Left to my own devices

One of Hollywood's matinee idols, solid thespians, and out gay actors has passed away at the age of 85. Farley Granger is probably not very well known to many of today's younger film-goers, but there was a time when he was a box office draw. He starred in such Hitchcock thrillers as Strangers on a Train and Rope , and later did television work in shows such as Ellery Queen and Murder, She Wrote . Watching some of his roles (most notably the Hitchcock ones), it has been suggested that we can see (very broad) brushstrokes of homosexuality, and I might agree with such an assessment. It's been rumored that staunchly conservative actor Jimmy Stewart felt uncomfortable on the set of Rope , where both his co-stars (Granger and John Dall) were gay. In his later years, Granger spoke out on the subject of homosexuality in Hollywood: Since the 1990s, Granger has appeared in several documentaries discussing Hollywood in general and Alfred Hitchcock in particular. In 1995 he wa...

Some of the world's foremost writer's share their thoughts and experiences on the medium. My favorite author, P.D. James, has several paragraphs of her own describing how she writes. I particularly enjoyed the following passage: I used to tell stories to my brother and sister. At one time we were in one room; my sister and I shared a bed most of our childhood – a double bed – and my brother had the single one against the wall, and they would want a story last thing at night, and they were very unimaginative in a way because they were all about the adventures of a pig called Percy Pig. I just knew I was going to write one day. What a nice, personal remembrance. Go ahead and read the whole article. It's quite enlightening, especially to those of us who enjoy writing, ourselves.

Andrew Sullivan links to a piece in Salon by Camille Paglia about Elizabeth Taylor. Specifically, it's about the type of body that Ms. Taylor had. She opines: To me, Elizabeth Taylor's importance as an actress was that she represented a kind of womanliness that is now completely impossible to find on the U.S. or U.K. screen. It was rooted in hormonal reality -- the vitality of nature. She was single-handedly a living rebuke to postmodernism and post-structuralism, which maintain that gender is merely a social construct. Let me give you an example. Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids Are All Right" is a truly wonderful film, but Julianne Moore and Annette Bening -- who is fabulous in it and should have won the Oscar for her portrayal of a prototypical contemporary American career woman -- were painfully scrawny to look at on the screen. This is the standard starvation look that is now projected by Hollywood women stars -- a skeletal, Pilates-honed, anorexic silhouette...

Finally, someone in the media states the bleedin' obvious , that Apple is a much better advertiser than many of its competitors. Case in point, the ads that Motorola have been running for its new Xoom tablet are, to put it mildly, a big cluster. Instead of following Apple's lead and simply (but elegantly) showing you what their product can actually do for you in eveyday life, Motorola has decided to eschew such money-making ideas, and instead opted to show you how, once activated, their Xoom tablet will transform into a spaceship that will surround you and fire its jet engines as it hovers above the ground. Or something. How some folks make it in the advertising world is beyond me. True, some rather annoying and confusing commercials actually seem to work for some companies, but it's looking like the Xoom tablet isn't among that elite. And while some wacky ads are kind of cute, and definitely memorable, they don't really tell me about what the product being sold ...

This week, it's Robert Pattinson, pre-Twilight fame. Enjoy!

Well, folks, meet my new phone... It's an HTC Inspire 4G. As some of you may know, my beloved iPhone 4 passed away a few weeks ago, and so it was time to try something new. I'd heard some good things about the Android OS (mainly that it was much more customizable than the Apple iOS), and did a lot of online research for what was available on the AT&T network. It came down to the Motorola Atrix, and the Inspire. The Atrix is a more powerful phone, but it costs more and, honestly, with my main usage consisting of casual web browsing, texting and a few minor apps, how powerful of a phone do I really need? So, the Inspire has proven itself to be quite capable during the last week-and-a-half. It's taken a bit of a learning curve to learn the new OS, but now that I've diddled around with it for awhile, I've grown to appreciate it. Certainly, it is much more customizable than Apple iOS, and I quite like the 4.3" display screen (compared to the 3.5" that ...

This article about the current state of the news media holds few surprises (perhaps aside from the stability of newspapers). Among the items that made me nod my head in an 'Aha!' moment of recognition was the following portion regarding the downsizing of editorial staffing: Many of the cuts have been copy editors. This has led to an increase in factual errors and typos. Another cost-saving strategy was to outsource editing and page design to regional centers. Thinner newsrooms have led to thinner news reports. There are fears that the changes will lead to a loss in quality, bringing down circulation, thus causing a further decline. Anyone who has been reading online articles lately has surely noticed the decline in quality of the basics. Sentence structure, spelling, it's gone to the dogs. Numerous times I'll be reading an article, and be left scratching my head, having to piece together what the writer was intending to say, versus what they actually wrote. Case in p...