Sunday 27 November 2016

Groucho Season?

The last week was eventful: a dark night-time walk between villages, upgrading of the computers up to Fedora 25, an online dating scam, the car hiding away at the garage, the first successful breading of something (chicken and mushrooms), a new undergraduate student, and of course the obligatory cancellations that come with the season. That night time walk stands out, though, as previously noted a few days ago, in 'Scary And Beautiful'. The low water mark was installing Fedora 25, which is shipping with a really rotten version of VLC and some shocking sluggishness. It seems 23 may be the last great version for a while... Compiling a decent version of VLC from scratch seems to bring so much dependency baggage that it's almost not worth it. However, let us not dwell on these petty things, gentle readers.

To bread something, for those not initiated into the mystery, you need some crumbs, some beaten egg, and some flour. You then dip the item to be breaded into the bowls in this order: flour, egg, crumb. Then, having prepared a tray, with the breaded items placed upon it, you stick it in the oven and hope for the best. For best results, you add seasoning and herbs to the flour, or is it to the crumb? I'm not sure at this point, it having been an excessively long weekend of tedium. Installing computers can be tiresome work indeed.

In other activities, 'The Music Man' retained its reputation as one of the great screen musicals on its latest showing here, 'Groucho Marx, Private Eye' is living up to the standard of the first book in the series. They probably deserve their own posts here at the Quirky Muffin, actually, being just different enough to be interesting in comparison to more conventional mysteries. Ron Goulart certainly seems to have caught the knack of writing Groucho for most of the time. Speaking of Groucho Marx, his 1972 revival performance is available at www.archive.org, and is pretty good. It's called 'An Evening With Groucho'. Any excuse to hear him sing 'Lydia, The Tattooed Lady' again is enough.

Perhaps Christmas 2016 will be Groucho season here on the blog, if I really know enough about the man. However, there are those four classic Paramount movies to write about, the Goulart detective novels, 'An Evening With Groucho' and the accumulated other content, already touched on with 'Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel'. Maybe that's not such a bad idea?

O.

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