Rant #1,596: Wasted Weekend

What a wasted weekend this was!

I can't remember a weekend that was so devoid of anything worthwhile.

First off, my parents' anniversary party was canceled, first to February 27, then to March 5.

With the oncoming blizzard, we could not take the chance of anyone having trouble getting to the party, so it was just put off until hopefully a better weather day.

I did food shopping on Friday night, and what with the impending storm coming, this itself was a panic.

Plenty of people did their food shopping that evening, and lots of things were gone before I had a chance to buy them.

When we are talking about a basically one-day event, why do people buy milk, water and bread at the rate they do?

I don't get it.

Anyway, overnight the snow came, and a lot of snow came to my neck of the woods, something near 30 inches.

It just came down basically all day Saturday, and it kept pretty much everyone inside.

Since we couldn't do too much, we turned to the TV for salvation, and when you have all the devices that we have related to our TV, there is always something on to watch.

I watched a load of old game shows on Saturday afternoon, on the new Buzzr channel that we have on Verizon.

This channel is so much better than the Game Show Network, because it basically replicates the old Game Show Network, before that channel became simply an outlet for off network game shows, one more horrid than the next.

Buzzr shows reruns of old game shows, but they involve in the mix the black and white game shows of yore, including such classics as "I've Got a Secret," "To Tell the Truth," and the best of them all, "What's My Line."

They are fun to watch decades after they were originally shown, both for their wit and decorum.

And the people on there ... Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf ... I guess you can say they don't make "celebrities" like this today.

That ate up a good part of the afternoon, and then came the evening.

My wife and I could not find anything to watch on Netflix, which has increasingly become a haven for trashy films, few of any substance. They removed a lot of classic films, black and white ones, so there isn't that much to watch there as there had been.

Anyway, when we didn't find what we wanted there, we turned to YouTube. Since we have Google Chromecast, we can just cast a film to our TV, and that is what we did.

We took a chance on an obscurity from 1962, a real film noir piece called "Stark Fear."

The film starred Beverly Garland--one of the all-time grade-Z actresses of the 1950s and 1960s who ended up making it big in the late 1960s and early 1970s as "Barbara Douglas" on "My Three Sons."

Garland had an interesting real life--she married well and had a string of hotels named after her by her husband--and she was a better actress than she was given credit for, and this film proved that to me.

She plays a woman who is in a loveless marriage. Nonetheless, she is devoted to her husband, and even when she is ripped by him and he leaves her, she is so devoted that she goes out searching for him.

Once she does this, she opens herself up for not only more despair, but some other things that I won't get into here.

Suffice it to say, she finds out some things about him that she didn't know, and in the meantime, meets the real man of her dreams, and she goes on to live happily ever after.

That isn't giving too much of what happens away, but let me tell you, I was quite surprised just how good this little unknown gem of a film was.

I always found Garland attractive on "My Three Sons," but let's face it, most boys my age were more attracted to the gorgeous Tina Cole as "Katy Douglas" than to Garland.

But here, Garland is way younger than she was on "My Three Sons," and way sexier than she could have ever been on that show.

In fact, the film truly pushes the limits of what was permissible on screen in 1962, and while you don't see much of anything, the sex factor in this little movie is quite big, and Garland is clearly at the center of that action.

If you have 90 minutes to kill, this is one movie that you can fill just about all of that time with. Look on YouTube for it; you will not be disappointed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-Dsp1hjOxY

The snow finally stopped on late Saturday night, so on Sunday, the drudgery of the cleanup was at hand, so my wife and I went out and did the best job we could with nearly 30 inches of snow on the ground.

My wife left to do some further food shopping after spending time on the front walk, and my son was only able to do minimal stuff because he was under the weather.

So the bulk of the shoveling was done by yours truly, and it took me about two and half hours do do what I did.

Well, I got my exercise in, let's put it that way.

I am not supposed to be shoveling at all, due to the pinched nerve I have in my neck, but that doesn't stop me from doing this.

Last year, I bought a specially designed shovel for those with neck and back problems, and it is bent in the middle so that there is less strain on your back when picking up piles of snow. It does work, even though after 150 minutes of doing this, I was kind of sore anyway.

When done, I sat down to watch some more YouTube on TV, and I found some pretty funny compendiums of what I would call "epic fails on TV newscasts," where something goes terribly wrong on a newscast, things like reporters being photobombed, animals going after reporters, women news anchors tops becoming unbuttoned, cameras not pointed where they should be, etc.

It was pretty funny, and they all looked real, including the tops popping open, which, of course, is more prevalent on foreign TV than it is here, because elsewhere, they sell sex as much as news on these broadcasts, it appears.

So having watched a few hours of falling and popping and plopping, I went out to get Chinese food, later planned to watch a WWE pay per view event on the WWE Network, and promptly fell asleep at about 8 p.m., before I got a chance to watch much of that action.

And here I am, preparing to go to work before I know it.

What a waste of a weekend, but at least I wasn't bored.