About A Film

Yesterday afternoon, while preparing to reheat overnight foodstuff for a late lunch, the wife decided to channel-surf and ended on a rather dreary beginning credits to a black and white film, quite obviously from some distant past.

After several night-time scene cutaways astutely showing a motley group of people agonizing and trying to cope with their personal problems, I had lamely asked the wife to move to another channel. Like the one showing those grand old Westerns shot in those wondrously beautiful locales in the Old West.

But she had calmly persisted, more to show who's boss rather than having a special liking for this dark film, which I did initially think was a film noir by some obscure film-maker.

Anyway, decided to bear the expected ennui and sit quietly intent on finishing the meal remnants.

Suddenly, after more dreary scenes which put together started to shed more light on the locale, a sudden bolt of recall came to my consciousness. Scenes of overhead trains, remnants of the old El in New York. Train stations scenes with familiar turnstiles and ticket booths. The different characters slowly but surely being drawn to a train station, very late in the night or very early in the morning.

And suddenly, the vague recollection from some distant past gelled into something recognizable and communicable. Thus, I blurted out: I have seen this movie as a younger man and at the end one of the soldier passengers, his right hand on a sling, is going to be knifed by a hoodlum on the train, because he is the only one brave enough to confront evil.

Indeed, the film was The Incident by Larry Peerce, and made in 1967.

For the curious, one doesn't need to rent the VHS which came out in 1989, I learned.

For this blogsite has most of the skinny, with liberal sprinkling of screen captures from the actual film, over a hundred of them. And some audio clips and the actual musical score.

It featured a cast of characters many will recognize even to this day. The soldier with the broken arm was played by Beau Bridges, son of the late Lloyd Bridges and elder brother to Jeff Bridges. A young Martin Sheen, playing the noisy but cowardly punk. A young Donna Mills, pretty and blond. Then old reliables like Gary Merrill and Jan Sterling. Even host Ed McMahon was in it. Yes, he acted before being known as a TV host. And evil personified played well by Tony Musante, a face you love to hate. He played a queer character in Sinatra's The Detective. Director Peerce is known more for his TV works, Wild Wild West and Batman.

Why was this memorable for me, thriving latently in some forgotten corner of my memory all these years?

Because it exposes in graphic clarity the classic confrontation and mortal combat between pure, pristine, and humble "good" against a pure and unmitigated incarnation of "evil".

Furthermore, it also exposes the very thin and easily breached veneer of polite and civilized society. How when we are faced with actual evil, we find ourselves not up to the challenges that we thought we could easily and proudly surmount.

We find ourselves playing uncharacteristically the role of "appeasers" of evil, exerting utmost efforts to play "safe" against evil. Both assiduously and frantically trying to parry and deflect all its attempts to harm us personally and somewhat hoping it moves elsewhere to cast its ugly spell.

In the end, in spite of being hobbled and disadvantaged by man himself, good triumphs using the same means evil uses - violence.

Gift Giving: Economics Vs Intangible Values

This is the day after Christmas. The much-anticipated day when retail stores collide with hordes of shoppers, the latter armed with tons of unwrapped gifts received but to be returned either as unexpected, unwanted, ill-fitting, or simply dispensable. And the former for their parts, ably fortified with inventory prices slashed to the bare bones, backed with everything down to the kitchen sink to lure those harried shoppers into the premises and shrewdly attempt to divest them of funds coming either from returns credits, from leftover or hoarded disposable funds, or from the now greatly favored and ubiquitous gift cards that retail stores have flooded the markets with.

In the US alone, perky TV newscasters wading into crowded stores and blending in with the packs of early-bird shoppers have been blaring all day about what this auspicious day promises to be. They authoritatively lecture listeners that retail sales for the period from Thanksgiving to Christmas will account for 25% of yearly sales, and that profits from this same abbreviated period will account for about 60% of yearly profits, making it the retailers’ most profitable period for the year. Fearless forecasts peg that total sales for this day will most likely exceed those on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the Saturday before Christmas, traditionally the best sales day for the entire year. This year sadly both dates could not break the 10 billion dollars mark for all those stores included in the reported surveys.

Thus, from a strictly Economics point of view, most early prognostications are generally upbeat. Score a big point for the dismal science. But on the downside, the same science in another vein exposes to us inefficiency in the current practices of gift giving, exclusive and apart from the ritual of massive returns of gifts which characterizes this day’s activities. And it is that by and large, when surveyed and polled gift recipients project a rather dreary unintended consequence about gifts received. For when asked about their estimates of the value of gifts received or how much they themselves would pay for the gifts received assuming they were needed by them, recipients typically undervalue the gifts or would spend considerably less for them if paying out of their own pockets. Undervalued by as much as 10% of how much the gifts actually cost, giving rise to what would be called a waste, or at the very least an inefficiency, in expenditure. Economists call it deadweight loss. Thus, had the recipient instead been given cash, he would have purchased the same for less price and get the same satisfaction. Now, to get perspective, if gift-giving in the US during the Christmas season amounts to over 50 billion dollars, and that would be a conservative estimate for actuals, we would have a loss of 5 billion dollars that could otherwise have gone to more productive undertakings, or put differently, allocated to more efficient application of resources. And we have not included here the other gift giving occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, etc.

Remember the ubiquitous gift cards mentioned above? They appear to be an easy answer to this dilemma.

But wait.

The revered practice of gift-giving, very visible and highlighted during the Xmas holidays, is more involved than that, for one it is generally accepted as lying at a plane above the very mundane concepts and earthbound theories of Economics. Because beyond just cash or financial values, gift giving in the spirit of Christmas partakes precisely also of things spiritual, intangible and unquantifiable. We enter into the realm of sentimental values. Because in gift giving it is “the thought that counts, not the price of the gift.” The self-same mantra recalcitrant miserly givers are accused of pre-empting and hiding under.

Add to that what the economic theory of signalling may connote and assign to gift giving, which essentially claims that gifts act as signals from the giver to the recipient, allowing the recipient to gain a hoped-for balanced access to information that a giver may have for the recipient. To illustrate, in gift giving to loved ones, in a real way the actual gift of the giver makes known to the recipient how the giver feels about him or her. Thus, we popularly speak about sentimental values, which typically trump financial values of the gifts. An apt application of the trite axiom, the thought and not the price of the gift.

So what are we to make of this?

In such an obvious dilemma, I suppose a happy blending of Economics with sentimental values could work justifiably well for society collectively. But given the vagaries of unpredictable human behavior expect no abatement to the frenzied rush we call the day after Christmas shopping spree.

Just assure you give best diligent efforts to “signal” to loved ones the appropriate messages your gifts are supposed to convey – not only your showering love and attention, but also your workable understanding of their real needs and desires.

Or maybe, be the modern “old” Ebenezer Scrooge, not for his lack of moral clarity, but for the “perceived” economic benefits for being maybe not miserly, but frugal, thrifty, sparing, economical, austere, or what have you. But that’s another issue for another time.

Elvis On The Holidays

Courtesy of YouTube, here are some little offerings for the holidays:







PEACE TO ALL MEN OF GOODWILL!

People Dying To Get to Colma, CA

A possible bumper sticker one may spot driving slowly, yes, slowly because one might miss the entire town if one blinks, along the abbreviated streets of Colma, CA.

To which a local resident may emit either a faint trace of a smile or a naughty smirk depending on his or her weather-borne disposition. And the why will be explained down the line.

But the town’s official motto is a bit puzzling to any outsider, too. It reads: It’s great to be alive in Colma.

Anyway, it is a postage-stamp-size town or city of 2.2 square miles, hemmed in from the north by Daly City and by South San Francisco from the south. Thus, when I was living in Daly City, I could actually boast that when I was jogging I was doing so across three cities, Daly City, Colma, and So. San Francisco.

In 1924, cemetery operators got together and decided to locate their “operations” in one place. Thus, that intent gave birth to Colma as a necropolis. Presently, it has 17 equal opportunity cemetery sites, now euphemistically called memorial parks, along its borders; while the entire town or city itself is 73% zoned as such. Thus, it has proper burial sites for Greeks, Italians, Serbs, for Asians like Japanese, etc. And yes, also for different furry pets in a couple of pet cemeteries sharing side by side locales with the rest.

It is no surprise that the biggest landowners are a landholding company and of course, the Roman Catholic Church. Still this burgeoning town has about 1500 residents alive and doing well, but clearly outnumbered by their subterranean neighbors now numbering about 1.5 million.

And adding to the puzzlement of the place, Colma has a bit of a personality problem too, only to the outsider though. It is both a town and a city. And that is attributable to California Law, which makes town and city synonymous. The law states that a city is either one created by a charter or one created by general law. Colma is of the latter blend. Thus for its new spiffy image the signs in front of its municipal offices read: City of Colma, while the earlier engraved signs around town read: Town of Colma. Well, 1.5 million permanent residents pay no mind and will not be confused.

Like any town or city, Colma has its own government hierarchy to represent and rule over the 1500 residents, headed by a council. And this has been so even during lean times when the residents willing to relocate there were much less. One can imagine that the early “mandatory” residents were those connected to the “operations” – gravediggers, landscapers, flower growers, headstone makers. And maybe later, cremation technicians?

Not anymore, now somberly-hued residential buildings line the boundaries of some memorial parks, many facing the neatly-manicured and well-maintained lawns of the parks. Two elementary/middle schools are located within its borders. And many businesses are thriving there, too. Ubiquitous Home Depot has two sites. There are also a couple of shopping centers, and yes, many car dealerships still abound, tracing their origins to the early days of the place.

And yes, the most popular card room in the area named Lucky Chances is located in Colma, owned and operated by a FilAm; and given its bountiful revenues, one can rightly surmise that these bounties are scattered somewhat within the local community in terms of taxes and local consumption expenditures.

Also, for the first time in memory a FilAm was elected to its suddenly-important council, in the person of Joanne Del Rosario, a sister of former Philippine ambassador to the US Alberto Del Rosario. And this she won by the slimmest of margin, in a town where 25% are of Asian origins.

Because Colma is in California, it also shares in the surging real estate prices. A burial plot can cost from somewhere between $20,000 to $over 200K for a family plot.

While talking and viewing cemeteries and the dead may appear dismal and gross to many, it does offer the curiosity angles, for the curious and the typical tourist to the place because Colma is no different from any other place. And this is apart from the beauty offered by the very attractive landscape designs, the exquisitely built structures, the nice chapels and ultra-modern above-ground mausoleums.

It also offers the celebrity angle. Tucked in one of its many cemeteries is where the legendary Wyatt Earp of the long-gone wild west is buried. And local legend and baseball icon Joe DiMaggio is buried there too in a Catholic cemetery, marked by a beaten path made by the many baseball fans hereabouts. And the burial place of songstress Tina Turner’s dog, reportedly buried wrapped in fur? Yes, one can find that there, too.

And personally, where my wife's late maternal grandmother and her father are also interred.

Credits
Credits

Coins Of The Biblical Realm

In the famous challenge to his kingship, Jesus Christ has given to us this now memorable Biblical statement:

“Render unto Caesar, the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. . . ”

We know that he was referring to the coin of the then Roman realm under which the Jews were obligated to pay tribute.

Click to read more.