Free Britney

 

The Free Britney Spears story has reached the New York Times.

Now the story has legs.

And it all started with a grassroots movement of her fans.

Free Britney.

-30-

what've aliens got to do - got to do with it?

 

     I like perusing Reader Comments in The Guardian.  You can tell they are written by British people even though you can't hear the accent.

__________________________

(Comments under a Guardian article about UFOs)

^  Not sure that even if there is intelligent life out there that we'd be able to communicate with it.  I mean, I know there are ants at the bottom of the garden but I can't have a conversation with them.  

     UFOs probably contain the alien equivalent of David Attenborough making documentaries about our primitive existence.  I suspect we are very much the ants in the wider interplanetary scheme of things.

^  Didn't all this nonsense start with a photograph of a coffee machine lid dangling in a New York bar, some time in the '50s?

^  I prefer the Tina Turner explanation... (UFOs over London turned out to be a Tina Turner laser light show reflecting off low clouds...)

^  What do you do if you see a spaceman?

Park in it man!

I'll get my coat.

-30-

same as it ever was

 

Walter Cronkite and model of Apollo 11

Washington Post reader comment

---------- I'll summarize the report for you:

"Various people have seen stuff in the sky that they cannot explain.

We don't know what they saw."

New York Times headline, 28 minutes ago

U.S. Has No Explanation for U.F.O.s, Does Not Rule Out Aliens

Washington Post reader comment

--------------- The aliens would have been watching the most frequently broadcast TV show to understand our culture:  I Love Lucy.  Instead of 'take us to your leader' they'll say 'You got some 'splainin to do!'

__________________________________

     As of this evening, there's a good, concise article from NBC, headlined

UFO report:  Government can't explain 143 of 144 mysterious flying objects, blames limited data

________________________________

     In those Washington Post reader comments there was also this, written kind of like a modernist poem, from the screen name "Some guy in Vegas" ...

With UFOs it's same as it ever was.

There have always been major media figures like Walter Cronkite doing reports on the subject.

He had credible testimony from former military and law enforcement.

Fascinating film of weird stuff in the sky.

And he urged us all to keep an open mind.

But that was in the 1960s.

Now there is more grainy footage and another Blue Book style government report on the way.

It will be inconclusive.

Same as it ever was.

Life is short.

_________________________________

     I'm still intrigued by the concept of that Golden Record they shot into space in 1977 with Voyager.

     Besides the Chuck Berry song, they included some classical music, folk music from various countries, and more, including a blues number by Blind Willie Johnson:  "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground."

That is an intense musical work.

It's on You Tube.

I had never heard it before.

-30-

deep down in Andromeda, close to Milky Way

 

recent headlines

June 15, 2021

Government UFO report is the product of years of military infighting over whether to take sightings seriously

~ CNN

8 hours ago

U.S. Government Prepares to Issue Landmark Report on UFOs

~ U.S. News and World Report

__________________________________

Why are UFOs back in the news now?  I hadn't thought about that subject in a long time.

     When I was a child, there were these phrases and ideas--maybe now they would be "memes"--about the possibility of life on other planets:  The idea that there would be "little green men" landing on earth and meeting up with some humans and saying portentously, "Take us to your leader."

     My mother said, "How would they be speaking English?"

     Good point.

Television shows explored this idea:

"My Favorite Martian"

and the 'uhny uftz' episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" --

both of these can be watched on You Tube.

______________________________

The issues with UFOs that draw my attention are the following:

1.  If someone sees a UFO and reports it, they may be laughed at or called crazy.

2.  If someone from another planet came here, would they want to harm us or would they be friendly?

I read a couple of articles online and then the Reader Comments underneath.

     One commenter wrote, "The government should stop saying anything you saw was a 'weather balloon.'  No one believes that anymore."

     Another wrote -- We saw one as we were driving home one night.  After it disappeared my husband said to me, "Don't tell anyone."

_____________________________

The Big Think has an article about a "Dark Forest theory."  It basically says the reason we've not discovered other civilizations in the universe is because they try not to be noticed, for fear of being killed.  Like -- "keeping your head down," or "making yourself scarce"....

     One scientist discussing this theory adds that we, on the other hand, have "broadcasts of I Love Lucy racing across the cosmos, ready to reveal our location and sense of humor to anybody who can pick them up."

     At its conclusion, the article says:

"  "

We've been screaming our existence to the cosmos for almost one hundred years now.  Any aliens within a one hundred light year radius of us would be receiving a barrage of radio signals from our direction.  If we had reason to avoid letting aliens know about us, as Stephen Hawking thought we did, we might have a problem.

Why haven't we heard from aliens yet?  If this theory is correct, they are purposely hiding in the darkness of space for fear of death.  Should we stop broadcasting our existence to the universe?  Or would alien life be a little nicer than we've been in our history?

[end, article excerpt - Big Think]

______________________________

     The Guardian has an article about a Golden Record that Nasa sent into space on Voyager 1 and 2 probes in 1977.  It was to communicate with any extraterrestrials that might be out there, and share aspects of our civilization.  (They included the song "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry!)

     Making a peaceful and positive overture to others in the universe is an interesting idea.

     This reminds me of other comments I read recently where people pointed out that if these UFOs have been sighted and some of them truly were from outer space, then if they wanted to kill us, wouldn't they have done so already?  And wouldn't they be more careful to not be seen...?

     People who have seen them often describe the object being in the sky, hovering, and then moving really really fast to one side, and then really fast up, or down, and disappearing.  Sometimes besides hovering, they kind of bob around... one commenter said they are letting themselves be seen on purpose, and trying to engage with people.  She said they seem sort of "playful."

     And then the idea struck me:  they're not hiding -- therefore, not sneaking up on us; they haven't killed us; and after traveling, somehow, from another planet or even from the future, once they get here they apparently -- just wanna dance....

Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans

Way back up in the woods among the evergreens

There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood

Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode

Who never ever learned to read or write so well

But he could play a guitar just like a-ringin' a bell

Go go

Go Johnny go go

Go Johnny go go

Go Johnny go go

Go Johnny go go

Johnny B. Goode

He used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack

Go sit beneath the tree by the railroad track

Oh, the engineers would see him sitting in the shade

Strumming with the rhythm that the drivers made

The people passing by they would stop and say

"Oh my what that little country boy could play"

Go go

Go Johnny go go

Go Johnny go go

Go Johnny go go

Go Johnny go go

Johnny B. Goode

His mother told him someday you will be a man

And you will be the leader of a big old band

Many people coming from miles around

To hear you play your music when the sun go down

Maybe someday your name will be in lights

Saying "Johnny B. Goode tonight"

Go go

Go Johnny go

Go go go Johnny gov

Go go go Johnny go

Go go go Johnny go

Go

Johnny B. Goode

-30-

sunlit pictures in the book of the dead

 

Finnish poster for the movie Deliverance

James Dickey:

-  wrote poetry

-  wrote the novel Deliverance (1970) and the screenplay for the movie (1972)

-  read one of his poems at the inauguration of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, in 1977.

_________________________

     

     On You Tube there's a video of James Dickey reading a poem to an audience - the video title says, "c. 1969."  [Circa 1969].

"Looking For The Buckhead Boys"

    by James Dickey

Some of the time, going home, I go

Blind and can't find it.

The house I lived in growing up and out

The doors of high school is torn

Down and cleared

Away for further development, but that does not stop me.

First in the heart

Of my blind spot are

The Buckhead Boys.  If I can find them, even one,

I'm home.  And if I can find him

Catch him in or around

Buckhead, I'll never die:  it's likely my youth will walk

Inside me like a king.

First of all, going home, I must go

To Wender and Roberts' Drug Store, for driving through I saw it

Shining         renewed         renewed

In chrome, but still there.

It's one of the places the Buckhead Boys used to be, before

Beer turned teen-ager.

                           Tommy Nichols

Is not there.  The Drug Store is full of women

Made of cosmetics.  Tommy Nichols has never been

In such a place:  he was the Number Two Man on the Mile

Relay Team in his day.

What day?

My day.                  Where was I?

                                          Number Three, and there are some sunlit pictures

In the Book of the Dead to prove it:  the 1939

North Fulton High School Annual.  Go down,

Go down

To Tyree's Pool Hall, for there was more

Concentration of the spirit

Of the Buckhead Boys

                  In there, than anywhere else in the world.

                                        Do I want some shoes

To walk all over Buckhead like a king

Nobody knows?               Well, I can get them at Tyree's;

It's a shoe store now.  I could tell you where every spittoon

Ought to be standing....

------------------ [it keeps going - this is an excerpt from the beginning of the poem]

It's interesting watching him and listening to him read it in the video.  He reads with such confidence - at the start, he plunges right in, and powers ahead.  At intervals, the audience gently laughs their appreciation and recognition.

     A comment under the video says the poetry has "good line breaks and homely, country specifics."

-30-

we don't really know what we're getting into

 

"Don't ever do nothin' like this again.

Don't come back up here.  I'd kinda like to see this town die peaceful."

And the 'sheriff' who speaks those lines at the end of Deliverance is, surprisingly, not an actor at all, but rather James Dickey, author of the novel that the film is based on!

You don't see that every day.

------------------------------------------------------- "Don't come back up heah."

__________________________________

[excerpt from Deliverance, the novel]

     "How, exactly, do we get to the river in the first place?" Drew Ballinger asked.

     "There's a little nothing town up here, just past the high ground," Lewis said, "name of Oree.  We can put in there and come out in Aintry a couple of days later.  If we get on the water late Friday, we can be back here the middle of Sunday afternoon, maybe in time for the last half of the pro game on TV."

     "There's one thing that bothers me," Drew said.  "We don't really know what we're getting into.  There's not one of us knows a damned thing about the woods, or about rivers.  The last boat I was in was my father-in-law's Chris-Craft, up on Lake Bodie.  I can't even row a boat straight, much less paddle my own or anybody else's canoe.  What business have I got up there in those mountains?"

     "Listen," Lewis said, knocking on the air with his foreknuckle, "you'll be in more danger on the four-lane going home tonight than you'd ever be on the river.  Somebody might jump the divider.  Who knows?"

     "I mean," Bobby said, "the whole thing does seem kind of crazy."

     "All right," Lewis said.  "Let me demonstrate.  What are you going to be doing this afternoon?"

__________________________

{Deliverance, by James Dickey.  Houghton Mifflin.  1970.}

-30-

let me have my toaster

 

Ned Beatty, American actor who passed away one week ago, was in some great movies --

Deliverance, 1972

Network, 1976

The Big Easy, 1986.

Deliverance, the ending where the local sheriff leans down and his face is right outside the car window and he says, "Don't ever do nothin' like this again.  Don't come back up heah."

     Four years later, Network comes out -- "Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything!  Just leave us alone!"  I remember seeing a preview and thinking, "Boy, I really want to see this movie."  

Such an odd, unusual film--even for the Seventies.  It has a unique vibe, and is photographed in low, smudgy light.  Faye Dunaway acts with a bold, spontaneous flair; William Holden--such a human cipher; Ned Beatty, scarily and comically bombastic in his single scene....

     And then it's 10 years until The Big Easy comes out...  An overlooked and forgotten film today, it is terrific, in my opinion -- belongs in the DVD library of any film enthusiast.  

Mystery!  Action!  Romance!  New Orleans!  Dennis Quaid!  

(When Ellen Barkin, distressed by his laid-back attitude while interviewing a "wise guy," calls him obsequious he reaches into a desk drawer and whips out a paperback dictionary to look it up... he is so cute.)

     An '80s attitude, sunny cinematography, and powerful, seductive Cajun music--it's an atmosphere you're glad you walked into, right from the beginning.

-----------------------------------

^^ Where you coming from?  Don't you ever sleep?

^^ Only when the music stops, cher.

-30-

show business is a small world

 

Ned Beatty, Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson's War

Ned Beatty (1937 - 2021), in his role as Doc Long in Charlie Wilson's War, has such an energy.  As a character actor, you forget the movies he's in, because he isn't Ned Beatty, he is the character.

     "Tell him, Mr. Poppadoppalus!  Tell him what we saw here today!"  In the scene referenced here in yesterday's post, he's so real in his sincerity, and his flaws.  Julia Roberts is also masterful in that scene -- intense, and perfect -- and there's another actress, Nancy Linehan Charles, who portrays Senator Long's wife.  She puts across an unforgettable gentleness, love, and stalwartness.  Really good.

In All The President's Men, Beatty plays Martin Dardis, Dade County, Florida, chief investigator.  (And his secretary, who tries to keep Dustin Hoffman (Carl Bernstein) from getting to see him, is played by Polly Holliday -- who was a waitress in the situation comedy "Alice," in the '70s.)

-30-

doing one's own part in the world

 

Ned Beatty (left) in The Big Easy

Readers commenting in The Guardian, sparring furiously under a review of the 2014 movie, Gone Girl --

^ Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike the new Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman?  Oh my sainted aunt....

Charles Boyer had one of the three or four most beautiful male voices ever heard in film, up there with Ronald Colman and Richard Basehart.  Ben Affleck's an honours graduate from the Hollywood School of Mumblers.  Ingrid Bergman had a cool sexiness to which Rosamund Pike can only aspire in her dreams.

To paraphrase the poet

Get you gone, you dwarves

...you beads, you acorns. ------------------------------

_______________________________

("Oh, my sainted aunt!" -- I think Katharine Hepburn uses that expression in The Philadelphia Story.)

-------------------------------

     Show business lost an impressive talent Sunday, when Ned Beatty passed away, at the age of 83.

All The President's Men

Charlie Wilson's War

The Big Easy

Network

Deliverance

     A couple of good scenes available to watch on You Tube:

Charlie Wilson's War 2007  1080p Blu Ray x264  Cinefile 02

uploader:  José Angel Alén Amil

(has Spanish subtitles)

"The World is a Corporation" (Network, 1976)

uploader:  Pedro Palatnik

___________________________________________

-30-

what she stands for, and what she won't allow

 

I'm the official historian on Shirley Jean Berrell

I've known her since God only knows and I won't tell

I caught her the first time she stumbled and fell

And surely she knows me just as well

I can tell you her birthday and her daddy's middle name

The uncles on her mama's side and the ones they don't claim

What she's got for Christmas since 1952

And that's only the beginning of the things I could tell you

'Cause I'm the official historian on Shirley Jean Berrell

I've known her since God only knows and I won't tell

I caught her the first time she stumbled and fell

And surely she knows me just as well

I can tell you her favorite song and where she likes to park

And why to this very day she's scared of the dark

How she got her nickname and that scar behind her knee

If there's anything you need to know 'bout Shirley just ask me

I know where she's ticklish and her every little quirk

The funnies she don't read and her number at work

I know what she stands for and what she won't allow

The only thing that I don't know is where she is right now

But I'm the official historian on Shirley Jean Berrell

I've known her since God only knows and I won't tell

I caught her the first time she stumbled and fell

And surely she knows me just as well

Oh, Shirley, she knows me just as well

________________________________

     Each time that song says, "surely she knows me just as well,"

it could be

"Shirley, she knows me just as well"

-- I switched the spelling myself, up there in the last line, just to see how it could go either way --

and I don't know how songwriters Don Reid and Harold Reid wrote it or intended it...  probably they aimed for us to enjoy the song and wonder which "surely" or "Shirley" - however the listener wants to take it...

     and like that plot twist in the last verse:

"I know what she stands for and what she won't allow

The only thing that I don't know is where she is right now"...  

    

It's a well-written, sweet, surprising, and elegantly witty little song.

-30-

problems about the universe

 

..."getting to the heart of things" -- in The Four Seasons, Alan Alda's character always wants to talk things out and get to the "heart" of a topic.

---------------------------------------------

     When watching the sitcom Friends I noticed that they used the expression "freak out" quite often.

"He was freaking out!"

"Don't freak out!"

"It freaked me out."

...etc.

I thought for a while that the writers of Friends invented the term, or that maybe "freak out" became a commonly used expression in some parts of American society during the 1990s and the Friends writers picked up on it.

     But then I watched episodes of The Cosby Show from DVDs and heard Theo say "freak out."  I only heard the phrase one time, it wasn't frequent like on Friends, but this tells us that the expression "freak out" existed in the 1980s, before Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, and Joey introduced themselves to us.

     Then this week, listening to The Four Seasons on Netflix, I had a "Whoa!" moment because Alan Alda's character, Jack Burroughs, says he "freaked out" -- that film was in theaters in 1981 (before The Cosby Show came on the air) so that expression pre-dates Friends by more than a decade.

     (Yes!  It does!  Film at eleven...)

     Maybe I worry about things like the phrase "freak out" to keep from worrying about bigger, scarier things like extremism and crazy people in the U.S. Congress.

---------------------------- [excerpt from the script for Manhattan (1979)]

Woody Allen, lying on a sofa and talking into a tape recorder:

An idea for a short story about, um, people in Manhattan

who are constantly creating

these real unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves

'cause it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about--the universe.

Let's...

Well, it has to be optimistic.

Well, all right, why is life worth living?

That's a very good question.

Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile.

Like what?

OK...for me...

Ooh, I would say Groucho Marx, to name one thing.

And Willie Mays.

And... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony.

And... Louis Armstrong's recording of 'Potato Head Blues'...

_______________________________

-30-

The Official Historian on Shirley Jean Berrell

 

I was listening to a You Tuber who was impressing upon her audience the idea that "the people who resent you having boundaries, are the people who benefit from you having none."

It reminded me of a line from a Statler Brothers song that says,

I know what she stands for, and what she won't allow...

Had to become a You Tube Detective to find that song because I couldn't remember the title of it.

(On Adblock m.you tube)

type in

The Statler Brothers - The Official Historian of Shirley Jean Berrell

uploader:  John1948TwelveA

     (this video has the best sound)

and Play.

-30-

getting to the heart of things

 

The Four Seasons (1981, Alan Alda; Carol Burnett) is on Netflix.

They used some really beautiful photography in that film -- outdoor scenery; colors.  It's pretty, and the Vivaldi music kind of imprinted The Four Seasons with a uniqueness, and je ne sais quoi.        (I think.)

-30-

from a 16th-century English poet

 

High above all a cloth of State was spred,

And a rich throne, as bright as sunny day,

On which there sate most brave embellished

With royall robes and gorgeous array,

A mayden Queene, that shone as Titans ray,

In glistring gold, and peerelesse pretious stone:

Yet her bright blazing beautie did assay

To dim the brightnesse of her glorious throne,

As envying her selfe, that too exceeding shone...

_____________________

excerpt from The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser

published, 1590

-30-

The Crown is not fiction

 

     When Season 4 of The Crown came out six-and-a-half months ago, a hue and cry suddenly rose up, "The Crown is fiction!  The Crown is fiction!"

     No, it isn't.  Every notable plot point of The Crown is in The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown.  If the writers of The Crown are "making things up," then how come those same "things" were somehow "made up" for The Diana Chronicles, too, which was published clear back in 2007?!  Does Peter Morgan have ESP with Tina Brown??  Are they time-traveling together or something...?

     The same incidents, events, and conflicts that we see in The Crown are sprinkled throughout other royal-featuring media--books, articles, videos.

     The claim that The Crown is "fiction" is 'thin soup' if not an outright lie.

     P-R machines for Prince Charles and the Palace apparently believe that saying something over and over again will convince the public.

------------------------------ [excerpt from The Diana Chronicles] ---------------- "All eyes were on Her Majesty," said Plunket.  "She was so young and it was so long since we'd had a Queen on the throne.  Fifty years!  And the only things we had ever read about her were positive."

     That's the point.  No Royal since has had his or her mystique left so thoroughly intact....The Queen then could do no wrong, and with her, the Royal Family.

Intense was the rage visited on a Tory historian, Lord Altrincham, when in an obscure publication he suggested that Her Majesty was too attached to the upper classes....the BBC dropped Altrincham from Any Questions, its iconic forum for public debate.  

He was slapped in the street.  

Club members moved to the other side of the coffee room when he came in.

 Altrincham observed:  "There was this atmosphere of almost cringing acceptance on the part of everybody in positions of authority whether politicians, churchmen, people running the press, people at the top in business.  They all had this sort of attitude of uncritical acceptance of everything that was done by the Royal Family."

     The notorious Altrincham--who actually believed very much in the monarchy as an institution--badly shook the Establishment, but it was a member of the Royal Family itself who made the first dent in the mass culture of deference.  

The loose cannon was Princess Margaret, the Queen's younger, saucier sister.  Distraught at her father George VI's death, she sought solace not only in prayer at St. Paul's Church, Knightsbridge, but also in the company of someone who had been her father's Comptroller of the Household, a Battle of Britain war hero, a man seventeen years her senior she had met when she was twenty-one:  Group Captain Peter Townsend.  The perfect romance?  

Alas, no.  

Marriage was out of the question.  

Townsend was a divorcé (like Wallis Simpson) and, perhaps worse, a member of staff.  Under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, no royal prince or princess could marry before the age of twenty-five without the permission of the Queen and Parliament....

     ...The Times had already assumed its lofty role of speaking for Britain, declaring that the Royal Family were a national symbol of family life and it would damage the monarchy for the Queen's sister to marry a divorced man.  

     But Hugh Cudlipp saw his paper as representing the brave new Briton who had been through two world wars and who no longer cared to "know his place in the social pecking order."  His Daily Mirror ran a poll on whether Margaret and Townsend should marry, addressing royalty in the vernacular of the street:  "COME ON MARGARET, MAKE UP YOUR MIND!"

     Such intrusion into the private life of a member of the Royal Family was considered deeply offensive, a rustle of mob rule in democratic rags. -------------------------------------- [end - excerpt]

________________________________

the Princess Margaret - Peter Townsend stuff

the Lord Altrincham stuff

...all in The Crown, Season 2.

          Just two examples among many.

-30-

"blimey" - ?

 

"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win...."

~ John F. Kennedy

September 12, 1962

President Kennedy gives the "moon speech" at Rice University.

July 20, 1969

Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to set foot on the moon.

__________________________________________

British people have some wild-and-crazy ways of speaking:  they kill me.

"spout the bollocks"

"the morons that Theresa May fancies"

"s--t on a stick"

"lovely heads of state chosen by the people"

"this pig's-trough of a series"

"rank rotten acting, bog rotten story..."

"blimey, you got out of bed the wrong side"

(from the La-Dee-Dah gallery) -- "The Guardian's rush to the cultural wasteland continues unabated."  (This sentence has to be said with the Tommy Lascelles accent from The Crown.)

"people who are keen to tell us..."

"Not my thing, but fair play to those that love it."

     And the commenter who mentions "the British living room" is immediately corrected below by someone asking, "Do you mean the drawing room or the sitting room?"

     To paraphrase Steve Martin -- "Well, ex-cuuuuuuuuse me!"

______________________________________

blimey

1.  Used primarily in London, but now all across the UK, to express surprise, excitement, or alarm

-30-