I’m on the Lake Shore Limited today, heading back to Michigan by way of Toledo. This is my 29th trip on the Lake Shore Limited, for a total of 23,596 miles. That’s about 20% of my Amtrak mileage, and slightly edges out the Capitol Limited (33 trips for 23,375 miles). I’ve got a complicated relationship with this train. I broke up with it in early 2013, only to make a rapprochement in 2017.

I made my first trip on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited on May 31, 2009, when I traveled out to a NITLE conference at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I was living in Kalamazoo, Michigan, at the time. I took the Wolverine down to Chicago and endured a long layover–back then the eastbound train left at 10 PM, Central Time. I rode in the Boston coach out to Springfield, Massachusetts, where I caught a Peter Pan bus up to Northampton.

My notes from that trip mostly concern trying to get an internet connection through a tethered Blackberry that I’d borrowed from my department. Based on that experience, I developed some long-standing beliefs about cell signal strength in various parts of the country. What I left out then is that I was used a Gateway laptop dual-booting Windows and Ubuntu, and the kludged-together open source software for tethering over Ubuntu was way less reliable than the official supported stuff on Windows. Thing is, I didn’t want to be booted into the Windows side, because all my development tools were on Ubuntu. These days the Lake Shore Limited has WiFi (it works sometimes), and hot spotting from my phone is infinitely more reliable than tethering. Cell phone networks have come a long way in 15 years.

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Cédric Pérolini calls 1964’s That Man from Rio (L’Homme de Rio) the “missing link” between the Tintin comics and Indiana Jones. Our main character neither exclaims “Great snakes, she’s been hypnotized!” nor cracks a whip, but neither would be out of place. Jean-Paul Belmondo loved the Tintin comics and the whole story runs on Tintin logic. Notwithstanding an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, several plot points are drawn from the two-hander The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun. Director Philippe de Broca claims Steven Spielberg saw That Man from Rio nine times, and several set pieces in the Jones films obviously take inspiration from scenes in the earlier film.

Spoilers toward the end.

The elevator pitch for That Man from Rio is that a group of Amazon tribesmen seek three statues. The statues were held by three men who led an expedition and removed them from the Amazon. Of the men; one is dead, one is in France (Professor Catalan, played by Jean Servais, the organizer of the heist in Rififi), and one is in Brazil (financier Mário de Castro, played by Adolfo Celi). Our protagonist is Adrien Dufourquet (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a private in the French Air Force on a week’s leave visiting Agnès Villermosa (Françoise Dorleac) in Paris. Agnès’ father was the third (dead) member of the expedition. Our plot is set in motion when the tribesmen steal Catalan’s statue from a museum in Paris and kidnap him and Agnès.

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The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) is the third of the Clouseau movies with Peter Sellers, but it’s also a pretty good heist movie in the tradition of Rififi, Topkapi, and Grand Slam. That the first Pink Panther belonged to the same tradition was overshadowed by Sellers’ performance as Clouseau; David Niven was supposed to be lead and Sellers stole the picture from him. The second film, the hilarious A Shot in the Dark, was a pre-existing crime drama with the Clouseau character grafted on to capitalize on the success of the original film.

The movie opens with the theft of the titular Pink Panther, a fabulously valuable jewel, from a museum in Lugash. The heist is patterned on the heists in Rififi and Topkapi, right down to the iconic Henry Mancini score disappearing at the climax. In response, the authorities in Lugash take the fateful decision to call in the famous inspector who recovered the jewel in the first movie. Meanwhile, relaxing at his villa in Nice, retired jewel thief Sir Charles Litton realizes that he’s being framed and that it’s up to him to catch the real thief first.

From here we proceed with two movies in parallel, occasionally overlapping: a heist caper built around Christopher Plummer’s Litton, as he tries to find out the truth and save his skin; and a comic farce featuring Sellers’ ludicrous attempts to conduct an investigation. Both work well and support each other.

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I’ve been working backwards to Rififi. Oh, I’ve seen earlier heist films. The Lavender Hill Mob came out in 1951, but it’s as much a comedy as a heist. Many of the conventions of the modern heist genre come from two French noirs, released a year apart: Rififi in 1955 and Bob le Flambeur in 1956. You can trace a direct line from Mission: Impossible, the Pink Panther movies, Topkapi, and others, straight back to Rififi. It was time that I saw it the original, and was not disappointed.

Rififi opens with Tony (Jean Servais) getting booted from a poker game because he’s out of cash. Tony’s just out of prison and his girl left him for a gangster. Tony’s friend Jo (Carl Möhner) tries to get him interested in a smash-and-grab job at a jewelry store that he’s been planning with his buddy Mario (Robert Manuel). Tony’s not so sure, but eventually agrees and ups the ante by adding Cesar, a safecracker from Milan (played by Jules Dassin, the film’s director).

This is the the usual assembling-the-crew stuff, but it plays longer than it does in derivative works. We meet Mado, Tony’s ex (Marie Sabouret). He’s abusive to her, but she might still be in love with him. We meet Jo’s wife Louise (Janine Darcey) and their young son Tonio. Tony dotes on Tonio. Mario and his wife Ida (Claude Sylvain) have a tempestuous relationship but are clearly infatuated with each other. Cesar has an eye for the ladies, and his relationship with the nightclub singer Viviane (Magali Noël) will have tragic consequences for multiple people.

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Dad was a chamber music fiend. Central Michigan didn’t pull enough acts north, then or later, so he and Mom were always going down to concerts at the Wharton Center in Lansing. Back then that was a good 70-75 minute drive each way, and finding a babysitter for me. Above the stairs in their home hangs Scott McKowen’s marvelous poster from the 1989 “Beethoven Quartet Cycle” performance series by the Juilliard String Quartet. The poster features a baleful Beethoven riding a wooden bicycle, sheets of a score fluttering away.

I didn’t have to go so far tonight. The Williams Center for the Arts is on Lafayette’s campus and within walking distance if I felt like tackling the hill (which I didn’t). Visiting tonight was the Neave Trio: Anna Williams on violin, Mikhail Veselov on cello, and Eri Nakamura on piano.

I’m strictly an amateur when it comes to classical music appreciation. The well-intentioned attempt by my parents to have me learn the cello ended in failure. I can’t read music nor carry a tune. I enjoy and find meaning in the experience while feeling that I lack the vocabulary to describe what I’m enjoying. No matter.

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I picked Triangle at random and went in cold. Aside from Liam Hemsworth, none of the actors are familiar to me. Even he’s not all that familiar; I only saw the first Hunger Games. I haven’t seen any of Christopher Smith’s other films. Two people I follow on Letterboxd have seen it, but neither of them mentioned it to me. The title implies a Bermuda Triangle connection, and I’ve seen plenty of those (all of them are bad). I’m always down for a good sea story. Spoilers follow.

Our primary point of view character is Jess, played by Melissa George. She’s a single mother with a young, autistic son. Her daily routine overwhelms her. Her grasp on reality is slipping. This is all conveyed in largely wordless scenes that open the movie. Her son fades into the background as she packs her car. When she arrives at the dock to meet her friends for a sailing adventure, we’re left wondering somewhat uncomfortably where her son is.

Six people assemble for a sailing party: Greg, Victor, Jess, Sally, Heather, and Downey. The group dynamics are set up quickly, with a minimum of fuss. Greg (Michael Dorman) owns and lives on the sailboat. Victor (Liam Hemsworth) is living on the boat right now; Victor ran away from home and Greg took him in. It’s implied, but not stated, that Greg and Victor are in a relationship. Greg met Jess at the diner where she works and invited her along. Sally (Rachael Carpani) and Downey (Henry Nixon) are married and old friends of Greg’s. Heather (Emma Lung) is a friend of Sally’s and Sally’s trying to set her up with Greg, oblivious to Greg’s disinterest.

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It’s harder to write about It Follows then, say, Gymkata or Alien Predator. This is new territory for me and I don’t feel especially well-equipped to tackle it, but I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.

This post will discuss themes of sexual assault. Please don’t read further if that’s going to make you uncomfortable, and consider this a trigger warning for It Follows itself if you haven’t seen it.

Readings

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1967’s Grand Slam belongs to two overlapping traditions. First, it’s an international heist movie, in good company with The Italian Job, Topkapi, and The Great Train Robbery. Second, it’s one of those European productions where the top-billed stars turned up for a day’s work and a paycheck, and are promptly never seen again. It’s easy to envision Ray Milland in the Edward G. Robinson role, if this was made in the 1970s.

We open with Edward G. Robinson, recently retired from 30 years of teaching at a Catholic school in Rio de Janeiro, dropping in on his old friend Adolfo Celi (dubbed, but not by Robert Rietty), now in the rackets. Robinson, as one does, has spent the last 30 years developing the perfect plan to steal $10 million in diamonds from the building across the street from the school, and he needs Celi to provide the team.

Compared to other heist movies the team is small. We have Robert Hoffmann as a French playboy, Klaus Kinski as a German ex-soldier, Riccardo Cucciolla as an Italian mechanical engineer, and George Rigaud as an English safecracking expert. Cucciolla makes toys for a living; Rigaud is a manservant; he cracks safes on his holiday.

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I’ve used PHP Composer for package management for years now and I’m still learning new things. Today’s cool new capability is aliases. Let me start with a tip of the hat to Laurence Gellert; I stumbled across his blog while trying to extricate myself from a dependency problem. Somewhat akin to proxying Cloudfront with Nginx, I want to emphasize that I chose this solution after considering and rejecting other options and I do not intend to make a habit of it.

We use Composer to build our Moodle deployment packages. Moodle has about fifty different plugin types. Each plugin has a component name: mod for activity modules, qtype for question type, and so on. Each has a different installation path, which means that our build process depends on the Composer installers plugin supporting each type.

Moodle shipped a revamped TinyMCE integration beginning with Moodle 4.1. CLAMP did a thorough evaluation at the 2023 Winter Hack/Doc Fest at Swarthmore. While the new TinyMCE integration itself is of the editors type, any plugin that extends it would be a Tiny editor plugin (tiny). That means that we’ll need support for that plugin type added to the Composer installers project. Unfortunately, that project isn’t very active right now–no new releases since 2022, and no response to two separate pull requests to add that change.

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Yesterday I watched the Detroit Lions, in their home stadium of Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan, defeat the Los Angeles Rams 24-23. This was a noteworthy event. Ford Field opened in 2002 and it had never hosted a Lions playoff game before, because the Lions had never managed home field advantage in all that time. The Lions had homefield advantage because they’d won the NFC North title. They’d never done that either; they’d won the NFC Central back in 1993. The last time the Lions won a playoff game was on January 5, 1992, when they beat the Dallas Cowboys 38-6.

32 years ago. I was nine years old.

The last 32 years of being a Lions fan have had more downs than ups. I’m not prepared to interrogate why people stay fans of bad teams. I’m so far through the looking glass I’ve asserted, more than once, that I don’t understand being a fan of a successful team. What I am going to do is bid farewell to some bad memories.

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