Madness! Another Eleven!

Sorry guys, I've got another Eleven movies, and I think I'm done for a bit. I'm not yet ready to write up some of the other ideas I was having, like my answers and my ziggurat's history and all that.

But, this maybe should have been my Second Eleven instead of the other collection.

Thanks, and good luck!

Some Notes and Another Eleven

 You guys are awesome! 

Part of the background for this idea I had was in trying to decide my own personal favorite movie. That was an internal conversation I've been having for decades, and in the last six or seven years I finalized, like, a list of five, where the fifth one seemed to change depending on my mood. 

Then I saw "The Third Man" from 1947, and my five-level ziggurat was shot. It was a splendid problem to have: to see a movie that you may have only heard about in passing, and it turns out to be, like, the best movie in history. Or at least in the conversation.

Later, some silly Facebook challenge I only had half the energy for helped push my thoughts out to ten, and I made a graphic very similar to the Eleven I showed you guys. Then I saw another movie that firmly buried itself in the upper pantheon of Movies for Pat, and I added the following picture, to get to a Prime number:

This image makes me giggle a little, in that (1) if you haven't seen the movie, it's most likely impossible for you to guess it correctly, unless your history buff game is strong; and (2) if you have seen the movie, then you definitely know what's going on here, and you'll get the answer immediately.

This is a scene from "The Battle of Algiers." Filmed in Algiers less than five years after the Arab majority kicked out the French occupiers, the movie is shot in B&W and paced like a documentary, it deals with the realities of starting, sustaining, and winning a revolution.

In one sequence, three ladies come into what seems like their apartment. They take off their head scarves and robes, revealing house clothes. One comes over to a mirror to check out her long, luxurious hair. Then she takes scissors to the thick braids, hacking away until it's mostly short. Then she grabs a jar of peroxide and starts to lighten it up. By the end, the three women are all dressed French girls, the one who gave herself a haircut and dye job is even in capris.

See, all three have to be able to get through security checkpoints without proper papers, and the only way to do that is by being---or looking---French. Once on the other side of the checkpoints, they can deliver their bombs. That girl up there is being hit on by two French soldiers, while sneaking a bomb through a checkpoint.

Later on I'll put up some answers to my first Eleven, maybe to go along with this next set. I'm with you Dan, about doing more, and more styles or genres or whatever.

But, the Next Eleven:

Until I get a new computer My Prime Number is going to have to be Se7en (Not Pictured, BTW...)

 Good luck everyone.  To quote Harrison Ford (also not pictured):

    'You're gonna need it.'

OK, I was at eleven, now it's thirteen - Sorry

 

Prime Movies - Most will be obvious

Trying to learn how to use Keynote, the PowerPoint application for Mac, and finding the right image for each movie ... I really struggled with this. And Yes, Pat, I know there's some overlap in our selections.

Prime Movie Challenge

 Like I mentioned earlier, the challenge is two fold:

• Choose a prime number of movies you love, grab screenshots, and make a graphic like the one I'm posting so we can guess what they are;
• Name the 11 movies I have in my graphic.

Good luck!

Celimate Universe

Let me start by saying the quarantine is going GREAT. Super GREAT, in fact. Two kids, teaching class online, what could go wrong?

So, it's no surprise that I like books. Eh, love books. I write books, I read books. I celebrate World Poetry Day, whenever it was last month. See? Look at these treasures of global literature:

One is my son's favorite book, the other was in my car hidden away for whenever I got stuck in traffic. The even sides are the original French, the odd sides are the mirrors in English. That should clear up which book my son loves.

I'm also somewhat a connoisseur of sequential art, AKA, comics.

I've come across some different stuff in the last few years that I want to share. DC Comics has procured the rights to the Hanna-Barbara stable of titles, and started to update them. From the originals:

From, respectively, 1971, 1961, 1963

These were the titles that DC started with, updating Scooby Doo, then moving on to The Flintstones with an award-winning run of a dozen comics, and then updating The Jetsons:

I've heard good things about each of these. That Scooby Apocalypse lives in a funny place. That issue #1 has the older logo, while issue #2 has the newer logo, having spanned the "Rebirth" event.

But the title of this post comes from the vocabulary used about a universe that, I'm positing, was first discussed in the following movie:

As well as in this movie:

This is a world where animated entities exist along side regular humans, alongside the regular world. This is the "Celimates Universe."

The word celimate refers to animated beings that exist with different physical rules, but otherwise under the same rules of general existence.

The titles here are, originally:

From, respectively, 1958, 1970, 1962

Ruff and Reddy were a cartoon duo on prime time, usually acknowledged as the first such show, predating even The Flintstones. I remember Dastardly and Muttley from Saturday morning cartoons, and Snagglepuss was a favorite of mine.

Here are the updated covers:

 

The Ruff and Reddy Show, above, is a deep dive into the ridiculousness of Hollywood, a satire of the first order. Dastardly and Muttley, it seems like, since I haven't read it, is a satire of the military.

The Snagglepuss story above, the first comic I got in this vein, is set during McCarthy-era America. Snagglepuss, a popular writer and performer, is in a sham wedding and visits a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village. In this story, Snagglepuss is Tennessee Williams, and his friend Huckleberry Hound is Faulkner.

It's very clever and has tons of heart, and has honest things to say about 'Mur'ka in 2018, when it came out. It won awards also. It's worth your time. Maybe.

Did I mention that the quarantine is going great?

From the Vault, Apparently

Mom sent me and Dan, I'm to assume, a thumb drive with 552 photos she'd discovered in boxes in a closet. She sent them to her favorite digitizer, and back comes the pictures and a disc. You can imagine the rest.

This isn't the first time she's done this, and I always find it fascinating, since the digitizing people don't ever seem to try to place the pictures in any kind of order. One minute there's a picture of me and Dan in the living room at Basswood circa 1994, then Christmas at Grandpa Tom's and Lizzie is 15 months old, then Bobbi holding an infant Heather with Scott toddlering around her feet.

The first few pictures, I was stunned to see, were photos I took during our 1990 trip.

I wanted to come here to share some of them, especially the cool ones.

Like this one, from Christmas some year at Grandpa Tom's, probably 1989:

Having a kid makes me feel differently about this kind of picture.

How about us boys, dad:

There were some tender pictures of dad and Lizzie, which were neat.

Remember posing on the couch for timer-induced family photo time? And then mom trying to snap one of just us boys?

That was when my hair was just starting to curl and I didn't know what the hell to do with it. Too bad Dan's hand is positioned like that.

Some were pretty cool compositions, pics I'm sure mom took. I especially like those momentary snapshot into the life of a guy, the SHERWOOD from the title of this blog, as he lives his life. One, as a father of two on a trip to Yosemite:

And another, as if this were penned by Joseph Heller, chilling on a couch, no kids, I'd even guess no wife:

This Sherwood-son has filled one of those roles, and is about to fill another.

There are more coming...Dan, feel free to put some up (you and me at Johnny and Janelle's wedding?).

These ones made me smile. They all did, though, really.