The Harry Potter Festival in Harvard Square

(which is peaking even as I write this as 11:24pm EST 7-20-07) is a bracing reminder of the old Harvard Square...full of oddly dressed gawkers and buskers of all descriptions...a real mob scene.
One thing I don't get though, if "Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows" is supposed to be a kid's book, then why are so many college co-eds tarted up in sexy schoolgirl costumes?
I guess it's a generational thing.

'Arry Potter odds

Given the omnipresent release hype for the last of the Harry Potter novels this week, I thought I'd toy with some death-odds on the leads. Alas, this is all pure buncombe on my part as I'm not a fan, the Edwardian school setting is very off putting to me.

:)
Harry: 50-50, I suspect JK Rowling is damn sick and tired of her boy wizard, the way Conan Doyle found Sherlock Holmes a curse. So there is ample precedent for simply snuffing poor Harry, but then you have to factor in pressure from the publishers and Warner Brothers who want an untainted revenue stream from Rowling's creations for years to come. Offing Harry is bad business.

Hermione: 60-40, in her favor: Hermione is Rowling's familiar spirit, I doubt she'd kill her own avatar. Besides if Harry turns up dead she can probably revisit the seriesh Ms. Granger as the lead, maybe that was the plan all along.

Ron: 20 to 1 against. Stick a fork in him, Ron is doomed. The comedy relief never survives to final reel in story's like this, his death is supposed to be the hero's final passage to adulthood, blah blah blah. Besides, it's an easy out and even the best writers succumb to cliches.

A perfect day at Horseneck Beach today

perfect surf and perfect weather. I doubt I'll be so lucky for the rest of the summer. The only thing that harshed my groove was the proliferation of mediocre to awful tattoos some on which adorned the flesh of kids too young to enter into a binding contract in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
I guess that must be the hot new sweet sixteen gift, a smeary awful looking rose tattoo on one's shoulder blade.

Ten years from now, when "skin art" is strictly for squares, yer gonna wanna own stock in one of those companies that make lasers for tattoo removal...they'll be doin' a land office business.

Pick of the Week

Forget Harry Potter and Johnny Depp's pirate in eyeshadow...The Harvard Film Archive is goin' balls to the wall with action tomorrow!
The Adventures of Captain Marvel is one of the greatest serials ever made and this is a one in a lifetime chance to see it in it's natural big screen setting.
Don't let that pass you by!
Kudos to the HFA for making good use of the University's lavish endowment!

Sighted on the Minuteman Bike Path last night in East Arlington

at about 8:30pm...a small tow-headed boy wielding a teensy tiny butterfly net methodically attempting to capture one of the many many lightning bugs that were flickering about.
Behind the wee lad stood his two obvious parents grinning like circus clowns, the father reverently clutching the traditional glass jar with a perforated lid.

Add in the "Tom Sawyer" style bib overalls and the picture becomes complete.

Despite the rain

the grand fireworks show on the Esplanade look great last night...came across vividly even atop Robbin's Farm in Arlington some seven miles away from the action.
Is it me though, or are they getting closer and closer to outright mushroom-clouds over the Back Bay every Fourth of July?
The pyrotechnics, especially the traditional big finish seemed more akin to the Bikini Atoll tests this year...

The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)

The best thing I can say about this movie, is that it is nowhere near as tedious as "The Incredible Hulk" or as pretentious as "Daredevil".
But that of course is faint praise indeed. This time the famed superheroic quartet must get the nigh-omnipotent extraterrestrial Silver Surfer away from the planet before he summons his master "Galactus" and the Earth is consumed like a cosmic cocktail weiner.
And in the midst of this, Sue Storm (an inert but beautiful Jessica Alba) has gone all Martha Stewart whilst planning her perfect wedding to Reed Richards (a baffled Ioan Gruffud).
At a sparse ninety minutes the film has no time to get boring but hits no heights either. Michael Chiklis as "The Thing" and Chris Evans as "The Human Torch" are really the best part of the film and do their best to bring a Marvel Comics feel to the movie. Therein though lies the whole problem, two of the four actors are up for it, the other two range from banal (Gruffud) to outright bad (Alba...who seems to have less dialogue this time around, maybe she has problems spouting the requisite techno-babble who knows?). Frankly if Sony wants to start making some money here, they should decorously drop Gruffud and Alba from the sequel and start anew with Chiklis and Evans and include some decorous actress with talent to bring in the requisite star quality. Think of it as a "Marvel Two in One" for the big screen...

Sighted on the Fellsway Yesterday

A lone guy on roller blades, blithely skating along right in the middle of this major thoroughfare. Utterly oblivious to the fact that the Fellsway has no breakdown lane and twists and turns dangerously making it tough for cars to see this poor shlub if the conditions are right.
Seemed like a laid-back way to commit suicide if you asked me.

"Love's Labor's Lost"

The Actor's Shakespeare Company is throwing a sort of Elizabethan's Mad Tea Party with this, the Bard's deceptively frothy comedy of manners and identity headlined by the one and only Johnny Lee Davenport a noble veteran of Shakespeare and Company and one of the region's best journeymen classical actors.
The cast was tight, the jokes well timed, but the show's outre dependence on a five person ensemble makes the play more of a showcase for individual players and their powers of sheer memorization rather than a coherent whole. I get this feeling a lot whenever a small cast executes a huge play, that the whole mishaugas is mostly about getting the right hat and wig on and hitting one's mark just in time.
It's not so much "stunt casting" as "stunted casting".
Still it was funny, Johnny Lee was particularly good as Don Armando the farcical Spanish Knight, Sara Newhouse shone as the Princess of France and let me just give a nice loud shout out to young Khalil Flemming as the scene stealing page Moth.
Overall I give er' three out of five.
I just wish A.S.P, would give up on this "All Male Titus Andronicus or All Female MacBeth" and give us Shakespeare that is "all good".
:)

I have a new heroine

her name is "Rags to Riches", she can't leap tall building with a single bound or swing from a web, but she sure can shut down the boys at today's Belmont Stakes. Won by a dainty little nose, first Filly to do so in a hundred and two years!
Pretty amazing race, Tod Pletcher the owner was over the damn moon.

Whoops stu-pid meee-ee...

According to David Abel in the Boston Globe that mysterious "tracking ship" tied up on the Black Falcon is the "BEM Monge", a French telemetry ship that has tied up looking for some R & R.
I got those sailors in civies right, but my tin ear for languages ran true, I thought they were Russian.
The above linked article sez the French sailors on liberty are given $290 and the night off to explore Boston. Fair enough, I hope they enjoy themselves, but as soon as those poor boulevardiers taste what passes for domestic wine here in the USA they'll haul up the anchor and make flank speed back to Calais.

Is there a "Tracking ship" tied up on the Black Falcon in South Boston?

Damned if I can figure this out!
I saw some sailors clearly on R & R walking up Drydock Avenue at 5:30pm this evening spouting what sounded like Russian.
When I boarded the Silver Line BMIP and came round the dog-leg what was docked at the pier but an old fashioned "tracking ship" festooned with huge satellite dishes and under guard with the usual anti-terror gimmicks in place.
Scanning dishes that big strike me as only being useful for tracking satellites and manned spacecraft..I could be wrong about this, but why is a Russian space tracking ship tied up in Boston?
Can anyone give me the low down?
Never seen such an odd looking vessel in all my years as a low level clerk in the insurance industry.

Sighted on Drydock Avenue in (Romantic) South Boston

The liner "Norwegian Dawn" in in drydock at the moment, gettin' painted & polished and generally spruced up.
The topmost deck, some five stories up all told, has an open air basketball court where yesterday morning sundry persons were blissfully & actively shooting hoops about 8:15am.
Nothing like a fast pick up game of b-ball before a tedious day of vacuuming and bathroom scrubbing or whatever the hell they do over there.

Notes on a short weekend getaway to Barnstead New Hampshire

I passed by a boot-n-tack shop on Route 28 in Allentown that was tarted up in garish frontiersman regalia looking all the world like the Ponderosa's guest house.
I came to the conclusion that New Hampshire is never more ridiculous than when it tries to pass itself off as cowboy country. This is a bizarre long standing theme in the otherwise sensible Granite State.
Anyone out there ever gone to "Six Gun City" in Jefferson N.H?
This is an inane but fun theme park dedicated to the notion that Big Sky Country commences a hour or so west of Rumford Maine.
Okay all kidding aside, Sparky's Sub Shop in Rochester NH makes a hearty Italian grinder and the vistor's center on Route 93 North in Rockinghams NH us staffed by the nicest most helpful people west of the Vistula.
***
Massachusetts drives though, are still classic massholes in extremis.
I watched with fascinated horror as the remains of a backyard grill with propane tank slid off the back of a truck speeding north on Route 93 in North Reading. The driver in question slowed down long enough to assure himself that his debris did not kill me and was now merely littering the breakdown lane before speeding up and shooting over the horizon.
OY!
Mike Dukakis and Deval Patrick are right!
We all need more rail travel in Massachusetts, we'll never learn how to drive!

Cardullo's in Harvard Square

keeps a flat screen television in it's show window and shows the Red Sox game some evenings to passers-by complete with audio piped in via discreet speakers.
The crowd watching last night's loss was pretty sparse and is indicative of Harvard Square's cruel decline as a destination...a few bums, a couple of boulevardiers, the usual long haired old ladies and a pair of EMT's lounging next to their ambulance without a care in the world.
Didn't quite know what to make of that, guess there wasn't much happening in Cambridge by way of pain and misery last night.

Spider-Man III

Serious comic book fans will note that despite being one of Marvel's A-List super heroes that the proverbial webspinner suffers from a decidedly second rate rogue's gallery. From Electro to The Vulture and on to the The Lizard they are, by and large a shopworn collection of one-note freaks.
So when it came to write Spider-Man III, clearly Sam Raimi threw caution to the winds and dug right down to the bottom of the barrel to dredge up MORE if not better antagonists for the title character. This is how we end up with such tedious hacks as "The Sandman" (Thomas Haden Chuch channeling Jim Nabors), "Venom" (an entirely superfluous Topher Grace) and James Franco's "Goblin Junior" or whatever the hell they called him....an unpromising bunch to be sure.
Local pundit Jon Haber has sensibly opined that when screenwriters start shoe-horning multiple supervillains into a script it is a time to worry as easily written excess has now supplanted mere creativity.
To me though, the real villain here, the one Spider-Man cannot beat, is hubris, that firm belief that with a cast this good producers can indulge anything sans reproof.
Sadly, this is not the case, at two hours and twenty minutes Spider-Man III feels like a ponderous three and a half hours as we wearily trudge from villain backstory to villain backstory and on to the completely joyless action climax.
This is disquieting to watch, generally the Spider-Man franchise has been impeccably cast from the git-go with strong thematic notions to underscore the and move the action. Here though, the vague notion that poor Peter Parker has been seduced by Spider-Man's popularity is burried under tons of treacly dialogue, witless brawls and bizarre continuity errors. I won't even try to discuss Spidey's new black uniform it's origin or it's ultimate fate...I don't have all night and it wouldn't make a lick of sense the second time around anyway.
Personally I think McGuire and Dunst should take a hint, cash their checks and move on, the franchise has nowhere to go but down.

Insult to Injury

Gordon Scott, my favorite "obscure" Tarzan actor has died in Baltimore Maryland. He was the biggest Tarzan (biceps like granite), also the first to speak normal English and the first Apeman to film one of his films in Africa.
He will be missed.

Joseph Zamparelli Sr. R.I.P.

It is my sad duty to report that our artist-in-residence's father died last week after a long illness.
If "Mister Zee" was angry or unduly fussy in life, he had a right to be as he was caring for a profoundly ill wife for over thirty years. His devotion to duty set the standard for the rest of us. He was no breaker of proverbs, he will do well in the life after this one, he was passionate he was steadfast and we will not see his like on this breathing Earth again.
So g'bye Mister Zee...kiss Peggy for us and put in a good word for the boys in the back room, we are gonna need it.

I saw the "Fenway Samurai" at work on Friday Night

it was entirely unavoidable, it was a Sox-Yankees smackdown on TV so the Summer Shack in the aforementioned Fresh Pond was full of happy howlin' louts. I even saw the big much discussed eighth inner surge, but being completely ignorant of the basics of baseball, I had no idea what was going on...save only that the crowd was happy with the Red Sox latest acquisitions from Japan.
Frankly, if it doesn't have boxing gloves or a horse's tail, I dunno a thing about it.
What th' hell, everyone was pleased with the last minute victory...I can't criticize hard work in desperate circumstances.
Baseball gets a big hard sell here in America, but I don't get what all the hoopla is about. Ball players stand around in the hot sun, seemingly thinking deep thoughts while they wait interminably for someone to score. A man could compose an opera in the time it takes to actually catch something in the outfield.
Football on the other hand is a chatty sport, or so it seems to this perpetual outsider, armored brutes stand around gabbing away in endless huddles or else get complicated instructions from the coach at the sidelines...and that is only after guys go in and come out to further add fuel to the eternal palaver.
Then there is twenty seconds of serious carnage, then it's back to the tawky-tawk.

The Ninety Nine in Fresh Pond has closed!!!!!!

This is a catastrophe in extremis, where will Arlington drink now? Oh sure in certain restaurants, you can order a drink with your meal, but where to go for a little nightcap at the end of Route Two???
With the loss of the Ground Round, we are down to the Summer Shack (Which is nice but is primarily noted for it's family seafood dining) and the Bertucci's at Alewife Station.
Slim pickin's if'n yew asked me.
This is a cultural setback for Arlington, nothing left for me to do but join the Sons of Columbus, the Royal Order of Osiris or The Imperial Order of Icemen.