Random Saturday - The new flatmate

Warning: Spider pictures and more!

Years ago, we visited relatives of the ex. His young cousin (actually we were young as well then) had all kinds of animals - it used to be a farm in a village - mostly fowl, such as ducks in a pond, chicken, pheasants, but also rabbits. When we went looking at them, he suddenly put a white mouse on my shoulder. Of course, he had hoped for me to freak out and scream, but even if had felt the urge which wasn't the case, I wouldn't have done him the favor.
Instead I petted the mouse and told it how cute it was. It was, you know. I think I gained his respect that day, not that that had been what I was after.

I'll be honest, though, I'm not as cool around all animals, at least at first sight. If a spider jumps at me, I will probably jump as well, not because it's a spider, but because I'm startled. I daresay it would happen with any other animal (der Dekan has one or four stories to tell about that).

If I just have a visitor looking at me, however, I can react accordingly. Sometimes, a single stink bug makes its way in through the open window and it will get evicted gently but firmly.
Spiders are allowed to live with me, not having a phobia I do not see any need to burn the house down with them in it.

I think she was
really pretty.

Flying specimen are guided outside as gently as possible although things can get hectic if they are of the stinging kind and a not so little cat is getting excited about them.
Clothes moths and carpet bugs are an exception. Seeing them, I don't even think about my karma and let go of all mercy (although moths have become hard to catch without a trap).

If I don't let the shade down on the window behind my bed all the way - so that I can look at the moon for example - I sometimes get late night visitors, moths and grasshoppers. Ponder was utterly fascinated with them and would keep touching the glass very softly. It was a good thing that there was glass because Ponder may have seemed very friendly, but I've seen him squash and eat more than one spider.

Those stripey bumps - der Dekan.

Der Dekan, too, is interested, but he's more the kind to lurk for a long time and then pounce with feet going in all directions. I have seen him trap visitors in here, but he usually lets them go again, looking after them with eyes as big as those of a child in front of a Christmas tree. He could at least knock them out gently to give me the chance to put them outside, but to put it less nicely, he's absolutely useless in these matters.

Yesterday, however, we had a visitor that surprised me because I had never seen one around here before.
Let me start with this page from one of my favorite books, "Daddy Long Legs" by Jean Webster.
Judy, the protagonist, is in college and writes to her mentor.

That describes it pretty well except this isn't a college.
I was woken up by somecat demanding breakfast at 5 a.m. I had only slept about four hours at that point and wasn't quite my alert and energetic self yet - stop laughing! -, but I noticed something big and black hanging on the ceiling which very clearly wasn't a spider. At closer look, it was a centipede which baffled me, about 2 inch long and way out of my reach.
I would say he had fewer legs than in the drawing, but was fatter.
The next moment, however ... plump! I honestly was amazed how loud that sound was when the centipede fell down right next to me. No cups, no tea table, no hair brush (although there is one on my nightstand). Instead I ran back to my bed for my tissue box for lack of a bowl in my bedroom (note: always keep a bowl and a flat piece of cardboard in your bedroom), but too late, he was already gone. I think he went under the wardrobe and I probed around a bit with a broom, to no avail.
What really bugs me is that I was sure he was just trying to hide from me interviewing him about what he could bring to the household and how he expected to pay his rent. I swear if he throws his shoes all over the place, I'm going to get mad.

While writing this, I'm still completely clueless where he is. He could be anywhere, so I guess we will have to live with him for now. Der Dekan hadn't even noticed him, but if he's to stay, there may be an encounter of the many-legged kind. Oh dear, I hope he's not a tap dancer!

I'm not overly concerned about him, but I don't like the idea of stepping of him, in the middle of the night, for example. I also don't like the idea of the brat trying to chase/kill/eat him and I'm not keen on finding him in my bed (that would be the jump thing all over again).
Is it weird that I wish I had been able to take a picture of him?

Please Murder Me!

For today's Summer of Angela (Lansbury) movie Lisa from Boondock Ramblings chose "Please Murder Me!" from 1956.
Here is Lisa's post.

Public domain via
Wikimedia Commons

Here's the plot (with spoilers).

Defense lawyer Craig Carlson buys a pistol at a pawn shop leaving it in his office desk with a file. Then he records a message saying that he will be dead in exactly 55 minutes and telling a story ...

It starts with Craig telling his best friend Joe that his wife Myra wants a divorce. The man she's in love with is Craig. Joe says he will need some time to think.
A few days later, Joe gives his business partner Lou a letter to mail, then calls Myra to tell her he wants to discuss something with her at home.
When he comes home, he confronts Myra, closes the door, and there's a gunshot.
Myra claims Joe attacked her and she shot him in self-defense.

In court, prosecution argues Myra killed Joe in cold blood because she wanted his life insurance, not because he attacked her for her wanting a divorce.
In his closing argument, Craig reveals that he's the man Myra is in love with, and the jury finds her not guilty.

Lou arrives at their celebration party and gives Craig the letter he forgot to mail. In the letter, Joe tells him that Myra had married him for the money and that she had been in love with artist Carl Holt all the time.

Craig, seeing everything in ruins for him anyway, decides to save Carl from Myra and make her pay for it all by having her murder him.
He sets up an appointment with her at his office. He keeps the tape running and hides the microphone before letting her in. Then he shows her the file and puts the gun on the desk. When he threatens to call Carl, she shoots him and tries to make it look like a suicide.
Craig had also made an appointment with Willis, the district attorney, though, shortly after the one with Myra. Myra tells Willis that Craig shot himself, but Willis plays the recording and she knows the game is over.

It's not hard to categorize this as a B movie.
Everything is quite simple including the sets, but the film is still pretty easy to watch, especially since the runtime is only about 75 minutes.

Practically every review I browsed mentioned this movie obviously being a test run for Raymond Burr's role as Perry Mason, and that's no surprise if you look at the court scene.
Mason's closing arguments usually convince me more, though.
The plot really has its moments, but I just can't believe a jury or court would go for a sudden "oh, by the way, I'm the new man, so the prosecution's money argument doesn't count"  - in the closing argument! I couldn't help but finding that very weak.

While I found the plot twist rather interesting, I thought Craig's decision to sacrifice himself in order to save Carl from the "disease" that Myra was (according to Joe's letter) was a little over the top. Okay, a lot over the top.
So his heart was broken over the loss of the woman he loved - that should heal quickly knowing what kind of woman she was - and broken over the loss of his friend - I get that, but he didn't plot to kill him - but he was certainly not the first lawyer who got duped into believing in a client's innocence. Not good for the career maybe, but definitely not its death penalty.
Burr played it with conviction, though.

I think Lansbury could have put a bit more passion in her femme fatale and I wonder if that was a decision of hers or the director, but it was nice to see her in such a different kind of role than probably most of us are used to.

The plot idea was intriguing, but with some more money I think they could have made more out of it, for example come up with a better reason for Craig to give up his life.
Nevertheless, it was fascinating to see Burr and Lansbury in this film noir.

Silent movies - The Race for the Sausage

Today I present to you a very short short, not even five minutes long.
Eventually, I will be telling you more about Alice Guy-Blaché, the world's first female film director, who has been said to make this film (which can be true or not, I'm going to stay out of that discussion).

Public domain via
Wikimedia Commons

The title of "The Race for the Sausage" from 1907 is very fitting.
A dog steals a long sausage chain and chaos ensues when more and more people are racing after him to get the sausage.

If you have five minutes, take a look and just have a bit of laugh with this early chase comedy.

Reading to cats

My little brother (not so little anymore) is almost nine years younger than I. Not just I, but also others in the family read all kinds of books and stories to him when he was small ... and a little bigger ... he'll admit himself that he was not an avid reader as a child because he just enjoyed being read to.
And although I would never have admitted that at the time, I now think I rather enjoyed reading to him except for the few times when I really had had other plans like watching a movie for example.

Have you ever read a sentence five times and still didn't know what you've read because your brain seemed to keep wandering off elsewhere - what do I still have to do today, what will I wear tomorrow, why do flies fly so erratically, where did I know the actress in the movie yesterday from or simply why are the people around me so loud ...
Reading something aloud can help us with our attention span and with processing what we read.
It activates our brain in different ways which can enhance comprehending and memorizing a text.

I have always been talking to myself on and off since I was a kid. To make the walk home from my friend's house less boring for example, I either read a book while walking or I made up little stories that I told myself whispering (I stopped if someone dared to walk close to me).
There are things at home I have to comment on while doing them. Sometimes I read an email out loud during drafting it to see if it makes sense and if I have covered everything.
When studying, I read something out loud if I had a problem to grasp it.
Eventually I started reading from books to myself every, now and then, a paragraph or even a chapter, but never a whole book.
Also, whenever one of my pets was sick and I held them in my arm, I read to them to comfort them. That began with Wurstel, my rabbit. I remember it like today, the only book that was in reach that day was Rübezahl, tales about a mountain spirit.

Then, about one and a half years ago, I started reading to my cats just for fun. I had sometimes done that before as well, little snippets here and there - because yes, I do talk to my cats and no, I have not started that since living on my own - but now I was doing it regularly.
Our first book was "At Christmas we feast : festive food through the ages" by British food historian Annie Gray. At first it was like "would you calm down now, come on, I'll read something to you", but I noticed I actually enjoyed doing it, and believe it or not, I felt the cats enjoyed listening. Okay, of course they did fall asleep eventually and I still read on until the chapter was finished, but yeah, it had something relaxing. 

You think that's ridiculous? A friend I told about it when we were talking about books laughed and asked me why I would think the cats enjoyed that.
Of course I would like to say now that they love my exquisite choice of literature and my talents as a reader, but that would truly be humoring myself. Our reading can only be called eclectic and my reading talents would definitely not qualify me for audiobooks.
Depending on the day I had, the temperatures, my level of tiredness or restlessness, and some other factors, I can be quite a good reader or a terrible one whose tongue gets twisted every few words.

You may wonder why I don't just participate in a reading program for children at the local library or find a group for shared reading if I like reading out loud.

There are several reasons.
Gundel and der Dekan are extremely understanding on my tongue twisting days. They don't complain if I skip a word, say a wrong one or if I struggle with the pronunciation for a second. You must know I usually read English books to them. For some reason it has always been more relaxing to me to read English out loud and German silently even before I read to the cats.
It's like a bedtime story meaning I do it before we go to sleep for the night. We don't read during the day. Well, I do, but silently. By now it feels like a good way to wind down, calm down and sometimes even sleep better (until one of the brats wakes me up for "breakfast" at 3 a.m.) or quicker. We usually do a chapter, sometimes more, rarely less, but there are no rules. The other day Gundel was lying in my arm purring while I petted her and read aloud. I think they pick up on my relaxation and they like that.

Excuse the bad pictures, but it's very hard to take one holding a camera up over your head and aiming blindly at something behind you.
When lying on the bed, I like to throw my hair back over the pillow to get it out of the way. Gundel settled in for our reading session - on my hair. Until der Dekan decided he wanted the spot, chased her off and it took a bit before we could go on reading.

They don't judge my reading choices. We've read about eating habits during Queen Victoria's time, we've read The Three Investigators books, we've read children's books, vintage crime, at the moment we alternate between a book about craft psychology and a biography about a crime author, we might add another volume from the Three Investigators.
I can choose time, duration, and book. Granted, there isn't much verbal feedback or discussion 😋, but that's fine by me. Is it slower, too? Of course it is, but we pick books accordingly.

Reading to animals isn't unusual, by the way. Shelters have discovered the benefits of reading to animals to help them deal with stress in the shelter environment.
There are loads of programs for children reading to mostly dogs, but also cats. These programs also help children to improve their reading - again, pets are very forgiving about mistakes - and concentration.
You have probably seen some of those heartwarming of about children at home reading to their pets, too.
Why should that only be useful for children, though? Isn't it more that adults are embarrassed about doing something like this? And even talking about it?

People also read out loud to one another and feel a bit embarrassed about it. I would definitely want to be the reader in something like that because I'm not a fan of audiobooks and don't know if I would like having someone else reading to me even if I knew them well.

Are you a silent reader or do you like to read aloud, too?


Selected sources:

1. Do Pets Like Being Read To? The Surprising Benefits of Reading to Your Furry Friends. On: Doggie Dude Ranch and the O'Cat Corral
2. Sarah Manavis: Read me a story: why reading out loud is a joy for adults as well as kids. In: The Guardian (archive of The Observer), May 5, 2024
3. Regina Mennig: Shared Reading - Literature for All. On the Robert-Bosch-Stiftung website, July 2018

The Pirates of Penzance

Lisa from Boondock Ramblings is doing the Summer of Angela (Lansbury). I hadn't expected to participate this week, but Lisa switched movies, so here I am, but a few days late because the day was already taken by another post.
Today's movie is "The Pirates of Penzance" from 1983.
You can find Lisa's post here.

Fair use via
Wikimedia Commons

Believe it or not, I have never seen anything by Gilbert & Sullivan.
I have heard one or the other song or rather parts of it and I could even sing those to you (only the tune), but only because I've heard them on TV shows or in movies, I even remember an impressive Simpsons version.
That early gave me the vague impression that you can't go through school in English speaking countries without performing in at least one of Gilbert & Sullivan's comic operettas while I wasn't aware they were such a huge thing here in Germany where we had operettas in German by Offenbach or Strauß.
Now was the chance to watch a whole Gilbert & Sullivan operetta - I mean, Kevin Kline as the Pirate King, how could I miss that any longer?

The plot (with spoilers even if you - yes, I'm looking at you - have probably performed in "The Pirates" yourself before 😉).
Yeah, the plot.
It's a bit confusing, to say the least, but that's operettas for you, especially comical ones.

A pirate ship. Pirates. Among them a young pirate, Frederic. As a child he had been taken there by his nurse Ruth who, hard of hearing, had misheard his father's instructions for her to take him to a pilot for apprenticeship.
Now that he has turned 21, he has fulfilled his indentures and is not only free to become a respectable member of society, but has also decided to exterminate the Pirate King and his crew (all of them orphans which keeps them from attacking an orphan even if that person just claims to be one).

Coming ashore with Ruth, the only woman he has ever seen until then, he meets a group of beautiful girls, all of them daughters of the Major General.
One of them, Mabel, answers to his courting and says she will marry him.
Then the pirates come ashore as well and want to marry all of the girls (which reminded me of "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers"), but their father turns up, claims to be an orphan who will be all alone without them, and the pirates leave.

Frederic is now ready to lead the town police to the Bay of the Pirates, but before he can leave, the Pirate King and Ruth turn up and let him know that his indentures are in fact not fulfilled yet. He was born on February 29th in a leap year, and the contract doesn't say 21 years, but until his 21st birthday, so they will hold him to his duty.
Being a pirate again, Frederic reveals that the Major General has never been an orphan which causes the Pirate King to plan an attack on the castle for the same night.
Frederic leaves Mabel, but promises her to be back once he has turned 84, and she promises to wait for him.

Mabel tells the police sergeant that the pirates will be attacking, so the policemen hide to wait for them.
The pirates win the subsequent fight (during which they all end up in the theater during a performance of "H.M.S. Pinafore", another Gilbert & Sullivan operetta), and the Pirate King tells the Major General to prepare to die.
The sergeant, however, demands that the pirates surrender in Queen's Victoria's name and as loyal subjects the pirates obey.
Before they can be taken away, though, Ruth divulges that they are just noblemen who have go wrong, and they are not only forgiven, but the Major General also gives them his daughters for brides (and Ruth gets courted by the police sergeant 😉).

Theatrical poster 1880
for the New York production

William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan collaborated in making fourteen operas between 1871 to 1896 before they had a fall out whose reasons are still being debated although creative differences, financial matters, and burnout have been named as contributing to it.
"The Pirates of Penzance" is among the most famous ones of those fourteen. It premiered on New Year's Eve 1879 and was an immediate hit with Gilbert's funny libretto and Sullivan's tunes working so well with the often fast and tongue-twisting texts.
Unfortunately, that made it a little difficult for me to follow at times. With some songs, I just let the music take over without even trying to understand the exact words as long as I still got what was going on (I watched on The Internet Archive because the sound was better than on YouTube even if the picture wasn't, so I didn't have subtitles).

Joseph Papp's production, directed by Wilford Leach, moved from Central Park (with Patricia Routledge as Ruth, you can watch that version here) to Broadway (with Estelle Parsons as Ruth, with 787 performances and 7 Tony Award nominations of which it won 3 including Kevin Kline as Best Actor in a Musical) and then to the screen with Kline, Ronstadt, Smith, and Angela Lansbury.

I like musicals (mostly older ones), but there can be too much singing for my liking (I often share my dislike for "Frozen" freely because I think even for a Disney movie it's just too much).
So I could have done without a few of the songs.
The singing, however, wow. It was really amazing.
I had seen videos of Ronstadt from it before, so her range didn't surprise me as much. Her Broadway performance got her a Tony nomination, by the way. The movie was her only one.

I know I had seen Smith somewhere before as well, but I don't remember where. I'm quite sure I never watched his short-lived TV show "Street Hawk", but I know one of his songs, so maybe that was it. Anyhow, I loved his voice.

I already knew about Lansbury's long Broadway career both in straight roles, but also musical roles because I have a "Sweeney Todd" performance with her as Mrs. Lovett on DVD and looked it up back then. So she wasn't a surprise for me.

For some reason, however, I had never known about Kevin Kline singing.
I absolutely loved him here. Singing, jumping, and quite a few times, I was reminded of his role as Otto in "A Fish Called Wanda" (I love this movie so much and he's perfect in it) five years later for which he got an Academy Award, and I enjoyed every bit of it just as much - not just because of his chest ...

Just for him this is worth watching even if the others hadn't been as good.

That was a nice introduction to Gilbert & Sullivan (besides having seen "Topsy-Turvy" years ago). Maybe I will watch more after all if I can find something.


Sources:

1. Gilbert & Sullivan. On: English National Opera
2. Cat Smith: The Pirates of Penzance. On: Film Obsessive, 2020
3. Luisa Lyons: The Pirates of Penzance. On: Filmed Live Musicals, October 2017
4. The Pirates of Penzance. On: Gilbert and Sullivan Archive (via Wayback Machine)
5. Ben Fong-Torres: The Pirates of Penzance. On: The Linda Ronstadt Homepage (an unofficial website)

Cats, cats, cats, and more cats, part 1

I said I might do a post on all my cat bags, but when I thought about it a bit more, it came to me that I could extend that to cats in general.
I have quite a few around the place, some because I fell in love with them myself, others because for some weird reason people think I like cats and have given me a lot of items over the years. Really strange, I know. Why would they think something like that? 😂
"Oh, just give Cat something with a cat on it and she'll be happy." Well, you know I probably will be!

I called this post part 1 just in case I can't hold back and need to share more of the craziness. Actually I'm pretty sure that's going to be happening.
As usual when I do something like this, the order is completely random.

This beautiful cat looks so much like my first cat White Dude, we just had to have this painting.
It hangs next to my bed and unfortunately der Dekan loves to push the frame, so it swings. He knows exactly that's getting him my attention. Not in a good way, but if he's starving - which usually is the reason - he'll take what he can get.
Main thing is the old lady gets up, she'll be doing the right
thing then for sure. I fall for it way too often, he started training me very early on.

When I brought home my beloved yellow mugs, I couldn't leave the pottery workshop without a cat, could I? It would really have been very rude to do that. I liked the funny look of this one.
It's a salt cellar, but I rarely use those, so instead this cat is guarding some of my cat books now.

Talking about cat books ... I may have two or three ... or maybe hundreds. Crime, stories, picture books, photo books, children books, tales, humor, facts, guidebooks ...
This one is not only of the very first cat books of my collection, it's also one of my all time favorites, "The cat who came in from the cold". A small cat sitting on a upturned bucket in a puddle of rain water - or in other words, a book about the cat distribution system. Longden took the cat (who had lied about not having a home) inside and Thermal did what cats do best - take over the place.
I love all of Longden's books that I have, but this one is dearest to my heart.

There's a story to these earrings. They were made by a fellow jewelry artisan from the UK. The first time I wore them to work, they still had open earwires. I lost an earring almost right away and although I could pinpoint exactly where I had been before losing it, it was nowhere to be found. I was so sad!
Until I went to the ladies' room and suddenly felt something poking me. Such a naughty little earring. It must have fallen into my neckline, found its way into my bra and managed to crawl to the back of it where it poked me.
My guess is the earwire got tangled in my long hair and then ... heck if I know. When the artisan heard about it, she was so sweet to send me a pair of closed earwires which kept the travelling earring in check.

I have several portraits of my own cats made in different ways. I have to show these two in one picture because Merlin and Meffi belonged together. My little lovebirds 💗

The pendants were hand painted by my dear friend Dawn (not just her hand painted pendants are gorgeous, by the way).
They have a little special surprise on the back, but that's between Dawn, Merlin, Meffi, and me, I have never shared it.

I made this pendant and ring in my silversmith class. Unfortunately it was the only one I could attend, but at least I got some good pieces out of it.

Did you know that my friend Denis, who works in animation, designed my logo?
I love it so much that I asked Kirsten from Quernus Crafts, who makes adorable polymer clay critters, if she could capture Denis (I named him after his creator) in clay. This is the result.

I haven't forgotten that this post was inspired by cat bags, so my last item today is one of my everyday grocery totes. There are several designs of them. They fold up nice and small, so I can put several of them in my shopper if needed. They are super sturdy.
You can find these tapestry inspired designs from Europe over the USA to Australia. I got my bags at a market, one of those where you can find anything from brushes to aprons, graters to candles, and so on.

Are you ready for more cats?

Silent movies - A Cottage on Dartmoor

My first thought when I read Dartmoor was of course "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (and I still hate how the villain treated the poor dog to make him this "monster", but I'm digressing).
Today's movie - "A Cottage on Dartmoor" from 1929 - doesn't have even one dog, but there is one match nevertheless - a man escaping from Dartmoor Prison (which is why it's also known as "Escape from Dartmoor" in the USA).

Let's start with the plot as usual (spoiler alert!).

Actually, that's what you see first, the moorland, then a prisoner jumping down off a wall and running. The water he's drinking from when he's taking a break turns into the water in a bathtub in which a mother is bathing her toddler. 
After putting the child to bed, the mother comes down to find the prisoner in her cottage.
Sally and Joe used to be co-workers at a barber shop and now we learn the story about they ended up where they are now.

Joe is a barber and Sally a manicurist. Joe is in love with her and asks her out to the talkies, but she turns him down. When she feels sorry for him later and says she will go with him, another barber has already taken the tickets that Joe dropped on the ground. Sally asks him to have supper with her at her boarding house instead, but Joe understands everything wrong thinking Sally likes him as well.

The next day he sends her flowers with a card telling her to wear one of them if there's hope for him. The card gets lost, though, so Sally doesn't know her putting one of the flowers on her lapel makes Joe think she reciprocates his feelings. He gets very jealous when he notices that Sally is drawn to a customer, a farmer called Harry, who keeps coming back for all kinds of treatments just to see her.

That's not Joe in the back, but another co-worker with the shiftiest eyes ever!

Now excuse me while I scream a little because Blogger decided it would be a good idea to delete the next few paragraphs.
Deep breath ... I'm back.

When Harry invites Sally to the talkies and she accepts, Joe follows them to the theater and sits right behind them. The more they are enjoying themselves, the more he's getting riled up until he can't take it anymore and leaves.
Harry takes Sally home and proposes to her with a ring.

The next day at work Sally overhears some co-workers talking about Harry and her. One of them says he will never marry her. She shows them the engagement ring and the co-workers keep talking about the news - standing next to Joe.
So when Harry comes for his usual shave and manicure and Joe sees Harry and Sally holding hands, his tension keeps rising. At one point Sally thinks he will cut Harry's throat, she calls out, chaos ensues and Harry actually gets slashed.
The police turns up and takes Joe away who threatens to be back for revenge on them both.

So now Joe is standing in their cottage on Dartmoor.
As he has told another prisoner about this plan, though, the police is already after him and two policeman turn up to protect Sally while she - believing when he says he hadn't meant to do it and asking for her forgiveness - is hiding him in the room upstairs.
The situation gets even more complicated when Harry comes home and insists on looking in on his child. Of course he's shocked to see Joe there. Again Joe assures them he hadn't meant to do it and Harry replies he will help him escape merely for Sally's sake.
So Sally gives Joe some different clothes and then goes to distract the policemen while Harry smuggles him out of the house and takes him to a stable with a horse.
When Joe finds a picture of Sally in the jacket she gave him, however, he decides not to go through with the plan and instead rushes towards the cottage knowing only too well that he will be shot.
He dies in Sally's arms telling her he couldn't live without her.

Hnh. I'm torn about this movie, I really am.
There are parts that are great and that I enjoyed very much, but there are also a few things that drove me nuts. Maybe it would have been different if it hadn't been so hot and I hadn't had a bit of a bad day overall, but I'm not usually that undecided.

"A Cottage on Dartmoor" was one of the last British silent films (you may have noticed the irony of the men asking Sally out to the talkies).
Its director, Anthony Asquith (who happened to be the son of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith and his wife Margot), was in his 20s when he made this movie, only his third one.
Asquith was drawn to the cinema from when he was a student at Oxford. When he visited his sister Elizabeth, who was a playwright and had many friends in the American film industry, in New York, they travelled to Hollywood where he got to meet a lot of the movie greats of that time, Fairbanks, Pickford, Lubitsch, Chaplin, and others, and also he got the chance to spend time on the set.
After Asquith returned home, he managed to direct his first film within a year and he used many of the techniques he had learned from being able to see European silent films, like lighting or montage techniques.

Those were the parts I enjoyed. The mood set by interesting camera angles, double exposures, by light and shadow, both in the scenes on the moors and in the cottage, worked beautifully for emphasizing Joe's increasing tension turning into obsession, almost insanity until the explosion.
And Uno Henning, a Swedish actor, does a wonderful job at making Joe utterly creepy. There's nothing romantic about this unrequited love.
Had Joe not been taken out of the picture early by going to prison, I'm sure he would have become a stalker. He's so convinced that Sally has to be his that I honestly didn't believe him when he said he didn't mean to hurt Harry even if it still looked like a threat to me at that moment.
If I had been Sally, I don't think I would have felt inclined to help him, and that Harry wants to help him really shows how much he loves Sally. I liked Harry and that Sally chose him. The inner values count.
(Too bad that Hans Adalbert Schlettow, who played Harry, was very close to the Nazis later which tainted my impression of his acting for me. )
Joe, however, is so beyond redemption that even at the end he just thinks of himself. HE can't live without her, HE has to tell her that, HE has to die in her arms. It's always about him.

I really loved all of the second half of the movie.
I also liked some of the first half, but I also hated some of it (I use "hated" on purpose here).
It's my old enemy, the length. 
My first problem was the awkward date at the boarding house. I think you could get the idea without the camera going back and forth and back and forth between Joe and Sally. I can tell you that my tension was definitely rising through that one, but not in a good way.

Much worse was for me a scene, though, which others loved, the cinema scene. There were some fun ideas, such as the orchestra playing for the silent short at the beginning and then playing cards, smoking, and drinking when the talkie came on.
The constant cutting from one person to the other, however, drove me nuts. It got really bad with the rapid cuts, I actually had to look away. This is a technique which has always been annoying me, in a movie, in a show or even in YouTube videos.
To top it, the cinema scene was about 12 minutes long! I would have lost at least 8 of those. I got so mad that I even had to call my sister for a little rant! 😆 

Another thing that annoyed me was that Norah Baring kept emoting through constantly raising mostly the right eyebrow, sometimes both. I don't know Baring, so I can't say if that was a mannerism of hers or if it was supposed to be dramatic acting, but you know how once you notice something, you can't not notice it anymore?
When she didn't do it, I actually liked her acting.

Lastly, I wasn't sure at all about the music. At the end, Stephen Horne was credited for the piano score. I really loved the piano parts, but it wasn't all piano and I honestly thought some of the other parts were terrible, for example in the cinema scene which made it even worse.
It was hectic and distracted me terribly. I know I should have tried it without the score, but a completely silent film would have been even harder.

This movie was a veritable rollercoaster for me.
If I watched it again, I would probably just fast forward through part of the date scene and skip the cinema scene completely. I'm sure I would enjoy it much more like that.


Sources:

1. Fritzi Kramer: A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) - A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, August 3, 2014
2. Benjamin Schrom: A Cottage on Dartmoor. On: San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Essay. Festival 2007

10 on the 10th, uhm, 9th - Dogs

Early once again. The 10th is Thursday - silent movie day.
So I'm already here today to talk about the prompt "Marsha in the Middle" gave us - our favorite dogs. Dogs??? Everyone knows I'm a cat person (you will know it even more in a few days)!

Luckily, I love dogs almost as much as cats in all shapes and sizes, but obviously I never lived with one. Marsha gave us an escape route for that, though. 
"They can be dogs you've owned, grew up with, are on tv, dog food cans, whatever!" Sure, Marsha. I always fall in love with dogs on dog food cans, sigh. But hey, I think I know a good "whatever" ...
As usual, the order is quite random.

1. Flocki was the first dog I met on the farm on my friend's parents. As the farm wasn't close to us, I didn't get to see her as much as I would have liked. I loved that sweet girl and I still miss her. I even got a tee with a picture of her once, it must still be in my wardrobe.
There's one unforgotten story. Once my friend visited her parents over the weekend and I came along and slept on the living room couch. The next morning I woke up to a nose in my face. My friend's mother told me that Flocki had insisted on seeing me first 🥰 quite the shock to my friend who was usually the first one to get woken up by her on visit weekends. When Flocki comes up in our stories, so does this story ... my friend still isn't over it, hehe!

2. I don't have a picture of Hera because she was the German shepherd on the farm of my godmother's parents when I was a kid. When I think of Hera, the first image that comes to mind is her waiting for the kittens to be done when raiding her bowl.

3. Chloey is a family member's dog. She's a French mademoiselle who found a new home in Germany via a shelter for polar dog breeds.
She keeps reminding me of a fox with those ears and this face and red coat (lighter or darker depending on the light), so I like to call her "onser Fichsle" which is just Swabian for "our little fox".
Do you see her grinning? That's because she knows exactly she has her two people wrapped around each single paw. The motto is: "Everything for the dog. Everything for the dog." (You're legally bound to say it twice, I know because we have the same one here, only with "cat".)

4. is a double pack. Kosimo, called Kosel, and Nemo, called Schnuck, are the resident dogs in our house. As you can see they are natural models, so natural indeed that they don't believe in weird poodle cuts (which traditionally had to do with poodles going into the water as they were bred for the duck hunt, but which are merely for optics today).
Kosel is all over me sometimes and I love it even if he had the habit to steal one of my pink shoes from the hallway. He loves pink and had to have this flamingo that his nephew is trying to steal. Just look at those dark eyes.
Nemo holds back with me a bit more after trying to knock me over for a greeting, but the other day we had a big hug.

5. Struppi was the first dog I met at my best childhood friend's house. He was a wirehaired dachshund and for some reason I always think of him as a little grumpy old man. No picture available, sorry.
Of course, there are quite a few memories connected with him, but I'll share just one.
We were in the car. My friend's Mom had made given us both a slice of bread with butter and salami on it. Ah, you know where this is heading, don't you? My friend and I sat in the back and Struppi next to me. One moment he looked out of the window, the next moment the salami was gone from my bread and he still looked out of the window!
In my innocence, I had held the slice of bread up and looked away for a second. It was practically like an offer and he took me up on it so fast I didn't even see it. 

6. Finni was another friend's dog, also a dachshund, but a longhaired one.
I can't remember Finni ever being anything but nice, quite amazing for a dachshund, a breed that can be very stubborn (I knew more than just Struppi and Finni). The only thing I remember her being extremely stubborn about was not eating a certain brand of kibbles.
There is a picture of her somewhere, a Polaroid, in a stack of loose photos, I don't know how well it still looks after all those years. If I find it, I'll add it. 

Of course I have met a lot of other dogs over the years and sometimes it was love at first sight, but often we had to part ways after just one fleeting encounter ... at the vet's, on the train, downtown ...
So here comes the "whatever" now.
There are a few dogs on the internet I'm in love with (or should I say I have a parasocial connection to?).

7. It started with Olive and Mabel.
They are the pals of Scottish sports commentator Andrew Cotter. When Covid hit and there wasn't any sports, Cotter commentated "The Dog's Breakfast Grand Final" - which the older and more experienced Olive won, by the way. Sorry for the spoiler.
Cotter followed up with more hilarious videos, for example Olive and Mabel lying on their online dating profiles or joining a gym, but even just him walking through his garden with the labradors has something very calming.



8. I found Ollie and Tato on Instagram and instantly fell for them. Their videos make me happy and give me a moment of peace, much needed these days. Who wouldn't be happy seeing labradors doing their own version of the Lion King (very impressive, that one), Ollie caring for his own pumpkin or Tato (the baby raptor) and his plotting against Santa?
Animal videos are the only time I'm not even disturbed by AI voices. I live for Ollie's mlems and Tatey's pew-pews.

There isn't much on YouTube as they are mostly on Instagram and TikTok, but here's one example.
Most of the time, they are perfectly normal dogs with normal lives, by the way.

9. I also found the Sisters of the Snoot on Instagram, well, the algorithm threw them in my path, start with one dog channel and they pop up like crazy.
The Sisters are Abby (void horse = borzoi), Cleo (chaos worm = silken windhound), and Marcy (void horse in training = younger borzoi). I have no idea why it's so funny to me to hear them being called noodles.
There isn't that much on YouTube here, either.



10. is not exactly a dog. It's a lot of dogs to fall in love with.
It's a channel on several platforms which constantly makes me laugh and cry, not hard to do even with good things. I'm talking about "We Rate Dogs".
"We Rate Dogs" started on Twitter almost ten years ago by - surprise! - rating dogs or "complaining" about people sending pictures in of non-dogs (aka "seals", "polar bears", "sharks", etc.).
Nowadays "We Rate Dogs" is also on Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, TikTok, YouTube and who knows where else. That could be reason to turn me off in other cases, but the owner Matt Nelson has not only turned this into a job by saying "The dogs were good again this week. Here are my top 5."




Part of the proceeds go to the 15/10 Foundation helping to sponsor dogs with medical or behavioral issues and supporting rescue organizations.

There you go, I made it all the way to 10 😊

P.S. How could I forget Snoopy???

From my children's book cabinet - Sue Barton

First of all - before you're coming at me now if you know the "Sue Barton" series, I know these are not children's books, but YA books.
There's a mix of both in what I have always been calling my children's book cabinet.

I never wanted to be a nurse myself. Nothing about it appeals to me personally. I can see my own blood, but not that of others, to start with. I can feel faint just from smelling a hospital on entering it. Mostly, though, I think I'm too soft ... or in other words, a wimp.
Feeling like that makes me appreciate nurses even more for being able to do this. I have been around one or two in my life (and haven't been happy with all of them, after all we are humans) and I'm friends with one or two as well.
So why have I read "Sue Barton" and why do I even own the books myself?
Oh, and if you don't know the series, who even is Sue Barton?

"Sue Barton" is the story of a young woman from student to staff nurse told in seven books written between 1936 and 1952 by Helen Dore Boylston who was a nurse herself.
Her books are among the first to define the YA category.

Boylston worked as a nurse in a field hospital during World War I and wrote a book about that experience as well. She stayed in Europe working for the Red Cross in different countries.
After meeting author Rose Wilder Lane (daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder), they decided to drive from Paris to Albania in a Model T. They lived in Albania for about a year before returning to the USA, a book based on their journal and letters was published in 1983.

Helen Dore Boylston, ca. 1928

After losing money during the Depression, Boylston went back to nursing and then began to take up writing more seriously.
She based her Sue Barton books on her own experiences and real people she knew, she even kept some of the real names, but insisted on Sue not being autobiographical, but the nurse she would have liked to be herself.
Her aim was not to convey a romantic but a realistic picture of nursing, and her protagonist followed different paths during her career just like she had herself.

There are seven books in the series, "Sue Barton: Student Nurse", "Sue Barton: Senior Nurse", "Sue Barton: Visiting Nurse", "Sue Barton: Rural Nurse", "Sue Barton: Superintendent of Nurses", and the last two which followed some years later, "Sue Barton: Neighborhood Nurse", and "Sue Barton: Staff Nurse".

The first two books see Sue and her friends Kit and Connie train at a famous hospital. She falls in love with young doctor Bill Barry and gets engaged, but insists on working as a nurse before getting married.
In the third book, Sue and Kit work for the Henry Street Settlement as visiting nurses in New York. Bill, who has taken a job as a rural doctor, has changed his mind about waiting and wants to get married as soon as possible which leads to a breakup, but not for long.
When his father dies, Bill has to postpone the wedding. Sue wants to be near him and organizes a job as a rural nurse for herself in the fourth book.
Sue and Bill get married at the start of the fifth book and Sue works as the head of the new hospital's nursing school, but isn't sure she's right for the job. The marriage gets a bit rocky, but at the end Sue is pregnant with her first baby and resigns from the school.
In the sixth book, Sue and Bill have three children. Sue regrets having given up nursing, but finds her experience also helps her in the family and around the neighborhood. Kit is now head of the nursing school.
The final book sees Bill taken ill. He has to stay in a sanatorium for months, so Sue needs to go back to work and care for her now four children with the help of an old friend. Bill recovers, and although the end is open, it still seems to hint at Sue going to give up working again when he comes back.

In Germany, the books were first published as a three volume edition in the 50s. More editions followed, but only later as the series of seven volumes. I remember how surprised I was when I first saw the seven paperbacks at our book store because I thought I had missed something until I read the descriptions.

Susanne Barden - Hinaus ins Leben
 (Sue Barton: Student Nurse/Senior Nurse)
Susanne Barden - Weite Wege
(Sue Barton: Visiting Nurse/Rural Nurse)
Susanne Barden - Reifen und Wirken
(Sue Barton: Superintendent of Nurses/
Neighborhood Nurse/Staff Nurse

I hated these covers and treated myself to a set of the edition I knew from my childhood as a birthday gift this year.
So sentimental, I know! The newer covers, however, always made me think of dime novels from the medical field (which takes me back to the shelf where they kept all the pulp fiction in the grocery shop of my childhood, so funny what we remember). I even liked the old font better.
Aren't they pretty?

For this post, I compared parts of the first books in English (which I found on The Internet Archive) and German, and the translation seems to stay true to the content for the most part, but is rather free in regards to the style.
There have also been some smaller cuts to the text. Maybe the reason for that was them turning seven books into three. I still don't approve and wonder why they felt they had to make the series a trilogy in the first place.
Sue Barton becomes Susanne Barden and a few of the other names are changed as well (which I only understand in one case in which the name has a special meaning).
What surprised me was that Fahrenheit wasn't changed to Celsius because that's something I'd have done. 68 Fahrenheit meant nothing to me as a kid.

My sister was the first one to borrow the books from our city library and she liked them (although she also didn't want to be a nurse), so I read them as well. That must have been around the second half of the 70s.
I don't think I really thought about how old exactly the books were, in the 70s they didn't seem that dated to me yet, after all I had absolutely no knowledge of nursing and you could have sold me anything.
I then bought the books for my collection as a grown-up. Of course it became clear to me then how old they were, but by now it was just a vintage read, anyway.

My favorites were the first one and a half German books (English 1 to 3) and the last third of the third book (English 7). I enjoyed the others as well, but not as much although at the time I never gave it much thought why that was. Do you already suspect something?

When I read the books again for this post, it was so obvious to me. Unlike others, I wasn't a fan of Bill.
My favorite books showed Sue as an independent woman who was following her dream and was good at it (okay, maybe a bit too good to be realistic, but it's fiction after all), and Bill wasn't featuring in them very prominently. Sure, he was the love interest, but for me romance wasn't the important part in these books. I think he lost me when he got really pushy about the marriage although he had promised Sue before that he would wait.

In one book, Sue called Bill "too serious, I sometimes think" (or something like that, I only know the line in German).
To be frank, to me he sometimes seems more like a spoilt child, no matter what a wonderful doctor he is, while Sue comes over as a lot more mature.
Boylston never got married, by the way, and neither did Kit in the books who is one of my favorite characters.
Then, however, I remind myself again of the time those books were written. The 30s were a time when women started to gain independence, for example in professions like nursing, but the 50s when the last two books were published wanted to see women back in the home, at the stove, and caring for husband and children.
At least, Sue could prove that she was able to survive without the man in the house.

I agree with a blogger, though, who wrote "I think the author sold out to the publishers on that one."
Granted, when Bill is telling Kit he will be coming home soon and wants to surprise Sue, she's sure Sue will give up working, but Bill wonders if she won't be missing it. Kit says that it's up to her and him to decide and Bill replies that it's up to Sue. It's just that I got the feeling from it that he hopes for her to quit and I don't seem to be the only one. Maybe we don't trust Bill to have grown up enough to understand?
As it is the last book, I guess we can decide ourselves what Sue is actually doing next.

I can't really tell you why I love reading these books, but every, now and then I grab them and still have fun with them, still feel Sue's passion about her work, still get annoyed about Bill and am still glad I'm not a nurse (as should every patient).

P.S. I seem to remember having seen Boylston's other series about actress Carol Page in the library or elsewhere, but don't think I've ever read them.
I have also never read Cherry Ames, another popular series about a nurse. Actually I had never even heard of her before researching for this post and couldn't find a German translation for the books.


Sources:

1. Katherine Ashenburg: Rereading: Sue Barton and Me. In: The American Scholar 72(2003),3, pp. 137 - 141 (closed access)
2. Deborah Philips: Healthy Heroines: Sue Barton, Lillian Wald, Lavinia Lloyd Dock and the Henry Street Settlement. In: Journal of American Studies 33(1999),1, pp. 65 - 82 (closed access)
3. Rebecca M. Douglass: Middle Grade Monday: Helen Dore Boylston. On: The Ninja Librarian, November 1, 2021
4. "lunacat101": Helen Dore Boylston (1895-1984), Part I, II, III. On: Authors' real lives, January 3, 2015 - April 5, 2015 - September 19, 2015
5. Travels with Zenobia - Paris to Albania by Model T Ford : A Journal by Rose Wilder Lane and Helen Dore Boylston. Ed. by William Holtz. Columbia & London, University of Missouri Press, 1983