I didn't watch the State of the Union address earlier, though it's waiting on my TiVo at home. (I am currently blogging from an undisclosed location.) According to Fred Kaplan though, Bush is still double-talking us through this war. Which is a shame. It would be nice to believe in Bush's plan...and even nicer to believe he actually has one.
Ed Golick explains something that hadn't occurred to me about that "soundie" I linked to...
The "Who's Yehudi film" was printed backwards on purpose. Panorams, the machines that showed the 16mm musical numbers, rear projected the films. If the films were printed normally the titles and the image would have been backwards. I own a number of original 16mm Panoram films and they all have reverse titles.
A little trivia. Years ago, a Yehudi radio contest was held on Bob Hope's radio program. Listeners were invited to send in who they thought the
mysterious Yehudi was. The winning entry — "Yehudi is the little man who turns out the light in the refrigerator when the door is closed."
Maybe someone who reads this site can help me with this. I'm looking for a place, preferably online, to buy two-sided blank DVD-r discs. I don't mean dual-layer. I mean the kind where you can burn Part One of a movie to one side of the disc, then flip it over and burn Part Two on the other side. Most companies have stopped making or carrying these because they're quite unreliable. I know this but I have a need for them in spite of it. I'd like 16X but will settle for whatever I can get.
Also: I'm looking into maybe/possibly/I'm not sure getting a wireless Internet card for my laptop. Several cellular companies offer them and I'm wondering if anyone reading this has a strong recommendation or warning about any particular provider or plan. Natch, I'm most interested in hearing from anyone in Southern California, which is where I can usually be found. So far, the deals I've seen all require that you to sign up for a couple of decades. Having once gotten stuck in a long-term analog cell phone plan when the rest of mankind went digital, I'm a bit leery of committing to anything that may not be what I want after the next Consumer Electronics Show. Anyone have a suggestion?
Several folks have pointed this out to me in e-mail: In the "Who's Yehudi?" soundie — our previous link — everything is mirror-imaged. Whoever did the transfer flipped the image.
Sharp eyes there. For years, whenever the movie Oliver appeared on home video — and sometimes even when it ran on TV — one entire reel (about 11 minutes) was flipped that way. The telecine operator who did the film-2-tape transfer erred and then that transfer was used over and over...with surprisingly few complaints. Finally, a few years ago, they did a new transfer and put things right.
I've been swamped with matters — biz and personal — all day so I'm behind in posting news and thoughts. I'll try to catch up later tonight. I also need to post our annual notice of the birthday of the great character actor, Charles Lane. He turns 102 on Friday, I believe.
Bear with us, please. It's not quite Cream of Mushroom Soup time here but it's getting close.
Here we have a soundie from 1942...and for those of you who don't know: Soundies were the music videos of that era. They were seen in a special kind of jukebox that was equipped to run movies instead of records.
The offering is "Who's Yehudi?" as recorded by Kay Kyser and his Orchestra, with Lane Truesdale as the vocalist. The song was written by two gents named Bill Seckler and Matt Dennis, who were inspired (if that's the word) by one of the many catch-phrases of comedian Jerry Colonna. Mr. Colonna, who was then a regular on Bob Hope's radio broadcasts, liked to make sport of the name of Yehudi Menuhin, a prominent violinist and conductor. For a time, no matter what sketch or bit Colonna found himself in, he'd find a way to ask the question, "Who's Yehudi?" and audiences would howl and I don't quite understand why it was funny, either. Maybe it was the way he said it. In any case, it inspired the following tune...
HumorousMaximus is a website that features daily cartoons. Yesterday, they began running old episodes of Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon, starting almost at the beginning. The first Canyon strip was a Sunday page which ran on January 13, 1947. Yesterday, the website posted the first daily strip, which appeared the Monday after.
As I understand it, they'll post a new daily strip each day until they reach the end of the run. The strip lasted from 1/13/47 until 6/4/88, which works out to 15,118 strips. There were 2,159 Sunday pages and this website isn't running them...so that leaves 12,959 daily strips. At seven per week, that means 1,851 weeks or around 35 and a half years. What does this work out to? June of 2042? I'm too tired to do the rest of the math. It's quite a while.
You can read each day's Steve Canyon strip here. If you don't know why people loved this feature, give it a few weeks. You'll see.
January 24, 2007
