Blargh. Between the national news, the desert heat, the prospect of returning to work in the morning, taking care of the cats and
did I mention the national news, my mind is all over the place this afternoon and evening.
I missed my normal window of putting together a coherent blog post this morning, partly because the
Phillies-Nationals game started at 8:35 a.m., Arizona time.
I'm behind on posting as it is. I do have a lot of good starter ideas stacking up in Blogger's "Unpublished" queue. It's just time that I need. Don't we all?
Anyway, here's a miscellaneous collection of stuff that's been on my radar and won't be in a separate post:
1. I made a cryptic reference to Orson Welles last Sunday, but I no longer have the energy or desire to do that as a separate post. I was going to write about how Ash and I watched the ridiculous 1981 "documentary" (it really shouldn't be called that) The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, in which narrator Welles shares the prophecies of Nostradamus, as badly interpreted by Erika Cheetham.
Skip it and watch
F for Fake if you're looking for something involving Welles pulling one over on the public. I stand by what I wrote about
The Man Who Saw Tomorrow in 2018: "The supernatural-seeming angle and the fiery, horrifying visions of the future offered by the film ... preyed on both Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation and racist anti-Arab sentiment. It cast "The Middle East" as some strange land from which a devilish villain would start the gears of World War III into motion in the 1990s." That is not an endorsement.
Further reading: Reddit and Jedadiah Leland on the Through the Shattered Lens website.
2. RIP, Terence Stamp. My official favorite movies of his are The Limey, Spirits of the Dead and Superman II. But my secret favorite movie of his is the absolutely bonkers Modesty Blaise (1966), where he saves the world alongside Monica Vitti.
3. Want to help a New York City bookstore, spread the availability of books and contribute in a small way to the ideas of social justice? There's a summer book drive for
Bluestockings Cooperative, a bookstore located at 116 Suffolk Street in New York. They're seeking new and gently used books on the topics of race, gender, sexuality, class, socialism, anarchism and more. The book drive continues through Sept. 1. For me, it was a
very positive way to chip away, once again, at Resimplify Me and clear some shelf space. Here's the poster.
4. Speaking of books, this amazing dust jacket cover showed up in my BlueSky feed recently.
Adventures with Phantoms, by British ghost hunter
Robert Thurston Hopkins (1884-1958), was published in 1946. I hadn't heard of this one before, so I'll have to keep my eyes peeled. It would look dandy alongside the likes of
Haunted England and
A Ghost Hunter's Game Book.
5. That's all for now, folks.
.jpg)
