Bonus Video(s)!

 


A little morsel for everyone who saw Rio Bravo last night. Who says John Wayne didn't have a sense of humour?




And, for anyone who couldn't make it, here is the clip of Groucho Marx with Señor Gonzalez-Gonzalez. Enjoy!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Echoborg is a Catfish.

Image
Earlier this month, the New York Times conducted a little experiment. They provided a series of writing samples in various styles and genres (Literary Fiction; Historical Fiction; Fantasy; Poetry etc) and presented readers with two extracts in each category. One of the two passages (we weren't told which one) was written by a human, while the other was generated by A.I. We were asked to choose our preference. Crucially, the test did not ask us to guess which one was human; it simply asked us to judge which was the better piece of writing. The response from readers was fascinating, to say the least. Many commenters angrily denounced the experiment as "unfair" or "meaningless". "I don't really understand the point here." grumbled one contributor. "It asked me which I preferred. It didn't ask me 'which one is the human'." Others were angry with themselves because of the choices they had made. "This is uncanny and downright ...
Read more

Dear Friend...

Wednesday, 4th February, 2026 Dear ChatGPT, I have been thinking recently about the film "Desk Set"; Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's penultimate film together. Written by Henry and Phoebe Ephron (the parents of Nora) Desk Set presents as a romantic comedy in the classical tradition. Hepburn is Bunny Watson, head of the "Research and Reference" department of a major television network (portrayed as fiercely independent and staggeringly good at her job) while Tracy is Richard Sumner, an "efficiency engineer" contracted to install a cutting-edge computer system (named EMERAC) which the reference team is afraid will put them all out of work. Desk Set is a film that works on many levels. It's a delightful, engaging and very funny comedy of manners that makes exceptional use of the specific talents of its stars (real-life couple Hepburn and Tracy had tremendous chemistry onscreen and off, and ultimately made nine films together) but it also serves ...
Read more

The First Hallucination

Image
When I was doing my music A-Level (about 150 years ago, give or take) I had one particular professor who was, shall we say, flexible with her facts. I don't doubt her qualifications, and I'm sure she was eminently capable in her chosen field, but I came to realise that nothing she said to us in class was reliably accurate. Sitting through her lectures became something of a "spot-the-mistake" game, which isn't really meant to be the purpose of a music A-Level. We were told, for example, that Mozart was born in 1754 (no) and that Bach's Brandenburg #4 featured trumpets (not so much). On and on it went; class after class, mistake after mistake. It was my own fault, I suppose; I should really have spotted the red flag the first day I met her, when she spoke to me about Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings , then asked me if I could tell her more about the "tenor horn". I found myself explaining to my future lecturer that the "...
Read more

NEVER Write What You Know.

Image
Let me tell you a little story about my friend Sheldon (his name is Sheldon). Sheldon. Sheldon lives in the East End of London, but he grew up in the US and moved to England with his family about forty years ago. Even though he has lived here for most of his life, Sheldon knows that he will always be something of an outsider in the UK, which is one of the reasons he loves living in London. Quite apart from the genuine thrill of a big bustling city with its crowds and traffic and chaos (Sheldon likes to say that you can trust the air in London because you can see it) Sheldon loves living in a city where millions of people from diverse cultures and backgrounds have deliberately chosen to live together in a messy, sometimes futile attempt to create a cohesive, functioning community.  Like Sheldon himself, almost every Londoner has an "origin story"; something that brought them on a path from wherever they were, and led them to London. They may not share a religion, an ethnicity,...
Read more

The Literal DeathBots

Image
If you immerse yourself even casually in the world of A.I. pop culture, you are going to encounter a lot of Apocalypses. (Apocalypsi? Apocalypsae? Did we ever decide whether "Apocalypse" has an official plural? Let's never find out...) Whether it's the Terminator, HAL, Colossus or Talky Tina, robots, ChatBots and supercomputers always seem to be running amok, taking over the world or trying to killing everybody (occasionally in that order). Can you blame people for getting nervous now that A.I. ChatBots are actually starting to enter our lives for real? We have decades of reference literature to justify those fears, and the ChatBots do seem to be spreading awfully fast, even if all they are doing at the moment is talking to us. But that's how it starts, right? A harmless chat here, a bit of cybersex there, and then boom! MurderBots on every street corner. We've all seen those movies. And guess what? The DeathBots really have arrived, but not quite the way you ...
Read more