One of those evenings where you spend about an hour on the Angriest Email Ever, trying to hone the point. It’s easy to dismiss angry people, even if they have every reason to be furious – and believe me, I have reason. This goes back to last summer, and concerns the fatal intersection of money, business and friendship. I would never go into business with a friend, but friendship arises out of successful business dealings sometimes. So when there’s an issue, shall we say, a wide spectrum of emotions come into play. Best to set them aside. But first you have to get them out.

The problem: short and cold can be dismissed just as easily as windy and hot. Short and cold is just another salvo. Windy and hot, on the other hand, can be viewed as the RANTINGS OF A MADMAN, and gives the recipient a certain license to hold your case in lower esteem. Also, remember that the most potent prose you can craft – something that strikes you as the death-dealing rattle of a Gatling gun - just brings to mind someone hunched over a keyboard, typing, which isn’t really all that impressive. So you have to give the impression of something horrible, held in reserve.

He says, fingering the handle of his megaphone.

 A few months ago Dennis Prager cut a commercial for a local guy who installs granite countertops. I called that fellow today. He –

No, let’s back up. The first gift I got my daughter last Christmas was some Magic Rocks:

Five bucks at Walgreen’s. Figured it would be fun. I’d always seen the ads in the comic books growing up, and this was the original item: it contained the obligatory Treasure Chest. Well, SeaMonnkeys may have disappointed, Silly Putty’s ability to pick up the images of the Sunday Comics – which was really great if Mom threw out the comics and you only wanted to read the first panel and had a mirror handy - but Magic Rocks remained untried, and hence still enticing. So I bought it. Wrapped it. Under the tree it went. She opened it the day we got back from Arizona, and was distinctly underwhelmed.

But the next day she wanted to do it, so Mommy helped. I came down later to a grim scene: she had poured the solution on the rocks against Mommy’s instructions, eager as she was to see the miniature rocks emerge, and had spilled the liquid. My wife had noticed that the instructions warned about spilling the liquid on any surface known to man, as it may stain or ruin finishes.

“Good thing we have granite,” I said. My wife mopped up the spill.

Three hours later the countertop still had the marks of someone wiping a cloth across its surface. Well. I used my old friend Vinegar Windex, which would be a great Philip K. Dick character name, and that did the truck.

The next morning the wipe-marks were still visible. I got out the can of Countertop Magic, always good for bringing a shine back to tired surfaces, and did all the counters. Hours later, the marks were still visible.

The Magic Rocks fluid had eaten into the marble.

Or maybe not. I called the marble guy, thinking he could come by and reseal the stone, since it was all getting a little dull. He asked what the problem was. I said my child had spilled growing fluid from Magic Rocks on the regular rock we have on the table. He told me that there wasn’t any seal to ruin; it was just buffed shiny with abrasives, like a man in the front row at a Don Rickles show.  (Not his exact words.) He recommended I use a razor blade to see if I could remove the marks, or possibly very soft steel wool. “Triple 0, or even 0 – 0 – 0 – 0. We use both.”

I said I would give it a try, and thanked him, and told him I’d like him to drop by anyway and bid on a job, and that I heard his Dennis Prager commercial.

He said he liked Dennis, and liked that Dennis liked cigars.

“Not mine,” I said. “He said it was too mild.”

There was a brief and perhaps uncomfortable pause, then a brief and uncomfortable laugh, as the fellow perhaps decided I was out of my mind. But he said he’d drop by. Hope he does. If he can do something about the marks, I’ll give him a cigar.

We threw out the Magic Rocks a few days ago. Ruined the granite, but the plastic tank looked just fine.

Now the weekly examination of black and white movies - not as reviews, but documentaries of their era, reminders of familiar or forgotten faces that passed through the film, and proof that everything can be traced to Star Trek, eventually. This week:

The title sequence is famous – which is why the “Clockers” poster raised eyebrows. It’s an homage!

The full credits:

No need to recount the famous plot – Jimmy Stewart, relaxed and gosh-aw-shucking only to make people think he’s just a simple country lawyer (he does use that line) vs. George C. Scott, smug and preening as a Big City Lawyer, tangle over a murder case. We know Ben Gazzara shot a man for raping his wife (Lee Remick), but was he crrrrazy when he did it? The film was notable for its Frank Language and Searingly Honest Depictions, which apparently lead Jimmy Stewart’s outraged father to take out ads telling people to avoid the “dirty” movie his son had made. So the story goes.

That’s the plot. Now, things that caught my eyes. What about this?

For one thing, it’s the streetlights. That’s a style you don’t see much anymore, but they were modern as all hell back then. They may provide better illumination, but the change from a human-scaled light to one two stories above took some of the romance out of the street.

Since the movie was filmed in Ishpeming, Michigan, and premiered here at the Butler theater, I’m pretty sure that’s the marquee. (Another Flickr view here.) So what, you ask? Good question. I’m sure there there’s an entire database somewhere devoted to movies that show the theater in which they were later premiered. If not, well, here’s the first entry.

(If you’d like more postcard views of small-sized Michigan towns in the 50s, here you go.)

One of those God Bless America shots, below. Stewart plays a lawyer who enjoys playing jazz on the piano to relax. He sits in with the band playing at a local base. Some band, eh? It’s Duke Ellington. Dig that suit, Jack: we call the pattern "Smoker's Lungs."

The courtroom scenes take up half the movie. I did screen grabs for various actors who looked familiar, and they ended up as a sad, strange gallery of men frozen in place by The Law, stripped to their core. The judge in this case was an actual judge – Joseph Welch, who’d defended the Army in the McCarthy hearings as a lawyer five years before. The audience may have known him from TV. He was delightfully genial in the movie, but looks like the Grim Suppository of Justice here.

Recognize the other fellow?

It’s the mayor of Amity, from “Jaws.” Murray Hamilton. In the 70s he was all over TV; in the 50s, he looked like one of those guys who always shows up in a sci-fi movie in a jumpsuit on a spaceship with a spanner in one hand. He did mostly TV, though.

Here’s a familiar face:

Or voice, if you wish. That’s Howard McNear. Floyd the Barber, if you’re an Andy Griffith fan. If you listen to a lot of old-time radio, you know him as his exceptional job as the sardonic  Doc Adams in “Gunsmoke,” and dozens of other roles in anthology shows.

It’s not fair, but the frame below makes him look like the bad guy he often played in radio.  It’s James Thurber, and he’s out to kill!

I have no idea who this fellow is. He just looks like all late-middle-aged men of means were supposed to look like in 1959, right down to the glasses. My grandfather had those glasses.

It all comes down to Stewart, and he plays the role with his usual skill. Smokes more in this movie than I ever saw him smoke anywhere.

So, that’s it –

Oh, right:

You’re thinking, so what? Arthur McConnell. Good ol’ Arthur McConnell, looking the same age in every movie, good natured, a gentle fellow, a pushover. What of it? No – it’s the other guy, the one on the right. It wasn’t until I checked the credits and saw him listed as “Distinguished Gentleman” that I went looking for his brief appearance.

So, that’s it –

Sorry, forgot. Anyone here connected to Star Trek?

Doesn’t get any Trekkier than that. Ken Lynch, who played Vanderburg in the “Devil in the Dark” episode.

Oh: Kup's daughter, at the time of her death, had broken up with a guy who later appeared in Star Trek: TNG and Deep Space Nine.

So yes, "Anatomy of a Murder" is a good movie.

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New comic cover - short text, but I don't know what more needs to be said. Have a fine day; see you off and on at buzz.mn, and all day on Twitter.