2012: Whap!

Holy moly—it’s the end of the year! And here’s me unprepared thinking that the whole Mayan apocalypse thing would obviate having to do a round-up of 2012.

My bad!

Looking back on the year there are a few experiences that stand out in my mind:

That whole nightmare with my health insurance cutting me off (without mentioning it to me) five days before I had knee surgery shadowed the entire year, I’m afraid. I’m deeply grateful that people I didn’t know stepped up to the plate to help me out of a serious pickle. I learned a couple of things from that: make sure your check clears the bank. And there are government functionaries who will do their job and make a megalithic corporation back down. God bless ‘em.

I made a commitment to post to this blog five days per week, which turns out to be a considerable effort. You might not think it takes anything at all to come up with the drivel I share with you, but it does. Some days the nonsense just flows. Others I have to Google randomly for hours to find something that either amuses or outrages me enough to share it with you.

However, the House of Windsor can usually be counted on to supply me with something.

Developing back pain that, on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being “shoot me now”) was hovering at an 8, and being severely restricted by having the crappiest health insurance it’s possible to pay into, turned out to lead me to a Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioner. Not only did Dr. Woo take me from the 8 to a 4 on that scale at my first visit, he introduced me to the benefits of acupuncture.

Woo was the first chiropractor I’ve ever seen who didn’t start out by taking a flock of X-rays and then schedule me for three appointments a week until my insurance benefits ran out. He felt my pulse and checked my tongue; told me to lay off sugar, drink more water and get out and walk for 60 minutes at least a couple of times a week; and he’s given me exercises to do to strengthen my core muscles.

Until about October, I was exploring the various trails around here several mornings a week. It was pretty painless exercise, actually, and it got me out and about.

Since seeing him and running out of early morning daylight, I finally broke down and joined a gym. Okay, I didn’t join it until December, but since doing so I’ve gone there on average five mornings a week (except while I was in Sedona), cranking out 60 minutes of cardio exercise per visit. I’ve lost about four pounds, which may seem insignificant and indeed is a drop in the bucket compared to what I need to lose, but is still something positive

But I think the biggest thing for me this year was deciding to produce at least the first draft of a novel. As of this weekend I rounded the corner on 95K words. What’s really amazing to me about this is how much better I feel about pretty much everything since I started working on this. I find it a lot easier to deal with moronic recruiters (of whom there is a massive surfeit in this world), ADHD executive directors and the other vicissitudes of the Silicon Valley.

As with the blog, some days the prose flows and some days I have to Google randomly for a long time to spark something. But I’m really glad I took it on.

As for rounding up 2012 in general—I’ll leave that to Dave Barry; he’s been at it a lot longer than I have.

I particularly liked learning about the Predator drones and Waziristan.

Seasonal excess

While we’re still within the confines of the Twelve Days of Christmas, I’m going to pass on a couple of bits of seasonal weirdness.

First up is a toting up of really, seriously tacky Nativity representations. It’s truly hard to choose the worst among them, at least for me. I’m thinking the meat, butter and Spam ones are certainly way up there on the crap-o-meter.

Although the one made up of junk food is also in contention.

A spin-off from this list is the depiction of the life of Christ in…Christmas lights. Up to and including the scourging on the way to Calvary.

Never underestimate the capacity and willingness of people to go to extremes of dreck during the holidays.

He was not a bullfrog

But he was totally a straight-shootin’ son-of-a-gun.

News tonight of the death at age 78 of General Norman Schwarzkopf. I’ll just leave you with one of his comments:

"Leadership is the potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy."

Running on empty

I spent a good chunk of yesterday getting home to the Silicon Valley from Sedona—from about 1030 to 1700, door to door. And of course I have a couple of observations on this process.

USAir has to be one of the saddest carriers still limping along, flying the most dilapidated aircraft that actually make it into the air. Their flight attendants do not inspire confidence when they can’t even read that flight safety announcement. (The one from Flagstaff to Phoenix seriously had the card in front of her face, and she still couldn’t get it right.)

The thing about spending the entire day on airplanes where they give you nothing to eat but a packet of pretzels is that, with only a couple of toaster waffles in you, you arrive home absolutely empty, but too tired to cook anything.

Thank God for TJ’s holiday-only “handmade” tamales that you can nuke for a couple of minutes.

Supper club in Sedona

I had an unusual Christmas Eve this year. My sister, whom I’m visiting in Sedona for the first time, arranged for us to go out to a “supper club” holiday dinner.

It’s sort of a mix between dinner theatre, a night club and the early-bird special. There was a four-course dinner and then a small, uh, entertainment group (singers, instrumentals and really, really bad patter). Evidently it was the first time this particular establishment has done this, and they hadn’t quite worked out the pre-show organizational bugs, but the food was actually quite good and the musicians were accomplished.

What they didn’t explain was that, in order to get more people into the venue, which isn’t that big, if you were a party of two, they sat you with another party of two. When we arrived at our table, we found that a (retired) couple from Seattle were already ensconced there and had eaten all the choice bits from the cheese platter.

This pot luck seating is one of the reasons I’ve never fancied taking a cruise. (The other one is that I am not what they call a good sailor and I’ve never seen the point in paying money to spend all my time hanging over the rail, if you catch my drift.) To be seated for five hours (less the 90 minutes of the two musical sets) with a prime example of the self-absorbed, self-satisfied inhabitants of the Emerald City was just plain mean.

In all the time I was there, the husband (John) asked me exactly one question about myself—where in the Bay Area I come from. That was just a foil for him to go off at great length about how he and the wife always go to San Francisco, “which is really comparable to Seattle, although it’s not as big”.

Oh, in his bleeding dreams.

The entertainers are obviously well-known to the audience—I expect that in a town the size of Sedona, people get to know the local performers. (The Seattleites assured me that there’s a massive music scene here.) Plus—the fans were clearly well-oiled.

It was actually an enjoyable experience once I got over the whole bad-PNW-fairy thing. Definitely an experience I would ordinarily not have touched with a barge pole. So, hurrah for the Christmas spirit.

Today I’m on my way back to the Bay Area, glad for the break, for seeing my sister and for trying something different.

Holiday flash, Part 6

For Christmas, I’m giving you one more “Hallelujah” flash mob. It’s the first one I ever heard of, put on by the Philadelphia Opera Company on behalf of Random Acts of Culture at the old Philadelphia Wanamaker’s (now Macy’s) store.

If I thought I could be engulfed by one of these flash mobs, I might be enticed into a Macy’s.

At any rate—I hope your Christmas is as surprisingly wonderful as any of the holiday flash mobs I’ve shared with you over the past week or so.

Tech connections

I’m visiting my sister in Sedona for Christmas. Flew out Saturday from Oakland, through Phoenix and then on to Flagstaff, which from the air appears to have expanded since the last time I was through there 30 years ago and rolled my car.

(Yes, that’s right. I did not spin out; I did a 360-degree roll. But that’s another story.)

I brought with me: my laptop, my Kindle Fire HD tablet (an early Christmas gift, with which I’m completely besotted), my smartphone, my Zune MP3 player, a Nikon 35mm DSLR and a Nikon POS camera.

Here’s the thing: because every blinking one of these things has a different connector at the device end for either power or to transfer files, I’ve had to bring with me six bleeding cables. My roll-on was a veritable snakepit of cords.

At least I can use the same cable for my pedometer and the DSLR.

Holiday flash, Part 5

To round off our holiday flash mob week, I’ll return to “Hallelujahs” at malls.

Here it is at a shopping centre in Weinheim, Germany. Auf Deutsch.

And here is my favorite (so far) rendition of it in a mall.

I love the way people pop up to join, and then melt away after it’s over. That is the most magical thing about flash mobs.

Holiday flash, Part 4

So far, the holiday flash mobs I’ve featured have been unsponsored. (Well, the LAX one might be quasi-official, but I didn’t see any ‘sponsored by’ indicators.) So here are a couple with corporate connections. Interestingly—they’re both from airlines.

This comes to us from a carrier I personally have never heard of. WestJet livened up things for late-night passengers at the airport in Calgary.

Now, I don’t know that it meets the criteria for organic flash mobs, inasmuch as participants in these phenomena are meant to appear suddenly, do their singing/dancing schtick and then melt back into the crowd. But it’s certainly stylish & entertaining. & the passengers on the red-eye headed to Toronto looked a lot happier than you’d ordinarily expect.

Plus—that whole Blue Santa thing: extra points for the style statement.

This one features flight attendants of Cathay Pacific strutting their stuff for charity. I’ve got to say that considering these men & women have an actual, you know, day job, they do remarkably well at pulling this off.

I like the woman pushing the service cart through the aisle of flight attendants, flinging packets of peanuts around. Plus—they totally get into it when the Macarena comes up, as it apparently usually does in an airport flash mob setting.

Holiday flash, Part 3

Today’s holiday flash mobbery comes to us from airports—since airports feature heavily in many of our holiday plans.

The first one takes place in Orlando International, and is “Hallelujah”. It sounds to me like the singers get out of synch for part of it, but that has to be one of the hazards involved in doing a choral work in this kind of venue. Still—props for pulling it off.

Now this second one—well, it’s going to take you a while to get through it, but well worth it. It comes from LAX, & let me just say this: those baggage handlers & cleaning staff got some moves on them.

Crank up the volume & join them. You know you want to.

Holiday flash, Part 2

Continuing the theme of holiday flash mobs, today I’ll move away from “Hallelujah”.

This one, at a Connecticut mall, is a little more than just a bunch of people showing up to sing or dance. It’s by a group called RedefineChristmas.org; you’ll see what they’re redefining.

For another kind of surprise, here are a saxophonist & a couple hundred of his closest friends from the University of Minnesota school of music. They showed up one day at the Carlson School of Management to show the MBAs-in-the-making that there’s more to life than ROI.

Aloha to the honorable gentleman

I can’t tell you how sad I am to hear of the death of Daniel Inouye. The Senator who represented the people of Hawaii since 1963, died today at age 88.

The man served the people of the United States pretty much all his adult life. He lost his arm in action in Tuscany against the Germans in 1945 as a member of the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team. For his courage truly above and beyond, Inouye was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor (initially the Distinguished Service Cross). Following his recovery from his wounds, he earned degrees in political science and law, and began his political career.

Inouye absolutely embodied the concept of public service. In an organization marked these days for veniality, pettiness and rabid ideology, he never lost sight of the greater good. I can’t think of him as a “politician” when the term applies to the likes of our Congress.

Sadly, they don’t make them like him anymore.

Holiday flash, Part 1

I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but I was expecting another week between now & Christmas. Someone apparently sneaked in & burgled it while I wasn’t looking.

At any rate, it’s time for holiday flash mobs. First up—because you can never have too much “Hallelujah Chorus” is a couple from Ireland.

This one, from a South Dublin mall, is remarkable to me because the setting is so depressingly like every mall in the US. Couldn’t they have built something not quite so vanilla?

(I was also struck by the yahoo who rode the escalator down with his/her kid in one of those fold-up strollers. Apparently Irish yuppies have no more sense of child protection than American ones—can’t be bothered to take the elevator, just jam the rear axle on the tread & hope that disaster doesn’t strike.)

Okay—I’m being a bit churlish there.

So by way of atonement, here’s one from Cork—apparently in the university dining hall.

Props to the choir for singing it a cappella.

Sandy Hook

In the wake of today’s shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the only comment I have is to reiterate what I said after the last major mass shooting, at a Sikh temple in Milwaukee (which followed less than a month after another mass shooting at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colo.)

“Let me just say that a whackjob with a gun doesn’t really need a cause to espouse or a specific group to hate; all he needs is the weapon(s), the ammo, the access & maybe the ability to go to full-auto.“

I was right, too—it didn’t take long for the next whackjob to target more victims for any or no reason at all.

Bucking the trend

As many of you know, I live in the Valley they call Silicon, which has more coffee shops than all the Benelux countries combined.

Naturally, at least 75% of them are Starbucks, but even so—there are lots and lots of places to go to have a really adequate beverage (or even a meal) in a clean, non-sterile environment without forking over the GDP of one of the aforementioned Benelux countries. There are some national chains, like Panera Bread, and local ones, like Le Boulanger; and independent shops. Some of the latter charge Starbucks prices, but at least they serve you decent coffee and you don’t have to wade through the disgusting seasonal crap like gingerbread or eggnog lattes. You might even get your drink in an actual mug, maybe with a latte art flourish.

So I just freaking do not understand why it is that, when someone needs to connect, they invariably say, “Let’s meet up at the Starbucks at [blah-blah].” I understand wanting a venue where there’s no table service, or check to split. But why Starbleedingbucks?

Every single one of them I’ve been in (Menlo Park, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Newark—doesn’t matter where) has been uniformly groady, with bad acoustics and few tables (fully occupied, no matter what time of day or night). And the tables aren’t big enough to support a checkerboard.

This week I was meeting with a guy who’s helping me with a number of things (including connecting me to the law enforcement community for my novel research). My venue choices (proposed by him): ‘Bucks at Poplar and El Camino or ‘Bucks at Mathilda and Maude, in Sunnyvale. I chose the latter—it’s in a shopping center so there’s actually some parking available—and arrived at 1700.

I could not believe—at 1700 every one of the (tiny) six tables was occupied, and there was a queue nearly out the door of people ordering overpriced froufy coffee-like drinks, wrapped in the ersatz cheer of a Starbucks holiday canned music CD blaring. I felt like I was in the third rung of Hell.

The only thing I can think of in mitigation is that the places are freaking ubiquitous and that if you can’t find one you must be an idiot. Although that in itself is problematic, since it’s fairly easy to go to the wrong ‘Bucks when there are two in the same shopping center or within a block of each other on a street like El Camino.

The pain in Spain

You knew this story wasn’t going to end with the last chapter, in which Cecilia Giménez butchered the voluntary “restoration” of a fresco at the Sanctuary of Mercy Church in Borja, Spain.

No—in addition to demanding a cut of the gate at the church, for which her work admittedly sparked a demand, Giménez is now hawking her original work on eBay. It’s listed as “Picture by Cecilia Giménez, Restorer of the ‘Ecce Homo’.”

The auction was up to €630 as of yesterday afternoon, up from a starting bid of €300.

Really—everything’s up-to-date in Borja.

A fine kettle of fish

This story came via NPR and focuses on NYC, but I’m betting that if anyone were to sniff around any city in the country, the results would probably be the same.

Seems that “off” smell all around us is the odor of the piscatorial equivalent of mutton dressed as lamb, according to a study by Oceana, a conservation group.

Meaning that there’s a whole lotta mislabeling of fish going on—you think you’re getting one thing, but in fact you’re getting (and paying for) another. Including some critters that are not at all good for your health.

Oceana’s report indicates that 60% of the retail outlets they sampled (from bodegas to high-end restaurants) were selling mislabeled fish. And 100% of the sushi bars they visited had species inaccuracies.

Certainly it’s all problematic, but what I’m not getting is: who buys fish from bodegas?

Rodent control

I frequent a bakery-café in Santa Clara that’s part of a chain operated out of Korea. It’s a good place to write and to people-watch, both of which I enjoy.

The chain has outlets in many states, but they don’t appear to have completely grasped English. Witness two confections I saw in the case yesterday:

And:

So far I haven't felt the need to blow $28 to find out whether they are labeled accurately. & my Hangul alphabet skills are a little rusty.

Of course—I could be making incorrect assumptions, & these cakes might in fact involve Friends of Mickey. But I rather think that if that were the case, the Santa Clara County health department might deploy a SWAT team.

Drumming for peace

In the spirit of the season, I’m giving you one of the more unusual pairings of vocalists.

One of the best things about this is that Bowie’s “Peace on Earth” largely drowns out Crosby’s “Little Drummer Boy”. The less pa-rum-pum-pum-pum in this world, the better for peace.

Library heat

Over the past week or so, we’ve had several rainstorms coming across the Silicon Valley. One of them accounted for me stepping up to my ankles last Friday in a huge puddle in the parking lot of the Korean café where I often go to write. My feet squished half the day.

It’s the very rare day like that that makes the two-sided fireplace (gas) in the Sunnyvale Public Library make sense.

Or it would if they hadn’t reorganized the area to hold book shelves instead of armchairs. It’s really odd—you have to edge your way around the new books on display to get close to the fire.

I suppose it’s the thought…

'Nuff said

As you know, as an antidote to a completely and utterly crap week (which seems to have slopped over into the past couple of days; but I’m counting it as overflow from before and therefore banishing it to the past), I checked out the complete series DVDs of Due South from the Mountain View PL, and have been watching them, episode after episode.

I’ve not yet got to one of my favorites, “All the Queen’s Horsemen”, which features Leslie Nielsen doing his looniest best to “maintain the right”. But I’ve been thinking about the song they sing in it: “Ride Forever”—it’s the RCMP’s Musical Ride, see, and they’re on this train about to be gassed by an Insane terrorist. Well, watch it yourself.

But, while I’m waiting for a new external DVD/CD drive for my laptop (just don’t ask, okay?) to arrive from Amazon, I’ve watched a couple of YouTube clips with the song in it:

As something of an aside, I sometimes slip a cog when it comes to picking up words in lyrics. I was beyond voting age before I realized the opening line in that one chorus from Messiah is “All we like sheep” and not “Oh, we like sheep”...

So for some reason, although I did hear the Mounties proclaiming “you can’t keep horsemen in a cage”, I swapped out the G for a V, and started wondering why you can’t keep horsemen in a cave? You could, you know. If it was a big enough cave. Depending on how many horsemen you actually, you know, had. And whether or not they had their horses with them. I'm just sayin'. 

But then I started wondering what other letters I could swap in for the G to find things you can’t keep horsemen in.

Cake—kind of hard to keep horsemen in a cake. Unless…no, I’m not coming up with any kind of a cake you could keep horsemen in.

Cane—nope, can’t do that.

Care—well that’s just being silly.

The one that I kind of like, though, is cape. You can keep horsemen in capes, can’t you? I would actually like to see horsemen in capes.

Baby mama

So, it’s looking as though Prince Harry may be off the hook, since the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have announced that they are expecting a child, who will be (either male or female, thanks to recent changes to the rules of succession) third in line to the British throne.

I personally find all the media hoo-hah a little extreme. According to this report in the Guardian, there’s been round-the-clock coverage of the “event” of the sort you’d expect for a cataclysmic earthquake or presidential election. Except that there’s no one to interview and nothing to report beyond (apparently) that the Duchess is glued to a throne of a different sort.

Yes—the cat sneaked out of the bag because Kate has been hospitalized for severe morning sickness.

Evidently broadcast executives have decided that they need multiple news teams on the scene—at a hospital to which they have no access—in order to speculate six ways from Sunday (boy? girl? name(s)?) about things that in a normal world wouldn’t be considered news outside of a zoo with a pregnant panda.

Even the Guardian itself managed to hawk up a hairball of nonsensical factoids: “It is understood she is less than 12 weeks pregnant, possibly only two months. The duchess is likely to be taking anti-sickness tablets and have a drip in her arm so she can receive fluids intravenously.” (Plus: look at all their sidebars.)

Well, duh! This is worth scrambling “11 production crew for the hospital watch” by ABC? Our ABC, not the Aussies’?

I’m just seriously dumbfounded that people are losing their minds to this degree over something that has less and less relevance to the real world. (Talking about maintaining that whole monarchy thing as anything other than a symbolic nod to tradition.)

On the other hand, Harry’s probably out with his mates downing a few and feeling massive relief that there’s soon to be one more body between him and the throne.

Motive for mayhem

I’ve been working with an organization that’s trying to help people shorten the job transition time & consequently lower the economic & emotional cost of being out of work. I mostly like it because what I’m doing as a product manager has a visible effect on the service, & I think it’s a worthwhile effort.

But it’s not without its challenges.

I’ve described the executive director as being like a puppy at a barbecue—always running off after another scent. When I mentioned this description to a person in the psychology business, she commented, “Sounds like he has attention deficit disorder.”

Well—I guess that would be the clinical definition of being a puppy at a barbecue.

Those who know me will get a laugh out of the karmic kick of me having to continually bring another CEO back to the topic at hand at every meeting, & having to continually make the same case for something he’s agreed to in the past but wants reconsidered within the intervening 48 hours.

But I’m thinking it’s hard to top the three-hour meeting I had with him the day before Thanksgiving, when I mapped out some new functionality by filling up a wall-to-wall whiteboard three times (draw it out, photograph it & erase it) with functional flow & arrows looping all over the place for a new feature set he wants in place by the end of December.

As I was working on the last layer, trying to see what might be missing, & continually asking, “What happens then?”—he suddenly chirped: “What is your degree in?”

“Hanh?”

“What’s your degree in?”

“I have a bachelor’s in European studies & a master’s in US history.”

“It’s just that you have…such a logical mind.”

“Well—the whole point of having a liberal arts education is that it teaches you how to think.”

“Yeah—but you think so logically. For not being an engineer.”

Yes, I, too, am wondering why I even bother.

Month of writing dangerously, Chapter 6

NaNoWriMo ended officially on Friday. My final tally as of then was 75,031 words.

I still have miles to go—I reckon I’m about halfway through the plot, and I still have a lot of blah-blahs to fill in. And a shedload of research required to finish both. And then I'll have to edit the living daylights out of it, because this sucker gives new meaning to the term "rough draft".

Still—I’m pleased that I hit my goal, that I got started & that I can still drive my malignant narcissist bastard bad guy into the ground.

A girl’s got to hang on to something.

Thank you kindly

I have had a bitch and a half of a week. It seems like each day brings its own particular brand of crap. And I’m not even going to go through it here.

In my NaNoWriMo novel, if faced with a week like this, one of my main characters would anesthetize herself with massive spreadsheets and crunch data until her ears were bleeding. The other main character would crank up the volume on a couple of Bach cantatas and then cycle through the Brandenburg concerti. My victim would have swallowed a bottleful of rum.

Me? I’m hunkered down with DVDs of the entire Due South series.

Make of that what you will.

Moes gettin' hoes

The SF-based NPR station KQED is running a series by The Kitchen Sisters called “The Making of…” about, well, pretty much anything you’d care to make—from a pot of tea to something that is uniquely SF: Homobiles.

Homobiles is a donation-based dispatch-only transport service for the LGBT community. If you’re in that demographic, your chances of getting a ride from a taxi at club-closing time are low. Homobiles fills that gap.

It’s an interesting story, and I love the way the Kitchen Sisters let the participants tell it. The audio runs more than seven minutes, but it’s worth it.

I especially like the one rider who understands why regular taxi drivers might not want customers who leave behind body paint, glitter and sequins. “You can’t get that stuff out.”

Really—God bless SF.

Nocturnal WHAT?

So this commercial for Smirnoff came to my attention by…well, you don’t really need to know that. I don’t believe it’s running in the US; if so I’ve not actually seen it on TV.

However, I find it…interesting. Because I don’t exactly know what it’s telling me. I mean, you’d think that if they wanted me to ingest their product—which is, after all, an alcoholic drink—they would, you know, say so.

Instead, I’m apparently being urged to…paint my body multiple colors, fill a grand piano with ice and throw fruit at fans? And evidently, only at night.

Psychic inflation

Hmm, it seems that nothing is immune to a rise in the cost of living here in the Silicon Valley. You’ll recall the cosmic confluence on El Camino Real of businesses involved with freshening up your inner and outer personas.

Well—the price for psychic cleaning has gone up:

Here's looking at you, kid

It was 70 years ago today that one of the all-time classics of romance, wartime intrigue and just sheer verve premiered. Casablanca opened at the Hollywood Theater in NYC on 26 November 1942. Since it was a film about the fragile encrustation of normalcy plastered over the underlying desperation and fear in Vichy North Africa, its premiere was moved up from Spring of 1943 to coincide with the Allied invasion of that territory in November.

Casablanca did well both critically and at the box office, right from the beginning. It’s consistently ranked amongst the greatest films of all time on any number of such lists. I myself watch it at least a couple of times a year—sadly, no longer with a bottle of Cordon Rouge (which is what Rick & Ilsa drank at La Belle Aurore to keep the invading Germans from getting it in 1940), but maybe with a glass of Mumm Cuvée Napa. & I find new aspects to enjoy every time.

When you think you’ve memorized every possible interaction between Rick, Ilsa & Renault, there’s still plenty to explore. I especially get a kick out of the minor characters—many of whom were played by European actors who fled the Nazis in their respective countries. Carl the waiter (S.K. Sakall), Sascha the bartender (Leonid Kinskey), the Leuchtags (Ludwig Stössel & Ilka Grüning) on their way to America. (Perhaps most ironic: Conrad Veidt as Major Strasser.) Watching them in little vignettes gives me something new to discover every time. The expression on Sascha’s face when Rick tells him to take the drunken Yvonne home—and come right back; Carl pulling an extra cordial glass out of his pocket—along with the best brandy—having anticipated that he’d be invited to share; the Leuchtags practicing their conversational English.

I also really love the music war—“Die Wacht am Rhein” vs “La Marseillaise”. It’s symbolically heavy-handed, but, damn, does it have style. That’s worth the price of admission right there.

If you want to revisit Casablanca, TCM will be showing it on 6 December. Set your DVR, put a bottle of bubbly on ice & settle back to enjoy.