Daily Blague

Phone service was restored at about 1:30, invisibly. Well, not quite. Nobody actually came to the apartment; for once, for once, it was a problem out there. I was sitting here fetisseling on the Web when I noticed the "free" and "in use" lights of the two-line phone were flashing oddly. Voilà. To have the problem cleared up so unfussily was almost disappointing.

Not much later, Ms NOLA sent a link to the notice of Ismail Merchant's death. What a loss! For I think that he was the brains of the gang. He ran a very tight ship, and for all the opulence of the films themselves - never garish or fetishistic, as critics mindlessly fell into the habit of suggesting - the budgets were very low. Hollywood, of course, is one of those garden hoses with holes punctured throughout their length. I remember glancing at a report that 20th Century Fox board members received, criticizing the costs of making The Great White Hope. (My father was a director of, not for, the company for some time.) The most memorable item was the suggestion that James Earl Jones's Everlast shorts ought to have been purchased outright, not rented at the rate of fifty dollars a day. This was in 1971 or so. There was plenty of room for the late Mr Merchant to work in. I look forward to a forthcoming book about the team, which of course included writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The other day, I was watching The Bostonians (1984), perhaps Christopher Reeve's best picture. What a picture of health he is, playing Basil Ransome!

Having written off the day from the moment of getting out of bed (see previous entry), I wasn't about to buckle down and get to work. Actually, there was a lot to keep me at the computer in the way of interesting correspondence. I spent twenty minutes or so trying to reconstruct a comment that had been lost when la petite anglaise crashed last night. (And did I ever overreact to that. To my undying shame, I wrote a frantic but pointless letter to la coquette, as if there were anything to be done but wait. Then again, petite has been through some heavy seas lately. I am truly taking those crazy pills from Zoolander.) Wandering about unsupervised, I came across the winner of the 2004 Best Dad Blog award. (Is there any central organization to this awards racket? And what category should I am to fit?), Laid-Off Dad. The author was laid-off when he began the blog but has since, mercifully, found work. He writes well about the joy of finding himself alone in his downtown apartment.

But you're looking for a way of wasting an hour or two, right? Well, here's just the thing, and it comes via kottke.org. Abusing Amazon Images. More testimony to the vast underoccupation of brilliant minds. 

I'm posting this on Wednesday evening, and you may chance to read it then. Depending on the weather tomorrow, I may slyly change the date and erase this paragraph. Don't tell on me.