Jaws at 50

I find it odd that one of the best and most important movies of all time never seems to get the respect it deserves. It spawned sequels and knock-offs, launched the careers of not just Steven Spielberg but John Williams, invented the “summer blockbuster”, and even gave rise to “Shark Week”. Get people talking about it, and they’ll soon agree it’s one of the greatest movies ever – or should at least be in the discussion. But come back to them the next day, and ask them to make a list of the Greatest Movies Ever…….

I think there are a couple of reasons for this neglect.

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Great Moments in Basketball History

I’m not a basketball fan. I can just about follow a game, but I have only the basic knowledge of the sport that one who glances at the sports news every day manages to acquire over the years. For example, I know that the NBA Finals are in full swing – but I couldn’t tell you what teams are involved.

But if you check out the “Book Reviews” page here, you’ll see that I’m a fan of history – and sports history. Recently (inspired largely by Joe Posnanski’s Why We Love Baseball and Why We Love Football), I started wondering what events and incidents would – or should – be included in a list of Great Moments in Basketball History.

There are plenty of lists out there – but I’m taking a much broader view of what belongs.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Great River

The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi
Boyce Upholt
W.W. Norton & Company
(c) 2024 by the author

The Mississippi River is one of the longest rivers in the world. Add its many tributaries to it – the Ohio, the Missouri, the Tennessee, the Arkansas, the Red – and you’ve got one of the greatest river systems on the planet. Upholt concentrates on the “Big Muddy” itself, giving a rough history of how people have used and tried to control it.

It’s not a perfectly linear history; like the river itself, he meanders quite a bit. A quick look at how people decided on what would be the source of the river gives way to the geological history of the river basin, which goes right in to its ‘discovery’ and exploration by Europeans. Then comes its role in the development and growth of the United States, complete with steamboats and river rafts. And then it’s back to the past as people start wondering about all those odd mounds that seem to pop up all around the river.

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City Connections

So Major League Baseball is starting Version 2.0 of the “City Connect” uniforms. Some of the new versions are clear improvements (e.g. Dodgers (though it wasn’t hard to come up with something better for them)); others are along the lines of “What were you thinking? Your first ones were great!” (e.g. Boston) Cynics can see them as just another way to suck money away from fans; others can see them as cool and fun ways to try something different on occasion.

I, of course, have my own Thoughts on the Matter.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Frankenhooker (1990)

If you dig in the heap of “Awful Movies That Are Still Fun to Watch”, you will undoubtedly come across The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1962). It’s about a doctor whose radical ideas on transplants has him on the outs with the medical establishment. He gets the chance to Show Them All! When his girlfriend is decapitated in an accident. Fortunately, he manages to keep her head alive – now all he needs is a body to graft it to.

Weird idea, but not one that’s unusual. In competent hands, and with some resources given to it, one just might be able to create a passable movie on that premise.

Frank Henenlotter wrote that he came up with the idea for Frankenhooker out of thin air when his pitch for another movie failed. But the similarities between the two movies are too strong for it to have been a mere coincidence. Perhaps he saw the older movie and vaguely remembered the plot, or perhaps he knew that “Brain” was in the public domain, so he was free to riff on it to his heart’s content.

Anyway…..

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Going to Overtime

The NBA and NHL Playoffs are in full swing, and with a couple of local (to me) teams involved, it’s hard to avoid hearing the latest results. My mind started to wonder – have any Game Sevens in the final championship round gone to overtime? Have the two teams ever been so evenly matched that they needed to keep going past the normal limit to determine a champion?

(NOTE: The year given refers to the year in which the game was played, not the year the regular season began)

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Charm City – 6

I noticed something on the drive down. Everyone, with reason, talks about the foliage of fall. All those brilliant and vivid golds, oranges, and reds on the trees, mixed in with the remaining greens. But in the spring, and lasting for about the same amount of time, one can notice a similar display on the trees as new growth bursts out of its protective coverings. Golds and reds among the many shades of yellow-green, with the occasional splash of pink, white, or purple from an ornamental tree that managed to escape into the wild. The colors are rather less “saturated”, of course, but they are there if you are willing to look.

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Charm City – 4

For those not wanting to leave the Inner Harbor area, there are a pair of Places To Visit right on the Harbor.

The Maryland Science Museum is located at the southwest corner of the harbor. Like almost every science museum these days, it’s got the dinosaur exhibit that shows the geological history of the area, interactive displays illustrating various principles of physics (which kids play with and on without stopping to wonder about the various principles involved), a demonstration theater / lecture hall for showing off visually exciting things in chemistry and physics, and a fairly large exhibit sponsored by one of the area’s major corporations / research centers.

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Charm City – 3

Of course, the real reason I went to Baltimore was to take in a few baseball games. I deliberately picked a week where the Orioles would be in town, and bought tickets to two games – conveniently with different visiting teams.

Now I have to admit that Oriole Park at Camden Yards (to use the full, official name) is a lovely place to watch a ball game. Clean sight lines, a nice backdrop, and easy to get to. Worth noting is that it doesn’t have any deliberate quirks that one finds in many of the newer stadia. No giant wall with a home run train on it, no corner of a building serving as a foul pole, no weird walls or angles “just because”…. OK, the left field wall drops back really quickly from 333 feet at the pole to 371 feet, and there is that building behind Eutaw Street in right field. But those things aren’t forced; they feel perfectly natural.

But there is one thing that really irks me; and it’s an absence rather than a presence.

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