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Ten cops came in with hatchets one day and all they left was two cherries and a tulip
I mailed my taxes and I think I'm coming down with a cold. It's the American Dream.
Yesterday was my father's birthday. He really wanted homemade hamburgers. My family may have gone slightly overboard with the homemade fries and malted milk shakes. I regret nothing, especially the spicy ketchup which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I personified as "Heliopause, Bringer of Presents." (We wrapped it in paper with a cupcake-and-candle pattern and stuck some frou-frou on top and all of a sudden it developed a personality. There will be pictures once I get them off my mother's camera. Also, it was delicious.) I introduced Rob properly to my aunt who was visiting from California and they exchanged cat pictures. My niece is sixteen months old and very fast on her feet.
We came home reasonably early and watched Larceny, Inc. (1942), a neat little Runyonesque comedy starring Edward G. Robinson as a smooth-talking ex-convict who buys a failing luggage store on Sixth Avenue in order to get close to the bank vault next door and ends up becoming a respected businessman and the hero of the neighborhood despite himself. It's a Christmas story, which only ups the schmaltz potential inherent in this premise, but the script—adapted from the short-lived stage play The Night Before Christmas, by S.J. Perelman and Laura West—does a clever job dodging most of the expected redemption arc. Perpetually on the make, if not always in the money, "Pressure" Maxwell has moments of altruism and repentance, but he never quite goes straight so much as he realizes that honest retail is an even better racket than a dog track in Florida. (His adopted daughter fondly farewells him and his two accomplices with "Goodbye, all you filthy capitalists!") Especially since Robinson's most famous gangsters are characterized by their bluster and their violence, it's a pleasure to see him playing a silver-tongued spieler, like Odysseus in the Iliad who's nothing at all to look at until he starts talking and then you can't look away. Pressure on his way out of prison nearly breaks down in tears in front of the warden, pathetically imagining his little girl's first sight of him after years in Sing Sing, "shuffling along in a shoddy, tattered suit." Cut to Pressure sauntering up out of the subway in the warden's own natty pinstripes, modestly deflecting the admiration of his sidekick Jug (an unbelievably young Broderick Crawford)—"The suit was easy. It was the tie that was tough." And then an overcoat of the right size goes by on a man who has no idea what's about to hit him, and we knew what kind of a film we were in for. I have no idea how much of the original script made it into the screenplay, but the double-talk goes by at high velocity and intermittently borders on the surreal ("You couldn't hit a medicine ball in a revolving door"), so I'm comfortable saying I can see the Perelman influence. The ending is a cute evasion of the Production Code. I wonder how much other comedy Robinson has done. He's good at it.
A thing I need to figure out: how to strike a balance between reminding people that my Patreon exists and not letting it eat my life. —It's not getting figured out right now; Hestia just clawed me in the mouth and it's difficult to type while holding tissue paper to my face. She was mewing piteously atop the second newel post on the stairwell, giving every sign of having accidentally trapped herself and wanting rescue; I tried to offer it and she panicked and hooked me through the upper lip. It hurt. I yelled. This may formally mark the stupidest and most inconvenient way I have ever been injured by a cat. If I wanted to go out with Kleenex stuck all over my face, I'd take up shaving.
Yesterday was my father's birthday. He really wanted homemade hamburgers. My family may have gone slightly overboard with the homemade fries and malted milk shakes. I regret nothing, especially the spicy ketchup which
derspatchel and I personified as "Heliopause, Bringer of Presents." (We wrapped it in paper with a cupcake-and-candle pattern and stuck some frou-frou on top and all of a sudden it developed a personality. There will be pictures once I get them off my mother's camera. Also, it was delicious.) I introduced Rob properly to my aunt who was visiting from California and they exchanged cat pictures. My niece is sixteen months old and very fast on her feet.We came home reasonably early and watched Larceny, Inc. (1942), a neat little Runyonesque comedy starring Edward G. Robinson as a smooth-talking ex-convict who buys a failing luggage store on Sixth Avenue in order to get close to the bank vault next door and ends up becoming a respected businessman and the hero of the neighborhood despite himself. It's a Christmas story, which only ups the schmaltz potential inherent in this premise, but the script—adapted from the short-lived stage play The Night Before Christmas, by S.J. Perelman and Laura West—does a clever job dodging most of the expected redemption arc. Perpetually on the make, if not always in the money, "Pressure" Maxwell has moments of altruism and repentance, but he never quite goes straight so much as he realizes that honest retail is an even better racket than a dog track in Florida. (His adopted daughter fondly farewells him and his two accomplices with "Goodbye, all you filthy capitalists!") Especially since Robinson's most famous gangsters are characterized by their bluster and their violence, it's a pleasure to see him playing a silver-tongued spieler, like Odysseus in the Iliad who's nothing at all to look at until he starts talking and then you can't look away. Pressure on his way out of prison nearly breaks down in tears in front of the warden, pathetically imagining his little girl's first sight of him after years in Sing Sing, "shuffling along in a shoddy, tattered suit." Cut to Pressure sauntering up out of the subway in the warden's own natty pinstripes, modestly deflecting the admiration of his sidekick Jug (an unbelievably young Broderick Crawford)—"The suit was easy. It was the tie that was tough." And then an overcoat of the right size goes by on a man who has no idea what's about to hit him, and we knew what kind of a film we were in for. I have no idea how much of the original script made it into the screenplay, but the double-talk goes by at high velocity and intermittently borders on the surreal ("You couldn't hit a medicine ball in a revolving door"), so I'm comfortable saying I can see the Perelman influence. The ending is a cute evasion of the Production Code. I wonder how much other comedy Robinson has done. He's good at it.
A thing I need to figure out: how to strike a balance between reminding people that my Patreon exists and not letting it eat my life. —It's not getting figured out right now; Hestia just clawed me in the mouth and it's difficult to type while holding tissue paper to my face. She was mewing piteously atop the second newel post on the stairwell, giving every sign of having accidentally trapped herself and wanting rescue; I tried to offer it and she panicked and hooked me through the upper lip. It hurt. I yelled. This may formally mark the stupidest and most inconvenient way I have ever been injured by a cat. If I wanted to go out with Kleenex stuck all over my face, I'd take up shaving.
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Oh, cat.
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Luckily, I love them.
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The movie sounds delightful, and I am now contemplating it as the annual wrapping paper movie (wrapping paper figures heavily in
The hamburger fest sounds like a lot of fun. :)
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Over here... (http://meritahut.livejournal.com/324195.html)
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Win$ton likes to pap us in the face in the morning when we aren't getting up as fast as he would prefer. This is not normally a problem - for all his little daggers, he is gentle - but sometimes he misjudges. Memorably, he once misjudged Darkpaisley in the eye, which was a bad and nervous day. Fortunately, medical attention wasn't needed, but Kate does not recommend the experience.