Hands and AI

I realized last night while watching The Late Show that when I see ordinary human hands on a screen, they’ve begun to look like the work of AI.

[The hands in the screenshot are real and belong to Timothée Chalamet.]

Pocket notebook sighting

[From Anything Goes (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1936). Click for a larger view.]

The notebook belongs to Sir Evelyn Oakleigh (Arthur Treacher, later of the Fish & Chips), who is collecting American slang — gangster slang, really. Why is his pencil positioned in the middle of a word? Because he’s correcting snitch to snatch. Know your slang!

Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings posts (Raindrop.io)

At the dentist, or barber

I went to see my old dentist, who was now working as a barber. He was in a large shop with one barber chair (red and white) and many chairs along the walls for waiting customers. I took a seat and a former student (not a favorite student) came in and sat down next to me. She said that it looked like I lost weight, and I thanked her for the compliment. She was there for a cavity: “Too much gin and tonic,” she explained.

My dentist, now barber, stepped out for a break. It seemed that everyone in the complex where he worked took a break at the same time. When he came back in, he was carrying a can of air freshener that he had won in a trivia contest by knowing and singing the song “Keep the Home-Fires Burning.” And everyone in the shop sang the song along with him.

The sources I can think of here: getting crowned last week (thanks, Grape-Nuts), reading a friend’s post with a campfire in it, and buying candles yesterday to, yes, keep the home fires burning. To the best of my knowledge, I have never heard “Keep the Home-Fires Burning,” though I’ve heard an adaptation, “Keep the Campfires Burning,” in an episode of Lassie. And yes, that’s Ken Osmond (better known as Eddie Haskell) near the Scout campsite, ever the saboteur.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Raindrop.io)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951).]

Interstate freakout

Driving home in our Prius post-Thanksgiving I saw the Tire Pressure Monitoring System light come on. We were on an interstate — yikes! — and had just passed the aftermath of a minor collision, with two cars on the shoulder and debris scattered on the road. I had dodged the debris, but now I wondered if I had run over a shard of something and sprung a leak.

We took the next exit and checked the tires — no obvious problem. We’ve had the TPMS light go on before, after getting the tires rotated, so we tried the TPMS reset trick, restarted the car, hoped, and drove on. But the light stayed on. Crap. We got some air closer to home, where we found that all four tires were slightly under pressure, no doubt because of a sudden drop in temperature (about thirty degrees) in the four days since we had last inflated the tires. And the light stayed on.

Rather than pay to have the tires’ sensors checked (an expensive proposition), we figured we should just get new tires (we’re about halfway there). So we called our dealer, who ordered tires but said that we could cancel if the problem went away. It didn’t: the light stayed on, and on. But yesterday, Elaine got gas, and the light went off, and it was only then that we remembered that we had gotten gas shortly before the light went on. It turns out that uncapping and recapping the Prius gas tank can create the problem, and that uncapping and recapping the gas tank can make the problem go away. To quote a redditor: “Last time I check[ed] it was the gas cap.”

And it’s been the gas cap for us before, setting off not the TPMS light but the Check Engine light. O brave new world, that has such gas caps in’t.

One more commentary on the election

It’s by Rebecca Solnit: “Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do” (The Guardian ).

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Max, Netflix, TCM.]

Our Betters (dir. George Cukor, 1933). From a play by Somerset Maugham, with a screenplay by Jane Murfin and Harry Wagstaff Gribble, and it would have been a nice addition to the Criterion Channel’s recent Rebels at the Typewriter feature. “There’s something about these people that makes me feel terribly uncomfortable”: yes, and it took our household some time to realize that we were watching a Wildean comedy, and that these idle rich folk in a great country house were not to be taken seriously. Constance Bennett stars as Pearl, Lady Grayston, an American heiress who takes a lover after discovering that her British lord of a husband has a mistress and married only for money. At the great house (where that husband is never to be seen), we find Lady G, her lover, her sister (with old-fashioned ideas about — ha! — monogamy), a duchess, the duchess’s kept man, various hangers-on, and Ernest (Tyrell Davis), a tango dancer who puts a considerable amount of pre into pre-Code. ★★★ (TCM)

[Tyrell Davis and Constance Bennett.]

*

Living (dir. Oliver Hermanus, 2022). An adaptation of Ikiru (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1952), which I haven’t seen. In 1950s London, Bill Nighy is Mr. Williams, a widower, a government bureaucrat, an icy enigma to his underlings, a figure of no interest to his grown son and daughter-in-law. Mr. Williams suddenly disappears from the office, and when he’s spotted by a neighbor, he appears to have taken up with the much-younger Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), a former co-worker. A poignant (though never merely sentimental) movie about leaving the world a little better than you found it. ★★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel features Noirvember Essentials, Columbia Noir, and Queer Noir

Detour (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945). It’s Noirvember at the Criterion Channel, so I had to watch. It’s a brilliant movie, a story of fate (or contingency), made on the cheap, imaginatively filmed to make up for the absence of elaborate sets, with a great performance from Ann Savage, who speaks some of the grimmest dialogue in noir: “We all know we’re gonna kick off someday. It’s only a question of when.” ★★★★ (CC)

Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder, 1944). The idea of queer noir might make a viewer rethink the relationship between Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), neither of whom has ever married, with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) as MacMurray’s amour on the side. I’ve watched this movie so many times, and this time I noticed the many pictures of fighters in Neff’s apartment, the way the pouring-drinks-in-the-kitchen scene looks unmistakably like a post-coital moment, Neff’s “I love you too” (to Keyes), and the funny moment when “Tangerine” plays in the background, and — surprise — it’s diegetic music. One incredible line: “There’s a very good osteopath in town I’d like to see before I leave.” ★★★★

Pickup Alley (dir. John Gilling, 1957). The alleys are figurative, the places where narcotics are handed off from one transporter to another: in London, Lisbon, Rome, Naples, and Athens. Victor Mature gets top billing as an FBI agent, but he has little to do; the real stars here are Trevor Howard as a thoroughly convincing sadistic criminal kingpin (that’s why it’s called acting) and Anita Ekberg as his “doll.” Sudden violence, flashy music (Richard Rodney Bennett), and some French Connection flavor. A surprising asset: Bonar Colleano, as a shady American in Rome, selling souvenirs and information. ★★★

Brighton Rock (dir. John Boulting, 1948). From a Graham Greene novel, with Richard Attenborough as Pinkie Brown, a psychopathic teenaged hoodlum, Carol Marsh as his devoted girlfriend Rose, and Hermione Baddeley as Ida Arnold, an indefatigible music-hall type who turns amateur investigator to expose Pinkie’s wrongdoing. “I’m like those sticks of rock,” she says. Caution: if you don’t pause for the newspaper article at the beginning and then switch on subtitles before the dialogue begins, you’ll likely be lost. ★★★★

Cry of the Hunted (dir. Joseph H. Lewis, 1953). In the Queer Noir feature, and it’s not difficult to see why: Police lieutenant Tunner (Barry Sullivan) pursues escaped convict Jory (Vittorio Gassman) from Los Angeles to the swamps of Louisiana, where they end up in a shared struggle to survive. The homophile element in their relationship is clear from the start: after the two men fight it out in a prison cell, they sit side by side in front of a cot, panting, with Tunner offering Jory a post-fightal cigarette. With a great chase scene along the Angels Flight funicular. Best line: “I’m not going to walk out on him!” ★★★★ (CC)

[Feet vs. train: a bit like The French Connection chase.]

*

From the Criterion Channel feature Starring Ida Lupino

Anything Goes (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1936). It’s fun to see Ida Lupino playing an English heiress, and it’s fun to see the young Ethel Merman (a force of nature), but there’s not much more for me to like in this adaptation. Only four of Cole Porter’s songs remain (with lyrics substantially rewritten for the censors), with songs by other hands added. Bing Crosby is Merman’s co-star, and he’s just weird, as he often is, doing an odd whistling bit as he rises from or sinks into a chair. I thought I’d try it ’cause it’s Porter but now think I hadn’t oughter, ’cause heaven knows, this movie blows. ★★

Yours for the Asking (dir. Alexander Hall, 1936). When casino owner Johnny Lamb (George Raft) takes pity on impoverished socialite Lucille Sutton (Dolores Costello), his pals hire con artists Gert Malloy (Ida Lupino) and Dictionary McKinney (Reginald Owen) to pull him out of Lucille’s clutches, and complications follow. Fun to see Lupino playing a lowlife pretending to be one of the smart set: her shifts in diction are entertaining in themselves. James Gleason, Edgar Kennedy, and Lynne Overman add considerable comedy to the proceedings. I wish this movie had been made before the Code kicked in. ★★★

*

Breath of Fire (dir. Hayley Pappas and Smiley Stevens, 2024). I seem to find out about cults only when they become the stuff of Hulu and Max documentaries. So it is here, with the story of Katie Griggs, aka Kundalini Katie, aka Guru Jagat, a teacher of Kundalini yoga with a Venice, California studio and celebrity clients. Griggs’s story brings in the stories of two other teachers, Yogi Bhajan, aka Harbhajan Singh Puri, a one-time customs inspector, and Hari Jiwan Singh Khalsa, aka Stephen Oxenhandler, aka Toner Bandit. Unpaid labor, sexual abuse, conspiracy theories, telemarketing fraud (that’s where the printer toner comes in), Yogi Tea, an awful lot of gullible people, and an awful lot of money. ★★★★ (M)

*

Raising Arizona (dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1987). Lunacy abounding: ex-con H.I.(Nicolas Cage) and ex-policewoman Ed (Holly Hunter) marry, and when they cannot conceive, they kidnap a quintuplet, Nathan Arizona Jr., whose parents, they figure, already have enough kids on their hands. And the search for the missing infant begins. The comedy here is broad, feral, silly, smart, and unending. What made me laugh the hardest: a hand rising through mud, followed by a leg rising through mud — or is that mud? ★★★★ (CC)

*

Surveilled (dir. Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz, 2024). Ronan Farrow looks at cyber-surveillance by authoritarian regimes, western democracies, and private entities, all spying on their enemies and objects of suspicion. This documentary is a dud, never offering a clear or even a bewildering explanation of how devices are hacked or of what can be done to prevent hacking. What we get instead is Farrow, always impeccably dressed, always with a different pen in hand, saying that it’s nice to finally meet a person, and then reading off questions deadpan, as if reenacting a genuine interview. Low point: Farrow being interviewed by David Remnick in posh New Yorker surroundings. ★ (M)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Raindrop.io)

YAS (Yet Another Scam)

I got this message last night as Elaine and I were strolling to a restaurant:

Your group order has been picked up from Chili's Grill & Bar and your Dasher is on the way! :-) - Msg&Data rates may apply. Reply STOP to cancel.

And soon after:

Your Dasher Abduvali is approaching with your group order from Chili's Grill & Bar. Enjoy your meal!

The message came from a number with a 201 area code — northern New Jersey. I was in New Jersey in October. Did someone get hold of my info? I immediately had visions of forgetting about dinner and being stuck on the phone with my bank sorting out the problem. So:

I checked the account. No charge for Chili’s.

I searched for the number that texted me and found it at 800notes, where other recipients of texts from this number had reported it: “Thanks for your order from Han Dynasty,” “Thank you for your order from Gus’s World Famous Chicken.”

Of course — a scam.

Scam efforts increase as we near the end-of-year holidays. Keep calm and carry on.

Recently updated

Gibson sues One cease-and-desist order later, Trump’s knock-off Les Pauls are off the market.

Recently updated

Words of the year Now with polarization.

Survey says sloppy

I received an e-mail more than three weeks ago asking me to complete a survey about my university and community. I stopped after the second question.

The first question asked if I’m a member of the campus or of the community. As a retired prof, what do I answer? I don’t get emergency text-alerts, because they’re not available to retired faculty, which makes me think that I’m not considered a member of the campus. Retired faculty who live at some distance would seem to be members of neither the campus nor the community. But since I’m a seven-minute walk from campus and have library privileges and free parking for life, I decided to say that I’m a member of the campus.

It was the second question that brought my survey to a stop:

Which picture best represents how closely aligned with [the university] and the community are CURRENTLY in terms of shared goals and concerns?

As written, this question makes no sense: the word with makes it gibberish. For a moment I thought that the question was asking whether I was aligned with the shared goals and concerns of the university and the community. I know of course that the question is supposed to be asking how closely the university and community are aligned. But it doesn’t ask that.

As I suspected, this question did not originate with an administrator in my university. It’s taken from a survey instrument called the Optimal College Town Assessment, a source credited, if obliquely, on my university’s survey form. But someone at my school screwed up the OCTA’s question, which should read

Which picture best represents how closely aligned your campus and community are CURRENTLY in terms of shared goals and concerns?

And I now see that someone also screwed up the survey question that follows:

Which picture best represents how closely aligned with [the university] and the community would be IDEALLY at some future point in terms of shared goals and concerns?

That question should read

Which picture best represents how closely aligned your campus and community would be IDEALLY at some future point in terms of shared goals and concerns?

After stopping at the second question, I wrote a polite e-mail to explain why I thought that the survey needed tweaking. IDEALLY, there would have been a correction. A follow-up e-mail to clarify retiree status and note the troublesome with would have done the trick. CURRENTLY, I’ve had no reply.

Yes, we all make mistakes. But we can correct them too.