It started over a cup of coffee. My friend Nate and I were having coffee at ThreeBirds. I was back from HighEdWeb North Carolina and getting ready for WPCampus. He was basking in a delightful trip that he’d taken to DC recently and was interested in replicating the experience–a trip taken for the trip’s sake. We didn’t set ourselves many parameters, save that we’d like to knock it out over a weekend and we wanted to travel by train wherever possible. We settled on circling Long Island Sound.

Long Island stretches 118 miles, from New York City to the Atlantic Ocean. North of it lies Connecticut. There are two ferries that cross it, one between Bridgeport and Port Jefferson, about halfway across; the other between Orient Point and New London, at the eastern end of the island. The Long Island Rail Road comes within a mile of one ferry and eight miles of the other. The various rail services on the Northeast Corridor have direct service to the ferry terminals in Connecticut. We devised a plan involving eight trains, three ferries, and two buses. Looks simple on the map, right?

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Back in October I started using Nix to run my local authoring environment. I stayed with it, found other use cases for Nix, and then co-presented (with Jason Woodward) at WPCampus 2024 on “Using Nix to Define WordPress Dev and Test Environments.” The monster has definitely escaped the laboratory at this point.

While working up that talk I discovered devenv. I think of devenv as a wrapper or overlay for Nix flakes and it does two things that I immediately found useful:

1. It wraps the complex Nix syntax into a set of declarations for adding languages, processes, and services.
2. It provides a text-based interface for managing those processes and services.

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It’s in the trees, it’s coming!

You’re an academic from the United States and you’re in England to visit a few of your collaborators. You’ve organized a small conference about the work of a fellow academic who leads a Satanic cult. He’s a fraud and you’re going to expose him. When you arrive in London you find out that one of your collaborators died in a freak accident the night before. There are strange clues in his notes. You visit the British Museum and the arcane work mentioned in the notes is missing. While you’re at the museum the cult leader visits you and after a conversation that is at turns fascinating and disturbing, he informs you that you have three days to live.

Night of the Demon features modern, skeptical people who do not believe in spiritual evil encountering people who not only do believe in that evil but know for a fact that it exists. This is distinct from the original Wicker Man or Midsommar; the pagans in those films believe, but neither film provides evidence for the fact of their belief. Night of the Demon, made in 1957, walks a similar path to The Devil Rides Out, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and The Exorcist. The execution, however, has some distinct features.

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Target: Harry is right in my wheelhouse–a bunch of actors trundled off to Europe to have a nice vacation and shoot a movie–but I got here indirectly. Target: Harry, also known as How to Make It and What’s in It for Harry?, was directed by Roger Corman and released in the United States in 1969. In 1979, for reasons that aren’t clear, it was released in eastern England on a double bill with Foes, an American science fiction film.^[1][2] Even after getting a proper Kino Lorber Blu-Ray in 2019 (2K remaster), it’s still pretty rare, with 209 ratings on Letterboxd as of writing.

As with so many of these films the production history is a little muddled. Roger Corman shot almost all of it in 1969, either as a made-for-TV-movie or a TV pilot that wasn’t picked up. The former feels more likely; the movie is feature length and it’s hard to envision a TV series from that era having the budget required. Gene Corman added two completely gratuitous nude scenes later, which apparently accounts for Roger taking his name off and getting credited as “Henry Neill.” They add nothing except running time; they’re even more gratuitous than the alternate-take nude scenes in The Beast of Yucca Flats.

Leonard Maltin dismissed Target: Harry as a “humdrum redoing of The Maltese Falcon.”^[3] That’s true to the extent that they’re both plot-optional, running strictly on vibes, and concerning a man who finds himself in the center of a criminal conspiracy. Where they part is tone and quality: The Maltese Falcon is a classic noir, set entirely in San Francisco. It’s also a superior movie. Target: Harry, like Harry in your Pocket or Silver Bears, invites you to go hang out with its actors in some location for an hour or two, and promises that you’ll have a good time. John Huston himself made an early, superior example with 1953’s Beat the Devil, which followed Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, and Peter Lorre to the Amalfi Coast.

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I learned about Foes on June 1, 2024. Someone Liz knows on a discord server drew her attention to it, and Liz drew my attention to the top two reviews on Letterboxd. The first one called it the “Messiah of Evil of 70’s Alien Films.” The second praised the atmosphere while also noting that you should watch the 72-minute director’s cut and not the 90-minute version with additional framing scenes demanded by the distributor.

Out of the gate Foes was ticking a lot of boxes for me. It’s a regional horror/science-fiction film shot on a modest budget. It’s little-known but might have interesting vibes. It also has a troubled production and release history. The theatrical cut is 18 minutes longer than the director’s cut and consists entirely of framing scenes with different actors. Sources were unclear, but it probably never had a theatrical release in the United States but may have had one in the United Kingdom. Garagehouse Pictures brought out a Blu-ray in 2019, sourced from 16 and 35 mm elements.^[1] 2019 is an eternity in boutique Blu-rays and I wound up dropping about fifty bucks on eBay.

Money well spent!

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Growing up, I was aware of Eye of the Needle in a vague sort of way. My parents had it on VHS and described Donald Sutherland’s performance in it as chilling. We never watched it together. Dad could be a little prudish about R-rated movies with sexual content; when he showed me The Godfather as a teenager, I remember that he had me cover my eyes when Sonny Corleone has sex with Lucy Mancini. I assume he did the same for Michael and Apollonia’s wedding night. Shortly before his death, and relevant to this review, Dad expressed his discomfort with Return of the Jedi’s treatment of Princess Leia in Jabba’s palace.

Richard Marquand directed Eye of the Needle, and apparently impressed George Lucas enough to be offered the job on Return of the Jedi. He made only three more features before dying of a stroke in 1987 at the young age of 49, following the troubled production of Hearts of Fire. Inevitably he’s remembered for Return of the Jedi, though as with Irvin Kershner and The Empire Strikes Back there’s an asterisk and the inevitable questions of who did what on the production. The difference is that Kershner died in 2010 at the age of 87, and anyone who’s listened to the commentary tracks for Empire recognizes Kershner’s enormous contributions to the finished product. By comparison, Marquand remains an enigma.

Eye of the Needle is a Ken Follett adaptation, and as of 2024 the only feature release. I haven’t read the source novel, published in 1978. The story is set in the United Kingdom during World War II. There is a prologue of sorts in 1940, with the main action in 1944. There are two primary point-of-view characters: Faber, a German spy undercover in the UK, played by Donald Sutherland; and Lucy, a young recently-married Englishwoman, played by Kate Nelligan.

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It was the morning after the HighEdWeb North Carolina conference and I was gathering sources about the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (as one does) before boarding the Carolinian to return to the Northeast. I was a little surprised to find that there wasn’t a recent book-length academic history and was falling back on JSTOR for journal articles. I was caught up short by a pair of articles in The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin (now Railroad History) by Laura E. Armitage.^[1][2]

Laura E. Armitage? In 1944? With a few key exceptions, railroading, then and now, is something of a boys’ club. Officials, engineers, maintenance of way workers, they’re almost all men, though that’s changing. If you go to a railroad memorabilia show, it’s men and boys with trailing spouses. Go rubberneck a derailment on the Lehigh Line in a mild rain? You’ll bump into men. And we’re not talking now, we’re talking the 1940s. Who was Laura E. Armitage, chronicler of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway?

Biography

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My repertoire of traveling disaster stories is limited. In large part, I’ve been lucky, and I’m also a careful planner. I try to bake resiliency into my itineraries and I’ve looked at alternatives. I’m a careful planner now because of what is known in my family as “The France Story,” a multi-day story of cascading failure driven by a series of bad decisions and poor planning, all on my part.

Thursday, May 15, 2003

I spent the spring of 2003 studying abroad at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, Germany. This was a three-month program, and I was a little over six weeks in at this point. I had a Eurail Pass, good for unlimited travel over a two-month period, and I’d been making good use of it, covering about 3,500 miles. Almost all of it was second class without a seat reservation. When I overnighted away from Bonn, I stayed in youth hostels. Reservations were cheap, €5-10 euro/night, plus (often) a deposit for the bed linen.

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Jim Loomis passed away on March 26, 2024, at the age of 87. I met Jim once, for about an hour, but he’s one of those people who stayed with me.

Jim was a train and transit enthusiast. He served on the board of directors for the Rail Passengers Association (which I will always call NARP). He blogged at Trains and Travel with Jim Loomis. He authored several books, including All Aboard: The Complete North American Travel Guide, Travel Tales, and Fascinating Facts about Hawaii.

This last title suggests what for me is the most fascinating thing about Jim. He moved from Connecticut to Hawaii in 1962, and lived there the rest of his life. Hawaii has no trains, save Honolulu’s light rail network, whose first stage opened just last year (I hope Jim rode it). It’s a five-hour flight from Honolulu to the West Coast. That didn’t stop Jim from riding almost every train in North America, some many times. It also didn’t stop him from advocating for improved service, even though as a resident of Hawaii he didn’t benefit directly.

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The fifth and final option from the Lehigh Valley Passenger Rail Analysis is Allentown to Reading. This is the odd man out, and I think was studied for completeness. The other alternatives involve connecting Allentown to existing railway hubs (New York/Newark, Philadelphia); Reading has no rail service and hasn’t since 1981. Restoration of Reading to Philadelphia service is being studied.

Allentown-Reading

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