Friday, June 26, 2015

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SORRY
If you are offended by my intellectual Pot- Porie, please let me know and I’ll not bother you with a notice of any of my new blogs.  Believe it or not, my selection of friends from all over the world,  is sometimes mis-directed. 

 ROBIN WILLIAMS REPLACEMENT?
Maybe I have led a sheltered life, but I just came across a British comedienne, Eddie Izzard  -  With a name like that, he has to be a comedian.  He thinks a lot like me but so much more cleverly.  His story of Noah & his Ark may be better even  than Cosby’s classic. But don’t let his dressing up as a woman deter you.

CHERNOBLE!
I have mentioned years ago about the great shed they were going to build over the destroyed hulk of Chernoble Nuclear Power plant in Russia. Well, a world-wide consortium is in the middle of actually constructing the thing. May be the largest movable object on earth. Go to Novarka and find the site that has the computer graphics of the whole project.  Then go to Borgues or Mammoet to see how they skidded the mammoth roof.  While you’re doing all that see the National Geographics short  0 seconds from Disaster!”, showing why the whole thing exploded and the dangers involved. My son (Zaidi) was at the San Francisco Airport heading for Russia with a small theater group  when they heard about it. They chanced it (The show must go on!) and were not in the area near Kiev where the problem  was. 

SELF PUBLISHING                      
     
  In case you are unaware that I have self-published four books,  I want you to have a chance at any of them .  However, the first one HILLSIDE HOMES may not be available at a price you can afford, as It became some kind of a cult classic and sold for a couple of hundred dollars on ebay for a while.  I published 1,000 copies in 1980 the hard way, writing it, designing the layout, getting the photos made in some weird format, getting the color copies of the cover made, etc. etc., and putting it all together to give to a print shop. But then I was faced with what to do with all these books.  This was all a lot of fun as I could get the page size right, with a square format and a blank spot on right edge for your thumb to capture the page (You just wouldn’t believe how many design decisions go into something like this. Anyway, I ended up selling thru Amazon, paying $8 to print each book and selling to them for $6.  If you do the math you’ll see why I’m not driving a BMW. 
  Later on, after that, I managed to decypt on-line publishing. This is all done on line with no actual contact with another human .  The real benefit is you can virtually order & print one at a time.  I managed to publish ATELIER (the story of renovating an old apple processing plant into Artists Studios) and THE LITTLE BOOK OF BIG TRUCKS (I just LOVE European big rigs!), as well as THE EDUCATION OF AN ARCHIITECT (Kind of a bio on getting into the design business, but a little bit dirty).  You can get most of them on LULU direct or give me a call.

LAMONT'S SUICIDE HOT LINE!
How to kill yourself cleanly, not the Heming-way(Swallow the shotgun, probably the worse  case scenario for you’re  miserable relatives and friends).  Most, if not all of these so-called suicide hot lines are set up to talk you out of killing yourself. We, @ my Hotline, have a different program, convincing you to kill yourself without leaving a terrible, disgusting mess for others. I just can’t imagine what people like Hemingway were thinking when they put a shotgun in their mouth to blow their brains, skull all over a room. What does that say about how he had no concern or respect for the poor bastards (family?) who had to clean up this whole, disgusting mess? Now, I’m no expert, but I’ve found a couple of folks who exited this miserable life cleanly. I found a guy hanging in a Berkeley apartment once who had tied a ceiling light fixture cord around his neck, then kicked the chair out. Now you would think this was OK, but he had bloody ooze hanging out of his nose, in a long disgusting string. Yuck! But now, my recommendation is to pull up a nice comfortable chair in your garage (a Barka Lounger is perfect),  Close up any vents to the outside, Start your inefficient car, set down and sleep right on off this planet. This results in a minimum mess. However, I do understand that when your body dies, it releases your bowels & bladder so be aware to wear Depends or equal. This assumes of course, you have left the inevitable suicide Note. Now, as an added service, I have several Suicide Notes already written, just pick out one that corresponds to your miserable state of affairs’.
NOTE #1
Goodby, cruel  world. It wasn’t my idea to be born here (Don’t be so sure, Buster). 
NOTE #2
I really don’t know if I should really do this. They have made it so hard to die these days. I had planned to leap out into space off the Golden Gate Bridge, but, damn! They just put a net that would prevent me from my last sally forth.
NOTE #3
Aw, FUCK IT !!

BIG THREE
During WW2 Roosevelt, Churchill and General de Gaulle had a conference in Casablanca to discuss the liberation of Europe. Churchill suffered acutely from the absence of alcohol at the insistence of Roosevelts deference to the Sultan’s religion.  Churchill’s program in a note to H. Hopkins for the day was; “Diner at the white House (dry, alas!) with the Sultan. After dinner; recovery from the above”.










Thursday, June 18, 2015

VIDEO ALERT



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CASABLANCA
  I came across some interesting notes regarding the great cult movie ‘Casablanca’ while I was reading a book about the Allies invasion of North Africa in 1942.
            Casablanca, city of hope and despair located in French Morocco in North Africa – the meeting place of adventurers, fugitives, criminals, refugees lured into the dangerous oasis by hope of escape to the Americas.’              (Liner notes from trailer)
A play called ‘Everybody comes to Rick’s’ was picked up by  Hal Wallis (Warner Bros.) the day after Pearl Harbor. Rick Blaines’ (The author) attitude corresponded to Walliss’ ideas of the probable involvement of the U.S. in the war.  What is mind boggling is that Ronald Reagan was initially considered for the part. Can you imagine what that would of done to the movie?  Ingrid Bergman was perfect but even she didn’t know how the movie would end a month before shooting was completed.  The original play ended with Ilsa  staying behind with Rick, but Hal fortunately had Rick develop a case of selflessness and got her and Lazlo Letters of Transit to Lisbon and on their way to America (or back into the underground). What a guy!

ON THE BEACH, THE MOVIE
  Near the beginning of the cold war, Nevil Shute wrote a book in 1957 about the death of all people on Earth due to an Atomic war between China and Russia. The resulting movies deviated a bit from the book (Why do they do that?). but still engaging enough that all politicians should have seen or read it. But, that’s just wishful thinking, as not many wanted to think of a scenario that could be so disastrous as all that. Here we are yet able to destroy the entire world with just a few of the thousands of missiles, but, we really don’t want to consider what we are really doing.  Yikes!  The story focuses on the last folks alive, in Southern Australia, detailing some pretty gritty concepts, like, you were going to die in a couple of days, yet, your year old baby would probably live for a few more days, dying alone, un-aided in her last miserable days. Would you give her the free government drug so it wouldn’t happen that way? 

FORSYTES’ SURPRISE
The serial ‘The Forsyte Sagas’ are right up my alley, showing how love manages to draw the maximum amount of pain from all those involved with such shenanigans.  However, on an up-beat note, one of he characters, Bosinny , the far sighted Architect, is hired by Saomes (an up-tight lawyer) to design his country house and forthwith runs off with the clients’ wife (Shades of F. Lloyd Wright), we are treated to a very fine example of contemporary architecture, a huge surprise to me in this Soap opera.  I was so surprised in fact, I had to find out how this design managed to manifest on this series. Turns out the production designer cobbled together four architects, Frank Lord Wright, Rennie Mackintosh (Scotland) and a couple of Brits, Volsey and Godwin, who supplied inspiration for the interiors.  These last  two were influenced by Japanese designs, as the Japs had just come out of the closet after hundreds of years.  Check the series out if for no other reason than to see the house called ‘Robin Hill’ and the interiors were well done also, considering the time in England of 1870’s. 

UPGRADE TIME!
I received an Apple ipod Nano , the smallest thing they make except the watch, for one of my incessant birthdays that seem to come around about every month. The Nano comes with some great ear pods but no directions at all. Since I had no six year old kid around to help me, I went to old Google and found a 30 page document I could download in order to turn the thing on.  I only printed out about half of it as the rest was all about the Podcasts (What the fuck is that?), Videos (I just want music!), Fitness (I’m already doing Tai Chi, leave me alone!), Radio (No! I don’t listen to radios with their constant advertising), and Photos (No! I just want Music !). This is not going to be easy, as I had up-loaded (What’s the difference between up-load & down-loading?)  all my CD’s onto my computer (itunes) so I could transfer them to Joy’s ipod (The bigger one). However, somewhere most of all that got dumped by Apple or someone (I get blamed mostly for this kind of stuff).  However, meanwhile, I gave all my CD’s away as we had them on digital, right?  So now I am running around, asking my friends if I can borrow my CD back for a short time. That doesn’t help a whole lot as now I have to figure how to organize these tunes on Playlists, Songs, Artists, Albums, Genres, even composers (Bach, Ray Charles, etc.). Once I get all this shit unraveled, all I have to do is find a Dock/Speaker/Radio combo (They don’t come without Radio) so I can listen to my swell tunes of Thelonious Monk or Alirio Diaz, guitar. These ’Docks’ cost about $60 but there seems to be a problem. The Nano has downsized the charger from the ipod and they don’t make them yet in the small size for Nanos!  And to think I gave away my turntable with my vinyl recordings!