Haines His Way

Page 5 dance!!!

DERBRCER where did you live that you didn’t have kindergarten?  I almost purchased a Dick and Jane 2005 calendar.

We lived in a new strip of houses on the edge of a large chicken farm in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania - the six-room elementary school adjoined a large dairy farm in Bethayres, Pennsylvania. (My folks wanted to move out of the city (Philadelphia) becasue it was thought too dangerous during the war - so we moved to the country - 200 yards from a giant Budd plant that pioneered steel auomotive bodies,
moved on to steel railroad locomtoives and cars:


and was now building tanks for the US Army.

It is not clear why living a stones throw from a major miltary production facility was deemed safer than living in a Philly row-house.

der Brucer

 

I guess it's a good thing the police didn't frisk or arrest  you--they would have been in for a real surprise !  

   

DERBRUCER the elementary school my boys went to in Richboro, Pennsylvania had originally been the only school in the area.  Parents of my children’s friends talked about going all through school there.  At the time I thought that included kindergarten, maybe not.

der Brucer, my Princess of Mars script, despite its cult status among Burroughs aficianados, is a dead issue.  It was the very first one written for Disney years ago, many have followed in its wake, to get that script out of Disney would cost a lot, for Disney would try to apply so much of its development costs against it.  

And I presume that if you attempted to write a "new" Princess of Mars script, they would claim it was a rehash of the one they now own.

der Brucer (wondering how many other works of quality are being held hostage?)

I'm back from our little rehearsal with Mr. Kevin Spirtas - I took a splendidly splendid photograph of him, which I'll share with you when the Powerbook is up and running tomorrow.  

Darling Ann, your New Year's resolution will be to STOP driving into ditches, and only have wonderful things happen.

The rain seems to have stopped.  I guess my being officially over it helped.

I bought my first computer, an IBM clone, in the early 90s. I was procrastinating, but then a friend's daughter got one for her Bas Mitzvah, and I figured I deserved one at least as much.

I quickly mastered all the Word Perfect function keys. Although I've moved on to Word, I'm convinced there are certain tasks that I performed more efficiently in WP 5.0 than I now do in Word.

The sun! I see the sun! I'm officially into it, man.

I've been thinking about chat, since I just got the bill to renew our handy-dandy chat room.  It has been quite a while since we've done one (I think everyone got chatted out and that a break was necessary).  So, if we do a chat this week, let's figure out a day and time when it would be optimal for most people on the site.  You know, maybe something like five o'clock my time, so that the New Yorkers would be chatting at eight.  

That time would make this New Yorker quite happy, but I also know that a lot of west Coast Kimlets would still be at work, so 8:00 would be best for Sunday.  
However, I will bite the bullet and be agreeable about 9:00 because I would not like to see anyone missing out on Chat.  If it hadn't been for Chat, DR Danise and I would never have met!

DR Jennifer, to do Telnet:

Open a command prompt, type "telnet" and hit enter.

I'm ignorant about telnet commands but if you type "/?" and hit enter, you should get a list of commands.

I know how to use telnet.  But where do i get it?  Do I have to download something?

The computer I was using had it on the front page under "internet".  The computer I am now using does not.  And I'm not sure what to do!

Does this make more sense?

Others please chime in on chat.  If you don't have chimes, then xylophone or bell in on chat.

Meant to mention that I, too, saw film adaptation of THE PHANTOM OF THE HOO-HA yesterday afternoon.

POTO never has been, and never will be, one of my favorite shows.  Amongst other reasons, I always felt the hype (back in the late 80s) outweighed the merits of the piece.  That being said, I always liked "All I Ask of You" very much, as well as a couple of other numbers.

I thought the adaptation worked well, though there were a couple of spots at which I found myself giggling.  Most notably, the rising candleabra.  For one, it was one of the more blatant "steals" from the stage version; for another, it was just silly in as realistic a medium as film.  As silly as Esther Williams emerging from the MGM tank with hair and lipstick in place, smiling broadly.

I liked the framing device, and the backstory (though it's about one of three or four backstories that now exist for the fantome).  For some reason, it was also the first time I ever was made to feel that Meg Giry might actually be the Fantome's daughter.  (The dear partner and I always chuckle about such a minor character being given the final curtain of such a major musical.  We chuckled some more, after seeing that the movie didn't change much of this.)

I thought that "Masquerade" was a mess.  First, the voguing.  Then the camera-work.  I wasn't even crazy about the black/white costuming, especially with other characters in colors other than black and white.  And I missed the cow.

I thought that Schumacher's allowing so many different accents was deplorable.  And I forget who mentioned Patrick Wilson's American take on the word "to" last week, but when the moment arrived, it seemed so out of place......

Loved Driver, Richardson.

Liked Wilson, Butler (who is awfully sexy).

Rossum was....in the words of Addison DeWitt...a revelation.  Loved her.  Thought she was beautiful.  Thought she gave an earnest, well-thought-out performance.  Has a waist the size of my thigh.  She was, however, saddled with a wigmaster with no concern with continuity.  In some scenes her hair looked fine, and normal, all the way through.  In some other scenes (mostly in the Phantom's lair, where the humidity must have gotten to her), she could start a scene with normal hair, and it would widen and "poof" to the point where she would look like Marisa Jaret Winokur (or Elsa Lanchester, if the Bride had let her hair down.....).

So, as with the show itself, I didn't love the movie PHANTOM, nor did I hate it.

I'm listening to an interview on BBC Radio 3 with Maury Yeston. It's quite good (IMHO). Fans of the other Phantom will hear some lovely work. Also pieces from Grand Hotel and a wonderful piece from an early show called In the Beginning.

Here is the link. It will be at the Web site until 11am (EST) next Monday, January 10th. Enjoy!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/stageandscreen/

The first computer I ever used was an IBM mainframe when I went to computer school.  Our programs had to be punched onto IMB cards and submitted to the operators.  If you're program worked, you would get back a few pages of output on that paper with the green bars.  If your program went wild, you would get back what we soon learned to call a Sunday Newspaper (because your stack would be at least as thick.)

The first PC I owned was a Timex Sinclair, which was probably about the same size as Writer's Block.  It was only 64K but I was able to write an amazing number of programs on it.  When I bought it, I was able to afford only one additional peripheral, either the cassette recorder "drive" of the printer.  I opted for the cassette recorder and by the time I had money to buy the printer they were no longer in stock (Timex didn't stay long in the computer business.)  I eventually sold my Sinclair for cheap to a friend, who later fried it and tossed it.  It's a shame because those units are considered highly collectable today.

My first internet experience was on a bulky desktop at school sometimes during '77-'78.  We could chat with people at other schools around the country and play backgammon with them.  There was also some kind of Star Trek game but none of us could figure out how to play it.

When I finally got a desktop PC at home with a modem in 1995 (a Compaq Presario), I initially connected to the internet by dialing up bulletin boards, which had access to chat rooms, usenet and search engines such as Archie, Veronica and Gopher.  I then tried Prodigy for a few months (which, as other DRs have mentioned, was extremely expensive.)