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Longtime B&Y readers know that I am intrigued by odd slang and other unfamiliar usages I come across in old movies.
Recently I was watching Twenty-Four Hours, a snappy little Pre-Code number that stars Kay Francis, Miriam Hopkins (who, in her role as a nightclub nightingale, reveals herself one of the worst warblers ever captured on celluloid), and Clive Brook.
In one scene, some mobsters are roughing up a bartender at a speakeasy, trying to find who pulled the trigger on a hit outside the club earlier that evening.
The bartender protests, but finally the ringleader of the gang grabs him by the scruff of his neck, jabs a gun in his ribcage, and growls, "Listen, are you going to bleat, or ain't you?"
"Bleat" -- that's a new one on me, and I love it.
This morning I logged into My.Yahoo, as I so often do, and there was a special greeting waiting there for me:
(For those not in the know, skyvue is my favored 'net handle and serves as my Yahoo user name.)
There's something depressing and not a little bit creepy about receiving one's first birthday wishes from a web site -- not even from an individual at a particular web site, but from the web site itself.
Thankfully, those felicitations were not the first I was to receive on this particular birthday -- my Flo was there, bless her heart, to ensure that this natal anniversary got off to a bright and cheery start.
My.Yahoo.com came in a distant second, and thank heaven for that.
Another Oscar night has come and gone, and I guess I can't really complain about any of the results.
I didn't really have a horse in most of the races, which is kind of strange. I thought most of the nominees worthy, but none had me cheering very hard for them. I seem to require a movie to root against, oddly enough, to get very passionate about the proceedings, and this year -- and last year, for that matter -- I didn't have any major complaints about the nominees in the major categories.
I did want Peter O'Toole to win -- eight nominations with no wins is tough to take -- but I figured Forest Whitaker would take the Best Actor prize.
And I was glad to see Martin Scorsese finally win it, but as so often happens, it was for a picture that was not his best work, in my opinion.
It wasn't nearly as egregious a misstep as Al Pacino winning for what might well have been his worst performance, in The Scent of a Hoo-ah!, some years ago, but to think that The Departed took the prize when classics like Raging Bull and Goodfellas didn't ... well, it leaves one shaking one's head.
I think I'd have picked Babel for Best Picture, had it been up to me (and why in the world wasn't it, for pete's sake?), as it's the one film that's stayed with me the longest, but I won't squawk very long or very loudly about it.
On Saturday night, I spotted Letterman bassist Will Lee at my neighborhood multiplex.
He was in line for an evening screening of Letters from Iwo Jima (2006).