I’m offering two free tickets to the opening of the Noir City Festival at the Egyptian Theater tonight. First response gets them. #NoirCity @amcinematheque.bsky.social

Off to see this great film again sporting my “Ale and Quail Club” t-shirt.

This is incredibly great news. There’s no better stewardship for this landmark theater. No needless wheel-reinventing by the Village Directors. What a great addition to the AC’s stable of theaters and what a gift for Westwood/UCLA cinephiles.

Gambling aside, tanking is bad for the NBA’s product. It’s bad for team morale and player development. It’s also bad for the soul. So IMHO what you gain by this far exceeds what you lose.

Smart GM’s can’t contextually out-think stupid GM’s, at least with future picks. It doesn’t matter if a team is good or horrible in two years if you get their pick. Large market / small market doesn’t either. Ping pong balls don’t care how much your team is worth.

The bad teams tend to remain horrible no matter which picks they get. How many promising careers have been destroyed by poorly-run teams? Picks suddenly become more valuable for good teams and less valuable for horrible teams. Or put another way, pick values become uniform and team-independent.

Hey @nba and @pablo.show .

If the NBA wants to eliminate tanking I can only think of one way: 30 balls in the lottery machine. It’s not as radical as it sounds. The current system really hasn’t created as much parity as it should.

I guess she didn’t get the memo about the boss’s priorities. Or maybe it was Wine o’clock when she got it.

I’ve been having a hard time with Milton for <fill in my years since high school>. And I earned a college Engiish degree too. It’s not him I guess, it’s me.

I will move to NYC and then I will leave.

P.S. A friend of mine worked on a straight-to-video movie using Dolby Surround. He put in a foley effect of a passing car panning left to right across the rear speakers just because he could. I never saw him so happy.

The Criterion Channel and other streamers may stream them too, unless they they run the sound through digital filtering - compression, etc - that inadvertently munges the Dolby process.

The point is it was easy to encode the 2.0 with Dolby Surround and put it out on everything, so why bother with a non-matrixed 2.0 soundtrack? All folm prints were likely matrixed so why wouldn’t they be?

Each to check. The matrixing is at the analog level and is (to my ears) transparent so it can only be detected if you run it through a home theater receiver and try. I did this back when I had such a receiver and was amazed at how much stealth Dolby Surround there was - on certain CDs as well.

If they lined up Senators in descending order of intelligence, Tommy would be in the corner eating paste.

P.S. I grew up in Philadelphia and lived in NYC for 12 years. Philadelphians are if anything worse about being bossed around. It must be a Northeast thing.

There’s nothing New Yorkers hate more than being told what to do. That’s why I knew he’d win as soon as I became aware of the race. The only chance the Establishment had of beating him was to do the exact opposite of what they’ve been doing - opposing him seriously and respectfully.

By sheer coincidence I listened to another live Callas Aida this a week - 1953 London with Barbirolli conducting. No high E-flat. None either on her 1955 EMI studio recording or on any of the other 8 or so non-Callas Aida’s in my collection.

The Reagan broadcast at the heart of Trump's free trade spat YouTube video by Reuters

Lets Streisand Effect the crap out of the Reagan video.

youtube.com/shorts/XTNCN...

That’s why there are a primaries. Let the people who elect decide who’s electable - not the media, the party leaders, the “experts” on social media, etc. Want to see who people will actually vote for? Hold a primary rather than argue and pontificate about it.

It’s not fair and yet totally right at the same time for the most beautiful woman in the world to also be the best-smelling. She is to date the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in person - 1983 BFI tribute. An indescribable experience.

There aren’t many media career paths at this point for McCain-minded Republicans.

Good. The Fox News personality just lost his audience. What else does he have going for him? Media events were the only part of the job he understood.

It actually may be her greatest work. In all seriousness I respected that.

I have nothing against wholesome per se - Shirley Temple, Garland and Rooney, etc. - but June Allyson is like that candy you put in your mouth and then immediately spit out.

All true, but acting wasn’t exactly MGM’s calling card in their heyday.

Angela Lansbury had a great career and the career she was meant to have. Who knows if that would have been the case if MGM gave her the starlet treatment.

The dirty little secret is that dictators have no use for lawmakers (or judges) anyway. Perhaps this time the Reichstag was merely adjourned instead of burned.

The career of June Allyson is one of life’s greatest mysteries. The other two were stunningly gorgeous.

Time codes are a very clever idea. The DTS soundtrack is loaded off of a CD-ROM or Internet downloaded onto a server. The time codes allow sync-up. This setup allows a much higher res digital signal than film encoding would allow at 24fps. It’s also in theory more robust.