More About Rain Barrels

I can't even remember now why I decided that the rain barrels needed to be moved because it's a helluva lot of work.  But I'm committed now.  The first step was to get guttering attached to the garage to run the water into the primary barrel.  That took long enough because everything is harder than a random guy on YouTube makes it look:

We haven't had any serious rain since I put this up so I don't know how well the gutter is going to drain water into that first barrel but I will soon find out as we are expecting a MASSIVE rain storm tonight (in fact as I type this massive dark gray clouds are quickly rolling in) which is predicted to continue through tomorrow. (Or so weather.com claims, but they are about as reliable as a 1910 Farmer's Almanac since the US federal government stopped paying its annual dues to the weather satellite system.) I spray painted primer on Barrel 1 and it was a miserable task: the paint smells terrible and gives me headaches and it takes forever and the coverage is patchy.  And it's boring work, too.  I also primed Barrel #2 and tried out the yellow enamel paint on the top to see how it looks:

I don't like the yellow--too shrill and too shiny. And the enamel paint smells worse than the primer. So I'm going to have to go to Home Depot AGAIN (I feel like I live there these days) to get a can of primer and a can of yellow outdoor paint and do this all over again using roller brushes. It won't smell, the color will be better, and I don't care if the roller brush leaves orange peel dimpling in the paint as it's going to end up being covered with leaf and raspberry debris anyway.  Meanwhile, these barrels are waiting in the wings:

This morning I disconnected the hoses, removed the spigots and moved the cinder blocks over to their new home next to the garage. (And I twinged my back and worked through the pain and now feel fine--there's a lesson in that for those who can pay attention.) Once this latest climate change induced mega storm spends itself, I'll paint these damned barrels and set them up. THEN I can finally move my raised bed containers into position and THEN I can finally plant the things up. If I get a vine ripened tomato before winter sets in, I'll be amazed.

Mott Parking Structure Demolished

Mott Community College is between us and work, and the quickest bike ride is through campus, and used to use a parking structure that had an entrance down low and an exit up high, next to the Planetarium (you can see a sort of teal dome in a couple of these pictures).  It's been fenced off for a while, and now I see that they've completely demolished it.  That's a LOT of concrete.

 

The Double Turn by Carol Carnac

 

A few weeks ago I restarted reading the so-called "cozy murder mysteries" as a break from so-called "literature," and started Airing in a Closed Carriage--an absolute whopper of a book (which is not typical for books in this genre) and it got WAY too upsetting to continue.  I have about 160 pages left of it and just could not go on, as the characters were just far too real and the tragedy was just too upsetting.  

So I turned to this book and it is absolutely the right type: the murders are bloodless, the bad characters are seriously flawed and the heroes are (somewhat but not overly) likable. If the name looks familiar, it should as E C R Lorac wrote all those Lake District novels featuring Chief Inspector McDonald I've discussed before. (The guy who wants to escape London and buy cows out in Lancashire where everyone is always saying "Champion!") The basic idea of this book (which does NOT feature McDonald) is that it is post-WWII (1956 when published) and the primary female character has returned home from living in Canada (where she taught at university and avoided being blitzed) to her father's home to help take care of him.  He's old, senile and bed-ridden.  He's also been taken care of by a formidable woman who is called "Trimming" (she doesn't seem to have a first name) who is his nurse, cook, housekeeper and a self-flaggelating religious nut. She's also miserly and won't spend money on gas for lights or house repairs.  So the enormous estate now looks like a crumbling haunted house that you'd have to spend the night in to get your inheritance. Trimming only begrudgingly lets Virgilia (yes, that really is the is the daughter's name) into the house to see her father, whom she hasn't seen in decades.  His mind swims in and out of focus and he acts as if he recognizes her. Meanwhile she doesn't actually want to be with him and really wants to be left alone to work on a book she wants to publish. She spends her days writing and drinking tea out in his old studio (once upon a time he was a well respected artist who painted massive things (think 25' by 25' in size) that only museums could house.  They are entirely out of fashion now (nymphs and other romantic images inspired by mythology) and so they are heaped up in "her" studio.  She does not like her father but tells everyone who will listen that she has a duty to care for him--yet she doesn't care for him (Trimming does that) and neither he nor Trimming even want her there.  Their only concession to Virgilia is in permitting a local doctor to visit her father once a week to make sure he's eating enough and taken care of.

After getting to know this household we drop by a much happier house next door: a retired lawyer lives there with his niece (who is a real Jolly Hockeysticks sort) and she is often visited by her boyfriend who is (fortunately for her) wealthy as she intends to be a modern painter and doesn't have two pence to rub together.  She is also committed to such communist ideas that property is theft and houses should not be locked and household objects should be considered communal among friends, families and strangers in need. But, she is fascinated to learn that her uncle's neighbor is a (formerly) famous painter and so she is desperate to see his works in person.  So they trot over and view the crumbling estate and massive paintings and, despite her ideological convictions, she is smitten with the magnitude of the property and all evidence of former wealth.  Her uncle is thoroughly cynical and is convinced there is ill will bubbling beneath the surface of that odd household.  

And he is right: the next day the doctor shows up as scheduled and the house is locked up and no one answers the doorbell.  He heads to the studio to let Virgilia know and she and he circle the massive house, looking for an open window or door, finding none.  She hasn't been in the house since the night before (she claims) and they both are immediately worried.  He breaks a window and lets them both in, only to find Trimming dead at the bottom of the massive stairwell with a broken neck and Old Man collapsed at the top of the stairs, alive, but unable to move as he's had a massive stroke.  He's taken to the hospital with no one believing he'll recover. It's so obvious Trimming tripped: the carpet on the stairs is old and worn and she is old and frail and the tray of food she was carrying was heavy.  So no mystery, right?  Yet the doctor has a bad feeling and calls the police and then THEY all have bad feelings.  Everyone is convinced that Trimnming was pushed.  But how?  And why?

Trimming doesn't have a penny to her name--she never even accepted payment from the Old Man.  And if he had money, why not kill him?  Or both?  And anyway, no one was in the house and it was locked from the inside.  A real head scratcher.  But before CID man Rivers is done, he's going to discover a suspicious geriatric plasterer named "Walter" (but really Willy Potts) who did horrible work on the ceilings and that Old Man was in fact a millionaire because he won an Argentinian lottery thirty years earlier and kept his money in Paris so the English government couldn't tax it (there was a lot of griping about regulations and taxes by all characters that were not police throughout the book).  And into all this weirdness appears a "nephew" of Virgilia who is way too interested in everything (he pokes about touching things he shouldn't, smearing fingerprints on everything) and has strong opinions about what happened. But mainly he wants the police to hit the road so he can put the massive tapestries up for auction so he and "Aunt" Virgilia can get at some serious cash.

So what happened?  And who did it?  It's completely bewildering until the second from the last page when (a) a third dead body appears and (b) the criminal suddenly confesses for no reason.  

I would say that this is a B- story.  Not great writing or very satisfying.  But certainly not upsetting either.  Now, back to Airing in a Closed Carriage...

Film review: Maniac Cop (1988)

One of the more notorious 1980s horror movies was Maniac from 1980, which was like an 80s gored-up version of Peeping Tom, where you took the point of view of the titular killer, who scalped his victims to provide hair for his mannequins.  It was directed by William Lustig, who also directed this little number, which will be notorious for precisely nobody, which goes to show what you lose in going from a noun to an adjective.  This one is in solid B-movie territory, as evinced by the fact that the hero (or rather, one of them, because there are different heros for the two halves of the movie) is Bruce Campbell, most famous as the muse for Sam "Evil Dead" Raimi (who also shows up as a TV reporter), who is just a millimeter away from leading man material (somehow a tiny bit too strange, a tiny bit too cheesy), and now has a thriving career being himself and going round various conventions, often performing marriages for his fans.  If this has been his sole output, however, he would not have half so many fans, as the role gives him no quippy one-liners or catch phrases, or indeed any chance to flex his comedy muscles.

The writer of the film is the prolific B-movie screenwriter Larry Cohen (famous for It's Alive, where the monster is a baby, or Q, The Winged Serpent, where it's a quetzelcoatlus that lives in the attic of a New York skyscraper, or, in a late-career mainstream breakthrough, Phone Booth), and I have to say, it's not one of his most imaginative.  The basic plot is that there's a giant guy dressed up as a New York Cop going round killing random people (the first person he kills is a poor woman running away from two muggers who thinks he's going to help her, but has her neck snapped instead).  This, understandably, exacerbates the public's already tense relationship with the fuzz, and, in fact, gets an innocent (well, ACAB) cop shot by a terrified civilian as a result.  This can in theory be blamed on our first-half hero, Detective Frank McCrae, played by one of those "I know that guy!" actors, Tom Atkins, 

who seems a bit old for the role, particularly as the reason the public knows about the Maniac Cop is because he leaked the story to a far-too-young-and-sexy (well, with allowances for ridiculously unflattering 80s hair) news anchor with whom he has, it is strongly implied, dallied.  (He looks old enough to be at least her father, and to his credit, he shows no interest now.)  McCrae is the voice of reason and decency, who (a) doesn't believe the culprit is any of the schmucks his higher-ups want to pin it on (like the two muggers), and (b) is very quick to believe that it's a rogue cop, to the horror of those aforementioned higher-ups (which include Richard "Shaft" Roundtree).  

When we are first introduced to Bruce Campbell's Jack Forrest (yeah, tried real hard with that name), it is as a purposeful red herring, because we watch him from behind putting on his police uniform, just as the film has opened with closeups of the maniac cop strapping on various items of equipment.  And, indeed, his neurotic wife suspects him of being the maniac, and keeps a scrapbook of all the newspaper clippings about the murderer.  After Jack leaves the apartment, we see part of the reason the wife believes this: the phone rings and a female voice taunts her with accusations about Jack being the killer.  This drives the wife to follow Jack as he goes out into the night (supposedly on patrol) and she finds that he is instead going to a sleazy motel where she bursts in on him in bed with a blonde (who turns out to be another cop, and is pretty much co-hero of the second half of the film).  Jack, to his minor credit is pretty ashamed once caught, but it's too late as his wife runs out into the night... and into the arms of the real maniac cop.  Once her garotted corpse is found in the very room in which the tryst occurred (by a cleaning lady who is, very unrealistically, not a non-English speaking immigrant, but another "don't we know her from somewhere?" type), Jack is slapped in jail, although McCrae is already convinced he's innocent, and goes to check on the blonde (Theresa Mallory, currently undercover as (of course) a prostitute), just in time to help her fight off the maniac.  (But she's already emptied a whole clip of bullets into him, so the extra couple that McCrae contributes can't be what swings it.)

McCrae is convinced that Jack must have been set up by somebody in the force, and somebody who knew about Jack and Theresa's affair.  But the only person she told was a mousy long-serving desk jockey with a bum leg called Sally Noland...  Anyway, McCrae pretty quickly works out who the real Maniac is, and his connection to Sally Noland, the only hitch being that he's supposed to be dead.  So he arranges a meeting with the coroner who supposedly conducted the autopsy, just before the maniac storms the cells killing all and sundry, except his intended targets, Jack and Theresa.  However, Jack is now a suspect in multiple murders - including (alas) McCrae's.  

So he must take over the mantle of hero for the remainder of the film.  We start with a visit to the coroner's to find out the mystery of how a dead man could be murdering so many people.  

We learn that he wasn't exactly physically dead, but the coroner was pretty convinced he was brain dead.  Then it's back to Police HQ for a bloody showdown, that transitions to a car chase to the pier and the usual "is he really dead?" ending to set up Maniac Cop 2.

Why the Criterion Channel of all things was showing this, I'll never know (Jami zeroed in on it when I asked her to pick a film - she ignored all the classics of the Czech New Wave and the like).  It's not cheesy or weird enough (unlike some of Larry Cohen's other creations) to be truly interesting.  It is competently made and acted, I'll give it that, but it kind of fumbled the opportunity for social commentary, and our killer didn't really kill with panache, which you want in your inhuman slashers.  If there's nothing else on, it can't hurt, but I wouldn't seek it out (unless you're a Bruce Campbell completist). 

Jami's Spring Gardening, Part the third

First honeysuckle.  Have three more to transplant to the lattice fence once it gets finished.

Front yard now: crazy bale raised beds. An experiment to keep sun loving vegetables off contaminated soil.  Also in Fall the straw will help improve the soil. 

Inside (but not for long): these two hydroponic things need a deep clean.  It's really difficult to do that in the dining room so they are going to spend the summer outside growing strawberries.  I can clean then with the hose very easily.  Then in Fall they'll come back inside to grow lettuce.

Baby strawberry peeking out.

Another backyard experiment: potatoes in cloth bags.

Jami's Spring Gardening, Part 2

Along with the fig tree this is where the food growing will be. 

Old rain barrel system which I started to move but lost steam today 

Raspberries: hese were planted by squirrels all over the yard so I've been digging them up and moving  them over here.  But they are a mess and I need to figure out how to organize them.  The most ambitious sprig was transplanted from a crack in the driveway near where I park my car.

Long been a problem: between our front yard and the parking lot is half a fence.   There was more but strong winds and homeless people pushed part over.  So fed up I'm going to finish off the lattice fencing to withstand any gale force and mentally unstable person.  It requires digging fence post holes which Ive been putting off. But it has to be done soon as the ground is like cheese cake and soon, once the spring rains stop, it'll be like Adobe brick. 

Future lattice and honeysuckle vine support.  Also featured are out of control grape vines.  I need a good idea to get them some sort of pergola sort of support but haven't finalized a design yet. 

Jami's Spring Gardening, part 1

Hosta haven: nothing grew under the balcony near the house and was told hostas would love it there.  They are outrageously expensive so I wouldn't buy them but you Simon bought me a Bordines gift card last year and I used that and this year they are looking lush: beautiful all summer and completely maintenance free. And we never gets slugs so leaves look perfect.

Shitake mushroom plugs in fresh cut tree chunks.  They take a full year to get their shit together but since it's completely shaded there next to the Dollar General, we have nothing to lose by trying mushrooms.  If these work well expand to buttons and portabellos.

Raccoons did a number on the liner two years ago and I'd been putting off draining most the water, cleaning the algae off, patching (think patching bicycle innertubes), and refilling it. About three weeks ago the fish were fully recovered from winter hibernation so I set to work.  Amazingly  it worked and now the pond has a lot more surface which fish need.  Plus the birds like the shallows.

 

I found a new plant store that does only pond plants so I got some when they got their first spring load.   I got grasses as they can best withstand bad winters.  In theory they'll oxygenate the water and the gdfish (some of which are 10 years old) will be even bigger and stronger,

Our soil is almost certainly contaminated so I'm going to try raised beds.  Everyone on our street has versions of these popping up in their cars given that food has increased 500% in the past few months. Everyone is planning for the complete economic collapse of the US. 

Never liked where they were because they weren't near the things that needed water but moving them required installing guttering.  Also they are ugly green so I'm going to paint them.

Film review: The League of Gentlemen (1960)

This is a fun one, and very much of its time and place.  The time is with just one toe into the 60s but enough so there are some racy elements in this that you wouldn't see in American films until the end of the 60s.  You get a few bare breasts glimpsed on the covers of seedy magazines that one of our Gentlemen has resorted to selling (Roger Livesey, looking much older than the young Colonel Blimp, but nothing like the old Colonel Blimp (he didn't get fat or bald)) and you get overt references to shagging, homosexuality (more on which in a bit) and you get Nanette Newman (who must be considerably older than I thought) lounging in a bath 

or waiting in bed for her lover, both apparently naked, and finally Jack Hawkins calling his ex-wife "bitch".  Other than that, it's basically a down-at-heel Oceans 11, which could have turned a lot sadder than it was if it has been a bit more introspective.

So, the film begins as we see Jack Hawkins' Lieutenant-Colonel (the real rank of Nigel Patrick in WWII) Norman Hyde cutting five pound notes in half and sliding them into copies of a book called The Golden Fleece (a real American crime novel by John Boland) and addressing them.  We next see the books arrive in envelopes at an array of ex-military who are struggling to various degrees (and either love-'em-or-leave-'em types, gay, posing as clergy or in very strained married relationships).  This opening scene sketches the characters of our main players, and they remain barely sketched, albeit brought to life by a solid array of character actors.  They are: Major Peter Race (Nigel Patrick - I didn't know him, but the face seemed very familiar (and now I know why)), who is a suave ladies man woken up by his affectionate young girlfriend with the information that they'd lost a lot of money gambling, and whom we later find out lives at the YMCA) - has the habit of calling Hyde "old darling" until he snaps at him for it; Major Rupert Rutland-Smith (Terence Alexander, who apparently had a role in Bergerac later), who is the cuckolded husband of Nanette Newman (who is actually the wife of Bryan Forbes), and a sort of mirror image of the confident Race, Livesey's Captain "Padre" Mycroft, who is posing as a priest with a suitcase full of smut (those are the officer class, and all posh); Lieutenant Edward Lexy (Richard Attenborough), a working-class Lothario who fixes one-armed-bandits for crooked casino owners, whose girls he steals from them; Captain Stevens, a tall, strapping, handsome type, who works at a boxing gym and is obviously gay, although not in the least bit camp (unlike Oliver Reed of all people, who shows up in a tiny cameo as a musical theater type, mincing egregiously); Captain Frank Weaver, a hen-pecked milk-drinking (we later find out why) drab little man, living in a cramped flat with his blabbermouthed wife and her deaf father, and finally, Captain Martin Porthill (the screenwriter of this very picture, and noted director in his own right, although this one was directed by Basil Dearden, Bryan Forbes - who directed The Wrong Box and appeared in An Inspector Calls, among many others), whom we meet coming home from a party with a young woman woman, to find an older woman (in a sumptuous London house) who dotes on him but whom he treats poorly - who isn't even his wife.  He purportedly supports himself by playing piano, but really it's by leaching of rich older women.

So that's our crew, that soon assemble at the restaurant indicated on the note (in a private room).  There Hyde is very disappointed to find that some of them haven't read the book, and those who have are not gripped with fervor at the bank-robbery described therein.  He also reveals why he picked them and why they are likely to be amenable to a life of crime, because they all served well until they were dishonorably discharged.  Race ran a black-market ring, Rutland-Smith ran up huge debts, Mycroft was dismissed for public gross indecency (is he also gay?  Not clear), Lexy was a signals-whiz who sold secrets to the Russians, Porthil is a crack shot who shot the wrong people in Cyprus, Stevens is obviously the muscle (and dabbled in Mosley-brand fascism until he was caught with a man), and Weaver who is a bomb-disposal expert whose alcoholism led to the death of four of his men.

As with most heist movies, the fun of the early part of the film is the getting-the-gang together, as here, and then the middle part is the planning, and then the (almost) last part is the actual job.  Here there are actually two jobs, one of which is stealing machine guns from an Army base in Dulverton.  This is mostly comedic (Livesey poses as a very-highly ranked officer and bosses Hyde and Pace around) 

but has moments of genuine tension.  Interestingly, they all affect Irish accents while carrying it out so that the IRA will be blamed.  But then we move on to the second part, which is a bank robbery involving smoke bombs and gas masks (also stolen from the Army base).  

Maybe it's because I've seen a ton of films no doubt influenced by this one, I didn't find this particularly gripping.  (SPOILERS) nobody gets shot, and they get away with the boxes that will give each of them $100,000 each (Lexy gets fined $500 because he sneaks out to see his girl on the night before the job).  What really does for them is that they have a huge party at Hyde's fancy country house 

(where he lives alone and eats from cans, Pace finds out when he tails him after the lunch meeting, after having come across in front of the others as uninterested).  This allows the cops time to tighten the net (although we never see the cops working this out, as the police arriving outside is supposed to come as a shock) and, let's just say that money will remain unspent.  This leaves a rather bad taste in the mouth.  As Hyde said to them at the very start, the British Government spent a lot on training them with useful skills before kicking them aside, and it's a shame not to put the skills to good use.  However, one doesn't feel too sorry for our men because they clearly can't function very well outside of a total institution, and they're heading for one.

Forbes's script is nicely structured (the film is nearly 2 hours long, but never drags) and refreshingly tart.  Apart from some comments from Lexy (who has been assigned a shared room with Stevens) about "sleeping with the lights on," Stevens's homosexuality is seen as no impediment to him functioning perfectly as part of a team, making the British Army come across much better than today's US Military.  But it is interesting - we just watched a French film where murder is committed, and the culprit gets away and we're supposed to be happy (because the victim was a lech and a leech), whereas here our chaps don't even get to spend money.  Instead the good old British police force efficiently rounds them up with minimal fuss and gently herds them (and Bunny, one of Hyde's old army pals who had shown up to the party and is going to have a hard time proving his innocence) off to the nick.  Jami remarked that in an American film they would've got away with the money, but I don't think so - they would've been shot, almost certainly, starting with the gay character.