Just a few random observations in no particular order:

I love my nieces more than anything in the world.

I think I want to buy a small brick house with a nice tree in the front yard somewhere close to them.

Miss Carole Lombard and Miss Myrna Loy are getting some serious flippin’ competition from Norma Shearer as my favorite.classic.actress.ever.

Although I have access to the internets here, my email client is set up only to receive, not to send. If you’ve sent me email in the last six days, I’ve received it and will reply once I get home.

Fraiser is funnier than hell, but Niles is even funnier. Roz is hot and so is Daphne.

Dreaming about S! J! S! is always a good thing (young Sarah Jane or old Sarah Jane) and even better when there’s lots of hugging, even if it is only (ummm…somewhat) platonic. Throw in a background of a weird dystopian setting and being on the run from the government with S! J! S! and you’ve got a recipe for a dream I never wanted to end.

1939

I keep finding Carole Lombard movies I’d forgotten about - like this one. I’ve had it for at least a couple of years, if not more and watched it last night because my copy of Plan 9 From Outer Space has gone missing. Or it’s hiding from me. I haven’t decided which it is. I’m not a terribly big fan of Jimmy Stewart, but he’s likable enough in this film. There’s nothing to say about Carole Lombard, naturally. The woman can do no wrong. This movie was interesting because I saw one scene where the scar she had on her left cheek was plainly visible; I’ve read she preferred not to have the left side of her face filmed because of it.

and each time in Warsaw!”

Vermont, that is. I watched one of my new Carole Lombard movies mentioned in my last post. Nothing Sacred is an entertaining little film, one I’m glad I’ve added to my growing collection of classics (thanks, Mike, for the tip!). The version I received isn’t the best and the color is a bit washed out, but it’s watchable.

I’m giving serious thought to getting rid of my television, since a) I don’t subscribe to cable (shades of Fahrenheit 451?) and probably never will, b) I get no television reception, anyway, and c) in order to get the screen caps I’m collecting and uploading to Flickr, I need to use the computer.

The thing holding me back from that is the immense VHS library I’ve got. Granted, I don’t pull out tapes very often these days, but I would hate to lose the ability to watch what I’ve got because I no longer have a television. I’m sure there’s a way to feed a VCR into a computer, but I’ve no more idea of how to do such a thing than I do change the oil in my car.

I think I’ll Google it now and see what I can find out.

It’s not often a television program jack-rabbits its way onto my shortlist of favorites: to wit, how long did it take for the obsession with Doctor Who to blossom?

Not so with The IT Crowd. It’s a gem, no doubt about it; I’ve just rewatched the first two seasons and still find it funny, side-splittingly so, if not absolutely funnier the second time around. I was plagued with the silent type of laughing, as well as the guffawing and outright snorting at least a dozen times each episode.

This is the type of program I must watch in its entirety, if possible…but not all in one sitting. Heaven forbid I don’t drag it out as long as humanly possible. But until TITC was viewed from the first to the last episode, I could not move on to other things.

And those other things include a backlog of the Doctor and seven new Carole Lombard movies I’ve had now for a week and haven’t made any attempt to watch. And with the absolute obsession I’ve got for both, it’s a good indication of how brilliant (most of the time) TITC is.

I’ve lived by a man’s code designed to fit a man’s world, yet at the same time I never forget that a woman’s first job is to choose the right shade of lipstick. –Carole Lombard

Here it is…the post I hope will cover the myriad observations, conversations, and situations over the past couple of weeks. Although it will be far from complete, here’s to remembering most of them, at least those not having to do with the factory proper. That may be tomorrow’s post.

By far the most noteworthy and exciting conversation took place just two days ago, at the factory, no less. A customer called to teasingly yank my chain about some pieces he’d picked up and then segued into an almost one-sided monologue about wanting to take me to lunch…to meet his sister. Yes, you read that correctly. He wants us to meet because, and since I expressed it so wonderfully in a recently sent email, I will shamelessly quote myself now and hope I don’t break any copyright laws:

…I nearly dropped the phone. “We’ll go to lunch one day!” he exclaimed. “She’s a really neat girl, Mickey Glitter and I think you’ll really like each other…you do know what I’m talking about, right?” I noised some sort of affirmative sound in the back of my throat and he continued, “I figure, if she’s going to go down the road she’s going down…well, never mind. I just want to make sure she knows some good people. And you don’t know how much I care for you and blah blah blah…” That’s about when my ears turned off and I just kept the phone to my ear. It might just be talk, but it might not be. Even if it is, it’s the most exciting thing to happen to me in a long time.

Maybe I should have left that bit for the end of the post, seeing that it really is the biggest event in my life over the past fourteen days. Isn’t it traditional to leave the best to last? Onto other happenings, Home Improvements for Amusement continues: I broke down and bought a real. grown-up. coffee maker. today. It has a clock and can be set to brew so a nice, fresh pot of coffee is ready when I wake up. This may be more difficult than I’d like it to be, since I’m waking up anywhere between half past one and three every morning. I’m glad to have the extra time back, since my over-all productivity is increased, but I really wish I knew how to sleep until at least eight or nine on the weekends…

The Library File Fiasco has been corrected (this is my oh, so clever name for the recent digital clusterfuck I got myself into) and I’ve got about 95% of my computer back to the way it was, albeit with a hell of a lot more disk space available at the end of the day. There’s still a backup program I need to download, plus a firewall utility, but as far as software, that’s all I’ve left to address. It’s another story completely with iTunes, though. Thankfully, my music is all on an external hard drive; my many playlists, though are not and right now are only available on my iPod. I spent some time this morning importing my more popular playlists to iTunes, but I haven’t gotten them all quite yet. I’ve decided to go this route to keep iTunes a little less cluttered than it has been. When one has over three thousand songs on file, it can be a bit painful even just to look at the list.

I’m continuing to work through quite a few movies I’ve downloaded over the last couple of years. So far, the sweetest find in my collection was Swing High, Swing Low - and only because of my recent discovery of and subsequent semi-obsession with Carole Lombard. I went through the same thing very recently with Merle Oberon and Myrna Loy, but my obsession with Merle Oberon lasted only long enough to get me through The Scarlet Pimpernel and Wuthering Heights. On the other hand, my DVD collection now contains almost as many Myrna Loy movies as it does Honor Blackman.

And while I’m on the subject of movies, I have absolutely fallen for Buster Keaton, hook, line, and sinker and no mistake. There are quite a few of his films in my collection, as well and I’ve watched all of them, or at least most of them. Is it fair to call Limelight a Buster Keaton movie, when his was such a small role, so small you’d miss it if you went to get more popcorn? After I read his name in the credits (do you think I would study the DVD packaging and figure it out long before I even put the DVD in the player?), I watched impatiently for the precious few scenes he shared with Charlie Chaplin. And although there were two, maybe three, seeing those two legends of Hollywood perform together for what I’ve read was the first time…ever…made even struggling to find something redeeming about Claire Bloom’s character worth the Herculean effort.

More to follow on the morrow, an hour later now that daylight savings time is kicking into gear. God, I detest this government regulated time change. Maybe I should move to Arizona so I can free myself of it.

This is, I think, my favorite picture of Carole Lombard. Ever. Well, maybe my favorite of the three I have. I’ve got three pictures and three movies. There’s some sort of weird synchronicity there, I think. Until a couple of years ago, I honestly had no interest in exploring Lombard’s films at all, but I’m not sure why. I must have had a good reason, or at least thought I’d had one.

The Alfred Hitchcock box set I bought at Costco served as my introduction to Lombard; the entire set was a strange mix of what I knew of Hitchcock (Dial M for Murder) and what I didn’t (Stage Fright, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Foreign Correspondent). Oddly enough, the only movie out of the four I didn’t really enjoy was Dial M for Murder, the only one with which I was familiar.

Of the three Lombard movies I own (and the only ones I’ve ever seen), My Man Godfrey is easily my favorite because Lombard is absolutely wonderful in her role as Irene Bullock and because I love William Powell. Take a look at the list on celluloid-a-go-go and you’ll see what I mean…but you’ll have to do some hunting and pecking. It’s not often I say I love an actor (inclusion of any actor portraying Doctor Who on this list cannot be expected, nor can the inclusion of Patrick Macnee). Seriously, I could name them on one hand, and two of my fingers wouldn’t count.

At any rate, the reason why I’m waxing so unexpectedly about these Hollywood legends is to counter on some excuse-ridden level my recent foray into exploitation movies. I’m talking about the likes of Reefer Madness (which I am currently watching) and Sex Madness (which is up next in the queue). I can only laugh at the first one and I’m sure the same will be true for the second. I’d like to add more of these to my collection because they’re so horrible and what movie collection is complete without a section of bad classics?