Image Credit: Chuck Poulsen
June 25, 2015 - 7:59 AM
These early worries about a bad forest fire season are well founded.
The Okanagan is drier now than it was previous to the Okanagan Park fire in 2003.
Here are the Kelowna airport precipitation figures in centimetres for April, May, and through June 23, 2003, compared with the same period for this year.
2003: 80.6 cm of rain
2015: 72.2 cm of rain
There was also only half as much rain/snow in March this year as in 2003.
On to matters of far less consequence, for which this column is noted . . .
* A Texas minister says that women who shout God's name during sex should be jailed.
Dr. John Hagee, the founder and senior pastor of the Cornerstone Church, declared: “That is one of the filthiest, most derogatory and sinful uses of the Lord's name I can think of. If it were up to me, I would put every single woman or girl who does that in jail.”
On the other hand, I think most men would rather have her scream “Oh God!” than scream “Oh Leonardo!”
* This summer is the 40th anniversary of the movie Jaws.
It was Steven Spielberg’s first hit and took all his genius to pull it off.
The book was a popular hit but Robert Shaw (Quint) way quoted as saying this of the book: “Jaws was not a novel. It was a story written by a committee, a piece of s—.”
Jaws was an oddity: a movie that was better than the book.
Peter Benchley wrote the book but was predictably out of his league when trying to write the screenplay. They eventually had to hire someone else to do it for him.
Spielberg had to leave the image of the shark largely up to the imagination of the viewers. He borrowed this theatre of the mind from Hitchcock, notably his Psycho.
It wasn’t the only borrowed idea. The famous theme song was a rip off from the French composer Debussy’s 1905 symphony La mer.
But here’s an example of stealing that didn’t work. These are the Rotten Tomatoes scores for Jaws and its sequels:
Jaws (1975) – 97%
Jaws 2 – 53%
Jaws 3 (1983) – 11%
Jaws: The Revenge – 0%
* Roy Scheider, the police chief, was the only one of the bunch who acted in the Jaws 2 flop.
I was in a long line at a trendy pizza place in Los Angeles years ago when the manager let Scheider jump the queue for a table. Waltzed right in, he did.
* Even if the U.S. wanted to get serious about gun control, it’s too late. There is a gun for every adult and child in the U.S. Think about that: statistically speaking, every average family owns four guns.
There are so many guns around that even gun maker Colt, which has been around for 160 years, is on the verge of bankruptcy.
* The proposal for Kelowna to rent public art rather than buy it outright is a good idea. It would allow the city to avoid such debacles as the purchase of the high flying artwork at the east end of the Bennett Bridge. Some smart ass named it “Tribute to Razor Wire.” The city is stuck with it although some other smart ass might suggest that there is a bit of money to be recovered by selling it for scrap metal.
* The Toronto Sun reported that Rob Ford has endorsed Donald Trump. It’s not every day that the political news makes you laugh out loud.
— Chuck Poulsen can be reached at poulsenc30@hotmail.com
News from © iNFOnews, 2015