Shakespeare, Shakespeare, rien que Shakespeare

Je visitais hier la librairie locale qui fait partie d'une chaîne de librairies nationale. Bien que c'est officiellement une librairie, une boutique de cadeaux est une meilleure description parce que la moitié du magasin est aujourd'hui rempli de cadeaux non-livres.

C'est sans doute la tendance dans toutes les librairies aujourd'hui, donc je ne devrais pas me plaindre. Des librairies sont essayer de survivre à cause de Amazon. Je comprends ça.

Aujourd'hui quand je feuillette des livres dans une librairie, un assistant vient généralement vers moi et demande: "Pouvez-vous trouver ce que vous cherchez?" Je ça n'aime pas du tout parce que j'aime à feuilleter tranquillement. Mais, ce que peux-je faire? Les temps ont changé. C'est tous.

Quoi qu'il en soit, hier quand j'étais dans la librairie locale, je allais à la section drame pour de voir si elle avait seulement Shakespeare. Eh bien, elle n'avait pas seulement Shakespeare, mais presque seulement Shakespeare - à environ 99% Shakespeare. Je n'étais pas vraiment étonné, parce que il etait toujours comme ça dans des librairies que j'ai visité.

Quelle est la raison pour cette situation étrange? L'impérialisme culturel, évidemment.

Impérialisme Culturel?

Today's posting continues where yesterday's left off. I had said, among other things, that baseball (which the other blogger called "the national pastime") had been exported successfully to other lands. I followed this up by saying in another comment:

Although le base-ball (le passe-temps national américain) has successfully been exported to other lands - Japan, Cuba, Dominican Republic - they aren't nearly as many as the lands that le cricket (le passe-temps national anglais) has been successfully exported to - India, Pakistan, Sri-Lanka, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand, and pretty much all the other countries of the old Empire, on which the sun used never to set.

Il n'est pas surprenant que, after "futbol", le cricket is the most-followed game in the world.

Since the lands that le base-ball and le cricket were successfully exported to, are lands once occupied and ruled by the lands where le base-ball and le cricket first came from, can one conclude that le base-ball and le cricket are expressions of l'impérialisme culturel?

Au sujet de l'impérialisme culturel, did you know that Shakespeare's plays may be yet *another form of it?*

Le Football Américain

A blog I often read had a recent posting on the topic of *this short video* by John Cleese about football (American), in which he said, among other things, that it was particularly ideal for the sponsors of television commercials.

I left a comment to this posting, that said:

Cleese's is a trenchant and witty take on le football américain, to be sure.

Le football américain's suitability for advertising beer and cigarettes and Humvees on prime time television is no doubt a big factor in its popularity. But a bigger reason is that le football américain is simply an integral part of la vie américaine, as much as mother, home and apple pie.

The Battle of Guadalcanal was won on the football fields of Princeton, you might say.

Why has le football américain not been exported successfully to other lands, as has le base-ball? Perhaps, due to all that expensive padding and equipment, you have to be a man of means, or have a mother and father of means, to play it?

A Rage To Live

I have this weakness for John O'Hara. It's not a weakness, though, that I admit to when with others, because his novels are maximalist and pull you slowly into their time and place, and so are not novels that you - if you're of the sort that likes to have regular colonic irrigations, and lunch regularly on pasta salad and white wine, and listen to Vivaldi - would enjoy, ie novels that have nothing unnecessary in them, that are cerebral, and cause you to think how clever the author is.

One of the main characters in "A Rage To Live" - the John O'Hara novel I'm in the middle of - is Grace Caldwell-Tate, a Pennsylvania society matron from Old Money, who is married to Sidney Tate (also from Old Money) with whom she has three children.

Despite being contentedly married, Grace, who is thirtyish and a good-looker, has a passionate affair with Roger Bannon, a rough and roguish building contractor who, before the affair began, she knew had recently beaten up a prostitute. Also, Grace, when Roger had begun showing an interest in her, told him he was the sort of man she hated and despised.

Nonetheless there was an occasion when she agreed to give him a lift in her motor car to somewhere-or-other in the vicinity because he had no other means of getting there. During the ride Roger told Grace how much he was crazy about her. Whereupon she drove the motor car to somewhere secluded, invited Roger into her arms, and before long they were Going At It in the back seat.

Not particularly outlandish for a married woman to do today, you'll be thinking. However, this was in 1917, which means that Grace and Roger were of the Victorian (or, if you insist, the Clevelandian or Harrisonian) generation, who were noted for being extremely prim and proper. Grace risked social and financial ruin should she be caught with Roger. Nonetheless she wanted to see him again after she and he had emerged from the back seat of her motor car.

So, Grace and Roger contrived to meet whenever and wherever they could, and to Go At It. They weren't caught overtly, but tongues began wagging. Roger, realising that the affair wouldn't last long, signed up to go off to war (this was the time of World War One), and the affair ended.

When Sidney Tate, Grace's husband, heard the rumours about her and Roger, he was none too pleased. So none too pleased was he that, as had Roger, he signed up to go off to war, and told Grace that after he came back, it wouldn't be to her. 

Grace told Sidney he was being silly because her thing with Roger had been purely physical, and that she and Roger would never Go At It again. It was over, finished. She loved Sidney, and only Sidney, and would always, she said. Why should he lose his home, and his children and all he held dear just on account of his hurt pride?

Sidney wasn't persuaded by Grace's entreaties, and the marriage effectively ended.

***

Had Sidney been a man of today instead of one of 1917, he likely would have stayed with Grace. However, in 1917 married men just weren't as forgiving of their wives Going At It with other men as they are today. No doubt this was because almost no married women of that time Went At It with other men. Maybe point zero zero zero of one percent did - next to nothing. So, Grace's Going At It  with Roger was an anomaly.

Even today, only fifteen percent of married women Go At It with other men while still married. So that eighty five percent Go At It only with the men they had solemnly vowed to Love, Honour and Obey.

***

As I said earlier, I'm only in the middle of "A Rage To Live", and so have much reading still to do, for it's a big novel. I'm enjoying it so much that I'm not looking forward to when I finish it.

An e-Mail

Someone sent me today an e-mail with a link to *this article* about how robots are making human workers more and more unneeded.

My e-mail in reply said:

I don't see the exponentially increasing computerisation of our society as a negative, but as a positive. It will free people from boring and meaningless work.

There will be more need for people who can design and fix computers. Computers will also create a need for human workers in areas that haven't even been thought of.

Even so, less human workers will be needed overall in the private sector as time goes on. This can be seen already in America, for example, where the number of people working is the same today as it was in 2007.

There are no longer full-employment economies. If you take the percentage of the fully unemployed and add the partially unemployed (those who have only a part-time job) the effective rate of unemployment in most of the developed world is anything between 15% and 20% - which was the unemployment rate during the Great Depression.

You can see the effect of computer-generated automation in the stock market rise, which has comes out of companies having profit margins larger than ever because they can now do more with less (ie cut costs) thanks to computer-caused automation.

The stock market has also risen because the rich, who are the main players in the stock market, have more money to buy stocks because their tax rates are now less than they were fifty years ago.

In America, for instance, the top marginal tax rate in the 1950's was 91%. In the 1970's it was 70%. Today it's 35%. You'll see this trend in all of the other economies in the developed world.

What has all this to do with computer-caused unemployment?

Well, if the rich were taxed as they were taxed fifty years ago, or even thirty years ago, there would be lots of money to put the unemployed to work in the public sector, doing the sorts of meaningful jobs that would improve the quality of life.

There is absolutely no reason why everyone shouldn't have a full-time job if they want one.

It just needs a radical change in thinking.

Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens

I had always meant to watch "Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens" (a symphony of horror), but somehow never did, until last night - on YouTube. I'm glad I waited this long because had I not, I wouldn't have thought to seek out the beautifully restored version of it that I watched. I can now understand why, in 1922 -  *ninety years* ago -  the "Schweizer Illustrierte Kino Woche" wrote that "Nosferatu"'s beguiling power caused those who watched it in theatres to forget they were there until the lights came on.

The premiere of "Nosferatu" was at a time when the horrors of the First World War still lived in the minds of all Germans. Millions of their soldiers had fallen, either killed or wounded. On every street corner, pedestrians were accosted by crippled former soldiers begging for alms. It was also the time when millions were dying from the Spanish Flu that was raging through Europe.

The producer of "Nosferatu", Albin Grau, said that the figure of Nosferatu helped him understand the horror story that was the First World War. In the way it sucked in and destroyed all who got near it, it was like a cosmic vampire.

The story of Nosferatu was based on Bram Stoker's "Dracula", a novel that had fascinated Albin Grau. However he hadn't found it particularly strange, for, when serving in the war, he had met a Serbian farmer who told him about his father. The father had died and been buried with no churchly sacraments. Thereafter he was seen by many, an undead being who seemed to be seeking a true and final resting place.

As a result of these sightings, the body was exhumed some months later. It was still in the coffin, but looked like it had only just died. Two preternaturally long and sharp teeth protruded from its mouth. It was decided it would be best to hammer a wooden stake into its chest, so it would pierce the heart. This was done. The undead being was seen no more.

After reading "Dracula" and hearing about the Serbian farmer's father, Albin Grau wasted no time in forming a company, Prana-Film, for the sole purpose of producing "Nosferatu". To be the film's director he chose the then up-and-coming Wilhelm Murnau, whose work on "Nosferatu" is still looked upon today as trail-blazing.

Despite most films then (in 1922) being filmed entirely on a studio set, "Nosferatu" was shot "on location" - the locations being the Carpathian mountains, and the medieval town of Arwaburg, and an old church in Wismar, and the salt silos of Lübeck.

The better to create a truly eerie atmosphere, the director and cameramen experimented with light and shadow - particularly light and shadow on the faces of the actors, so that the malevolent eyes of the Nosferatu could seem the deeper in his massive skull.

There is the now-renowned scene where the Nosferatu in the wee hours has infiltrated the Hutter's home. You can see only his shadow as he creeps up the stairs and into the bedroom where the defenceless Ellen Hutter lies in her bed. You see only the huge shadow of his unnaturally long fingers with their unnaturally long nails as they reach for Ellen's neck.

One of the odder things about "Nosferatu" was the name of the lead actor, Max Schreck, for the German word "Schreck" means "terror" or "fright". Was it only a stage-name? It turned out it wasn't, and that Schreck was his real name. This, plus how convincingly Max Schreck played the vampire, caused some serious film critics to ask whether Schreck wasn't, himself, an actual vampire.

So enthusiastic was Albin Grau to make "Nosferatu" that he went ahead despite not getting the film-rights to the story. Because the plot of "Nosferatu" was so like that of "Dracula", Bram Stoker's widow successfully got a court-order that all film-copies of "Nosferatu" be destroyed. And they were, but only in Germany, for the reach of German justice didn't extend beyond Germany's borders.

There was already a film-copy of "Nosferatu" in France and one in America, which is the only reason you can still enjoy "Nosferatu", and see it for one of the masterworks of German Expressionism which it is.

***

If there aren't vampires really, what about that there are other-worldly beings that, like vampires, come out in the dead of night and disappear when dawn comes?

Think about the Nightmare, which you only get in the dead of night. However, when dawn begins to break, you need no longer  worry about the Nightmare......well......at least not for another twenty-four hours.

How about that the atmosphere in the dead of night has properties that lower your psychic defenses, making it easier for malevolent beings from a parallel world or another dimension, to invade your mind when you are asleep? But, when dawn comes, these atmospheric properties change, and these other-worldly beings have to go back from whence they came? Isn't this as plausible a cause of the Nightmare, as what the men of science tell you? 

***

If you are at least half interested in the history of cinema, you owe it to yourself to watch "Nosferatu" if you haven't yet, and particularly the wonderfully restored and re-mastered version that I last night watched, and which you can too if you *click here*.

As you watch, and you forget where you are as much as did those watchers whom the "Schweizer Illustrierte Kino Woche" wrote of those ninety years ago, ask yourself whether a silent film with its intertitles and atmospheric music, isn't superior in conveying a good story on film, to your normal sound film.

It was ninety four years ago today..........

.........that The Red Baron, le Baron rouge, left this earth for ever, after being shot down from below out of the sky like a partridge.

He was only twenty-five, but has left his footprints forever in the sands of time. He was destined for only a short life, for he courted death willingly. Less than a year before he left forever, he was seriously wounded in the head while in the sky.

Completely disoriented and having lost a good part of his vision, he managed to land his machine. He had to undergo several operations to get fragments of bone out of his head. Six weeks later, despite warnings from his doctors, he was again in the sky. However, throughout the remaining months of his stay here on earth, he suffered headaches and nausea. And, in character, he was not the same again. 

His fame lies in his shooting down of eighty enemy planes, though more likely eighty-one, since one of his kills came down on the French side, and so couldn't be confirmed by his own side, the Germans. In any case, he shot down more planes than anyone else in the Great War, la Grande Guerre.

It might be thought that because he was so adept at shooting down enemy planes, he was an aerial acrobat. Far from it. He simply had an eye for the weakest pilot in any enemy flotilla his squadron came across in the sky. Like an eagle over the savanna he swooped down on the prey he'd picked out, and that was that.

Even so, he ensured his success by ordering his colleagues to cover his sides and rear as he swooped down.

Something else about him. He didn't like war as such. He simply liked it for the sport it offered. For each plane he shot down he bought a silver cup and engraved on it the date of the victory and the type of plane. However, after his sixtieth victory he could add to his collection of cups no more because, just as Germany was running out of money, he was running out of money too.

Who was it who shot him out of the sky like a partridge? No-one knows for sure, although names were circulated about. This, though, is not what is important. What is important is the respect he had in the eyes of his opponents.

They organised a military funeral for him. Six allied officers carried his coffin. A guard of honour fired salvos as the coffin was lowered into the ground. On his gravestone, someone anonymously wrote: À notre ennemi vaillant et digne.

Sleeping Dogs

I often think about how bored dogs must get. They can’t do most of the things we humans do to pass the time, like read books, surf the internet, watch television etc.

Apart from time spent going on walks with their owners, dogs can do little else to pass the time than sleep.

Come to think of it, sleeping more wouldn’t be a bad way for us humans to better pass our free time. We would dream more, and consequently multiply the chances of having interesting dreams that we could analyse, thereby understanding ourselves better.

Sleeping more, we would also have less time to make trouble for others; and those others, if they slept more, would have less time to make trouble for us.

Our society would be the more peaceful for this.

Sleeping dogs have much to teach us.

Miss Burden

I'm continuing reading William Faulkner's "Light in August", that I spoke briefly of in my posting of March 21st. I'm savouring rather than wolfing "Light in August" because you just can't wolf Faulkner.

I had never read Faulkner before, and had always promised myself to, but kept putting it off. Then the writer of a blog I regularly read said there were connections between "Light in August" and Kafka's "The Trial". This was the prompt I needed to begin reading Faulkner, and what better than with "Light in August."

Now half-way through it, I haven't yet come across anything that makes me think, "Ah, The Trial''. It must then be somewhere in the second half.

One of "Light in August"'s main characters is Joe Christmas, so far twenty or thereabouts, who had been adopted and raised by a poor and pious couple. He escaped them and drifted through many towns and many jobs.

Joe has some black ancestry, or "negro" ancestry as it was called in the nomenclature of the 1920s Deep South, the time and locale of "Light in August". However, he passes for white.

At the point in "Light in August" I'm now, Joe is living in a cabin on land owned by a fortyish spinster, Miss Burden, who comes from Old Money, and who lives alone in the main house. Joe and Miss Burden drift into an affair, and most passionate it is. This all doesn't at first sight sound very believable, but Miss Burden has volcanic feelings too long suppressed, that manifest when she and Joe are together, which they are most nights.

Joe was aware of Miss Burden's

.....imperious and fierce urgency that concealed an actual despair at frustrate and irrevocable years, which she appeared to attempt to compensate each night as if she believed that it would be the last night on earth by damming herself to the hell of her forefathers, by living not alone in sin but in filth.

She had an avidity for the forbidden wordsymbols; an insatiable appetite for the sound of them on his tongue and on her own. She revealed the terrible and impersonal curiosity of a child about forbidden subjects and objects; that rapt and tireless and detached interest of a surgeon in the physical body and its possibilities.

And by day he would see the calm coldfaced, almost manlike, almost middleaged woman who had lived for twenty years alone, without any feminine fears at all, in a lonely house in a neighborhood populated, when at all, by negroes, who spent a certain portion of each day sitting tranquilly for the eyes of both youth and age the practical advice of a combined priest and banker and trained nurse.

Growing Up Absurd (2)

In my posting called "Growing Up Absurd (1)" I asked whether most jobs today were any less absurd than the jobs of the judges, lawyers, and other officials in the legal bureaucracy in Franz Kafka's "The Trial". I cited the jobs of generals and soldiers; the jobs of men who make weapons for them; the jobs of the men in that part of the jail system dedicated to keeping drug-users and drug-sellers behind bars; and the jobs of teachers of history in schools.

Although these are "public sector" jobs, they are, apart from the teaching jobs, the sort of public sector jobs that normal men like you think are worthwhile. Normal men like you agree, do you not, that you can never have too many generals and soldiers, and guns and tanks and fighter planes, and jail guards and jails.

I'm going to turn today to jobs in the "private sector". Although, as a normal man, you'll believe as a self-evident truth that all jobs in the "private sector" are worthwhile jobs and therefore not absurd jobs, is it possible you're wrong?

Do you, by chance, work for an organisation that makes or distributes potato chips, popcorn, cheese-whizzes, nachos, fizzy pop drinks, and their like? Or perhaps you work in a hamburger joint, or are the manager of one? If so, your job is in the service of making or selling foods that make your customers unhealthy, so that your foods will kill them if they eat enough of it.

But, even if your customers don't eat enough of your foods to kill them directly, to the extent that they do eat them, they will suffer clogged arteries and high blood pressure that will lead them to expensive heart operations and imbibing expensive drugs that the taxpayer will have to pay for.

Perhaps, though, you work for an organisation entirely different, like a news organisation. Maybe you're a journalist, or an editor, or a television news-reader with expensive hair. If so, you'll surely know that the news you give out is not to educate your readers or viewers, but to distract them from what's really going on, or to frighten them so they'll keep coming back for more.

You may work in advertising, so that your job is to persuade people to buy things they don't need, or don't really want.

Or you may work on Wall Street and routinely do the sorts of things that nearly caused the world's economic system to crash not so long ago.

If you work in any of the jobs I've just talked about, your job is absurd, as absurd as the jobs of the judges and lawyers and officials in The Trial, as absurd as a job where you're paid to dig holes and then immediately fill them again.

The real difference between your job, and the jobs of men who dig holes and immediately fill them again, is that they'll know their jobs are absurd, whereas you either don't know your job is absurd, or you don't want to know. Even if you suspect your job is absurd, you must pretend it isn't, otherwise you'll be fired and your little world will collapse.

Have you wondered about all the jobs people do for nothing, the volunteer jobs that make people's lives better and make cities better places to live in? These are non-absurd jobs, but no-one wants to pay people to do them. Isn't this absurd? Nyaaah, you don't want to think about that........

In The Hot Still Pinewiney Silence of An August Afternoon......

I always meant to read Faulkner but somehow never did. Until now. Because someone said there are echos of "The Trial" in "Light In August", I've begun reading "Light In August".

When it starts, a young woman, Lena, is walking the dusty roads of rural Alabama, trying to find the father of the child who lies in her womb. She sits down on a ditchbank at the side of a road for some moments rest. She hears a wagon, and looks up and sees it coming towards her.

The sharp and brittle crack and clatter of its weathered and ungreased wood and metal is slow and terrific: a series of dry sluggish reports carrying for half a mile across the hot still pinewiney silence of the August afternoon. Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon a mild red string of road.

So much so is this that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread being re-wound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost travelling a half mile ahead of its own shape...........

I think I'm going to like Faulkner........

Growing Up Absurd (1)

At the beginning of Franz Kafka's "The Trial" Josef K is arrested in his boarding house by two men who march him into the room next to his for an interrogation by a police inspector.

Regarding all this, the following passage says much, notwithstanding that Kafka later deleted it:

The interrogation seems to be limited to looks, thought K., well, I'll give him a few minutes' grace. I wish I knew what kind of an official body it can be which goes in for such elaborate arrangements in a case like mine which, from the official point of view, offers no prospects of any kind. For elaborate is the only word to use for this whole setup. Three people already wasted on me, two rooms not belonging to me disarranged, and over there in the corner three young men are standing and looking at Fräulein Bürstner's photographs........

Absurdity and the wasting of time by paid officials are what this passage is about. This is also a theme of "The Trial". A huge judicial bureaucracy has to exist because large numbers of people, of whom Josef K is one, are charged with crimes, but aren't told what their crimes are. They must spend years trying to get the charges lifted. Hence the need for large numbers of police, lawyers, judges, and the administrative staff to support them.

While the jobs of these officials are clearly absurd and a waste of time and money, are they any less absurd and any less a waste of time and money than most jobs today?

Think of armies. They exist to fight wars, but wars most times never come. So the generals and ordinary soldiers spend their entire working lives practising for wars they'll never fight. However, if the army is big enough, it'll often find excuses to start little wars to justify its existence.

Think also of all those who make the guns and tanks and aeroplanes for the soldiers to use. Are their jobs not as absurd and as much a waste of time and money as the jobs of the generals and soldiers?

Think of all the jails that must be built, and all the prison warders who must be employed to keep drug-users and drug-sellers in jail. Most of these drug users and drug sellers have never harmed anyone. If they live in free societies, why aren't they free to take drugs and sell drugs if they feel like it? If they were free to, as they should be in a free society, the jobs of all the prison warders who keep drug users and sellers in jail, wouldn't be necessary, nor would the jobs of those who build the jails. Hence their jobs are absurd and a waste of time and money.

While schoolteaching is looked on as an honourable profession because it lessens ignorance, does this apply to the teaching of history in schools? Since history, as taught in schools, is shaded to inculcate flag-waving patriotism, any history that shows that the country's founders did bad things and told big lies must be ignored. So, history as taught in schools is merely propaganda, and, as such, perpetuates ignorance. Is not, then, the job of the history-teacher absurd and a waste of time and money?

I've dwelt only on some "public sector" jobs. What about some of the "private sector" ones? I'll speak of them next time.........

A Little About Kafka

I recently re-read Franz Kafka's "The Trial". I found it as depressing as I found it the first time, which was twenty years ago. I read it again because I feel any novel worth reading, like "The Trial", should be read more than once, and because someone whose blog I read regularly has been writing about "The Trial".

Surfing the internet, I see there's an awful lot that's been written about "The Trial", most of it too abstruse and intellectual for me to understand. This is the same for me with other Great Novels I've read. Most of what's written about them I can't understand. And the little I can understand (or think I can), speaks to me hardly at all. Is it just me?

Maybe it's for you too, but you won't admit it for fear of looking foolish in front of your little friends, who, too, won't admit that they can't understand most of what learned professors say about the Great Novels, and what little they can understand speaks to them hardly at all either?

I feel, though, that to understand a Great Novel, you should learn at least a little about its author, since novels tend to be autobiographical. What, then, about Franz Kafka?

I've learned via Google that Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, into a German-speaking Jewish family. Although good in school, he didn't like the traditional, hidebound and authoritarian way he was taught. On leaving school he studied the Law and got a degree in it. However, he didn't practice law, but worked for an insurance company, and then for an insurance institute.

Although he found insurance work tedious and boring, he stuck at it until 1923, when he would have been forty. Then he moved to Berlin to pursue writing. However, he was already suffering from tuberculosis, from which he died not too long after, in 1924.

It appears that Kafka wasn't close to his mother and father. His father, a successful merchant, was a tyrant who bullied his son psychologically. As for women, Kafka had relationships with several, and became engaged to one. But he never married.

At the end of his life, he was isolated from his family, and from a regular job and the companionship of colleagues that went with it. Being Jewish, he was surrounded by anti-Semitic Germans, whose language he wrote in. In his loneliness he tried to find God, but felt God was too distant.

Does this, however little, help in understanding "The Trial"? I'll speak of this another time.........

Nixon and Me

Most afternoons at about five, when on my way back from something-or-other, I stop off at a little supermarket to buy food for my supper. I find it a pleasant place to buy my groceries. Although it charges a bit more than another much larger supermarket closer to my home, I prefer to shop in this little supermarket because the extra money I'll have to pay is worth the pleasant experience of shopping there.

I do realise I'm not like most of you in grocery-shopping this way. Not only am I happy to pay more in pleasant surroundings, rather than paying less in less pleasant ones, I also shop for groceries every day. Were I to grocery-shop once a week, as Normals do, I would know more or less what I'll be eating for supper over the next seven days. This would be boring.

This little supermarket has a bin in which are used-DVDs of films for sale. Although they sell for between $3.99 and $4.99, I hardly ever buy any because well-nigh all of them I wouldn't watch even if handed out free. Nonetheless I never lose hope that there are DVDs there that I might like. So, each time I buy food for my supper in this little supermarket, which is to say nearly every day, I sift through the bin.

Some weeks ago I came across a DVD of "Frost/Nixon" in the bin. Normally I would have bought it while trembling with excitement, for I can never get enough of Richard Nixon. Until 1994 when he crossed to the Other Side, Nixon had always been a part of my life. The Kitchen-Debate with Khrushchev, the TV debates with Kennedy, the trauma of Watergate and the resignation in disgrace. I had closely followed them all. I read many books about Nixon. I visited his Presidential library in Yorba Linda. Nixon was so much a part of me that when he Crossed Over, a little of me died. Can I go on living with no Nixon, I've asked myself many times since. Seventeen years later, I'm still here. It's not been easy, though.

Nonetheless I didn't buy the DVD of "Frost/Nixon" at first, for I had seen the promotional trailer, which had put me off the film. Hence I had never gone to see it when it was still in the theatres. However, I had seen the original Frost/Nixon interviews, and remembered them well, and thought a re-enactment of them couldn't fail to be disappointing, particularly the re-enactment as shown in the trailer.

Allow me at this point to say that trailers have often put me off films that, when I later did see them, I thought good. What does it say for a film's promoters that the trailer they produce to show prospective viewers how good their film is, makes prospective viewers like me think the film terrible, when it's actually good?

Each time I subsequently shopped for my supper at the little supermarket after first seeing the DVD of "Frost/Nixon" in the bin, I would look in the bin and would see that "Frost/Nixon" was still there. Finally I bought it, but I procrastinated watching it. Then, needing a change from watching the science fiction films on YouTube that I've also been writing of, I did at last watch "Frost/Nixon". I found it................riveting.

***

A good part of "Frost/Nixon" dwells on something I'd not thought about - the $600,000 that David Frost paid Richard Nixon for the right to interview him. While $600,000 doesn't sound much today to you who are rich, it was a lot in 1977. Perhaps it was like like $4 million or $5 million is today?

David Frost's TV career was going downhill, and he saw interviewing Nixon as a wonderful way to make it go uphill again. He contacted Nixon's people and, after much bargaining, the $600,000 figure was agreed upon, and paid. But, Frost couldn't get the big TV networks to agree to air the interviews because they considered them "checkbook journalism" - as pejorative a term as you get in the journalistic milieu.

So, Frost was in a financial hole. How to get out of it? Offer the interviews for syndication. This worked. The rest is history.

As for the interviews as portrayed in the film, well, they weren't quite as I remembered them. In the film, Nixon bullies the overawed Frost in the first three interviews. Then in the fourth - the interview that focuses on Watergate - Frost finds his feet, and, courtesy of rigorous research, gets Nixon to admit things he hadn't intended to admit. However, in the actual interviews as I remembered them, Frost had more than held his own in the non-Watergate interviews, and - as the film indeed shows - got Nixon to say things he hadn't meant to, in the Watergate interview.

The film has Nixon making a drunken late-night phone call to Frost, in which he said self-revealing things he wouldn't say if sober. It turns out that Nixon made no such phone call to Frost, although he was supposed to have made such drunken phone calls to others.

There's a scene where Nixon, inquiring of Frost how his weekend had gone, asks him, "Did you do any fornicating?" According to Frost, Nixon did actually say this.

***

If you've not seen "Frost/Nixon", do. Maybe you'll find a DVD of it in a bin in a supermarket near you.

Time now to unpack my groceries...........

The Blob

I write this, happy that I didn't suffer the terrible fate of so many in "The Blob", a 1958 film I saw last night on YouTube.

"The Blob" begins with something from Out There hitting earth one night. The sound wakes a nearby homesteader. He goes outside and sees a big hole in the ground in which is a small round metallic thing that has cracked open. Inside it is a dark jelly goo.

The homesteader pokes at the goo with a stick to see what it will do. Well, it oozes onto his arm and he can't get it off. It seems to be devouring the arm. The homesteader runs around in great pain.

He is found crawling at the side of a road by a young man, Steve, and his girlfriend on a jaunt in a convertible. They take him to a doctor who is puzzled by the goo. The doctor injects the homesteader with something to make him sleep, then takes out reference books from his bookcase and begins paging through.

After paging through awhile but not learning much about goos that devour any human limbs they ooze onto, the doctor checks to see how the sleeping homesteader is doing. He sees that the goo now covers the whole arm. The doctor concludes that cutting off the arm is the only thing to do. He telephones his nurse who had already left for the night, and tells her to come back quick.

Meanwhile, Steve, with his girlfriend, has driven back to the spot where he found the homesteader, to look for clues as to what exactly fell from the sky. After rooting around he's still no wiser. He drives back to the doctor's house.

Steve finds the house empty. Where's the doctor, and where's the homesteader? He checks round the side and sees the goo. It has now become a giant......Blob. It has turned red, and has just devoured.........the doctor.

This isn't enough for the Blob. Having devoured the doctor, and no doubt his nurse too, and not to speak of the homesteader, the Blob likes the taste and seeks more. Can it be stopped before it devours.....well.......everyone.

You'll have to watch "The Blob" to find out...........

***

What lessons are there from "The Blob"? Well, if things from outer space ever land on earth, they may bring germs with them, or may have deadly characteristics, against which the human is helpless.

Because "The Blob" came out in 1958 - the time of the Red Menace, and of Communists under beds, and behind every door, tree and lamppost - the Blob may have symbolised all this. Think only that it became red.

What else?

Oh yes, should the Polar ice caps melt because of Global Warming, a Big Surprise may await............

***

To watch "The Blob", *click here*.

The Amazing Transparent Man

At the beginning of "The Amazing Transparent Man" - a 1960 film I last night watched on YouTube - a man has just escaped from jail. From watchtowers above, powerful searchlights sweep the terrain below. Police with snarling dogs search the undergrowth. Roadblocks are everywhere.

This isn't enough to catch Joey Faust, the man who has escaped. There's a car waiting for him on a road. It takes him to the headquarters of Paul Krenner - a former major in several armies - who had arranged that Joey be sprung from jail because, being an expert safe-breaker, Joey's the man the Major needs.

The Major explains to Joey - who didn't know why he'd been sprung from jail - that he wants him to steal from a top-secret safe, radio-active atomic fission material that can make people invisible. The Major is planning to create an army of invisible men that will take over the country, and eventually the world.

The Major has under his control, a scientist in a laboratory who is developing the invisible-making abilities of fission material. There are some flaws still to be overcome. The fission material in the safe that the Major wants Joey to break into, is of the sort that hopefully will iron out those flaws.

After learning he's to break in to the safe, Joey protests to the Major that because he's an escaped prisoner, everyone will know his face since his picture will be posted everywhere. The Major assures him this won't be a problem because he'll be made invisible before he sets out.

Joey is told to lie on a table in the scientist's laboratory. A machine directs rays at him. In next to no time, Joey becomes invisible. Now he can break into the safe in broad daylight with no-one seeing him..........

There is of course lots more, but you should watch "The Secret Transparent Man" to find out.

***

Making men invisible isn't as impossible as it sounds. I read somewhere not long ago that large objects like military tanks have been made invisible through attaching to the tank, mirrors that reflect the surrounding terrain but not the tank.

Think also of x-rays that make invisible the flesh that surrounds the bones.....

While physical invisibility is not yet a widespread reality, what about psychological invisibility? All women above a certain age remember the day they became invisible to men on the street. From being used to seeing admiring glances from men, they must now tolerate these men looking through them as if they're not there.

It's not just women above a certain age who are invisible. It's old people too, whether man or woman. I, myself, being now old, have, at social gatherings, had to get used to young people acting as if I wasn't there.

Not that I blame them. I, when young, acted this way towards old people too.

***

If you wish to watch "The Amazing Transparent Man", *click here*. To tempt you even more, I'll let you know that Joey Faust looks something like Richard Nixon, and sounds like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Ronald Reagan.

Maniac

I saw the film, "Maniac", last night on YouTube. Because there have been several films called "Maniac", you should know that the "Maniac" I saw, was made in 1934.

From what I've gleaned, "Maniac" was originally titled "Sex Maniac". I can only assume its title was changed because "Sex Maniac" was too shocking a title for film-goers in 1934. I feel, though, that more people would have gone to see it had its title not changed.

As "Maniac" begins, you hear the fourth movement of Tchaikovsky's sixth (and last) symphony as the following words scroll down:

The brain, in and of its physical self, does not think any more than a musical instrument can give forth melody without the touch of the musicians hand. The brain is indeed the instrument of thinking, but the mind is the skilful player that makes it give forth the beautiful harmony of thought.

It is because of the disastrous results of fear brought not only on the individual but on the nation, that it becomes the duty of every sane man and woman to establish quarantine against fear.

Fear is a psychic disease which is highly contagious and extraordinarily infectious. Fearthought is most dangerous when it parades as forethought.

Combat fear by replacing it with faith. Resist worry with confidence.

--- Wm. S. Sadler, M.D., F.A.C.S., Director of the Chicago Institute of Research and Diagnosis.

Then the following scrolls down:

Unhealthy thought creates warped attitudes which in turn create criminals and manias. The Chicago Crime Commission made a survey of 10,000 convicted criminals and found them all suffering from some mental disease.

- William Samuel Sadler (1875-1969), psychologist, psychiatrist and surgeon at Chicago for over 60 years, teacher of Psychology at the McCormick Theological Seminary.

If you've guessed that mental illness is a theme of "Maniac", you're right. As for the fourth moment of Tchaikovsky's sixth symphony, well, it's very doleful. Tchaikovsky committed suicide shortly after he'd composed it. He must have been mentally ill.

***

In "Maniac"'s first scene you see two men working in a laboratory. They are a physician, Dr Meirschultz, and his assistant, Don Maxwell, who is an actor on the run from the police. Dr Meirschultz knows about Maxwell being on the run from the police, but he doesn't tell them.

Perhaps it's because Dr Meirschultz is absorbed in matters more important. He's just developed a serum that brings dead bodies back to life. It's already worked with dead dogs and dead cats. What about dead humans? The problem is, where to get a dead human on which to try the serum? The obvious place is the city morgue. But, how to get in there and retrieve a body without raising suspicion?

This is where Don Maxwell is useful. Being an actor, he can impersonate people, and so can impersonate the city coroner who's boss of the morgue. Under this guise, Maxwell enables Dr Meirschultz to get into the morgue late one night. A beautiful young blonde woman had recently been brought in. She had killed herself through inhaling carbon monoxide. She's perfect for Dr Meirschultz to try his serum on. He injects her. Soon her eyelids are moving. Other parts of her begin moving too.......

However, the Doctor wants to achieve more. In his laboratory there's a jar with a palpitating heart in it. He wants to put this heart in a dead human to see if it will make him alive again. He takes out a gun, hands it to Maxwell and says, "If you vill shoot yourself, I vill bring you beck to life by putting ze heart in zat jar, into your body in place of ze heart zat you hef now. Zis vill make me famous, and you vill be famous too."

Maxwell, not liking this idea at all, points the gun, not at himself, but at the Doctor, and fires........

What to do with the Doctor's body? Well, there's a bricked-up wall in the basement behind which to put it without busybodies finding out........

What if people come asking, "Where's Dr Meirschultz?" There's only one solution, which is, become Dr Meirschultz.

Maxwell dresses himself up in Dr Meirschultz's clothes, puts on a false beard and glasses, and soon looks like the Doctor. He can also speak with a German accent, and so can sound like the Doctor too. But, can he do like the Doctor? He reads all the medical writings of the Doctor he can find. Then he begins treating the Doctor's patients, most of whom seem to be attractive young women.......

***

What has all this to do with mental illness, you may ask. Well, Maxwell begins thinking he's actually Dr Meirschultz. For instance he begins laughing, when alone, in the same demoniacal way that Dr Meirschultz used to laugh when in the grip of his delusions.

When Maxwell's young women patients are in advanced states of undress, he fantasises making love to them.

Maxwell tries to strangle the Doctor's black cat, "Satan". One of Satan's eyeballs pops out onto the floor during the struggle. Maxwell picks it up and eats it. It tastes to him wonderful, like an oyster..........

***

When watching "Maniac" (and I highly recommend that you do) you may find yourself thinking of your own doctor. How do you know he's not merely pretending to be a doctor? Like most men who present themselves as doctors, he'll have a framed document on his office wall that certifies he's a doctor. But, how do you know it's not a fake certificate?

When he examines you with your clothes off, does he look at you funny?................

***

Should you wish to watch "Maniac", *click here*.

Dinosaurus

"Dinosaurus", from 1960, is the latest film I've seen on YouTube.

The locale of the film is a Caribbean island, of the sort that those who belong to the Contented Class in rich northern countries go to for their sun-filled beach-lazing holidays.

A construction company is altering sections of the island's shoreline as part of building something-or-other. When you alter a shoreline, the first thing you do is put dynamite deep in the sea not too far from a beach. Then you blow up the dynamite. If you do this, though, chances are you'll blow up the sea bed below as well, that contains embedded frozen bodies of creatures that lived long, long ago, like dinosaurs and Neanderthal men.

Would you know it, such creatures were under the very sea bed that the construction company blew up. The frozen and perfectly intact bodies of a Brontosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Neanderthal man, float to the sea's surface after having lain peacefully under the sea bed for millions upon millions of years.

Ordinarily they would make fine specimens for a museum or some-such. However, while becoming unfrozen, they are struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. This seems to re-light the life-force within them. The bodies come alive and roam the island.

The Tyrannosaurus Rex causes the most problems because it's a natural meat-eater, and is particularly nasty as a result. The Brontosaurus, an eater only of leaves and whatnot, is more gentle. As for the Neanderthal man, he's not as fearsome as he looks, and is more confused by the modernity he comes across, than anything else. For instance when trampling through someone's garden one night, he sees behind a window of the house, a woman who has just applied lashings of make-up to her face. This so terrifies him that he flees.

An orphan boy makes friends with not only the Neanderthal man, but with the Brontosaurus. It's too bad for the orphan boy that the gentle Brontosaurus gets in a fight with the ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex, and loses, and dies of its wounds.

There's lots, lots more in "Dinosaurus".............

***

While there's no known instance of frozen dead bodies being brought back to life, who's to say this'll never happen. And some scientist somewhere in his lonely laboratory may well already have brought a frozen dead body back to life, but daren't tell anyone for fear of being put in jail.

You've no doubt heard of those frozen dead bodies of rich men who, when alive, had ordered that they be frozen at the moment of their death from some disease or other, so they can be unfrozen when someone discovers a cure for what they died of, and they can then resume their lives where they left off.

Even if you have no disease, but find life boring, it might be nice to have someone put you in a fridge and freeze you. You could be unfrozen in, say, a thousand years time, when life is less boring than now. Although having someone freeze you when you are still alive isn't allowed, this could one day change.

***

Should you wish to watch "Dinosaurus", *click here*.

Mesa Of Lost Women

"Mesa of Lost Women", a 1953 film I saw last night on YouTube, begins with a man and a woman staggering through a desert - the Muerto Desert - while a narrator says:

Strange! – the monstrous assurance of this race of puny bipeds with overblown egos; the creature who calls himself ‘Man’! He believes he owns the earth, and every living thing on it exists only for his benefit. Yet how foolish he is!

Consider: even the lowly insect that Man treads underfoot outweighs humanity several times, and outnumbers him by countless billions! In the continuing war for survival between Man and the hexapods, only an utter fool would bet against the insects.

Let a man or woman venture from the well-beaten path of civilisation, let him cross the threshold of the limited intellect, and he encounters amazing, wondrous things; the unknown, and terrible. If he escapes these weird adventures with his life, he will usually find he left his reason behind.

Perhaps that is what happened to these two souls, lost in the great Mexican desert. But then, ask yourself: why would anyone tread from the usually well-travelled roads of this modern age? – from the luxury of an air-conditioned automobile?

It’s difficult for our modern world of statistics and electronics to accept miracles, but you could almost call this a miracle; a genuine miracle. Out of hundreds and thousands of square miles of heat and seared wasteland, where the vultures wait for the other vultures to die, an American oil surveyor has chosen to explore this particular terrible corner of the earth. The Muerto Desert; the Desert of Death!

This surveyor can hardly credit his eyes. Perhaps they are only illusive images, produced by roasting the optic nerves? But if they do exist, if they are living things from somewhere, one fact is certain: miracle or not, they will not be living things for long. The Muerto Desert, true to its name, will soon convert them into dead things....

The surveyor - who works for an oil company - and his guide, an elderly man called Pepe, bundle the barely conscious man and woman into the surveyor's jeep, and he takes them to the oil company field hospital.

After the man and woman have partially revived through drinking some water and eating some food, the man, Grant Phillips, in a terrified voice, begins telling of giant tarantulas and of misshapen little men and of beautiful indestructible women, made that way by a scientist in a hidden laboratory atop a mesa - the Zarpa Mesa.

Pepe's eyes widen as he hears this story, for he has heard similar stories before. Grant Phillips' voice trails off while the narrator says:

Quite a story he’s telling, isn’t it, Pepe? You heard from your people about Zarpa Mesa, and the mysterious Dr Araña, even though your bosses haven’t. So, why tell them? They would only laugh at you and say,'Poor Pepe! You’re getting old!'

But you’ve heard for years about the grotesque and misshapen people; about the women – strange women who do not die! No, Grant Phillips doesn’t know the whole story. You see, he came into it rather late. It actually began---oh, almost a year ago; the night Dr Leland Masterson, the world famous specialist and researcher, found himself in the middle of the Muerto Desert; the Desert of Death!...

Indeed, Dr Masterson had heard of Dr Araña and was curious. So he made a long journey to meet Dr Araña at his laboratory on Zarpa Mesa. On being shown into the laboratory by a misshapen little man, Dr Masterson noticed that the people working in it were woman, all young and beautiful, and silent.

Then Dr Araña entered and introduced himself. After the obligatory small-talk, Dr Araña began to tell Dr Masterson of his work in transplanting human pituitary glands that control growth, into the bodies of tarantula spiders. Dr Araña said:

The tarantulas began to yield amazing results. They grew as large as human beings, and began developing new reasoning powers; and I found I had the telepathic power to communicate with them. And then I reversed the process; transplanted the control centre of the insect back into the human body.

Doctor, observe this girl! I call her ‘Tarantella’. She has human beauty and intelligence, but still retains the capacities and instincts of the giant spider.

As for the misshapen little men, Dr Araña explained that, just as the male spider is small and weak and the female spider big and powerful, so this dynamic replicates in humans who are injected with growth glands taken from spiders. Before being injected with spider glands, the misshapen little men had been big and strong. Now, not only are they misshapen and small and weak, they are no match for the women who have been made powerful and intelligent and beautiful through being injected with spider glands.

After observing the young woman called Tarantella, whose fathomless dark eyes spew pure evil, and after observing some misshapen little men, and after observing a giant human-sized tarantula, Dr Masterson decides he wants nothing to do with Dr Araña. Not only that, he decides he'll do all in his power to see that Dr Araña's laboratory is destroyed. He tells Dr Araña this. In that case, said Dr Araña, he cannot allow Dr Masterson to leave Zarpa Mesa..........

This is just a little of what's in "Mesa Of Lost Women"........

***

Made in 1953, "Mesa Of Lost Women" came out in a world very different from today. In that world, it was men who ran it. Women stayed home and minded the children. That was as it should be, for women hadn't yet evolved to where they could do the work of men. Their relatively unevolved brains didn't yet allow them to drive buses or play in symphony orchestras or be lawyers or doctors or run corporations or be prime ministers and suchlike. While some did, they were just exceptions, just as there are exceptions to every rule.

Compare this to today, 2012. Everywhere you look, the Woman is taking over. Look at all the women doctors and lawyers and corporate controllers and politicians and whatnot. In schools today, girls outperform boys. At the University, women now constitute two thirds of the graduates.

Women are storming the redoubts of men everywhere. They are casting them into the valley of the shadow of redundancy. In their desperation, men more and more seek refuge in football, cage-fighting, and the Republican Party. In the growing power of the Female vis a vis the Male, human society is turning into that of the spider..........

Since 1953 wasn't even sixty years ago, what explains the extraordinarily fast evolution of the brain of the Woman, so that She may take over the entire world before you know it. It may not be because of evolution, though, for evolution is supposed to be glacial. How about that laboratories like that of Dr Araña are now a fact, so that, unbeknownst to you, they are releasing women in their many millions into society who have been injected with the glands of the spider?

***

If you wish to watch "Mesa Of Lost Women", *click here*

Cat Women Of The Moon

"Cat Women Of The Moon" is the latest film I've seen on YouTube. Made in 1953, it tells of a manned mission to the moon. Although a manned mission, it has a woman in the crew, Helen, who's the navigator.

As the rocket-ship nears the moon, Helen tells the captain that the best place to land is in a valley on the moon's dark side. The captain thinks it a strange place to land, but, since Helen is the navigator, he has little choice but to take her advice. Helen also says there's a cave in the side of the valley that will be useful to explore.

The rocket-ship lands safely in the valley. The crew unstrap themselves and get up and stretch, Helen too. She also takes out a little hand mirror and arranges her hair and powders her face. All put on their space suits, that include an oxygen mask, and they clamber outside.

Although little can be seen outside because it's the dark side of the moon, Helen is able to lead everyone to the cave in the side of the valley that she'd told everyone about. It's a big cave that seemingly has no end. When the crew are deep in the cave they feel the atmosphere has changed. They remove their oxygen masks and find they can still breathe. There must be oxygen around. Odd.

Walking through the cave as it leads down into the depths under the moon's surface, the crew come across huge buildings that an advanced civilisation must have built. Did the beings who built these buildings breathe oxygen? If so, it explains the oxygen inside the cave.

It turns out there are inhabitants, young women wearing catsuits. There aren't too many of them, and they are all that's left of a nearly extinct moon civilisation. This near-extinction has happened because the supply of oxygen in the moon's underground has been dwindling for a long time, and there's now only enough to support a few moon-people. All the men have died, so only women are left - the ones in the cat-suits.

Being only a matter of time before all the oxygen is used up, the cat-women know they'll soon have to leave the moon for a another planet with oxygen. Earth is the best bet. The cat-women decide, then, to try and travel to earth and settle there. However, they have no rocket-ships. The only way to reach earth is therefore in one of earth's rocket-ships. But, how to entice one so that it lands near the mouth of the huge cave where they live?

The cat-suited women have a highly-developed extra sensory perception and can use this to control the minds of others, even if those others live on other planets. Hence they could sense the earthling's rocket-ship even before it left earth for the moon. They could therefore sense that the crew included a woman, Helen, whose womanly mind was more easily manipulable through interplanetary mind-control by other women, despite those other women being moon-women.

Thus the leader of the moon-women could send mental commands from the moon to Helen, to instruct her to tell the crew to land the space-ship in the valley near the moon-women's cave entrance. Once it's there, the moon-women plan to get into it and fly it to earth after they've killed the crew.

Things don't go exactly as planned because, for one thing, a moon-woman and a crew member fall in love. That's enough of the plot that I'll tell of.

***

"Cat Women Of The Moon" raises a number of issues.

Because the moon-women are not of earth, they can't genetically be human. However, this wasn't enough to stop one of the moon-women and one of the crew members falling in love. Also, it was obvious in the film that the other crew members found the moon-women attractive as women. One assumes, then, that they would want to have sex with them if the circumstances were right.

Given that the chimpanzee is genetically almost the same as the human - and so would genetically be closer to a human than would a moon-woman - I've heard of no instance of a human male falling in love with a female chimpanzee and wanting to have sex with her. But........you never know.

Having a woman, Helen, as a crew member led to tensions, leading to a punch-up between the captain and deputy captain, both of whom had fallen in love with her. This raises the issue of the gender composition of space crews today in the real world. Have any had both men and women?

If so, have there been punch-ups in space-ships or space-shuttles far above earth between male crew members in competition for romantic opportunities with female crew members? While punch-ups do have their place, a space-ship or space shuttle in which there's so much delicate instrumentation, isn't one of them.

***

Should you wish to watch "Cat Women Of The Moon", *click here*.

They Came From Beyond Space

What is singular about "They Came From Beyond Space" as a science fiction film, is that it's British-made. I watched it last night on YouTube.

This 1967 film begins with a bunch of meteors landing somewhere in the English countryside. The locals report this to the Authorities, who send scientists to examine the debris. They are astonished to see that these meteors, unlike your normal meteors, had landed in a perfect geometrical formation. It's as if they're intelligently controlled. And, also unlike your average meteor, these meteors look like very large crystals, but are blackish grey.

To get a better sense of what these meteors are made of, one of the scientists hits it with a large hammer. This causes the meteor to send out a powerful wave of energy that also makes a funny but scary noise. The scientists gathered there fall to the ground in agony. Their faces contorted, they wriggle around for a few seconds. Then the noise stops. But when the scientists get to their feet again and begin talking, they sound robotic. It's as if invisible alien entities have taken over their minds.

This turns out to be the case. However, one of the scientists, the head scientist in fact, isn't affected by these invisible alien entities. Hence he is still himself, and must flee his colleagues, the better to consider what to do.

Next, people in the neighbouring town and elsewhere, start acting robotic too. The invisible entities have obviously also taken over their minds. Will it be only a matter of time before the minds of everyone in England, and indeed the minds of everyone all over the world, Americans included, are taken over by these invisible alien entities? And to what end?

Why should the mind of the head scientist not have been affected by the invisible alien entities? It's because he has a band made of silver inside his head. Doctors had inserted it after he'd injured his head in a car crash when young. Anyone not having the luxury of a silver band inside his head, can only prevent his mind being taken over by wearing a head-covering of silver. Easier said, though, than done.

Something else starts happening. People begin being covered with painful rashes and drop dread. It seems the alien entities have brought their germs with them, against which the people of England have no immunity. What if this plague should spread beyond England, to throughout the world, America included?

The plot gets complicated, so I won't say more about it.

***

As with most science fiction films, "They Came From Beyond Space" makes you think. Like, are you a robot? Do you, for instance, think the same things as do most people, and believe the same beliefs as do most people, and enjoy the same films as do most people, and go euphoric about the World Series and Superbowl as do most people, and wear the same clothes as do most people, and laugh at the same silly jokes as do most people, and guzzle hamburgers and fries as do most people, and go to a soul-destroying job everyday as do most people, and live in a split-level house in a suburb with a two-car garage and two brats and a dog and a cat as do most people?

If yes, chances are you're a robot. As you live as a robot, so you'll die as a robot.

"They Came From Outer Space" may be one of the last films in which almost everyone speaks with Received Pronunciation (RP). It was only in the early 'sixties with the "kitchen sink" dramas, and actors like Albert Finney, Tom Courtney, and Michael Caine, that the sort of accents with which most Englishmen speak, began to become the norm in English filmdom.

***

If you wish to watch "They Came From Beyond Space", *click here*.

The Yesterday Machine

At the beginning of the 1963 film, "The Yesterday Machine" that I saw last night on YouTube, a young college man is trying to fix his car at the side of a road in the middle of somewhere Texas, while his coed girlfriend dances by herself to music coming from the car's radio. College boy can't get the car to go, so he and the coed go looking for help.

They set off through deserted-seeming scrub-covered land and come across two men dressed in very old-fashioned army uniforms, and who are brandishing equally old-fashioned rifles. Seeing that the two men appear hostile and are about to shoot, college boy and the coed run off as the two men fire away.

College boy is hit and falls to the ground. He gets up again and continues running, and is again hit and again falls to the ground. This happens a few more times. Eventually college boy reaches his car, but he can't see his coed girlfriend. Next, he's in a hospital bed, being questioned by detectives.

While the detectives find of interest what happened to college boy, and that his coed girlfriend still can't be found, they are more intrigued by the findings of bullet-experts, that the bullets removed from college-boy's body had been made in 1853 - 110 years ago (the film came out in 1963, don't forget).

This case also attracts the interest of a keen reporter at the local newspaper. Among those he talks to is the missing coed's sister, who is a nightclub singer. She can't enlighten him much. He tells her he's about to drive to the scene of the shooting to try to find out more. She insists on going with him, and does.

When there, they find the coed's scarf lying on the ground, but no coed. They walk back to the reporter's car to return home, but there's no car. What's more, the tarmac road is now a dirt-track, and the telegraph poles they'd seen, aren't there any more.

They begin walking along the dirt track, and see approaching a young yokel on a horse. He's dressed very old-fashioned-like - like he's from the 18th or 19th century. When he comes close to the reporter and the coed's sister, he stops, looks at them strangely, and gallops off in the direction from which he'd come.

Then the reporter and the coed's sister feel themselves falling through space. When they come to, they are in what seems a laboratory. It has lights that flash on and off, and a large metal chair. An old man is there. He introduces himself as Professor Von Hauser. He explains that he used to be one of Hitler's top scientists. The wonder weapons he'd invented when working for Hitler, would have ensured Hitler's victory if only he'd been given more time to perfect them.

But the Americans arrived too early, and the Professor had to escape. Now, here in his Texas laboratory, he's in the end stages of perfecting a time machine that will go into the past, and send Hitler and all his Nazis from before 1945, into the present time. Under the Nazi regime as it was before 1945, Professor Von Hauser will now have the time to put the finishing touches to the wonder weapons which will win the war for Hitler.

When the reporter asks how someone could be sent from the past into the present, Professor Von Hauser says in part, "If ze shpeed of time ist increased from vot it now ist, it vill go beck to ze past. Mein machine increases ze shpeed of time, so zat I vill send it beck to 1945, and it vill send Hitler forvard to today."

That's, admittedly, a rather imperfect transcription of just some of what Professor Von Hauser said. But it should cause you who are reading this, to at least think, and is why you should watch "The Yesterday Machine." Hence I won't reveal how everything turned out.

Watching "The Yesterday Machine" will also enable you to see how men and women were in 1963, the year "The Yesterday Machine" was released. The reporter and the coed's sister are quite typical. For instance, when they go to the scene of the shooting, and have to walk though the hot scrubby terrain to look for clues, he has on a suit-and-tie, and she has on a hip-hugging knee-length skirt and is wearing high-heeled shoes. The better to protect her, he holds her hand as he walks with her though the scrub. He gives the orders, and she obeys. That's how it was then.

If today, while hiking along a country trail, you saw coming towards you a man in a suit-and-tie holding the hand of a woman wearing a hip-hugging knee-length skirt and high-heeled shoes, would you not be as startled as was the 18th or 19th yokel in the film, when he saw such an apparition on the dirt road he was riding his horse along?

If you wish to watch "The Yesterday Machine" (and you should), *click here*.

Plan 9 From Outer Space

Despite film critics saying "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is the worse film ever made, I watched it last night on YouTube, and am glad I did, for I found it entertaining and thought-provoking.

The brainchild of Ed Wood, "Plan 9 From Outer Space" tells of a visit to earth by extra-terrestrial aliens in flying saucers. They are concerned that earthlings, unless they change their ways, could soon blow up the sun, and therefore destroy the solar system. The aliens whose home planet is in the solar system, and who therefore have a vested interest in the solar system not being destroyed, want to persuade earthlings to change their ways.

Easier said than done, because most earthlings - or at least those in 1959 when "Plan 9 From Outer Space" came out - didn't believe in extra-terrestrial aliens. So earthlings weren't disposed to listen to any extra-terrestrial aliens they might come across, who told them to mend their ways, else they'll cause the solar system to be destroyed.

The alien high-command decides to get the attention of earthlings by implementing a plan they call "Plan 9", under which dead bodies in graves will be brought back to life. Having technology far in advance of that of earthlings, the aliens can direct rays of energy at grave sites of the newly dead, which activates a gland or somesuch in the dead body, that causes it to break out of its coffin, then burrow out of the grave, and to trudge to a public square and congregate with all the thousands of other alive-again dead bodies that have been activated under "Plan 9".

Earthlings happening upon such a gathering would not help but think something most strange was happening, and call the police. The aliens would then, at the propitious moment, introduce themselves. Earthlings, in their panic, would be disposed to listen seriously to what the aliens have to say about how earthlings threaten the solar system unless they mend their ways.

This is the bare outline of "Plan 9 From Outer Space".

While we earthlings, today, can't bring dead bodies back to life, who's to say we'll never be able to. Our scientific knowledge, after all, is currently doubling every two years. Remember, the aliens in "Plan 9 From Outer Space", bring back to life not the long-dead, but only the just-dead, whose bodies therefore haven't begun to decompose. Hence bringing dead bodies back to life isn't as far-fetched as one thinks.

What is the mechanism by which earthlings could blow up the sun? "Plan 9 From Outer Space" postulates a device called a "solartron" (I think), that when directed at particles of sunlight can cause them to explode. Since sunlight comes out of the sun, and is everywhere in the solar system, particles of sunlight that are exploded could start a chain reaction that would reach the sun and blow it up, in the way the flame from a lighted fuse travels along a wire to blow up a stick of dynamite. Blowing up the sun this way isn't therefore completely off-the-wall.

The aliens fear the huge disparity between the earthling's quite primitive emotions, and his much more developed technological abilities that have produced the likes of the hydrogen bomb that can destroy all of life on earth. Therefore an adult earthling with a hydrogen bomb is like a three year-old earthling with a hand grenade. Can we wonder, then, that the aliens in "Plan 9 From Outer Space" are so fearful about earthlings getting a "solartron"?

These are some of the things "Plan 9 From Outer Space" makes one think about.

Film critics have laughed at its amateurish special-effects. Well, yes, they are somewhat amateurish, but this adds to the film's charm.

So I recommend "Plan 9 From Outer Space". You can watch it by *clicking here*. At the very least it's not half-bad, which is more than one can say for any film with Adam Sandler in it.

The Wasp Woman

"The Wasp Woman", that I watched last night on YouTube, is a 1959 film produced and directed by the famed Roger Corman, and has many features of interest for those outside the normal run of horror-film watchers.

I won't talk of "The Wasp Woman"s plot, except to say that it's about a scheme by a cosmetics corporation to enable its middle-aged and elderly women customers to look like the beautiful and desirable twenty-somethings they once were, through having them injected with enzymes from wasps.

My saying more would only vitiate the excitement and the raw and visceral horror I know you'll experience if you watch "The Wasp Woman".

"The Wasp Woman" will be of additional interest if you are a social historian. This is because the main character, Janice Starlin, is a forty-something single woman who is the boss of her own cosmetics corporation, whose yearly sales run into the many tens of millions of dollars. It's a large corporation.

That it's a large corporation isn't at first sight noteworthy. But, that it's a large corporation run by a woman certainly is, particularly if you remember that this was 1959, when corporations were owned and run almost exclusively by men. And the men below them had all the important jobs. Women of course also worked in large corporations then, but they were in the typing pool.

In 1959 if you were a forty-something woman, and single, it was because you hadn't been able to attract a man sufficiently for him to ask you or your father, for your hand in marriage. This was usually because you weren't beautiful enough. Or if you weren't beautiful enough, you didn't have the pleasing personality to more than made up for you not being beautiful enough.

However, the thing about Janice Starlin is that, despite being forty-something and single, she's still somewhat beautiful, and certainly would have been beautiful enough by far when young, to sufficiently have attracted a man, or indeed many men, to ask her or her father for her hand in marriage.

Why, then, was she still single? Was it because, being a corporate boss, she had a personality so forceful, that it frightened off men from asking her or her father, for her hand in marriage? You must remember that young women in 1959 were expected act coy and demure. If they didn't, well, this was enough to consign them to permanent spinsterhood, even if they were beautiful.

Also of interest for the social historian, is how the staff of Janice Starlin's corporation acted when at work. Everyone smoked in the office, or at least all the men did. This was how it actually was in all corporate offices in those days.

Some of the men in Janice Starlin's corporation acted towards, and said things to the women in the typing pool, that today would cause them to be called on the carpet. For men to act this way was simply the done thing in corporate life then.

Anything else? Oh yes, Janice Starlin wears blacked-rimmed glasses of a shape and style that is today current. Odd, that.

I hope all this has sufficiently whetted your interest in "The Wasp Woman" for you to *click here* and enjoy it as much as did I.

The White Man's Burden

As I write this, the airwaves and newspapers are filled with feverish talk of yet another coming attack by a certain Great Power upon yet another small land over the seas in an area ruled not so long ago by another Great Power.

This is best understood if one thinks of Kipling's famous poem - as good an example as any of poetry succinctly capturing a truth in a way that reams of bombastic journalistic prose and floods of excited television chatter, can't.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

Doubt

After I'd talked in yesterday's posting of having doubt about History, I thought of what John Patrick Shanley wrote when introducing his play, "Doubt". Some excerpts:

.......We are living in a culture of extreme advocacy, of confrontation, of judgement, and of verdict. Discussion has given way to debate. Communication has become a contest of wills. Public talking has become obnoxious and insincere. Why? Maybe it's because deep down under the chatter we have come to a place where we know that we don't know anything. But nobody's willing to say that......

.......Let me ask you. Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting? Have you ever given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed? Have you ever told a girl you love her and felt the faint nausea of eroding conviction......?

.......What is doubt? Each of us is like a planet. There's the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state. I know my answers to so many questions, as do you. What was your father like? Do you believe in God? Who's your best friend? What do you want........?

".........Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so. Because under the face of easy response, there is another You. And this wordless Being moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation, fluid and wordless, until the resisting consciousness has no choice but to give way.........

..........It is Doubt....... that changes things. When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he's on the verge of growth. The subtle or violent reconciliation of the outer person and the inner core often seems at first like a mistake, like you've gone the wrong way and you're lost. But this is just emotion longing for the familiar. Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present.......

.........I still long for a shared certainty, an assumption of safety, the reassurance of believing that others know better than me what's for the best. But I have been led by the bitter necessities of an interesting life to value that age-old practice of the wise: Doubt........

........There is an uneasy time when belief has begun to slip but hypocrisy has yet to take hold, when consciousness is disturbed but not yet altered. It is the most dangerous, important, and ongoing experience of life. The beginning of change is the moment of Doubt. It is that crucial moment when I renew my humanity or become a lie..........

.........Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite - it is a passionate exercise......... We've got to live with the full measure of uncertainty. There is no last word. That's the silence under the chatter of our time..........

The Professor and Me

Today's entry comes out of a comment left by a reader, a Professor Smith, who wanted to know what I'd meant when I wrote in another comment, "..... the further back the History, the larger the pinches of salt that should be taken with it......".

Professor Smith wanted to know what exactly I meant. Did my statement imply that the further one goes back in History, the less one can believe it?

I replied:

That's exactly what this statement implies. My doubts about the veracity of the ancient History most of us were taught in school began when I learned that the origins of the English language and of the Romance languages may not be what we were all told.

I invite you, Professor Smith, to read what I recently wrote about this, *here*, and *here*.

I don't expect you, after having read these modest and non-scholarly blogging entries, to now believe that the English were already speaking English when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and to now believe that the ancestors of those who today live in the Romance-language areas of Europe were already speaking these languages when the Romans invaded.

However, on the assumption that you believe what everyone else believes, I hope there is now at least a smidgeon of doubt in your professorial mind about English having come out of Anglo-Saxon, and the Romance languages having come out of Latin.

I invite you also, Professor Smith, to read what Professor Stephen Oppenheimer wrote about the *origins of the British*.

Oppenheimer postulates that the British are not, as is commonly supposed, descended mainly from the Anglo Saxons, but, rather, from the Basques.

And he postulates that the English were already speaking a Germanic-type language - the forerunner of today's English - when the Romans arrived.

I also learned of the *Paleolithic Continuity Theory*, which postulates that ".....The prehistoric distribution of proto-languages akin to Italic was an important factor underlying the current distribution of Romance languages throughout Europe......".

What this means is that long before the Romans, the forebears of today's Romance-language speakers were already speaking Latin-like languages.

It's not important in itself that we may have got everything wrong about the origins of the English and Romance languages. But if we are wrong about them, we may also be wrong about much other History we take for granted.

For all I know, what we were all told at school about the origins of English and of the Romance languages, that they came out of Anglo-Saxon and Latin respectively, may be true after all. But, enough plausible objections have been raised against these two self-evident truths, to cause the man on the street to at least raise his eyebrows.

I, for one, have doubt about these two self-evident truths which I accepted unquestioningly until quite recently. I also have doubt about the truthfulness of History generally, particularly ancient History.

I'll talk more about this at another time.........

Knockin' On Heaven's Door

Among the many things I've been meditating upon while reading a recently published book about Hannibal has been the legendary Gunfight at the OK Corral. It seems odd even to think about The Gunfight at the OK Corral, let alone to meditate upon it, while reading about what Hannibal and other luminaries from history can each us about our lives.

On a sultry soporific sun-drenched early afternoon in Tombstone Arizona in 1881 a gunfight took place among seven men that lasted thirty seconds. At the end of those few seconds three men lay dead, another three lay wounded, and the remaining one was unharmed. Despite the brevity and innocuousness of the event, it has become a legend. There is arguably no-one living today in the entire world who hasn't at least heard of the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

However it wasn't until 1931 - fifty years after the gunfight - that the public began to know of it. Someone had written a biography about one of the dramatis personae in the gunfight, Wyatt Earp. This biography was later determined to be largely fiction, but it was the spark that began the Gunfight at the OK Corral legend that has never stopped growing. Many films - dramatic, fictional and documentary - have been made about it; many books - both novels and non-fiction - have been written about it; songs have been composed and sung about it.

Given this, and that the events leading up to the gunfight, and the details of it itself, are thought uncertain, is it any wonder that accounts of it, and interpretations of it, have differed wildly for reasons emotional, ideological, artistic and commercial? It has turned into myth you might say. Its dramatis personae have turned into myths too.

Come to think of it, is it really so odd that I thought of The Gunfight at the OK Corral while reading about Hannibal..............?

Dabbling

Today's posting continues where I left off last time (the posting of February 11th). The last posting concerned Ludwig Erhard, as written about in the recently published book, "*Hannibal and Me*".

Despite having been a mediocre student in high school, and despite having struggled particularly in the left-brain subjects of accounting and mathematics, Erhard, after his traumatic experiences as a soldier in The Great War, managed in the post-war years to get a PhD in Economics - ostensibly a left-brain discipline.

However, Economics has a branch called macro-economics, that looks at the forest rather than the trees. Perhaps, then, Erhard, who may have struggled with left-brain micro-economics as much as he had struggled with left-brain accounting and mathematics, was so outstanding in the more right-brain macro-economic subjects, that it more than made up for any failings in the left-brain micro-economics subjects.

Assuming that Erhard was more comfortable with macro-economics than with micro-economics, it says much for his pertinacity that he could write articles as dessicated as, "The Finished-Goods Market" and "Economic Policy Newsletter of the German Finished-Goods Industry".

Erhard had little choice but to write them because, being an avowed opponent of the Nazi Party in the Hitler years, he was barred from official academia, and so could only eke out a living writing soporific left-brained micro-economic tracts for interested persons under the table.

Given that Erhard had struggled with mathematics and accounting when in high-school - subjects so important in the study of economics - why did he choose economics as his profession in the first place? Did it offer him the best way to make a reasonable living because economists were more in demand than, say, historians?

For what it's worth, I, too, always struggled with left-brain subjects like mathematics and accounting. This is because, arguably, I have the most atrophied left-brain than anyone in the history of mankind. Yet, after several years of lucubrations, I managed to get, of all things, a professional designation to do with numbers because I had reasoned there was a demand for it. It led to a reasonably pleasant job with reasonable security. I needed this for reasons too complicated to go into here.

I might otherwise have tried to make History my profession, for it was History that interested me most when in school. However, my not trying to make History my profession turned out a blessing because, later on, History interested me less and less. I felt it too confining for my eclectic tastes. I turned, in my spare time, more and more to Psychology because, being an emotional basket-case, I wanted to understand why I was one. I was also dabbling in the various other non-left-brained subjects.

I've digressed from "Hannibal and Me". I'll return to it next time..........

Gods and Monsters

This posting continues the last one (of February 8th) which was about the book, *"Hannibal and Me"*.

Harry Truman was an example of a man who became great, not because he sought greatness, but because he had greatness thrust upon him. It was principally because he was in the right place at the right time that he became President.

The young Truman had been what the author of "Hannibal and Me" calls a "wanderer" - someone who didn't have a consuming goal in his life. Truman wouldn't even have imagined he might become President some day. But, President he became.

"Hannibal and Me" uses Ludwig Erhard as another example of a "wanderer". There was little that was out-of-the-ordinary about Erhard as he grew up, for his school grades were mediocre. He did, however, love classical music and dreamed of becoming an orchestral conductor. From today's perspective this did make him appear at least a little out-of-the-ordinary, for how many boys today love classical music and dream of becoming an orchestral conductor? Not many, I suspect.

However, in the Germany of the time in which Erhard grew up, it may have been as normal for a boy to love classical music and to dream of becoming an orchestral conductor, as it is for a boy today in America to love rock music and to dream of becoming the lead guitarist in a world-shaking rock group.

Despite a deformed foot - the legacy from polio - Erhard was, when nineteen, inducted into the army during The Great War as a gunner. During this time he caught typhus and was given up for dead. He eventually recovered sufficiently to return to duty. He again almost died, this time from severe wounds from an exploding artillery shell. Miraculously he pulled through, but at the expense of an atrophied left arm that he could hardly again ever use.

Erhard's being permanently maimed from war wounds, in addition to life in the trenches - the horrors of which have been vividly written about in books such as "All Quiet On The Western Front" and "Goodbye To all That", plus many, many other graphic accounts - it's remarkable from today's perspective that Erhard would appear never to have complained about, nor to have dwelt upon his war wounds.

No doubt this was because he would have found it too emotionally painful. Also, those of his generation didn't generally when with others, emote as do those today about their vicissitudes. However, we now know that traumas - and life in the trenches was, if nothing else, traumatic - that are not acknowledged, will usually become the proverbial eight-hundred pound gorilla in a room.

While severely wounded survivors of the trenches, like Erhard, may have tried to ignore their traumas, they (the traumas) would, as a consequence, have surfaced in the form of violent nightly dreams for the rest of the survivors' lives. This was a theme in the excellent film, "Gods and Monsters", of a few years ago.

I'll continue this next time.........