A good review
I love Almanac Weekly. It’s full of good things. I am very interested in films and as a senior, I am quite knowledgeable about Hollywood and the film industry the way it used to be during the so-called Golden Age. And it’s quite true — it was The Golden Age.
I want to commend your movie critic Frances Marion Platt. She is a very astute critic. Her reviews of Hyde Park on Hudson and Les Misérables were right on the mark.
No one ever mentions in reviews of these current films the previous versions, which were classics each in their own way.
Sunrise at Campobello with Ralph Bellamy’s performance as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Greer Garson as Eleanor Roosevelt. I have this film on VH9 and have watched it many times. In contrast to Hyde Park on Hudson being filmed in England for some ridiculous reason, the scenes in the Bellamy film were shot at Hyde Park.
As for Les Misérables, (aside from the fact that they even want to make such an epic into a musical astounds me), I also have the version in black and white with Fredric March and Charles Laughton — two great actors made in 1935 the definite version of it.
I don’t particularly like the score of Les Mis. I’m a pianist and love playing songs from the great musicals.
Frances Marion Platt’s reviews are worth saving.
Robert Milroy
Rhinebeck
Stop spouting gun falsehoods
The mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. obliges us all to consider how such an event can occur. We should consider any mind, no matter how deranged, can formulate the idea to shoot first-graders. Similarly we should consider why our children reach for a gun and shoot each other over clothing, drugs or an insult.
Gun control is a mechanical and particularly a probabilistic solution to gun violence — the premise is, because the tool may enable the phenomenon, remove the tool and the phenomenon may happen less often. At the same time as Newtown, 22 Chinese schoolchildren were wounded by a deranged person wielding a knife. This was seized on as proof of the value of gun control, because with a knife they were only wounded. I suggest a different conclusion: it was mere chance that the perpetrator only wounded them; the results could well have been the same as Newtown.
Regarding semiautomatic assault weapons, New York currently has a ban on them identical to the 1994 federal ban, based on them accommodating a magazine holding more than 10 rounds, and being designed with two or more features which make them look like the military guns they are sometimes derived from. Guns with completely different designs shooting the same bullet and thus having the same destructive power are legally available.
Whether the banned features multiply the guns’ potential to kill is at best questionable, and statistics show that the 1994 federal ban had a negligible effect on crime, significantly because assault weapons are used in a tiny fraction of crime to begin with.
As regards sporting purposes, AR semiautomatic rifles, derived from the military’s M-16 machine gun, are the predominant gun used in civilian rifle competitions, which were originally established by Congress. Statistics say that 55,000 people participate in those competitions per year, and millions more use the same guns, legally and peacefully, in informal target shooting. The claim that they have no sporting purpose is false.
There are no simple answers to this question. We need to exert ourselves to get past politicization and hankering for quick, popular fixes, to come to terms with what underlies gun violence. To start, all sides need to do better than spouting canned political dogma, particularly if it’s based on falsehoods.
Johannes Sayre
Kingston
Status of fracking and our state-wide key actions
What is the status of horizontal High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (HVHF) in New York State?
RECENT PAST: (1) Wednesday 1500 of us from every corner of the state came to Albany to rally during the State of the State address asking Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban this toxic form of drilling for shale gas. (2) On Thursday three New York State Assembly committees including the Standing Committees on Health and Environmental Conservation held hearings to receive comments on the HVHF regulations proposed by the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) with participation of environmentalists, health professionals, local elected officials, gas and oil industry representatives and various proponents of HVHF. (3) Friday environmental groups delivered 204,000 comments (not including online and snail mail entries) to the Dept. of Environmental Conservation on why these current draft regulations to govern HVHF are inadequate and will not protect us.
PRESENT: (1) As the sole decision maker Gov. Cuomo still needs to hear from every New Yorker (even once a week) at 518-474-8390. Post on his Facebook page. Tell him that the risks of HVHF (also called fracking) to air, water, public health, the environment and future generations far outweigh the benefits. And that the only safe drilling is no drilling; he must ban fracking now as he leads the state into a 21st century green energy future and away from a 20th century fossil fuel hazard. (2) It is of KEY importance to find out if your friends, family and colleagues across the state are un-informed or mis-informed and recommend this 150 second overview at www.tinyurl.com/batakx3 .
FUTURE: The Governor will most likely decide by the end of February. If he gives the go ahead to frack, nyagainstfracking.org will have our next steps. This action will be either fulfilling the pledge thousands of us New Yorkers have signed for nonviolent civil disobedience or a march and rally in Albany in the tens of thousands. I prefer the later as the first step so please stay informed and be prepared to drop everything and show up in Albany. I am very inspired by a May 2011 march of over 30,000 citizens in Puerto Rico who (because of their numbers) saw the cancellation of the 92 mile Vía Verde Natural Gas Pipeline across their country. We can do the same and stop this potential destruction (think BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf) from moving one step forward, should the need arise.
Rosalyn Cherry
New Paltz
Can American sanity return?
There have been 7 mass shootings in 2012, including the one in a Movie theatre where 12 were killed and 58 wounded, one in Wisconsin where 6 were killed and the recent one in an elementary school, where 26 children were killed.
Of these mass murders it is reported that about l/4 of the guns were obtained illegally. Half of the killings were in schools and workplaces, also malls and religious buildings. Only one of the mass murderers was a woman. Many were attributed to mental health problems.
At least 1 in 5 adults or 57.7 million Americans experience some sort of mental health disorder in a given year. One in 17 Americans live with mental illness such as schizophrenia; depression or bipolar disorder and 1 in l0 children have serious mental disorders. We know that we have to attempt to force our “representatives” to put some regulations into gun legislation, (not to mention those crazy video games), so let’s skip to the main causes of mental illness. Let’s turn to Toxins and Climate Change, (i.e. Global Warming, which is what it is). Toxins cause mental illness. I’m not going to make the scientific case here, it’s just true. So you might ask: why so many toxins?
The answer: Money and greed! Coke and Pepsi recently took some of the cancer causing ingredients out of their products, but good luck if you’ve been drinking it all of your life. Fish like tuna have mercury in them. If you live near a nuclear power plant, I would imagine that you already feel it, and now with Fracking, we’ll be getting all kinds of toxins including methane, which causes autism, from our drinking water. (Couple that with no gun control.)
Toxins cause mental illnesses, as well as physical – so…. I agree that mentally ill people shouldn’t be allowed to have guns, and particularly mass weapons, but then we have a few other problems at this particular place in time. We are living in a toxic word,, which was caused by greed. The BOGI’S (Big Oil and Gas Industry’s) They just can’t get enough money. I just don’t understand what they plan to do with it. Do they really think that money will allow their estates to be protected from the earth wide toxins that they’ve created, or do they just feel that they’ll live it out – and forget about their own children?
Jill Paperno
Glenford
Ash borer outbreak
There is what is most likely an emerald ash borer outbreak on 212 between Woodstock and Saugerties near old 212 and Band Camp. The woodpeckers have stripped the bark and are eating the borers, so you can tell the infested trees by the stripped bark. I talked with the DEC invasives people and they said it was best, if the trees are still alive, to cut and burn the trees on the spot or cut the tree to pieces on the ground on the spot so it dries out and is no longer a host. It is important not move any of the infested wood from the immediate outbreak area or it will spread.
Alex Lines
Mt. Tremper
Tesla Gets Shortchanged Again
Bob Berman in the December 27 Almanac Night Sky column mentions physicist Victor Hess as the first one to discover, in 1912, that Cosmic Rays are coming from the sky.
The Great Nikola Tesla discovered them in 1896. Here is what he said: “They can steal from me and conceal me, they laughed at me when I discovered Cosmic Rays in 1896, they called me crazy when I predicted radio in 1892…still, no power on earth can deprive me of the imperishable glory for I will still be recognized by posterity as the original discoverer of Cosmic Rays and the Father of Wireless.”
In London, England, on February 3, 1892 in his lectures at the Institute of Electrical Engineers, and the next day, February 4, at the Royal Institute, Tesla didn’t just predict radio, he demonstrated basic principles and components for radio signaling to ‘any’ distance. Among his resonance circuits he displayed his famous Tesla bulb (oscillator and detector) forerunner of the vacuum tube.
Milan Cupurdija
Woodstock
Bob Berman replies: I like Tesla, too, but Hess is credited with the discovery of cosmic rays. He even won the Nobel Prize for the discovery. See the Wikipedia article on Cosmic Rays (or check any physics textbook.)
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