Buried Treasure, a movie by Jeff Galfer and Leslie Hope.

Buried Treasure, a film by Jeff Galfer and Leslie Hope.

The popular reification of the male mid-life crisis is the hot red sports car. As the modern, middle class man approaches middle age, it is said, he takes a look at the amount of time allotted him by his DNA and lifestyle and implacable fate, or whatever else it is that he thinks controls his comings and goings, and he panics. What has he done with his life? Why did he not take up skydiving or cave diving, or just diving into something a little more risky than double AA bonds? Why didn't he make love to that blonde who lived down the hall when he was twenty-seven and not yet married? Well, damn it, there is still some time left. There is still some gas in the tank. And there is the red sports car zooming around the curves in the commercials.
But what if death itself, rather than the mere pungent whiff of mortality, were to intervene, precipitating the crisis? Not his own death, but that of the woman he loves?
Life is a merry-go-round, a carousel in a microwave. That's the image that we get of our hero Mark's existence in the first shot of Buried Treasure, a thirty-two-minute-long feature written by and starring Jeff Galfer, directed by Leslie Hope.
Mark's life is an autopiloted cycle that makes a hamster wheel seem as though it would be meaningful. His job appears to consist of listening to his boss Jerry (Gregg Henry) hypochondriacally diagnose himself with yet another hernia, followed by a game of Hot-Cold for plastic dinnerware. (They are tax accountants, evidently. The idle season lasts forever for accountants.) Mark eats frozen Lean Cuisine at home and at the office, wrapped around a stop at an otherwise empty diner for an equally tasteless salad supper. Other than his boss, the waitress is the only other person with whom he has any contact. His schlep from home to office and from office to home is robotic, annotated by the GPS in his car. His house is barren, the pile of unopened mail the principal sign of occupancy. He lives out of boxes, the house being but a larger one. He doesn't sleep, or if he does, it is while sitting fully dressed in a chair or hanging from an inversion table. And even so, he has three alarm clocks. His suits are as brownly dull as his life.
It isn't until almost five minutes into the movie that we get a hint of the cause of his surrender to bleakness. We are suddenly pulled into Mark's memories of his wife. Or is it a fantasy? An idyll of a sleepwalker? No, it is memory. A haunting.
Mark's programming breaks down only when his car's computer suffers a crash, forcing Mark to divert, literally, from the well-worn way. He pulls into a gas station. He ignores the station attendant's attempts to converse. It is only when Mark wordlessly, without any noticeable gesture, sends out the signal that he wants to use the restroom, that we see a hint that there is more going on than a rest stop.
In the restroom, Mark, attracted to the gurgling of the toilet tank, removes the lid and finds a small plastic box floating in the water. In it is a Matchbox 1979 metallic red Corvette. The transformative and metaphorical crisis has arrived. With it is a note: "My first toy. Boy did I love this thing."
The attendant tells him of the reason that the toy car was concealed in the toilet tank. The attendant is part of a subculture of geocachers, who hide things and then post the GPS coordinates, so that others can find them. "Why?" Mark asks. Mark knows nothing of the hunt, and had found the toy by accident. Why? The attendant explains that it is in some manner a way to leave something of himself for others to find. A bid for immortality. The little red car that defies time, age, death. In a pivotal moment, sensing Mark's aimlessness, the attendant gives Mark the car. (And Mark gives it to his boss, who seems to need it.)
From there, Mark becomes alive again, even if he doesn't quite know it yet. In his otherwise empty garage is a box of things he can't classify. A couple of scarves, a flower-patterned collapsible umbrella with a silver-toned handle, photos. And a crayon drawing that he and his wife had made. Mark has a purpose now. He gathers things that his wife left behind, including a large, unfinished bottle of prescription painkillers, and packs them in a suitcase.
Driving to the desert, Mark leaves his car, and walks out into the sand with a shovel and the suitcase. At first, we think that he is going to bury the suitcase. Then we get the gut punch: He is about to commit suicide. But it is here that the transformation is completed. He leaves behind everything, except the umbrella and his underwear, building a shrine to his one treasure, the memory of his first date with his wife, for others to find. And they do, hiking across the desert, each person leaving a message, if only in the form of a lipstick lip imprint on the back of the drawing.
Life isn't a closed loop. The road goes on. You don't need the little red sports car to take you where that road leads. You can just walk.

Elegy in Gray.

She lay on the bed, seemingly weighed down by the sheet that covered her thin body. The word “frail” had been used with increasing frequency in the past month. It had first surfaced during her last visit to the GP, four weeks ago. She had recently recovered from the latest of a series of respiratory infections, but she had a persistent, annoying cough -- incipient acute bronchitis. The doctor suggested that she might not respond well to extreme lifesaving measures such as chest compressions. Her frailty would make her liable to broken bones. It was further suggested that a Do Not Resuscitate order, antiseptically called a DNR,  be signed. The form was simple, and it went home with her. She showed no interest in it, despite the living will she had drawn up eighteen years earlier.

She was sleeping. Her breathing was regular and silent. It seemed a shame to wake her, but I knew that I must. I stood on the left side of the bed, next to the drip which nourished her and provided antibiotics and a diuretic. I reached beneath the sheet and found her hand. It was warm, almost childlike in size. She didn’t not notice. I spoke a few words. Her eyes blinked open, and I spoke a few more words. There was no recognition.

Her will had been, perhaps, her most distinguishing personality trait. She had faced and overcome more obstacles in her life than any two or three other persons. The story was that she had been born during a late-winter blizzard March 1, 1916 in the aptly-named Stormville. A blue baby, her father had rubbed her with corn liquor and wrapped her in a rough blanket until the doctor could arrive. There was also talk about a cold porch to stimulate her. It was the first of many tests of her strength of will.

She had seven brothers and sisters. She was thirteen when the Great Depression knocked the country to its knees. A picture taken when she was sixteen shows a smiling, pretty girl, sitting on the steps of a house in her hometown. There was no hint of darkness in that sunny photograph. But the darkness was just beyond the door behind her. Her father battled regularly with her elder siblings. Two of her sisters were in open rebellion against his harsh treatment. She stood up for them. In a short time, she would follow them out the door of the family home, into an early marriage. The marriage would end in annulment, over the strong objections of her father.

She moved back home. Her father was an orphan, who had been educated at Girard College, a school for white, male orphans in Philadelphia, established by the will of America’s first millionaire, the financier of the American Revolution, Stephen Girard. One of grandfather’s sisters married well, becoming the second wife of Sebastian S. Kresge, the founder of Kresge Five-and-Dime stores, the rival of Woolworth and W.T. Grant. The corporation is now known as K-Mart and owns the other great 19th Century retail survivor, Sears, Roebuck and Company. A brother moved to Hawaii before the Second World War, establishing his family in the middle of the Pacific. But grandfather lived closer to the land. He farmed. He worked on the roads. He moved the family about, returning to Philadelphia. She met her second husband there. My future father pursued her, the story ran, despite her aversion to him. He dated one of her friends, with the objective of ingratiating himself with my mother. He was very charming in a crowd.

Being pursued was a narrative thread that gradually assumed greater and more frightening prominence in her life, eventually overshadowing everything. She had stories to tell. A mechanic wanted to impress her. As she told it, her car would not start. The mechanic took it into the garage to fix it. He got it running. Then it broke down again. She took it to another mechanic. He found sugar in the carburetor. Her stalker had sugared the gas to be close to her. That she was beautiful lent credence to the stories. She was a Rita Hayworth type. It was entirely believable that men would be knocked off their feet by her.

Married in June, 1941, she and my father would soon be part of the war effort on the home front. He built planes and ships, 4-F because of flat feet. They moved to Baltimore, where he built bombers, then moved back to Philly, where he worked in the Naval Yard as a shipfitter on the Liberty ship assembly line. At last, as the war dragged on, 4-F rejects were called up. He was drafted into Army Corps of Engineers. He was sent to the Pacific Theater, serving in the liberation of the Philippines. She worked as a cashier for a while at Sears on Roosevelt Boulevard. She hated the register, and wanted to tear out the keys. She spent the bleak nights cowering in fear in an apartment on North Broad Street.

After the war, things were alternately brighter and darker, but the progression was always to the darkness. It was four years until they added to the Baby Boom. They decided that Philadelphia was no place to rear a child, and, with the financial help of his mother, they bought some land across the Philadelphia line in still-rural Bucks County. The land was wet, swampy might be a more precise description, and therefore relatively cheap. They built a small house in what passed for the suburbs along the Old Lincoln Highway. Levittown was on the spatial and temporal horizon, only a few years and miles away.

In 1953, they moved again, selling the little house and using the money, as well as another loan from his mother, to build a larger house on a hillside. She was now taking Librium. There was a large wicker basket into which the empty pill bottles were deposited. Her moods were never quite under control. Around 1960, she stopped taking the tranquilizers, saying that she was “nervous” only because of Father. Her stories became increasingly more improbable. After her mother died, she began to smell a strange odor in her bedroom. She was convinced that she was being haunted. One day she reported that she had seen a bright red light rise up from the wooded lot next to our house. To a child, the stories were not all that odd. After all, perfectly reliable people have had ghostly experiences and seen UFOs. She was suspicious of everyone. Yet, being suspicious, she had a gift of perspicuity. She saw through pretensions and false smiles, getting to the unspoken aims. People always wanted something, and she, in her penetrating, corkscrew vision of the world, could “see around all the corners.” Those insights gave her other declarations the tinge of truth. Then the abyss opened. People were sending her obscene messages. Radio and TV news reporters were making direct reference to her. Aircraft contrails that crossed high in the stratosphere formed the “X” that marked the spot. Naturally, she fought back against these enemies. She knew, and she wouldn’t take it. Her will was unbending. While visiting me at college, she went to a lawyer and complained about a local solid citizen, supposedly making a threat against him. The lawyer violated confidence and she was sent to involuntary confinement at a state mental hospital.

These were the last days of the “snake-pits” run by the states, which warehoused mentally ill patients in dreadful squalor, depriving them of basic rights. Being “committed” could lead to a long, sometimes lifelong, often extra-judicial, sentence, in conditions that made the worst prisons seem luxurious. The lawyer’s misconduct provided a legal loophole. A court hearing established that the lawyer’s information was improper, and she was released, although a formal diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia was made. She refused treatment. She fought through the darkness. We moved again. The darkness followed, the always threatening but familiar forms drawing closer. Her disease had become crafty. It hid itself in company. It was as if the disease were a separate, cunning entity -- a demonic presence would have been the term in earlier centuries, which retreated into the locked corners of her mind from which it watched warily for its moment of escape, its malevolence building until it could no longer be contained. And it was cyclical. There would be long stretches, months perhaps, in which she appeared sweet and caring, but during which the fury was building, at last bursting out of confinement, finding the slightest pretext for wild accusations. Someone might have scratched his nose while standing in line at the supermarket: It was an insult. Someone else might have cut her office in traffic: Flooring the gas, she would set off in chase, heedless of the danger. Then it would subside, usually after some screaming confrontation at home. Finally, it became too much for my father. He simply walked away, hating her. He acknowledged that she was “sick,” but blamed her for it.

We tried a change of scene once again. Briefly, it seemed to work. We met her uncle, the very image of her father, in Hawaii. He was ninety-six and partially paralyzed, cared for by our cousin, his daughter. She was unmarried and completely consumed by his care. His resemblance to his older brother was a shock. When he died a year later, his daughter pined away.

Strangers and new surroundings removed for a time the connection to past persecutions, but only for a time. Strangers had no reason to be involved in the elaborate plot against her,  until the idea of money sprang into the equation. People were being paid to harass. Daily the place became more inimical. The complaints droned on like a constant background roar, rising and falling like the tides, sometimes exploding in outbursts of irrationality. She ran off twice. Only after a day long search was she found the first time. The second time she fled to someone she knew only through correspondence. Getting her back was more complicated. Another move was agreed.

By now, all the people who had been complicit in her original delusion were long dead. But the delusion found new actors, somehow mysteriously moved by dead hands. People were working to thwart her every act. Then the hallucinations began to come in earnest. The Gray People were lurking everywhere in the house. She could smell them. Dirty. They were always talking, whispering. Ghosts? Ghosts would be a relief. But, no, not ghosts. They were touching her. Things disappeared. Things were thrown away, burned, hidden. She knew nothing about all that, only that the Gray People were breaking in and stealing. The yelling began. All day, she screamed vile curses at them. Language that would melt the air was spewed at her tormentors. They were lying. “He’s not going to die.” “Get out.” Stop it.” “Make them stop jabbing me.” Then they would vanish for a time. Other behaviors took their place.

Once, on a cold February night, after 10 o’clock, she dressed herself in summer-weight clothing, all black, and walked out into the rural darkness. It was forty degrees. Frantic searching around outside the house found only emptiness. It was a common enough occurrence, elderly persons wandering off. Sometimes they would be found alive. Often their bodies would be found -- off in the woods, in a ditch along a roadside, behind a clump of live oak. The sheriff’s deputies were called. A helicopter with infrared detection capabilities thundered above, back and forth in the still, crisp air. A sergeant in a patrol car found her after half an hour, about a mile away, walking in the roadway. She was shivering, hypothermic. EMTs were called. They warmed her. What was she doing? Where was she going? “I was walking to town to get a cup of coffee.” Town was almost nine miles away. She was transported to the hospital, and involuntarily committed for observation.

Times had changed. No longer could a person be kept indefinitely confined for being mentally ill. There were limits to the period of observation, after which a judge must rule on any request from police, doctors or family to continue the hospitalization for purposes of treatment. The person must be a danger to himself or others. And even such orders are limited to a set span of weeks, after which another hearing is mandated. And the hospitals are not state-operated, but privately owned and run. Treatment beyond the minimum to stabilize the patient is almost always voluntary. And therein lies the great failure of the system. Scarcely ever do the mentally-ill patients choose to continue taking medication after the forced treatment has ended. The prescriptions are discarded or never refilled. And the illness returns. The cycle begins again. The state has solved its problem by washing its hands of its mentally-ill citizens. The whole responsibility of coping with mental illness falls upon the family. Often, as with my father, the burden becomes insupportable. Families members are forced to make choices of personal survival, choosing between their own survival and that of a loved one least capable of surviving alone.

When she was eighty, pneumonia crept into her. It was hardly noticeable. She hadn’t been eating. She had been taking lots of aspirin. Then she was in hospital. There was some gastric bleeding. She was told that she needed a transfusion, or she could die. She consented. She recovered. But whenever the hospitalization was mentioned, she insisted that she had died.

The hallucinations continued, as did the unpredictable forays into odd behavior. She wasn’t suffering dementia. She remembered everything, everything except what her disease concealed from her. At eighty-four, she climbed up on the roof of the house, from which she was rescued by the fire department. The illness seemed to unnaturally preserve her vitality. She was committed for observation again. Again she was treated and released. Again she refused to take medication.

Now there were people telling what she could and could not eat. She became thinner and her resistance to infection weakened. She became more confused and uncooperative. She developed an infection and was hospitalized. She seemed wasted and almost totally dissociated from reality. This time she was transported to a psychiatric hospital for primary treatment of both the infection and her psychosis. When she was physically well enough, a judge ordered her confined for two weeks, and she consented. After two weeks, the judge offered her a choice, consent to continue the medication or be ordered to take it. Of course, this order depended entirely upon the ability of the family to enforce it, and was essentially a impotent threat, but something had changed. She accepted the medication.

It was not a panacea. The hallucinations became less vivid, less urgent, but they were never entirely banished. She would ask if something were real. The improvement was most noticeable in her behavior, which became less combative. There were still bullheaded insistences, but they came less frequently. It was progress. Progress did not come without cost. There were side effects of the drug, primarily tremors and loss of balance. She slowed down, and the darkness gained ground, taking another shadowy form, this time on the x-rays of chest. Pneumonia, pleurisy, bronchitis successively invaded her lungs. The pattern was all-too common. A tenacious infection would yield only after a succession of antibiotics had been tried. There would be months of health, then a new infection, as tenacious as the previous one, would sap her strength. A new round of antibiotics would quell the infection, only to have it shift from one lung to the other. With each infection, she withdrew further into the gray world of her fears. During her last doctor’s appointment, she was almost mute, her most coherent moment coming when she asked, “Do you have my son’s chart?” Gradually, over three weeks, the bronchitis worsened. She would wake in the morning congested, coughing, unable to clear the mucus from her throat. She sat staring when awake. It was harder and harder to get her to respond. What was going on? “I’m holding on to my life.” Finally, she was choking.

She lay on the bed. There was nothing more for me to do. I had already signed the death warrant, the DNR. The doctors had handed down the death sentence, imposed by Nature: She was dying of old age, the suddenly fashionable term for the collapse of an aging body beneath the onslaught of time upon heart, lungs and brain. I moved to her right side, found her hand under the sheet. The fingers were drawn together, seemed only bones. I bent forward and kissed her on the forehead. Her eyes snapped open, stayed open, filled with recognition. Those brown eyes were clear and shone with happiness. Under the oxygen mask, her lips closed and pursed in a smile and a kiss. I said a few meaningless words. We lingered together. She slowly closed her eyes. There was nothing more for either of us to do.

My mother died early the next morning, December 1, 2010, aged 94. The darkness had won, as it always does.

Myths About Hand Planes.

You have to spend $400 each for a good hand plane.

If you are thinking about buying a new bench plane,  spending hundreds of dollars per plane is about your only choice. Apart from the worthless hunks of metal that are made in India and China, that can be found for less than $50.00, the premium models from Lee Valley, Stanley and the like are all that you have to choose from. They are fine tools, but none of them are worth the money asked.

The alternative is to buy a used plane. There are hundreds listed online by eBay sellers, the websites of antique and vintage tool dealers, and more from local flea markets, estate, storage and yard sales. Virtually all of them can be had for a tenth of the price or less of the new planes. And they are every bit as good at doing the job as the premium planes.

True, many old planes need to be reconditioned before they can be put back to work. They might have been stored or neglected in a garage for decades. Even the best of them can have rust spots, nicks, dings or the ubiquitous broken tote. Some will be crusted with rust and pitted. Japanning might be gone. But, unless the base casting is cracked or broken or the frog is missing the lateral adjustment lever and its top, all those planes can be cleaned up and used. Some of them can be shined up until they look new. If you can buy a used plane for a few dollars and return it to a working condition by expending a few dollars and a few hours, why would you spend hundreds of dollars for an equivalent new plane? Other than simply to say that you can afford to waste money, that is?

The only used planes worth buying were made by Stanley.

Stanley was the largest and most enduring maker of iron bench planes. From before the American Civil War until circa 1970, Stanley made millions of planes, most of them based upon the designs and refinements created by Leonard Bailey. The Bailey pattern bench plane became the de facto standard. When Stanley's patents expired, many foundries, large and small, copied the Bailey planes. Some of them were poorly machined or made with inferior materials, but a great number of them were as good as the originals. Sometimes, with some simple variations, the copies were better than the Stanley planes they imitated.

Over the years, Stanley eliminated most of its competitors, either by buying them out or by out-marketing and out-producing them, flooding the market with Stanley planes. Stanley made several grades of planes, and they could sell at any price point and win the battle for market share at any level, simply with the Stanley name.

Sargent and Millers Falls were the two "big" names that lasted the longest as rivals of Stanley. Both companies had sizable shares of the market, although neither was able to challenge Stanley's dominance.  One place where they could fight on an equal footing with the giant was in the secondary or house brand market. There were dozens of hardware companies, ranging in size from Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, and other national  chains, through regional companies such as E.C. Simmons, down to loosely affiliated collectives of stores, all of whom had their own brands of tools, planes among them. Because of their lower prices, Sargent and Millers Falls could offer top-of-the-line planes to those companies at a price that Stanley could not match for its best tools. Thus, at any given date, Sargent or Millers Falls might be making the high-end Craftsman brand plane for Sears. Other times it might be Stanley, using the slightly lower quality designs that Stanley sold under its own "hobbyist" or "home carpenter" brands such as Handyman or Victor. The Bailey fleet of planes, of course, remained its strength. The Baileys were the everyday tools of craftsmen, carpenters and joiners, not only in the United States but around the world.

Like Stanley, Sargent made different grades of planes. The Very Best Made, VBM line was their equivalent of the Bailey. It differed little from the Stanley planes in quality of material or machining. The only functional difference was lack of  the fine adjustment screw of the Baileys. The lateral adjustment lever was folded, sheet steel, rather than the two-piece version used by Stanley, a minor variation. Sargent also catered to the occasional handyman, selling a model called Hercules.

Millers Falls was a rather late entrant into the plane market. Their copies of the Bailey pattern differed from the Stanley aesthetically or cosmetically. Red frogs and a bent-tab lateral adjustment lever were usual visible differences. After a while, Millers Falls added a unique hinged cap iron, that they claimed reduced slippage of the cutting iron and chipbreaker assembly. While interesting, like most improvements to the Bailey model, there was little evidence that the new lever cap  accomplished anything more than could be achieved by proper adjustment of the original plane. Which leads to the next myth.

The Bedrock (or Bed Rock) design was superior to the Bailey.

In the 1890s, Stanley, after listening to its users, decided that "chatter" was a problem that needed to be addressed by its plane designers. Chatter is the vibration of the cutting iron as it moves across and cuts into the surface of the wood.  It shows up as ripples or ridges in the planed surface. It can be felt and heard during the planing, It is the result of the resistance of the wood to the motion of cutting edge. On other words, it is created by the laws of physics. You cannot escape physics.

Every successful design of Nature or of human invention loses something in order to gain a particular advantage. Bailey had designed a plane with an adjustable frog and more closed mouth, to allow for finer shavings. The more closed mouth had required a thinner cutting iron. The thinner iron increased the chatter, especially at slow planing speeds, as on small work pieces, the pieces on which a smoothing plane would most likely be used. Increasing the iron thickness would require opening the mouth, which would decrease the effectiveness to some degree of a smoothing plane.

The Bed Rock design was based on the theory that the thickness of the iron could effectively be increased without actually making the iron itself thicker, but by making the iron and the frog more integral, more of a unit. In theory, by increasing the contact area between the frog and base casting and between the iron and the frog, the tendency to chatter would be reduced, even with a thin iron, thereby preserving the closed mouth. Thus, the best of both worlds would be achieved. In theory.

The problem is that there is no evidence that in practice there is any appreciable difference in the reduction of chatter. Chatter can be reduced in the stander Bailey design by several adjustments, either in the plane on in the way that the plane is used. Skewing the plane to the direction of planing will measurably reduce chatter, not to mention rear out. Using a heavier plane will also reduce chatter, as the increased mass will tend to keep the plane moving over the wood. Increasing the speed of the plane will also decrease chatter.  Merely making lighter cuts will solve he problem, too. In the end, the effect of the change in plane design is negligible, at least in comparison to every other variable.

Stanley itself made the case for the Bed Rock's superiority weaker by it's modifications to the Bailey. The single best innovation of the early Bed Rocks was the introduction of the FIne Adjustment Screw to the rear of the frog. While the fine adjustment was nice, the mere presence of the screw was more useful. It allowed the disassembly of the plane for cleaning, and the reassembly without loss of the exact frog position. Thus, a plane that had been adjusted to the workman's preference could be returned to that precise setting without fuss. When Stanley came to improve the Bailey, the Fine Frog Adjustment screw as added. But, did Stanley also make changes to the frog to make the seating of the irons and the frog more integral? No. In fact, over time, Stanley reduced the amount of surface area of the frog that was in contact with the irons, finally settling on the "indented" frog surface in the Type 16. And the mating of the frog to the base casting was in like manner made less integral. If the theory behind the so-called superior design of the Bed Rock was sound, why did Stanley take the opposite approach in the improvements to the Bailey? The Bed Rock was a clever design, and the second version was even more clever, allowing the movement of the frog without removal of the irons, but it did not make the planed surface any smoother. It improved convenience, but nothing else.

Everything must be made or adjusted within tolerances of thousandths of an inch.

This is one of the more demonstrably ridiculous ideas about planes. Oh, sure, if you are building a house, the finicky planers will allow, you don't need to have perfection in a plane. You can do well enough with good enough. But not if you are building fine furniture. Oh, no. Then everything must be perfect, or as nearly perfect as science and technology can produce. That is nonsense. For thousands of years, when measuring was crude and tools were made only as fine as the crudity of the times allowed, people produced fine furniture. Even when machined tools became the norm, nobody demanded perfection. Now, however, you will read solemn exhortations to the user to take the machinist square and the micrometer to the plane to get it a thousandth of an inch better, or to set the mouth of the smoothing plane finer than the width of a human hair. Rubbish. Planes are flat enough and square enough as found, barring some violent accident. Even the pitted sole is of no concern, as long as there are no burrs to mar the wood. Just enough sanding to remove a jagged edge or sharp protrusion is all that is needed. If you want to waste time doing all the unnecessary work to satisfy the hyper-censorious high priests of planing, go right ahead. But it is still a waste of time and effort. The end result on the wood will not be better or noticeable. Wood, after all, will not stay in that planed condition for long.

Mitt Antoinette Romney.

"I don't care about the very poor/"

"Let them eat -- whatever it is the poor eat."

We have one third of a Grand Prize.

Great is the honor of possessing this most admirable and timekeeping wristwatch machine, which commemorates the Leader of the Turkmen, President of Turkmenistan and Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers, Suparmurat Niyazov, first president of Turkmenistan, 1990-2006.

Not Chairman Mao, but more rare, and just as tacky.

Awarded as one third of the Grand Prize in the Fiddler in the Subway copy editing challenge, which was held sometime during the last century, or so. (You can find it for sale somewhere of other, probably. It's a book, by the way.  By Gene Weingarten.)

Marlowe.

Having mentioned the 1969 movie Marlowe, starring James Garner as Raymond Chandler's knight-errant detective Philip Marlowe, I take this self-generated opportunity to praise it.

James Garner as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe.

Marlowe is Sterling Silliphant's adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister. Silliphant was a screenwriter of the classical age of television in the 1950s. Working on through the '60s and 70s, he wrote hundreds of hours of excellent TV, including scripts for The Naked City and Route 66, the latter of which he created. While not of the same class as Paddy Chayefsy or Rod Serling, he won an Academy Award for the screenplay of In the Heat of the Night, starring Rod Steiger and Sydney Poitier as the Bull and Mr. Tibbs.

Sharon Farrell as Orfamay Quest.

Marlowe is remarkable for all the things that made Silliphant's writing so durable and satisfying: It had sinuous often serpentine plotting, a balance of sinewy action and vibrant dialogue, and the characters revealed themselves through their behavior, rather than exposition. Silliphant allowed his characters to remain enigmatic, always giving them more depth through suggestion and  artful reticence than through speeches. It is a fine example of the soft-boiled detective genre. There are plenty of killings, but the soft-boiled detective story is about the pure-hearted detective, who must ravel and sometimes tangle the often crimson-stained interactions of the central characters, serving and preserving his client, while finding the means to extricate himself still clean and with his self-esteem relatively intact in the end.

Gayle Hunnicutt as Mavis Wald.

The actors, most of whom are very familiar, are cast perfectly, and perform with perfect fidelity to their characters. A blonde Sharon Farrell, whose career was cruelly interrupted by a cardiac arrest and brain damage, is a sugar-coated poison pill as Orfamay Quest, Marlowe's initial client. The fact that she is both crazy mean and just plain money mad, but looks harmlessly tight-fisted is the fulcrum of the whole movie, and Farrell plays the woman with just the right intensity of nastiness and feigned simplicity. The patrician Gayle Hunnicutt is Mavis Wald, the woman with the profile of a Praxitelean Athena and a chilly manner to match, who stars in "the top-rated" television sitcom, and is, not coincidentally, being blackmailed. (Imagine Mary Tyler Moore and John Gotti.) Her constant companion and best friend, Dolores, is played by Rita Moreno. Oh, and she's a stripper, a fact that precipitates the movie's climax.

Rita Moreno as Dolores Gonzales.

Carroll O'Connor and Kenneth Tobey as Christie and Fred.

The movie features the first American appearance by Silliphant's friend and karate trainer, Bruce Lee as mob enforcer Winslow Wong. Lee has two brief scenes with Garner that are, at best, tangential to the plot, but both of which are memorable, and foreshadow his career and legend as a kung-fu star. There are some equally memorable moments with Carroll O'Connor and Kenneth Tobey as the police duo, French and Fred, who provide Marlowe with straightlines. Silent film veteran Jackie Coogan is a suitably seedy grifter, who complicates Marlowe's life by getting an icepick in the spine. And William Daniels manages to actually steal scenes from Garner as Crowell, Mavis Wald's fretful agent, whose peptic ulcers seem to be multiplying even as we watch. Lastly, there are two supporting character actors of note, H.M. Wynant, the type of an actor who can fill any role from guest villain to guest hero, here as Sonny Steelgrave, the Johnny Stompanato of the piece; and  Paul Stevens as Lagardie, a Dr. Feelgood of the stars and the mob. (Bonus points to the reader who recalls that the name Sonny Steelgrave is borrowed by Stephen J. Cannell for the character of the slightly insane mob boss in the '80s TV series Wiseguy.)

Bruce Lee as Winslow Wong, mob enforcer.

William Daniels as Crowell, the agent.

Cannell's name brings us to the other point of note: The movie is all but an early pilot for The Rockford Files. It almost certainly was the inspiration. Garner's Marlowe, both in manner and wisecracks, is the prototype of Jim Rockford. He's persistent, or stubborn as the situation warrants, rather than aggressive, as likely to match a punch with a witty jab as with a counterpunch; and even some of his best quips from the movie will make their way into the show.. He breakfasts on Oreo cookies. The major differences between Marlowe and Rockford can be attributed to inflation: Philip works for one hundred dollars a day plus expenses, while Jim gets two hundred, and Marlowe's drab office in the famous Bradbury Building is far more upscale than Rockford's Malibu trailer. Rita Moreno became a recurring guest star in the series and in the later Rockford movies, as the proverbial hooker with the heart of gold. Daniels, Wynant, Tobey and Stevens all had guest roles on Rockford.

Talk Like Gene Weingarten Day.

Everyone buy a helium balloon on October 2 to participate in what I hereby designate Talk Like Gene Weingarten Day.