1. As usual, I’ve been gardening here at Cape Cod. The picture above, a red dahlia, is one of the perennials I’ve added this year. I think I’m supposed to dig it up and store it indoors in the winter. Hmm, wonder if I’ll get around to that in the fall.
2. This second image is also a new plant, another dahlia.
3. Over the last few years I’ve been planting a lily garden in the “shell yard” of our house. I demarked it from the shelled area with a few stones. The most recent addition, which I put in a couple of days ago, is the lonely-looking guy in the foreground. It’ll propagate and spread, and, if necessary, I’ll separate the “babies” to get a fuller look. I think this will be the last addition to this area.
4. I’ve been seeing “top lists” of movies being blogged up lately, and I don’t want to be left out. I don’t rank them in order (yet), but the ones listed here are definitely on my list. Excalibur. This version of the King Arthur story is just stunning. Nicol Williamson’s portrayal of Merlin is worth the price of admission. One of my favorite movie lines (the words, the delivery, the setting): Merlin: “It is the doom of men that they forget.”
5. Breaker Morant. The first wave of Australian-made films came along back in the seventies (or sixties, or eighties, who cares). They seemed to me to have a different sensibility or something. Anyway, this one has stuck in my mind all this time. Three Aussie soldiers fighting in the Boer War shoot a prisoner (following orders, or at least tacit orders), and (for political reasons) get court-martialed for it. It was based upon a book called Scapegoats of the Empire, I think, I’ll try to look up the author. I did look it up. The book was written by George Witton, who was tried with the others but got life instead of death. Interesting history on the book.
6. Unforgiven. The best Western ever made? Well, I don’t know about all that, but this was a heck of a movie. Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece, if you ask me. Unforgettable line: The evil sheriff (Gene Hackman) rails at Eastwood for shooting an unarmed man. Eastwood: “He should have armed himself.” A bit out of context, but, then, aren’t some of the best movie lines, as they lock themselves in our memories, out of context?
7. Alien. Here’s Twoblueday on Sci-Fi movies: 99.9% of them suck, blow, and are a waste of film, a soup sandwich as it were. This opinion comes from a guy who loved to read sci-fi as a young dude, but has pretty much abandoned it as an adult. This movie is pretty much a haunted-house movie set in a spaceship named “Nostromo” (a Josheph Conrad novel). The follow-up movies rank from okay to terrible, but the original is a classic (whatever the word “classic” means).
8. Nosferatu. Cheating a bit here, I include both the old black-and-white film and the later version starring Klaus Kinski. They shoulda quit making vampire movies after these two.
9. The Hunt for Red October. I know I’m chiming in with others who’ve made this a top-100 choice. I think I may have seen this film, or snippets of it, more than any other. If I’m channel-surfing, and come across it in progress, I almost cannot turn it off. Worth the price of admission to hear Sean Connery say “Buckaroo.”
10. Yesterday we drove to Osterville to a framing shop. I wanted some of my photos re-mounted (I’m going to enter some of them in the Barnstable County Fair). While there we ate at Wimpy’s. Naturally, we had the Wimpy Burger (the bison version). Yummy. The Tiger Woods/Rocco Mediate playoff was on the telly, and there was much chit chat amongst us and our fellow patrons at the bar and the bartender (boy, this sentence blows!). I didn’t know who to pull for (it’s hard not to pull for Tiger, but the “old” feller had a lot of appeal for me–personality that won’t quit). Greg Norman’s famous collapse at the Master’s tournament came up, and a fellow said he and his son had bumped into Mr. Norman somewhere, and all the Shark wanted to talk about was baseball. Hmmm. For no reason at all a fellow I’d been acquainted with while practicing law in Miami came into my head. He had actually beaten Tiger Woods in match play in the Dixie Amateur in 1993. He, the lawyer, was about 40 at the time I’d guess, and Mr. Woods was probably 17 or so. The lawyer in question had been an All-American golfer at Michigan State. I regaled the crew at Wimpy’s with this story. I even gave the lawyer’s name, in case they wanted to look it up: Rick Woulfe.
Okay, out for today.
K.
