Here's my daughter, furiously working towards a deadline on the first edition of  "The Cloud Pop Times". One key at a time.


Here's a type sample from her machine. Ribbon needs replacing.

#1


                                Directed by Michael Curtiz
              Warner Bros., 1942
               Screenplay by Julius J. Epstein,              
                Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch
                 and Casey Robinson (uncredited).
                  Based on "Everybody Comes to Rick's"
                   by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison.


The story centres around Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American, who runs a casino/bar in unoccupied Morocco during the Second World War. Complications arise when Rick's old flame, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), arrives in Casablanca with her new lover, a Resistance fighter named Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), whose presence unnerves the recently-arrived Nazi Official, Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) who is intent on arresting him. Strasser is in Casablanca to investigate the murder of two German couriers who were carrying letters of transit, which allow the bearer freedom to travel throughout neutral territories. These letters of transit are now somewhere in Casablanca and Laszlo is out to get them so that he can carry on his Resistance work.
Rick remains neutral as both the German High Command and the French Vichy Prefect of Police, Renault (Claude Rains), try to get a bead on what makes him tick and where his loyalties lie.
Here's a scene from a transcript of the screenplay. It's one of the beautifully-written exchanges that populate this entire film.;


                                          Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo

Claude Rains was a great character actor and here he delivers a wonderful performance as Captain Renault. In fact, this film has a beautiful array of character actors throughout, from Peter Lorre's brief screen-time as the oily Ugarte, to S.K. Sakall and Leonid Kinskey as Rick's employees, to Sydney Greenstreet as Ferrari, a shady businessman. And of course, there's also Dooley Wilson as Sam, the piano player at Rick's, whose rendition of "As Time Goes By" has become the stuff of Hollywood legend. Although, Barbra Streisand did a great little version of it in "What's Up, Doc?" (Dir: Peter Bogdanovich, 1972).

                                  
                                          Claude Rains as Captain Louis Renault

As mentioned above, I have read that the screenplay to this film was written in a very haphazard way, due to the working shedules of the writers involved. The Epstein brothers went off to do their patriotic bit for Capra and Howard Koch took over before they returned to the story a month later. It was even reported that whole scenes were being written on the day that they were due to be filmed. Either way, it's a great script, and, in 2006, the Writer's Guild of America named it the best screenplay of all time, and the American Film Institute have ranked "Casablanca" as Number 2 in their list of The 100 Greatest Movies. Probably behind "Citizen Kane", no doubt.

Perhaps it's because I'm a romantic at heart that I consider "Casablanca" to be such a great film. Perhaps it's because this film touches on notions of sacrifice for the greater good over one's own desires.
Perhaps it's because "Casablanca" is a perfect example of moviemaking from a time when story was important and scenes were given time to unfold.
I don't know.
All I know is that I watched it again a few hours ago and it's still in my Number One spot.


 #2

 

Here's the first issue of 'Premiere' magazine that I bought in April 1990.


And here's the last issue from April 2007 when this great magazine folded. And I had every issue in between.



The Lettera 32 was my first typewriter. This Olympia SM9 is my latest. I had to wrap up this post as soon as the sun began to shine. There was a fence outside that needed painting.


And the same picture again with the filter set to 'Key Line' to make it look nifty and cartoon-like.


The watch in the picture up above is my circa 1962 Omega Seamaster. No way was I gonna wear this watch while painting.  I had it on one day when I came off my (mountain) bike. Instinctively, I covered the watch with my right hand as I fell.
So, if there's any risk of damage, I tend to switch to this Seiko Automatic (Model No. SKX031). Timekeeping-wise, it's a little bit...'relaxed'. It can gain or lose anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds per day, but these things will run twenty years without necessarily requiring a service. You could probably clamp this watch around a hand-grenade and pull the pin and it will still tick afterwards.


 Thanks for reading over the last couple of years, folks!

When I put up that picture of my Seiko Dive watch in my previous post the other day, I got to thinking that I should do a quick write-up on this watch, plus the other two Seikos that I have.

Having read Rob Bowker's nice post about his own Seiko wristwatch;

T42

...I felt inspired to write about my own Seiko wristwatches. I'm already working on another sprawling review of a different watch, but thought it might be an idea to get back into watch-writing mode by writing about these fantastic watches from Japan.

 

Up above is how it looked when it arrived. Definitely has plenty of Seiko DNA in its design, but the three-link bracelet was a little too Rolexy for my liking (with this watch, anyway), so out came the tools and off came the bracelet.
Here's the Oyster bracelet, as equipped on a Rolex Submariner;



picture courtesy of Valet.com- Anatomy of a Classic; The Rolex Submariner

If I'd wanted a watch to look like a Rolex Submariner, I'd get myself a Rolex Submariner. One day. So, off came the bracelet and on went a nylon ZULU strap;



Just quickly, ZULU straps are basically the US military's version of the British Ministry of Defence-approved NATO strap. The main difference is the shape of the hardware. The ZULUs have oval-shaped rings, whereas the NATOs will have rectangular fittings.



And because the case and bracelet are made of titanium, it makes for a very light watch to wear.

Here's the bearing. Anybody have any...uh...'bearing' on where it might belong inside the SM2?




Thanks all!

So, what I thought was going to be a short and cruisy post about my five favourite movies got a little out of hand once I began writing about the first film, "Casablanca". I realised that, to talk of these films properly, I was going to have to split the write-up in two parts.

Here's Part 1. It's okay, I'll wait...;

"Casablanca" and The Other Four Best Movies EVER Made...In My Humble Opinion. Part 1

...Okay, now that you're up to speed, I'll continue with Movie Number Three, "Chinatown". However, I won't say too much about it, since I already wrote a little bit about this film last December. And here's the link to that post;

"Forget it, Jake, it's Christmas."

The early 1970s saw a slew of movies set in 1930s America. While the Sixties gave us films like "Bonnie And Clyde" (Dir: Arthur Penn, 1967) and "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" (Dir: Sydney Pollack, 1969), the early Seventies produced films such as "Cabaret", "The Sting", "Paper Moon", "The Way We Were", and Roman Polanski's "Chinatown".

#3


                                           Directed by Roman Polanski
                   Paramount, 1974
                    Screenplay by Robert Towne


It was back in 1984 that I did Cinema & Film Studies at Preston College of TAFE. My lecturer was a fellow named- actually, I won't name him. That would be bad form. Anyway, he'd divided the year into three separate genres of film. In Second and Third Term, we would be tackling The Western and Alfred Hitchcock respectively. However, Term One would deal with Film Noir.
"Oh, this is gonna be great!", I remember thinking. I had already immersed myself in some Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett crime fiction, so I had some understanding of the Classic American hard-boiled detective and his world, but to some extent, "Chinatown" would go against much of what I thought I knew about fictional private detectives in America of the Thirties.

Robert Towne's brilliant screenplay mines Los Angeles history as it touches on the severe drought conditions that threatened to wipe out farming communities on the outskirts of the city in the late 1930s. The story concerns itself with Private Detective J.J.(Jake) Gittes, who is hired by a woman to gather evidence of her husband's suspected infidelity. Her husband just happens to be the city's Water Commissioner, a man named Hollis Mulwray. Jake Gittes does indeed get photos of Mulwray with a young woman and these pictures wind up splashed across the front page of the newspaper before another woman claiming to be Mulwray's wife appears with a lawsuit against Gittes, stating that she never hired him to investigate her husband's affair.
Gittes decides to find out who set him up and why. The film then goes into the corruption underlying City Council and Big Business as Gittes is drawn further and further into a conspiracy. I won't say any more about the plot. This really is a film worth seeing for yourself.

The character of Jake Gittes is, as far as I'm concerned, Jack Nicholson's finest hour. Others would say that "Five Easy Pieces" (Dir: Bob Rafelson, 1970), "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" (Dir: Milos Forman, 1975) or "The Shining" (Dir: Stanley Kubrick, 1980) was Nicholson's best role, but I beg to differ. Nicholson is a great actor and the role of J.J. Gittes fits him like a glove.
I suppose when one thinks of Jack Nicholson these days, it conjures up an image of a slicked-back receding hairline above a pair of black Wayfarers above a freshly-lit Marlboro Light. However, he is one of the finest actors of his generation. Even The Joker couldn't kill him AND he was cool enough to have kept all those purple suits after "Batman" finished filming.


Faye Dunaway plays Evelyn Mulwray, the Water Commissioner's wife and she delivers a beautifully nuanced and realised character that is at turns confident and brittle. You can see her struggle to maintain her composure whenever a certain person is mentioned to her. I always thought Dunaway was fantastic in "Bonnie And Clyde". And although she had a good career with films such as "The Thomas Crowne Affair", "Little Big Man",  "Three Days of the Condor" and "Network", I feel that she was underutilised. One of the better actresses of the 1970s.



The great John Huston plays Noah Cross, a self-made millionaire who wants to see a new dam built on the edge of Los Angeles, one that will starve the farmers of their precious water. It's kind of fitting to see him appear in this fine film, considering that his cinematic debut was back in 1941 when he adapted the screenplay for and directed the classic noir film "The Maltese Falcon", starring Humphrey Bogart.

Robert Towne's screenplay is a masterclass in how to write this kind of detective story for the screen. All of the classic elements are here- a private investigator with a smart mouth, a mysterious femme fatale, shady businessmen, sadistic thugs.
However, Towne throws in some major curveballs. Perhaps the most famous private eye in fiction would be Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, a P.I. who didn't do divorce work. Jake Gittes, however, appears to earn a living mainly from getting pictures of cheating spouses. And he does alright out of it, based on how well-tailored he is in the film.

The classic private detective is a product of the city and it is interesting to note that whenever Gittes steps outside of the urban boundaries of the city, he lands in harm's way. There's a particularly nasty encounter that he has with a short, knife-wielding creep, perfectly played by the film's director, Roman Polanski. I've read different things about the knife used in this scene. I've heard that the blade had a small hinge in it, and I've heard that the blade was real. I believe the latter, knowing Polanski.

The score by Jerry Goldsmith is mainly horns and some piano, and it works well for this film. The opening music over the credits is quite wistful and in many ways creates an image (in my mind, anyway) of a vintage Los Angeles on a summer's night as Jake Gittes steps out of his office at close of business, lights a cigarette, and gets into his car to drive home to an empty apartment.

I don't want to mention any more about the plot. It's a beautifully structured film, and we as the audience are, like Gittes himself, one step behind everything that's going on. There are a couple of truly shocking moments in this film which have lost none of their impact over the years, despite the fact that there have been a few variations of these story elements in other films since.

"Chinatown"  had the benefit of a solid script, which played around with the conventions of film noir and the private detective story,  and a respected and gifted director (till 1977, anyway), one who was able to take a classic American art form and sift it through a European sensibility.
These are just a couple of reasons why "Chinatown" remains a classic film from Hollywood's last great Golden Age and why it easily sits in my Top Five Favourite Films.





The next film features my other favourite actor from the old Hollywood era, Mr Cary Grant. Truth be told, a lot of my favourite films are Cary Grant movies. And this film is also one of Alfred Hitchcock's best. Apologies in advance for the annoying 'Pause' symbol that appears in the lower left corner of each picture.


#4


                                     
                                                      Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
                        M.G.M., 1959
                          Screenplay by Ernest Lehman

My third semester of Cinema and Film Studies was all about Alfred Hitchcock. We watched "Dressed To Kill" (1980), directed by Brian Di Palma, at the end of the course in order to get an understanding of Hitchcock's influence on other film-makers since his death in 1976.
If you ever decide to sit down and watch Alfred Hitchcock's output of the 1950s and then find yourself hungry for more, check out "Charade" (Dir: Stanley Donen, 1963), starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. It is the best Hitchcock film that Hitchcock NEVER made.

"North By Northwest" represented the fourth and final time that Grant and Hitchcock worked together. This collaboration concerns slick New York advertising executive Roger Thornhill, who is mistaken for a man named George Kaplan, a government agent who is trying to foil the plans of a man named Phillip VanDamm, wonderfully played by James Mason. It's a simple 'wrong man' scenario that has been done often in Hollywood films, and you can see a variation on this tactic in the recent Steve Carell/Tina Fey comedy "Date Night". "We are the Tripplehorns."


Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, wearing what some have called the best suit ever worn in film. It perfectly represents Thornhill as the modern, urban and ordinary Everyman who finds himself thrust into extraordinary situations.  Grant can do no wrong in my book and by this late stage in his career, the smooth and urbane Cary Grant persona was very firmly established. "Everybody wants to be Cary Grant", he once said. "Even I want to be Cary Grant", he added.

Hitchcock films are well-known for clever uses of camera angle and placement and the way the camera represents the viewpoint of the characters. There are a couple of instances in this film which highlight Thornhill's increasing isolation as the story progresses. This shot here, for example...


...see that diagonal pathway, leading to the Yellow cab,  in the top left side of the frame? That speck in the middle is Thornhill making an escape. Beautifully staged shot. Cinematographer Robert Burks did some very fine work for this film.

This film also features another 'Hitchcock Blonde' in the form of Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall, a woman whom Thornhill meets aboard a train, and one who may or may not turn out to be his ally. Hitch had a thing for blondes throughout his films of the 1950s and '60s and Saint's character stays in your memory long after the final credits roll.


Screenwriter Ernest Lehman has written a chase thriller that moves at a great pace. Hitchcock threw in what he used to call a 'MacGuffin'. Usually, it's something that everybody in the film wants, but we, the audience, never find out what it is.
In this film, it is a statuette which contains a microfilm that VanDamm is planning to take out of the country. We never find out what's on the microfilm and it doesn't matter. Hitch was a shrewd filmmaker and he knew that the MacGuffin was merely used to move the story forward. Quentin Tarantino did a similar thing with the mysterious briefcase that Marcellus Wallace was chasing in "Pulp Fiction" (1994).
The blueprint of this film is what Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman sought to replicate when they were in the process of bringing James Bond to the screen with "Dr No" in 1962.  They even approached Cary Grant to play Bond. He said he'd do one film, but he didn't want to lock himself in to a series. After filming "Charade" in 1963, Grant was wise enough to realise that he couldn't play the leading man to much younger women (on screen, anyway. His last two marriages were to women considerably younger than he, the lucky devil) anymore, and he retired from acting after completing "Walk, Don't Run" in 1966.
The Bond producers hung a main aspect of the plot of "From Russia, With Love" (1964) on their own MacGuffin, the Lektor cipher machine that Bond is sent to retrieve before embarking on a cross-continent chase that includes some further borrowing from "North By Northwest".
Lehman's script also provides the cast with some great dialogue filled with wit and innuendo. There are no wasted words in this script.

There are countless classic scenes from the first sixty years of Hollywood film that flicker 24 frames per second though the projector of my memory; The Little Tramp meeting the blind flower seller, Groucho Marx walking into a room, Astaire gliding across one, Dorothy clicking the heels of her red shoes, Philip Marlowe and Vivian Sternwood talking about horse-racing...or are they?, Gilda "Putting the Blame On Mame", Charlie Allnutt pulling The African Queen through the water, Sefton being beaten by his fellow POWs, Vince Stone throwing a pot of scalding coffee into Debby Marsh's face, Sugar Kane walking along a train station platform...and Roger Thornhill running for his life as a cropdusting biplane descends towards him.


This has become a classic action scene. Totally preposterous way of trying to kill somebody, but Hitchcock never really concerned himself with reality. "Most films are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake", he once remarked.

Hitchcock was wise enough to highlight the strengths of his cast and accentuate their iconic status. Cary Grant left home at a young age to join an acrobatic troupe before he became an actor. There's a confidence in his physicality and Alfred Hitchcock makes good use of this in the crop-dusting scene above, where Grant slips into a smooth run that increases in speed as the plane makes repeated attempts to kill him, and later on when Grant climbs out of a multi-storey hospital window and stands on the ledge before making his way in through the window of an adjacent room. This scene also plays on Grant's sex appeal when the woman in this room yells out "Stop!" before putting on her glasses, taking a clearer look at Grant and then repeating, but in a breathy, come-hither tone "Stop".
Cary Grant was 55 years old when he made this film, but he moves like a man ten or fifteen years younger.

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN'T SEEN THIS FILM. (SHAME ON YOU)

The finale takes place on the monuments at Mount Rushmore. Wonderfully staged, you begin to think that the cast were actually climbing around the faces of these historic Presidents.
It's a nail-biting scene.

SPOILER OVER

The film wraps up very quickly after that, and Hitchcock throws in some phallic imagery just to keep film students pondering for the next fifty years. There's a minor gaffe that occurs in the film's Third Act. Check out the kid in the café. I'll say no more.

"North By Northwest" is a slick film. And certainly, film scholars sit and analyse Hitchcock's other films such as "Vertigo", "Rear Window" and "Psycho" to within an inch of their lives. And while I think that those films of his are worthy of repeated viewings and analysis, I tend to prefer his other movies such as "The 39 Steps", "Saboteur", "Notorious", "Rope" (80 fantastic minutes long) and "The Man Who Knew Too Much". Here's an exercise for you; Get a copy of his 1956 remake (of his previous version) of "The Man Who Knew Too Much", starring James Stewart and Doris Day.
Watch this film with a few friends. I guarantee you that somebody will scream when a particular scene comes up. It's all to do with the framing of the shot. Hitch was a master at composing a shot to reveal information. When I first saw this film as part of my studies, one of my female classmates screamed when this shot appeared. People go on about the shower scene from "Psycho", but this scene from "The Man Who Knew Too Much" will make your stomach muscles clench.

And it's always a buzz when a film does that to you.


picture courtesy of http://www.everydayminerals.com/fan-club/play/544-akiko-stehrenberger


Film Number Five in my list is one that I've heard is screened every year at Christmas on at least one TV station in the US. It is perhaps a little dated in these cynical times, but the romantic in me loves this movie.

#5


Directed by Frank Capra, RKO, 1946, Screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra and Jo Swerling.
Based on a story by Philip Van Doren Stern.

As with the other films in my Top Five, much has already been written by film historians, reviewers and scholars about this film. I can really only write about why they appeal so much to me. This story has been retold over the years, most recently as "The Family Man" (Dir: Brett Ratner, 2000), starring Nicolas Cage and Tea Leoni.
However, the 1946 James Stewart film is the most famous version of the story of a man who gets a chance to glimpse what the lives of his loved ones would have been like if he had never existed. The film concerns a man named George Bailey, who runs the family Building and Loan business in a small town called Bedford Falls.
George has dreams of travelling the world to explore far away lands and build cities of the future, but has always been held back by obligations to the business and there is a powerful and mean old rival banker named Henry Potter who is looking to ruin Bailey Building and Loan so that he can then have a stranglehold over the entire town.
George's Uncle Billy is entrusted with a large sum of money, which he promptly misplaces and this throws the future of the family business in turmoil, with George facing embezzlement charges and a jail sentence. It's at this point that George Bailey decides that his family and his business would be better off if he were dead. I'll say nothing more about the story.

James Stewart was perfect for the role of George Bailey, a decent man. A nice fella who just never seems to get a break where things go his way. He is utterly likeable. Makes you wish he were a friend of yours, although, in a way, he is, by the time the end credits roll. His George Bailey is just the kind of guy that you'd entrust with your life's savings. It was the type of role that Stewart was made for and I don't think it would have worked with many other actors of the era. Although, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda or Spencer Tracy would have been interesting in the role. However, Stewart embodied a certain kind of American, one that looked like he'd just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

I was running The Cinestore, a film bookstore in the city on the day that I heard James Stewart had died. Robert Mitchum died about three days later (or was it before) and I began to think that the end of the world had commenced. "Thank God for Kate Hepburn!", I remember thinking to myself.
I know that nobody lives forever, gang, but it still packs a wallop when somebody from old Hollywood throws in the towel. I was devastated when Cary Grant died, as I mentioned in Part 1.
I'm gonna be a friggin' mess when Connery goes.



Stewart is beautifully matched by Donna Reed as the girl who's had a crush on George since childhood, Mary Hatch. If there's a girl worth staying in Bedford Falls for, it's her. Reed gives Mary a nice girl-next-door quality and their relationship is well written, from when they're a couple of kids to when they become adults. But George dilly-dallies so long that Mary winds up dating another man and there are some tender moments during this segment of the film. The telephone scene is classic and is regularly used in compilation clips about the history of Hollywood film or James Stewart's career.

I haven't seen this film for some time. My DVD copy is in a box among 24 other boxes in the garage and I'm waiting to see if my wife has a copy at the library branch where she'll be working tomorrow. Actually, wait a sec, I'll just check the library's database...
...okay, I've just reserved a copy at the branch where she's working tomorrow. Nice. I hope it ain't scratched to hell.

THE NEXT DAY...

Right, I've had dinner, plus a stick of Kit Kat (or two) and I shall now repair to the lounge room with a cup of Earl Grey (black, one sugar) to watch "It's a Wonderful Life" for the first time in about eight or ten years. See you in 130 minutes (approx.).
                                                           
Yes, it STILL holds up. Some of the acting is a little hammy here and there, but this is to be expected for a film from this era. At just over two hours, I had forgotten how the story played out in between the more well-known scenes and I'd forgotten that this film's running time was so long. However, Capra keeps the story moving and it covers the years from around 1919 right up to 1946 when the story is set. Capra has sometimes been accused of being overly sentimental with his films. "It's a Wonderful Life" is, after all, a Christmas story, but there are moments of great cruelty in it. I said to my wife while watching it that I felt the nasty moments in this film seemed to outweigh the good ones.
I can see why this film is replayed every year at Christmas. It's a story of hope, one that's there to remind us that we are fortunate with what we have, even if we don't know it at the time. And it's a reminder to us all that we have an effect on those around us.
As one character puts it; "Each man's life touches so many other lives."
And that line leads me into a little detour about a book I bought back in the mid Eighties called "Suspects" by film critic and historian, David Thomson. If you're a fan of film noir, this book is a must. Narrated by George Bailey at the age of 75, it links characters from over 80 Hollywood films, from Casablanca's Rick Blaine to Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle. In some way, they are all connected through George Bailey and it is an astounding trick that Thomson has pulled off in overlapping their lives. It may even tarnish your opinion of George Bailey by the time you're done. Well worth hunting down.

In the end, "It's a Wonderful Life" still resonates with me. By the time the end credits rolled on my viewing last night, the good moments overcame the bad as I sat there in my lounge room with eyes welling up.
I love it when a film does that to me, but I find that, as I get older, films do that to me more and more.
I must be mellowing in my old age.




I must admit that there are too many films that I consider favourites. These that I've written about are my Top Five, but I can see myself doing semi-regular write-ups on other films that I like. There are easily five or ten other films that come to mind, without thinking too hard.
Anyway, those are posts for another time, I suppose.

Thanks for reading!



New York, December 1956 "She fell for her photographer. I'm told it's an occupational hazard for fashion models. Should've seen it coming. Too much of a coincidence to wind up working with the same shutterbug on six different shoots. On the upside, I just got that bonus. And I know just the thing to take the edge off a bad break-up. Think I'll get it in 'Tahitian Pearl'."

This watch's full name is the Omega AquaTerra Railmaster Co-Axial. The case design is identical to the AquaTerra range which is part of Omega's Seamaster line-up of watches. The model number is 2504.52.00. 

That Martini recipe was basically two straight shots of gin. As I sit here contemplating a follow-up article about Bond's Vesper Martini, I dread the fact that 007's recipe calls for "three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka".
As you pointed out in your post, NA, Bond spends the first few chapters of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (1963) putting away a lot of booze. But Bond worked hard, lived hard, and played hard. According to his medical report in "Thunderball" (1961), he was consuming up to half a bottle of spirits of 60-70 proof per day. Where did he find the time?
They bred them tough in merry old England back then.

And then, I remembered something apt from a Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn movie called "Holiday". I learned long ago that there's a line in a movie or a song that you can apply to anything in the universe in order to help you understand something.




Forty-five mil of Ballantines Scotch Whisky (should'a had thirty) and a couple of pistol-shaped ice cubes. Olympia SM9 to the left.

And I got my desk reasonably tidy yesterday, too. We'll see how long that lasts.



Thanks again for reading!

***typecast on a l966 Olympia SM9***

Up above is the crossbar that tilts downward with every keystroke. I must make two apologies to y'all. One for the blurry pictures, and the other for my lack of knowledge regarding typewriter parts.
Anyway, that bar tilts down whenever a key is hit.

This is how the watch looked when I first got it. The crystal had scratches and stains on it. And notice the crown tube? It's totally stripped, meaning that the crown wouldn't screw down securely.


 More crud on the caseback. It looked like mud. Or at least, I hoped it was mud. Either way, I wasn't going to attempt removing it myself.




And here's how I got it back. It took my watchmaker just under three months to fix this. Most of that time was spent waiting for parts to arrive from overseas. The case-back was cleaned up and polished;


Here's what I like about Tudor watches. The case-backs are engraved, stating that the case is manufactured by Rolex. Funny how Rolex models themselves don't have anything engraved on the back. Shame, really. The whole 'Oyster' designation is something that Rolex has always used to signify that their cases are watertight. Like an Oyster.

The new crown tube and winding crown. Notice that it's a crown manufactured by Rolex with their five-pointed crown logo;


The textured dial, which was in outstanding condition with no blemishes, pitting or water damage. Rare for a watch of this age. The applied hour markers are all clean. The hands still retain their original, faded tritium inserts. I think I'll leave them that way unless I can source new replacements for them. Otherwise, they look just fine as they are;


Timekeeping-wise, I think this watch loses about one minute per day, but I'll worry about it at its next service. Although, it is a 60 year-old wristwatch, after all. Being a hand-wound watch with no date function, it should be relatively straightforward to service.



A light tan-coloured fake croco strap works nicely against the silver dial and makes a change from darker brown or black, which I tend to have on my other vintage pieces.

I've wanted a Bakelite rotary-dial telephone for quite some time and I finally got one off eBay back in December. It was a nice, heavy jet-black model dating back to the late 1950s. Perfect. Made me want to put a call through to Marilyn Monroe.
There's something about rotary-dial phones that give me a sense of comfort.
Perhaps it has to do with nostalgia for the 20th Century, before everybody carried a mobile phone with their entire lives loaded into them.
Perhaps it has to do with seeing too many old movies, where the shrill sound of the ringing bell would startle the character on-screen before they lifted the  receiver from its cradle to be told of the ransom demands, or where the double-agent would be at a certain time, or were asked why haven't they checked the children.*
I suppose like typewriters, a rotary-dial phone only does one thing, but it does it well. There wasn't much that I took from my Mother's house after she died last year, but I did take this;


This AWA ivory-coloured model was the main telephone in our house when I was a kid. I still recall the six-digit phone number, which is still just barely visible, handwritten in faded BIC ballpoint on the paper insert of the rotary dialler. I think this one goes back to 1968, based on the numbers on the underside and I'm amazed that it still works. This telephone saw a lot of use, thanks to my Mother.  There was no such thing as a 'quick phone call' , as far as she was concerned. And if I had to use the phone after her, the receiver would be quite warm from being pressed against her ear for an hour or so.
Around 1980, she got a job as an after-hours cleaner at a sub-station of Telecom, the Australian phone company along the lines of AT&T or Bell. After that, I think that almost every room in the house had a phone line installed. And she managed to snag a few more telephones along the way. Nothing wrong with having a spare...or three. Somewhere, I have a brand new, still-wrapped-in-plastic phone that she got in 1982, but never used. It's pretty much identical to this one above.

Here's something funny- she used to stay up until two or three am so that she could ring relatives back in Italy when it was convenient. For them. And in turn, whenever they called us, it would be around three or four am in the morning Australian Eastern Standard Time.

About eight or ten years ago, I was visiting an overpriced and snootily-owned antiques bazaar where they had a bunch of phones for sale. One of them was an Ericsson Ericofon, which is also sometimes referred to nowadays as a 'cobra'.


I suppose if you take enough LSD, this phone probably could resemble a cobra with its flared hood, but I think it's a bit of a stretch, personally. Still, the name has stuck whenever I see these advertised from time to time on eBay.
However, I have always called it 'The Skippy Phone'.
"Skippy the Bush Kangaroo" was an Aussie television series produced from 1966 to 1968. It is Australia's equivalent to "Flipper", but with much, much less water. And it is considered a sentimental favourite among many of my generation.


I don't really know why I ever called it The Skippy Phone. As far as I'm aware, this style of telephone did not appear in any episodes (some "Skippy" experts, feel free to chime in now), but if there's anything that screams of a certain aspect of 1960s Australia to me, it is this television show and this telephone. Although, having said that, I sometimes get a quick vision of "The Thunderbirds" flashing through my head when I look at this telephone. Something to do with its mid-century futuristic design. Just the kind of phone that Lady Penelope would use to call Virgil Tracy on. Again, as a kid, I would sometimes wake up at the unGodly hour of 6:00am on a Saturday morning to watch this fantastic show.
"Thunderbirds are GO!!!"



Look at her. Less plastic than some of today's Hollywood stars.

About a year ago, my wife called me at work one Friday evening to tell me that the power had gone out at home. She was calling me from her cellphone and she said the battery was extremely low and the phone might cut out any second. She couldn't call me from the land-line because the hands-free phone was plugged in to the (currently non-existent) electricity supply. I told her I would call around for an after-hours (and pretty damned expensive) electrician.

When I got home to a dark and cold house (t'was mid-Winter), I realised that the Skippy Phone was in a box in my daughter's bedroom. Had I been thinking a little more clearly, I would have told my wife to plug this phone in and call around for an electrician, since I was still at work and didn't want to risk getting blasted by management for making personal calls, despite the fact that it was an emergency. The beauty of a standard land-line telephone, with a rotary dialler or push-button one, is that it has one RJ plug for both the phone connection AND the source of electricity for the phone, which runs along a separate line directly to the telegraph pole in the street. I think.
Anyway, what it means is that you can still use these phones in the event of a blackout because they have no internal battery.

Now, my darling wife and I have watched the "Terminator" series of films on numerous occasions and we fully understand that they are about technology letting people down, but we were caught off-guard that night and not thinking straight. It was cold, we were in the dark, and we hadn't prepared anything for dinner. Luckily, I went out to get us some pizza and we ate it by candle-light in the lounge room while the electrician worked on the fuse box outside.

The Ericofon is pretty cool. First designed in the late 1940s, this particular design first emerged around 1952 and was marketed towards hospitals. It was designed so that patients could make phone calls from their beds without having to lift a receiver and then stretch across with their other hand to dial a number. It was a precursor to today's handset telephones.
One catch with this phone. If you are talking to somebody and you place the phone down in its upright position to grab a pen and paper or something, you will disconnect the call. The rotary dialler has a spring-loaded section which pushes down when the phone is placed down, thus disconnecting a call. That's how you hang up these phones.


*"When A Stranger Calls" (Dir: Fred Walton, 1979)

Here's the original classic Rolex wristwatch ad that appeared in magazines in the mid 1960s.



The Rolex Explorer (Reference 1016) was long pitched at those who led a more adventurous lifestyle than your Average Joe. Rugged, water-resistant and supremely legible, the Explorer became a classic for the Rolex Brand.

I was doing some handy-man crap around the front yard while wearing my Omega Railmaster and this magazine ad popped into my head.

"Hey honey, can you get my camera?", I called out to my ultra-patient wife.

And here's the result;



And here it is in glorious black and white;



The white text gets a little lost, but I tried every other colour in the spectrum and white seemed to work best. And it's a little more legible in the colour version.

Okay, now I'm hungry. 2:05pm. Yep, past lunchtime.

Thanks for reading, all!

The page-view counter rolled over the 100,000 mark at around 11:30am this morning AEST. It almost happened without my noticing, to be honest. Life has been a little hectic with;

Study- I've got two classes on Tuesdays and I've added an online class as well. I'm a little dubious about it, since it requires me to work at my own (glacial) pace and it will require me to exercise some discipline as well. One of my other subjects is Cataloging and it involves the way library records are set out.
Here's an example- Let's say I need to write out a catalogue record for this Bond novel;



The standard layout for the record would be set out like this;

Octopussy and the living daylights/ Ian Fleming.
Edition: First Edition
London : Jonathan Cape, 1966.


 
Picture courtesy of Ryan Lane/iStock. Taken from www.countryliving.com
















However, these days, everything's been converted to digital. Catalogue records have to be able to be read by a computer program. And these are known as MaRC2 or Machine Readable Catalogue Records, Version 2.

So, the Bond hardcover's MaRC2 record HAS to look like this;

245   $aOctopussy and the living daylights /$cIan Fleming.
264   $aLondon : $bJonathan Cape, $c1966.

Every number, every dollar sign, every colon, every space, every full stop (period.) has to be in its proper place or the computer program will not recognise the catalogue record. Which is fine if you're a computer, but if you're just some schmuck with a pen and paper (i.e.-me), then you can find yourself in a world of hurt pretty quickly when trying to write these out by hand.
And the good news is that I have a 90 minute test on this tomorrow morning! I'm so tempted to write that classic line; "By the time you read this, I will be dead", but I've done a few revision exercises and this will be an open-book test.
And yet, I'm still a little apprehensive about it. Gotta get 70% to pass.

Anyway, to the subject of this post. One hundred thousand page-views. First of all, thank-you very much to all of you who have visited this blog more than once. That would imply that I've done something right. I basically wanted to write about the things that I was interested in myself.

It almost goes without saying, but that Tissot Visodate review is still the most-viewed post on this blog by a very wide margin. Although, in its original location on a wristwatch forum, it's done a lot of mileage since I first posted it up in October 2010. Man, if I had a dollar for every...







MOST VIEWED POSTS

1) Tissot Visodate 1957 Heritage Automatic- REVIEW       14,194 pageviews
2) How To Buy A Wristwatch: Part 2- The Dive Watch         3,140 pageviews
3) How To Buy A Wristwatch: Part 1- The Dress Watch        3,042 pageviews
4) Longines Expeditions Polaires Francaises
    Re-Edition- REVIEW                                                          2,978 pageviews
5) Omega Railmaster Co-Axial Automatic
    (36.2mm) -REVIEW                                                            2,054 pageviews


BUSIEST MONTH - June 2013   9,375 views


MOST VIEWED TYPEWRITER POSTS

1) Imperial Good Companion 5  (circa 1958)                           2,127 pageviews
2) Olympia Splendid 99   (circa 1960)                                      1,330 pageviews
3) Olympia SM2  (circa 1951)                                                     965 pageviews
4) Olivetti Lettera 32  (1960s?, Made in Ivrea, Italy)                  949 pageviews
5) Olivetti Lettera 32 (purchased new, 1982, Made in Spain)     844 pageviews
6) Remington Remette (circa 1938)                                             820 pageviews
7) Groma Kolibri  (circa 1958)                                                    618 pageviews

PAGEVIEWS BY BROWSERS

Internet Explorer    27%
Firefox                    23%
Safari                      22%
Chrome                  18%
Opera                       4%
Other               Less than 1%

KEYWORD SEARCHES

tissot visodate review           564
tissot visodate                       188
olivetti lettera 32                   141
omega speedmaster                 82
groma kolibri                           61

And there you have it. No real big changes since my first check after 50,000 pageviews. The Imperial Good Companion post overtook the Olympia Splendid 99 as far as views are concerned. The Browser stats are pretty much the same as they were at the half-way mark.
 I've received 803 comments from you wonderful people out there on the World Wide Web, out in The Typosphere and beyond, and I've received countless spam comments from websites selling fake Rolexes and Louis Vuitton handbags, and links to some shady websites. To them, I say 'go to hell!'.

To the rest of you, I say 'thanks' for visiting this blog! I may lay low for a while as I tackle the adjustment to a slightly more hectic study schedule while continuing to look for a part-time job as I attempt to continue writing the two or three film scripts that I've started this year.
I really, really need to get a little more organised.
Ah well, the struggle is the glory, as they say.

Thanks again, all, and thanks for reading!


                                          

My wife and I were due for a trip to a large antiques centre which is located about half an hour from our house. I thought that if I saw something worthwhile, I'd consider purchasing it. So, we dropped the kids off at school, went back home for a quick cup of coffee, and then off we went.

It's a large, cavernous former factory where this antiques centre is located. It's made up of stalls run by various vendors and there's definitely an eclectic mix of stuff on offer. Everything from a 1950s aluminium construction worker's helmet to a six-inch Predator figure still in its box.
It would take a good, leisurely couple of hours to have a look at everything in this place. And, the first time we came here, we soon realised how frigging cold it can get inside a large, cavernous former factory, so, this time 'round, we rugged up. However, by the time we were done looking, my finger-tips were pale and numb.
Next time, I'll wear gloves.

But I was on the lookout for typewriters, 35mm cameras, if something caught my eye, and binoculars, although I already have a decent vintage pair.

Anyway, the first typewriter I saw was an orange plastic Adler Contessa, selling for $95 bucks.




Too orange, too girly, too expensive, I thought, and I'm not a fan of plastic typewriters. Also, with two Lettera 32s, a Groma Kolibri and a Splendid 99, I figured my small portable typewriter stable was pretty well-stocked.
The next machine I came across was this Royal Portable from 1930 (according to the sales ticket);


Moving right along, I came upon this;


It looked like it weighed at least a tonne. I tore a page out of my passport-sized notebook (I always carry pen and paper) and slotted it into the machine. I turned the platen knob and...nothing. The shiny rubber platen wouldn't grip the paper to feed it through. I gently fed the paper into the front of the platen, just behind the ribbon vibrator and typed out 'halda'. It printed out in red, since the colour selector was set to this. I didn't bother checking the price, since the slipping platen turned me off. If it were a portable, I would perhaps have considered it since it was reputedly a Hemingway favourite. And I have to say that these wide carriage models don't thrill me. It's more typewriter than I need.

Tucked underneath a saw-horse, I found this '70s(?) Remington.


And then I landed on...eeewww! Aaarrgghhh, my eyes, my eyes!!!


Luckily, I soon saw these. This Remington looked like it would need some serious TLC. I fed the paper into it and it typed straight and true...



Continuing on, I saw an Olympia Splendid 99 selling for $169.oo! I paid sixty-one bucks for mine last year. Pass. There was another Olympia on display. It was a large, heavy standard SG-1 model and I think it had seen better days. Couldn't find the price on it. It typed okay, but again, a better ribbon was well past due on this one.

My wife called out to me, pointing to the floor of a stall to my right; "Hey, T, there's an Olivetti Studio...."
My ears pricked up. 'Please say 42, please say 42!' I thought to myself.
" ...Forty-Four in a case over there" .
Damn!
It sat in its case in all its Olivetti bluey-green splendour.

This is what my Olympia SM3 was doing;


It was driving me nuts. Such a near-perfect typewriter, but with one irritating flaw. I wrote about it here;

Why Wont My Olympia SM3 Just Let It 'b'?



Ahh. Looking and running as it should. Nice!

Mailed off Keith Sharon's Project 88 letter this afternoon.
And, in keeping with the trend of showing photographic proof, here it is;


I used four different typewriters and one fountain pen. I had to keep it interesting somehow!

Cheers, all!

After managing to align the upper and lower case letters on my 1947 Royal QDL, I once again gave some thought to replacing the faded keytops, since they are hard to read in most light. You may recall that I wrote about this some time ago;

Keys to the Kingdom- Considering a Modification to My Royal QDL. Good or Bad Idea?

Now, I'm not here to discuss keychoppers. Much like lawyers and Real Estate agents, keychoppers are sometimes a necessary evil, especially if one is looking to replace a set of typewriter keys.
It would be the same if I had a 1967 Ford Mustang Fastback...


picture courtesy of http://mustang-ford.eu/ford_mustang_1967

...and I needed to replace a quarter-light window on the passenger-side door. If there was somebody out there junking one of these cars (the madman!) and selling off its parts, then I would deal with them.
Besides, with these keytops, I was planning to resurrect a typewriter, so if I can prevent a set of keys from becoming a pair of cuff-links or one of those stupid bracelets that don't spell out anything intelligible, then that's exactly what I was gonna do.
The seller that I bought the keytops from was selling just the already-removed keys.
And please don't give me the elephant tusk/typewriter keytop analogy. While one is an industrial engineering marvel that revolutionised office productivity and literary output throughout the 20th Century, the other is a living, breathing creature that looks like nothing else on Earth.

And so, to quote a line from a character played by the Patron Saint of Typewriters, Our Man In Hollywood, Mr. Tom Hanks, "and that's all I have to say about that."
Damn, I said I wasn't gonna discuss keychoppers.

Anyway, back on topic, looking at the keybank showed that most of them had faded (The picture below is AFTER I replaced the keytop. Thought I took a BEFORE photo, but there you go).


The only ones that appear the most legible are the D, C, V, 6, 8, and 9 keys.
I'm no expert, but I suspect that there may have been some water-entry under the glass (plastic, maybe) keytops at some point, causing discolouration.  I decided to tackle the faded letter 'U' key first.
Using the knife of a Leatherman Wave tool, I prised the metal prongs back off the key and very gently lifted the metal ring away from the keytop arm. So far, so good.
The next part would prove to be trickier. How to remove the card insert from the keytop recess. It was nestled in there since the 1940s, so I figured it was not gonna come out without a fight. My weapon of choice? A pin from a sewing kit. The idea was to push it down the side of the keytop recess and lever it out. Of course, what I hadn't figured on was the fragility of a 66 year old piece of water-damaged cardboard. My first attempt lifted a section of paper away from the card insert. Rather than curse, I figured a light dab with a Texta (Magic Marker- by the way, which of those two names is sillier?) would cover up any mishaps once the glass cover was put back in place.

And this is what I ended up with;


The card insert was definitely faded. Turning it over revealed...


...that perhaps it had had some water damage at one time. While I had the ring off, I grabbed hold of some stainless steel polish and gave the ring a rubdown. This will probably be the more time-consuming job in the long run.
Looking at the ring, I felt that I could probably bend the prongs a few times before they snap off completely. However, if I do it right, I'll only need to bend them open and closed once.


Here's the keytop recess with the card insert removed. I was thinking of a dab of glue to hold the replacement insert in place, but decided against it in case it caused a different kind of discolouration in the years to come. Besides, I reasoned that the metal ring and glass top would hold the insert firmly in place once all was said and done. Please excuse the blurry photo;


Looking at the two letter 'U' inserts, you can perhaps see that the replacement on the left is in better condition than the removed one on the right. A quick touch-up with the Texta to cover up the small tear on one edge of the card and it was ready to be fitted into the keytop recess. For this, I used a pair of tweezers and took my time lining it up so that it sat upright  and straight in the recess;


I used a pair of flat-nosed pliers to bend the prongs on the rings back into place. Not a 100% perfect job with one prong (slightly visible along the bottom edge of the key), but it's all secure and back in place;


Okay, one down, thirty-nine to go!

Having these keytops also means that I have some spares handy in case the steel does snap off and I can also replace the glass tops that are scratched and chipped.
Hopefully, this Royal with look as good as it types by the time I'm done with it.

Thanks for reading, all!

 This brilliant artwork was done by Yoji Shinkawa who did the concept art for these games.



Another Boss Battle occurs later in the game between Snake and this badass named Vulcan Raven. That washing-machine sized keg strapped to his back is filled with bullets, so he ain't gonna run out of ammunition anytime soon. It's a wonder he doesn't slip on all the empty shell-casings that his Gatling gun spits out.

 This is what Snake is up against. And you thought YOU had problems.




                                                      (Look up. See Meryl's name? Okay, look above that.)
                                                                  "Oh, you're kidding me!"