I think the thing about the Hughes films is for me, they really illustrated what I thought of as a "normal American" backdrop in a lot of ways.

Totally. As a grownup, I'm still kind of surprised when I see the actual suburbs that look like that.

I am home, have the day off, and have had one meeting and checked my email. I think that's all I'm going to do, though.

Oh, Mame!! Was there ever anyone better in that role than Rosalind Russell?

No, but Lucille Ball gave it a pretty good try.

A quick follow-up as to why I think The Fugitive is probably the Best Chicago Film Ever--Andrew Davis picked great Chicago faces and people to play Chicago characters. Most if not all of the cops featured in the conviction and subsequent pursuit of Richard Kimble were actual Chicago cops, as were the reporters (Lester Holt, now on NBC and MSNBC, is prominent in the news pack), and the other regular people Kimble encountered. The woman who was Kimble's landlady in the basement apartment was someone they met (IIRC) at O'Hare, and the guy who played her son who ratted out Kimble was a buddy of someone on the set.

Also, Davis showed the cops eating Chicago hot dogs at the station--gotta love the hometown boy featuring the local cuisine!

Most if not all of the cops featured in the conviction and subsequent pursuit of Richard Kimble were actual Chicago cops

Heh. I think there's a law that if you're a man and you want to be a Chicago cop, you have to be a big guy with a mustache. Although they sometimes grant waivers, and allow new cops time to gain weight and grow a 'stache....

I think there's a law that if you're a man and you want to be a Chicago cop, you have to be a big guy with a mustache.

Case in point: Dennis Farina.

No, but Lucille Ball gave it a pretty good try.

She did-- and she got to utter the better version of the immortal line, "Life's a banquet..."

But Ros had the cooler version of the apartment.

For San Francisco - Vertigo.

Here's something that most people never do - play the banjo during brain surgery....

Banjo player Eddie Adcock recently had brain surgery where surgeons installed deep brain stimulator electrodes to control a tremor in his right hand. Patients are sometimes kept awake during brain surgery to interact with the surgeon and help guide the procedure. In Adcock's case, he played the banjo as the surgeon worked.

...

Those neurosurgeons were eager to operate on Eddie, with his life-long high level of musical accomplishment and the unique requirements related to his fine motor skills. During the brain-implantation stage of the surgery, he was kept conscious in order to be able to play his Deering GoodTime banjo and assist the team of surgeons in directing the fine-tuning of their placement of electrodes in the brain -- an operating-room 'first'.

Banjo playing during brain surgery

Oh, I forgot to say Happy Belated Birthdays and Congrats to Billytea and Wallybee!!! Also, good luck to your pup, brenda.

Growing up in Miami, the idea of dropping temperatures and changing leaves and snow was so foreign and seemed to me, this idealized image that I desperately wanted to be a part of, especially as my own family was falling apart when I was a kid, with my parents' extremely contentious divorce and both of their subsequent mid-life crises where I was caught in the middle. It's not an uncommon scenario, by any means, especially for the late 70s/early 80s, but for a kid like I was, introverted and shy to start with, those carefree images amidst falling leaves or frolicking in the snow, were powerful icons. Symbols of everything I thought my life was lacking.

After growing up in South Florida I was shocked to go to college in central Ohio and see white clapboard houses and picket fences and deciduous trees and chimneys smoking and all that Leave it to Beaver stuff.

I had fairly dim notions of Paris until I read Tropic of Cancer and Anais Nin's diaries. That's what made me want to go to Paris.

When I first got to London I was pleasantly overwhelmed reading the Underground map and seeing all these places I knew from songs by the Stones and the Kinks. There's Knightsbridge! There's Notting Hill! There's Shepard's Bush!

But Peter Pan's flight over London at night was my first real sense of London. Or possibly any city.

My first impressions of Berlin were from a Rolling Stone article about David Bowie and Iggy Pop living there in exile. (I've always found it horrible and funny that Bowie had to leave Los Angeles and go to Berlin because LA was too decadent.)

I guess my New York was from reading the Village Voice in high school. That's the NYC I wanted to see.

Risky Business made me think that riding the trains in Chicago would be a very sexy undertaking.

At some point in my post-collegiate life I think I realized that I had very deficient notions of world geography and started to rectify that with a fascination about port cities. Which is why I know Valparaiso is on the coast and Santiago is inland.