Like Clockwork
I drop by The Bagel Bin in Manchester (formerly Hooksett Bagel) about every six weeks. Every six weeks is approximately when I have put off doing the dishes for so long that I am completely out of even the most basic of flatware — knifes — and cannot even butter an English muffin to consume for breakfast. My friend Meghan said that sometimes she’d rather buy new clothes than do laundry, and I consider this pattern of mine to be the runt cousin of that sort of mentality.
So as I saunter in this morning, the girl behind the register looks at me and recites precisely what I was going to order. Now, I have been to this establishment fewer than a dozen times, and I had barely even heard of it prior to last June. But apparently I have become a “regular.”
I wanted this phenomenon to happen to me during my last year of college. I’d spend two and a half years living in a dormitory, and once I moved into an apartment on the outskirts of Saratoga, I enjoyed the breadth of the wider city. I came home one evening, having spent an enjoyable forty minutes getting lost down blind, meandering residential areas, and declared that my friends and I needed a hangout. Me needed to find an odd greasy spoon, and out-of-the-way diner, a “joint” that we could transform into our home away from home. A place where we were regulars.
“You mean, like Cheers?” someone asked.
That sort of took the wind out my Great Idea. That and the discovery that the neat, hole-in-the-wall pizza place I was proposing to be our new clubhouse didn’t actually have any chairs, as they wanted you to vacate the premises as quickly as possible. What good is a place where everyone knows your name, and you can ask for “the usual” if you can’t stay there and de-rez?
And now I’ve become a regular by accident at a yuppie breakfast joint. Highly irregular.
Snowfall
It’s been warm where I live recently. Somewhere between 40 and 50 degrees, on average.
I’ve hung the seven-pound wool topcoat back in the closet and have been enjoying the comparative weight of the black cotton trenchcoat — like taking off roller skates.
And right now it’s snowing, which wouldn’t seem unusual for February in New Hampster, except that it’s been blissfully, unseasonably warm for the past two weeks.
Big honking clumps of snow — about a third of an inch acoss, on average — are falling with some speed.
I’m not a big fan of snow — and less of a fan of driving in it, so this all better be gone by Friday — but I stood and took stock of it, and it fell around me outside the office.
What I adore about snow is how it messes with your sense of space. There are so many layers of depth as one looks out across a field or any expanse, and the micromuscles of the eye go nuts trying to focus on so many distances as your eye is subtly attracted to movement, but there is movement as far as it can see.
And it stops you from being able to tell how far away anything is, and it stops you in your tracks. And I love that sensation. I may hate snow, but I love snowfall.
Charade
I received my sixth copy of the 1963 film Charade on DVD the other day from Amazon. This was a bit of a departure for me in my Charade acquitions, as four of the five others were tripped over serendipitously. This one I ordered.
Last year, having just purchased a DVD player, I was having fun window shopping as retail joints were suddenly flush with DVDs. The most outrageously bad films were being offered for “bargain” prices of more than $25USD, a price justified seemingly because of the fancy new uber-technology. As a true capitalist reactionary, I found myself pawing through Bargain Bins, laughing at the public domain options.
And then I found a copy of Charade for eight bucks. Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Walter Matthau, James Coburn… these were names to be conjured with, not relegated to remainder bins! I snagged it, brough it home, and found out why. The producer, Diamond Entertainment, had acquired a dingy old 35mm print of the film, made the transfer to digital, and printed the DVD. No artisan cleaning job was done on the content: when the film jumped, when there were scratches and pops on the soundtrack, they were all preserved perfectly.
I howled with laughter. The version produced by D3K uses stock footage photos of the stars on the cover and doesn’t allow you to get to the first or last chapter from the “scene selections” menu. It also has a “digitized” soundtrack that makes everything sound like a MIDI played through a tin-can telephone. Madacy Entertainment has Audrey Hepburn’s biographical information under James Coburn’s name and photograph in the “Special Features” biographies, and includes the special feature of a completely unrelated film, also called Charade! Front Row Entertainment’s offering claims to be widescreen and is anything but.
Each one of these prints has it’s own flaws and cuts and crimps and pops, and I adore them all. DVD Profiler lists five more prints by different companies out there. I will have them all.
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