Movie Quote of the Day (‘Casablanca,’ With One of Its Great Throwaway Lines)

Captain Renault [played by Claude Rains]: “Ricky, I'm going to miss you. Apparently you're the only one in Casablanca with less scruples than I.”— Casablanca (1942), screenplay by Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, and Casey Robinson (uncredited), directed by Michael Curtiz

TV Quote of the Day (‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,’ on a Major Source of Fancy Sentences)

“That's the fanciest sentence I've ever heard, and I used to watch Frasier."— Kimmy Schmidt (played by Ellie Kemper), in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Season 1, Episode 2, “Kimmy Gets a Job!,” original air date Mar. 6, 2015, teleplay by Sam Means, directed by Tristram Shapeero     

Guess what? Kimmy’s going to add to her treasure trove of highfalutin language. Seventeen years after signing off on his gig as a Seattle radio psychiatrist, Frasier Crane will be contributing more pearls of wisdom, in a “reboot” of the sitcom that will help anchor ViacomCBS's new streaming service Paramount+.

Kelsey Grammer (pictured here with an actor equally adept with allusion-heavy dialogue, David Hyde Pierce as younger brother Niles) will step into his Emmy-winning role for the 21^st season. This will break the tie he set when leaving the show with James Arness (as Gunsmoke’s Matt Dillon) for playing the longest-running character in primetime TV (a record since broken by Richard Belzer and Mariska Hargitay on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit).

You have to ask what is leading Grammer to take up his career-defining role again. Is he short of money? Just antsy after so long in COVID-enforced isolation? Over the years, he has tried valiantly to escape typecasting on the tube and onstage, in performances well-received (Boss) and panned (a disastrous 13-performance Broadway revival of Macbeth 21 years ago). After so much time, is he finally saying the heck with the struggle?

The great risk is this: to what extent can he bring together the talents that made his spinoff of Cheers such a success—not just the wonderful supporting cast, but also the directors and writers (you know—the creators of those pretentious, persnickety lines that Kimmy remembers so vividly)?

This last factor is a far greater risk than what one might expect. Even the hugely talented Peter Falk had an extremely difficult time when he returned to Columbo more than a decade after finishing the series in the Seventies. Most fans would agree that the second incarnation of the show was inferior to the original, largely because of often lackluster scripts.

Oh, well. As a worshipper of Shakespeare, Frasier (and Grammar) will undoubtedly say: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” Let's just hope he won't follow up, several unsuccessful episodes later, with "You can't go home again."

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Dreams, ‘The Touchstones of Our Characters’)

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, which is our atonement, measures inversely the degree by which this is separated from an actual unworthiness. For in dreams we but act a part which must have been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt could discover some waking consent thereto. If this meanness has not its foundation in us, why are we grieved at it?” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on a Fine Specimen of the London Legal Establishment)

“[Barrister Hiram Grewgious] was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been put into a grinding-mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately into high-dried snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of anybody's voluntarily sporting such a head. The little play of feature that his face presented, was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away the chisel, and said: 'I really cannot be worried to finish off this man; let him go as he is.'”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

Vivid descriptions like this leave readers all the more mournful that Dickens did not manage to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood. For what it’s worth, we have his other novels, each brimming with life and remarkable in its own way.

Lawyers, appearing in in 11 of his 15 novels, particularly provoked his powers of observation and invective. If you think that Mr. Grewgious (which rhymes nicely with “egregious”) is bad, then look at Mr. Vholes of Bleak House, “a sallow man with pinched lips that looked as if they were cold," who appears "dressed in black, black-gloved, and buttoned to the chin." 

If he could only have shed that Eastern European accent, Bela Lugosi would have been perfect for the part, had the novel ever been adapted for film in Hollywood’s Golden Age. Movie fans familiar with the legal profession would have found him no more horrifying than in his other roles at Universal Studios.

Quote of the Day (Suzanne Vega, on Explaining Her Songs to Audiences)

“I’ve had my moments where I’ve maybe blurted out more than I intended to, but most of the time if I don’t talk to the audience then it becomes a very uncomfortable show. My songs are kinda dense, and a lot of the time people wouldn’t know what I was talking about. So I learned that it’s better to tell them a bit about it. Not all the songs are my own particular stories, so it’s not like I’m having some sort of cathartic experience when I sing them.”—Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega quoted in Henry Yates, “Welcome Back… Suzanne Vega,” Classic Rock Magazine, February 2006

Photo of the Day: A Raft of Ducks on the River

As I contemplated a potential headline for this photo I took yesterday of the Hackensack River, a few miles from my home in Bergen County, NJ, I thought of the waterfowl at its center. What was the name for a group of ducks?

At first, I thought of referring to a “school of ducks,” with all sorts of wordplay related to that. But it turned out that “school” was out—it wasn’t the proper word.

Then I thought of making the headline about a “duck dynasty.” But that’s a pretty long line of heirs I see. And if you can spot even a scintilla of facial hairs on these guys, your eyesight is far better than mine.

Then I took the easy way out and did a Google search for a group of ducks. “Raft” described these creatures on the water—and, together with “river,” there was a bit of alliteration involved. 

Thanks, Google--you kept me from committing fowl play.

Quote of the Day (Joe Queenan, on Music and Disharmony With Alexa)

“Basically, I don’t think that Alexa likes me. This may be because of a tiff we had a few months ago when I told Alexa to never, ever play smooth jazz in my presence. Never. The problem…is that it’s hard for an electronic assistant to determine what constitutes smooth jazz when you issue a generic command: ‘Alexa, play jazz.’ Alexa doesn’t know that traditional jazz—Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong—is divine, while smooth jazz—a surprisingly tenacious, satanic leftover from the 1990s—is what you listen to when you are on hold for a dental appointment.

“And in these cases, I suspect that I may have taken on an abusive tone, questioning Alexa’s intelligence and sophistication. And yes, perhaps even swearing at her. Which was just not right. Even though Alexa was clearly in the wrong.”—Joe Queenan, “Moving Targets: If Alexa Won’t Talk To Me, What Hope Is There?,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 6-7, 2021

Oh, those electronic assistants! Even when they speak in voices users like (a relative of mine has programmed his to sound like an Australian female—an awful lot like Naomi Watts, maybe even Nicole Kidman), they still may leave something to be desired, as Queenan has discovered.

I know just how he feels. Recently, I commanded, “Hey Google, play Dinah Washington.” I should have known I wasn’t going to get quite what I expected when my “Google” (who sounds like a female consultant conducting human resource seminars for employees) announced that the selections would come from Spotify stations that play Dinah Washington. 

Sure enough, I was shortly hearing Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and other jazz luminaries.

Granted, it wasn’t the kind of assault on taste that raised Queenan’s hackles. But it leaves me thinking that technology still has a way to go before it replaces some essential human functions.