Midge

I saw Vertigo in college, either at the student union theater or at one of two local art-houses. This is not a review of the movie, but rather about a discovery:  The cute sidekick of Jimmy Stuart's character, Midge, was cute and familiar.  It came to me by the end of the movie:  She was Miss Ellie Ewing from Dallas, which was a very popular prime-time drama, that had first aired when I was in high school.

I get an odd feeling when I come across an actress, or really anyone, out of order:  I was used to older woman/matriarch Barbara Bel Geddes of Dallas, not Bel Geddes as gamine in Vertigo.  I get a similar feeling when I look back on my teen years and think about the neighbor moms.  At the time, they seemed old and sexless, now that I'm 20 years older than they were at the time, they seem strangely hot.

I can only imagine the novel someone like Nabokov would write -- if an elderly man got his wish to go back in time to his younger self:  With all his memories, taste and sensibilities intact, suddenly this version of his teen-self becomes uninterested in the futile quest to nail the daughters of the neighbor women* and set's his sights on the local bored housewives, to hilarious effect.

*Since it's Nabokov, obviously the character would nail both the moms and their daughters.

Wordle 1220

 

Wordle 1219

 

Writing For The AI--How I (accidentally) Dodged a Bullet

After HS I planned to follow in my two elder sibling's footsteps:  Join the Air National Guard and simultaneously earn a bit of money for college and have a bit of adventure in the bargain.  I took the tests and qualified for whatever I wanted and so I chose to train to be an air traffic controller.  It would be a long school, so I would be delaying college by a whole year, but I would accumulate a bunch of savings and I could even skip college and just start in on a well paid job, in which I had just gotten a bunch of free training.

There was only one drawback:  The slot for training wasn't until October and this was early summer.  Okay, well what can I do?

A couple of days later, there was a knock on our door, it was a Marine recruiter.  I told them my story about planning  to go into the ANG and they suggested I take their tests and see what they offer.  Fine.  Why not?

I could go to any field I wanted and the longest one was about the same as the air traffic control one, but it was for avionics tech.  Also, the next slot was in October.  Well, that was a huge waste of time!

I told both sets of recruiter that I would go with whoever could take me first.  A couple of days later, I got a call from the Marines--a slot had opened!  Some guy who had my MOS had crashed his car and broken every bone in his body and obviously could not go to boot camp later that week.  Would I like to go?

I figured their story was BS, but I went anyway because it saved me a few months of boredom doing nothing around the house all day.  They were probably telling me the truth though--I was the only recruit at MCRD in San Diego who was personally carrying my service records.  As an aside, the Marines will take you to MCRD, take away all of your possessions, including clothes and shave your head.  They will do this without finding you on any list or asking for any ID.  Eventually they wondered who I was and asked me very impolitely why I didn't give anyone my records earlier.  I was holding them in plain sight and figured someone would ask for them at some point.

Anyway, the point of all this is that President Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers on August 5, 1981 and as a result, many military reservists found themselves on active duty, working as air traffic controllers--which is not a well-paying profession, if you wear a uniform. 

So, I might have gotten stuck for a while making not much money, but some guy crashed his car and I went a different direction.

About 10 years later, my Marine squadron, VMAQ-4 got called to active duty and I spent about one year away from what I would have been doing.  But that's another story.

Wordle 1218

 28th Loss

Previous loss:  Wordle 1128

Wordle 1217

 

Wordle 1216

 

Jemma, Almost Home

 

Wordle 1215

 

Wordle 1214