Why Lisa Is Currently Furious

My friend at “Through the Shattered Lens” is currently angry – how do you other bloggers feel about this latest WordPress change?

Through the Shattered Lens

Hi there, WordPress subscribers!

Have you looked at you WordPress Reader lately?

It’s been reformatted once again!  The WordPress Reader is now using combined cards and it’s probably going to kill a lot of your favorite sites.  I just thought everyone might want a little advanced warning.

See, here’s how combined cards work.  Let’s say that there’s a wordpress site — like this one — that publishes multiple different posts during the day.  In the past, each post would appear separately in your reader, as a “card.”  However, someone apparently thought that prolific writers — like me for instance — were posting so much that the WordPress Reader was getting crowded.

So, now, we have combined cards!  Instead of getting a card that reads, “TV Review: Twin Peaks On Through The Shattered Lens,” followed by another card that reads, “Why Lisa Is Currently Furious,” you’ll get a card that reads…

View original post 266 more words

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish 1916

A crazy silent starring Douglas Fairbanks as “Coke Ennyday” courtesy of the blog Old Boy, which is definitely worth your while!

Movies From The Silent Era

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916) is a short film starring Douglas Fairbanks and Bessie Love. In this unusually broad comedy for Fairbanks, the acrobatic leading man plays “Coke Ennyday,” a cocaine-shooting detective parody of Sherlock Holmes given to injecting himself with cocaine from a bandolier of syringes worn across his chest and liberally helping himself to the contents of a hatbox-sized round container of white powder labeled “COCAINE” on his desk.
The movie, written by D.W. Griffith, Tod Browning, and Anita Loos, displays a surreally lighthearted attitude toward cocaine and opium. Fairbanks otherwise lampoons Sherlock Holmes with checkered detective hat, coat, and even car, along with the aforementioned propensity for injecting cocaine whenever he feels momentarily down, then laughing with delight. In addition to observing visitors at his door on what appears to be a closed-circuit television referred to in the title cards as his “scientific periscope,” a…

View original post 63 more words

A Refreshed Reader for 2017

The New WordPress Reader… like or dislike? I think it’s a much cleaner layout, how about you?

WordPress.com News

Reader is WordPress.com’s town square, where you can follow your favorite sites and read them in a distraction-free environment. We’ve been working on a refresh for months, and we’re thrilled to share it with you today. For readers, we hope these changes will surprise and delight you, adding more diversity to your stream and exposing you to posts you’ll love. And for writers, we want to put your awesome work in front of a whole new audience.

A Simplified Design

We want Reader to feel like a magazine you can cozy up with, so we’ve streamlined the design, featuring clean text on a simple white background. We’ve also increased the information density so you can see more of the sites you love with less scrolling.

New Post Layouts

There’s a huge variety of content in Reader. We want to make sure it looks great no matter what, so the layout now responds to what’s in the post. For example…

View original post 499 more words

ROCK ‘N’ROLL MONSTERS: THE AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL STORY

Today’s Halloween Havoc! Extra comes courtesy of Kevin G Shinnick at SCARLET THE FILM MAGAZINE, and is worth reading for AIP fans:

scarletthefilmmagazine

ROCK ‘N’ROLL MONSTERS: THE AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL STORY by Bruce Hallenbeck (Hemlock Books) paperback pages 280 published August ,2016

U.K. £16.25 http://www.hemlockbooks.co.uk/Shop/category/7
U.S.: $47.85   https://www.amazon.com/Rock-Roll-Monsters-American-International/dp/0993398936/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1477073892&sr=8-1&keywords=rock+n+roll+monsters

Author /film historian Bruce Hallenbeck has published another must have book for lovers of movies. After giving us wonderful books on many of the British companies Amicus and Hammer, Bruce Hallenbeck turns his focus on the little upstart company that grew and challenged the majors in areas where they could not or did not compete. American International Pictures finally began to become a major, only to find that the other studios were now churning out higher end versions of the type of movies that AIP had done, and so the studio vanished into corporate buyouts after 26 years.

AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL PICTURES began when studios began to lose audiences to television. Small independent producers began to create their own films outside the studio…

View original post 711 more words

Meet & Greet+ Favorite Books and Movies

Friday night Meet & Greet at A Texan’s View of Upstate New York!

Meet and Greet @ Dream Big: 5/7/16

Danny’s Meet & Greet Weekend is open!

TCM + Criterion Partner for FilmStruck Streaming Service

Big news from TCM and Criterion, courtesy of Will McKinley’s great blog, “Cinematically Insane”!!

cinematically insane

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” John Lennon wrote in “Beautiful Boy.”

And FilmStruck, a just-announced subscription video-on-demand service from TCM, is what happens to Old Movie Weirdos while we’re waiting for the option to subscribe directly to TCM without cable or satellite.

To be clear: FilmStruck is not a standalone streaming version of Turner Classic Movies. But what it is (or will be when it launches this fall) is potentially something even better – a unique programming alternative to the linear TV channel with the same expert curation that’s made TCM beloved by fans for more than two decades. And while the service will not focus primarily on the Studio Era (as TCM does on-air), FilmStruck is expected to include a wealth of content that will appeal to those who prefer films of an older vintage. 

For a monthly subscription price expected to be in “the…

View original post 764 more words

Meet and Greet Weekend @ Dream Big: 3/25/16

It’s an Easter Weekend Meet and Greet at Dream Big Dream Often! BYOEE (bring your own Easter Eggs!)

Week #3 – Meet and Greet Fridays

Join Carolina’s Meet & Greet at Yesterday After!

New Book on Lupe Velez Debunks the Myths of “Hollywood Babylon”

An excellent post on Lupe Velez and “Hollywood Babylon” by the always interesting and informative Will McKinley at Cinematically Insane

cinematically insane

Ask the average person about Lupe Vélez and you’ll probably be met with a blank stare. But query those same folks as to whether or not they’ve heard of the classic film star who “drowned in the toilet,” and they’ll likely perk up with smirking recognition.

We have Kenneth Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon to thank for that.

Of course, there are other (perhaps unwitting) accomplices: The Simpsons, wherein guest John Waters joked about the store where Vélez bought her toilet in the 1997 episode Homer’s Phobia; Frasier, in which Lupe is said to have been “last seen with her head in the toilet” in the 1993 pilot; and Andy Warhol, whose 1966 film LUPE depicts the popular Mexican actress facedown in a toilet, dead.

But the apocryphal story of the tragic demise of Lupe Vélez, who took her own life with a barbiturate overdose in 1944 at the…

View original post 1,497 more words