Monday, September 18, 2017

The Rain and the Sun Together

Started off the day - and continued to test the new DVD player - with a first season Backyardigans episode. Pablo, Uniqua, and Tyrone can't decide on whether to play something fast, thrilling, or funny. Tasha suggests a "High Tea" party. This is met with groans from the others. Tea parties are boring! Not the way Tasha does them. She takes the kids off an adventure to the jungles of Borneo, the palace of the Emperor of China (Austin), and the Gobi Desert to find the right ingredients for the perfect cup of tea.

Worked on writing for the rest of the morning and early afternoon. Jasper tries to ask Leia out to dinner, but she refuses. He's flabby, sweaty, and vulgar, not to mention a gangster. She wants nothing to do with him. He has distractions anyway. He's about ready to unveil his newest act. 

To Leia's horror, two men pull off a canvas tarp to reveal Hank in a cage, mostly naked and covered in white makeup to resemble a living statue. He's in a heavily drugged haze, enough to obey Jasper's commands to dance for the crowd. Jasper calls him a Grecian warrior who was enchanted by a wizard...and as the wizard's "descendant," he is now the only one who can awaken the "statue." His bodyguard Babe Fortuna holds Leia back as he returns the "statue" to his cage, setting him up in the lobby to be displayed like a decoration.

Charlie and Lance meet her in a quiet corner of the casino floor. She's more determined than ever to get Hank - and all of them - out of there. The trio make plans as people begin to move elsewhere for the evening...

Switched back to a homemade DVD when I broke for lunch. (After getting a call for Charlie that he planned on turning off the water to work on a clogged sewer pipe. Whatever. I was going to have yogurt and muffins anyway.) The Muppet Babies Video Storybooks were what they said on the tin - a series of made-for-video shorts, each based around one of the Muppet Babies picture books of the mid-80's. They were made with minimal animation and look as cheap as they probably are, but the stories are charming, and they do feature wrap-arounds and narration by the adult Kermit, and in the episode I watched, Robin.

Kermit tries to read Robin stories to get him to go to sleep, but he keeps asking for more. The first has a bored Gonzo imagining he's a pirate following a "treasure map" on the back of a cereal box, and discovers how much fun creating stories in your mind can be. In the second story, Baby Piggy's holding a ball for all her dolls. Gonzo wants to play too, but she says no. He'd ruin the party. She learns just how snobbish she was acting when her beloved clown doll acts out and ruins things anyway...and she still forgives him, because she's his friend. The third has Kermit, who refuses to sleep, dreaming he helps a knight who didn't get a good night's rest rescue a beautiful princess from a fire-breathing dragon.

I ended up spending the first half of work in the registers. A cashier had called out, and they needed extra help. It wasn't so bad when I came in, but rush hour was insane, with very long lines. Today was the end of a four-day sale, and the Giants played Monday Night Football. (Incidentally, the Detroit Lions mauled them 24-10.) It was so bad, they finally pulled me out of the registers around quarter of 5 to do carts. I also ended up doing some bagging. 

(Incidentally, the weather was really weird tonight. It was sunny for most of the day, until around 4:30, when the clouds started to build...sort of. We were showered on by one big, thick cloud for about ten minutes. By the time I finished, the clouds were gone and the sun had returned.)

While it wasn't as hot as it has been, thanks to a nice, cool breeze, it was still really humid. I went straight into the shower when I got home. I bought two cans of soup that were on clearance (along with milk and bakery chocolate chip cookies) on my way home. I settled on having Beef Vegetable Soup for dinner. 

Since the book I'm currently reading, Mercedes Lackey's version of Beauty and the Beast titled The Fire Rose, is set in San Francisco just prior to the 1906 earthquake, I thought I'd watch the 1936 movie San Francisco tonight. Mary Blake (Jeanette MacDonald) arrives at Blackie Norton's (Clark Gable) Barbary Coast night club without a cent to her name, looking for a singing job. He hires her, and the two eventually fall for each other. Blackie's buddy Father Tim (Spencer Tracy) thinks Mary could do better. So does Jack Burley (Jack Holt), who wants her to sing at his opera house. Mary doesn't want to break her contract, but changes her mind when Blackie tries to push their relationship too hard. Meanwhile, Blackie's trying to get onto the San Francisco Board of Directors, hoping to reform fire codes and vice in the Coast. Burley, who owns some of those firetrap tenements, doesn't like this at all and arranges to have Blackie's saloon shut down. Mary sings in his honor at a local ball and wins a prize. Blackie turns it away...and instantly regrets it when the earth rumbles beneath them, the ground splits open, and all hell literally breaks loose.

Classic early disaster film set the mold for many that came after it. While Gable, Tracy, MacDonald, and Holt aren't bad (Tracy was Oscar-nominated; the sound recording won), the real stars of this film are the still-amazing special effects in the last 20 minutes. Even today, the sequence is incredible, with all the falling debris and cracked floors. 

If you love the cast, old-fashioned romantic melodrama, or disaster movies, this is one of the earliest and best of the genre. 

Oh, and first of all, as you may have guessed from the shower, the water's back on. Second, Richard said he was going to look at the outlet. I'm guessing he did. It's now covered by duct tape. He hasn't told me exactly what happened, but my guess is the outlet is old and finally died.

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