It’s actually coolish this morning.
I turned off the air conditioner. I may have to turn it back on again later, but it’s so nice to have quiet and birdsong, instead of the constant whir of the A/C.
I ran some errands yesterday. I know, big deal. But it was the first day I felt good enough to venture out for longer than a few minutes here and there. (More about the trip on Just Let Me Finish This Page.) The trip tired me out but I revived enough to do some weed whacking later on in the afternoon, while Don did a little mowing. Baby steps.
There was nothing worth watching on television last night, so we watched TCM On Demand. Don’s choice? A movie called Tentacles, made in the seventies and so dreadfully bad that it was good. You know what I mean. Sometimes there is a movie that is so bad that it makes for the perfect viewing experience. (As long as you’re not spending any money.) Clearly trying to build on the success of Jaws, the plot revolved around a giant octopus who was attacking and killing people in a coastal beach town. The producers were Italian and parts of the film were obviously dubbed. I don’t know how they got them, but the cast included Shelley Winters, John Huston, and Henry Fonda. Henry had sort of a cameo role, most of his scenes took place on a terrace and were, I’m sure, filmed in one day. He was part of a subplot that involved the work his company was doing on an underwater tunnel and the frequent use of high frequencies of sound that presumably created this monster octopus. Shelley played John Huston’s sister. Huston was a reporter and Shelley, a bit long in the tooth at this point in her career, as was Huston, was the mother of a little boy of about 10 or 12. What?? The whole thing was cheaply done, with bad special effects and closeups of a regular old octopus that were supposed to be terrifying. The plot got more absurd as the film went on, eventually involving some Shamu-type killer whales from a place not unlike Sea World that had been trained by the guy (played by Bo Hopkins) who was hunting the octopus (and who, by the way, had lost his wife, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, and friend to the killer octopus, simply because they went out on a boat and used their radio to contact the Coast Guard – those sound frequencies again.) Bless them, those killer whales took on the octopus and killed him in a long scene that was so cheesy and blurry that I was unsure what I was seeing.
All this with a cheap sounding musical score created on a synthesizer.
I can’t make these things up.
It’s Friday. We have no plans for the weekend but Don does have a gig on Sunday. I have to catch up on my reading. I have books to read and review and I didn’t much feel like reading when I was sick.
Happy Friday.
