Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

Questions Without Answers

Bergman always does this—asks tons of questions about life and God but never even attempts to answer them. What's his point? None really. His photographic style of cinematography is interesting, and his very sparse use of music as well. He tends to use rooms to great advantage by leaving them sparsely furnished with wooden floors so that the sound is very lively in them. Every movement is heard, and this almost negates the need for musical enhancement in his films. Bergman has great style, and his questions about the world are substantive, but if a man has no answers and goes through life with no opinions, he best stay out of filmmaking.

There are some people of the low-brow liberal variety who won't like me stating the obvious, but Bergman is a highly overrated director/writer. His movies are very cold and lifeless.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

Bryan Forbes' Best Film

Forbes also wrote this one (as he often did). It's hard to find any fault with this movie. You can't get much better than a film, not only written and directed by Forbes, but starring an unforgettable pairing in Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough. Ms. Stanley didn't make too many movies, but this one is enough to show why she's often thought of as the best stage actress of the 20th century.

Just to tell a small bit of the story, it's about a woman and her husband who earn some money giving séances for people. It's unclear whether the husband, played by Attenborough, actually believes anything supernatural is going on, because as the story progresses, what does become clear is that his wife, played by Stanley, is having, or has already had, a serious break with reality.

A word of warning to those thinking this is a movie about the supernatural given the film's title—it is not, although some may see something of the supernatural in the wife's delusional mode of existence. The film is actually about something entirely different—the kidnapping of a young girl. Very suspensefully done from beginning to end.

There Is Nothing Wrong With Your Television Set

Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. Who are we? Why, we're the Nielsen Ratings of course! Let the news be heralded on every corner. Shout it from every mountaintop. It is I, the pure one, whom the Nielsen Ratings people in their great wisdom have chosen to be representative for television viewing in my neighborhood. You heareth correctly knaves. I will decide what's fit to watch and what isn't. I will control the viewing destiny of man. You will hide in caves and holes in the Earth. You will pray for death, but no reprieve for your sentence shall be granted. I will smite thee with my mighty remote control. Be afraid, ye of mortal birth, for he who hath tasted the honey dew of the electron gods sitteth among you, and yea, his arm is not weak. The flipper doth tremble at his touch.

Just saying....

World's Goofiest Water Tower

Nuff said.

Tal Wilkenfeld

You don't see many female bass players to begin with, but there are few, male or female, that play with as much enthusiasm, skill, and technique as Australian born Tal Wilkenfeld. She was so certain of pursuing a music career that she dropped out of school to come to America and study jazz when she was 16. I watched her become a world-wide phenom playing with Jeff Beck a few years ago at around 20 or so years of age. (I believe she's 24 now). Here she is with Beck at the Crossroads Music Festival-2007. Her solo starts less than a minute and a half in:



Here they are at The Fillmore in New York a couple of years later playing a rather unusual bass duet:

Rally 7471 Portable Hand Generator

People are going to think I'm starting a sales blog or something if I keep posting stuff like this, but I thought this was really a neat little item. This is a generator made by Rally. Its internal battery can be charged up by plugging it into a wall outlet, or it actually has a hand crank on it which will charge it too. Why you can't find other hand crank generators for sale is beyond me because the technology is very old for doing this. They had hand crank generators in use during WWII. The unit has a 140 Watt power inverter and a regular 110 plug outlet, so you can power virtually any 110 appliance with it. It also has a USB port for charging things like cell-phones or camcorder batteries.

And it has a built-in air compressor for inflating flat tires or rubber rafts, a 12 volt outlet and jumper cables for jump starting your car, and an LED flashlight (LEDs are easy on power). This would of course be a Godsend on camping trips among other things. It takes three minutes of pulling the handle to charge the battery enough to jumpstart a car. It will run a typical laptop for an hour and a half on a full charge. (I imagine you'd probably have to crank it all day for that though). What more could you ask for? Let's hope the battery is replaceable (unlike most electric generators). It cost a hundred bucks. I haven't seen it for sale in stores, so you'll probably have to order it from Amazon etc.

Lewis and Clark's Girandoni Air Rifle

I'm not into guns at all, but I just happened to stumble across this video last night and thought it was really interesting. Who knew they even had airguns nearly 300 years ago, let alone great ones? It's also interesting the way Lewis and Clark performed demonstrations of it everywhere they went so that the Indians never attacked them. I always wondered how they managed to trek all the way across the country without getting killed by Indians.

Here's another video showing a replica of that same rifle being fired.