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More shed love than I was expecting.  Nice.

Followup for the shed enthusiasts: the exterior is now fully painted and stained, and verified waterproof by several recent thunderstorms.  Interior shelves and worktables now underway.

Have never seen Threads, and continue to have mixed feelings about whether I want to.   Possibly because I have seen Testament, a feature that came out the year before Threads and covers pretty much the same ground.  Testament seems mostly forgotten now, though Jane Alexander was nominated for an Oscar for it. 

It's not as sensational as I gather Threads is - it's a very small movie about a small town outside San Francisco after a nuclear war. Nothing spectacular happens, it's just two hours of watching things get worse and characters dying of fallout poisoning, with Jane Alexander trying to keep it together as the mom of a small family after dad never came back from work that day.     Saw it once in 1983 and some scenes are still burned into my memory. Although it's a great, well-made movie I've never felt an urge to watch it again.

So I wouldn't call this a recommendation per se, but hey, if you saw Threads and thought "gosh I hope there are more movies like this", then Testament is there for ya.

Of course there's also On The Beach, the original "well, the world is over so NOW what?" fallout movie from 1959, in which the residents of Melbourne wait to die from the aftereffects of a Northern Hemisphere nuclear war they weren't even involved in. 

So that'd be one hell of a triple feature, if you want to really cheer yourself up.

I'll throw this on the stack, since it's my current obsession. 

DIF'ers in the UK surely know all about this, but here in the colonies we know nothing about the goofball glory that is "Time Team".    (We have a franchise version called Time Team America that airs sporadically on PBS, but most people don't know about that either.)

Time Team aired in the UK for 20 years and every episode is exactly the same - a team of archaeologists (and Tony the "presenter", whose purpose is to pester the actual archaeologists about what they're doing) spend three days digging up somebody's turnip field or rose garden and discover a Roman villa or a Bronze Age graveyard or sometimes both.    This show proves beyond any doubt that the entire UK is just human bones and pottery shards covered with two inches of topsoil. 

The show's secret weapon is Phil Harding, who can get legit misty over a flint shard and then explain why, in the most spectacular accent in television history.  (Supposedly it's a Wiltshire accent but I say Phil is clearly a Hobbit who came here to learn our ways.)   

Another fave of mine is John Gater the nerdly "geo-phys" guy who generates spectacular target maps with ground-penetrating radar and then takes endless shit from the rest of the team when they invariably find nothing there.

Anyway, there's an (apparently) official YouTube channel that posts an old episode once a week, plus lots of non-official uploads online that I guess are a-ok with the Time Team folk as well.   It IS a reality show at its core, so take it all with a grain of stone-ground Celtic salt. But with 20 seasons of this thing (plus a couple dozen "Time Team specials"), if this is your kinda thing at all, there's enough here to get you through two apocalypses.

Netflix knows that us Americans don't do well with fancy titles.

"House of Paper? The hell is that? Pass." 
"Money Heist?  I bet they heist some money!  Cool."

I've been fascinated by the disastrous Scott expedition story since I first learned of it in jr. high school, and more recently even more fascinated by the Franklin expedition. (If anyone doesn't already know this, season one of AMC's The Terror, based on Dan Simmons' novel, takes what little we do know about the Franklin disaster and fills in the blanks with indigenous snow demons and other weirdness.)

So next on my list of Incredible Polar Hubris books is this one. I have not yet read it yet, so I can't exactly recommend it. But come on, look at this damn thing...

It's about some lunatics who tried to get to the Pole in 1897 in a hydrogen balloon.   Thirty-three years later their journals and photos were discovered because of course they all died, and so we know a lot about what happened.  Short version, apparently a day or so of ballooning followed by months of the usual freezing misery and then death.  I can't wait to read this thing.

So for those that weren't following the saga minute by minute (and if not, why not?), we did make our funding goal plus a little extra by the deadline.  Which means we've now switched to "In Demand funding" - we can keep accepting donations as long as they keep coming in.  Whee!  So if you didn't have the disposable income to pledge for a dvd or whatev, you're welcome to check back when you do have a few extra $$ to waste.

In the meantime I'm planning the first shooting roadtrip, either a loop through Texas and Oklahoma, or through Colorado and Washington.  I'll be posting updates on the Indiegogo site of course, and if I'm feeling energetic I might do the same here. 

So thank you everyone for contributing to and/or plugging the crowdfund!  Excelsior or something!

That does happen, but they use a regular helicopter for that.

Final reminder - last week of the fundraiser!  We're not at our goal, but we're getting there.  Looks like this one's gonna be a grind all the way to the wire. 

Deadline is next Monday March 25, midnight Pacific time.

So - this is my last request for you to make with the tweets, FB posts, Insta-Grandma, MySpot, HorsePix, Lookamee, Swiper, KardasshioScope, ThudMuffin, Klompr, Krisper, Chomper, Needler... whatever you use to communicate with others.

Spread link, make happiness.  USA! USA!

https://igg.me/at/corneliafort

And another joins the club.  Welcome!

I didn't get around to Wages of Fear until very recently myself - it has that typical older-movie first act that seems to go on forever before the story really "starts", but that's just how they used to make 'em.  Once they get on the road, it's just about as good as Sorcerer - and just about as cynical, which feels really unusual in a movie that age.

"Americans?  Here?"
"Wherever there's oil, there's Americans."

And yes to Scheider's 70s body of work - which I would contend lasted into the mid-80s with Blue Thunder and 2010.  Most people seem at least aware that 2001 had a sequel (and I think a quite good one, just much more conventional), but Blue Thunder seems oddly forgotten these days.   

But it was huge at the time, and if you think Sorceror was nuts with the truck stunts in the jungle, check out Blue Thunder for some really nutty helicopter stunts over (and in) Los Angeles.

Or if anybody wants to come clean my apartment now, I'll just show them the entrance.