It may surprise you to learn that I did some power washing over the weekend. The patio sand problem. I don’t want to talk about it. I think it’s done, thanks to the help of the Giant Swede’s shop-vac, a Dalek-shaped thing I dragged around, sucking up the viscous gritty gunk. The patio is certainly cleaner than ever, but I find myself saying “out, out, damned dirt, begone, you’ve no place here, not a fleck of mud shall remain” when it is literally outside. I think there are different standards for outside.

Upgraded to the latest phone OS, and I love it, and it’s the best ever, and by that I mean it will probably lead to less time spent looking at the phone. It is inconceivable that the Apple of Yore would have released something like this.

		It is antithetical to the Mac experience to even consider whether the widget on top is slightly narrower than the icons below.
		Don’t get me started on the overlap and the lack of any white space between the static top portion and the scrolling messages below.

Everything has a white stroke, sort of, because it’s “glass,” and hence shiny. The more I looked at this the more I thought I was going to have a white stroke. I can’t remember if I pitched a similar fit the last time they had a major overhaul, but the last look was refined.

However, we were all bored with it, so they had to come up with something to goose our need for novelty. To combine the Mac OS UI with the phone UI. Some people went away on a retreat for a week and came back with a piece of paper that said

More roundy corners. Like, super-roundy

Uh - transparency? Transparency.

Oh and we move all the buttons around on the native apps

Did we mention transparency? Okay it’s also very round transparency

Apple Intelligence! Yeah we had that before but more of it now. Remember how it used to summarize your text messages, in a way that somehow didn’t communicate at all the voice of the person who sent the message but spoiled the plot, and you had to read it anyway? That’s better now, in ways you will never notice because you hate the whole concept.

I had the new OS on my laptop for a day, and it bricked half the apps and looked like junque. I’m not saying “Steve Jobs would have sacked the entire team and had them strung up on poles outside of the corporate office, so the presence sight of their lifeless flyblown bodies caked with blood presented a reminder to the new team that they had to get it right,” because Jobs green-lit some truly bad design decisions. The hockey-puck mouse. The stitched-leather on the calendar app. The little thumb wheel on Quicktime you had to manipulate with your mouse. But he would have thrown this phone across the room and made team leaders dampen their britches.

Well, I’ll get used to it. Otherwise, a weekend! Good football! Sun! Rain! Light! Dark! A popover with hashbrown and eggs! Steak! We had company over on Sunday and it's put me behind the 8-ball for the rest of the night, so this is all you get - except, of course, for the Free Monday Substack. So it's not like I'm cheating you. Much.

 

 

We continue with a small amount of manufactured enthusiasm to explore the trademarks of 1925, because we've been locked into this feature for a year and a half and don't know how to break free without feeling as if I've taken something away.

Three-pound hosiery, for lads:

		This is the house where Mr,. Ragan, the owner, lived. As you can tell, he can hardly be excused for missing church.

 

Gee, this looks noir as all heck!

 

 

It’s Dark, and it’s about the Past! A Dark Past.

Don’t know who this guy is, but he has a nice typeface to herald his work.

 

 

So. We’re in the City, and after some stock footage we board the bus in the backlot . . .

 

 

. .. where the narrator speculates about the other people on the bus.

 

 

 

You know, like people do. But the narrator is special, because - well, we don’t know yet, but he’s talking to us like an old friend, and we like him. Then we find out he’s headed for cop shop, where he’s greeted as a peer. So he’s a cop? No. He tells us there’s a story behind each of these department doors, and we wonder which one we’ll go through. The Murder Department? That would be awesome! No, he’s going through -

No, not THAT ONE

 

 

Ahhhh, heck, dang.

Lee J. Cobb is a police shrink. He solves crimes and heals minds. He settles back to tell us a story about his days when he was a professor, something that instantly takes all the tension away because it’s all a flashback.

Basically, it’s “Petrified Forest” larded with lazy Freudianism. See, William Holden is a psycho killer who busted out of stir, and can be easily identified by the ear-shaped thing glued to his head:

 

 

He’s holding the prof and his dinner party guests hostage. He’s also well dressed. As it happens, Lee J is concerned about the psycho-killer’s mental health, and he knows he can cure him. The killer’s moll spills the beans: he’s troubled by a recurring dream! So the Prof gets to work.

 

 

Eventually Professor Cobb, after puffing on his pipe and looking worried, gets the details about the dream. If he can can unlock what the dream means, William Holden will never kill again!

IT’S JUST THAT SIMPLE PEOPLE

Cheap Freudianism ruined so many movies back in the 40s. Did people buy this stuff? Did the pretentious people go along because this was SCIENCE? It’s a reminder that the science is, shall we say, fluid.

Anyway, they pick out the details one by one. DOC YOU GOTTA HELP ME I'M IN REVERSE

 

 

What does it mean? One by one, they unravel the symbolism.

 

 

It’s a remake, based on a stage play. It’s also talky and pretentious, and miscast: Holden should be the doc, Cobb the psycho. Holden is not very good at all in this one, a one-note eye popping performance.

I guess this was a review. Sorry.

 

 

It's the Diner!

That will do for today. Matches and a free Substack await; it'll be up around eleven. Thank you for your patronage, as always.