Stephen King

I've never read and of Stephen King's books. (Horror isn't my thing.) But I have seen some of the movies based on his writing.

I liked Brian de Palma's movie of Carrie.  That's the one with Sissy Spacek as a girl with a religious nut mother and nasty schoolmates, who develops telekinetic powers and burns down the whole school.  It captured that feeling of being caught between your parents and your peers and not being understood by either.

I also liked The Shawshank Redemption, with Tim Robbins as a lifer who forms an unlikely friendship with prison fixer Morgan Freeman and ultimately transcends their institution.  The Robbins character seemed to have Asperger's Syndrome, like me.

I've also seen Stanley Kubrick's movie of The Shining, with Jack Nicholson as the caretaker in an isolated, mysterious hotel who ends up going berserk and hunting his own family.  It's a controversial adaptation that King himself hated.  I get the impression that the book was about the family, while the movie was more about the hotel itself: 

a haunted-house movie on an epic scale.

I did like some of the shots, like when Nicholson looks down at a model of the hotel maze and then we see his wife and kid playing in the maze, and it's done so smoothly it's like he's looking down at them!  And I like how Nicholson held his menacing axe near the end, with the gait of a caveman.

Cigarettes

I've managed to stay clear of smoking.  But if a smoker is considerate enough to ask "Mind if I smoke?" I give him a break and let him. (Steve Martin says that if someone asks you that question you should answer, "No, mind if I fart?")

Does anyone remember the candy cigarettes they had fifty years ago?

When you see a period show like Mad Men, the characters are always smoking, which makes them rather pitiful.

Sadly, Hollywood has done a lot to promote smoking over the years.  If you see Breakfast at Tiffany's today, you'll notice that Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard smoke constantly--even in bed!  In Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea they show people smoking on board a submarine!  As recently as Titanic, they showed that Kate Winslet was a "free spirit" by having her smoke despite her mother and fiance's disapproval. (Does she smoke Virginia Slims?) That isn't just wicked, it's trite!

And it's pretty clear that the cigarette companies knew their product was harmful long ago.  Back in the 1950s they came up with the ad line, "More doctors smoke Camels"!  I say that all cigarette companies should be nationalized.  And I think that tobacco and marijuana should be treated the same.

"It's a guy thing"

Speaking as a man, I've never understood this business of women saying, "I have nothing to wear!" You aren't naked, are you?

I remember a scene in the movie Bull Durham where Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins started quarrelling and Susan Sarandon said, "Don't be such guys!"

I was reading an Arabian Nights story involving two brothers and a sister.  They had to go up this hill where all the stones were calling out to you, and if you turned around and looked at them, you'd turn into a stone too! The brothers tried to reach the top but ended up yielding to the voices and became rocks.  But when it was the sister's turn, she put cotton in her ears and got to the top.  She cheated and won.  That's the sort of way women can be smarter than men. (They have less to prove.)

On the other hand, consider this Chinese movie Raise the Red Lantern.  It's about these four women living together, all married to the same man (whom they never show). Of course, the wives keep scheming against each other, with dire results.  It seems to me that if those wives were smarter they'd unite, and scheme against the husband!  If I had four wives, that's what I'd be afraid of.  I guess that teamwork doesn't come as naturally to women as it does to men.

Resolutions

I'm not big on resolutions. (Years ago one of the wars with Iraq caused me to stop swatting flies.) It seems to me that when people talk about "will power," they really mean the power to do what other people want you to do, so it's really about their will!

One thing I don't like is movies with lame resolutions.  Years ago I saw this movie Mr. Holland's Opus, with Richard Dreyfus as a high-school music teacher.  One of the storylines involved him dealing with a smart pupil in a rather jerky way.  How do they resolve it?  Years later, when he's retiring and his former pupils come to see him again, it turns out that the smart kid has forgiven him!  Yeah, right.

I also remember in Forrest Gump where Gary Sinise is this Vietnam veteran with a severe case of PTSD, but then he spends hours raging at a hurricane and when it's over he's cured!  Yeah, right.

An eccentric person

I have to admit that I'm on the eccentric side.  You know how frozen French fires look before you put them in the oven?  I used to like eating one while they were still frozen!  I used to rub orange peels on my face.  And I have exactly 24 shirts that I wear in a regular cycle.

Some of my biggest heroes are eccentrics.  Like Mahatma Gandhi, who was a first-class kook even by India's liberal standards.  And there was Queen Desideria of Sweden.  She started out as Desiree Clary, daughter of a Marseilles silk merchant, became one of Napoleon's many lovers, then married a French general, Marshal Bernadotte, who was chosen as the next King of Sweden.  There's a Hollywood movie about her, Desiree, with Jean Simmons and Marlon Brando.  But the movie barely mentions how kooky she was:  she liked to visit the opera house after the performance was over, and take her carriage out for long nighttime rides.  And she'd invite kids in off the street and give them candy. ("Come, come" was about the only Swedish word she knew!)

For some reason, you get a lot of eccentrics in frontier societies, like Johnny Appleseed and Emperor Norton of San Francisco.  And British Columbia in the late 19th century had a politician who took the name Amor de Cosmos, meaning "love of the universe."

The fragility of life

The Chinese have a saying, "We take our socks off at night, not knowing if we'll put them on in the morning."

Speaking of fragility, I had a set of drinking glasses that broke easily.  The last of them recently developed a crack near the bottom, but I didn't care because it wasn't leaking.  The other week a relative visited and my room got Marie Kondoized. (I admit it was on the messy side.) One of the changes was that I got a big new table for my computer.

The crack in that glass had grown longer, but I still didn't care.  So of course, when I sat down at my new computer table, my glass came apart spontaneously and the table got drenched!  Hello again, mess. (I didn't tell anyone because it was my problem.)

I once had a laptop computer where the screen got cracked. (I think one of my little nieces must have sat on it.) It turned out that the warranty didn't cover a cracked screen.