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Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean, on returning to earth after walking on the moon:

Since that time, I have not complained about the weather one single time. I’m glad there is weather. I’ve not complained about traffic. I’m glad there’s people around.

One of the things that I did when I got home, I went down to shopping centers, and I’d just go around there, get an ice cream cone or somethin’, and just watch the people go by, and think: “Boy, we’re lucky to be here. Why do people complain about the earth? We are living in the Garden of Eden.”

(This is from the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon.)

In my younger days, I was a huge fan of Marvel comic books.

I enjoyed the first two Spider-Man movies. I cringed through both Fantastic Four movies. I’m eager to see Iron Man when it comes out on DVD — probably around Thanksgiving time.

I didn’t know what to make of Ang Lee’s Hulk movie. Frankly, it left me baffled. I didn’t enjoy it, but I thought maybe I could see it five years later and say, “Are you kidding? It’s brilliant!”

Now, five years later, it looks like they’re trying again. Universal is promoting another Hulk movie, scheduled to open June 13th.

Unfortunately, the computer-graphics Hulk still looks like a character from a video game.

Who knows? Maybe in another five years…

Fans of old BBC TV, particularly Doctor Who, may enjoy this visit to the old sound effects workshop.

People unfamiliar with those old shows will find themselves saying, “That’s a door?”

Update: This must be Dalek day on the prestigious internet. Boing Boing found a voice-changing Dalek helmet. But what if you already sound like a Dalek?

I feel good knowing that voters play a small, but important, part in the process of electing a president.

I don’t think anybody in the Daily Show audience has seen The Grapes of Wrath.

Via Boing Boing:

Wildly Popular ‘Iron Man’ Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film

Hollywood ruins everything.

I could hardly believe this.

I used to watch The Adventures of Robin Hood, a weekly TV show starring Richard Greene. I enjoyed it then, but I was very young, and now I don’t know whether it was any good or not.

We shall see.

Amazon.com is offering the complete first season on DVD for only $5.49. It’s 39 half-hour episodes on three discs. Even if my memories are wrong and the show is terrible, that might be a fair price for three shiny coasters to put under a drink.

The great British actor Paul Scofield has died. Here’s a short scene from A Man for All Seasons, in which Scofield played Sir Thomas More.

Roper: So, now you give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down (and you’re just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

As everyone knows, all wisdom is contained in the movie The Empire Strikes Back. Naturally — it’s got Yoda.

One of the big slam-bang wisdom scenes in the movie occurs when Luke Skywalker tries to levitate his crashed spaceship out of a swamp. Luke grimaces and strains, and manages to raise the ship a few inches, but then he collapses and the ship sinks even deeper into the muck. “It’s too big,” he gasps.

Yoda tells Luke that size doesn’t matter. “My ally is the Force,” he says. It is a field created by all living things. It’s particularly strong in the swamp, which teems with life. “And a powerful ally it is,” collectively much bigger and more powerful than Luke, or Yoda, or the sunken spaceship. Then he raises the ship and moves it to dry land.

Luke failed because he thought he was doing it himself.

In last week’s debate, Hillary Clinton said, “The question that I have been posing is, who can actually change the country?” She says she can.

Remember Hillary’s tongue-in-cheek Christmas campaign ad, where she was wrapping up “universal health care,” “alternative energy,” “bring troops home,” and “middle-class tax breaks” as the gifts she was giving to the American people? It bothered me. I still like to imagine we have government by the people, not by the president.

In a speech last month, she said, “It’s about picking a president who relies not just on words but on work, hard work, to get America back to work.”

Just words? Obama has inspired millions of Americans who were sitting on the sidelines to get involved in building a stronger and better America — an involvement that doesn’t end on Election Day, but only begins then.

If Clinton thinks that doesn’t matter — that his message is “just words” — if she thinks that solutions to the country’s problems can be her gift to us; if she thinks she can grimace and strain and make the change America needs by the force of her will, then I think she is not a Jedi yet.

On a DVD, playing on a big screen, with surround sound, this scene from Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams is just breathtaking. I don’t know how effectively it will come across in a YouTube video — it’s certainly no substitute for seeing the movie properly — but I hope you’ll be able to see why I think this is worth sharing.

In fact, it’s good to be alive. It’s exciting.

You can never get enough of what you don’t really need. — Harold Ramis, quoting “a very wise person” in an interview on the newly-released DVD of the 1967 movie, Bedazzled, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

I grew up mostly in Bellefontaine, Ohio, about sixty miles northwest of Columbus.

It was a quiet little town. We would get excited whenever Bellefontaine was mentioned on one of the Dayton or Columbus TV stations — that was the Big Time! — and frustrated if they pronounced it Bell-fon-TAYNE. We pronounced it Bell-FOUN-tin.

We were proud of our little town. We had the first concrete street in America — a test of whether concrete made sense as a paving material — and the shortest street in the world. (Wikipedia says the “shortest street” claim is in dispute.)

Bellefontaine is near the highest point in Ohio — which is also the highest point between the Allegheny and the Rocky Mountains. When I lived there, the two local radio stations were WOHP (Ohio’s Highest Point) and WTOO (Top Of Ohio), so you can tell we were proud of that, too.

The Bellefontaine Opera House opened in 1880, and when I was growing up I was told that, in its time, many prominent performers had played there, including the great W.C. Fields.

But maybe I got that last part wrong.

I just got this collection of W.C. Fields movies and watched The Old Fashioned Way. Except for an early train sequence, the whole movie is set in Bellefontaine, Ohio. Fields is The Great McGonigle, head of a theatrical troupe who perform at the Bellefontaine Opera House. I thought it might be a Bellefontaine in some other state, or a purely imaginary Bellefontaine, but the address on a letter delivered to McGonigle at the end of the movie removed all doubt.

What a surprise! What a thrill! I’m sitting on Top of Ohio! This is the Big Time!

I’m only sorry that, though the whole movie, everybody except one Pullman porter pronounced it Bell-fon-TAYNE.

Drat!

From Boing Boing: Nemo has been found.

One more reason not to eat sushi.

One of my most-awaited TV series is finally being released on DVD: WKRP in Cincinnati.

According to Amazon.com, the first season will be released on April 24. I’m ready!

I’m a big fan of the old Stan Lee - Jack Kirby Fantastic Four, but not of the 2005 Fantastic Four movie.

I’m sure the forthcoming movie sequel will be another terrible disappointment, but the title is Rise of the Silver Surfer, and there’s a teaser trailer here. What? No sign of Galactus?

Well, I’m a glutton for punishment. Bring it on.

From the 1934 movie Six of a Kind, W.C. Fields tells how he got the name of “Honest John.”

Seems it would have been tough to stand by while Fields worked and keep a straight face.