Dave's Journal, Mar2024
Movie Trailers
Trailers for vintage sci-fi movies are fun to watch, and say a lot about what attracted audiences to the theater. Actually, trailers are usually better than the movies.
This is one of the best that '50s sci-fi had to offer. Listen to and read the drama that this trailer brings to the screen....
I recall (1953) getting 50¢ from Mom two Saturdays in a row to go see this one at the theater. It's a classic of that genre and I've watched it many many times in the last 70 years !!!
Fabulous scene from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948), that I watched last night and realized I do NOT have the DVD, but that will be corrected later today.
I wondered for years who is this guy - is he an actor or a local Mexican of-the-street? Turns out he was a airly popular actor, Alfonso Bedoya :
Mexican character actor who achieved his greatest success in U.S. films. He was born in Mexico city, living in numerous places throughout the country. He received a private education in Houston, Texas as a teenager, but dropped out and roamed about doing an assortment of jobs. His family, however, brought him back to Mexico City, where he subsequently found work in the struggling Mexican film industry. He appeared in many Mexican films before director John Huston offered him the role of Gold Hat in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Bedoya stole the scenes in which he appeared as the smiling cutthroat and delivered the famous line about not needing any "stinking badges".
They make 'em cute down Texas !!
(Just watch the first half then bail out.)
The Ides of March is the 74th day in the Roman calendar, corresponding to 15 March today.
In modern times, the Ides of March is best known as the date on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC. Caesar was stabbed to death at a meeting of the Senate. As many as 60 conspirators, led by Brutus and Cassius, were involved. According to Plutarch, a seer had warned that harm would come to Caesar on the Ides of March. On his way to the Theatre of Pompey, where he would be assassinated, Caesar passed the seer and joked, "Well, the Ides of March are come", implying that the prophecy had not been fulfilled, to which the seer replied "Aye, they are come, but they are not gone." This meeting is famously dramatised in William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, when Caesar is warned by the soothsayer to "beware the Ides of March."
I forget what actually triggered me on this topic, but I was wondering where all the US presidential votes go, so I pulled together this info on the 2020 election.
First off, there were at least 10 political parties in the US who ran for the president's office.
The votes for the 2020 candidates break down like this:
In 2020, only 66.8% of the citizen voting-age population (255,457,000) voted in the presidential election = 170,645,276 total votes cast in 2020.
Total votes for Biden & Trump = 155,507,476 = 91.1% of total votes cast
Biden = 81,283,501 = 47.6% of total votes cast = 32% of voting age population
Trump = 74,223,975 = 43.5% of total votes cast = 29% of voting age population
Total votes for all other candidates = 15,137,800 = 8.9% of total votes cast = 5.8% of voting age population
The big take-away for me is that typically the guy who gets elected president is voted in by about 30% of voting age Americans. And we are NOT actually a two-party system, although the real campaign $$$ goes only to D's or R's.
Exercising my Constitutional right to steal other peoples' videos off the internet, here is a very neat AI video showing the evolution of Bugatti racing cars.
Back in the '60s, part of the Hippy culture was to embrace the concept of Transcendentalism. I never took the time, until yesterday, to look into what that was.
Transcendentalism is a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday ....
I am kind of struck by this revelation, because that's pretty much generally how I feel about people, and social - religious - cultural - political groups. I think inherently individuals are only cautious / suspicious / prejudiced of other individuals until we are sure that other person is not a threat to our well being. However, once a group gets created and fired up, its core objective is to control members by throwing gasoline (not water) on that caution / suspicion / prejudice. You know "those other guys are a threat to you but stay here with us and you will be safe".
The '60s hippies really hated what they called "tribes" because tribes (groups) keep people separated and against each other.
The US political system is a shining example of "we'll keep you safe from those other guys who want to make your life bad".
I've put myself in a pretty despressed mood about "It is definitely not my world anymore" - from the social cultures, the music(s), the jokes people share, the TV commercials that blitz by so fast I can't figure out what they are trying to sell me, to electric cars, to the movie heroes and heroines and storylines, to the jokes in the New Yorker !!! and the weird sh#t they put on TV.
I am no longer part of the "target audience" for what's going on in the world.
Yeh yeh ..... I sound like my Mother - I get it now, Mom !!
On top of all that, more and more of the physical world I was born into is being bulldoze and replaced by stuff people think is better. Like I said, it's not my world anymore and that made me pretty said today, as I looked up my elementary school on Google Earth. I do this now and then - look up places in my past - for no good reason.
Buildings A and B were once our schoolyard where we played "off the wall", dodge ball C, punch ball, "ring-a-leevio" (that's a guess on the spelling and don't ask me what it means).
The building F attached to the school is the auditorium / movie theater they'd charge us 10¢ to watch old cowboy movies after lunch.
Note the sign that says the school is tempoarily closed. Hopefully only for COVID?
Ahhh ..... street corner E is where William Hayes and I had a well-advertised fight in front of a large after school audience. I actually won but felt awful, as he was a good friend of mine and I can't remember what that was all about.
Meanwhile, from ..... seriously ..... Inner Mongolia ...
I was wondering, so ....
