December 2021 recap

The WP map shows my hits have come from 29 countries around the world. China at #4! Romania & Jamaica in the top 10! Most popular posts were, as expected, the sets of Christmas Lights – Lights Delight. Tied top blogs were Here to Stay & Measuring Up. Both of which are personal faves as well.

Picture Perfect: 98 sections, about 142,000 words posted so far with approximately 45,000 to be edited then posted. I made another major cut of just over 4200 words – fun stuff but a tangent that didn’t add enough to any of the plots. There’ll be more cuts to come in what remains – so maybe Perfect will be done by the end of 2022. Then what?

Watched a great Argentine film-noir La Beastia Debe Morir adapted from the novel The Beast Must Die. The novel begins with a diary entry “I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him …” Which is perhaps one of the best openings I have ever read next to “Which one of us is going to kill Mother.” Anyway the film adaptation beings with the killing, eventually gets to the reason. It is tense, heated & excellent. I recorded it from TCM.

Alan Zweig’s follow up to his 2000’s Vinyl is called, for some reason, ‘Records.’ It is another, less depressing, look at record collectors & what drives them to collect. The collectors run from single men, women, married couples with children, even one gender questioner. Having been an amasser at one point I have major empathy for these people & the lure of one more. Not that I don’t have a vast mp3 collection already, but you know one more is waiting to discover me.

Fortunately, I guess, for me the closing credits that listed all the music played slid past too fast & was too small for me to read 🙂 There was more than one moment of ‘listen to this’ as an interviewee dropped the needle on a track. That brought many memories of me doing the same for a friend. I have to admit I did make note of a couple of lps: J. K & Co., Rusty Kershaw & listened to samples on YouTube but stopped there. Both Vinyl & Records are highly recommended.