Lives)
  • Erykah Badu--1 of 3 (The Cider House Rules)
  • Athol Fugard--2 of 7 (The Killing Fields,Gandhi)
  • Montgomery Clift--4 of 17 (The Heiress, A Place in the Sun, From Here to Eternity, Judgement and Nuremburg
  • Russell Crowe--5 of 23 (Master and Commander, A Beautiful Mind, Gladiator, The Insider, L.A. Confidential)
  • Dustin Hoffman--7 of 33 (The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Lenny, All the President's Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie, Rain Man
  • Greer Garson--5 of 25 (Good Bye, Mr. Chips, Mrs. Miniver, Random Harvest, Madame Curie, Julius Caesar)
  • Grace Kelly--2 of 10 (High Noon, The Country Girl)
  • Noel Coward--2 of 10 (In Which We Serve, Around the World in Eighty Days)
  • Levon Helm--2 of 10 (Coal Minner's Daughter,The Right Stuff
  • Lee Strassberg--1 of 5 (The Godfather, Part II)
  • Mikhail Baryshnikov--1 of 5 (The Turning Point)
  • Nathan Fillion--1 of 5 (Saving Private Ryan)


I am uncertain what to do with child actors like James Robinson, who was in one film, playing Young William Wallace in Braveheart.

Thursday, July 08, 2004

I've returned to something that bothered me earlier in the year--movies buying commercials during the Super Bowl--this time with some numbers in tow. To buy one commercial slot during Super Bowl XXXVIII in January it cost $2.3 million. According to NATO (that is the National Association of Theatre Owners, not the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) the average movie ticket price in the US in 2003 was $6.03. Thus, just to gross enough money to recoup the $2.3 million spent on one Super Bowl commercial for Starsky & Hutch, it would have to convince approximately 380,000 (roughly the population of Minneapolis) to go see the film, and it would help if these people would not have decided to see the film based on the rest of the ad campaign. Another way to look at it is that they spent more than 8% of the openning weekend's gross to air one (1) commercial six weeks before the film was released. The film was released by Warner Bros. and Miramax and the Super Bowl was on CBS, and so I don't know of any corporate synergy at play here. I don't get it.

On the other hand, it's sad to say, but I don't really think spending $2.3 million more on the film's quality (I have not seen the film, which had a budget of $60 million.) would draw more filmgoers either. However, I'd love to see what kind of film someone like Robert Rodriguez could make with a budget of just the cost of airing one (1) Super Bowl commercial. The tenth place film at the box office during the July 4 weekend (Two Brothers) earned a gross of $3.9 million.

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

No Respect

The nation's third largest nongovernmental cemetery is the Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, Indiana. Over 185,000 people have been interred there. On the front page of their website, they say "Crown Hill is the burial site of such famous people as: President Benjamin Harrison, Colonel Eli Lilly, 11 Indiana Governors, 1 Kentucky Governor, 14 Indiana Mayors, 13 Civil War Generals, poet James Whitcomb Riley, author Booth Tarkington, automobile manufacturer Frederick Duesenberg, and the infamous bank robber John Dillinger." However, one must dig deeper to find out that it also has the remains of 3 Vice Presidents, more than any other cemetery. They boast of being "the only Indiana cemetery with a U.S. President, 3 Vice Presidents, and 4 unsuccessful VP candidates." Only one state (New York with ten) has more vice-presidential gravesites. On a day when the role of vice president is in the news, I see it fitting to singing the praises of these three Veeps.
  • Thomas A. Hendricks (1819-1885),
    U.S. Senator, 1863-1869; Governor, 1873-1877, U.S. Vice Presidential Candidate, 1876, U.S. Vice President, 1885
  • Charles Fairbanks (1852-1918),
    U.S. Senator, 1897-1904, U.S. Vice President, 1905-1909. Fairbanks, Alaska is named after him.
  • Thomas Marshall (1854-1925),
    Governor 1909-1913; U.S. Vice President, 1913-1921.

Monday, July 05, 2004

On July 4, we celebrate people coming to America, sailing past the Statue of Liberty with nothing, and making a better life for them and their children. To celebrate this, yesterday I watched a film where someone does just this--The Godfather, Part II. I had watched The Godfather the previous night because Marlon Brando died. Both are such excellent films, but it had been quite while since I had seen them. I noticed something that gives me a greater appreciation for The Freshman--the casting of Bruno Kirby as the guy who brings the Matthew Broderick character into the family. I was unaware that Bruno Kirby (credited as B. Kirby, Jr.) was in The Godfather, Part II, where he plays the young Clemenza, bringing young Vito Corleone into the world of crime.

Sunday, July 04, 2004

Why am I watching this?

No, it's not the dumbest show ever, but VH1's Bands Reunited is not a classic to be lauded for ages. But something must be said for a show that somehow keeps me watching as host Aamer Haleem criss-crosses the country having only seven days to reunite the six original members of Berlin, a band that made only one song that I know, "Take My Breath Away" which I strongly dislike. This can't be an easy show to produce, with not a lot of bands that still have enough members alive and not playing together, but still able to be found and persuaded to play. Plus the band would need to be popular enough to be known, but simultaneously not popular enough that someone would have reunited them already for money. Thank you VH1 for getting Kajagoogoo and Flock of Seagulls back together. According to their website, there are ten episodes, of which I've never heard two of them--Romeo Void or Klymaxx.

Friday, July 02, 2004

"Fun to play with, but not to eat!"

This seems like a bad product tie-in: The Play-Doh Little Debbie Snack Cake Kitchen. It's comes with molds that allow you to make replicas of your favorite Little Debbie Snack Cakes out of Play-Doh Brand Modeling Compound. What exactly you do with an oatmeal creme pie made out of modeling compound, I don't know.

Two AOL addenda

1) within 24 hours of my previous post regarding AOL, i recieved a telemarketing call from them.* i quickly jumped into a spiel about how they had wasted more than one month's usage fee on postage for me, the guy clearly did not understand. he said, "But the disks are free." "you're missing my point, i'm telling you that your company is wasting a lot of money." he wasn't amused. he was also confused by my answer to why i didn't want AOL. i said, "well, it's AOL."

2) i got another CD today! that's two this week! but this one was different. the last one offered me free unlimited usage for 3 months. the new one offered 1099 free hours over 50 days. which one would i use? (obviously the later, since for signing up for AOL would indicate something of lack of mental power.) i don't unstand though why only 1099 free hours in 50 days. in 50 days, there are only 1200 hours. the complexity required to make sure that i don't exceed my free 1099 and go into those extra 101 hours just doesn't seem worth it. previous offers include 2 months for free and over 45 days (1080 hours), 1000, 1025, and 1045 free hours.

*--i got on their calling list because last fall when my roommate's boyfriend was visiting from Denmark, he couldn't get online with his laptop and so we used one of the free disks since he'd be here for only two weeks. now the disk says "No Credit Card Required." however a phone number is required, but even after supplying mine, it still would not work without a credit card number. but they did get my phone number i guess, so something works. unfortunately, i realized immediately after hanging up that i forgot to tell them not to call back. arg.

Thursday, July 01, 2004

left click, right click

my mouse on my computer at home has been acting screwy, with the left clicking button sticking so that when i hit the back button it goes back to pages or when i pull down a list, it automatically withdraws again. so this three or four days ago, i came up with a solution--swap the roles of the mouse buttons. i was surprised at how easy i could switch to using my middle finger to click on everything. when i did need to "right-click" with the left button, it still kept sticking, and so i then rerouted the right-clicking to my never used thumb buttons. again, i didn't really have any trouble using it. however, this morning when i got to school after working at home for the last three days and started using a regular mouse, i was all thumbs.