New Year memo

Happy new year everybody, it’s that time of year again when we have to remember to use a new number from now on. I know you people are out there dating things. Get it right. Traditionally, for this New Year post, I put up pictures of my cats—Sam (gray) and Golly Gee (tuxedo)—one at a time in alternating years. That’s Golly over there contemplating light. The late Esme, Annabelle, and Charlie also made appearances likewise. But this year (with my first smartphone!) I got a good picture of Sam and Golly, actually together (below). So it’s been a big cat year and smartphone year too, among other things. As for blog stuff, it feels like I have been slowly falling behind in my reading (and a current slump is not helping anything) so I may be missing some Sunday book reviews here and there this year and/or there may be more stories. I looked up one day and suddenly realized how short-story-intensive this blog has morphed into being over the years—horror stories, for example, will continue on Thursdays. I’m also going to spend another year, on the last Sundays of every month, on a decade-by-decade tour of horror stories, this year starting in the 2020s and finishing in the 1910s. Don’t worry, I won’t make a habit of it—next year (‘24) I plan to use those last Sundays to focus on Hemingway stories. I will still be doing at least one album per month (on Saturdays), but albums are no longer the main focus they started out being here. Maybe streaming did it to me. I have so successfully replicated the programming styles of radio between 1965 and 1981 that shuffling one playlist with songs going in and out is mostly the way I do it now. My heart is in those quarterly Top 40 installments, which will continue, Napster willing. What else? Looking forward to the shakeup the Sight & Sound poll will have on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? lists. I thought that poll landing on Jeanne Dielman as the greatest movie ever made was brilliant (inadvertently, of course, by way of statistical calculations that merely suggest a kind of consensus) and I was sorry to see people I want to admire like Paul Schrader getting grumpy about it. Everyone, please stop using the word “woke” immediately. I promise that’s the last time I will ever use it myself. Anyway, TSPDT classic movies and 21st-century picks will continue to dominate the longer Friday reviews. Monday reviews became a little problematic as the pandemic proceeded. They’re supposed to be new movies but have turned more into whatever is around on streaming that’s both affordable ($6 top price, preferably free) and interesting to me, however fleeting. I’m also in a little bit of a slump about watching movies now—it’s harder to finish many of them. I lose interest and drift away. I’m hoping to brave theaters again circa April and may get back to that “new” mode then. OK, yeah, so I think that covers all the days of the week that I publish. All the best to all for a happy new year!