A Movie Every Night: Marked Woman

Marked Woman (1937)
Director: Lloyd Bacon (mmmm bacon)
Starring: Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Lola Lane, the delightful Isabel Jewell

Hostesses with the mostest-es
left to right: Mayo Methot, Lola Lane, Bette Davis, Rosalind Marquis, Isabel Jewell

Hard day on the job? Your boss treating you like you're an idiot? Jerks barking at you on the phone? So, let's say you work at this clip joint run by a mobster and you go all night cozying up to guys, trying to get them to lose at craps, hoping to get a cut of the action so you can pay the gas bill. You think you're smart, because so far you've kept going on the dimes they throw you, but you've got this dopey kid sister who gets mixed up in the "fun" and ends up dead. That sucks, huh? Whaddya gonna do about it? You think you're going to talk, do you? Well, let's say the mobster gets his goons to put the double-cross on the side of your face to shut you up.

So, you go to the DA, but he's not going to help you because you lied once to protect your mobster boss. Why should he believe you now? Because he's got it for you, baby. You're his kind of girl, only you're a "hostess" and he's legit and at the end it's just you and the girls walking off into the fog while reporters start primping him for a run at governor.

So think about it, as you watch them saunter away into the dark, leaving the vocal devotees of society's moral code who support justice, but reject those who serve it: working girls looking for a break, hoping to show that they have scruples like anyone else.

They just work crap jobs.

Today's "I cut my tongue on these pancakes" Moment

cust: YES
cust: I HAVE A CONPLAINT
cust: HELLO
us: I'm sorry to hear that, how can I help you today?
us: Hello---
us: How can I help you today?
cust: WHEN I OPENED A PACK OF YOUR DENTYNE ICE GUM I GOT A SLIVER OF METAL IN MY FINGER
cust: I SPOKE TO A FEW FRIENDS AND THEY SAID IT HAPPENED TO THEM ALSO

It made my day.

Sholay!

Or, as it's known on the Netflix envelope G.P. Sippy's: Sholay.

Best movie EVER --- and we've only watched half of it. It's a really nutty mix of 1970's action and 1960's American western, and I swear, we just watched an almost shot by shot homage to Once Upon A Time in the West and it was AWESOME. Yeah, sure, you've got to get past the silly motorcycle song and the somewhat awkward Hitler humor, but it's totally worth it.

Oh, and Amitabh Bachchan steals it from Dharmendra with his dazzling urbanite coolness. He is my new hero.

unFair

I apologize if you've heard this metaphor before, but I can't think of a better one -- It used to be that hearing a concert at the Lane County Fair was like buying a vowel on Wheel of Fortune: Why would I pay $13 to stand on one side of the barrier when I can hear the same music for free on the other side of the barrier (or the front lawn of our house)? It's useless. I'm not shelling out dough for something I can get for free. Well, apparently someone got wise and moved the concerts inside one of the exhibition halls, right next to the room with the cakes, cookies and shortbreads, and now you can't hear it outside anymore.

Which, on the aside, it was pretty funny to be looking at Junior Yeast Breads and listening some local opening band shout out the old "ROCK ON EUGENE" on the other side of the wall.

This year's big act was Foreigner. We didn't pay for the show (as usual), but since the good bathrooms are in the exhibition halls anyway I figured we'd catch at least one decent song by doing a pop-in. What do you think is playing? Is it "Hot Blooded"? "Urgent"? "Cold as Ice"? "Juke Box Hero"? ANY of the great ones????

No. It was "I Want to Know What Love Is." And since security was there to move along loiterers trying to catch the show for free in the hallway, there was no chance to wait around for something better.

Boo.

So we went on the Zipper. TWICE. The second time my sunglasses zipped right out of the cage. We found them later on the midway.

Thank God for contact lenses, man. That's all. If my bi-focals had come off they'd have knocked somebody out.

This one's for my dad

My pop didn't believe me when I told him I had seen this, so I used the sh--ty phone camera to capture it for posterity.


Who would buy this? You know that when you get it up to the register the first thing they're going to look at is your turkey neck. "That'll be $42.5--wow that is bad."

It's a little better on their website where the tough love packaging is replaced by a common sense tag line: "If you have skin... you need StriVectin®!" Whew, good thing only a few of us have skin. And as much as I love the ellipsis as a pause between thoughts, I'm not sure what its purpose is there. "If you have skin..." -- take a moment and think about it. Do you have skin? Do you? Really... Do you? Okay then, you need...

I used to like Mondays

I wake up this morning 3 times because I have to pee, walking through the kitchen in the dark without my glasses 3 TIMES to the bathroom on the other side of the house. The last time I was actually awake to do my morning routine, so my glasses are on as I come out of the bathroom, and I reach down to change the cat's food and see this mutha-...er waiting for me.

Yes, I've used the picture before. No, it's not the actual spider, just a small reproduction of the GIANT NUCLEAR TEST AREA INSECT that was staring me down. It was bigger than Veda's head. It was so big, we could leash it and take it for walks. We could put a saddle on it and run it before judges at the fair. If you wanted to call it, you'd have to look up its f...ing country code. And I had walked past it, over it, brushed against it, traded witty bon mots with it 3 TIMES without even knowing it.

But it was in the kitchen and in the kitchen it's bad luck to kill a spider. "If you want to live and thrive, let a spider stay alive." Don't ask me, I just know that to kill it I would have to get something really big and certain, like the car, to make sure it died and then I'd have bad luck for all that trouble. Worth it? Perhaps not.

So I got the big Watney's Red Barrel pint round and trapped it. I put Saran Wrap on the top and poked it full of holes until the cousin could get up and take him outside.

Then I vomited.

Then I called the tow truck guy to come pick up the Honda because the clutch didn't work and I thought I'd be smart, right? Help him. Move it from the driveway into the street, right? So I let it roll and it gets stuck there with the back end sticking out into the street. I think ... "hmm ... maybe I can get it into reverse," and I could, but then it would stall when I let up on the clutch because the clutch didn't work. Remember how the clutch doesn't work? Yeah, so then I got the shift stuck in reverse with the car sticking out into the street. My neighbor left her house and drove away as though I wasn't even there. Thanks, neighbor. So I'm playing classics of 1960's Hindi films until her dog barks itself hoarse.

But then, after working and fretting and trying not to worry about finding other spiders in the house, we get home (eventually, by many means, but without the car) and put in A History of Violence and that, my friends, made me believe in film again. God bless us everyone.

At least you've got your health

I like the Wii Fit, don't get me wrong. I like when it tells me my Wii Fit age is 22, because that's pretty satisfying. But it's a real jerk sometimes. It asked me today if I wanted to "review my sleep habits," which I've done before. It consists of the machine asking you how many hours you sleep at night and then telling you how wrong that is. So I said "No." "Well, you might want to think about it." This is a plastic board that sits on the floor telling me this. It shut up when I scored perfect on the walking test. Usually it asks if I trip when I walk.

So that's how I start my day, followed by a trip to my bathroom where the fan -- I swear -- smells like BO when it runs. The cousin/roommate doesn't believe me.
"It smells like a taxi driver."
"Oh yeah, what's his name?"
"Harvey."
"Does he have a beard?"
"Yes."
"So what's his sign?"
"Scorpio, maybe Saggitarius."
"You're making it up, K. I don't smell a thing."

Okay, so I don't care about my sleep habits, I'm Wii 22 and I'm crazy. Boh. And my platelets dropped to 39, but my weight dropped to 140, so there's a kind of Zen balance there.

I started to scan the photos. Here's one of my great-grandmother. Mom says she looks like me, but I think we just have the same way of pursing our lips (she tends to keep her eyes open).


And this little cutie is my grandmother (before she hit the Busby Berkeley chorus line):

It's so funny how pictures capture kids' expressions that you later see in them as adults. I don't think any of us really changes. We all just get taller.

Instant Karma's Gonna Git You

This is what I get for starting the morning with a rant.

This was the first experience and it was actually with a co-worker. He came back later and got me and said the same thing, but it was much longer. This was shorter and you get this gist (all typos are verbatim):

Is this your first visit?
Visitor: yes
Great! We appreciate the opportunity to assist you! How can I help you today?
Visitor: The new "Dixon Ticonderoga" are junk. I just bought 2 boxes of each.
Did you buy them from us? What is your order number please?
Visitor: I don't remember. That's not the point. The point is that you're pedaling cheap Chinese junk, and passing if off as known quality mdse.
I'm sorry you are unhappy with the product--
Visitor: If you thik passing the junk as quality mdse, you are a young modern that should not have your job. If you choose to not answer me, it won't change my opinion. I will look for qulity elsewhere. You and your low quality company can look for customers that don't know any better. Don't try to pass this off with sarcastic comments. Try doing your job and pass along my criticism.
Visitor: I am the customer! For a fact!

He concluded this with "End of Message" and then told me that co-worker had hung up on him.

He gave us his name later and it turned out that he had purchased them from someone else -- for a fact! -- and most of my chat time with him was trying to convince him of this. He was a retired former Federal employee, so who the hell was I to tell him he was wrong? Some young modern, I guess.

Politics and Religion

I keep hearing people complain about how Obama's not "doing anything," especially the Christian Coalition co-worker who sits behind me and likes to bark along with her blaring right-wing radio programs, carping on and on about how the Democrats fought so hard to get into office and what have they done? What? Have? They? Done? And how she hopes there will be a town-hall meeting in Eugene so she can go and shout down her congressman.

For the love of God.

Here are some reminders so you can follow along:

Your man got us into this mess. He got us into the war, into a shite economy, into people getting thrown out of their homes and losing health care.
Your party's policies have made it impossible to pull yourself up without government assistance -- yes, that bad ol' government who should stay out of the lives of its citizens and can't now because you expect it to save the lives of its citizens.
Your man had 8 years to do this.

Our man's been on the job since January. No, not vacationing in Texas and playing golf -- he's actually on the job. He's just started untangling the knot that your man created and he's got a lot on his plate right now. He's got to start unraveling your junk while still trying to manage the new junk that keeps coming in. And if you want to go downtown and shout down your congressman for not being the Magic Man, then go right ahead and let everyone else see what a great big moron you are. Go on, ask them why they haven't fixed the economy that apparently just turned bad in January because it was so great before that.

Oh, and before I forget, cops asking for color on a suspect description IS racial profiling, and if Prof. Gates wants to "throw the race card" it's not unfair, it's what whitey has been doing for over 200 years. (Old news? Ask anyone in Oregon who isn't white.)

Full Moon? Yes.

Actual phone conversation (with some security changes) that just happened:

Me: -------------.com, this is li'l hateful.
Customer: Yeah, my order is 79490.
Me: I'm sorry, that's not one of our order numbers. Was this ordered from ------------.com?
Customer (barking): Who else would I have ordered it from?!
Me (tries to read mind. fails): I don't know. What's your name?
Customer: Jim L------.
Me (checks order database): I'm sorry, I don't show that you've ordered from us. What is the item?
Customer: What good with that do you if you say I didn't order from you???
Me: I can get you a phone number for someone who can help if I know what this is regarding.

Customer launches into long involved story about a big and tall executive chair that he ordered on Tuesday, just received, the guys put it in his office, he sat in it, got up to get coffee, came back AND THERE WAS A HOLE IN IT! A HOLE!!!!!

Me: Well, we haven't sold that chair since May, so I --
Customer: Listen, I've got a Staples catalog sitting on my desk. What does that tell you?

(pause to control laughter and snarky response ... fail)

Me: It tells me you ordered it from Staples. Here's their phone number.

*** that was followed by this email from someone else ***

"Our order was received and I am very pleased, thank you. If you had any sort of coupon toward our next hypothetical order, I think I could sell my boss on locking you in as a go-to."

Sure, here's a virtual coupon for your hypothetical order.

Having a Helluva Time. Wish You Were Here

Am I stuck in a perpetual trap of rushing around and not having time to blog? How the hell did I ever find time for school? I wake up, go to work, come home and the day is completely shot. I blame Wii.

So, to recap the last couple of weeks:

art - lovely(That's me with the Hopper - eyes closed, wrong ISO, mom taking at a blurry angle - perfect)

gambled - lost

sunburn - still red(that's my sunburn, yeh. It goes to 11)

back to oregon - hot

family pictures - haven't scanned them
(autograph - JOAN CRAWFORD!!!) (story for Antiques Roadshow - in my head)

photo story - published at last

now - ... ... I forget what I was doing now. Oh well, that about sums it up for this week. Come back again next week when we'll explore the benefits of coffee together.