Day: January 2, 2020

I just saw this bizarre tweet:

Guillermo just sent this video from the radish harvest near Oxnard CA. Farm workers are laboring hard, moving down the cold muddy rows on their knees as they work piece rate, harvesting this veggie we enjoy in our salads & pozole. #WeFeedYou https://t.co/xEsyJa92xs

It has a video and everything. It’s so creepy because even in stupid Russia nobody picks radishes by hand in the field. On their dachas, people do but commercially? What is this, 1910?

In Russia, by the way, a third of the population doesn’t have indoor plumbing. And still nobody needs to crawl around in cold mud to gather radishes.

It’s weird when people feel so self-righteous about something so clearly barbaric.

The movie resolution of 2020 is off to a good start. I did not hate this movie at all and didn’t have to make myself finish it. I genuinely wanted to keep watching. The story still feels relatable, which is unusual for such an old movie. You’ve got to be a robot not to share at least some of George’s feelings sometimes. I think the movie is so popular because most people can relate to what the character experiences.

My favorite character was the blonde “loose woman.” She’s very beautiful and the best actress in terms of skill in the whole movie.

I’m thinking Midnight Cowboy for the next movie choice. What do you, folks, think? Good idea or not?

Another think that struck me almost at once is how much better the actresses were back then. The emotional range they could transmit without even having to say anything or move is amazing. So far in the movie the actress called Donna Reed has said absolutely nothing but you can see a huge play of emotions on her face. And there was another actress who appeared in the scene a minute earlier, said nothing, but killed with the vast emotional range she can portray.

This is precisely why I say that today’s Hollywood has no acting. Actresses today are more like models. Beautiful visuals but zero emotion. I now want to track the moment when real acting disappeared from Hollywood.

Another fascinating thing from It’s a Wonderful Life that I discovered at the 17-minute mark is that these horrible restaurant-type “salads” that consist of a ton of carelessly torn lettuce leaves, two chunks of tomato and nothing else already existed in the 1940s! And people ate them at home!

I always wondered about the origin of these bizarre concoctions. Does anybody even really eat them?

In keeping with my New Year’s resolutions, I started watching It’s a Wonderful Life on Prime. And right from the opening credits, it gets weird. The score is exactly like the Stalin-era movies of the 1940s. It’s like I’m watching a Lubov Orlova flick.

Turns out that the composer for It’s a Wonderful Life was a Ukrainian who’d escaped from the 1917 revolution (a lucky bastard) and ended up in Hollywood (a really lucky bastard). But his musical training is from the same place as the makers of the Stalinist movies. And those movies were very professionally made, so it’s not a criticism.

Watching movies is great. I’ve only seen two minutes of opening credits and already I’m discovering interesting stuff. I have a feeling I’ll be enjoying this resolution.

My sister recently attended a skating competition for tweens. It was horrible. The skating was extremely bad. The kids looked like they had never bothered to practice and as a result spent most of the competition on their butts. In the end, though, everybody got a medal. Literally.

My sister regularly meets business owners who can’t hire workers for entry-level positions. These are usually younger employees, and they are impossible to get to apply or to show up more than a couple of times. These are $40-an-hour (CAD but still) jobs with bonuses.

It’s as bad with college graduates who expect unrealistic salaries and a ridiculous speed of advancement.

My sister is talented, though, and she immediately came up with a way for the “$40 plus a $1,500 bonus” employer to find people to hire. Test your knowledge of the young generation and guess how it can be done at zero extra cost (and obviously nothing illegal like hiring illegal immigrants or things like that).