Author: David Gorsline

What does the O stand for?

Via wood s lot, Todd McEwen deconstructs Cary Grant’s suit in North by Northwest:

This is what’s ingenious about this picture, at least as far as the SUIT goes—Cary’s able to travel all over the country in just this one beautiful suit…. It’s so well cut you can’t tell if he’s even carrying a wallet (turns out he is). Here’s what he’s got in that suit! He goes all the way from New York to Chicago to the face of Mount Rushmore with: a monogrammed book of matches, his wallet and some nickels, a pencil stub, a hanky, a newspaper clipping and his sunglasses—but these are shortly to be demolished when Eva Marie Saint folds him into the upper berth in her compartment. (Really this is a good thing, because Cary Grant in dark glasses looks appallingly GUILTY.)

Return to text

Hey, wow, I was paging through the annual report of my local chapter of Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, and halfway back, before the thank-you boards for big-bucks contributors and the pictures from the annual fundraiser, I read that I’ve finally made my 1000 hours of service milestone. That puts me on the list of Golden Reels, which is a bit anachronistic since we’ve been all-digital for years now.

The most interesting part of each annual report is the profiles of our borrowers, high school and college students mostly, who need an audio assist with their reading. Dyslexic students predominate (this year a beauty queen and a recent masters degree recipient), along with blind users. But the standout is a now-practicing lawyer who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis while an undergraduate. The MS caused intermittent vision loss in one eye; the loss was unpredictable and untreatable at the time. RFB&D readers got her through Yale Law School. So, a hat tip to my friend from Texas David G. and to all the other volunteers out there crunching through the law texts.

There, but for the grace…

Via Monkey Bites, Gary Anthes reports the results of a Computerworld survey of IT managers at 352 companies. The short answer: COBOL is still with us:

62% of the respondents reported that they actively use Cobol. Of those, three quarters said they use it “a lot” and 58% said they’re using it to develop new applications.

What brought me up short in this story (which seemed to feature a disproportionate number of state agencies) was the finding that the average age of a COBOL programmer is about 50. HR managers are concerned about COBOL new hires: those that have the skills are nearing retirement age. I touched my last COBOL compiler in 1997 and wrote my last app in the language in 1990. Heck, I didn’t realize that Computerworld was still around.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Catalyst Theater Company brings Bertolt Brecht’s chilling satire of the early career of Adolf Hitler to the friendly confines of the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Written in exile from Germany while World War II still burned, Arturo Ui imagines Hitler as a comical gangster who sets out to organize the vegetable-sellers’ rackets in Chicago. With a thick Bronx accent, Arturo Ui and his henchmen are figures of fun out of a bad Jimmy Cagney movie—at least until the death toll begins to mount and Ui invades neighboring Austria (or Cicero, as the play would have it).

Scot McKenzie’s inhabiting of Ui is at its most frightening when he pauses in a climactic monologue and just stares us down. This before launching a stunning Hitlerian tirade that swamps the black box theater and the handful of cast members who provide background applause.

The evenly-matched ensemble cast of eight executes multiple duties, serving as scene shifters, lighting operators, and a three-piece orchestra. Some of the scene shifts take longer than we would like, but most transitions are covered by slide-show projections that establish the connection between events in the play and those in 1930’s Germany. Standouts include Grady Weatherford’s sotted Fish, scapegoated for the play’s Reichstag Fire stand-in; as well as Scott McCormick and his robust baritone, placed in the service of Butcher, Giri, and other roles, and a brisk second-act opening song.

  • The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Christopher Gallu, Catalyst Theater Company, Washington

A leitmotiv

So I’m working my way through Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and the Fred F. French Building keeps making recurring appearances along with the atomic bombs and piles of garbage and various movies and Bobby Thomson’s home run. And I asked, “Who was Fred F. French?” in much the same way that the character Rochelle does. Well, James Morrison answers the question.

A mystery

So I went down into the basement yesterday evening to check something in a book (the end of Willie Stark), and then I went over to the workroom side to make sure that the sump pump was working and everything was dry. (A couple days of steady rian for us.) I didn’t turn the light on, but I could see something in the bottom of the utility sink, like a big crumpled up leaf. Now every once in a while a camel cricket will get trapped in the sink. I’ll run the water in the sink, and the cricket will hop around angrily, and I will ignore it. “Hey, you were the one who hopped into the sink.” Sometimes I will feel compassionate, and I will catch the cricket and let it outside.

But this was a lot bigger than a cricket. So I turned the light on, and there in the sink, stiffer than a porn star, was a dead mouse. How did it get there? Did it crawl into the basement to escape the rain? Has it been living in my house for some time? Are there more mice that I need to worry about? How long has it been there? The last time I remember being in the basement was Sunday to do laundry. I think it was Sunday. Was it dying already when it got trapped in the sink? What’s it doing in my utility sink? A dead mouse.