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My weekend #LastFourWatched is a palindrome. It’s not that The Social Network and Maximum Overdrive are equals, but I enjoyed Maximum Overdrive and merely respected The Social Network.

The Social Network, 3.5 stars
Digger, 4 stars
The Bees, 4 stars
Maximum Overdrive, 3.5 stars

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Who knew The Enchanted World was part of IKEA’s design specifications? One Kallax cube is exactly the right size!

The Enchanted World books in a Kallax cube. Sorter in academic order.

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Now to find them a home on my shelf.

Big Stan of the Enchanted World Time-life books stg on my coffee table

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I’m watching The Bees (1978), which is about killer bees, something I expected to be a much bigger part of the horrors of the 2020s. So far I am unsure of it knows it’s a movie about colonialism, but I do know I have Marge Simpson’s voice running through my head on a loop.

Marge Simpson, holding Maggie and screaming. “They sound angry, and Africanized.”

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I have questions for this Wikipedia editor who describes Stephen King’s books as “somber.” Despite their reputation, most Stephen King books are like 90% slice of life sitcom, 10% something weird happens. That or inter-dimensional Arthurian fantasy westerns. Which I still wouldn’t call somber.

The film is King's only directorial effort, though dozens of films have been based on his novels
or short stories. It contained black humor elements and a generally campy tone, which contrasts with King's somber subject matter in books.

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I’ve managed to talk myself out of dropping $200 on The Enchanted World, but they’re at the Lane Ave. Half Price Books if you have less self-control (or just more money) than I do.

The complete 21 volume The Enchanted World Time Life book set on sale for $200.00

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Few things better than the moon at noon.

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The first two rows were fairly easy (though my favorite TMBG and CRJ albums are always in flux), but that third row could have gone so many ways. my9albums.com

Factory Showroom - They Might Be Giants
The ArchAndroid - Janelle Monáe
Emotion - Carly Rae Jepsen
Apple Venus Vol. 1 - XTC
The Trouble with Poets - Peter Mulvey
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme - Simon and Garfunkel
Phantom Power - The Tragically Hip
Welcome Interstate Managers - Fountains of Wayne
Dare to be Stupid - Weird Al Yankovic

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Talcott @talcotts.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Roast beef, pickles, onions, tomato, six cheeses, and honey mustard.

Rectangle pizza, sesame seed curst, red onions. Orange and white cheeses.

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Looks like it’s time for another One of These Things is Not Like the Others #LastFourWatched.

Winnie the Pooh (2011), 5 stars
Saw X, 2 stars
Lady Bird, 5 stars
One Hundred and One Dalmatians, 5 stars

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Talcott @talcotts.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I can’t get this weather app to remove the pins for Cleveland and Cincinnati, but sometimes it doesn’t matter because the rain is perfectly angled.

A long rain storm on the weather radar, at the same angle as the Three Cs of Ohio.

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Talcott @talcotts.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

There was that post going around about 2010s Twitter, and I don’t think anything was more 2010s Twitter than getting movie tickets from Klout. Also go watch the 2011 Winnie the Pooh movie if you haven’t (or rewatch it). This might actually be my favorite Disney cartoon of the 21st century.

Winnie the Pooh 2011
Five stars
Watched Oct 1, 2026
"He was so distracted by his rumbly tummy that he didn't notice he was walking on the next paragraph."
In a better world, Winnie the Pooh (2011) would have been a huge hit, ushering in a new golden age of theatrical 2D cartoons. Val and I were among the very few people who saw this in the theater, and only because she got tickets through Klout (remember Klout?). We were both blown away, and it's even better on rewatch.
It's such an inventive throwback. Not as if time stopped, but as if the evolution of mainstream animation took a different path. It's absolutely beautiful; I would go so far as to call these background Wattersonian. It's meta, with three layers of reality overlapping in a seamless way that's so different than any other cartoon of this era. Also the end credits, which are fully part of the movie (despite Disney+ trying to get me to watch something else first), are maybe the best I've ever seen.

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Talcott @talcotts.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The folding of Hulu into Disney+ continues to be jarring. (I am clinging to Hulu as long as I can for its much better UI, but figured Disney would be better for something light. This should at least be American Psycho II: All American Girl, with Mila Kunis and William Shatner.)

Numerous Horror category. A kids cartoon called The Doomies followed by American Psycho.

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Talcott @talcotts.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

New Staff Picks at my imaginary video store. I usually have at least one older movie (“but Talcott, 1995 was 31 years ago” “first, stop that”), but two of these are set in the 19th century, so I’ll allow it. Anyway, go watch these. They’re all great!

Before Sunrise, Meek’s Cutoff, The Wolf House, Little Women

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Talcott @talcotts.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I’m watching Saw X after largely bouncing off the first one ages ago, and I can’t shake the feeling that these are just church Hell Houses with better politics.

Chief Wigum in front of a diorama of a hippie eating a baby.
“She’s got the munchies for a California cheeseburger.”

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Talcott @talcotts.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I’d been thinking of doing a reread of the series for a while, and while I don’t love The Magician’s Nephew being treated as the first book instead of a flashback, this was available, I’m on a Gerwig kick, and should revisit before the movie is out. (I was maybe 10 last time I read them)

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Talcott @talcotts.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

My Cambrian Dream blanket from @windywallflower.bsky.social just arrived! Look at it!

A beautuful woven blanket of Cambrian creatures. Featuring Anomalocaris

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Talcott @talcotts.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Really leaning into my brand by writing a long footnote about my name and gender in a review of Little Women (2019).

Little Women 2019
Five stars
Watched Sep 28, 2026
"If the main character's a girl, make sure she's married by the end. Or dead."
There's nothing like watching an adaptation that opens by addressing my biggest complaint about the source material (which I just finished and otherwise loved). This is all so beautiful and painterly. As stylized as Barbie, just with a different aesthetic. And, as if that wasn't enough to win me over, there's so much focus on memory and Jo and Alcott's* relationship to gender (and each other). In a lot of ways I think it spoke to me more than the book, but it wouldn't have done so if I hadn't just finished the book.

*So far as I know there's no relation between Alcott and Talcott, beyond perhaps a shared linguistic origin. But I have always treated my name as if it were a gender, long before I realized that's what / was doing, and the only other Talcott I've known had the same experience. It is of course fraught to cast modern gender terms onto people who never expressed it in those words, but everything I've read of Alcott's relationship to gender (especially as expressed by Jo) feels so familiar. It might all be a coincidence, but I can't shake the sense of connection across time.

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With that out of the way, I can move on to something a little more intellectual. I’m only 20 pages in, but the first chapter is all about what everyone is having for breakfast.

STAR TREK
HOW MUCH FOR JUST THE PLANET?

THE NEW NOVEL BY JOHN M. FORD

The cover features Kirk in a tux, a Klingon, and an impish fellow in an old suit.

Chapter One
In Space, No One Can Fry an Egg

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“Somewhere in this Country full of beef…”

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“Yeah, you can ski in Ohio. If you have to. I guess.”

Geological perversity notwithstanding, YES! There is skiing in Ohio

Thanks to artificial snow and river valleys, there are a number of

interesting places to ski in Central Ohio - and a few places around
Cleveland you might try if you're up there anyway. Here are hill, lift and ski school
descriptions, costs, beginner tips and aprés ski possibilities.

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It’s been at least seven years, and I’m still sad that The Village Bookshop, my lifelong favorite bookstore in the city, is gone. The building’s been sitting empty ever since.

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Just how bleak was food in the 1970s? The top restaurant dishes here include something called “Charlie’s Bucket” and reheated frozen bread.

1
Fish chowder
Engine House No. 5
Smacks of the salt air and dockside chowder houses.
It comes in a big kettle, so there's plenty for sec-onds. And you may not need seconds since the spicy broth is chockful of sweet, tender fish and vegetables. (Price: included with entrees, or $1 separately.)
2 Crème crèssoniere
L'Armagnac
This is an aristocrat among soups. Based on a strong, homemade chicken stock and spiked with tangy watercress, it does just what a good soup should - pleases the palate and prepares it for more pleasures to come. (Price: included with main entrees.)
3 Onion soup
The Clarmont
There are imitations, but this aromatic bowl of thick onion soup blanketed with baked-on Swiss cheese is the best. The ideal time to have it would be mid-winter after ice skating. (Price: $1.35.)

4 Charley's Bucket
Engine House No. 5
A steamed seafood potpourri for two. There are mussels, clams, half a Dungeness crab, and two tender little Maine lobsters, plus two ears of corn and some red potatoes. (Price: $24.50.)
5 Escalope de ris de veau à la crème/ L'Armagnac
A star in a menu full of them. The sautéed sweetbreads at L'Armagnac, with their perfectly complementary cream sauce, have been consistently superb. (Price: $12.)
6 Spareribs
The Top Steak House
There's plenty of meat on these ribs, and plenty of thick, spicy barbecue sauce. With some sauerkraut, dill pickles, and an order of onion rings, you can't do much better. (Price: $7.95.)
7 Rack of lamb
The Place Upstairs
Intended for two, but plenty of food for three. You must order a day in advance so the lamb can be marinated overnight. (Price: $25; varies.)

8
Rye bread
The Clarmont
The bread is flown in frozen after partial baking in ew York. It bakes up into loaves with plenty of substance, enhanced by the liberal lacing of caraway seeds. The restaurant serves it warm and cut thick.
With a jug of wine and a buddy, this would be good bread to take to the wilderness. (Price: included with entrees.)
9 Super Salad
Sé Va Longevity Cookery
Sometimes the kitchen runs out of alfalfa sprouts and the Super Salad isn't so super. When they have it all together, the salad's combination of sprouts, cauliflower, greens, tomatoes, Colby cheese and mushrooms with the house dressing of creamy garlic tastes so good you don't care whether it's health food or not. (Price: $2.25.)

10 Chocolate torte
Delikatesa
Filled with apricot jam and rich as a bonbon, Delikatesa's chocolate torte is a sybaritic treat for Christmas or any other day. If your heart leaps up at the thought of a Hershey bar, this is chocolate in a form that might persuade you to sell your soul. (Price: 754 a serving; $8 for a whole torte.)
11 Cannoli
Casa di Pasta
When made with bits of dark chocolate this is one of the most original and delicious treats in town.
When made with "sprinkles" of other flavors, or preserved fruit, it is still very good. Cannoli is essentially a rolled almond cookie with a ricotta cheesecake filling. (Price: $1.35.)
12 Coffeecake
Sé Va Longevity Cookery
When we think of coffeecake, we think of a light textured cake with an icing made from granulated sugar. Sé Va's coffeecake is nothing like that.
There's no icing. It's made with unprocessed sugar and whole wheat flour. It also is magnificently rich and heavy — but not so heavy that it doesn't go beautifully with a dollop of vanilla ice cream. (Price:
60¢; with ice cream, 95¢; whole cakes, $8.50 up.)

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Columbus is not beating the sitcom town allegations with this hot dog cart pyramid scheme.

The
collapse
of the hot dog
empire
The story of Felix Szymanski ("That man Felix was our god") and his All-American Hot Dog Corporation is one of super-hype, Cadillacs and three-piece suits; indictments and bounced checks. The company started with five hot dog carts in July, 1975, and now owes creditors something like $200,000.

was destined to become "the largest food corporation in the world." Its real business objectives were nebulous - something to do with warehouses and food distribution
- but the streetcorner hustlers weren't selling those objectives.
What they were selling was franchises, supposedly $5,000 franchises available for a limited time for $3,300, giving the buyers the right —among other things-to sell additional franchises to others.
The pitch was smooth, the salesmen persuasive and the profit predictions glistening enough that nearly $20,000 in franchise fees quickly flowed in. Until one day, in the same type of tactical blunder which would later plague All-American, a salesman had the bad luck to hustle an office worker for Ohio Attorney General William J. Brown. Brown's staff moved quickly to file charges against 21st Century Foods for promoting an illegal pyramid sales

But simply peddling hot dogs on street corners- whether in Columbus or Tokyo - doesn't make people rich. From the start Szymanski's plan was to license others to operate the carts in particular areas - with All-American's core group reaping substantial "override com-missions" on the license sales.
"We're the greatest salesmen in the world," boasts Mikey D. "We feed off the free enterprise system."
For a few months, things seemed to be working out nicely indeed.
The company started with just five hot dog carts, imported from New York, and used the money from license sales as working capital to build new carts. "We worked out a franchising system to build our fleet," says Felix. "We were pio-
neers in the area.
The basic deal was relatively simple. A licensee bought - at first for $2,000, later for as much as $4,000— a 20-yearlicenseto operate a cart in a certain area - often not much bigger than a single street corner. All-American had the cart built, manned it with a vendor and sent it out daily to the license area.
The licensee was required to do no work, but would receive a cut of the cart's gross sales each month.
There were a few fees in the fine print of All-American's license contract which Szymanski's salesmen rarely talked about-a $100
monthly franchise service fee and a $1,500 additional capital investment every five years during the term of the license, for example.
But even when prospective licensees noticed these fixed costs, the salesmen argued persuasively, if hyper-bolically, that a licensee's projected monthly profit share of more than $800 from the sales of a single cart would make all the fees seem small.
Szymanski's plans, which were

Four of the All-American principals: (I to r) Richie Harris, Mark Walzer, Rhein-hold Knipple, Felix Szymanski.

Imagine four sleezy 1970s business men. Three in suites, one in a tshirt. Your mental image of “men who would run a hot dog pyramid scheme” is more accurate than any description I can type here.

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I never knew that Amelia Earhart was at the dedication ceremony for Port Columbus!

The early days of aviation in Columbus
While today most air travelers accept as routine a six-hour non-stop flight from New York to Los Angeles, it is interesting to note that in its earliest days, Port Columbus was a key link in a chain that provided 48-hour coast-to-coast passenger service
- a speed considered astounding in its day.
Port Columbus was dedicated on July 8, 1929, the same day that saw the inauguration of transcontinental rail-air service from New York to Los Angeles. Passengers boarded a night train in New disembarked from the Pennsylvania
road Airway Limited the next morning at a railroad station on East Fifth Avenue near Hamilton Road. and boarded a Ford Tri-Motor for a flight to Way-noka, Okla. There they switched to another train to travel overnight to Clovis, N.M., where they boarded a plane for the final leg of the trip to Los
The service was operated by the Pennsylvania and Transcontinental Air Transport, Inc., predecessor of Trans World Airlines.
Port Columbus' dedication was attended by a host of civic dignitaries along with aviatrix Amelia Earhart, Henry Ford and son Edsel and Harvey Firestone and his three sons.
In its first year serving Port Columbus, TAT, tho only airlino sorving the city, moved 11,282 sengers through the airport. At the time of its dedication, the airport consisted of 524 acres, a terminal building which still stands on East Fifth Avenue and a single hangar.
Port Columbus actually shrunk in 1940, when the
Curtiss-Wright Corp. leased
83
acres
to build
what is now the Rockwell International plant. Not until 1941, when the federal government took over operation of the field, did Port Columbus get a major expansion. The Navy actually controlled the air-port, turning it back over to the city in 1946.
In 1948, 252 acres were added, and that began a series of land acquisitions which eventually saw the total area c the field reach 2,200 acres.
Improvements to facilities were financed through a series of bond issues, some of the…

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What movies are we going to see this Christmas season? I think Drexel is the only one of these theaters that’s still around.

Films tentatively scheduled for the Christmas holidays
FILM
A Star is Born
King Kong
Nickelodeon
Pony Express Rider
Silver Streak
The Enforcer
The Pink Panther
Strikes Again
THEATRE
Eastland
Eastland Mall
Northland
Northland Mall Great Western
West Broad Street at Wilson Road
Loew's Arlington I
1800 W. Henderson Rd.
Loew's Westerville
60 Schrock Rd.
Grove City Il and III
Hoover and
Stringtown Roads
Cinema North I|
2260 Morse Rd.
Town and Country East Broad Street at Robinwood Avenue
Westland
Westland Mall
Northland
Forum I and Il
4501 Refugee Rd.
Loew's Morse
1000 Morse Rd.
Cinema East
4177 East Broad St.
Continent Il
6360 Busch Blvd.
Grove City I
Camelot North
4250 N. High St.
Continent I
Drexel
2254 E. Main St.
Westland
SYNOPSIS/RATING
Remake of the Judy Garland show biz classic. Starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. PG
Dino De Laurentis' remake of the 1933 classic. Starring Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin and Jessica Lange. PG
A Peter Bogdanovich comedy about turn-of-the-century show biz. Starring Ryan and Tatum O'Neal, Burt Reynolds and Stella Stevens. PG
A comedy with Gene Wilder. From the writer of Airport and the producer of Love Story. PG
Clint Eastwood's third Dirty Harry film. R
The further adventures of The Pink Panther, with Peter Sellers and Lesley Anne Down. PG
Cinema North
The Seven Percent
Solution
The Shaggy D.A.
A new Sherlock Holmes mystery with Nicol Williamson as the sleuth, Álan Arkin, Vanessa Redgrave and Robert Duval.*
A Disney comedy with Dean Jones. G
Continent III
Eastland
Great Western

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