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 It’s bad enough to stay up until 1:30 when you know you have to get up at 6:30, but when you stay up to watch Star Trek there’s something wrong. Ah, but you say: had you seen that one in a while? No, I hadn’t. “The Immunity Syndrome.” The Enterprise battles a gigantic single-cell organism. It’s almost a note-for-note copy of the all-time best episode ever, “The Doomsday Machine,” right down to the order in which the ominous music cues are played, the role of a Doomed Shuttlecraft, and the last-minute use of antimatter to teach the nasty beastie a lesson. Now that I think of it, I wonder if John Williams was a Star Trek fan; there’s this growling ominous cello figure used for all tense battle sequences that sounds like a precusor to the Jaws theme.
I know there are others like me: people who can go two, three years without seeing a particular episode, and will not only correctly predict which music cues will be used but will whistle them softly without even thinking about it. What I find remarkable over the years is how well the music cues work, how well they fit the action. They obviously edited to the highlights; the big tense build-up music ends in a crazy brass fanfare, and all the editor had to do was nail that sound to the inevitable explosion that signaled another Triumph of Kirk. At the time, of course, they didn’t expect anyone would remember the music from week to week. People remembered title music, but incidental music that was used four, five times a year?
My GOD it’s now almost midnight and I am writing about something I stayed up too late watching. Pathetic. So: it’s picture day here at the Bleat. I have no words left, and I want to get back to reading the “Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man” book. (Note: 89 pages into the book, the title remains the sole ad hominem remark. And even so it’s a winking reference to Moore’s own work, as well as Al Franken’s deathless tome on Limbaugh. I’ll say this for the Moore book: it’s brisk and deft, and avoids screedy polemics for one-on-one factual refutations of what the authors identify as Moore’s more egregious fictitions. I was piqued by the theory that Moore manipulated his confrontation with Mr. Heston in “Columbine” – the scene where he showed Heston a photo of a murdered girl and asked for comments. If the authors are correct, what Moore did was the same thing William Hurt’s character did in “Broadcast News” – manipulating a one-camera shot to make it seem as if it was a two-camera shot, and editing post-interview footage to make it look as if it was all one contiguous event.) Full review on Monday.
Now, the photo parade begins! Remember the storage room project? It began like this:
Then it was framed:
Then it was drywalled:
And then it was finished:
Dang! This is the second job Jon has done at Jasperwood, and the work just shines. Twin Cities residents in need of such contractors will find him here. I intend on hiring him for years to come for all sorts of stuff, including the makeover of the Closet of Wonders upstairs in my study.
Finally, I mentioned Monday on the Hugh Hewitt show that I was going to post pictures of the big new fabulous electronical trolley we have here in Minneapolis. Shooting the photos the other day, I discovered something unusual, and I don’t know what to make of it. Apparently aliens are involved. Judge for yourself. Here’s the sequence; have an excellent Fourth, and we’ll see you Tuesday.
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