Arr!
Today is the International Talk Like a Pirate Day, or so they tell me.
And what best way to celebrate this jolly occurrence but with a nice gallery of pirate pictures?
I always loved Don Maitz’s art… and he’s a specialist in pirates.
So here goes!
And I also have a pinboard filled with Maitz’s pirate pics, if you want more!
I spent about two hours in the company of Bogart and Bacall.
To have and Have Not in Italian was called Acque del Sud (Southern Waters), and it was one of those movies that once were a staple of afternoon programming, before TV stations discovered the joys of reality and talent shows.
Of course, To have and Have Not is Faulkner adapting Hemingway (that’s TWO Nobel-prize winners for the price of one), and Howard Hawks directing.
You can’t get any better than that.The plot is thin – and there’s not much of the original stories by Hemingway in it – but there are a number of elements that make this one of my favorite movies. Continue reading
Guillermo del Toro’s triumph at the Venice Film Festival took the Italian media by surprise.
True, some wankers protested for The Shape of the Water being a commercial movie, but the real fun began when an online news service announced that Benicio del Toro had won instead, publishing a photo of the actor instead of the photo of the director.
But the top was the Italian interpreter, that translating live the director’s acceptance speech, blundered and translated
I have faith in monsters
as
I have faith in mustard
Which was only broadcast live worldwide, so it’s not that serious, right?
As I mourn the passing of Walter Becker, half of the creative team behind Steely Dan, here’s a song about Ulysses travels – quite on topic on this blog.
Yesterday, while taking a break from writing, I was browsing the Facebook updates and I stumbled on an image that I remembered from my high school days.
This one.
It is an illustration for Poul Anderson’s story Tiger by the Tail, part of the Dominic Flandry series.
It’s been thirty-five years, yet I still remember when I first saw it, and I still get the same feeling, the same thought…
I must write something like this one day or another.
The artist is the multi-award winner Michael Whelan, and I’m surprised and pleased at the number of my favorite books he illustrated. Here’s a small gallery of my favorite paintings by him.
Karavansara 