My home office needs a name. I am choosing between:
- The Room Where It Happens
- The Cockpit
- The Boom Boom Room
- The Dangerous Exotic Bamboo Tiki Lounge and Bowling Alley
Robert A. Heinlein’s Red Planet was the gateway drug to books for me. My 3rd grade teacher, Miss Kaufman had a little area of bookshelves in the corner of her classroom. I read Red Planet and a biography of Helen Keller and was hooked.
I told that story on Facebook a few years ago and in 2018 I heard from Miss Kaufman. She said she remembered me well. Holy crap. Mind-blowing for me. I imagine it was for her too – she remembered an 8-year-old boy and now she was messaging with a 57-year-old man, who was typing to her from a hotel room in Florida. But I expect she’s used to that by now.
I think my Heinlein addiction finally subsided, within the last three years or so. The supply is exhausted – he’s not writing any more – and I’ve reread everything a million times. I still do love history though.
There was a new Heinlein published in the last year or two – a previously lost manuscript – “Pursuit of the Pankera.” Supposedly pretty good, but I’m just not highly motivated to read it. It’s an alternate version of “Number of the Beast,” one of my least favorite of his novels.
This house has a dinosaur in the yard. The dinosaur wears a nametag. His name is Burt. 📷
Out of curiosity, I rewatched “Dance of the Dwarfs,” a 1983 low-budget horror-adventure that was in heavy rotation on cable TV around the time it was released. Back then, cable TV didn’t have a lot of content to choose from, so you saw a lot of the same thing over and over. I ended up seeing this movie a few times then, and then not since.
It’s based loosely on “The African Queen.” And I mean, very loosely. A then-famous actress named Deborah Raffin plays an anthropologist, who hires drunk helicopter pilot Peter Fonda to fly into the jungle to investigate legends of a race of pygmies. The cast also features John Amos as a witch doctor. The location is unspecified, but I expect it’s Latin America based on the supporting cast of Latino stereotypes – bandits, street urchins, servants and a couple of hookers.
I don’t know if it’s a good movie, but I enjoyed seeing it again. Raffin is leggy and gorgeous. She does what the role requires of her. Fonda plays a down-on-his-luck drunk very well, in a stained luau shirt and tropical white pants; you can almost smell him. There are a couple of nice comedy bits, some decent action sequences. Raffin screams piercingly, but she is also an expert shot and thinks her way out of trouble. The monsters, when finally revealed, look cheap. Raffin and Fonda have no chemistry – you can understand why she comes to like and respect him, but not why she falls in love with him, other than that’s what the script requires.
The director, Gus Trikonis, did TV and exploitation movies. He started his career as a dancer in the movie “West Side Story,” and was Goldie Hawn’s first husband. His latest IMDB credit is 2001, on a TV series with the delightfully cheesy name. “18 Wheels of Justice.”He does a good job on this movie, there are some nice shots of the helicopter in flight with the jungle below. And the helicopter itself is gorgeously decrepit.
I watched the movie over several days. It goes well with lunch. I do not expect to watch this again; there are too many other options for entertainment today. But if it’s 1983 and you’re looking for something to watch, “Dance of the Dwarfs” is a good choice.
📺
We don’t get many majestic trees like this in San Diego. 📷
We’ve been living in this house more than 20 years and last night Julie showed me an extremely useful lightswitch which I had previously been ignorant of.
My brothers and me having a Tarantino moment at Niagara Falls around 1971. 📷
I think the white car was our car. Dad liked a muscle car. It was an era when you could get a family-size muscle car.
Even when I was a little boy, I understood the importance of personal style. Around 1964. 📷
Just look at this beautiful house we saw on a trip to Athens, Ohio, to visit family a few years ago. Just look at it. 📷
