To mix Firefly with a Christian proverb, the 'verse works in mysterious ways.
I'd be lying to claim that I had stopped posting just because Scooter passed five weeks ago. Given that posting had already slowed to a crawl, that would have been a nice, self-pitying pretext. Fortunately, the rest of May helped the mourning go more easily.
The actual reason for the pause was all the road travel (Nebraska for one weekend, Houston for the next and barbeque-famous Lockhart, Texas, for the following week), and lots of time with the siblings. All four of my sisters and I spent the turn of the month together with my dad, for the first time in six years. Good times, actually.
Anyway, I'm just saying 'hi,' here, hopefully to start posting more regularly. After the sun comes up again: an Euro 2012-related Friday Double.
Episode 22: Time and Again First aired: 27 January 1974 Author: Ian Martin
A clock maker times the time:
And the last thing I heard that night... was the triumphant beat of the clock, sounding my inner ear. Or was it the sound of my heart? -- Ethan Vigil
Back in 2000, I was thrilled to learn that someone at a Pacific 12 university had posted almost the entire run of CBS Radio Mystery Theater. As a relatively affluent and experienced Internet user, I was happy to have an ultra-fast 56k modem with which to download. Sure, it took 45 minutes to pull in one episode; but at two (maybe even three!) a night, I could have the whole set loaded onto Zip cartridges sometime in 2003. Woo-hoo! Progress!
Well before then, I had downloaded my favorites, and even put a few of them on a CD I took to Chicago as 2000 came to a close. As usually happened every Christmas holiday season until 2003, my sisters brought their kids (and one grandchild), and we had a family reunion. My original plan was to listen to my freshly downloaded episodes on my father's computer his den, by myself. Now that the kids were also in town, I came up with a better idea.
One night just before the New Year, at a few minutes to midnight, I convinced three cousins -- aged 8, 8 and 6-1/2 -- to join me. While I sat at the computer, they formed a small arc behind me. As second- and third-graders, my nieces and nephew were too young for most horror stories, but "Time and Again" held exactly the right amount of terror and excitement for supervised kids that age. They shook and fidgeted with fear, combined with a grim, shared determination to stay until the end. To their credit, they stayed -- and then they asked me to play "Time and Again" for them again.
The youngest of them will graduate from high school next May, but all three still cherish the memory of that amusing night.
So far as I know, "Time and Again" is entirely original, but the if teaser has brought a Twilight Zoneepisode or two to mind, that would be easy to understand. Like the hyperlinked teleplays, Ian Martin's play, his fourth for Radio Mystery Theater, centers on someone who finds an object that can stop time. But only in "Time and Again" does the using that object exact a price.
Oddly enough, this story about time doesn't specify when the action takes place. It's certainly in the past, because host E.G. Marshall tells us that he's reading a note left behind from one Ethan Vigil (John Beal). The note quickly tells its reader that Ethan ekes out a living by making and repairing clocks. His work, in fact, doesn't pay the bills -- he has to share expenses and his home with his chronically ill wife Henrietta (Grace Matthews) and her hard-nosed sister Harriet (Bryna Raeburn). Even then, they've been able to wire a telephone into their residence, but must still rely on kerosene lanterns to fulfill their lighting needs. Some people have cars, but not the Vigils. All the clues point to a Prohibition-era urban setting, but nothing more definite.
As the story begins, Ethan has closed his shop for the night when a derelict barges in with an unusual clock with several unusual features -- including the number 13 at the top of its face. His decision to buy the clock draws Harriet's ire, not least because he's been burning too much kerosene for her comfort.
No matter how much Ethan tinkers with it, the clock itself refuses to work -- until sickly Henrietta sticks her hand in its hourglass-shaped case. The moment she pricks her finger inside the case, the clock starts. It runs, all right, but with a bizarre rhythm.
Like all the other working clocks, this one eventually strikes midnight, as Ethan and his doctor are playing chess.
For everyone but Ethan, time stops.
Ethan finds himself able to move about freely, but for exactly one hour, the world stops frozen around him. That hour passes for him and him alone, and he can now explain the number 13 on his clock's face. It happens again at noon, then at midnight, and so on. Twice a day, the rest of the world freezes, leaving Ethan to do whatever he wishes, unopposed.
It all seems like harmless fun until Henrietta falls ill again. Whatever is ailing her this time proves unstoppable, sapping her life force until she's finally too tired to take another breath. Although it doesn't happen right away, Ethan eventually discovers a connection between his extra two hours a day, his wife's passing and "that damnable machine." Meanwhile, we listeners get to observe the destructive power of Ethan's new addiction -- something that proves well beyond the reach of any twelve-step program.
One of my big objections to horror stories is that so many of them require stupid protagonists to work. "Time and Again" comes awfully close to that cliché, but much of its suspense comes from watching Ethan finally "get it." Anyway, it worked out for my nieces and my nephew when they were grade-schoolers. They got to experience the creepiness, while avoiding the gore that had become too common in horror movies even in 1974. It would work as well in a Goosebumps novella as it did for adults 37 years ago.
Here is Scooter, sleeping in a new spot. That blue comforter Scooter loves is now serving as an everyday bed cover, so she now sleeps everywhere on the bed, not just the corner where her blanket lives.
I don't really care where she sleeps, actually. I'm just grateful she made it through a rough winter that included two illnesses and a pair of huge guest dogs that (shockingly) didn't submit to her will. It all left her a bit traumatized, but she's slowly started to reclaim her old napping spots outside my bedroom. As of two days ago, she's graced my life for thirteen years. She was about a year old when I adopted her, so now she's 14 years old. Here's hoping she has quite a few more left with me.
...because it's way too broad. Anyway, I have Baja California Sur playing defense/special teams for the Fluttering Horde next season. Maybe just trade the Texas GOP for Acapulco?
I hate when this happens: I spend hours working on a new blog post (this one about the Rebecca Black fiasco), make the edits, add the pictures and links, and proofread it one last time. Upon that final review, I then realize that I've said either nothing or, even worse, overextended my logic the way Napoleon sent his armies too far. The grammar is sound, the spelling is all correct, but the post is just an unreadable mess.
In almost a hundred posts on this blog, I've somehow managed to avoid any mention of one of my passions, the movie soundtrack. A good score can make a bad movie tolerable; and, as John Williams demonstrated in The Empire Strikes Back, it can make a good movie one of its decade's best. If it weren't for Sam Spence's scores for NFL Films and its weekly highlight shows in the 1970s, I would probably have never developed any taste at all for music.
Superior scores are probably the best reason either Out of Africa (1985) or Dances with Wolves (1990) won an Oscar for Best Picture. Without the lush John Barry scores that also graced 11 James Bond movies and numerous other works over 40 years, Wolves might have still won on novelty1; but the execrable Africa would have had no chance. Barry's passing yesterday at age 77 brought to mind a couple of personal memories.
The theme from Born Free, which won John Barry his first two Oscars in 1966 (for both theme and overall score), might actually be my first memory, period. Kids gravitated towards the theme song, which finished twelfth on the 1966 Billboard Top 100. Even as a toddler, I couldn't get enough of it; and that only intensified once I became old enough to adore and admire the kitties lions in the movie itself. As I turned five years old, I kept wondering when it would next show up on TV. Several years would pass before I realized it, but Born Free's soundtrack was the first one I enjoyed for its own sake. (Barry's Bond scores to that point soon followed.)
His last Oscar came for the Dances with Wolves score, a cassette copy of which I owned a little over thirteen years ago. Along with almost all my other worldly possessions, that little tape was in the car I was driving to California. Day three of that moving trip stretched from the desolation of central Wyoming to the desolation of northern Nevada. Outside the environs of Salt Lake City and Reno, my listening choices on the radio were minimal. Whenever I encountered mountains, especially in Nevada, those choices dropped to nothing, not even classical-music NPR stations.
From Carlin, Nevada, Interstate 80 climbs into the last such dead zone, which includes the Emigrant Pass, a dual tunnel and, finally, the Twin Summits. At the western end of the zone, the road curves gently into one last hill.
As it happened that day in late January, I popped that Dances with Wolves cassette into my car's tape player. The first two cuts played as I crossed the dead zone. Then, at the top of the last hill, this played:
I could see the Interstate dropping into yet another vast, desolate plain, marred with the low ridges that define that part of Nevada. As the short prelude of low strings played on my stereo, the haze of the Summits made the ridges in the background appear as one. At exactly the moment the high strings cued in, the single ridge began splitting into its components, each ridge seeming to split from its neighbors. The timing between the music inside my car and the developing scenery outside was so exquisite, it made me believe in a higher power.
Somewhere far above, with John Barry as spokesman, God was welcoming me to the West.
Or not. The date was 22 January 1998. When NPR came back into listening range several minutes later, the first thing I heard was President Bill Clinton -- swearing to the nation that he "did not have sex with that woman."
Last Friday, the thermometers here in Chicagoland dropped below zero degrees. Farenheit. The good news was that I had a heavy jacket ready to go. It kept me nice and toasty, even though I had to fill a gas tank in the deep freeze.
Super. Spiffy. Genius.
The bad news was that it was a Cleveland Browns jacket. I spent all day assuring the cashiers that, yes, I did have my orange Brian Urlacher jersey ready to go at 1400 Sunday afternoon. Well, it was, but I ended up wearing my super-spiffy Bears polo shirt instead.
Gotta dress properly on Sunday afternoon, don't ya know.
Anyway, it occurred to me that several of my football posts have involved uniforms and shirts, so now the blog gets a new main category for fashion. As before, these will concentrate on the sometimes awful things athletes wear on the field, and things fans wear to games, but it's still fashion.
Like all right-thinking Chicago Bears fans*, I was sad to see them lose last night's NFC title game to that terrorist front NFL team from Wisconsin. Among the numerous failures from head coach Lovie Smith and quarterback Jay Cutler, the 21-14 loss was the most painful to endure.
These are from last season, but they would've fit right in yesterday.
First, there's Cutler's showing. I'm not talking about what he did on the field. That mess came as no surprise, given that the Packer defense had previously vexedhisbetters and caused the firing of two headcoaches. It's Cutler's behavior after his injury-triggered benching that turned his performance into an epic FAIL. Instead of standing by his teammates and providing encouragement, he spent most of the second half sitting on the bench, alone, with his head hung low. Maybe the producers at FOX Sports were just messing with us Bears fans, but their images of Cutler on the bench are those of a quarterback who has lost his team. It was backup QB Caleb Hanie who rallied the Bears and rocked the Packers on their feet. He, not Jay Cutler, almost turned a blowout loss into a legendary game.
And Hanie would've done it, too, if it hadn't been for that meddling head coach of his. On the final drive, Hanie had his players lined up for a classic power sweep against a confused and unprepared Packer defense. Just as Matt Forte made the turn on a devastating third-down power sweep (oh, devastating irony!), the whistle blew, stopping the play.
Lovie Smith, Super Genius, had called a time out.
Instead of helping the Bears, that pause gave the Packer defense time to reorganize. Even worse, Smith changed his team's call into a disastrous pitch play to Chester Taylor that lost three yards. The next play was a desperate fourth-down pass that the Packers promptly intercepted, sealing the Bears' fate.
Aaarrrrrgh. D'oh. Crikey. It was Cutler and Smith at their worst, at the worst possible time.
Oh, well. I was expecting a 4-12 season from this group, so I'm happy the Bears got this far.
Well, here at the edge of Chicagoland, we've been treated to another white Christmas. All the snow came yesterday during a day-long shower. It's pretty enough, but the temperature is right around the freezing point of water. The show on the streets iced up, so even walking got slippery this morning.
Oh, well. It's Christmas, and we didn't have plans to go out. The salt can wait until tomorrow.
Here's what happened: After his Buffalo Bills had forced visiting Pittsburgh into overtime, the Steelers left wide receiver Steve Johnson wide open for a winning touchdown pass. Bills QB Ryan Fitzpatrick threw a perfect strike... which Johnson then dropped. The Steelers later won with a field goal. If the post-game press conference didn't make Johnson's distress clear, his later Twitter message drove it home.
The reaction was swift, negative and, as typified by TMZ's snarky remark about the tweet, utterly wrong. We often see athletes who score a winning play thanking God; why not, as George Carlin once suggested, blame God once in a while for a failure? Johnson deserves a shout-out, not condemnation, for admitting to blaming God. In any event, it's not as though he hadn't already blamed himself for that dropped pass.
Enough with the flames, people. Most of you would do exactly what he did.
Fantasy update: Well, my season is going to the dogs. Key players keep failing, and some with high profiles are now headed to my benches.
Exhibit A: overall first pick Chris Johnson, who gained a grand total of 7 yards in Tennessee's 20-0 loss at Houston. Any kind of decent performance would've put the Middlemen in striking distance, but instead, they lost to No Clue 2010, 120-104. It didn't help that No Clue had Tom Brady, Wes Welker and BenJarvus Green-Ellis (total: eight touchdowns), but with Antonio Gates still hobbled, I needed help from C.J. He provided none. Until the Titan offense regains its senses, starting C.J. is pointless.
Exhibit B: Peyton Manning, who also had his worst game in years. It contributed mightily to The Fluttering Horde's 99-74 loss to Flying Hawai'ian 3. Theoretically, Manning should bounce back next week at Dallas. In reality, his Fluttering Horde season has come to a shockingly early end. Injuries have taken away the Colts running game and most of their receivers. I'm sure Manning will perform well, and he may even win out. What he can't do now is score fantasy points, so Atlanta's Matt Ryan will assume quarterback duties for the rest of the season.
Episode 1322: The Woman Who Wanted to Live First aired: 14 June 1982 Author: Bryce Walton
Dude, it's on!
I should do you a favor? Walk to my place of execution? -- Liza to Ray Bardon
Hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving. Here's a hint for the future: Achiote and cilantro turn out to be excellent ingredients for your turkey-basting sauce. It sounds crazy, but the meat is delicious.
The CBS Radio Mystery Theater had almost a year's notice of its cancellation. CBS permitted the 1982 season to proceed, but declined to extend it into 1983. Perhaps not surprisingly, producer Himan Brown opened RMT to all sorts of experimental scripts. With Tammy Grimes assuming Marshall's host duties, the 1982 season featured some of the series' worst episodes, some of its best, and a few that reached just beyond their grasp.
"The Woman Who Wanted to Live," which aired in June, might be the best of the 1982 lot, so it was disappointing to learn that it was originally an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Two decades after penning the original screenplay for the half-hour AHP, Bryce Walton expanded it into the hour-long radio episode.
It's literally a dark and stormy night on the Gulf Coast. Convicted murderer Ray Bardon (Larry Haines) has escaped from prison, but at serious cost. The gunshot wound he's just suffered doesn't require immediate attention, but it has left him too weak to keep running on his own. If he is to avoid recapture, someone else will have to drive him to another state.
His first chance to bum a ride comes at an isolated gas station, whose hapless attendant informs him that the vehicle parked outside is actually disabled. A disbelieving Bardon kills him; but before he can hide the body or move on, the titular woman (Roberta Maxwell) pulls into the station. By now, word of Bardon's escape has spread, and young Liza makes the mistake of identifying him out loud. Bardon is ready to kill her on the spot, too, but Liza stays calm. She convinces him that killing her would be a mistake; that would still leave him stranded. Instead, he carjacks her.
To buy time, and maybe a way out of her situation, Liza agrees to help Bardon -- but she doesn't submit. As she drives him past this flooded-out road and that police checkpoint, she's engaged him in a serious battle of wits, and he knows it. But does he really understand the severity of this battle -- or the lengths to which she will go to survive the encounter?
The joy of the story isn't in its outcome, but in the path Liza takes. She may start out as a damsel in distress, but that image fades quickly. She quickly gains advantage and initiative, but we have to wait until the end to discover whether she can use either. It's Liza's trip that makes "The Woman Who Wanted to Live" one of RMT's best episodes.
Rating: 98/100.
Notes:
The 1962 television version featured Charles Bronson as Bardon.
Act I is one of only two in the entire series -- 4197 acts -- that consists of a single, continuous scene. The other is Act I of "A Ring of Roses" (Episode 13). [Perhaps not coincidentally, "Ring" is also one my favorites.] Furthermore, these are two of only 22 RMT episodes in which all three acts share the same musical curtain. [To be fair, as a sign of the series' declining fortunes, 16 of those aired in its last 18 months.]
Bryce Walton was probably best known as a frequent contributor to the science-fiction pulps of the 1940s and '50s, though he also wrote mystery stories in the '60s. "Woman" is one of four RMT episodes he wrote, and one of six from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. [But it's the only one to appear in both series.]
Up until now, I've despised AutoTune. It turns out that, until now, no one has made good use of it. Enjoy this Quote of the Month nominee from Jacob Isom, Texan skateboarder and now national hero.
Administrivia
The Victory Weighted standings for the new NFL season are up. Expect three updates every Sunday and a fourth late Monday night.
I learned of this video from Informed Comment, Juan Cole's most excellent daily notes on the Muslim world. Not surprisingly, its emphasis these days are on the AfPak theater and Iraq.
I've been playing around at the edges of the blog design, adding and dropping widgets, and enjoying the new Pages feature. A purplish button bar now separates the title from the posts; and right now, it has a button marked, "Victory Weighting." Press it, and you'll find a page explaining what Victory Weighting is (an alternative standings scheme for NFL games) and why I think the NFL should adopt it. Last year, I put the Victory Weighted standings in a widget at the bottom of the page. This year, they'll live on a semi-permanent page of their own, and you'll be able to get to it via the purple button bar.
I love, love, love this new feature, and the toolbar widget Google provided to go with it. Thanks, Google! (But no thanks for trying to cut a side deal with Verizon! Bad business, there.)
So Germany applied a big smackeroo to Australia, 4-0. The win didn't surprise me, but the margin did. More to the point, with star Tim Cahill out for a red-card offense, the Aussies' chances to advance sunk through the floor. If they want to succeed at something this month, maybe they should apply for Pac-10 membership.
In the meantime, that bracket I posted last Tuesday now lies in ruins. I had tipped the U.S. to reach the semifinals, but that assumed that the Yanks would win Group C and draw Australia in the round of 16. The Aussies are pretty much out, and with them go the American's most realistic hopes of even getting to the quarter-finals.
At this point, it's pointless to keep posting my picks until the first round has finished. Crazy things will happen, so I anticipate posting something about the Cup every day or two. Just not daily predictions.
This was not a good day for AT&T's Internet customers in the Midwest. When I couldn't connect to either this blog or the other Google-based blogs I frequent, I figured it was just another minor Google glitch that corrects itself in a few minutes. After several hours and a bit of research, it turned out that AT&T had been blocking access to Blogger and Blogspot. The only affected areas are in the Midwest, where Ameritech used to provide phone service. As of this writing, the folks who run Blogger were still working on the problem, presumably with AT&T.
I ended up having to reset the DSL modem, and that's when things got really weird. Usually, service resumes the moment I reset the modem. This time, though, the modem forced me to go through the AT&T setup process again. Even worse, when I tried to run the setup through the primary computer (a Windows XP machine), both Internet Exploder and Firefox warned me that the process was taking me to an unsecured site. To solve the problem, I had to finally call AT&T. "Andy," the techie on the other end, did a great job, helping me run the setup manually.
The good news is that Andy did a great job. The bad news is that AT&T has dropped the ball regarding access to Google. I shouldn't have had to reset the modem, let alone making that tech-support call. Grrr.
Hi! "Take one" was something called "Shaddup and Eat Yet Burritos," which also lived on Blogspot. I had hoped it would be a general-purpose blog, but somehow, it turned instead into a football blog. That really wasn't what I wanted. At the beginning of this year, I had to turn my attention to more pressing matters, like moving halfway across North America. Of course, I could have just added new posts to the old blog, whose last entry was in January. On further review, however, I decided to move the blog to a new place. For one thing, it was inspired by the fact that I was living in Maricopa County, home of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his anti-immigrant obsessions. While Illinois has plenty of immigrants, the obssession isn't as strong, so the title doesn't mean as much. More to the point, it occurred to me that I have something else to talk about in a blog. One of my favorite things about the 1970s was the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, the nine-year, 1400-episode extravaganza that marked the end of radio drama in the U.S. I have quite a few things to say about CBSRMT, enough for years' worth of weekly or bi-weekly posts. Hence: The Ghost-Grey Cat. The new title is a play on "The Ghost-Grey Bat," one of the best horror installments of the entire CBSRMT run. I'll discuss this episode, and CBSRMT in general, in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, the NFL season has started again, so I'll first talk about Victory Weighting, my proposal for making sudden-death overtime periods fairer to the teams that have to endure them. Happily, the Titans and Steelers gave me more material last night. Anyway, welcome to The Ghost-Grey Cat!
