Golden Globes 2013: A New Hope

The Golden Globes is my favorite awards show. By mixing movie and television stars with lots of alcohol all sorts of good natured fun can be had. One tradition I have is to give out my annual Miss Golden Globes award. But this year was a bad year for that high and tight look with the more daring celebrities, hostess with the mostest Amy Poehler included, going for necklines plunging down to about the knee.

  

In the case of J.Lo, her dress seems to be composed entirely of a fungal infection. She should have a botanist take a look at it.

In another runner-up award, Lucy Liu sewed up the It's Curtains, Scarlett Award with her upholstery inspired get-up.

Michelle Lea, whose bezoms I have seen in person back when she was being sexually assaulted nightly (and twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays) in Spring Awakening, must have misunderstood the point (or lack therof) of my award and emphasized the 'golden' part of the phrase. She had such an auric glow that she made Selma Hayek look like Jessica Chastain. Close but no cigar (and no, that wasn't a backstage with Bill Clinton joke).

But in the end, the starlet most willing to raise her exposure level was Modern Family Girl-Gone-Wild Sarah Hyland who decided to steal some attention back from her much younger (and much more demurely dressed) sister costar. So without further ado, we say adieu to Ms Hyland's sense of modesty as we crown her with this year's double-orbed trophy.

But the real highlight of the night was Jodie Foster's stream of consciousness (or lack thereof) Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award speech. While many seemed baffled by what she either trying to say or not trying to say, two items were clear to me:

•    At age 50, she's just two years older than me.
•   She is back on the market.

My possibly unseemly obsession with the Yale grad is well documented, but this puts a new light on matters. And just to cement my hope, take a look at her red carpet dress:

Yes, she made it out of duct tape and chain mail. That can only mean one thing. She's a nerd just like me. And while there are perhaps a million nerds out there, she still might cast her eye on me. So what if the odds are only a million to one. As Jim Carey says in Dumb and Dumber, "So a million-to-one? That means I have a chance."

Photos From The Past

The Library of Congress has a Flickr page where they posted several hundred amazing color photographs from the 1930s and 1940s. Not only were they rare full color pictures, but they were deep insights into how this country lived seventy years ago. As i looked through the over 1600 photos I began to have a sense of deja vu as I had been to many of these places or seen things like them. Here are some of the more jarring juxtapositions with one photographer in particular:

 

This photo by Jack Delano shows a woman painting the scenery along the Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah mountains. 

 

Seventy years later the place is just as popular for the scenic artisl.

 

 The Chicago lakefront was once a bustling railyard with skyscrapers overlooking them as shown in this photo, also by Jack Delano..

Now this area is the site of Millennium Plaza and the Art Institute of Chicago even though the train tracks still run through. Can you find Metropolitan Tower in both photos?

 

 Many of the photos in the archive are of industrial settings or trains like this one by Jack Delano taken in Chicago as well.

 

Now these trains just sit in museums and train graveyards like this one in New Mexico.

 

I found it odd that I kept being drawn to the photos of Jack Delano. Delano eventually moved to Puerto Rico where he took this street view.

 

 When I went to San Juan, the streets were the same only with fresher paint and newer cars.

I seem to have found a kindred spirit in Jack Delano who worked for the Farm Security Administration Photography program during the Great Depression taking photographs of simple working folk all over the country. He died in Puerto Rico in 1997 but somehow I feel as if his soul still lives on.