The shuttlecraft Discovery is doing a fly-by in D.C. this morning (that is to say, it's flying in from Cape Canaveral atop a 747), and I think half the city is going to be clogging the roads to go see it. I was considering driving out to Gravelly Point to catch a glimpse, but as it took me roughly twice as long to get into work as it normally does this morning, I think I'll pass.I installed my new yard sale cabinets in the garage: short video here, photos here. It doubles my cabinet space; more room for knobs, outlet hardware, extra faucet handles, etc. that I'll probably never have the need to use but feel I must keep. I knew I'd find some usable cabinets sooner or later if I kept my eyes open... Now I have to raise the one on the opposite side of the wall up three inches. It doesn't look right anymore.
I watched a rather ho-hum film noir the other night: The Capture (1950), a Western that's not a Western. It's a Roy Rogersish production where you see people wandering about riding horses and wearing cowboy hats. Then a car pulls into view, giving you visual confirmation that the film is not, in fact, set in the 1800's, but, rather, in modern times. Were there really places in the West like that in the 1940's and 1950's, where horses and cars were considered more or less interchangeable modes of transport? Or was this a Republic Studios thing?
Oddly enough, a plot point in this is that, psychologically, a man cannot raise his arm to signify surrender to the authorities and therefore takes a fatalistic view that's he's going to be killed. (Because he killed somebody under identical circumstances.) Weird. Also, there's a comic sequence where the protagonist is bathing in a barrel that I really could have done without.
I added three new Picasa photo galleries for no good reason other than that I was cleaning up an old photo of myself and sort of got on a roll: U.S. Marines photos, Reenactment photos, 1985 Battlefield panoramics.
How to End the War.
I sort of went into Avocado Memories mode with the captioning for this one.
Last night I found and bought a VHS copy of the legendary New Market Battlefield Park "Flag Film," formally known as New Market: Field of Honor. It's a low budget production from 1967 that they used to show at the visitor's center. It stars no human beings. Instead, the VMI flag marches out from VMI, brews a pot of coffee atop a campfire and rests against a tree, then assaults the Yanks at New Market and wins imperishable honor for itself. The production was something of a favorite of reenactors in the 1980's; the killjoys at the park replaced it with a more credible, Emmy-winning production that is now shown repeatedly every day.
I once attended a scout camporee at New Market; I warned the scouts about the flag film, but that didn't keep them from giggling all through it. They totally lost it in the second film Stonewall's Valley, at the line "Baldy Dick Ewell extended himself..." I'm trying to find that film as well,
A guy at work introduced me to the Ball Watch line... based more or less on railroad industry watch designs from the last century. I like the Trainmaster series. Nice... I really like those script numbers which look like those found on a grandfather's clock. It's somewhat difficult to come up with distinct watch designs, but it appears Ball has done that.
Webelos den meeting tonight. We're starting the Athlete activity pin, which means running these little guys around some and getting them to do long jumps and sit-ups. Generally speaking, the average ten year-old boy is happier when he's in motion than when he's sitting at a table listening to a cub leader talk.
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