Month: May 2024

Daniel Kramer photographs are on two great Bob Dylan album covers

PopSpots by Bob Egan – the Bringing It All Back Home Cover

Covers: We’ve Only Just Begun

I’m not a Carpenters fan but the origin story for “We’ve Only Just Begun” is cool.

Tweets and video about a man who lives in a Boeing 727

Tweets and YouTube videos about the film Casablanca

There’s also a fine book about it:

The New Republic on the 100 most significant political films

This is an excellent list and The Battle of Algiers is a worthy #1. Two lesser-known films I recommend are #29, The Great McGinty and #30 Gabriel Over the White House. Gabriel is a really unique film. I don’t agree with a lot of what it says but it’s well worth watching.

I can’t believe this really happened

I had to read Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy in high school. I thought it was terrible and full of implausible plot developments.

I wrote a paper in school parodying it. In the book, a character is stung by an adder and dies at a very convenient moment. In my paper, I had someone get hit by a meteorite which I thought was equally plausible. I wrote that people were more concerned about getting the blood off the meteorite than they were about the victim.

Yesterday, I read that someone really did get hit by a meteorite.

One other note on the book. In Thomas McGuane’s The Bushwhacked Piano, there’s a character named Egdon Heath. Hardy’s book is set in Egdon Heath. I have always wondered if this was because McGuane loved Hardy or hated him.

47.20 hits a home run

Last season, I lost $47.20 because Ryan McKenna of the Orioles dropped a fly ball. See this post: https://wordpress.com/post/sad209898016.com/43576

Yesterday, McKenna hit a very improbable home run. I was at the game. I told the friend I was with that I would have given McKenna the ball if I had caught it and wouldn’t have asked for a bat or a ball. He said maybe McKenna would give you a ticket to a Norfolk game. (I assume he winds up back there.)

Tweets on the AR-15 rifle