Messages

1

Off-Topic Discussion / Re: Hi

« on: April 17, 2022, 12:23:49 PM »

Hi JSE! Welcome back.

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Discussion Board Troubleshooting / Re: Can't start a topic in Off-Topic Discussion

« on: April 17, 2022, 12:22:57 PM »

Deep in the recesses of my old brain, I seem to remember that this board was set up so that newbies couldn't start new topics in the Off Topic forum. I remember we were having non-Clint fans coming here and just either spamming the board or wanting to use our community to discuss their one (other) topic of interest ad naueseam. So it was set up to only allow seasoned board members the opportunity to start off-topic posts. Of course anyone who visits our board and is a newbie can start a Clint Eastwood topic, it's just the Off Topic forum that we were trying to hamper down.

I think Newbie status ends at 51 posts, so you can keep going for a little longer, or ask one of us to start a topic for you. 

3

Off-Topic Discussion / Re: What are your favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger films?

« on: January 27, 2022, 12:35:42 PM »

True Lies. 
Collateral Damage
Commando
Total Recall
Predator
The Running Man
End of Days
Eraser
Last Action Hero

I have all of these, but can't rate them -- it's been too long since I've seen them. But, True Lies would have to be #1 for sure.

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Web Site Announcements / Re: KC, our beloved Board Administrator, our Everything, has passed away

« on: November 23, 2021, 08:22:00 AM »

We have a very special project for any member who was close to Kathie and who is able to travel to NYC. I can't go into details here, but please PM me if you're interested and able. Timeline on this is almost immediately, so please write me asap.

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Eastwood News / Re: Who saw Cry Macho? Members' Comments (WARNING: SPOILERS ALLOWED!)

« on: September 18, 2021, 10:21:10 AM »

I went to see it last night. It was my first time in a theater since COVID-19 hit. It was a Friday night, but I got a parking spot right outside the main entrance. This never happens at my theater -- typically you have to walk 4-5 minutes to get inside the theater.  I visited the bar before getting to my seat and ordered a Moscow Mule, and the people in line behind me overheard my order and started discussing The Mule and how they wouldn't miss seeing a 91 year old Clint Eastwood on screen for yet another of his films. I thought that was funny "Speaking of your Moscow Mule, did you see Clint's The Mule"?  Taking my seat, I found most seats in the small theater were taken - maybe 40-50 people. I'm in Tennessee, and there were plenty of older conservatives in the audience. The person next to me grumbled that they'd never buy a Samsung phone now, after seeing an ad showing a LGBTQ person with a Galaxy. It's strange to me how divided our country has become on social issues.

So, the movie starts, and the opening scene with Dwight Yoakam set my expectations at rock bottom. That was some of the worst acting I've ever seen. So I settled myself in for what I expected would be a very low effort film, and hoped there would be some value to it. There was the obligatory scene with a much younger woman wanting to sleep with Clint's character (well, she had ulterior motives, but that seems to be a theme in Clint films too -- women trying to bed Clint's character in order to get him into a vulnerable position, or for some other purpose). It made me think of the scene in True Crime and how many members here hated seeing Bob's wife in bed with Clint at his age. Well, here we have Clint 23 years older. Good thing that didn't happen.

Somewhere after that scene, about 20 minutes into the film, the film's best co-star makes an appearance -- Macho. And, it's all uphill from here. Yeah, there are some laugh-out-loud bad moments. And every scene with Dwight Yoakam is cringe. There are implausible scenarios in nearly every scene. There's every woman (even young girls) turning to butter with just a glance of Clint's steely blues. But, I was surprised to find that the film DIDN'T feel like it dragged on -- it just meandered in a pleasant way right to the last scene. The only spoiler - where Macho winds up at the end. And I won't spoil it, but I did find that one part of the film a bit too sentimental for my liking.

As usual, Clint has a few great one liners. My favorite:

I don't know how to fix old.

So, Clint has somehow managed to entertain me yet again. Cry Macho is by no means a great film, but it's an enjoyable piece of cinema and it's worth the price of admission.

6.5/10

6

Off-Topic Discussion / Re: How's everyone holding up?

« on: July 24, 2021, 10:51:12 AM »

I don't really agree. A lot of people who aren't getting vaccinations have already had COVID. Their natural immune system is giving them the protections that the vaccine would, but the vaccine is more likely to cause them to be very ill than those who haven't been vaccinated. So trying to shame/force these people to get vaccinated so they can fly, work, etc., is ridiculous.

I watched Matt Damon's video yesterday, and find it ridiculous. So he has friends who are immunocompromised and can't get the vaccine, therefore, hae wants everyone else to get vaccinated so we reach herd immunity. Welllll.... a lot of the people who aren't getting vaccinated also have good health-related reasons not to. I have a good friend who is older, in her 70's, and due to extreme allergies cannot take any of the 3. I did discuss J&J with her, thinking it would be safer, but her doctor told her to not even risk that.

This conversation is ridiculous. Let everyone make their own health decisions. If you're vaccinated, you're safe from a serious case of COVID. I don't see why anyone is worried if they're already vaccinated.

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Off-Topic Discussion / Re: How's everyone holding up?

« on: July 23, 2021, 10:08:12 AM »

I will always support people's health decisions being free of government intervention. This includes assisted suicide, abortions, and vaccinations. Everyone should make their own health decisions for their own body. Period.

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Off-Topic Discussion / Re: How's everyone holding up?

« on: July 22, 2021, 11:14:34 AM »

Yes. It's surprising that this pandemic had to become so political. Trump probably would have won re-election if not for COVID. Biden won just by hiding out and wearing a mask when he went out in public. When you have as much political hostility as we have now in the U.S., and the politicians and press divide the masses between the "good" and the "bad" depending on if you get vaccinated or wear masks, there's going to be resistance. Then you have Biden out there saying people on Facebook are "killing people" for even just discussing side effects from the (non-FDA approved) vaccine.

I got the vaccine as soon as I was able. I completely understand anyone not wanting to take it. I don't worry about them, because I'm vaccinated. At least for now, what we hear is vaccinated CAN get COVID, but it's mild, and people aren't dying or being admitted to the hospital. So if everyone who wants the vaccine gets it, they shouldn't worry about who isn't vaccinated. Then maybe when all this ridiculous political BS dies down a bit, hold-outs will get the vaccine too.

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Off-Topic Discussion / Re: THE ENDLESS, POINTLESS thread

« on: July 01, 2021, 10:42:14 AM »

That sounds freaky! We've had cicadas and now falling frogs!

I don't post for a month, and this is what you get from me. 

Well, I didn't have much to say. But frogs falling from the sky (or chipmunkis, or something else that size) is worth mentioning.

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Off-Topic Discussion / Re: THE ENDLESS, POINTLESS thread

« on: June 30, 2021, 12:43:01 PM »

I think a frog fell out of the sky while I was on my back porch yesterday. I'll never really know. Whatever it was, frog or chipmunk, it landed in front of me and bounced straight up after landing, rebounding off my porch like a rubber ball and was never seen again. We did have stormy weather and low clouds, but it wasn't raining at the time. There was no other place it could have fallen from except the roof, but it would have had to lunge far away to land where it did.

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Off-Topic Discussion / Re: Favorite Current TV Shows

« on: May 03, 2021, 04:45:19 PM »

I know I've brought up Cobra Kai before, but has anyone watched it? It's really fun. 

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Web Site Announcements / Re: KC, our beloved Board Administrator, our Everything, has passed away

« on: April 25, 2021, 03:30:13 PM »

Thank you Matt..
What an amazing lady. I feel privileged to have known her.

She was! And I feel the same.

This is just so sad. She had a friend who always took her to the first home series of the Yankees  season, and one of the things that broke my heart was seeing that she was getting to go to that big game within 2 days of this accident, especially since with COVID there hadn't been home games for such a long time. She got vaccinated in preparation for it. She must have been so excited to go. It just breaks my heart. I miss her. I have this awful habit of missing people more when they are gone, and taking for granted when they are with us. I keep trying to bear this in mind with my friends and family. Having lost 4 of my very best friends in the past 6 months, it is just so difficult.  But, of all my friends, she was the most magnificent. She was the one who I truly felt privileged to say was my friend.

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Web Site Announcements / Re: KC, our beloved Board Administrator, our Everything, has passed away

« on: April 24, 2021, 07:09:55 AM »

Kathie's obituary in the New York Times has been posted online.  The article mentions that it will be in today's print edition (Saturday, April 24).

I'm going to post the entire article, which we usually don't do here, but these are extenuating circumstances, and the New York Times will sometimes require a subscription to read articles (especially if you've already read a few articles on their site without subscribing):

Kathie Coblentz, 73, Dies; Not Your Ordinary Librarian

A Yankees fan, marathon runner, cinephile, editor, and, yes, a cataloger, she was the New York Public Library's third-longest serving employee.

Kathie Coblentz, a Renaissance woman who read or spoke 13 languages; collaborated on books about the directors Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Alfred Hitchcock; and, during her day job, cataloged rare books for more than 50 years at The New York Public Library, died on April 3 at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 73.

She was apparently grazed by a car pulling out of an underground garage as she was walking home to her apartment on West 58th Street, fell and hit her head and never regained consciousness, her friend and former colleague Jane Greenlaw said.

In that home, of 900 square feet, were some 3,600 books of her own, all having served as inspiration in her writing The New York Public Library Guide to Organizing a Home Library (2003).

Ms. Coblentz was recruited for a library job in 1969 even before she graduated from the University of Michigan, said Anthony W. Marx, the library's president and CEO. "She thought she'd work at The New York Public Library until she figured out what to do next," he said. "Well, she never left."

She was the library's third-longest serving employee, working most recently in the 42nd Street research library's special formats processing department of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.

Her supervisor, Deirdre Donohue, described her as the "matriarch of our work family," who cataloged hundreds of items "that were the products of detective work, deep research and skepticism about facts."

Ms. Coblentz was a bibliophile with interests that ranged well beyond the written word. Her blog on the library's website was full of eclectic arcana. She demystified a Wikipedia debate over whether the Syrian author of "Scala Paradisi" wrote in the sixth or seventh century. And she rhapsodized about photographs of the last "blue blood moon" seen over North America in 1866.

As a rare materials cataloger for the Spencer Collection -- it "surveys the illustrated word and book bindings of all periods and all countries and cultures," the library says -- she conducted public tours of the steel stacks beneath what is now known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street, reminding visitors that browsing among those books was prohibited and that researchers had to order hard copies of materials from the card catalog, which was later digitized.

"That's why catalogers are the most important workers in this library," she would tell her tour group.

Ms. Coblentz was a true-blue Yankees fan (she and a friend were planning to go to a game being played two days after her death), and a committed cinephile.

She collaborated with her former teacher from the 1990s at the New School, Robert E. Kapsis, a professor emeritus of Sociology and Film Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, on researching (including translating avant-garde European criticism into English), editing and indexing books.

She edited anthologies of interviews with contemporary filmmakers and was a contributing editor, writer and programmer for Professor Kapsis's interactive Multimedia Hitchcock project in 1999 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

And she ran in several New York City Marathons.

Kathie Lynn Coblentz was born on Nov. 4, 1947. Her father was Dr. Jacob Coblentz, an immigrant born in Riga, Latvia, who was a bacteriologist in Lansing, Mich., where she appears to have been born. He also worked in Tennessee and Ohio before settling in Frankfort, Mich., where he was employed by the Pet Evaporated Milk Company and the Michigan Department of Health; he died when she was 10. Her mother was Sidney Ellarea Coblentz, an art teacher and artist.

Even in high school in Frankfort, in northwest Michigan, Ms. Coblentz demonstrated a bent for cataloging, winning a mathematics award for a paper titled "Some Possible Systems of Numerical Notation."

She earned a degree in German from Michigan State University in 1968 and a master's of library science from the University of Michigan in 1969. She learned Danish, Norwegian and Swedish so that she could read her favorite Scandinavian authors of murder mysteries unaltered by translation.

She had no immediate survivors. Her older brother, Peter, died in 1969.

For a lifelong cataloger who wrote a high school paper on improving ways to sort things numerically, her system of classifying her own collection of books at home defied library science and was ripe for parody. Ms. Coblentz had 16 bookcases holding more than 200 feet of shelf space in her one-bedroom apartment. The books were arranged by country of origin, size, sentimentality and personal obsession.

"Your system doesn't have to be logical," she told The New York Times in 2005. "It just has to work for you."

Sam Roberts, an obituaries reporter, was previously The Times's urban affairs correspondent and is the host of "The New York Times Close Up," a weekly news and interview program on CUNY-TV. @samrob12

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/obituaries/kathie-coblentz-dead.html

Thank you, Laura, for sending the link for me to share here.

14

Collectors' Corner / Re: Clint Eastwood funko pop?

« on: April 12, 2021, 09:51:37 AM »

Those are really cool sets. Is that two Eastwoods in the For a Few Dollars More package? I wonder if they did/would do the same with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

You get TWO! TWO! TWO Eastwoods in ONE!

Yes, there are two.  And you do get 2 in the GBU set too!  Here's that one:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Diamond-Minimates-The-Good-The-Bad-and-The-Ugly-RARE-MOMC/283917791856?hash=item421ad1b270:g:FUgAAOSwnpZe6lId

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Web Site Announcements / Re: KC, our beloved Board Administrator, our Everything, has passed away

« on: April 10, 2021, 09:43:45 PM »

I haven't found an obituary yet, but did find these two articles -- the first is a bit of a tribute in the New York Daily News.

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-nyc-woman-killed-minivan-garage-20210409-jx6uv2y6vjgjjd2oyqzhu2uphe-story.html

I'll quote one small part of this article:

"She was an astounding person with so much to give and so much intelligence and wit and humor," said library curator Madeleine Viljoen, who knew Coblentz for 10 years.

"It's tragic."

I'm sharing this short article as it includes a brief description of the accident.

Woman, 73, Dies After Being Hit By Car Near Columbus Circle

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Collectors' Corner / Re: Clint Eastwood funko pop?

« on: April 09, 2021, 03:39:49 PM »

Guess you saw this one coming next....

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Spaghetti-Western-Clint-Eastwood-Minimates-For-a-Few-Dollars-More-Box-Set/121189101296?hash=item1c376eeef0:g:B68AAOSwj0NUjRC5

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Collectors' Corner / Re: Clint Eastwood funko pop?

« on: April 09, 2021, 03:38:19 PM »

No, they're made by a company called "Diamond Select".  So I looked on eBay, and I found a set from FOD too:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Minimates-A-Fistful-of-Dollars-Collectible-Clint-Eastwood-western-worn-box-set/231008620458?hash=item35c92fcfaa:g:A4MAAOxyfS1RzzBU

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Collectors' Corner / Re: Clint Eastwood funko pop?

« on: April 08, 2021, 05:37:16 PM »

My last PM from KC was asking what a funko pop was.

Thanks for answering this one, Christopher.

Look at this strangeness I Found:

https://www.entertainmentearth.com/product/clint-eastwood-for-a-few-dollars-more-minimates-4pack/dc80948



Note that these figures are sold out and "are for informational purposes only".

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Web Site Announcements / Re: KC, our beloved Board Administrator, our Everything, has passed away

« on: April 08, 2021, 05:30:44 PM »

Here's some information from Laura.

For those of you who might want to make a contribution in Kathie's memory: we haven't yet located Kathie's attorney or her will, so we don't know if she had any specific charities in mind, but I can offer a couple of informed opinions:

You might know that Kathie was a disciplined runner, covering three miles in Central Park each weeknight and ten miles on Sundays. The Central Park Conservancy maintains those paths, as well as the flowers, trees, playgrounds, etc. Their website is: https://www.centralparknyc.org/

Kathie was a breast cancer veteran. The website https://www.breastcancer.org/ is a terrific resource for anyone who finds herself (or himself: men can have BC also) diagnosed with it, or just has questions about it. Please consider helping them to keep getting information out and offering support.

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Web Site Announcements / Re: KC, our beloved Board Administrator, our Everything, has passed away

« on: April 08, 2021, 01:02:55 PM »

And, sorry if I'm going off-topic. This is a memorial thread for KC, but when the topic comes up "how to honor her", I can't help but think that the best way to honor her is to maintain the integrity of this board. If it devolves into a reddit type board, or Facebookeque, there is no point. There are plenty of places (Reddit or Facebook) for that.

To get back a little bit on track here, I've lost so many friends in the past 6 months that I engaged an attorney to work on a Will just 2 weeks ago. It's still being drafted. It occurred to me recently that "tomorrow is promised to no one" and we can go at any time, just like that. I hope everyone here maybe can think of how someone as strong and healthy as KC can be gone in an instant... and maybe take a lesson from that. Prepare for that future. Love your friends more. Love your family more. Treat every day like it's a gift.