Fred, Barney & Alec Guinness

No blogging till Sunday or so. Best to all for Thanksgiving.

Till then, some odds and ends. A local radio news report this morning claimed that today, in fact, is the busiest day of the year at O’Hare International Airport, in terms of the number of human beings who arrive, depart and transfer there. A madding, and probably maddening, crowd. I’ve flown on days like that. No thanks.

At least the skies are clear and the winds light, so there wouldn't have been the standard weather-delay shots on local TV news tonight of people sleeping at O’Hare boarding gates. Or the standard interviews of Families Who Just Want to Get Home for the Holiday, But Can’t. I sympathize, but what’s the news value in that?

Friday is Buy Nothing Day. I’m unpersuaded of some of the creators’ (a group called Adbusters) ecological premises, such as “the Earth could die because of the way Americans live,” or its sociological notions, namely that Americans are uniquely pathological in our consumer acquisitiveness. Just more successful, perhaps. Still, I like the idea of such a day, if only because of personal inclinations. My quixotic dream would be to buy all the nonperishable goods I ever needed at once, and then never have to buy any more of them again. With certain exceptions, of course, mainly books.

Netflix certainly doesn’t promote DVD acquisitiveness, since they go back by return post. Just send back Season 1, Vol. 1 of The Flintstones. I remember it as a Saturday morning cartoon, not a prime-time series. In fact, I think I was in my 20s before I realized that it had originally been in prime time, running longer than any other cartoon of the pre-Simpsons era.

The DVD colors are lush, which made me wonder why Hanna-Barbera bothered with color at all in 1960, when most TV shows were still black and white. Also, either Fred Flintstone mellowed slightly over time, or I misremember his character, but there were moments in these early episodes when he reminded me more of Moe Howard than Ralph Kramden. At one point he clonked Barney on the head despite discovering the he, Fred, had been mistaken about Barney taking something of his. He then told a puzzled Barney, “That’s for the next time you do something wrong.”

Kind Hearts and Coronets also went back recently. One day a few months ago, I decided I hadn’t seen nearly enough Ealing comedies, creations of a British studio of that name in the late 1940s and early ’50s, so I put several in my Netflix queue. Considering all the interruptions around here, it takes three or four sittings at least at work my way through a feature-length movie, but I've seen two so far. The Lavender Hill Mob came first, then Kind Hearts.

Droll comes to mind, though the word hardly does either of them justice, since they’re so much more. They’re comedy for grownups, for moviegoers that the filmmakers assumed were paying attention. It takes a deft touch to make movies about grand larceny and mass murder and yet leave the audience smiling.