Stage Fright, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith

We finally got to play Ultimate again on Tuesday. I've still been rather tired this week, plus my legs have been a bit sore and the calluses I'd built up on some sensitive spots on my feet had worn down due to the long layoff. So it was a strenuous evening of frisbee, beginning with my dropping the very first throw of the evening. Grr.

But other than that it was a successful evening. I caught a few throw and made a few, and I did a good job on defense, I though, especially covering the person with the disc; several people I covered made bad throws, and when they're doing so with some consistency, I'm inclined to think that, gee, maybe I am partly responsible for it!

Next week is I believe our last game of the season; I'll miss it. I might join something over the summer, depending on how other things shake out. We'll see.

Last night, rather than gaming, Subrata and I went to see a couple of Hitchcock films, being joined for dinner and the films by another gaming buddy.

These were not A-quality films, unfortunately. The first, Stage Fright (1950), is in black-and-white despite its late release date. It stars Marlene Dietrich (the first time I recall ever seeing one of her films) as stage actress and singer Charlotte Inwood who has asked her lover, Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd), to cover up for her murder of her husband. Jonathan gets the full blame placed on him, and he runs to an aspiring actress he knows, Eve Gill (Jane Wyman, first husband of President Ronald Reagan) to help him. She appeals to her father (Alastair Sim, in a flamboyant and entertaining performance) to help hide him. As Eve is in love with Jonathan (although he clearly cares little for her), she sets out to clear him by proving Miss Inwood's guilt. Along the way she meets the dashing Inspector Wilfred "Ordinary" Smith (Michael Wilding) who falls in love with her.

It's actually a pretty complicated film, with Eve embarking on a dual identity and the entanglements because of it coming to a head at several points in the film. And the ultimate kicker to the plot is fairly well covered by the unusual manner in which the backstory is revealed. The script, too, has its share of zingers:

Eve: "I quite like strange men. I mean..."

Eve's mother, when introduced to Inspector Smith: "Smith... that name sounds familiar..."

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) is a decidedly different film, being largely a romantic (and often unromantic) comedy: Ann (Carole Lombard) and David Smith (Robert Montgomery) have an unusual marriage: We meet them three days after having a fight, and we learn that they have a rule that neither one can leave the bedroom after a fight until they make up. One spat went on in this way for eight days! Fortunately, David's job as a lawyer allows him flexible work hours. Their marriage seems to be a happy one, but David reveals in answering his wife's query that if he were to do it all over again, he wouldn't marry her.

Well, we soon learn that due to a quirk of the law, they are in fact not legally married. A man comes by the office to tell David this, and, entranced by the notion that his wife is now his mistress, he plans to wine and dine her that evening before taking her to bed. Unknown to him, the messenger has also told Ann, and she expects him to remarry her immediately, and when he doesn't, she kicks him out of the house. David soon realizes that he doesn't want to give her up, and he pursues her at great length, although she is quite cold towards him and begins seeing other men.

I guess you'd call this film a farce, as it is entirely over-the-top, with several rather ludicrous situations, some of which depend on David being somewhat stupid or on contrived situations. It even includes an interminable scene in a restaurant in the middle where David has been suckered into a blind date; it all ends up horribly predictably and is perhaps the worst scene I've ever witnessed in a Hitchcock film.

On the other hand, the script is at times clever, and Lombard and Montgomery are terrific in their roles. But the plot could have used another revision or two, especially as the ending is about as sappy as these things get.

At work I've spent most of this week in Windows Hell.

I think I mentioned that my old Windows machine died last week, so I grabbed the one from my departed boss' office. Its power supply was bad, so I replaced it with the supply from my dead machine. I now had a machine with a spiffy upgraded processor and motherboard (compared to my old one). Two problems: The drive was only 1.2 Gb - too small for real work - and it was running Windows 2000, which I think is a big step down from Windows NT 4, and also will apparently not run some of the software I need to run for my next project.

Worse, not only could I not get the machine to recognize a second hard drive (swapped from my old machine), but I couldn't get it to install Windows NT. Aargh!

Well, it took some doing, but I finally resolved all these problems: I figured out how the IDE controllers expect me to wire up the drives - it's a substantially stupider system than SCSI, if you can believe that. So now I have two drives.

I never did figure out why I couldn't install directly on my machine, but with Tom's help we swapped the main drive into his Windows machine and did an install from there (his machine will boot from CD-ROM; mine won't), and then swapped it back into my machine. also got an updated boot sector installed on the drive. After some additional fiddling (Windows NT Workstation requires you to install some key components separately from the main install), I finally seem to have it all working. Woo-hoo!

It did point out just how brain-damaged the whole Intel PC and Windows world is: Macintoshes hide all the boot and low-level crap from you, whereas it's all painfully exposed on Windows. The OS installation process on Macs is about as close to trivial as such things come, and getting them to recognize hard drives (not to mention format them) and boot from CD-ROM is also fairly straightforward.

It's amazing to me that anyone ever gets any work done using Windows. Thank goodness for Macintosh!

Well, I think the machine is all ready to go, anyway. It certainly too long enough.

I received an order from Amazon.com this week:

First, I discovered that Amazon carries DC Archive Edition hardcover comic collections, usually at decent discounts, so I ordered the latest (ninth) volume of Legion of Super-Heroes from them. It covers the late 60s/early 70s era of this futuristic superhero team, including a run of short stories which are not fondly remembered in fandom, but which I enjoyed quite a bit when I bought them (as back issues) fifteen years ago. Strong character stuff, I enjoyed thumbing through this set.

And then I bought three CDs: Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which I found disappointing: Peter Gabriel's lyrics are often impenetrable and generally not very satisfying, and the arrangements are a lot sparser than I'd expected. It seems like a prototype of Pink Floyd's The Wall, but is not as good.

James Taylor's first, self-titled album, released in the late 60s on The Beatles' Apple Records label. It's got different arrangements of "Something in the Way She Moves" and "Carolina in my Mind", which are interesting but not as good as the more popular versions. It's an interesting album, but Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon is a much better efforts, overall.

Finally, Barenaked Ladies' live album Rock Spectacle is mostly very good, including renditions of "Such a Good Boy", "The Old Apartment", and "If I Had $1,000,000". However, it's edited in such a way as to completely hide the "live experience": The crowd cheers, the cascading from song to song, that good live albums have. It could have been much better than it is.

So, not a terrific selection of albums, though the latter two I will likely listen to a fair bit, over time. As for the Genesis album, I dunno. It might grow on me.