Author Archives: Raoul Pop

A Guide To A Good Life, Reviews

Easter Parade (1948)

Easter Parade“Easter Parade” is a veritable showcase of talent: Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Irving Berlin, Ann Miller… need I say more?

There are many memorable scenes in this movie. One such scene is at the opening of the movie, where we see Fred, who plays Don Hewes, a famous dancer of his time, strolling through the streets of his town and buying gifts for his sweetheart, who is also his dancing partner. Happy as can be, he loads the arms of his gift carriers, while unbeknownst to him, his sweetheart is signing a contract and leaving their act. In this particular scene, Fred sees a rabbit he really wants to buy. Unfortunately, a little boy has sighted that same rabbit. Fred has to dazzle the boy with his dancing, and manages to draw his attention away to other toys – namely, drums. One can’t help thinking the boy’s mother would have preferred the rabbit! Nonetheless, Fred dances amazingly here. The absolute ease with which he dances still leaves me speechless.

To this day, I have not seen anyone dance as gracefully and as effortlessly as Fred Astaire, and this scene shows why. Every other tap dancer I’ve seen struggled through difficult movements, while Fred lightly tosses them at the viewer, nonchalantly, as if to say, “Look, it’s no big deal, I’m just enjoying myself…” Wow!

Ann Miller plays her usual role of hard-working girl, and her legs take center-stage in one of the movie’s big numbers. I think she manages to show her legs in most, if not all of the movies where she acts, but nowhere as prominently as in Kiss Me Kate (1953). I wonder if she wanted to do that, or the directors pushed her to do it. Peter Lawford also reprises his usual role of the time, that of the English pal, and does a great job at it, too.

Check out the trumpet player in the scene where Judy sings “That’s why I wish-igan I was in Michigan”. He can’t help smiling as Judy stands next to him. He’s starstruck, and it’s pretty funny.

In the scene where Fred tests out Judy as his dancing partner, Judy quips “I’m never sure” when he asks her whether she knows her left foot from her right, then goes on to explain why. When she was little, her doctor advised her family to force her to write with her right hand, even though she was left-handed. You might think that’s just a funny line, but it’s true, and it really wasn’t that funny for the children who were beaten and forced to use their right hands.

Another truly funny scene is when Fred asks Judy (the future “Juanita”) to walk ahead while on the street, so he could see whether men would notice her. The poor Judy tries saying hello to them, only to be ignored ruthlessly, until she makes the funniest face! Suddenly, everyone takes notice of her! To me, this is one of the most hilarious movie moments ever, and ranks right up there with the face that Cary Grant makes in the ending scene of Charade (1963).

Their first dance together as Hewes and Juanita is a disaster, and is worth watching for the wonderful counterpoint that it presents. There’s Fred, being truly professional, looking great, and thrown constantly off balance and out of poise by Judy’s confused prancing. And let’s not forget the flying feathers! The stage is filled with them. Judy ends up looking like a mad mother hen, turning out and looking for her chicks, while Fred, the elegant rooster, is ignored and stepped on. Wonderful, just wonderful!

I couldn’t find out the name of the frustrated head waiter at the restaurant featured in the movie. He’s snubbed not once, but twice, by Fred, Ann Miller and Peter Lawford, when they leave the restaurant without dining. His facial expressions and gestures are great fun to watch.

Fred’s “Steppin’ Out” number is the most interesting and difficult one in the movie. Besides the coreography, which is complicated enough, Fred does something amazing here. When you watch the scene, you wonder why it’s raised by about 2 inches halfway down its depth. Fred and the dancers have to watch out for that ledge, and it just doesn’t make sense, until something amazing happens at its end. The camera angle changes suddenly, and Fred starts moving in slow motion while the dancers in the background continue through at a normal pace. It is then that we realize the raised floor was used to delineate between the two shots, which were superimposed to create this wonderful effect. Today, this might not seem like much, but back then, this was amazing stuff. It’s similar to the special effects used by Fred in the Bojangles dance of Swing Time (1936).

Finally, it’s wonderful to watch the Fred and Judy’s vagabond dance. They’re dressed in the funniest outfits, and they play the roles of two “well-to-do” tramps who would like to make it to the town’s upper crust social events, but have no transportation. Ligia and I were rolling in laughter on our couch as we watched this. Judy’s got the ugliest wig, and they both have one of their front teeth blacked out. Come to think of it, it reminds me of Cary Grant’s wig in I Was a Male War Bride (1949). It does my heart good to see a number like this. It’s just wonderful!

Easter Parade is a wonderful movie, made memorable by the amazing coreography, music, and the chemistry between the actors who play in it – all true masters of their craft.

(This review has also been published at BlogCritics.)

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Thoughts

In praise of CD mixes

Ligia and I went on a road trip this past Memorial Day weekend, and I put together CD mixes for the trip instead of taking an iPod along. The result was surprisingly good. In the past, I’d simply take the iPod along, plug it in, set it on Shuffle, and go, but the sheer volume of music made it hard for me to enjoy it much. I like to get a sense of closure to my trips, and going through one or two or three CD’s does it for me. I know each one will take about an hour or so, depending on how many songs I burned on it. With an iPod, I arrive at my destination, and I still have another few hundred hours of music before I’ve gotten to the end of my collection. It’s not as fulfilling.

I also like the thought and effort that goes into making a mix CD. I have to sit there and manually select each song, place it in a playlist, then burn it to a CD. When I pull out that warm CD from the computer, I feel like I created something. It gives me a little sense of achievement, however minuscule it may be. I also enjoy the CD more, knowing I wanted each song to be there, and I chose it for that particular trip. I don’t get that with my iPod, not nearly as much. Instead, I have to skip through many songs I don’t feel like listening to at a particular time, and that’s annoying.

Where I think the iPod proves its usefulness is with repeated use. CDs will tend to skip after being played several times in the car, whereas an iPod won’t. Yes, I’m aware of the ability of copying playlists to the iPod and playing them, but somehow the decidedly low-tech CD gives me a little more satisfaction. Just like inserting a coin in a jukebox, sliding a CD into my car’s CD player lets me know I’ll get a tangible amount of entertainment I’ll want to listen to.

Finally, it’s still troublesome to use an iPod in the car. There still aren’t simple, easy to use solutions out there. There’s either a radio transmitter, which gives you radio-quality sound, with static and interference in densely populated areas, or the various incantations of data links, each of which works in its own, limited ways. Some allow you access to the entire library, but degrade the sound quality somewhat, and you can’t control the volume and the tracks from the car’s stereo, while some will allow you to do just that while preserving sound quality, but limiting access to the entire iPod library. With the latter, you’re stuck making and playing custom playlists, while making sure each can’t exceed 99 songs, etc. For the money, data links are still pretty annoying, and that’s why I say CD mixes still rule.

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Thoughts

The world wouldn't be the same without Romania

This video will show you why Romania is a wonderful and inventive country. Yes, it was sponsored by some beer companies, but it’s very nicely put together, and the things it talks about are all true.

The subjects presented in the video are listed below in the order of appearance:

  • The invention of the fountain pen, by Petrache Poenaru
  • The invention of the cybernetic model, by Stefan Odobleja
  • Insulin, invented by Nicolae Paulescu
  • The first jet-powered aircraft, invented by Henri Coanda
  • The first History of Religions, written by Mircea Eliade
  • Defending four penalty strokes in a row – done by Helmut Ducadam, in the soccer World Cup of 1986
  • The second most spoken language at Microsoft is Romanian
  • The Maramures Gates – some of the most beautifully sculpted wooden gates in the world
  • Romanian girls are some of the most beautiful in the world – I should know, I married one!
  • The sculpture of Constantin Brancusi
  • Brancovenean Architecture
  • Baseball (its grandfather, anyway – the sport got started all the way back in 1364)

In case you’d like to learn more about Romania, ICI.ro has a great collection of illustrious Romanians right here. Use the link menu on the right hand side to brows by subjects like Geography, History, Politics, Culture and Tourism.

(Thanks, Cristina!)

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Thoughts

Quote for today

H. Mumford Jones – “Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.”

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How To

Moving email from a PC to the Mac

Background

For the purposes of this guide, I’m going to assume that you were using Outlook or Outlook Express on the PC, and you want to import your messages into the Mail app that ships with Mac OS X. I speak from personal experience with this guide. I had to do this when I switched from a PC to a Mac in September of ’05. I’ve finally solved the last piece of the puzzle, and I wanted to share this information with you so it won’t take you as long as it took me.

I had an email archive that spanned close to 10 years – a fairly complete one at that. I’d been keeping it in Outlook Express, then Outlook, over the years. When I switched to the Mac, I didn’t want to lose it. My wife had an archive that spanned a few years as well, and she kept it in Outlook. We didn’t want to lose those messages, either. As you know, there’s no easy way to import email directly from the PC into the Mac. There’s no nice and easy transfer wizard, for multiple reasons: different operating systems, different file systems, different ways of storing the mail, different applications, etc. Even if there had been a wizard, given my huge mail archive, I’d have probably crashed it.

What didn’t work

Still, I tried to be reasonable. I thought equivalent Microsoft products on the two platforms might be able to import from each other. So I took my PST from my PC, transferred to my Mac, and opened Entourage (the Outlook equivalent on the Mac). The import failed. The two can’t talk to each other. You can’t import between them either way. I thought that was pretty silly. Of all the things Microsoft does wrong, this has to be one of the more obvious ones.

Next I tried the less possible, which was to import from the PST file directly into Mail. That didn’t work, either. I surfed the internet for solutions, and stumbled across a possibility of installing Eudora on the PC, importing from Outlook into it, then copying the library onto the Mac, and using some special utility to do the PC to Mac translation. Well, Eudora failed on the import from Outlook. Again, I had a big PST, I wasn’t surprised. Plus, even when I tried transferring the messages it had managed to copy to the Mac, the utility didn’t do its job. At any rate, I hadn’t put my hopes in Eudora. It might have been all the rage in the early nineties, but it’s pretty useless now. Somebody else suggested using old versions of Netscape Mail. I tried that as well, only to fail again.

I called Apple Support, who were completely clueless about this. Finally, on my second try, the technician suggested I use an IMAP account to transfer the email between the two computers. I saw two problems with that, both related to the size of my archive: one, where am I going to find an IMAP account with more than 4GB of storage, and two, I’m not going to sit there and upload over 4GB of data through my DSL connection. It was going to take days, if not more. Obviously, not a very practical solution.

➡ Updated 1/3/08: Gmail now offers more than 6 GB (and growing) of email storage, and includes both POP and IMAP access.

What worked

Just so I won’t drag this out needlessly, Thunderbird turned out to be the best solution for the transfer. I installed it on the PC, imported from Outlook into it, then transferred the mailbox files to the Mac, where I had to delete the mailbox index files (.msf) files, and only leave the un-indexed data files there. That’s because the Mac version of Thunderbird needs to build its own indexes. So, I located the directory where the email got stored for Thunderbird on my Mac, moved the mailboxes there, and deleted the index files. I then opened up Thunderbird, and after it re-built the indexes, there were my messages! After all the trouble, I was pretty happy!

Next, I wanted to get my email into Mail. This is the step that took the longest for me, and I just solved it yesterday. Granted, I hadn’t been looking very hard since last September… Now, some of you might be asking yourselves why in the world I’d want to switch from Thunderbird to Mail, and I’ve got two reasons: one, and the most important, Spotlight indexes Mail messages, so I can search for what I need from one location, and two, iPhoto sends out photos through Mail, and we email photos a lot; we wanted to have our email messages in one place. Yes, I know, we should share our photos on the web instead, etc…

So, how did I solve it? Certainly not by calling Apple Support, who are were clueless on this issue as well. And I also didn’t solve it by importing from Thunderbird into Mail, which is impossible (not any more), as you might find out if you try it. Version 2.0.7 of Mail crashes miserably, and has done so, reliably, since September of ’05, on my every attempt to import from Thunderbird. I choose Import, then I select the Other or the Netscape/Mozilla option (since Thunderbird isn’t listed as one of the options), then I browse for the location of the message databases, and when I select Import, it crashes like a drunk limousine driver.

Instead, I solved this by doing a search on the Apple Support forums, where intrepid users have posted some great solutions. Among them, I found the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. It’s a wonderful little utility that will let you drag your Thunderbird message databases onto its icon, and will automatically convert them to Mail message databases. It will also copy them to the proper Mail message library. All you need to do is sit back and wait for it to finish, then rebuild your Mail folders, and all your messages will appear – just follow the directions you’ll find on their website. The best part is that it didn’t crash while it processed my entire archive (over 4GB of messages)! Now that’s a reliable application!

➡ Updated 1/3/08: It turns out, as one of the commenters has pointed out, that Leopard’s version of Mail includes an import function from Thunderbird. Problem solved. Thanks Logan! Now I wonder if a new version of the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner will be released, or whether this new import feature in Mail will negate the need for it.

When I got done, I was ecstatic. All my mail is indexed with Spotlight, and I can instantly find messages and files that are years old without having to do separate searches for each!

Let’s review

  1. Install Thunderbird on PC, import from Outlook/Outlook Express into it.
  2. Install Thunderbird on Mac, note storage location for mail files.
  3. Copy message databases onto Mac, in the specific directory where mail is stored, delete index files, then start up Thunderbird and let it rebuild the indexes.
  4. Use the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to export to Mail. (only for OS X Tiger)
  5. Rebuild mailboxes in Mail, then relax, because you’re done! (only for OS X Tiger)
  6. If you have Leopard, skip steps 4 and 5, and use Mail’s import function to get your messages out of Thunderbird. (only for OS X Leopard)

💡 Thunderbird and the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner are free software. If you find them helpful, please don’t forget to donate to them, even if it’s just a few dollars. It’s the right thing to do if you want to support the efforts of their developers. Here is a donation link for Mozilla (the maker of Thunderbird), and here is a donation link for the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner.

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