#tough to handle 1937

[from1837to1945]

Frankie Darro in Roaring Rails (1924) / Tough to Handle (1937)

[luckylittt]

September 2024 Horoscope: What’s In Store for Each Zodiac?

Astrology enthusiasts and those who follow feng shui will find September 2024 to be a month of interesting developments for each zodiac sign. Feng shui, meaning "wind and water," is often used to harmonize energies and can bring insight into how each sign will fare. Let’s take a look at what’s in store for each zodiac sign this month.

Rat

Birth Year: 1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996, 2008, 2020 September Horoscope for Rat: This month, Rats may experience some tension as the Quarrelsome Star stirs up irritability and challenges in your interactions with others. The meaning behind feng shui energy shifts, like these, often indicates a period where you must focus on maintaining harmony. However, a positive aspect of this energy is the Ho Tu combination created by the annual and monthly stars, bringing leadership luck your way. This means that even amidst disagreements, you’ll be able to assert your authority and handle obstacles at work effectively. It's important to stay calm, as balanced emotions will help you manage any hurdles successfully.

Ox

Birth Year: 1937, 1949, 1961, 1973, 1985, 1997, 2009, 2021 September Horoscope for Ox: This month brings a surge in positive energy for the Ox, thanks to the Victory Star. According to the principles of feng shui, meaning energies that promote success and harmony, this period is filled with potential for windfalls, career advancements, and recognition. The Intellectual Ho Tu also favors the Ox, making this an excellent time for students and those in academic fields. With heightened creativity, it's the perfect opportunity to dive into artistic projects and generate innovative ideas.

Tiger

Birth Year: 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, 2010, 2022 September Horoscope for Tiger: Tigers will find their luck improving as cosmic energies align to enhance both career and creative ventures. This is a time to explore new opportunities and aim for ambitious goals. By taking decisive action, Tigers stand to achieve remarkable successes and well-deserved recognition. For young student Tigers, the stars particularly favor academic pursuits, while those involved in creative fields will find this period especially fruitful and inspiring.

Rabbit

Birth Year: 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999, 2011 September Horoscope for Rabbit: This could be a tough month for Rabbits, with challenges in work, relationships, and health. The principles of feng shui, meaning the balance of energies, suggest it might be best to maintain a low profile and defer major decisions until next month when the energies become more supportive. While it may be a difficult period, these troubles are short-lived, and keeping a steady, calm approach will help navigate through this temporary turbulence.

Dragon

Birth Year: 1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000, 2012 September Horoscope for Dragon: Dragons can look forward to a positive shift as obstacles begin to clear, allowing projects to come to fruition. Recognition for your hard work is imminent, and some may even experience a financial windfall. Feng shui teachings emphasize trusting one's instincts, and this month is no exception. If you sense anything off with your health, it's wise to consult with a doctor promptly. Prevention, as always, is key to maintaining balance and well-being.

Snake

Birth Year: 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001, 2013 September Horoscope for Snake: Snakes will enjoy improved luck as the Heaven Star arrives, which helps to weaken the annual Illness Star. This shift brings better health and renewed energy. According to feng shui, meaning positive shifts in energy, the month will offer financial stability, potential windfalls, and increased recognition for your efforts. This period is a welcome respite, providing the chance to regain your balance and recover from any recent difficulties.

Horse

Birth Year: 1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990, 2002, 2014 September Horoscope for Horse: The Illness Star influences the Horse’s sector, which may lead to health issues and drained energy. Incorporating regular exercise and prioritizing self-care is essential this month to mitigate these effects. On the bright side, the Ho Tu combination in your sector suggests financial opportunities. Understanding the feng shui meaning of such energy combinations can help you make the best of any financial windfalls and maintain a positive outlook despite the health challenges.

Goat

Birth Year: 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003, 2015 September Horoscope for Goat: Goats can expect a shift in their fortune as favorable stars converge in their sector. With the influence of the Academic and Romance Star, creativity, intelligence, and romantic prospects are on the rise. In feng shui, meaning the understanding of how energy affects aspects of life, these stars signify a period of productivity and rewards. The presence of the Ho Tu formation bodes well for business success, making it an opportune time for entrepreneurs and professionals to explore new ventures.

Monkey

Birth Year: 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004, 2016 September Horoscope for Monkey: Monkeys will feel a surge of intelligence and creativity with the arrival of the Literary Star. It’s a great time to network and form new connections, especially for younger Monkeys who are seeking growth opportunities. In feng shui, meaning the connection between people and their environment, maintaining strong relationships can lead to exciting personal and professional opportunities. Stay engaged and open-minded, and this could be a period of fruitful growth.

Rooster

Birth Year: 1945, 1933, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2005, 2017 September Horoscope for Rooster: Roosters should proceed with caution this month as the Misfortune Star is amplified by the visiting Expansion Star. This can bring some risks, so it's crucial to move thoughtfully and avoid impulsive decisions. According to feng shui, meaning the harmonization of one’s environment, there are golden opportunities available, but a measured approach is best to make the most of them without falling into misfortune.

Dog

Birth Year: 1946, 1934, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994, 2006, 2018 September Horoscope for Dog: The Wealth Star brings a period of financial inflows, success, and happiness for the Dog. However, as its influence is weakened in Period 9, activating this star's energy is essential to fully benefit from its gifts. Feng shui’s meaning in this context is about balancing and enhancing your environment to attract positive energies. Set new goals and pursue them with vigor; the stars favor bold and active efforts.

Pig

Birth Year: 1947, 1935, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007, 2019 September Horoscope for Pig: Pigs continue to enjoy strong luck as the Wealth Star moves into their sector. This means positive results in all endeavors, but it's wise to remain humble in the face of success. With excellent wealth prospects, thriving relationships, and great vitality this month, maintaining an open mind and considering the opinions of others will help maximize the benefits of this period. In feng shui, meaning balanced energies, maintaining humility is key to ensuring continued good fortune.

[chiseler]

Ginger Rogers: Curse of the Working Class

A natural-born mimic, ham, tease, hard worker, stoic follower and out-of-reach babe, Ginger Rogers has proven one of the most difficult to define of all the 1930s Hollywood stars. At her best she was a synonym for fun and high spirits while also conveying a dignified and skeptical kind of resistance to other people, and these contradictory impulses made her one of the most special and ambiguous performers of her time. Rogers excelled in her first seven musicals with Fred Astaire and in several of her comedy vehicles and even in some of the programmers she churned out in the early 1930s. She was beloved, and rightly so.

In Stage Door (1937), Rogers gives one of the most distinctive, most suggestive, and most perfectly judged performances of the period, molding every one of her bone-dry, wisecracking line readings (and what lines she has in that movie!) into something pleasurable, something unexpected, even something profound, delivering them all with her guarded, in-transit sort of face.

I’ve seen Stage Door probably more times than I’ve seen any other movie, but I always notice something new in it, some new line, some new angle. As a kid, I didn’t really understand the source of Rogers’s misgivings here, which is the same source that animates her outrageously and inventively bitchy yet somehow tender and worldly fights with Linda (Gail Patrick), her high-falutin’ former roommate. Linda is the mistress of Anthony Powell (Adolphe Menjou), a powerful Broadway producer. When Powell sees Rogers’s Jean Maitland rehearsing a dance routine, his little weasel eyes light up with lust. He thinks she’s just playing hard to get when she makes her habitual mordant jokes at him, but she is really just trying to delay the inevitable. She wants no part of sleeping with a man for his money not because she thinks it’s morally wrong, per se, but because she’s basically too tired-out to go through those motions.

Jean is so disenchanted that the disenchantment seems to be leading her to some kind of drastic change. She talks herself into going out with Powell but gets out of sleeping with him by getting, or pretending to get, disruptively yet vaguely drunk. Jean gets drunk the way she does everything else, at some very unusual kind of steady and wary behavioral half-mast. She cracks wise as a matter of course, but she sleeps with a doll and she plays a ukulele. These cute details don’t seem to fit her character, but they do express the divided character of the woman who was playing her.

Jean stumbles home from Powell’s penthouse to her new roommate Terry (Katharine Hepburn), a rich girl with airily la-di-da attitudes about life and the theater. Hepburn had not endeared herself to Rogers with her much-repeated remark about Rogers’s partnership with Astaire: “He gives her class and she gives him sex.” The competitive rivalry between Hepburn’s upper-class pretension and Rogers’s low-burning common sense is the heart of their conflict in Stage Door, and this conflict and mutual dislike reads as pure chemistry on screen, just as it did for Rogers with Astaire.

There is such chemistry between Jean and Terry that Stage Door has always been a kind of closeted lesbian classic just waiting to burst into full-on Sapphic love. Terry has no love interest and shows zero interest in acquiring one, while Jean looks more than ready to give up on poor, unreliable young men and rich, sexually demanding older men like Powell. Jean and Terry, in fact, are perfect for each other and wind up with each other, and in the last scene Rogers reaches a kind of epiphany as she reacts to their friend Judy (Lucille Ball) leaving New York to get married. “At least she’ll have a couple of kids to keep her company in her old age, and what’ll we have?” she asks. “Some broken-down memories and an old scrapbook that nobody’ll look at.”

I first saw Stage Door when I was eight years old. Now that I’m well into adulthood, these last few lines that Rogers tosses off with such face-the-facts casualness have the force of revelation, as if she has finally washed up on the shores of some final philosophy. They predict the real lives of both Hepburn and Rogers (though some people still do want to leaf through those particular scrapbooks) and Terry and Jean, and everybody else for whom the easy way and the conventional way of living will never fit or will never be acceptable.

Rogers was capable of that tough-minded and frank and bleak attitude on screen, but in life and in general she was actually, and alarmingly, one of the most clueless of stars, never quite knowing what it was that people liked about her. Starting as early 1938, the year she made Vivacious Lady and Carefree, something peculiar started to happen to Rogers. After years of the most unlikely and enormous success in her Astaire films, where she was up to any dance challenge he gave her and where her timing in both musical and comic and dramatic scenes was magically sharp, her timing started to go horribly awry. Rogers began to be afflicted by self-consciousness, miscalculation, cutesiness, self-infatuated archness and flashes of deep-rooted mean-mindedness. She slipped back into her best controlled star mode in several films after that year, but she started to deteriorate more and more by the mid-1940s, almost as if someone had put a curse on her.

Rogers was born Virginia McMath in Independence, Missouri in 1911. Her formidable mother Lela Rogers was a writer for silent films and a journalist, and she was seemingly joined at the hip to her daughter. It was Rogers who wanted a career as an actress, and Lela resisted this at first, but when Ginger won a Charleston contest Mama Lela knew which way the wind was blowing. She poured all of her own considerable energy and ambition into making Ginger a star and keeping her one (that first name supposedly came about because a cousin couldn’t pronounce the name Virginia).

At the height of her stardom, when Rogers was sent the script of The Hard Way (1943), she wonderingly said, “This is the story of my life,” and turned it down. In that movie, Ida Lupino works like a demon to get her malleable kid sister (Joan Leslie) into show business, and the comparison is not flattering to Lela, who made a fool of herself testifying before HUAC as an expert on Communist infiltration of Hollywood, citing particularly the time when Rogers had to say Dalton Trumbo’s line, “Share and share alike, that’s democracy” in Tender Comrade (1943). Lela herself actually turns up playing Ginger’s mother in Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor (1942), and she’s a rather low-key presence, but she talks and moves like a woman who has power and feels no need to make any outward show of it.

In that Wilder movie, Rogers spends most of her time pretending to be a twelve-year old, and this uneasy reversion to little-girlhood was one of her most troubling fallback modes. She had made her first successes on stage with “baby talk monologues” written by Lela, and her early style, as seen in films like Young Man of Manhattan (1930) and Honor Among Lovers (1931), was very much a hold-over from the 1920s, a Betty Boop baby vamp persona that was more suited to cameo roles than to leads (Claudette Colbert, the star of Young Man of Manhattan, gently mocks these baby affectations after meeting Rogers’s character).

She churned out lots of low-budget programmers in 1932, and in 1933 she made ten films. In two of those, 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, Rogers nearly steals the show in fairly small parts. As Anytime Annie, a notoriously obliging chorus girl in 42nd Street, Rogers is first seen wearing a monocle and affecting a grand manner accent, and this was the first sign of her aptitude for two-faced disguise. As Manuel Puig once said of Ann-Margret, Rogers is anything but reassuring.

She’s close to surreal in her gold-coin outfit singing “We’re in the Money” with pig Latin verse in Gold Diggers of 1933, looking directly into the camera and not flinching as it travels all the way up to her face. Rogers gobbled up attention like that, and she had what it took, but she needed something or someone to stabilize her. When she strips down to her slip and stockings and gyrates in Professional Sweetheart (1933), an outraged Norman Foster spanks and then punches her, the first in an increasingly ominous series of punishments that would shadow her later career.

In the very horny Pre-Code musical Flying Down to Rio (1933), her first film with Astaire, Rogers is a hot mama, singing and swaying to “Music Makes Me” in a vagina power dress that even Marilyn Monroe might have rejected as too overt. When they dance “The Carioca,” Astaire starts out holding his head slightly away from Rogers, as if she might be diseased, but by the end their electric chemistry has fully kicked in.

Astaire had spent his youth dancing with his sister Adele and didn’t want to get stuck with another steady partner. Rogers had her eye on dramatic parts, announcing to an incredulous press that she wanted to play Joan of Arc. She was an ambitious and competitive person, and she knew that she was not even close to Astaire’s Olympian league as a dancer. But that’s part of the magic of their series of films, in which Rogers improves as a dancer bit by bit until she is fully capable of following his every step.

Astaire objected that no one would believe Rogers as an English girl in The Gay Divorcee (1934), and surely no one could mistake her for English, but this part gave her the reserve that she intriguingly used and toyed with for her best years as a star. Like most first sexual experiences between two people, their first real romantic dance together in that film, “Night and Day,” is both exciting and a little awkward. In their follow-up Roberta (1935), Rogers looks tense during their slow “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” routine, but she comes wonderfully alive when they casually tap to “Hard to Handle,” their first really great dance together.

She was always at her best in the lively comic numbers, where her wacky energy seems to warm Astaire, but she worked hard at the dramatic routines, so that when they do “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” in Follow the Fleet (1936), Rogers has somehow ascended up to Astaire’s level as a dancer. It must have taken nearly super-human will, but she did it, and audiences saw and felt her progress, and they loved it because it meant that anything was possible if you worked hard enough, even dancing like or with Fred Astaire.

Astaire didn’t like her feather dress for the “Cheek to Cheek” dance in Top Hat (1935), and you can see why he didn’t: it’s a little tacky. Costumer Walter Plunkett said Rogers always wanted to “add a crepe paper orchid or a string of beads or some goddamned feathered thing. She just never could resist little improvements.” But her feather dress in Top Hat does move beautifully when she dances, even if we do see some of the feathers floating away from them, as if she’s molting.

A more characteristic and winning image of her comes in the way she hikes up her skirt in the “Pick Yourself Up” number in Swing Time, which has a deeply charming kind of put-on nonchalance, or in the soldier-like way she executes a series of brutally exacting turns at the end of the “Never Gonna Dance” finale toward the end of that movie (while she shot this scene, her feet started to bleed in her shoes). One of the real pleasures of American moviegoing is watching Rogers as Astaire sings a love song to her: she would listen so intently, with barely any change of expression, but with such sensitive receptivity behind her eyes and in the set of her mouth.

People like to wonder if Astaire and Rogers hated each other. Maybe there were moments when they did, but mainly they just resented being tied together as a team, and those misgivings are part of what give their partnership and their best dances such impact, such crackle. Rogers reported in her autobiography that Astaire had taken her out on dates in New York when they were both working in theater, and at the end of one such date he gave her “a kiss that would never have passed the Hays Office Code!” But when they worked together in films, Astaire was married to a woman he adored, and he was a distant taskmaster in the killer rehearsal sessions for their dance routines. His friends, cultivated when he played on stage in London in the 1920s, were the English gentry. Rogers was not his cup of tea, and he made that known to her in subtle ways. She said either, and he said eye-ther, and they wanted to call the whole thing off, but no one else ever did.

In the many years after their partnership ended, they were still stuck with each other, and they both still resented that. Rogers would sometimes make friendly overtures to Astaire, and he would politely but firmly put her off, and this led to hurt feelings for her, so much so that she didn’t even go to his American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony. Film scholar Joseph McBride helped to put together that evening, and when I asked him about it, he remembered Astaire saying, “I suppose we’ll have to have Ginger,” in an irritated voice. When she didn’t come to the ceremony, it seemed like sour grapes on her part, but it had been made clear to Rogers that Astaire only wanted the bare minimum to do with her, and so she withdrew. It would do well to remember, of course, just how obnoxious Rogers could be. If you want to feel the full force of that, just look at any number of the films she made from 1944 to 1964 and you’ll see one garishly misplayed, mistimed performance after another, including the last one she did with Astaire, The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), where her dramatic aspirations were mocked and then the mockery was unintentionally confirmed when she did a goggle-eyed recreation of Sarah Bernhardt reciting the Marseillaise.

So what happened to Rogers? Why did she lose all of the qualities that had made her a star right after her stardom was confirmed? Many writers have tried to explain it. Analyzing Astaire and Rogers in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (1972), Arlene Croce says, “She’s an American classic, just as he is: common clay that we prize above exotic marble. The difference between them is that he knew it and she didn’t. Rogers always wanted to be something more. Probably no other major star has so severely tried the loyalty of her public by constantly changing her appearance and her style.” In his book Romantic Comedy (1987), James Harvey writes, “Can there be any other major star who was so variable, even from film to film, as she was?”

Harvey blames George Stevens, who directed maybe the finest Astaire/Rogers film, Swing Time (1936). He sees a softening of her character in the straight scenes in Swing Time, but the rot really sets in with Vivacious Lady, a romantic comedy that has all the elements for success but perversely ruins them with its taffy-pull pacing, its willful lack of coordination, its leaning on jags and cutesiness and bizarre sequences like the fight scene between Rogers and a rival that devolves into a series of unmoving tableaus broken only by a coy laugh from Rogers, as if Stevens wanted to turn her into Frank McHugh. In the same year, in Carefree with Astaire, Rogers exhibits such unpleasant sadism when her character is under hypnosis that it feels like a revelation of some inner nastiness that had always been prudently hidden from view.

The damage was reversed in Bachelor Mother (1939), a working girl comedy that has no right to be as charming as it is, where Rogers added a kind of moony dreaminess to her repertoire of personas. She then made two films for Stage Door director Gregory La Cava, 5th Avenue Girl (1939) and Primrose Path (1940). In her second La Cava film, Rogers is so deadpan that it reads as a lack of basic vitality, a first in her career; it’s as if La Cava is unearthing the suicidal or even homicidal side of Jean Maitland. “People annoy me,” she says in that movie, and boy does she mean it. In Stage Door, when Powell tells Jean he wants to put her name in big electric lights, she says, “Gotta be big enough to keep people away.” La Cava is the director who understood Rogers the most, discerning something anti-social and solitary behind her sunny audience-pleasing looks and manner. In Primrose Path, he cast her as a teenager who breaks away from her family before she joins their prostitution racket, and her work in that movie is stark, clean, unsentimental.

Rogers won an Oscar for Kitty Foyle (1940), and many have dated her decline from that point, even if she is modestly touching in what is a modest working girl soap opera. She was close to unbearable in Tom, Dick and Harry (1941), where director Garson Kanin seems to dote on every moment of her self-indulgent performance as a dumb and narcissistic telephone operator who must choose between three suitors. Something about playing dumb here makes Rogers’s style seem laborious and throws her timing all out of whack, yet the following year, in Roxie Hart (1942), she certainly gets her laughs with her broad playing of a very dumb murderess who lives for publicity and likes to do the Black Bottom for reporters. In her segment in Tales of Manhattan (1942), you want to say to her, “OK, you can have all that hair on the top of your head or you can have all that hair fanning over your back, but you can’t have both, Ginger.”

Leo McCarey’s Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942) did her no favors, but most writers agree that the real coup de grâce in her career was Lady in the Dark (1944), a Technicolor movie of the psychoanalytical stage musical that had starred Gertrude Lawrence. Rogers insisted on playing it, and she was at loggerheads with director Mitchell Leisen and Paramount studio chief Buddy DeSylva, who vengefully cut most of the Kurt Weill songs from the film. All in all, the mercifully little-seen Lady in the Dark looks now almost as if it had been made in a spirit of deliberate sabotage. It is has to be the most nastily misogynist of any major studio production of this time, constantly hammering home the idea that Rogers’s Liza Elliott is an unnatural woman unhealthily attached to her work, and her leading man Ray Milland warrants particular scorn here for the gleefulness he brings to the scenes where he humiliates Rogers’s character. In the one extended musical number Rogers has, “The Saga of Jenny,” she doesn’t seem to have been given any choreography or direction and she can barely move in the outfit Leisen designed for her. “After Lady in the Dark there was nothing left of the Rogers character,” wrote Croce. “She died on the analyst’s couch.”

Rogers’s career proceeded only through sheer determination on her part (and on Lela’s part). She floundered in an updated remake of Grand Hotel (1932) called Week-end at the Waldorf (1945), and the next twenty years of her career were a real trial for her fans from the 1930s. Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business (1952) was supposed to be about scientist Cary Grant reverting to childhood when he drinks an elixir of youth, but Rogers insisted that she “wanted to do the kid thing too,” and so she ripped into scene after scene of coarse-grained youthful impersonation, the wise child of her early ‘30s character bearing rotten and poisonously un-watchable fruit.  Cast as a hardened gangster’s moll in Phil Karlson’s Tight Spot (1955), Rogers is so heavy-handed and slow and cutesey with her dialogue that the effect is ghastly. If I were to make a simple diagnosis of her problems in the last half of her film career, I’d say that she caught a bad case of George Stevens-itis and never got over it (she had an affair with the married director during Vivacious Lady, which had Lela up in arms).

When she worked with a fine and sensitive director, as she did with Frank Borzage for Magnificent Doll (1946) and with Edmund Goulding for Teenage Rebel (1956), Rogers was still capable of restrained and acceptable if somewhat colorless work. But hateful things kept happening to her. In something like Storm Warning (1951), where she does battle with the Ku Klux Klan while also doing a transposed version of A Streetcar Named Desire, it seemed as if someone behind the scenes wanted to see Rogers punished. When Steve Cochran attacks her in Storm Warning, the scene is so prolonged that finally it is Rogers being humiliated and hurt, not the character she is playing.

Rogers went through five husbands, including the pacifistic and beautiful Lew Ayres, and most of them lasted for a couple of years, but Lela was her real partner for life. The last husband, William Marshall, got her to play a madam in a dire film shot in Jamaica, variously known as The Confession and Quick, Let’s Get Married (1964), and after that low point she made only Harlow (1965), where she was intriguingly cast as Jean Harlow’s mother, before retaining her star status in long-running stage stints in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway and Mame in London. After that came a little TV and nightclub work, where she ended most of her songs with a corny wink to the audience. A Christian Scientist like her beloved or at least inescapable mother, Rogers refused medical treatment after having a stroke, and she was ill for several years before dying in 1995.

The last forty-five or so years of Rogers’s long career basically ran on fumes of good will from her first twelve years in movies, and particularly those Fred Astaire musicals that she preferred to forget. Like many actors, Rogers had no real center or base that was really her, and this lack of center meant that she was able to in effect be something she wasn’t with Astaire, and transcendently so, but it also meant that bad habits and instincts were ready to rush in and overwhelm her when her guard was down.

“May I rescue you?” Astaire asks her in Top Hat, to which she snaps, “No, I prefer being in distress.” The Astaire/Rogers films are so romantic because part of her resistance is that she is suspicious of romance, and maybe she doesn’t believe in it at all. That lack of belief was what made her so sexy beyond her God-given but worked-on perfect figure (“Women weren’t born with silk stockings on, you know,” she says in Follow the Fleet). Look at how cool and unreachable she is when Fred is singing his heart out to her during “Never Gonna Dance” in Swing Time. She preached that God is Love and soda fountains were forever, but in her best work with Astaire and in Stage Door, she let darker and more movingly yearning things cloud her almost cartoonishly pretty brow, and those things are what should define her and what should be remembered.

by Dan Callahan

[jasonfry]

(D’oh, I wrote this sometime this winter but it never escaped my drafts folder. Better late than never!)

Time for another round of movie classics everyone’s seen but me!

The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

The blueprint for innumerable impostor-proves-better-than-the-genuine-article stories, and a pretty good swashbuckler. First off, the cast is terrific. Ronald Colman is properly dry and English in a dual role as 1) a vacationer drawn into a murderous royal intrigue in the fictional kingdom of Ruritania and 2) the ascendant king surrounded by enemies; Raymond Massey is brooding and menacing as the king’s scheming brother, Black Michael; and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. pulls off the tough assignment of making a witty, charming villain actually work on-screen. Such roles are easier to write than they are to act, but Fairbanks’ Rupert of Hentzau is simultaneously great company and an appalling moral void. The sparring between Colman and Fairbanks in a scene where they negotiate for the throne is perfectly played, a showcase for two pros pushing each other’s performances to be even better.

And the double role is handled pretty well technologically, particularly for 1937 -- you know that’s Colman talking with himself, but the seams don’t show, and after a minute or two of trying to take apart the trick you sit back and let the movie be. 

Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)

A John Ford western disguised as a Revolutionary War period piece, with Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert as frontier settlers menaced by Indians and Tories in upstate New York’s Mohawk Valley. Colbert works hard at a thankless job, spending most of the movie screaming or gazing adoringly at Fonda. He’s his usual soulful-eyed, decent self, which isn’t meant to be dismissive -- Fonda's leading-man roles are often light on shading or subtleties, but he always inhabits them completely. He believes, and so you believe -- which is far more important to a movie’s success than thespian pyrotechnics.

A couple of elements lift Drums above more typical fare. First off, Edna May Oliver walks away with the picture in her back pocket, turning in a bravura performance as Mrs. McKlennar, a widow who long ago declared herself Over It, whether It is problems with tenants or invaders determined to burn her out of her house.

And war is treated with surprising solemnity and caution, given that this is a movie about the American Revolution that was released with the world sliding into another World War. Sure, it ends with patriotic music and an American flag being raised, but Ford’s staging of the settlers returning from battle is stark and unsettling, culminating in a startling soliloquy from a shell-shocked Fonda about the horrors he saw. According to film lore, budget woes kept the actual battle from being shot, with Fonda and Ford improvising his soliloquy; if so it was a lucky accident, because that speech is more powerful than any action sequence could have been.

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

It’s funny what shorthand gets attached to movies in the popular imagination. I never saw this David Lean epic because I always heard it discussed as a romance, and “more than three hours of romance set in Russia” wasn’t a draw for me, to put it mildly. And Doctor Zhivago is a romance, of course -- but it’s also a sweeping epic about a nation being upended by revolution and how people do their best (and their worst) to survive it. Compare that with, say, From Here to Eternity, generally billed as a war movie when it’s mostly a soap opera, one emo enough to rival Wuthering Heights.

Anyway, Doctor Zhivago is certainly long, and it’s full of Lean’s huge skies and endless landscapes. Omar Sharif and Julie Christie do fine work despite fairly one-note roles -- he’s red-eyed and overcome, she’s luminously patient and tragic -- with the real star turns coming from the supporting cast. Alec Guinness is one of film’s greatest chameleons, and inhabits the role of a KGB lieutenant so thoroughly that you stop thinking of the great actor behind the role by the end of his first scene. But Rod Steiger is the heart of the movie -- he’s riveting as Victor Komarovsky, a complicated, cynical, and thoroughly monstrous character.

[astronautasinorbita]

Top 11 American Food Dishes That People Love

Fast, garbage, handled - with regards to American nourishment, the nation is most popular for the stuff that is portrayed by words more qualified to oily, granulating mechanical yield. In any case, residents of the USA have a great craving for good stuff, as well.

To commend its interminable culinary innovativeness, we're tossing our rundown of 50 most delightful American nourishment things at you. We realize you're going to need to toss back.

Standard procedures: recognize that in any event, attempting to characterize American nourishment is extreme; further recognize that picking most loved American things unavoidably implies forgetting about or unintentionally ignoring some much-cherished territorial claims to fame.

Presently get the elastic cover on in light of the fact that we're going first. Let the nourishment battle start:

1. Key lime pie

Key lime pie is a staple on south Florida menus.

Politeness Joe's Stone Crab Restaurant

In the event that life gives you limes, don't make limeade, make a Key lime pie. The official state pie of Florida, this cheeky tart has made herself an overall notoriety, which begun in - what other place? - the Florida Keys, from whence come the minor limes that gave the pie its name.

Auntie Sally, a cook for Florida's first independent mogul, transport salvager William Curry, gets the kudos for making the primary Key lime pie in the late 1800s. In any case, you may likewise say thanks to Florida wipe angler for likely beginning the mixture of key lime juice, improved consolidated milk, and egg yolks, which could be "cooked" (by a thickening concoction response of the fixings) adrift.

2. Potato tots

Potato tots are crunchy singed potatoes.

Potato tots are crunchy singed potatoes.

We love French fries, however for an American nourishment minor departure from the potato subject, one dearest at Sonic drive-ins and school cafeterias all over, consider the Tater Tot.

Notice it frequently has the enrolled trademark - these business hash dark colored chambers are for sure restrictive to the Ore-Ida organization. On the off chance that you'd been one of the Grigg siblings who established Ore-Ida, you'd have needed to think of something to do with extra bits of cut-up potatoes, as well. They included some flour and flavoring and formed the squash into modest tots and put them available in 1956. Somewhat more than 50 years after the fact, America is eating around 32 million kilos of these potatoes every year.

3. San Francisco sourdough bread

Sourdough bread is San Francisco's most adored prepared treat.

Sourdough bread is San Francisco's most adored prepared treat.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America/Getty Images

Sourdough is as old as the pyramids and not circumstantially was eaten in antiquated Egypt. However, the hands-down American top pick, and the sourest assortment, originates from San Francisco.

As much a piece of NoCal culinary culture as Napa Valley wine, sourdough bread has been a staple since Gold Rush days. Once upon a wilderness time, excavators (called "sourdoughs" for making due on the stuff) and pilgrims conveyed sourdough starter (more dependable than other raising) in pockets around their necks or on their belts.

Thank heavens that is not the manner in which they do it at Boudin Bakery, which has been turning out the bread that nibbles back in the City by the Bay since 1849.

4. Cobb serving of mixed greens

Initially made with extras, Cobb serving of mixed greens now one of America's preferred tidbits.

Initially made with extras, Cobb serving of mixed greens now one of America's preferred tidbits.

The gourmet specialist's plate of mixed greens began back East, yet American nourishment trailblazers working with lettuce out West wouldn't have been beaten.

In 1937, Bob Cobb, the proprietor of The Brown Derby, was searching at the eatery's North Vine area for a feast for Sid Grauman of Grauman's Theater when he set up a plate of mixed greens with what he found in the ice chest: a head of lettuce, an avocado, some romaine, watercress, tomatoes, some chilly chicken bosom, a hard-bubbled egg, chives, cheddar, and some good old French dressing.

Dark colored Derby legend says, "He began cleaving. Included some fresh bacon, swiped from a bustling gourmet specialist." The serving of mixed greens went onto the menu and straight into the core of Hollywood.

5.Pot broil

Braised meat and vegetables - the ideal warming hot pot.

The youth Sunday family supper of gen X-ers all over the place, pot cook asserts a wistful most loved spot in the best 10 of American solace nourishments. There's an entire age that would be lost without it.

Hamburger brisket, base or top round, or hurl set in a profound broiling skillet with potatoes, carrots, onions, and whatever else your mother tossed in to be imbued with the meat's stewing juices, the pot meal could be blessed with red wine or even lager, at that point secured and cooked on the stovetop or in the broiler.

6. Twinkies

Twinkies are known for their toughness and timeframe of realistic usability - gossip says they could endure an atomic assault.

Twinkies are known for their sturdiness and timeframe of realistic usability - talk says they could endure an atomic assault.

Entertainer's notable "Brilliant Sponge Cake with Creamy Filling" has been sugaring us up since James Dewar developed it at the Continental Baking Company in Schiller Park, Illinois, in 1930.

The Twinkie spurned its unique banana cream filling for vanilla when bananas were rare during World War II. As though they weren't incredibly adequate as of now, the Texas State Fair began the trend of profound singing them.

Dumped in hot oil or essentially torn from their bundling, Twinkies charm with their name (propelled by a board promoting Twinkle Toe Shoes), their ladyfinger shape (punctured multiple times to infuse the filling), and their summonings of noon break. They were incidentally removed the racks between November 2012 to July 2013 - when Hostess declared financial insolvency. Presently they are back and going solid.

Related substance

Behind the intrigue of America's craziest reasonable nourishments

7. Jerky

It probably won't look mouth-watering, however the taste represents itself with no issue.

It probably won't look mouth-watering, however the taste represents itself with no issue.

Dried out meat withered nearly to the point of being unrecognizable - an improbable wellspring of so much gustatory delight, yet jerky is a high-protein most loved of explorers, street trippers, and snackers all over the place.

It's American nourishment the manner in which we like our wild grub - extreme and fiery.

We like the creation legend that says it's the immediate relative of American Indian pemmican, which blended fire-relieved meat with creature fat. Hamburger, turkey, chicken, venison, bison, even ostrich, gator, yak, and emu. Peppered, grilled, hickory-smoked, nectar coated. Seasoned with teriyaki, jalapeno, lemon pepper, bean stew.

Jerky is so flexible and compact and packs such nourishing force that the Army is trying different things with jerky sticks that have what could be compared to some espresso.

Anyway you take your jerky - caf or decaf; in strips, chips, or shreds - get ready to bite long and hard. You've despite everything got your own teeth, isn't that so?

8. Fajitas

Fajitas: the embodiment of Tex-Mex food.

Take a few vaqueros chipping away at the range and the dairy cattle butchered to take care of them. Toss in the disposable cuts of meat as a feature of the hands' salary, and let cowpoke resourcefulness go to work.

Flame broil skirt steak (faja in Spanish) over the open air fire, enclose by a tortilla, and you have the start of a Rio Grande area custom. The fajita is thought to have fallen off the range and into mainstream society when a specific Sonny Falcon started working fajita taco remains at open air occasions and rodeos in Texas starting in 1969.

It wasn't some time before the dish was advancing onto menus in the Lone Star State and spreading with its dearest exhibit of toppings - flame broiled onions and green pepper, pico de gallo, destroyed cheddar, and harsh cream - the nation over. Remember the Altoids.

9. Banana split

The banana makes it bravo, correct?

The banana makes it bravo, isn't that so?

Like the banana makes it bravo. In any case, praise to whoever concocted the variety of the sundae known as the banana split. There's the 1904 Latrobe, Pennsylvania, story, in which future optometrist David Strickler was trying different things with sundaes at a drug store soft drink wellspring, split a banana the long way, and put it in a long pontoon dish.

What's more, the 1907 Wilmington, Ohio, story, wherein café proprietor Ernest Hazard thought of it to draw understudies from a close by school. Distinction spread after a Walgreens in Chicago made the split its mark dessert during the 1920s. Whatever the history, you'll discover bounty something worth mulling over at the yearly Banana Split Festival, which happens on the second end of the week in June in Wilmington.

10. Cornbread

Cornbread is well known the nation over, yet it's a Southern great.

It's one of the mainstays of Southern cooking, yet cornbread is the spirit nourishment of numerous a culture - dark, white, and Native American - and not only south of the Mason-Dixon. Granulate corn coarsely and you have corn meal; absorb bits soluble base, and you have hominy (which we urge you to concoct into posole). Raise finely ground cornmeal with preparing powder, and you have cornbread.

Southern hushpuppies and corn pone, New England johnnycakes; cooked in a skillet or in biscuit tins; enhanced with cheddar, herbs, or jalapenos - cornbread in any manifestation remains the speedy and simple go-to bread that generally made it a most loved of Native American and pioneer moms and keeps it on tables the nation over today.

11. Popcorn

.Popcorn can either be fortunate or unfortunate for an individual's wellbeing, contingent upon what goes into making it. All alone, with no additional sugar or salt, popcorn makes a nutritious, empowering nibble.

Popcorn is a kind of corn part that, when individuals heat it, it flies to turn out to be light and cushy. Popcorn contains a lot of supplements and nutrients when individuals make it in the correct manner.

Be that as it may, numerous popcorn marks in general stores and cinemas contain heaps of included spread, sugar, and salt. These increments can be awful for an individual's wellbeing.

Right now, take a gander at how popcorn can be a restorative bite, its dietary benefits and advantages, which types are empowering, and which types are most certainly not.

We likewise see how individuals can make their own invigorating, air-popped popcorn at home.

[claudia1829things]

"THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD" (1938) Review

”THE ADVENTUERS OF ROBIN HOOD” (1938) Review Eighty-one years ago, the 1938 film, ”THE ADVENTUERS OF ROBIN HOOD”, was released in theaters for the first time. For many fans and film critics, the swashbuckler is considered the definitive Errol Flynn movie. They also view his character, Sir Robin of Locksley, as the pinnacle of the Australian actor’s career.

There have been previous versions of the Robin Hood tale before and after. The other most famous versions are the 1922 silent film that starred Douglas Fairbanks and the 1950s TV series that starred Richard Greene. Like the other versions, the movie told the story of the young Saxon nobleman (Flynn) who created a band of outlaws to protest against the reign of Prince John (Claude Rains) in England during the early 1190s. With King Richard the Lionhearted (Ian Hunter) a hostage of Austria’s king, John usurps the royal power to oppress the English poor – especially the Saxons – with the help of Sir Guy Gisbourne (Basil Rathbone) and the Sheriff of Nottingham (Melville Cooper). Robin and his right hand man, Will Scarlett (Patric Knowles), recruits the likes of Little John (Alan Hale, Sr.), Friar Tuck (Eugene Pallette), Much the Miller's Son (Herbert Mundin) and a band of outlaws. Soon, Prince John and his Norman cronies find their cruelties opposed and themselves harassed beyond all bearing. Robin also finds the time to fall in love with the Norman noblewoman and royal ward, Maid Marian Fitzwalter (Olivia de Havilland). To be frank, ”THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD” is a glorious triumph not only for the Warner Bros. studio, but for Flynn as well. It has everything that the moviegoer could possibly want in a swashbuckler – great action, rich color, a superb score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and a leading man who more than embodied what the main character stood for. Warner Bros. executives Jack Warner and Hal Wallis had originally cast James Cagney in the lead. But the actor became embroiled in one of his many feuds with the studio and two years later, Flynn won the role. I cannot say how Cagney would have portrayed Robin of Locksley. But Warner and Wallis certainly struck it rich with Flynn in the lead. Not only did he look the part, he handled the physical aspects of the role, perfectly. And he managed to inject Robin with a great mixture of roguish humor and sincere compassion. The rest of the cast were also superb. Olivia de Havilland was never more lovelier. Even better, her Maid Marian became more than just the love interest and damsel-in-distress. Once Robin had swayed her to his cause, she turned out to be a valuable recruit. Not only did she managed to come up with a plan to save Robin from execution, she was the one who discovered a plot by Prince John, Sir Guy and the Sheriff to assassinate the returning King Richard. Claude Rains, with his soft voice, made a deliciously sly Prince John. Basil Rathbone was tough enough to serve as a physical adversary for Robin. Their duel in the final scene at Nottingham Castle is considered a classic, thanks to the fencing choreography staged by Fred Cavens. And Melville Cooper was his usual funny self as the buffoonish Sheriff of Nottingham. Although I find it odd that he was the only one who was able to come up with a successful plan to capture Sir Robin. And where would ”THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD” be without its supporting cast that portrayed Robin’s Merry Men? The handsome Patric Knowles made a sly and witty Will Scarlett. Alan Dale Sr. returned as Little John, a role he had first made famous in the 1922 film. Eugene Pallette made great use of his frog voice and gruff demeanor as Friar Tuck. And Herbert Mundin, as Much the Miller’s Son, seemed to be the best of the bunch. Not only did he proved to be as brave as Robin, he also won the hand of Marian’s nurse, Bess, portrayed by the always memorable Una O’Connor. Surprisingly, ”THE ADVENTUES OF ROBIN HOOD” had two directors. Hal Wallis first assigned the film to William Keighley, who had directed Flynn in ”THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER” (1937). But Hal Wallis felt slightly dissatisfied with Keighley’s slow handling of the action sequences and replaced him with Warner Bros’ reliable warhorse, Michael Curtiz. Flynn, who detested the Hungarian-born director, must have screamed in frustration. But Curtiz’s direction gave the film a tighter pace and better action sequences for which the movie is famous. ”THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD” was one of the first films of the studio to use the old three-strip Technicolor process. And it paid off, giving the movie a rich color and vibrancy. And what would this version of Robin Hood be without Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Academy Award winning score. I am still surprised that Korngold had originally turned down the assignment because he felt that his score could not live up to the movie’s action. Thankfully, he proved himself wrong. ”THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD” seemed to have everything going for it – great cast, great photography, great action and great music. And it all seemed to blend seamlessly. Yet . . . it is not my favorite Errol Flynn movie. I had come across a review of the film in which a critic stated that one of the reasons this was his favorite Flynn movie was its light-hearted tone and simplistic characterizations that allowed the audience to escape from the more complex, modern world. And I could see those traits in the movie. But as much as I had enjoyed it, there were times when the movie came off as a little too light or simple for me. Sir Robin of Locksley may be considered Flynn’s best role, but I must admit that I found his portrayal of Geoffrey Vickers in ”THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE” (1936) and Geoffrey Thorpe in ”THE SEA HAWK” (1940) more complex and interesting. In fact, I consider the two movies to be my favorites that Flynn ever made. However, I do love ”THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD” and consider it one of the most entertaining films I have ever seen.

[wazjunz]

Owlboys

Raelene touched Gordon gently on the shoulder.

“Gordon, you’re hyperventilating,” she said quietly.

Gordon’s hands wrung at the steering wheel like he was squeezing water out of a soaked towel. Raelene could see beads of sweat forming at his temples.

“Is this the place?” she asked. Her voice was calm, steady; like a psychologist’s should be. Gordon nodded, staring past her down into the field. Raelene followed her patient’s gaze.

“Can you see the owlboys now?” she asked. Gordon’s eyes flicked to hers, irritated.

“Do you think I’m experiencing psychosis Raelene?” he snapped. “Have I had a schism? Am I detached from reality?”

Raelene was shocked, though years of practice allowed her not to show it. She’d been a mental health practitioner in a metropolitan hospital for twenty years. She’d certainly handled more extreme behaviours than a snippy comeback, but for gentle, intelligent, thoughtful Gordon, this was a sign of extreme stress.

Gordon took a deep breath and dragged his fingers though his grey-brown hair. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s fine,” she replied. “You’re really scared aren’t you?”

Gordon laughed nervously.

“I’m so scared,” he replied.

Raelene believed him. She’d made a career out of believing people. She joked that it was her one real marketable skill. She’d figured out pretty quickly that being a good psychologist wasn’t rocket science. People just want to know they’re not crazy. They want someone to say, “I believe you." Raelene had spent two decades of her life doing everything she could to deliver those three words to patients before someone else (usually a Doctor or a Nurse or even another psychologist) messed up royally by saying anything else. A lot of the people who came through emergency as mental health admissions had been sexually assaulted. Raelene saw first hand that for people who had just been through a major trauma a misplaced ‘are you sure?’ in the place of ‘I believe you’ could break someone’s spirit almost as badly as the assault itself.  

She never even thought about going into private practice until after her divorce. Her ex-husband was an arse, but he shared her work ethic, so they owned their own home and had savings. Starting again was relatively easy. Raelene told her colleagues that she had every intention of staying on at the hospital, but at the same time she bought a small house in a misty little rural valley an hour out of the city. She resigned a few weeks later. Her little house had an artists studio out the back that would be a perfect home office. Raelene was only in her 50s, and had spent most of her divorce money on her new home, so she still had to work. Her adult son reluctantly build her a website, rolling his eyes the entire time. He’d inherited his father’s belief that everything Raelene did was annoying and slightly stupid.

Her first private clients were painfully boring. After twenty years of dealing with crisis day-in-day-out, three ladies her own age with long term, but highly functional depression didn’t do much for her in terms of mental stimulation. Business didn’t really pick up until she got a call from a farmer on a neighbouring property. He was a tough looking 40-year-old family man who probably hadn’t been to a GP for twenty years. He seemed out of place in her little studio, surrounded by indoor plants and comfy cushions, wound up tighter that a rubber band.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t really believe in counselling or whatever, but you aren’t allowed to tell anyone what I say to you right?”

Raelene assured the farmer that the only reason she would break confidentiality was if someone’s safety was at risk. That seemed to satisfy him.

“I saw a big hairy man in the bush on my property,” he blurted.

“He must have been eight feet tall and built like a brick shithouse. He just stood in the tree line about forty metres away from me, watching while I filled a horse trough with a hose.”

His voice was shaking. Raelene looked him in the eye.

“I believe you,” she said.

He came back twice more. She asked him how he felt about what he’d seen, how he coped when he woke up dreaming about it, and then about his life more generally. At the end of his third session he told her he felt a bit better just telling someone, and that he didn’t think he’d need to come back again.

Word must have spread somehow from there. Raelene started getting calls from otherwise normal people who claimed to have seen or experienced something they knew no one would believe. She saw a high school science teacher who was convinced aliens had put a microchip in her arm. She met with a family who claimed an angry poltergeist was noisily opening and closing their kitchen cupboards at 3am every night. Two distraught parents came to her with their little girl who claimed her imaginary friend bit her on the arm. The parents said she’d screamed so loud and long that they rushed her to the hospital. Raelene seemed to have accidentally cornered the market on healthy, average people who needed to tell someone about an unexplainable, socially unacceptable trauma. She told them all the same thing.

“I believe you.”

Just like at the hospital, that alone seemed to help the most. Some people she saw regularly, their visits morphing from ghosts and monsters into the usual concerns about their life and relationships. Others dropped their strange experience on her lap and never returned.

Gordon came to her about a year after the farmer. She liked him immediately. He was exactly ten years older than her, slender, with thick wavy hair and smart, smiley, dark brown eyes. He used to be an academic, and now worked for a publishing company, proofreading textbooks. He spoke quietly but clearly, laughed easily and often, and always insisted on showing Raelene videos of his grandchildren on his smartphone. He also believed that mysterious, sinister beings called ‘owlboys’ were stalking three generations of his family. 

Gordon was visibly nervous the first time he came in. He had a little leather satchel with him, and he held it on his lap like a shield, but it didn’t take much to get him talking.

“I’m a somewhat disturbed,” he told her. “Not mentally. I mean...not clinically. But I’m worried about something, and I don’t want to tell anyone because I know it sounds mad.”

Raelene nodded, for him to continue.

“I guess I didn’t think much of it until I found my grandfather’s diary,” Gordon continued.

“I’ve always been a little bit jumpy, and I tend to have bad dreams a lot, especially when I’m stressed. One dream has been recurring since I was a child. I see these odd, um, creatures or beings. They just show up in whatever regular dream I’m having, standing at a distance, or leaning out from behind a tree or a door frame. They never attack me or anything but there’s a feeling about them that gets to me. A sense of…doom I guess.”

“What sort of beings?” Raelene asked. Gordon rubbed his chin.

“To me they always looked like fuzzy rectangles with big black eyes,” he said. “But there’s something really wrong about them that I can’t describe. Something about the way they move. I’ll see them in a dream, and then for the next few days I have that experience where you think you see something out of the corner of you eye, but you look again and it’s not there. I just put it down to an overactive imagination…until I found the diary.”

Raymond reached into his satchel and pulled out an antique leather book.

“This was my grandfather’s,” he said.

“It’s mostly really dull farming stuff, but there are three entries that made me think I’m either going crazy, or there’s something weird going on.”

Gordon explained that his grandfather was one of the first landowners in this valley, and ran a large cattle farm in the early 1900s. Gordon’s own father, Roland, had grown up on the farm, and Gordon had spent the first few years of his life there too, before his family moved to another part of the valley. There were three yellow post-it notes poking neatly out of the diary. Gordon turned the pages to the first note and looked at Raelene. She gave a little nod, and he began to read.

“This one’s dated August 1, 1929,” he said.

“Saw something in the far paddock today. The largest owls I had ever seen, gathered in the centre of the far paddock, in the gully. I estimated them at four feet tall, with black eyes the size of saucers. There was something very peculiar about the way they moved.”

He flicked to the second post-it.

“August 1, 1937. Roland saw the strange owls in the far paddock today. Said he was too frightened to get a closer look. Could not tell if they were people or animals. Called them ‘owlboys’ because they looked like little boys but with owl faces.”

He jumped to the final post-it, speaking more quickly now.

“This one is the first of August, 1940 and it’s mostly about a fence falling down and chasing stray cows around the property,” he explained. “But then he writes, ‘Owlboys in the far paddock. Came back in early.’ The diary goes on for another decade, but he never mentions them again.”

Gordon snapped the diary shut and looked at Raelene expectantly.

“I think the fuzzy white rectangles I’ve been seeing my whole life might be owlboys,” he said. Raelene didn’t reply.

“Did you notice the thing that the entries had in common?”

Raelene wasn’t really a detail person. She had no idea what Gordon meant.

“August first,” he explained. “Every time they saw the owlboys it was August first. I think the owlboys, whatever they are, visit that spot every year on the same day. I only got the diary in November last year, after dad died, so couldn’t do it last year, but this year on August first I’m going to that spot to see if they’re there. I want you to come with me as a witness.”

Raelene had agreed to go with Gordon on the condition that he come and see her once a fortnight for the six months to August. He’d agreed, and had quickly become her favourite patient. They talked about his grandfather and his father, his career, his wife, his own children and grandkids. Of course, they also talked about the owlboys. Gordon was convinced they were real. Maybe not flesh and blood creatures, but real, intelligent beings nonetheless. He burned through a number of theories as the weeks went by. At first he thought they might be native spirits of the valley, angry at his forefathers for clearing a sacred spot to graze cattle. Then he decided the whole ‘owl’ thing might be an alien cover-up, citing the big black eyes, and a number of obscure books he’d dredged up that talked about alien abductees having weird memories of giant owls, supposedly revealed (under hypnosis) as ‘screen’ memories’ intended to cover up an abduction. As the date drew nearer he began to err towards the owlboys having something to do with his family specifically, but he wasn’t sure what.

He’d seemed oddly calm when he rolled up to her house in his neat Volvo station wagon on the first of August, but as he drove her up into the hills on the North side of the valley towards the area where his grandfather’s farm used to be he’d become increasingly agitated. By the time he pulled the car to a stop on the little ridge with a view down into the gully on their left he was breathing fast and strangling the poor steering wheel to death. Raelene put her hand on the door handle. Being in the car with Gordon’s huffing and puffing was starting to stress her out too, and she needed some air. Gordon’s hand shot out and grabbed her firmly on the shoulder.

“Don’t get out,” he whispered. “I’m getting that feeling. The doom-y feeling.”

Raelene turned to look at him. She was about to tell him he might be making himself lightheaded, and to try and slow his breathing, when something white in the trees behind him caught her attention. She leaned to look past him for a better view of whatever was there. Time slowed down. She could hear her heart pumping in her ears, but all other sound seemed to have stopped. Her brain was trying to desperately to explain the input from her eyes. She almost thought it was a child because of the size, but the body shape was wrong. It could have been a person in a costume, but no, the eyes were too real. They were huge, and black and so deep. Whatever it was kept swaying side to side, partially behind a tree about 30 metres into the bush. There was something completely unsettling about how it moved.

“Gordon, what is this,” she whispered.

Gordon had swung around to follow her gaze into the bush.

“Where, I can’t see,” he asked shakily.

“There! Right there!” she shrieked. “Can’t you see it?” Gordon scanned the bush frantically.

“I can’t see a thing,” he said. “What is it?” Raelene ignored his question and grabbed his arm hard.

“Get us out of here, now!” 

Gordon threw the car into drive and made a quick u-turn. For a terrifying moment, this swung Raelene closer to the being in the trees. She shrank down in her seat. The thing had stopped moving but it’s eyes followed her as the car picked up speed down the hill. Now it was her turn to hyperventilate. Gordon barely slowed down through the curves towards the main road.

“Did you really not see it?” Raelene was frantic now. “Gordon tell me you saw it too.”

Gordon glanced across at her and shook his head.

“I couldn’t see anything,” he said.

Raelene put her face her hands and let out a little moan. She felt Gordon’s left hand rest gently on her shoulder.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s OK… I believe you.”

[ink-logging]

Detective Comics #1000, Chris Conroy & Dave Wielgosz, eds.: I bought this on impulse because it was on the new releases shelf and people were talking about Batman online. It’s a 100-page anthology tribute for the Batman character’s 80th year and the one thousandth issue of “Detective Comics”. I don’t think anyone is ever at their best in a tribute anthology, but that makes them kind of interesting to look at, you know? There are eleven stories, which I will now spoil in their entirety.

1. “Batman’s Longest Case”, Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion, FCO Plascencia, Tom Napolitano: The first of two stories in which Batman is doing something that looks grim, but is actually happy and anniversary-ish - both with similar titles, and both from major Batman writers. This is the better one, because I think Capullo is an interesting artist. He’s comparable to Jae Lee, in that he’s someone who had some work in comics under his belt prior to being ushered into the second ‘generation’ of popular Image artists, and has continued to evolve quite vividly over the years. The Capullo of today dials up the use of shadows and silhouette that used to sort of decorate the folds of Spawn’s flowing cape and such - here, they’re used more to focus attention on storytelling fundamentals: geography; gesture; etc. I also generally like the colorist, FCO Plascencia, who’s done some Varleyesque color-as-mood work on earlier comics with this team, though the story here is subdued... very classy, dressed for the gala.   

Hints of ‘90s grotesquerie only pop up once Batman has solved a large number of flamboyantly abstruse riddles and discovered that the titular Longest Case is really an initiation test fronted by wrinkly old Slam Bradley, the original Siegel & Shuster-created star of “Detective Comics” back in 1937, who welcomes Batman to a Guild of Detection. This is clever of the writer, Scott Snyder, because Batman as a basic concept is hugely derivative of earlier pulp, detective and strip hero characters - and, if you’re being honest about paying homage to the character’s origins, you might as well play up lineage as your metaphor.

2. “Manufacture for Use”, Kevin Smith, Jim Lee, Scott Williams, Alex Sinclair, Todd Klein: In contrast, this story shoots for the quintessential. Smith, of course, is the filmmaker and longtime geek culture celebrity who’s written comics off and on, so maybe it’s his distance from the continuum of superhero writing that has inspired a short story that could have run as a backup in any Batman comic since the 1970s, give or take few cultural references. Matches Malone (Batman, when he is being an undercover cop) descends into the secretive world of true crime memorabilia to buy the gun that killed Bruce Wayne’s parents, which he then melts down to form the metal bat-symbol plate Batman wears on his chest, verily steeling his heart with the memory of this tragedy to fortify him in his neverending battle against crime! NANANANANANANANA BATMAAAAAN! Jim Lee and his usual crew makes everything look like it’s ‘supposed’ to, provided you see this type of statuesque posing as the best sort of superhero art, which many DC comics readers presumably do, given how a lot of these things look.

3. “The Legend of Knute Brody”, Paul Dini, Dustin Nguyen, Derek Fridolfs, John Kalisz, Steve Wands: Dini has written tons of comics, with not a few of those drawn by Nguyen, but this feels mostly like DC1k (acronym’s resemblance to “DICK” a purely innocuous reference to Nightwing, I assure you) acknowledging the extensive legacy of “Batman: The Animated Series”, on which Dini was a writer and producer. The story takes the form of a biography of an infamously clumsy hired thug for supervillains, whom even the most novice reader will have figured out is a Batman Family asset about halfway down page 4 of 8, leaving a whole lot of laborious and narration-heavy slapstick to wade through. Admittedly, this might work better as an animated cartoon, with voice acting leavening the pace of the gags, but I’m also not sure ‘this would be better in a different art form’ is the impression superhero comics should be giving right now.

4. “The Batman’s Design”, Warren Ellis, Becky Cloonan, Jordie Bellaire, Simon Bowland: 

Most of the drawing in DC1k is the kind of stuff you can easily trace to a few popular and fairly narrow traditions of ‘realistic’ superhero art. Becky Cloonan is the only woman to draw an entire comic in here -- Joëlle Jones co-pencils a story with Tony Daniel later on, and Amanda Conner does a pinup, mind -- and her work is the only place in this book where you catch glimpses of a global popular comics beyond the superhero provinces in the Hewlettian wild eyes of the hapless human opponents of her Batman, lunging through velvet layers of cape and smoke, lipless mouth parted on a shōnen ai jaw. It is really very impressive. 

The writer, Warren Ellis, does a pathos-of-the-hard-man story, in which Batman explains his combat strategies via narration while carrying them out, occasionally making reference to the medical bills his prey will incur and their timely motivations as terroristic white men who feel ignored by the world, and at the end Batman asks the last guy U WANT TO LIVE IN MY NIGHTMARE, LITTLE BOY and the guy is like n- no dr. batman sir, and gives up because Batman’s is too dangerous and scary a life model. It is made clear from the text that Batman has programmed himself into a system of reactionary violence that he inevitably reinforces, but this message is so heavily sugared with cool action and tough talk that the reader can easily disregard such commentary, if so inclined, which has been a trait of Ellis’ genre comics writing since at least as far back as “The Authority” in the late 1990s. It fits Batman as naturally as the goddamned cowl.  

 5. “Return to Crime Alley”, Dennis O’Neil, Steve Epting, Elizabeth Breitweiser, ‘Andworld Design’: I was surprised that there weren’t other writers from across the Atlantic in DC1k, given the extensive contributions of Alan Grant and Grant Morrison to the character. I was maybe not as surprised to see Dennis O’Neil as the lone credited writer to pre-date the blood and thunder revolution of Frank Miller et al. in the mid-1980s, as that commercial shadow is far too long to escape. Of course, O’Neil was one of the architects of superhero comics as a socially relevant proposition and Batman as a once-again ‘serious’ character in the 1970s, and it may be a reflection of his standing as a patriarch that this story contains no sugar whatsoever: on the anniversary of his parents’ death, Batman is confronted by a childhood caregiver who has figured out his dumb secret identity, and castigates him for doing stupid shit like dressing up as an animal and punching the underclass when he could actually do something as a wealthy man to improve the world. Then Batman starts beating the shit out of young masked teens who have stolen a gun, after which Batman, who is also a masked thug, is told that he is, at best, a figure of pity. The end! 

What emerges from this story, to my eye, is that Batman is a terrible fucking idea if examined with any sort of serious realism - and Steve Epting draws the story as close to photorealism as anything in this book gets. I also think it is not insignificant that O’Neil, the writer here most unplugged from superhero comics as a commercial vocation, is the one to make these observations; to believe in superhero comics is to understand that there is play at the heart of these paper dolls, and to make your living from these things is to contemplate new avenues for play. Maybe Batman is dark, obsessive! Should he... kill? Sure, Bill Finger made him kill. The Shadow killed lots of dudes. So did Dick Tracy. Ramp up the verisimilitude too much, though, and you’ve got a guy wearing a hood going out by the cover of night to scare the shit out of superstitious cowards who’ve been taking from the good people of society, which, in terms of motivational narratives, is the same origin as the Ku Klux Klan. To play nonetheless, is the craftsman’s burden.

6. “Heretic”, Christopher Priest, Neal Adams, Dave Stewart, Willie Schubert: Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, is veteran Batman artist and frequent Dennis O’Neil collaborator Neal Adams. And while Adams is not credited as the writer on this story, it bears all the hallmarks of his 21st century work at DC: whiplash pacing; uneasy expository dialogue; and eager callbacks to Adams’ earlier work. This is the Batman comic as a continuity-driven adventure, and I found it largely incomprehensible as a story, not unlike Adams’ recent “Deadman” miniseries. I still like his husky Batman, though. 

7. “I Know”, Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev, Josh Reed: Hey, did you know Brian Michael Bendis, writer of approximately ten and one half zillion Marvel comics, is writing comics at DC these days? Here he teams with longtime collaborator Maleev for a story that brings to mind the old line from Grant Morrison’s & Dave McKean’s “Arkham Asylum” about Batman being the real person and the guy under the mask being the mask. The Penguin, of all villains, figures out Batman’s secret identity, but elects not to pursue Bruce Wayne in his private life, because destroying Bruce Wayne would create a pure Batman far too dark and twiztid for anyone to handle. Or, maybe that is all just an image the perfectly sane Batman has deliberately encouraged as part of his umpteenth contingency plan. I would argue that this is a gentle spoof of people taking Batman too seriously, which clicks with what I’ve read of Bendis’ idea of the character in those 100-page comics they sell at Walmart: a globetrotting detective-adventurer, appropriate for all ages. Bear in mind, I’ve read maybe 0.2% of all Brian Bendis comics.  

8. “The Last Crime in Gotham”, Geoff Johns, Kelley Jones, Michelle Madsen, Rob Leigh: Whoa, now we’re talking! Kelley Jones! Just look at this: 

Such totally weird stuff, coming from the artist who drew all those classic ‘90s covers with the huge bat-ears and wildly distorted musculature, the cape this absurd, unreal shroud. It looks like he’s working from photo reference with some of this comic, but also just tearing out these drawings of huge jawlines and shit, this total what-the-fuck-is-going-on haze, which perfectly matches Geoff Johns’ furiously ridiculous story about an elderly Batman and his wife, Catwoman, and their daughter, and Damian, and a dog, who all investigate a mass murder that turns out to be the Joker’s son committing suicide, and then Batman unplugs the Bat-Signal because crime is over in Gotham forever, and then we find out it’s all the birthday wish of Batman, who is blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, in costume, in the Batcave. Is “Doomsday Clock” like this? Should I pirate it??

9. “The Precedent”, James Tynion IV, Alvaro Martinez-Bueno, Raul Fernandez, Brad Anderson, Sal Cipriano: Inevitably, we come to the story that argues that Batman is actually a great guy, and his pressing of children into action as vigilantes under the cover of night is an amazingly positive thing. This is what I mean by “play” - it doesn’t literally make sense, we all know that, but if you buy into the superhero idea, you can buy into this universe of metaphor where the Batman Family is a vivification of finding your company of people, and belonging, and being loved. Lots of talk in here about snatching young people out of the darkness and forging them in light, and helping them find a better path - it sounds like Batman is signing these kids up for the Marine Corps, which is one of several organizations that recognizes the power of these arch-romantic impulses.

10. “Batman’s Greatest Case.”, Tom King, Tony S. Daniel, Joëlle Jones, Tomeu Morey, Clayton Cowles: This is just unbearable. Oh god, what absolute treacle. It’s the second story in this book about Batman being serious and mysterious, but it turns out something nice is going on - he really just wants a photo of the whole Batman Family, because he lost his family when his parents got shot, but then he cracked his greatest case by finding a new family, which is the Batman Family!

All of this is communicated via clipped dialogue in which various Batman Family superheroes trade faux-awkward quips and cutesy ‘moments’ that are supposed to embody the endearing traits of the characters, but read as the blunt machinations of art that is absolutely desperate to be liked. This is art that is weeping on my shoulder and insisting I am its friend, and I want to get away from it, immediately. Tom King is the most acclaimed superhero writer of this generation, and I can only presume his better work is elsewhere.

11. “Medieval”, Peter J. Tomasi, Doug Mahnke, Jaime Mendoza, David Baron, Rob Leigh:

Finally, we have the obligatory story-that-leads-into-next-issue’s-serial, thereby demonstrating that Batman endures. It’s done as a series of 12 splash pages, depicting Batman in battle with his greatest foes, and it benefits immeasurably from the presence of artist Doug Mahnke (some inks by Jaime Mendoza), whose been a favorite of mine since those early, blood-splattered issues of “The Mask” at Dark Horse decades ago. Broadly speaking, Mahnke is working in a similarly muscular vein as many contributors to DC1k, but his sense of composition, of spectacle -- that boot-in-the-face energy the British call thrill-power -- adds an important extra crackle, and an element of humor; his Batman looks like a hulking maniac dressed in garbage bags, beating the shit out of monster after leering monster. What we are seeing is the fevered imagining of a new villain, the Arkham Knight (a variant of a character introduced in a video game), whom writer Peter J. Tomasi characterizes via the old trick of having the villain narrate to us a bunch of familiar criticisms of the hero, which the hero will presumably react to and overcome, or acknowledge in an interesting way, or something, in future installments. This probably would have worked better if other stories in this book hadn’t already made a lot of the same points in a manner that is not an advertisement for the rebuttal of those points... or if I were even capable of reading a story like this without imagining a final dialogue bubble coming in from off-panel going “SIR, THIS IS A BURGER KING DRIVE-THRU.” But something’s gotta go in issue #1001.

-Jog

[believersiasacademy]

Indian Aviation Needs a Strong and Steady Tailwind

Indian Aviation Needs a Strong and Steady Tailwind

Concern

The growth in aviation has been hindered by regulations, tough barriers for new entrants, high fuel prices due to high taxes, and inefficient public sector airports which have led to monopoly airports that extort the airlines due to absence of robust competition.

Lack of a long-term visionary strategic policy for airlines as well as for every sector in the aviation industry.

There were annual sales of 140 million tickets in the pre pandemic era. However, this number is not completely accurate as this includes 35 to 40 million frequent flyers who form the bulk of the sales.

The final count shows that only 4% of the population can afford air travel, which places India just above the poorest nations in Africa. Whereas the fellow developing nations such as Brazil and China are much further ahead.

Need for Aviation

Aviation sector helps in equitable economic growth, will make the country globally competitive and to change the situation in development in the parts of India that are struggling with poverty and unemployment.

Passenger airlines and air cargo overcome geographical restrictions and connect remote areas that are alienated from the mainstream.

They can drive investment deep into the country, giving people access to markets.

It will also give a boost to tourism which is a major sector which not only brings in economic development but also brings foreign currency as well.

Way forward

Increase the Cargo handling capacity of Indian Airports.

Ensure greater connectivity of the Airports by integrating them with roads and railways.

Reduce the expenditure incurred by the Airlines through large scale reforms in the air cargo, airports, aviation fuel taxes (State and central, which in India are among the highest in the world) and Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO).

Similarly, the market of chartered aircrafts has not had much growth in the previous years. This has led to lack of employment to several Pilots and other support staff for these aircrafts.

We must amend India’s Aircraft Act, 1934 and Aircraft Rules, 1937, to keep pace with the requirements of the modern aviation industry.

India’s statutory regulatory authority, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, needs to be modernized, well-staffed, motivated and incentivized.

For more information, visit Believers IAS. Believers IAS Academy is one of the best IAS coaching in Bangalore, providing excellent quality mentoring with relevant study materials, excellent guidance from experienced faculty and weekly tests to improve your skills. The online and offline classes are designed to cater to various learning needs of candidates and help them reach their goal of becoming an IAS officer.

[elcinelateleymickyandonie]

MARJORIE MAIN.

Filmography

Movie theater

1932 Hot Saturday

1933 New Deal Rhythm

1934 Music in the Air

1937 Stella Dallas

1938 Test Pilot

1938 Three Comrades

1938 Girls' School

1938 Little Tough Guy

1938 Too Hot to Handle

1939 The Angels Wash Their Faces

1939 Another Thin Man

1939 Chesterfield Apartments

1939 Women

1940 I Take This Woman

1940 Dark Command

1940 Turnabout

1940 Susana and God

1941 The Trial of Mary Dugan

1941 A Woman's Face

1941 The Shepherd of the Hills

1941 Honky Tonk

1942 The Bugle Sounds

1942 The Affairs of Martha

1942 Tennessee Johnson

1943 Heaven Can Wait

1944 Meet Me in St. Louis

1944 Gentle Annie

1945 Murder, He Says

1946 The Harvey Girls

1946 Undercurrent

1947 The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap

1948 Feudin ', Fussin' and A-Fightin '

1949 Big Jack

1950 Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town

1950 Summer Stock

1950 Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone

1951 Mr. Imperium

1951 Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm

1951 It's a Big Country

1952 The Belle of New York

1952 Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair

1953 Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation

1953 Fast Company

1954 The Long, Long Trailer

1954 Rose Marie

1955 Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki

1956 The Kettles in the Ozarks

1956 Friendly Persuasion

1957 The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm.

TV

1956 December Bride

1958 Wagon Train.

Créditos: Tomado de Wikipedia

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Main

[from1837to1945]

Tough to Handle (1937)

[darkfurypolice]

The history of the shopping trolley

A trip to the supermarket wouldn’t be the same without the shopping trolley, a utilitarian piece of design that allows us to buy more than we can physically carry. Colin Bisset takes a look at the history of an invention that changed consumerism forever.

The shopping trolley is one of the most successful marketing inventions of the 20th century. It came into existence in 1937 as a by-product of a new kind of shopping experience popularised in the 1920s: the supermarket.

The trolley was the idea of American supermarket owner Sylvan Goldman, who dreamed it up as a way of encouraging shoppers to buy more items in his Humpty Dumpty chain of stores.

The frame was inspired by a folding chair and held two wire shopping baskets, one above the other, doubling the quantity of goods that could be carried. They were unpopular at first because they reminded women of prams and men considered them effeminate. To counteract this Goldman hired male and female models who spent their days pushing trolleys around his stores, leading to their gradual acceptance.

The next big innovation was made by Orla Watson in 1946. He came up with a design with a hinged rear panel which allowed trolleys to be easily pushed together for storage. The Telescope Cart was patented in 1949 and remains the model for most trolleys today. The 1950s saw massive growth of supermarket and mall-style shopping with huge parking areas, making a trolley an almost an obligatory shopping aid. The density of customer traffic made compact storage essential. In 1954, the further refinement of a fold-down seat for toddlers meant that parents were free to focus on the shelves.

Increasing store size has since created demand for larger shopping trolleys to cope with increased sales, and the arrival of self-scanning equipment attached to the trolley handle has simplified the checkout process in some places. In 2013, a jet-propelled shopping trolley reached 70 kilometres per hour in Britain, but the idea has thankfully not been taken up by supermarket chains.

The Edgemar shopping mall in Santa Monica, California, which was designed in the late 1980s by local architect Frank Gehry, has been home to a towering Christmas tree made entirely from shopping trolleys every year since 1995. Created by artist Anthony Schmidt, each tree is over 10 metres high. Although they would appear to be a most appropriate symbol for Christmas consumerism, Schmidt adds that they also remind us of those in the world whose possessions would fill only a single shopping trolley. The first tree's silvery shimmer was, he says, inspired by a friend's mother who had platinum hair.

While the wonky-wheeled trolley has long been a visual gag in film, the abandoned trolley is more often a symbol of urban waste, and many are dumped by roadsides or in waterways. More than one million trolleys are manufactured each year, adding to the millions already in circulation. Most supermarkets now make considerable efforts to retain their property, adding coin-deposit mechanisms to ensure their return in areas of high theft as well as wheels that lock when a trolley is pushed over a magnetic strip set at a mall entrance.

The scale of the shopping trolley has also grown and the supermarket model is now used for everything from furniture shops to pile-it-high discount stores. For some, Sunday wouldn't be Sunday without pushing a trolley around a hardware store or a wine warehouse. Thanks to the increased kinetic energy implicit in the larger size and weight, there have been reports of people being crushed, sometimes fatally, by trolleys. However, many supermarkets today also offer scaled-down versions so that small children will learn shopping habits early. Sylvan Goldman would certainly have approved of that.

Why Don't People Return Their Shopping Carts?

While some supermarkets are better than others, it's probably not unusual to find a few stray shopping carts littering the parking lot to the dismay of shoppers who may think that a parking spot is open, only to find that it's actually being used by a shopping cart. It seems like a basic courtesy to others: you get a cart at the supermarket, you use it to get your groceries and bring them to your vehicle, and then you return it for others to use. And yet, it's not uncommon for many people to ignore the cart receptacle entirely and leave their carts next to their cars or parked haphazardly on medians. During peak hours, it can mean bedlam. Where does this disregard come from?

Some supermarkets have tried to make this relatively easy: they have cart receptacles throughout the parking lot, a cart attendant to bring the carts back to the store, and some may even rely on a cart "rental" system where you pay for the cart and are reimbursed when it's returned. In the instances where there is no rental system, people may leave their carts stranded for some of the following reasons:

The receptacle is too far from where they've parked their car.

They have a child whom they do not want to leave unattended.

The weather is bad.

They have a disability that prohibitive to easy movement.

The perception that it's someone else's job to collect the carts.

They're leaving the carts for someone else to easily pick up and use.

Similarly, there are five categories of cart users:

Returners. These people always return their carts to the receptacle regardless of how far away they've parked or what the weather is like. They feel a sense of obligation and/or feel badly for the people responsible for collecting the carts.

Never Returners. People who never return their carts. They believe it's someone else's job to get the carts or the supermarket's responsibility, and show little regard for where the carts are left.

Convenience Returners. People who will return their carts if they parked close to the receptacle, or if they see a cart attendant.

Pressure Returners. People who will return their carts only if the cart attendant is present or if the adjacent car's owner is present, which means they don't have an easy avenue for abandoning their carts.

Child-Driven Returners. These are people with children who view it as a game to return carts, often riding them back to the receptacle or pushing them into the stacked lines.

Social norms fall into two general categories. There are injunctive norms, which drive our responses based on our perception of how others will interpret our actions. This means that we're inclined to act in certain ways if we think people will think well or think poorly of us. And there are descriptive norms, where our responses are driven by contextual clues. This means we're apt to mimic behaviors of others—so what we see or hear or smell suggests the appropriate/accepted response or behavior that we should display.

Shopping cart, bag or basket?There is no golden rule.

In any case, since we are talking about an e-commerce website, all you want to do is to reduce the friction in the flow and reduce the cognitive load of the user. Everything has to look familiar and work as expected. Or to put it in UX terms, the system must meet the user’s mental model.

But why is it that sometimes you see websites or apps using different terms for the same functionality, and which is the right one for each case?

The user‘s mental model.

Users form their mental models based on the physical world and the websites and apps they use in their daily lives. So they expect to see a similar functionality to the one that they are used to from their previous experiences, this can happen by using a metaphor to make it easy for the users to think of a concept they are already familiar with. In our case, shopping in a store. So the scenario would be something like this:

Walking into a store.

Adding the products to a cart.

One last chance to think if we got everything.

Go to the registry and pay.

If you think about the physical world, things make kind of sense. You use a home shopping trolley for larger objects, for example, electric appliances — a basket for smaller ones like groceries, and a shopping trolley bag for the smallest items, like clothes.

But why don’t we use the same patterns for digital experiences?

Finding a balance between innovation and familiarity.

What’s wrong with the ‘Cart’ anyways? Well, it just doesn’t fit with every kind of store. Some stores don’t use carts in their physical stores, so it might not make sense to use them in the digital one. Plus, it is also a bit ugly as an icon if you want a rather artistic opinion.

For some reason, the ‘Cart’ became the norm, and it seems that it is tough to break out of the norms. It was Amazon and Zappos in the late 90s that familiarized the idea of the shopping cart and users didn’t seem to have trouble understanding what ‘Cart’ means.The word ‘Cart’ has become the default word when it comes to e-commerce.

In fact, in some cases, websites that use a bag icon in their menu, use the term ‘Add to cart’ in the call to actions just because users are more familiar with the term. But that doesn’t mean that every website should use this. It could confuse the users even more, and you should avoid it.

Many fashion e-commerce websites broke out of that norm. Sites like Macy’s use the ‘Bag’ for years and many other websites followed that example. Nowadays the term ‘Bag’ has become the new norm at least for websites that focus on apparel and fashion. Even a tech company like Apple has shifted to the use of the term ‘Bag’ on their website.

[chiseler]

Myrna Loy: Keeping Cool

If an actor is said to be “underplaying,” what does that mean exactly? It might mean not doing the obvious thing and not displaying the obvious emotion. Or it might mean feeling various emotions but holding them back and only sharing a tiny portion of them. This is a risky strategy, because most audiences might just think you can’t “act,” at least not in the expected way. When Myrna Loy made The Rains Came (1939), she was thirty-four years old and an established star. The film is what used to be called a “well-mounted” production, filled with dramatic incident and exotic settings and lots of extras and love crises and natural disasters. The role of Lady Edwina Esketh, a dissolute, promiscuous noblewoman who redeems herself through sacrifice and love, would seem to provide a juicy opportunity for showboating. It’s easy to imagine Bette Davis in the role, her eyes popping with restless desire. Whereas Loy had the kind of eyes that always seemed half-closed even when they weren’t.

Loy’s playing of Lady Esketh is cool, modest, almost non-committal, and this approach can seem alienating at first, but if you focus closely on what she’s doing, her under-the-radar work starts to pay dividends. The film’s producer Darryl Zanuck called her into his office midway through the shooting and complained about her performance, but Loy stuck to her own interpretation. She was known for her dry handling of light comedy, high comedy, even farce, and she refuses to play Lady Esketh full out as temperamental or mercurial, as practically any other actress of her time would have done. Instead, Loy keeps her cards close to her vest and lets her knowing attitude do the rest. Her expressive voice is light and almost fey, but very grounded, with ringing intonations, and this makes it different from a huskier yet more vacillating voice like Jean Arthur’s.

Even when Lady Esketh changes her tune, Loy doesn’t go all Noble. In fact, underneath the self-sacrifice her Lady Esketh seems to be as flip and above-it-all as ever, somehow, and this works well for the film. “I hate scenes,” she tells her lover George Brent, and this would be a laugh line for a Davis or a Joan Crawford, but Loy is an actress who actually does hate “scenes” or drama. She’s basically detached, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have feelings. It’s just that she doesn’t parade them around as other performers do.

This instinct Loy had for underplaying didn’t always work out so well. In Parnell (1937), Loy and Clark Gable do a lot of walking around and talking quietly to each other, and they come off like zombies in period dress. But her moderation in many other films was so unusual and original that Loy fashioned her very own type of screen character. She was almost never a working girl, but more usually a wife, a mistress, a lady with money and time for play, so fetching that she got away with lots of nose wrinkling and eyelash fluttering without ever seeming coy.

As a young girl, Loy had seen Eleonora Duse on the stage, and she had admired the restraint of that fabled actress. “Oh, I could have cried all over the place in many of my films, but it just didn’t feel right,” she said in her charming 1987 memoir, Being and Becoming. “The audience loses respect for the character. It seems that instinctively I’ve done this kind of underplaying a good deal in my work. That brand of acting had impressed me since first seeing Duse. She had an inner light, you see; you’ve got to have it…You can’t be thinking about how many people you’re having for dinner.” According to Loy in her book, nearly all of her leading men and many of the other men she met developed crushes on her, and that’s understandable. She had the damndest nose, turned up at the end and elaborately structured, and that reserved, hard-to-get manner that promised the deepest bliss if you could melt some of her reserve.

Loy was born in Montana, and she began her career early as a dancer in live prologues for silent films. She was an extra in the original Ben-Hur (1925), and for the next nine years she made eighty-odd movies, mostly in bits. As a maid in Ernst Lubitsch’s So This Is Paris (1926), Loy just walks across a room. She’s a lady in waiting to Lucrezia Borgia in Don Juan (1926) and a chorus girl in the first talking movie, The Jazz Singer (1927), and she was continually cast as vamps and tramps, often of Chinese, Latin or all-purpose “foreign” extraction.

In her first full talkie, The Desert Song (1929), Loy plays Azuri: “That name means tiger claws!” she informs us, in a hilariously BEEG! accent that she came up with herself. She’s very sexy in that movie, but she’s also making a kind of joke of sex, and this campy attitude also informs her Yasmini in John Ford’s The Black Watch (1929) and her gypsy temptress Nubi in The Squall (1929). Loy is enjoyably over the top in these roles and in some of her other vamp parts of this time, and she worked so often in this exaggerated fashion that maybe she was just all tired-out by the time she became a star in 1934 with The Thin Man, and so she made a low-key style out of this tiredness.

Loy is a hoot in The Truth About Youth (1930) as a gold-digging singer with a temper, and she was time-stoppingly lovely in her brief role in Ford’s Arrowsmith (1931). She had one promising scene with Robert Young in New Morals for Old (1932), but then the film drops her entirely. Loy steals Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) with just a couple of naughty lines, socking them home in an attention-getting way that’s rather far removed from her later laidback delivery, but she was still being cast as vixens in racist concoctions like The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), where her Fah Lo See delights in having men whipped, and Thirteen Women (1932), where her hypnotic half-caste takes methodical revenge on a bunch of sorority girls who spurned her. It must have taken much stamina and patience to wait out all these years and all these small and unworthy parts. She had a lead in a modern dress version of Vanity Fair (1932), which was shot in ten days at a poverty row studio, sometimes from 4AM to 4AM. Loy does an intriguingly subdued Becky Sharp, but maybe she was too exhausted to play it any other way.

The speedy director W.S. Van Dyke took her in hand in 1933 at MGM, and her parts began to improve. She thrived with John Barrymore in the sophisticated comedy Topaze (1933), and she fell in with her best partner, William Powell, in Manhattan Melodrama (1934), where she also tussled with Clark Gable. The Thin Man was made by Van Dyke in sixteen days, and it set up a long-running formula for Powell and Loy that proved irresistible. As Nick and Nora Charles, a private detective and his heiress wife, Powell and Loy struck up a bantering attitude with each other that still feels like a fresh and attainable ideal of marriage.

The mystery plots of their six Thin Man films were usually perfunctory, but that didn’t matter because audiences really came to see Nick and Nora verbally jousting and keeping each other entertained. Just listening to them is a pleasure: Powell with his deep, plummy voice and Loy with her bright, high, tinkling one. “They hit that wonderful note because he always did a wee bit too much and she underdid it, creating a grace, a charm, a chemistry,” observed George Cukor.

Nick and Nora are party people, and the running gag in their films is that they always want to get a rest or take a break but they never seem to, and that suits Loy’s Nora just fine. She married Nick for excitement and great sex and teasing that always goes right up to the edge of being dangerous but never topples over into hurt feelings (it did just one time, in After the Thin Man (1936), when Nick drunkenly mentions making a mistake and Nora for a brief moment thinks he means he was mistaken in marrying her because her family is so stuffy). Nora can be slightly dizzy, but she is also flexible and tough. “There’s a girl with hair on her chest!” says a cop in The Thin Man, after Nick and Nora have just gotten out of a scary scrape with a gunman and she comes out blithely crying for more action.

As she watches Nick shooting the ornaments off their Christmas tree in The Thin Man, Loy shoots Powell an only semi-loving “You are beyond belief” look, a very modern kind of juicily sarcastic look that is also in some sense unreadable. Nora’s love for Nick is a private and multi-leveled thing, and Loy will only reveal a small bit of it. They both see the fun or absurdity in practically any situation, even things that would irritate most of us. “We were married three years before he told me he loved me,” Nora says in The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), and she relates this in an admiring way, because they both like to avoid the obvious, or look askance at it.

The seven or so other films Loy made with Powell were often ordinary, but they were always redeemed by their give-and-take, their rapport, his two-drinks-in silliness and her quizzical, nearly deadpan reaction to him. Loy is at her peak in Libeled Lady (1936), playing a quasi-bitch in the first half but then softening beautifully when she falls for Powell. It’s clear that she’s a former dancer because she always moves gracefully, and distinctively: there’s a difference between the louche posture of her call girl in Penthouse (1933) and the ramrod straight posture of her rich playgirl in Libeled Lady, which suffers from unimaginative direction from Jack Conway. Loy too seldom worked with top directors. She’s at her womanly best in Test Pilot (1938) with Gable and Spencer Tracy, and she brought all of her tenderness to the smallish role of the wife in her most famous movie, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), but it seems a shame that she never worked at length for Lubitsch, or Preston Sturges, or Howard Hawks.

As an older woman, Loy concentrated on progressive politics as her career wound down. She played one hilariously timed scene where she fussily picks paint colors in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), but she had little chemistry with Cary Grant, who needed a more extreme woman to react to. Loy was a mother and feminist heroine in Belles on Their Toes (1952) and she worked in a more histrionic vein in Lonelyhearts (1959) and From the Terrace (1960), proving that she could play this way if she wanted to, but it isn’t much fun seeing her argue with a nasty Robert Ryan or stumble around drunk as Paul Newman’s mother, so far from her usual context.

She worked on stage and bowed out gracefully with Summer Solstice (1981), a short teleplay about an aged married couple where she was still teasing and fun loving with her mate, Henry Fonda. They called Loy the perfect wife, but her own four marriages didn’t work out, and the second one, to rental car heir John Hertz, Jr., was particularly bad. Hertz gave her a black eye once, and surely there is a special place reserved in hell for the man who gave Myrna Loy a black eye. As so often with these stars, real life did not live up to screen life, and she herself did not get enough of the pleasure that she gave to us.

Loy was one of the rare stars who seems to have been much like the person we see on screen: tolerant, sophisticated, nice without being sugary, dignified without being rigid, treating life with amused sang-froid. She was the sexiest and smartest of role models, all the more attractive and suggestive for keeping so many things to herself.

by Dan Callahan

[gloranstatad1971]

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[the-whoofwhoof]

Didn’t Know about the Akita Inu

The Akita Inu is quite possibly the most good dog breeds with characters that take after the convention of its tribal land; Japan. Its appearance is honorable and threatening, and it is a shrewd dog exceptional to deal with risky dangers. Also, that isn't all, as there are various intriguing realities about the Akita Inu dog breed that will leave you dazzled.  If you looking for best pet grooming in delhi visit to our website

1. The Akita Inu is an irreplaceable asset in Japan

The Akita Inu's honorable appearance and character made him so well known with the Japanese that it was assigned an irreplaceable asset. Truth be told, the variety was respected exceptionally to such an extent that its possession was confined distinctly to the royal family, and dogs having a place with the rulers were treated as sovereignty. Also, the Akita Inu is of incredible otherworldly importance to the Japanese that each infant is given a sculpture of it to represent long life, wellbeing, and satisfaction.

2. There are two sorts of Akita Inu

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3. It was first brought to the U.S. by Helen Keller

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4. Its size is forcing

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5. They can without much of a stretch become forceful

The Akita Inu is genuinely quiet and faithful. Notwithstanding, it is normally guarded and forceful, and certain dangers effectively prompt showdowns. These dogs are particularly compromised by the presence of different dogs, however outsiders may likewise turn into an issue when they cross certain limits. To this end, the dog ought to consistently be held under rope when openly places, for example, the pack or, more than likely it might turn into an issue containing a battle thinking about its size. It is likewise significant for the dog to take instructional courses when still a pup to impart control, submission, and unwaveringness.

6. They are generally quiet and calm

The Akita Inu has a quiet disposition to supplement its respectable appearance. These dogs don't bark frequently except if they danger a danger or are glad. Therefore, woofing ought to be paid attention to and researched as these dogs have awesome impulses. Furthermore, regardless of their enormous bodies, these dogs will in general be quiet and inert more often than not. Nonetheless, this rapidly changes when they feel compromised.

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10. They love day off

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[shenae-majorproject-2020]

Island Bay Italian community - narrative deep dive

Site information

Tapu the ranga in the middle of the bay shelters and allows for boats to reside

In Trent, Reef and Brighton Streets and on the Esplanade and the Island Bay Parade the Italian migrants congregated close to each other. In one way it was almost a carbon copy of how some of them lived in Italy. Some people referred to this area as “little Italy” https://www.facebook.com/islandbaylittleitaly/posts/dear-everyone-for-those-of-you-who-could-not-attend-the-talk-by-paul-elenio-the-/1247750391906558/

Stories

https://teara.govt.nz/en/video/451/the-island-bay-community

In this clip from a documentary about the Italian fishing community at Wellington’s Island Bay, Maria Grazia Toscano, who arrived from Stromboli as a young girl in 1924, recalls starting school.

Italian and Scottish families, including several from the Shetland Islands, were among those to take to the waters in search of a livelihood. The Shetlanders are often touted as having taught the Italians how to fish the tough Cook Strait waters because the conditions reflected their homeland much more than the serene waters of the Mediterranean. (http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/3210316/Story-of-a-suburb-Island-Bay)

The start of the chain migration was with the accidental arrival in Wellington of a teenager from the volcanic island of Stromboli in the 1880s, Bartolo Russo. After he settled down and carved a niche for himself in the eastern bay area of Wellington called Eastbourne his brothers joined him in New Zealand. A little later they were joined by the Della Barca brothers who visited Wellington while on a round the world voyage. The Della Barcas were from the small town of Massalubrense, a coastal village in the Bay of Naples near Sorrento and Pompeii. They were subsequently joined by the Meo brothers.

They shared one thing in common - they were all fishermen and they recognised the sea bounty that was ready for them around the wild area known as Cook Strait which separates New Zealand's two main islands. The chain migration continued as other family members and friends arrived from southern Italy between the 1890s through till the 1960s. The immigrants came for the same reason, seeking greener pastures and the prospect of seeking Una Buona Fortuna (a good life), and wrote in letters home, alle fine del mondo (to the ends of the earth). The book by this name goes into detail describing the chain migration of Italians, including those who came from the north of Italy and became market gardens in the area of Lower Hutt that is part of the Wellington region. http://www.clubgaribaldi.org.nz/history/

“My father came to New Zealand in 1937, the fourth of the four brothers to leave Italy. Bearing in mind his brothers went to North and South America the choice of New Zealand was based purely on his close connection with one of the earliest sets of brothers, the Della Barca family.

My father was a fisherman at home and was a fisherman in Island Bay. The differences were huge. Even then the Mediterranean was being drained of fish to feed millions. When he came here he, like the others, found fish that were dragged off the launch in Island Bay into a waiting dinghy with two men needed to handle each fish.

That was the upside. The downside was that fishing Cook Strait was not for the faint hearted. Back in the Bay of Naples the waters were usually calm. Here they found huge tides, a roaring wind and tough conditions even at the best of times.

One time the boat my father crewed, the Ika, was out in Cook Strait when one of the famous southerlies struck Wellington. For two days my mother and the other wives had no news of what had happened and feared the worst. The Ika eventually came home having spent more than 24 hours sheltering in the Marlborough Sounds.” https://www.facebook.com/islandbaylittleitaly/posts/dear-everyone-for-those-of-you-who-could-not-attend-the-talk-by-paul-elenio-the-/1247750391906558/

Materials

Water/ocean

Fishing nets/fish/scales

Boats

People

Carlo Muollo, 68 (His family has been fishing the local waters since 1902, and sitting in the kitchen of the house he's lived in for the past 44 years, he rattles off tales of family fishing life.)

Bartolo Russo (was the first italian to inspire others to also move to wellington from italy in 1880s)

Dates

1880 (Bartolo Russo arrived in Wellington - started fishing in eastbourne

Around 1900, 12 ex-gold miners, also from Stromboli, started fishing at Island Bay, which was more sheltered. By the 1920s the Eastbourne contingent began to join them. https://teara.govt.nz/en/italians/page-3

History

result of one hundred years of chain migration from four southern localities of Italy; Sorrento, Massa Lubrense, Stromboli and Capri. 1

Lived in a result of where they were from in a semi-urban/semi-rural lifestyle.

Italian migrants to Island Bay tended to settle and live close to where the previous migrant had settled… The proximity of dwellings of first and second generation Italians is evident today in the many descendants who still reside in Island Bay. The reasons are more due to family proximity as opposed to the necessity to be close to the fishing grounds of the Cook Strait, which was the main source of income for the early Italians. 6

(Cultivating Continuity and Change : The Domestic Garden Tradition of the Italian Community in Island Bay, Wellington, New Zealand. p. 9.)

The fishing industry continued to flourish, although the 1930s saw depressed prices for fish.

Violent eruptions like the sea quake in 1930 which generated 30-metre waves and a decline in the island's economy have sent periodic waves of its people - 'Strombolani'- to many countries including New Zealand. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/spectrum/audio/201799214/the-stromboli-connection - this is what lead to migration to wellington

Bay used to be filled with fishing boats

Italian community on a summers evening would gather at the beach, lean on the wall, sing songs

In 2000, the Wellington descendants of the immigrants from Stromboli, one of the Aeolian Islands, held a festival to celebrate their heritage. This led to the creation of a book chronicling their stories, which was published the same year. Its title is Famiglie Strombolani – Strombolian Families. http://www.italianlegacy.com/new-zealand-strombolani.html

During the WW2, the italian community were highly marginalised and affects with suspicion by NZers as they were the enemy. Stories of people getting shipped to Somes Island and losing their jobs. They weren’t allowed to listen to the radio. Police used to visit homes at night to check they weren’t using the radio. The fishing boats moored at Eastbourne were forcibly relocated to Island Bay so that the police and maritime authorities could monitor them, fearing that the fishermen would make contact with shipping from Japan, Italy or Germany. https://www.facebook.com/islandbaylittleitaly/posts/dear-everyone-for-those-of-you-who-could-not-attend-the-talk-by-paul-elenio-the-/1247750391906558/

Trent Street was were a lot of italians lived when they moved here.

In the 1890s the Russo family arrived from the volcanic island of Stromboli. They began fishing at Eastbourne, buying land and establishing a small village. Around 1900, 12 ex-gold miners, also from Stromboli, started fishing at Island Bay, which was more sheltered. By the 1920s the Eastbourne contingent began to join them, and relatives of both groups continued to arrive from Stromboli and Massa Lubrense, near Naples, into the 1950s. They worked mainly as fishermen or fish retailers. The Little Italy of Island Bay was still active in the early 2000s. https://teara.govt.nz/en/italians/page-3

Italian community faced a lot of cultural differences and assimilation eg. name changes from an italian name to english spelling

In the case of Wellington the Italians enjoyed each other’s company at Club Garibaldi. This club, named after the soldier whose army unified Italy in the mid-18th century, was established in 1882 – probably the oldest Italian organisation in the southern hemisphere. https://www.facebook.com/islandbaylittleitaly/posts/dear-everyone-for-those-of-you-who-could-not-attend-the-talk-by-paul-elenio-the-/1247750391906558/

Many families gre abundant gardens - tomatoes for pizza/pasta