Tuesday, 14 August 2018

Column of Light



After I left the food bank on Saturday I took my food home, put everything away and then headed down to No Frills for fruit. I got two bags of cherries and a couple of baskets of nectarines among some of my usual other purchases. There were no great deals on meat but I already had some chicken and so it wasn’t a concern. I remembered to buy a new can opener.
For lunch I heated up the double cheeseburger that my upstairs neighbour David had given me the week before. I added more cheese, ketchup, mustard, tomato and cucumber and washed it down with some lemonade-ice tea.
In the late afternoon I took a bike ride. I called out to another cyclist on the Bloor Viaduct that I was passing him on his left and he moved over. When I passed and said “Thanks!” he said “Cheers!”
Once again I avoided the Danforth festival by riding up Broadview to Mortimer. This time I went down Donlands to get back to Danforth on the other end of the fair. I went to Warden and then north to Malley Rd, took that past a mountain of broken concrete to its dead end, then came back to Warden and went up to Comstock, which carried me east to Birchmount.
I stopped at the Starbucks on the way back and even at that end of the festival it was crowded. The fruit stand near where I locked my bike was doing very good business selling drinks, watermelon slices and cherries this time compared to the night before. There was another long line-up for the washroom in Starbucks.
On my way back west I went a little further north than last time but still had to weave north and south a lot just to get through to Broadview.
I stopped on the Bloor Viaduct to take some pictures of a column of light that was sandwiched between greenery and clouds on the northern horizon. It didn’t look as interesting in the pictures though.
On my way west along Queen the clouds over the sun were so black that it was like the sun had already set and much darker than it should have been for this time of year.
When I got home I was surprised that it was so late. Trying to find a passage around the festival had probably cost me half an hour and then I’d stopped to take photos but I hadn’t thought it had been that long.
I went out to buy two cans of Creemore.
            I fried my eggs and had them with toast and a beer while watching the 1982 version of  “I, the Jury". It was the same basic story with the same characters but they changed the details to an extreme degree. First of all they set it in 1982 and put in car chases, explosions, a soft porn sex scene. They expanded the plot so that the jewelry racket of the novel was a Mafia scale organization but with a tremendous amount of hi-tech weaponry. They tried to make Mike Hammer into more of a cross between Rambo and James Bond when he single handedly stormed a heavily armed compound. Plus, though Armand Assante is quite natural on the screen, he looks a little too Italian to be Mike Hammer. The mastermind was still a beautiful psychiatrist but they changed her name to Charlotte Bennett and had her played by Barbara Carrera, who is very beautiful but not a great actress. Instead of just being a psychiatrist she's a sex therapist and her institute has orgies as therapy. The twins are far less interesting in this movie. They are played by Leigh and Lynette Harris (who are not very good actors) and instead of being old friends of Hammer’s murdered friend, Jack, they are two of Charlotte’s sex surrogates who meet a horrible end because another added plot element is a psychotic serial killer who is being mind controlled by the organization. He puts red wigs on his female victims, cuts their clothing off with his switchblade and makes them tell him "I love you” before he kills them. If they don’t say it in a sincere enough tone he tortures them. He kidnaps Hammer's secretary, Velda, who is blonde in this story, whereas in the novels and in all the other movies she has short, black hair.


Barbara Carrera was offered the role of Octopussy but she turned it down because she wanted to work with Sean Connery when he returned as James Bond in Never Say Never again. I’ve always gotten Carrera mixed up with Laura Gemsler, who played Black Emmanuel.



No comments:

Post a Comment