Musings & Thoughts for Sunday, May 30, 2021, or: Just Another Uneventful Day in My Quiet Corner of Florida

Hello, Dear Reader. It’s early afternoon here in New Hometown, Florida, on Sunday, May 30, 2021. It’s a sultry late spring day; the temperature is 88˚F (31˚C) under partly sunny skies. With humidity at 41% and a becalmed wind, the feels-like temperature is 91˚F (33˚C). Today’s forecast: We can expect thunderstorms to pass through the area, and the high will be 94˚F (34˚C). Tonight, skies will be mostly clear, and the low will be 69˚F (21˚C).

Well, as usual on weekends – especially since the breakup with the Caregiver – I don’t have any exciting “what we did on Saturday” news. I also don’t have any earthshaking news about today, unless you count the fact that I’m waiting for Amazon to deliver a DVD of director Milos Forman’s 1981 film Ragtime at some point this afternoon.

Ragtime is a loose adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 historical novel about turn-of-the-century New York City  (it only follows a couple of Doctorow’s many plot threads) and features a stellar cast that includes Howard E. Rollings, Jr., James Cagney, Brad Dourif, Elizabeth McGovern, Moses Gunn, Mary Steenburgen, James Olson, and Pat O’Brien, just to name a few.

I saw Ragtime once when it was on cable and HBO had a free preview back in the 1980s, and it never crossed my mind to try to get it on home media until…well, Friday night. I was looking through Milos Forman’s filmography on IMDb,com and saw that Ragtime was his fourth American-made film (he started out in his native Czechoslovakia in the mid-1950s when that now-vanished country was under Communist rule but immigrated here in 1968) after Taking Off (1971), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and Hair (1979).

I have not seen any of those, but I have Forman’s 1984 Amadeus (or more precisely, the 2002 Director’s Cut). Amadeus is one of my favorite “grownup” films, and because I seem to have liked Ragtime (I like the music genre which Doctorow chose for the novel’s title), I went with that movie instead of Cuckoo’s Nest or Hair.

Currently, my DVD copy of Ragtime (probably one of those DVD-on-Demand ones) is Out for Delivery and will probably arrive between 3 and 6:30 PM.

Other than that, my plan for the day involves dusting some of my furniture and vacuuming the floor. I can do the dusting part as soon as I post this, but I will do the vacuum-the-floor as soon as I know that Gamer Boy in the adjacent room is awake. I wouldn’t want to wake him up.

Well, that’s all the news I have to offer today. I hope your weekend has been a nice and peaceful one, and I hope you stay safe and healthy. So, until next time, ciao, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.