YouTube miracle

A while ago I wrote about how you can learn to repair pretty much anything via YouTube. No matter how arcane your problem, someone’s uploaded a homemade video on how to solve it.

Well, when I got home yesterday afternoon, the house seemed really warm, and when I lowered the thermostat, nothing happened. Believe me, yesterday was a day when you didn’t want your AC non-operational.

I’d had an issue some months ago when the thermostat just went blank, and YouTube showed me how to replace the batteries. I didn’t even know thermostats needed batteries—I don’t recall ever having to replace them before. So that was my starting point. But still nothing happened. And the actual temperature actually went up a degree while I was doing it.

Ulp. Off to YouTube.

I was watching some guy walk through the steps of determining why the blower might not be going on. After checking the circuit breaker (not tripped), he lost me when he hauled out some kind of electricometer and read out how many volts were dancing on the head of a pin, and then more dancing in the thermostat. I despaired: “Dude—I don’t want to take a course in being an electrician; I just want AC.”

And at that very moment, I heard the electronic click come from the thermostat. I ran to the front door, and hallelujah, the unit was working. I set the temp for four degrees lower than usual, just to make up for the panic.

God bless YouTube.

Do you care enough?

You know, given the events of this week—just the most recent abominations in the run-up to the mid-terms—I feel we could all use something different. So, have the latest recruiting video for New Zealand cops:

I say “latest”, because those clever clogs are known for creativity in online recruiting; here’s the one from last year:

You’ll want to watch all the way through the credits, especially for the exchange on this year’s video.

Now—get out there and vote.

Dancing in the streets

I came across this Evian commercial this week, which just kind of cracks me up:

Since seeing it I have been trying to imagine what sort of inner toddler I might have wriggling around waiting to get into the shot. Here’s my conclusion:

I’d be the pudgy red-head with the bad haircut my mom gave me, in my sister’s hand-me-down clothes. The one hopping the bus to blow this taco stand.

Funky French Friday

I’ll close out the week with a really terrific, wacky video; everything you suspected was going on with the Internet:

It’s 14 minutes long, and you’ll have to read the subtitles (unless you’re a francophone), but it’s completely worth it.

Nine point seven (except for the East German judge)

I’m ending Friday of a strange week with something that’s strangely compelling.

Don’t know about you, but I needed that.

Feeling Lost?

The US this week marked the death of a couple of TV programs. I’ve already written about NBC cancelling Law & Order. The final episode aired Monday & I’m trying to work out what the appropriate period of mourning would be. A month in black? & then three more in dark purple? Veil or no veil? It’s hard to know.

Also this week, “Lost” broadcast for the last time. In case you missed any of the chapters, here’s a summary of the series’ six years.

It probably helps to follow if you ever actually watched a single episode, which removes me from the enlightenment. But I put this forward as a public service.

Muse of Fire

I have one more recommendation for a film for Memorial Day. This one’s a little different from yesterday’s list. And it’s related to last year’s Memorial Day post.

That was about Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of US Troops and their Families (Random House, 2006). As the title suggests, Homecoming is a collection of writings by those we’ve sent into harm’s way since 2001. It’s the outcome of a project by the NEA to help soldiers and their families use writing to process their experiences at war.

And the film is Muse of Fire; a documentary about that project. A few of the writers who took part in the project and the head of the NEA talk about the purpose, and a few of the participants talk about their experiences and their writing.

There’s not a lot of action, but there is a great deal of emotion.

I won’t go into a lot of the details, but there’s one story I’ll carry with me for a long time.

An Army specialist recounts the experience of being part of a transfer of a body from an Iraqi ambulance to a US one. What astounds and undoes him is when the body bag emerges from the Iraqi vehicle: “It’s the size of a pillow.”

His mind simply cannot connect with the anomaly of expecting a body, assuming it would be an adult, but then having a baby emerge, with the one-size-fits-all bag being folded over several times to accommodate the infant.

He feels like vomiting. After a while he spends the entire night writing, the literary equivalent of detoxifying. He assures us he didn’t send that output to anyone because it was too raw. But if he hadn’t been able to write—if he hadn’t had the NEA training—he thinks he’d have gone insane.

Another specialist talks about connecting with an old Iraqi, a man whose son has just been killed in a “roadside incident”. The specialist, who’d lost an infant daughter, thinks he can appreciate on some level the old man’s anguish, and he tries to comfort him. The Iraqi keeps repeating something and the specialist asks the translator what he’s saying.

“Just shoot me now.”

The film runs less than an hour and it’s on DVD. I found it at the King County Library, so you might check out your local branch or find it on Netflix. It’s more gripping than entertaining, but I highly recommend it.

GM's art of cost cutting

GM has announced that it will cease funding the documentary work of Ken Burns (since they need those few hundreds of thousands of dollars to subsidize their ex-pat programs for senior execs who require $30K worth of private school fees per year, & all. Plus, there are those Byzantine “work 10% fewer hours & get paid 5% less; so you’re going to get 5% of your salary for doing nothing” schemes…).

Okay, they’re not talking about the parenthetical part, but they have cut off the flow to Burns.

I understand—times are hard. But it’s really a great pity. I love Burns’ work.

I think one of my favorites is “Horatio’s Drive: America’s First Road Trip”, about a medical doctor who took it in his head to be the first to drive from California to New York in 1903. He, a driver & a dog named Bud made it across the country—which did not at that time have either a real road network or petrol stations—in a little over two months. There’s something magical about that story.

Toward the end there was a photo of a family—perhaps around 1910—on a trip; males in the front, females in the rear of an open touring car. The expressions on their face were absolutely classic: this was not a family having fun.

I assure you, I’ve been on that trip.

Anyhow—at the moment no telling how Burns will finance future efforts. The final project to be subsidized by GM is on the US National Parks.

Celluloid hearts

In case you’ve been hanging out in a cave without any media access and only just now woke up to check the blogosphere, let me point out that Saturday is Saint Valentine’s Day, the “you-vill-be-romantic-und-you-vill-enchoy-it” vortex of chocolate, jewelry and other forms of conspicuous consumption.

For something a little off the beaten rose-path, you could settle in with a bottle of bubbly and an elegant, witty romantic comedy.

To get a film with those two particular modifiers, you’re going to have to go back several decades, either chronologically or stylistically. Films like Made of Honor and What Women Want may have some persons who are quite a treat to the eye, but it’s hard to really give a toss about them and their predicaments.

Go back to My Man Godfrey (1936; although the 1957 version with David Niven is acceptable), with William Powell and Carole Lombard. The premise may be far-fetched, but you just can’t get enough of the dialogue. (The underlying premise of the absurdly wealthy living cheek-by-jowl with the "forgotten men" laid low by the (last) Big Depression lends some bite to the fluff.)

Ditto The Thin Man (1934); Powell again and Myrna Loy. Plus—Nick and Nora drink like they just got out of Prohibition. Oh, wait...

Still on a Powell-Loy roll, Libeled Lady (1936) also includes Spencer Tracy and a very funny Jean Harlow. Powell trying to bluff his way through fly-fishing is a treat; and the chemistry between him and Loy is electric.

Then there’s His Girl Friday (1940), in which Rosalind Russell shoots out some of the best and fastest dialogue in film history as she tries to fend off Cary Grant and get a scoop on an escaped death-row prisoner.

Ninotchka (1940) sees Greta Garbo, a dour Russian functionary sent to Paris to bring some discipline to the sale of tsarist jewels on behalf of the Soviet government, come under the spell of the City of Light (and that sly Melvyn Douglas). Garbo laughs.

Perhaps slightly off the rom-com beat is Topper (1937). I’m not talking the part about Cary Grant and Constance Bennett being a sexy and  witty couple. It’s how they help the middle aged Mr. and Mrs. Topper (Roland Young and a delicious Billie Burke) recapture romance in their marriage. Or—more likely—capture it for the first time.

And, here’s the thing: anyone can make a romance about 20-somethings who are drop-dead gorgeous and wear $850 designer shirts. (You can make a romance, but it’s not necessarily engaging.)

But building a film around a woman d’un âge certain (not just a middle aged guy; because how many movies have we seen where Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford get it on with chicks 30 years their junior, in between cortisone shots or DUI arrests?), who has more history and more riding on the outcome of the romance… Now, there’s a story.

That’s the attraction of any Katharine Hepburn movie—Philadelphia Story, Pat and Mike, and my personal favorite: Desk Set. The scene where Hepburn gets looped at the office Christmas party and riffs on Spencer Tracy’s logic questions and then faces down the mainframe computer he’s installed in her research department is worth the price of admission on its own.

Everyone knows An Affair to Remember (1958)—largely because of the homage in Sleepless in Seattle (cute, but no cigar). Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant are the embodiment of class and style in the story of two people who’ve set themselves up with wealthy partners because they’ve been around the block a few times and opted for security over love. They meet on an ocean liner (courtesy of their partners’ money) and decide to take a chance—wagering everything they have against the possibility of love.

Now that’s romance. Really: the crapshoot of love.

Indiscreet (1958) pairs Grant with Ingrid Bergman, a combination it’s hard to top. The premise—Grant claims to be a married man unable to get a divorce as a defense against any woman’s aspirations to matrimony. When he falls for Bergman, a leading lady in all senses of the term, there’s a series of farcical events. Frankly, the plot’s a bit hard to swallow, but you don’t really care because the packaging is super.

Within the past 20 years, I rate Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990) very high on the truly romantic scale. First of all: Alan Rickman. You don’t really need more, but the story is about the deceased cellist (Rickman) returning from beyond to ease his lover (Juliet Stevenson) through her overpowering grief. The scene where he appears, playing his cello while she’s playing the piano, and she sobs—that’s one of the most affecting lovers’ reunions ever filmed.

Enchanted April (1992) has a fantastical (as in “imbued with fantasy”) air to it. Four Englishwomen (strangers to one another—already an anomaly in English society) pool resources to rent a villa in Italy for the month of April. The setting is the 1920s, not my favorite era, but it turns out to fit together absolutely perfectly. The magic of Italy takes hold, healing the wounds of each of the women. The ending is a bit pat—but not out of order in a romance.

Not a comedy, The Last of the Mohicans (1992) is still one of the best love stories going. Lyrically shot by Michael Mann (of all directors), it’s visually stunning and emotionally compelling. When Daniel Day-Lewis abjures Madeleine Stowe (Hawkeye/Cora Munro), about to be taken by the Huron, to “No matter whatever happens, stay alive. I will find you no matter what”—well, it’s utterly heart-melting. There can’t be a woman alive who wouldn’t want her man to give that sort of adoration.

Playing against the trend of no witty and engaging rom-coms in recent years is 2008’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. It’s charming and blessed with superior characters and dialogue. (Okay, Frances McDormand can do no wrong; simply by a narrowing or widening of an eye she can communicate utter despair or puppy-wriggling pleasure.) Again, it’s that last-chance-at-love hook that I find much more appealing than the usual ho-hum Drew Barrymore-Matthew McConaughey fluff.

I think my all-time favorite romance, however, is I Know Where I’m Going (1945). Yes, it’s a bit contrived, and you know what the “twist” is going to be. But Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey have such chemistry in their clash of wits, it just knocks you out. Hiller is the strong-willed city girl on her way to marry her wealthy, older industrialist fiancé (see the money-security options in An Affair to Remember), who has rented an island off the Scottish coast. The weather intervenes and puts her in the path of Torquil McNeil, who (it turns out) actually owns that island, but is land-rich and cash-poor.

Well, you know what’s going to happen, but getting there is just charming and well worth the time.

Beware the power of IKWIG, however. It can fool you into thinking there are Scotsmen who are worth the gelignite it would take to blow them back to hell.

Oh, wait—that’s a different sort of comedy.

The truth is out there

Apparently the ecstasy associated with the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States was more far-reaching than we realized. Footage, here, of the universal celebrations.

And for another view of the event, let's cut to the satellite feed.