QZ redux

Sunday Times

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 17:05:00 -0400

Although it has been decades, seeing a Sunday New York Times still brings back memories of a childhood game. I expect this one is not well known, so I thought I'd share it.

My wife likes to read the Times Magazine in paper form, so we get a NYT delivery every Sunday, and only on Sundays.

Young kids play a game called "Duck, Duck, Goose." The rules of the game are pretty simple, I'm sure there are variations from place to place and time to time, but I remember them like this:

‣ Kids sit on the ground, in a circle facing inwards. Somehow one of them is choosen to be "It", possibly by age, or an adult, or a chosing game like "Eeny, Meeny" (see Wikipedia for the verse, we used the "My mother says" variation, and not the one with the racist word).

‣ The It kid walks around the circle, on the outside, touching heads saying "duck" with each one.

‣ Until the It kid says "goose" while touching the head.

‣ Now the It persons runs around the outside of the circle and the Goose has to get up and try to tag them.

‣ If tagged, It is out and sits in the center of the circle. Any previous "out" person is back in the game and rejoins the circle. If It is not tagged, It sits down in the vacant spot from the Goose.

‣ Either way, tagged or not, Goose becomes new It, going around touching heads and saying "duck."

‣ There is no fixed end to the game, it is usually just run until something ends it like lunch or getting tired.

As a teenager, I played a variation on that game which we called "Duck Duck Goose with a Paper Bat." A club would be fashioned from a Sunday New York Times (note that the Sunday paper is the largest of the week, and it used to be a more substantial paper when I played with a stock section, classified ads, and other filler). Basically you roll the paper up in a tapering shape and tape it together to make your club.

‣ Now instead of sitting, people stand with hands behind their back. ‣ The It person walks around and picks someone to hand the club to. ‣ That person then chases It trying to hit them with the club. ‣ There's no "out" in the center, just escaped or smacked. ‣ The club holder becomes the new it when a complete run around the circle has finished. ‣ Game ends when the club is destroyed or time runs out.

The bat is hard to really hurt with, because a too hard hit just destroys it. But it provides enough motivation to race around the outside.

Colored Films

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:54:00 -0400

You can download basic movie data from imdb. I do so every few years, most recently about six months ago. Every once in a while I do some exploratory analysis.

datasets.imdbws.com has the files

Here's an example line from the tab separated value title.basics.tsv file:

tt7811018	movie	A Yellow Animal Um Animal Amarelo	0	2020	\N	115	Drama,Fantasy

In field order: you've got an identifier, a media type (other types include short, tvSeries, tvEpisode, video, etc), an English title, an original title (might be the same as English), a flag for "is an adult" title, a pair of years (start and end, for which movies only have the first one, while tvSeries will have both), runtime (in minutes), and comma separated list of genres. Even Les Vampires, the serial film for which the first part was broadcast November 1915 but the last in June 1916, is a movie with a start year of 1915 and no end year.

tt0006206       movie   Les Vampires    Les vampires    0       1915     \N      421     Action,Adventure,Crime

Les Vampires at Wikipedia with episode release dates

But that digresses from my project.

$ zgrep "^tt[0-9]*${tab}movie${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz | wc -l

703671

Just over 700,000 movies in the list.

$ zgrep -E '^tt[0-9]*${tab}movie${tab}An* (Black|Brown|Violet|Purple|Blue|Green|Yellow|Orange|Red|White)${tab}[A-Z][a-z]*${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz |wc -l

27

Just twenty-seven are "A (Color)" (or "An Orange"), and you've probably heard of none of them. Note that I'm looking for just a single word, no-hyphens, after the color.

FWIW, I used the eight colors of the basic Crayola crayon pack as the basis for picking the colors to care about, then added white. They label one of them as "Violet (Purple)", so I used both color names.

Lots more with "The (Color)":

$ zgrep -E '^tt[0-9]*${tab}movie${tab}The (Black|Brown|Violet|Purple|Blue|Green|Yellow|Orange|Red|White)${tab}[A-Z][a-z]*${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz |wc -l

1115

And more still with no article:

$ zgrep -E '^tt[0-9]*${tab}movie${tab}(Black|Brown|Violet|Purple|Blue|Green|Yellow|Orange|Red|White)${tab}[A-Z][a-z]*${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz |tee /tmp/colors | wc -l

2642

What colors are common? Mostly black:

$ for color in Black Brown Violet Purple Blue Green Yellow Orange Red White ; do
        printf "$color${tab}"
        grep -c "${tab}$color " /tmp/colors
        done

Black   950
Brown   16
Violet  11
Purple  53
Blue    370
Green   132
Yellow  83
Orange  31
Red     556
White   440

All of this was inspired by a movie titled Black Tuesday (1954)[*], so now let's look at the days of the week here:

$ for day in Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday ; do
        printf "$day${tab}"
        grep -c " $day${tab}" /tmp/colors
        done

Sunday  5
Monday  3
Tuesday 2
Wednesday       1
Thursday        2
Friday  20
Saturday        1

And I'll look at those titles. The ones with null (\N) for year are a bit sus:

$ zgrep -E '^tt[0-9]* movie${tab}(Black|Brown|Violet|Purple|Blue|Green|Yellow|Orange|Red|White) (Sun|Mon|Tues|Wednes|Thurs|Fri|Satur)day${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz | cut -f 3,6

Black Friday    1916
Black Friday    1940
Black Tuesday   1954
Black Sunday    1960
Black Sunday    1977
Black Thursday  1974
Black Friday    2001
Black Friday    2004
Red Thursday    2003
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    2020
Black Friday    2021
Yellow Saturday 2021
Black Friday    2021
Blue Monday     2021
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    2021
Black Friday    \N
Black Sunday    2010
Black Sunday    \N
Black Tuesday   \N
Blue Wednesday  2023
Black Friday    2015
Blue Monday     2016
Black Sunday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    2017
Blue Monday     \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N

[*] Film noir about an escaped con: Black Tuesday (film) at Wikipidia

Film historian and critic Alain Silver said of the film, "When society at large is threatened, the psychopaths presented tend to be of the most violent ilk, as if to justify social repression by exaggerating the threat. Edward G. Robinson as gangster Vincent Canelli in Black Tuesday... exhibits a sadistic bent rivaled only by James Cagney in White Heat."

Black Tuesday and White Heat. Color theme detected.

For some reaon, I always has a highly diverse "recently viewed" list at imdb.

Funerals are for the Living

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:10:00 -0400

Funerals are for the living.

Graveyards are for the living.

The living have attachments, dangling, with the dead. When death comes, the survivors are often unmoored. There's a industry of people ready to help.

I've had some time to think about all this recently. I choose to re-read an old art book, Blinky by Jeffrey Vallance. On the 27th, April 1978, Jeffrey Vallance went to Ralph's supermarket and purchased a frozen chicken, took some photographs, and then drove to a Los Angeles pet cemetary. He paid cash for their most expensive service, then got the chicken out of his car for the service. Later he published it all in a small art book. First edition was 550 copies, second edition 2000. Used copies, and mine was used, cost about $40 these days. The whole story was described on Letterman:

But that book wasn't the only pet cemetary project of 1978. I also took the time to watch documentarian's Errol Morris, film Gates of Heaven (1978). It was made with the encouragement of Werner Herzog, and that is described in the Les Blank short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980).

Filmed in 1977 and completed and released in October 1978, Gates tells stories of people who operate(d) pet cemetaries, animal rendering facilities, and people who have interred pets at the cemetaries. One of the cemetaries featured is still in business, and it is a business, but their website neglects to mention the film.

Errol Morris is not cruel about the business, and seems to have genuine concern for the people. Jeffery Vallance seems a little more mocking.

My focus took me to pet death not because I have recently lost an animal, but because I am watching someone go through the complicated grief of losing a family member and it feels somewhat detached for me. There's so much paperwork for dead people, while animals need so little.

There are so many people who need to be involved but were not involved with the life. With pets, people only get involved because the owner wants it. No one stops you from just buring your animals in your yard after they die at home.

Vinegar Syndrome

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:04:00 -0400

Taking its name from acetate decay of old film stock, Vinegar Syndrome is a company that specializes in finding, restoring, and releases on home media films that get overlooked by other conservationists. Things like blue movies, drive-in quality B-films, exploitation titles, and things made outside the studio system.

Vinegar Syndrome

I like what they do, even if I don't want all of their titles. I have purchased a few discs from them. Their "Reviver" label, specifically to fund film restoration, has had two releases so far. They are titled on the website "One" and "Two".

There's no listing of the movie titles on the disks. I purchased "Two" as a pre-release knowing only it had two titles on it both filmed in the same non-US country. Now, post-release, they still don't list the titles. I guess I should have expected that, because "One" was post-release at the time and still didn't have the title.

For the record, "One" has Boots and the Preacher (1972) (imdb page) some shorts and related special features. The "Two" has Paradise of Terror (1965) (imdb page) and The Horror from Beyond (1965) (imdb page). So far I've watched Boots and Paradise.

Boots was considered a lost film until Vinegar Syndrome rescued it. The film has a rambling investigation into a small town murder at a church affiliated radio station. It's hick-ploitation with country music and corrupt small town stereotypes. We first see the sheriff waking up in bed with a prostitue at the local whorehouse. It's not high art.

Paradise, on the other hand, is art. Filmed in the Philippines and never released, this is a story of a military assisted evacuation for unstated purposes of a US government official from some unspecified Asian country in the midst of a conflict. Their plane is hit and everyone parachutes out. Then begins a story that's something like Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) if it were a 84 minute Vietnam war film. Truly a delight.

But there's no mention of title on website that sells the disc. I find it hard to tell people "Yeah, this film is good, you should watch it" when you can't go to the Vinegar Syndrome website and find the disc by searching for the title. Even once you have it in hand, the slip case, both sides of the reversible box art insert, and even the disc silkscreens don't identify the contents.

There's a little bit of text on the box insert, clearly visible are the words "To Claim Bride" but the text seems to be a newspaper piece unconnected with the film. The silhoutted woman in front of a window with horizontal blinds is a still from Paradise of Terror. That "2" is the only title it has.

In short: I like what Vinegar Syndrome has done, but I wish they would drop the secrecy now that's released.