Claire's Life

In 2018, Entertainment Weekly  published a bracket called "The Greatest Best Picture of All Time." I am now on a quest to watch and rate all the represented movies. Old Hollywood Continued:  Gone With the Wind (1939)   vs.  Marty  (1954) First Contestant Gone With the Wind  is the longest Best Picture winner, the record-holder for  the most-watched American movie of all tim e, and winner of 8 competitive Oscars in addition to two honorary ones. It is also, in my opinion, not worth half the hype it has. But here goes. The plot of Gone With the Wind  is four hours long, and goes something like this: a spoiled brat named Scarlett is growing up on an antebellum Georgia plantation, surrounded by slaves who seem downright happy to be there. She is in love with a man, Ashley, who doesn't love her back. So naturally she marries his fiancee's brother to make him jealous, which doesn't work. Then the Civil War breaks out. Her first husba...

Back in February 2018, Entertainment Weekly  magazine published a bracket to help readers determine the "Greatest 'Best Picture' of all Time." They also ran a poll on their website, in which I couldn't participate because I hadn't seen enough of the movies. Since then, I've been on a quest to watch them all. I report here on the results of my first round. Part 1: Old Hollywood The top-left corner of the bracket featured 16 movies made between 1930-1960. With the help of our county library system, Bryan and I started here. First Contestants:  All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) vs. The Lost Weekend  (1945) All Quiet on the Western Front  was the third movie, second talkie, and second war flick ever to win Best Picture. War is a theme that the Academy loves and has returned to frequently. All Quiet on the Western Front , however, is a war film that could not have been made in any subsequent decade, for two reasons: It's about World War I. It...

For 6 years now, I've been investigating the question, "Which fictional character has the most dead girlfriends?" I'd like to thank everyone who has already read my reports on James Bond and Captain Kirk  and/or provided suggestions for additional subjects in this study. I cannot go any farther, however, until I report on a true American classic: the first TV show ever to stay in the Nielsen Top 5 for 9 seasons straight ; the namesake of the Cartwright Curse ; the triple-Emmy-winning series which popularized color TV,  Bonanza. For best results: press play now. The Series Bonanza  was a Western TV series that aired on NBC, in "glorious technicolor." It  centered on a family in which the women are all dead.  I'm not joking: the premise of this series is that Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene) has been married 3 times  (to Elizabeth, Inger, and Marie) , and each of his wives died, leaving him with 1 son apiece (Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe, resp...

Today - November 21, 2019 - is the 3,000th day since I injured my spine. I remember the exact date of the injury (September 4, 2010) because it was the same day that I was issued my Massachusetts EMT license. That night, while taking a shower, I leaned forward...and broke my back. Yup, apparently it's just that easy to wreck your physical health. Sleep tight, dear readers! As it happens, today is also the day on which I leave a job I've done for 4 years. If 4 years does not sound like a long time, keep in mind that I've been organizing volunteer programs longer than I've ever done any other type of job. (Excepting my work in my grandmother's auction barn, which was less regular but went on for longer.) My last day of work calls to mind several other days. For one, there's November 20, 2014, the day I interviewed for this job. I was 12 weeks out from my second spinal surgery (and only 4 weeks out from a car accident that majorly set back my recovery). I was st...

Last July, I reported part one of the findings from my multi-year "Dead Fictional Girlfriends Research Project." Now, after 13 months of additional research, I have prepared Part Two: Captain James T. Kirk. The Franchise Star Trek  was a low-budget sci-fi series that got summarily canceled after 3 seasons, and then had a major impact on literally every aspect of American culture, including our language, our space program, and our telecommunications science. Part of this impact came from the extremely efficient way in which it built a world. For example, have a look at Episode 1, Scene 1, which aired at 8:30 PM on September 8, 1966: To sum up, in the first 45 seconds of airtime, this show establishes: The main characters live on a spaceship; Their first officer is an alien; This ship is orbiting an inhabited alien world; People can materialize (beam) from place to place; This spaceship's missions include medical examinations of alien archaeologists, one of ...