I am officially old. There were three specials last night. I started with Dick Clarke's Rockin' Eve on ABC. Ryan Seacrest is far too enamored with the sound of his own voice. Not sure who the female co-host was, but her loud, forced, hyperactive attempt at being funny was tiresome. The first group I saw was Journey singing two of their very well-known songs. However, the front man was awful. It was more like shrieking than singing. So, I switched to NBC which had a host I've never heard of and performers unknown to me. Believe it or not, the Nashville special on CBS was what I wound up watching. They had the least annoying hosts and performers that I actually recognized and liked. I'll take a bunch of denim-wearing guys in cowboy hats over some dude in what looked to be a tin foil outfit any day of the week. What does it say when a city girl like me spends New Year's Eve watching country singers?
Professor, your answer is so good and so coincidentally similar to my own experience that I had to glom onto it. You can pay me royalties later for stealing the idea that I was going to post. Grrrrrrr.
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I never watch that stuff any more, not since I was a teenager, it interested me back then. Nowadays I’m just an old fogey who can’t stand that loud noise the whippersnappers call “music”, I can’t stand the way they dress or talk or act, so I just stay away completely. There is nothing there for me. (And keep them off of my lawn, too!) My wife, who is two years my senior, loves all of that stuff. She thinks she‘s 16 years old.
Instead,I watched a whole bunch of episodes of “The Twilight Zone” marathon that I didn’t even know would be airing, I just happened to stumble across it as I was channel surfing. It was showing reruns of the original series from the 1960s, of which I’ve seen every episode numerous times, so some of them I skipped over by watching something else and then flipping back to it.
Professor, your answer is so good and so coincidentally similar to my own experience that I had to glom onto it. You can pay me royalties later for stealing the idea that I was going to post. Grrrrrrr.
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That one is kind of “The Ox Bow Incident”-esque, in my opinion. Also, towards the end when he was running for so long and dog-tired, did you notice how long and how far he ran on that tough terrain with his eyes closed (or mostly half-closed)? As an avid runner myself, all I could think of was that he’d trip over something and go head over teakettle into a dirt-eating face-plant. I understand that her was tired, was running for his life, and that in the end it played into the final plot twist, it’s just that running like that is too unrealistic for me. Grr. (That’s only a small grr because I do recognize that it’s not only fiction, it’s also science fiction.) End of rant.
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You’re right! I was thinking if it was supposed to be untamed wilderness, why towards the end was there a perfectly straight dirt road that was tree-lined also in perfect rows, then when the road bisected two symmetric-looking bodies of water too. I realized at the end why that was, but along the way, I was skeptical.
Funny that you and I have closely critical eyes for those types of things.
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I saw a photo of an artillery unit in action in Vietnam, it was labeled as something like “US Marines unleashing a barrage in a call-for-fire mission.” I immediately noticed it was a US Army unit, not Marines. The former wore black web belts, the latter wore khaki ones.
A few months after the movie “Heartbreak Ridge” came out in 1986, my unit was out in the field on a joint infantry and air exercise, attack helicopters and fixed-wing jets providing Close Air Support to a battalion on the assault of an enemy’s defensive position. A fighter pilot is assigned to the battalion to coordinate communications between ground and air, I was his radio operator. A few of the other enlisted men and I were discussing the movie, the pilot said to us, “The scene where they take off from the carrier aboard a Huey (UH-1 Helicopter), fake as can be. They take off on a Marine Corps Huey, but the next camera shot showing them approaching the LZ (landing zone) is a Navy Huey.”
We asked him how he knew, hell, he’s a Marine Corps pilot, he would know the difference, right? He said, “Navy Hueys are single engine, Marine Hueys are dual engine. If one engine gets shot out or malfunctions some way, there’s a backup. In the movie, you can clearly see a single engine on one Huey, and two engines on the other one, yet it’s all supposed to be the same flight.”
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(Dick Clarke Clark)
Element 99 