Sherry Chandler

Rebate Letters to Cost $42 Million:

WASHINGTON (AP) — At a cost of nearly $42 million, the IRS wants you to know: Your check is almost in the mail.
The Internal Revenue Service is spending the money on letters to alert taxpayers to expect rebate checks as part of the economic stimulus plan.

The notices are going out this month to an estimated 130 million households who filed returns for the 2006 tax year, at a cost $41.8 million, IRS spokesman John Lipold confirmed.

McCain Sees Pork Where Scientists See Success:

WEST GLACIER, Mont. — If you’ve heard Sen. John McCain’s stump speech, you’ve surely heard him talk about grizzly bears. The federal government, he declares with horror and astonishment, has spent $3 million to study grizzly bear DNA. “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal,” he jokes, “but it was a waste of money.”

…

Kendall, on orders from her superiors, will not directly respond to McCain (”I really can’t wade into that”), but she clearly doesn’t find his jibes amusing, much less accurate. The truth is, her project is focused not on the DNA of grizzly bears, but on counting them.

As a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, she set out to get the first head count of grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem. She and her co-workers at the USGS have used DNA primarily as a bear-identifying tool.

…

Grizzly bears in northwest Montana are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. But Kendall’s project — the results of which will be published soon in a scientific journal — revealed that there are more grizzlies than anyone had realized. That suggests that three decades of conservation efforts, costing tens of millions of dollars, have paid off.

This could have long-term implications for the Northern Divide grizzlies, possibly including their removal someday from the threatened list. Delisting them would restore management of the bears to state control after decades of federal oversight.

“It was extremely well executed and well worth the money,” said Sterling Miller, a bear researcher working for the National Wildlife Federation. “Someone like McCain should be delighted, in fact. The Endangered Species Act works.”

So let’s see — $5 million (actual cost) to count grizzly bears or $42 million to send a letter telling people they’re going to get a rebate but not sending them a rebate. Which looks like wasteful spending to you?

And with apologies to those of you who liked The Road more than I did: Cormac McCarthy Does Toy Story 3:

An Oprah-fueled frenzy of book sales for my latest novel, The Road. An upcoming movie adapting my No Country for Old Men. Intoxicated with success, I sit looking out at the stark desert, and it comes to me like a fever-dream. I must call my agent …

Click the link.

Watch at YouTube.

In spite of Yankee Doodle Dandy, I find it hard to think of James Cagney as a song and dance man. Yet Wikipedia tells me he started out as a chorus boy in vaudeville and on Broadway and was once a street dancer known as Cellar Door Cagney.

This longish number here is from Footlight Parade, one of three musical extravaganzas Warner Brothers produced in 1933 with huge Buzby Berkeley production numbers. The other two were Gold Diggers of 1933 and 42nd Street.
These were not actually pre-code films — Footlight Parade even makes reference to the code by having a censor in place but he, like the code, was abused and ignored as they proceed to put on numbers like “Honeymoon Hotel,” which seems to have more in common with a notell motel than the bridal suite at the Ritz and “Shanghai Lil” with it’s professional women in opium dens.

Kicking the gong around.

Footlight Parade gets good reviews and some even think it is the best of the three Warner Brother musicals. I didn’t like it much.

Even the huge synchronized swimming number, “By A Waterfall,” was remarkable without being particularly interesting. It consumed an entire reel, as did “Shanghai Lil.”

I’d heap rather watch Ginger Rogers doing “We’re in the Money.” In Pig Latin or not, I wish the long-lost dollar would make another comeback. And come to think of it, that might be part of my problem with Footlight Parade. Too many love songs.

To my somewhat modern eye, the frame story was sexist, racist, and clichéd. I mean, Ruby Keeler as a Chinese courtesan speak/singing pidgen?

What was worse, James Cagney seems to inhabit an entirely different universe from that of Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, and Guy Kibbee. Joan Blondel could match him for edge but the others belonged in a gentler world.

But the movie has one delightful minute, in the middle of the long number above, when Cagney and Keeler break into a tap routine on the Shanghai bar. Keeler even mimics Cagney’s distinctive marionette-on-a-string tap style for just an instant.

(That style also showed up in about ten seconds worth of “direction” for a sort of pre-Cats number called “Sitting on a Backyard Fence,” but it was only a tease. All was to be saved for the finale, “Shanghai Lil.”)

Alas, the whole number breaks down in the end to a sort of patriotic drill team routine, and how we got from AWOL sailors in Shanghai to FDR’s image on the American flag is a little puzzling. The Warner Brothers did love FDR, but this routine doesn’t have either the emotional power of The Gold Diggers‘ “Remember my Forgotten Man” or the Wow! of 42nd Street’s skyscrapers.