10 on the 10th - Would you rather ...

It's time for 10 on the 10th!
This time Marsha is asking us a few "Would you rather ..." questions. Let's see which ones I'll be able to answer.

1. Would you rather live in a tiny house in the country or on a boat on a river or lake?

To be honest, neither. I'm very claustrophobic and just the thought of it makes my skin crawl.
Still I'm fascinated by English canal boats, so if you make me, that's what I would have to choose.
 

Picture via pxhere

2. Would you rather be a character in a Shakespeare play or a Stephen King movie adaptation?

That's easy. Shakespeare all the way, preferably one of the three witches in the Scottish play (yes, I know this is a blog and not a theater).
The Scottish play was one of the topics in my English major and therefore always brings back a few memories.
One of them is how our English teacher asked if we wanted to do something for our "Abifest". Abi(tur) is the end of class 12 or 13 (depending on the system, in my time it was always 13 years).
My friend and I said we'd do the witch scene, but only if one of the others played the third witch. That other one was our teacher's favorite - it wasn't just us two who felt like that - and he hands down refused. We didn't mean it as a joke, we would have gone through with this which would have been hard for someone like me who's not a public speaker, but hey, it wasn't to be ...

Cavendish Morton, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

3. Would you rather your kitchen was full of all black appliances or all pink appliances?

Black, silver or red. No pink, please!

4. Would you rather be allergic to cake or chips?

Chips. I don't eat them that often, but I would definitely not want to miss out on my sister's coconut sheet cake!

5. Would you rather have a five minute conversation with your past self or your future self?

Past self. I don't think I would want to hear anything about the future at this point.
 

6. Would you rather be rich or famous?

Another easy one. Rich. There's so much good you can do with money. I'd love being able to donate more.
On the other hand, I don't do well in groups and appreciate my privacy, so being famous doesn't even bear thinking about.

7. Would you rather drive a brand new big, big truck or a slightly used small car?

I don't drive at all (never even bothered to exchange my license for the ones required here now), but my dream had always been an old VW Beetle convertible (which, according to several people including my ex, needs a garage and its own mechanic).

Picture via pxhere

8. Would you rather live with your parents or your kids?

I don't have kids except furry ones and I already live with them 😋
I wouldn't want to live with my parents again. I'm usually quite happy living on my own.

9. Would you rather have an ugly tattoo where everyone could see it or a beautiful one that no one could see?

I have one tattoo which I love. It's on my leg and people usually can't see it completely because I rarely wear something short enough. I wanted it that way because it's for myself.

10. Would you rather eat a peanut butter and spam sandwich or a strawberry jelly and lettuce sandwich?

I don't like peanut butter and I'm a vegetarian. I'm also no big fan of jelly because it tends to slip off my bread, I prefer jam or marmalade.
Even if I weren't vegetarian, I would always choose strawberry jelly and lettuce, though. Something I didn't use to do, but have done a few times lately is teaming up bitter orange marmalade and cheese and I quite like that.
Lettuce wouldn't spoil the strawberry taste, I think, it would add something fresh to it.

There you go, I made it through all ten!

Bleeding Heart, the sequel

I had another look at the picture of the pink Bleeding Heart in my springtime post and that's where it hit me - the white peeking out from under the pink.

Why hadn't I thought of that right away? I had some white beads and also small amounts of pink and purple lined clear beads, so maybe that would be enough for the prototype of a big heart?
Surprise!

There was one purple bead left over at the end!
I'm quite happy with this bigger attempt because I learned a few things from it.
Using the bigger beads I can't curve the petals as well as in the small heart and I would try to prolong the heart at the bottom in some way - the bigger beads don't make such a nice tip - and make the drop a bit smaller. There should also be less white in the heart, but I had to do that because I was so low on pink and purple.

Here's a comparison between the big and the small heart.
The small one is really growing on me and after all there are usually different sizes on a plant as well.

And so it's clear that the journey will continue ...

Silent movies - Safety Last!

I already mentioned that before this project my silent movie "knowledge" mostly consisted of snippets from the compilation shows we watched as children.
One of those snippets is of course this iconic picture.

How many people know the film this is from, though? I can't remember ever having watched it completely as a child although I always liked Harold Lloyd better than Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, even if he was called "The Third Genius" and his name is less known today.
Maybe it was just me being superficial because I found him more handsome or because he seemed so normal, just your average guy. Maybe the reason is that I tend to be on the underdog's side and he felt like an underdog compared to his more appreciated colleagues (although I hardly could have known that as a kid). Who knows, it could even be all of this together.
Anyhow, it was about time to watch some Harold Lloyd starting with "Safety Last!"

The plot (as usual with spoilers).
Harold is leaving his hometown to go to the big city and get successful enough to marry his girl.
Things don't quite work out, Harold is a dry goods salesman at a department store and shares a place with his friend "Limpy Bill", a high-rise construction worker, but he can't get himself to admit that to Mildred. Instead he pawns the phonograph (Bill's and his?) to get her a very pretty lavalier (a kind of pendant, I had never heard the word before), but he can't afford the chain yet.
At the end of one shift, he meets a policeman he knows from home and when Bill comes to pick him up, he tells him as a prank to push the policeman over who is on a callbox saying he will sort it out. Unfortunately, it's a different policeman now and to escape him, Bill climbs up a building.

After Harold has sent Mildred a chain costing him more than his last weekly salary, Mildred's mother convinces her not to wait any longer and follow him to the city.
She arrives at the department store and now Harold has to keep up the lie about his success, especially when Mildred sees him next to the general manager's office and thinks he is the manager.
Then he overheards the manager saying he would pay $1000 for a new idea bringing people to the shop and suggests a "human spider" climbing the 12-story building where the store is, thinking of Bill of course whom he offers half of the money.

The day of the big stunt arrives, but the policeman has seen it announced in the newspaper, guesses that Bill is the mystery man and waits for him at the starting point.
So Bill tells Harold to start climbing himself and he will take over upstairs, but he just can't get rid of the policeman, so Harold climbs and climbs and climbs having to overcome obstacles like ledges, a rope, hungry pigeons, a clock ... until he finally reaches the roof where Mildred is waiting for him (who got married to him in real life shortly after, by the way).

This movie seems to have two parts.
You have the romance and the workplace, combined when Harold tries to hide the truth from Mildred, and you have the last 20 minutes which are full of suspense and actually were the initial idea for the movie.
Lloyd had seen Bill Strother who plays The Pal climb a high building and thought this would make a good thrill sequence, then they made the introduction for it.

As usual, reviews are divided.
There are people who think Lloyd just wasn't funny because he wasn't as inspired as Chaplin and Keaton, others praise that he may not have been a natural comedian, but that he became one.
I don't know why I have to compare them at all. Am I not allowed to enjoy different approaches?
Also I can definitely say that there were a lot of funny moments in "Safety Last!" The anniversary sale scene for example reminded me very much of the first days of the summer and winter end sales we used to have here (which I avoided) and was very funny. I liked the fast thinking Harold shows trying to keep his lie from being exposed or when he gets caught in a towel truck and does his best to get back to work in time, so he won't lose his job.
The last sequence is not so much funny as exciting and it totally grabbed my attention although I of course knew he wasn't really climbing a 12-story building.

Which brings us to the #1 question - how did they do that sequence? Did Lloyd do his own stunts? What was the trick?
Again I was surprised at some commenters. It was as if they thought the fact that Lloyd was "only" three stories high at the most was cheating.
Yes, so he had help from Strother (for wide shots) and from a circus artist (dangling from the rope) and a stuntman. Smart people get help from people who specialize in something.
Also, Lloyd had actually lost thumb and index finger of his right hand some years before when a prop bomb for a photoshoot turned out to be real.

I don't care (even if it's interesting) what camera angles they used or if they built a platform on the building instead of using the real building itself and that I knew that beforehand because it was so convincing that I still gasped and had a hard time watching some of it.
And by the way, Luke Skywalker isn't a real Jedi and Sinbad didn't fight real monsters. Just saying.
I watched the film without a score (although there is one with score on YouTube here) and I don't even want to know what suspenseful music during the climb would have done to me.

Last but not least a warning - there is one short scene portraying a Jewish shopkeeper, a very ugly stereotype, not unusual for the time unfortunately as we know, but still uncomfortable to watch today.

All in all, this is a movie I can definitely see myself watching again.

Sources:
1. The official Harold Lloyd website - Biography
2. Ed Park: Safety Last!: High-Flying Harold. On: The Criterion Collection. Essays. June 17, 2013
3. Jeffrey Vance: Safety Last! On: San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Essay. 2013
4. Arik Devens: Safety Last! On: Cinema Gadfly. Essay. May 16, 2015
5. Pamela Hutchinson: Don't look down: 100 years of Harold Lloyd's Safety Last! On: The Guardian, March 24, 2023
6. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill: Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius. TV documentary 1989.
7. Roger Ebert: The third genius of silent film. On: RogerEbert.com, July 3, 2005

Bleeding Heart, a prototype

I don't often make prototypes. I play. I experiment. I make forever WIPs (not on purpose!) to look at so I can wonder what the heck I actually did there and how I'm supposed to repeat or refine it.
I never write anything down. I don't make sketches. Not smart, I know, but that's not going to change now (wait, I once did, for my wire crochet Christmas balls, but I don't know where that note went which doesn't matter as I haven't made any of them in years).
I don't sit down and actively try to work something out. Measure and count. I don't have an analytical mind. Things come to me or they don't.

This time, I made one, a prototype, kind of.
I didn't want to show it to you yet because I wanted to get it right first, but that may take a while.

The 3D heart wasn't the difficult part, but the blood or tear drop (depending on your language) and the ends of the outer petals which curve up.
Here I used just size 11 and 15 seed beads to make the petals curve, but I didn't like them smaller and like this the heart was too small for my taste.
Right, therefore the size 8 that inspired the stash tackler post.

I didn't have enough white beads in the size 8 to try out if that would look more like what I was thinking of, though.
Postage has definitely become too high for ordering just one tube of beads. Now minimum for postage free shipping has gone up quite a bit as well. As if it wasn't difficult enough for me to put a bead order together!
Not that I wouldn't understand the bead stores, mind you, they have to deal with business realities and their finances just as we all do more and more, as I do as a matter of fact.
I have enough stash, so I can't really justify another bead order just yet.

I don't have any other bead colors in all three sizes, either. Similar maybe, but not the same.
There will be a bead order sometime, though, and the design is absolutely staying on my list, but as I said, it may take a while, so all you get to see for now is this rather tiny protoype, sorry.

And another picture in my hand to give you a better idea of its size.

Random Saturday - Where did they go?

A few months ago, I said goodbye to Sharon McCone when I got the last book in the series. Yeah, that was a little premature because I had actually missed the book before that, but it was nice to end on that one now because I liked it better than the last one.
I also mentioned being sad when I read the last Discworld and Kinsey Millhone books after Terry Pratchett and Sue Grafton had died.

The other day it was time again to go through my books for a little purge. That's when I came upon the three books by Sandra West Prowell.

I got my first book by Sandra West Prowell at a fleamarket - not the first book in the series - and I was captured right away by her protagonist, the FBI agent turned private detective Phoebe Siegel living in Montana.
Phoebe comes from a Jewish-Catholic family, her father and one of her brothers were policemen.
Inheriting a lot of money from her aunt gives Phoebe the chance to buy an old house and to offer her services as a private detective at very reasonable fees. Feeling a connection to the victims is her main incentive.

The books are not Whodunits, they don't just tell the story of her cases, but also of problems within the family and of her relationships, but not in a way I find annoying. Of course that could have to do with there only being three books.
Character development is good, but it can also bring you down if for example the protagonist doesn't seem to have one happy moment in their life over I don't know how many books which has been a reason for me to abandon more than one series. Life can be depressing enough.

However, this is not supposed to be a review of Prowell's books, after all it's random Saturday.
I want to talk about why there are only three books. The last book had one of those short author introductions saying "... and is currently working on the fourth volume about detective Phoebe Siegel."
I was looking forward to that, to a new case and to see how her relationship with the Native American deputy would be coming along.
So every, now and then I looked her up, but the fourth novel never came, not even in English. Then I would forget about it again. I did that on and off for almost ten years wondering where Prowell had disappeared to, not obsessively, but usually when I put a book in my cabinet in a spot close to her books.
Weirdly enough, I can't remember having done the same with other authors. I guess it was that introduction. If she had been working on a new book, what had happened?

I'm also one of those people who watch some old movie or show and wonder where this actress or that actor has ended up and then look them up. I want to make clear, however, that I don't fall for those terrible clickbait YouTube videos showing fake pictures of someone's "gruesome fate"; and thinking about it, I usually limit my search to actors, actresses or authors (and sometimes cats and dogs I have become attached to on the web which may lead to tears, but that's a different story).

One day, much to my surprise, I found something, a post from November 2016 on Lise McClendon's website. McClendon also writes mystery and was a friend of Prowell until they lost touch.
She wrote the post on the day she found out about her friend's death over one year before.
Obviously, Prowell had unknown issues that not only made her stop writing (although the fourth Phoebe Siegel was supposed to be published in 2000 or 2001, and there was another standalone manuscript) and break off contact to writer friends, but that even made her stop talking about writing with her family.
I felt strangely sad about it. I don't know what I had expected to find, but that wasn't it.

Of course the same happens with people in our own lives. It's like a train. People go with you from the start to the end of the line, some go with you from just one to the next station, some get off suddenly, maybe even without saying goodbye, and sometimes you throw some off the train ... hm, maybe the analogy isn't that good, but you get the idea.
We can't expect to spend all our lives with always the same people around even if it may come as a shock if someone hops off without a warning after a long time.
With some people it's easier to accept, with others it isn't. Sometimes it hurts to feel you have been cut out of someone's life without knowing what you did or if it has to do with you at all. Sometimes you just drift apart and that's okay.
And sometimes you reach out and re-connect which may work out or not.

That reminds me that there's a friend I should call. It has been a while since we last talked.
Oh, and if you wonder, by the way, the Prowell books didn't get purged.

Source:
Lise McClendon: Remembering Sandra West Prowell. On:Lise McClendon, November 18, 2016

Tackle that stash - Hearts, hearts, hearts

There's something I never bought on purpose, seed beads bigger than size 11. I don't usually feel the need for bigger ones in my bead embroidery, I never tried a Cellini spiral, and I don't string seed beads for chains.
So when my first size 6 and 8 seed beads arrived in one of the surprise mixes I order every, now and then, I had absolutely no idea what to do with them at first.
I finally used some of them in bead embroidery, but still had a bunch left over.

When I started fiddling around with a Bleeding Heart design, I thought size 8 beads would probably work better than size 11. I will still need different bead sizes in matching colors, though, which I don't have (yet).
Seeing, however, how many colors I had of the big seed beads, I decided to take a little break from fiddling, just play around with some hearts instead and maybe use up one or the other color.

Picasso finishes often remind me of natural stones.
Therefore, these hearts made me think of the phrase "getting blood from a stone", so I added just a little drop of "blood".
This is not the kind of bleeding heart design I'm fiddling with, by the way.

You may remember that there can also be leftovers in the surprise mixes, so I didn't always have enough of one color to make a pair of earrings or even a pendant.
Multicolor hearts were the solution, like these ombré ones for which I used a tiny drop of "water" instead of "blood".

This metallic mint is a fun color, but I had only enough beads for a pendant.
Which color is your favorite?

Silent movies - Kohlhiesel's daughters

I practically grew up with the 1962 version of today's movie and to be honest, I hadn't even known that it was already the fifth dramatization of a play inspired by Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew".
For this post, however, I watched the first one from 1920 made by Ernst Lubitsch - Kohlhiesels Töchter (which you can find with English intertitles here some of which are translated too freely for my taste, but there aren't too many, anyway).
Maybe you have been asking yourself how I choose which movies to watch - well, if you have been following me for a while, you will not be surprised to hear that I stumble upon a title somewhere, on Google, on a blog, in YouTube recommendations, and put it on a list from which I pick randomly, not because I think I will love the movie or hate it or even find something interesting to say about it.
In this case, I obviously already had an idea of the plot from the 1962 version, but that had no bearing on my choice.

Film poster, public domain
via Wikipedia

The story set in the Bavarian mountains is told rather quickly (spoilers as usual).
Father Kohlhiesel has two daughters.
The older one, Liesel, is bad-tempered and rude which is good enough for her father if he needs her to throw guests out of his inn at closing time. She works hard and isn't interested in pretty clothes or hair.
The younger one, Gretel, is dressed nicely, laughs a lot, but seems a bit vain and not too smart.

Xaver and Seppl are smitten with Gretel at first sight. Xaver, a big bull of a man, both in looks and behavior, takes her by storm and asks her father for her hand, but Kohlhiesel tells him he will have to find a man for Liesel first or he can't marry her.
Seppl has the idea that Xaver should marry Liesel and behave so badly that she will divorce him quickly, so he can marry Gretel afterwards. Xaver thinks this is a brilliant idea, but of course Seppl just wants Gretel to be free to marry him instead.
After marrying Liesel, Xaver behaves even worse than before, for example by throwing out all the furniture until she hides under the sofa. Instead of being driven away, though, this makes her fall in love with him.

Seppl, who has successfully started courting Gretel, gives Liesel the advice to change her looks and it works. Xaver stays with her and Seppl gets his Gretel.

This is not a subtle movie. It was made to amuse the masses in the old tradition of rural comedy and that's what it did, it proved to be very popular.
A lot people said they really enjoyed the film while I was torn myself. Once again.
Yes, there were some funny moments, and yes, I'm aware Lubitsch did draw the characters as caricatures on purpose, and yes again, it was 1920.
It's the old problem. How much slack should we give an old movie or book or play? How much slack do I want to give it personally?

None of the characters were very likeable and they weren't meant to be, but of all of them I actually liked Liesel the best. Yes, she was unnecessarily rude, but she was herself - until she changed at the end to make herself attractive for Xaver. There's nothing wrong about wanting to be attractive, but not for that kind of man. I hated watching an act of domestic violence making Xaver attractive to Liesel as much as I hated the same scene in the newer movie.

I found interesting that people described the sisters as the pretty and the ugly one because I didn't think Liesel was ugly, just because she didn't wear makeup and had a messy bun on her head instead of braids.
It's even more interesting if you know that they were played by the same actress, Henny Porten, which not everyone noticed right away, also because "they" were on the screen together in some scenes. Maybe people didn't expect a split screen in such an old movie.
Porten did a really good job at creating two very different characters and it looks as if she had fun with it, especially with Liesel (actually that's the part I liked about the new version as well, Liselotte Pulver (who you may know as the secretary dancing on the table in Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three) seemed to play the sisters with such joy).

So yeah, after watching this for the first time I said I wanted my hour back, but then I jumped through it again in the German original to have a look at the intertitles there and I appreciated some of the scenes I caught during it more than the first time around.
However, I still can't get over the idea that women like a "bad boy", that you have to clean up your act - in this case look nice and cook something good for your husband - and you'll live happily ever after.

So this one is not going to make on my re-watch list, but it was still an interesting experience.


Additional sources:
1. Michael Koller: Kohlhiesels Töchter. In: Senses of Cinema. Issue 112, November 2024
2. Jubiläumsfilme des Aufführungsjahres 1920. On: Stummfilm Magazin (in German)