Author Archives: WS50

New Jersey Beach Looks Like a Million Bucks

13 Thursday Mar 2014

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BY BOB SMITH

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently began a beach replenishment project in Bradley Beach. The plan is to dump over a million cubic yards of sand onto the beach between Asbury Park and Avon-by-the-Sea, a few miles south. For scale purposes, a cubic yard takes up about the same amount of space as a normal-sized kitchen stove. What will it cost to gather up, and dump, a million stoves’ worth of sand onto our humble beach? A mere $18.3 million, or about 18 bucks per stove.

It’s a huge project, by any standard. The entire shoreline replenishment project may cost as much as $102 million, and is supposed to cover the beaches from Sea Bright to Manasquan. In fact, it’s the most extensive beach replenishment project the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has ever undertaken, and by volume of sand it’s the biggest beach-fill project in the world.

I can personally testify to the gargantuan nature of the effort: night after night, you can hear the monotonous backup beeps of the bulldozers as they push the new sand around on the beach, in the glare of banks of floodlights run by diesel-powered generators on wooden sledges.

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The process is fascinating. There are two tanker ships they use to suck up a slurry of sand from a designated site offshore. Once one of them is full, it moves into position approximately 100 yards off the beach, and hooks up to a floating pipe about three feet in diameter. That floating, flexible pipe connects to a series of rigid metal pipes of similar size connected end to end, and strung along the shoreline.

Affixed to the discharge end of the pipeline on the beach, there’s an open metal box with heavy-duty wire screen walls measuring probably 10 feet wide, by 12 or 15 feet high, by 10 feet deep. When the tanker is pumping, a gray slurry of watery sand gushes out of the metal pipe, and is forced through the wire mesh, which acts as a filter.

IMG_7562They need that because it seems the best offshore area for grabbing all that sand is located under an area where, years ago, the U.S. Navy blew up old ships, and other cool stuff for fun. Oops, I mean target practice. So periodically, they shut down the flow, and workers climb into the cage to clear out fish, clams, plastic bottles and bags, and any military shells that may have been sucked up by the tanker offshore. That’s a good thing, because rolling over on your blanket to find yourself staring at a hunk of large-caliber unexploded ordnance (i.e., a really big, live bullet) generally doesn’t make for a festive beach day.

Anyway, as the slurry is being pumped out, the jumbo bulldozers continually push it back and forth, away from the discharge end of the pipe, grading and smoothing it to a uniform level from the inland side of the beach down to the surf. Their goal is to restore the beaches to conditions better than they were before Superstorm Sandy, and based on what they’ve completed in Bradley Beach so far, they’ve done that. The beach appears to be just as wide as it was before that storm.

The only problem I have with the project is that they completed the last major beach replenishment project in 2001, and the one before that was some time in the ’90s. Clearly, no matter what we do, the ocean eventually claws the sand right back.

Now don’t get me wrong. As an owner of a home nearby, I’m thrilled that our government sees fit to throw good sand after bad, decade after decade. Maybe they’ll keep funding this kind of Sisyphean fun as long as I’m alive so I’ll always have an expansive swath of beach on which to lay my head.

But is this really a good long-term use of our tax money? I guess it keeps the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers busy. After all, what would they do if it they didn’t have beaches to replenish? Fix our rusted-out, rickety highway bridges? Replace aging water pipes and upgrade the electrical generation and transmission infrastructure so we don’t risk blackouts every summer?

Come on. That stuff’s too easy. And none of it’s half as much fun as pushing around a million stoves’ worth of slurry in the world’s biggest sandbox.

The Stuff of My Stuff

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

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BY ANTHONY BUCCINO

Whatever happened to George Carlin’s stuff?

Actually, I don’t care what happened to the entertainer’s stuff. His stuff was crap. My crap is stuff. He would say so himself, except he’s gone, and as an atheist, probably not far. But as for me I’ve been thinking about my stuff as I sit here in my man cave/bunker/warehouse with about 60 of those white storage boxes full of my stuff.

I’m not a pack rat. I’ve been writing for more than 40 years, and I don’t have any notes from before 1971, more or less. So, I’ve got a lot of notes about stuff I wrote about, and probably a lot more notes about stuff I wanted to write about but haven’t done so yet. And boxes of books that I used in my research. And more boxes of books I intend to read when I get some time. I can’t bear to part with any of them.

Some of these boxes I had taken down from the attic where there are just as many boxes as the beams will hold. I was looking for something, and I probably found it, but haven’t gotten around to bringing the boxes back up, yet.

While the boxes were handy, I went through them and discarded all the junk. That eliminated almost two boxes. I filled those two boxes with accumulated knick-knacks, opened playing cards, souvenirs and such, Mom’s swizzle stick collection and such, then labeled them so they are ready to go up to the attic.

I compare these sagging white boxes surrounding me to the various hard drives hooked up, and others standing by my computer. It’s probably a close comparison as to which hold more data. But that’s not what got me thinking about my stuff. A power surge or a burst water pipe would certainly have me moaning for all the lost treasures in my stuff. But, no, that’s not it either.

It’s all about what happens to my stuff when I’m not here anymore to take care of it, to sift through it – looking in just the right box for the right piece of paper, or photo, or book, that I need to somehow complete my thought. With the computer I can put in a word or phrase, and I get rows and rows of documents where that word or phrase appears. With these white boxes and the ones cooling in the attic, the sorting algorithm is in my ever-shrinking pack of grey matter.

When I’m gone, what will become of my stuff? Will my surviving relatives declare my stuff as crap, and send it off to the Happy Hill Recycling Farm? Already, I know someone in whom this collection cluttering the basement incites a near grand mal seizure at the mere thought of dumping all this stuff without my aging muscles to bag, lug and tote to the curb.

The books, in several trips, would go to the local library’s annual used book sale, and those not sold to be refreshed into new books some day. My notes and scraps of ideas? Oh, where will they go without me? I suppose the truth is that if there is no extant published version of what I may have produced from my stuff, online or in print somewhere, the thoughts and background stuff will be surely tossed.

I get it. I have to get rid of my stuff so the next guy has a place for his stuff. But first, he has to get rid of my crap so he’ll have a place for his stuff.

Hats are Off, and ‘Out’

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

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men in hats

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

There’s a line in the Stephen Sondheim song “The Ladies Who Lunch,” from “Company,” in which the character played in the original production by Elaine Stritch asks, “Does anyone still wear a hat?” That was in 1970. Now, more than 40 years later, those of us who remember them can still ask, “Does anyone still wear a hat?”

The answer is almost no one, male or female, wears a hat for fashion. The only time I see hats on women is when I pass near an African American church on Sundays. There are no hats on fashion runways; no hats on the red carpet at the Oscars. There are no hats in most churches.

Those of us over 50 know full well that it wasn’t always like this. Men and women used to wear hats. Just watch any movie made before 1960. Men wore hats to work. Men wore hats to the ballgame. And I’m not talking about baseball caps. They wore real hats, like fedoras and derbys and homburgs. In summer, they wore straw hats. My grandfathers wouldn’t think of going “out” without their hats.

pat in hatWomen’s hats were an entire industry. Women wore a different one with every outfit. If you wore a coat, you wore a hat. And it wasn’t just for well-off women. Even working women in the movies and television wore hats. Even hard-boiled dames in Raymond Chandler stories wore hats. Lois Lane picked up her hat every time she was leaving the Daily Planet building.

Head coverings were actually required in many Christian churches until the 1960s. I remember there was a nun at the front door of my church who used to pass out handkerchiefs and tissues to girls who forgot their hats. And of course, Easter bonnets were a real thing back then. Women wore elaborate hats to Easter services. And the hat was the chief attraction at the Easter Parade.

The women’s hat industry was so big that they had a special name for a person who designed, made, trimmed, or sold women’s hats. He or she was called a milliner. It’s a word that has disappeared from our world like cobbler and blacksmith.

If I had to speculate at the one event that helped to killed men’s hats, I’d say it was the appearance of President Kennedy at his inaugural in 1961 standing in sub-freezing cold without a hat. Apparently, he wanted to have photographs showing him hatless next to President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon, both of whom were wearing hats. That was supposed to show that he was a young man of great vigor. It sounds to me like something Vladimir Putin might do today.

Anyway, apparently hat sales plummeted after that as America bought the idea that hats were old-fashioned. And when soon afterward the Catholic Church dropped the requirement that women wear hats to church, the writing was on the wall for milliners.

Of course, hats have never gone away completely. Every so often some celebrity appears wearing a porkpie, a pillbox or a Panama hat. But the days of regular men and women wearing hats for fashion are probably over.

Today, hats are worn for utilitarian purposes — to keep our heads warm in winter and protect them from the sun in the summer. But although I hated as a boy when I had to wear a hat when I got dressed up for a special occasion, I did like looking at other people wearing them and I still do.

Does anyone still wear a hat? Well, now that I’m a grandfather, maybe I’ll start wearing a hat to look the part. I’ll bet I could rock a fedora.

New Jersey State Officials and Soil Safe: ‘Perfect Together?’

10 Monday Mar 2014

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BY JULIE SEYLER

Have you ever heard of Soil Safe? I hadn’t until I read an article in The New York Times about how the state of New Jersey wants their business.

The Soil Safe Web site explains the “beauty” of what they contribute to the world. They specialize

in the recycling of soils contaminated with a variety of petroleum products and heavy metals. Since our founding, Soil Safe has processed over 18.5 million tons of contaminated soil from over 40,000 successful remediation and construction projects.

While I wish I had the time to investigate whether that 18.5 millions tons of contaminated soil has been as successfully remediated as Soil Safe claims, it seems their boasts are sufficient for New Jersey. The state intends to use their dumping trucks to lay some toxic waste in the vicinity of the Rahway River in North Jersey. This particular site is a little wildlife haven for diamondback terrapin, yellow-crowned night herons, and bald eagles, but it appears it shall be thrown under the wheels of the trucks because there are big bucks to be made. When weighing billions of dollars against the health and safety of the citizens of New Jersey, and their environs, money is talking way louder.

These are the facts according to The Times:

1. Soil Safe will dump enough petroleum-contaminated soils to create a 29-feet-high mound of garbage in North Jersey between Staten Island and the Arthur Kill. (I am pretty sure this area may already be an environmentally-polluted area, or is very proximate to another landfill dumping site. Could the unsaid perverse reasoning of it all be that it really doesn’t matter, given what’s already in the ground around there?)

2. Since the plan was first floated, back in 2010, to as recently as last year, various experts within the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection have verbalized the fact that dumping this much contaminated soil could have severe consequences on the environment. One grave concern would be a flood. In such circumstances, that mound filled with soil laced with oil could collapse into the water.

But what’s a little pollution in the riverbed? The agency, whose goal is to protect the environment, gave conditional approval for Soil Safe to proceed.

The Times made a connection with the workings of New Jersey politics. It looks like profits are to be made, either though direct distributions to the pocketbooks of certain well-connected people, or to the campaign coffers of others.

For example, Soil Safe is a client of Bob Smith, duly elected state senator of the 17th Legislative District, Chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, and a lawyer in the firm of Bob Smith & Associates. The Times stated that Senator Smith “represented Soil Safe at a hearing before an elected county board.” That means the chairman of the state Senate’s committee that oversees the environment got paid for representing a company that deals with materials that contaminate the environment. Not sure what happened to conflict of interest concerns.

At the moment, Soil Safe pays the three landowners of the future dumping site rent of $75K a month. It is unclear to me what they could possibly be renting. Are they paying “rent” for the right to be guaranteed the contract to dump? But this is a paltry sum because “if the deal goes through, (Soil Safe) promises the owners many millions of dollars in tipping fees.”

What are tipping fees? Another way of saying, “pay-off”? Or, “thank-you”?

There are other politicians that are benefiting from a connection with Soil Safe. The State Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney is logistically close, being that he serves out of Gloucester County, and Soil Safe runs operations out of the same county. Mr. Sweeney and the county both seem to have gotten a little richer from the generosity of Soil Safe.

It also appears that Governor Christie has a hand in the pie, if not exactly directly, through the throwing of political favors. But that’s a whole different story on a different day.

In Naples, it is said the Camorra controls the garbage, and makes the money. In New Jersey, we anoint our duly elected officials to be our Camorra.

The Smoke and Mirrors of ‘Beauty’

07 Friday Mar 2014

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Beauty in the mirror

Let’s put beauty in the eyes of the older.

BY LOIS DESOCIO

Recently, while sitting at a bar with a 62-year-old male friend, he looked at the ebullient, smooth-skinned, 20-something bartender, then looked at me, and said: “Ah, to be young and beautiful again, right?”

“Been there, done that,” I said. “If she’s lucky, she’ll be 59 some day.”

While I don’t see myself as falling victim to the coveting of youth, and I’ve held on to my wrinkles (for now), I was never a Hollywood sexpot. And I’m not 81. Like Kim Novak.

That collective consciousness that judges women by how they look, was shoved, at Ms. Novak’s expense, in the faces of anyone who watched the Academy Awards last week, and was privy to the subsequent chatter, tweets, blogs, and mean-girl bashing about the pillowed lips, the skin-tight cheeks, and the raised eyebrows of Ms. Novak.

While I admit to having been taken aback at first by her looks, the irony and the hypocrisy of my reaction quickly took center stage. What happened to what we all know, and learned in kindergarten – don’t judge a book by its cover?

And don’t assume Ms. Novak sees herself as so many others did – the aging screen siren, who can’t face the truth, or much less a mirror, so she, out of desperation to stay young and beautiful, altered her face ineffably.

I applaud her, and I choose to believe she feels good about how she looks. She felt confident enough to face a Hollywood audience mostly half her age, and less.

Let’s add women who choose to take advantage of the latest dermatological advances to the list of the non-judged – to the list of those who know that aging gracefully is not about how others perceive you, or how much you choose to nip, tuck, pull, plump, lift, or allow to sag, but how you feel about yourself, and how you are allowed to take steps to maintain that credo in whatever way you choose.

A little pearl of prudence did roll out from under all this fray in the form of 31-year-old Lupita Nyong’o, and her speech at a Black Women in Hollywood luncheon days before the awards. It centered around her wish, when she was a young girl to “wake up lighter skinned,” and how it took “validation” from “a celebrated model …” to pull herself up and out of that … seduction of inadequacy.”

“…she was dark as night,” Ms. Nyong’o said. “I couldn’t believe that people were embracing a woman that looked so much like me as beautiful. Now I had a spring in my step because I felt more seen, more appreciated by the far-away gatekeepers of beauty.”

While Ms. Nyong’o’s words are a wretched, and disgraceful, reminder that even a by-any-standards-breathtakingly-beautiful (inside and out, it appears) young woman can fall victim to the societal “rules” of beauty, it also highlights her emergence away from that, and a grasping of the wisdom that, simply, beauty really does come from within.

This conversation is nothing new. But I’m hoping that the timing of Ms. Novak’s public thrashing, which came on the heels of Ms. Nyong’o’s personal confession, will at least nudge this next generation of women to kick that societal pendulum, which has been frozen closer to “you’re inadequate,” towards “everyone is beautiful.”

And I hope I’m lucky enough to be 80 someday.

Much Like Deer in the Woods, Tomorrow Will Take Care of Itself

06 Thursday Mar 2014

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Frank deer

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

When you’re young, it’s easy to put things off to some unspecified future time. After all, when you’re younger than 40, you probably have more future ahead of you than you have past or present. It seems like there’s a lot of room in that attic for storage of dreams. But as we age into the right side of 50, the amount of future time left to us begins to shrink to a point where the idea that putting off things (such as pleasure) to a future time is no longer a viable plan. Those of us in the 50+ club have to live in the present.

I was reminded of this in church, of all places, as I attended services this week. While there’s some silly stuff in the Bible, there’s also a lot of wisdom. In fact, there’s a whole book in the Bible called “Wisdom.” And there’s also a book of Proverbs. It seems to me that a lot of the purpose of the Bible was to write down the collected wisdom of the herd. Unfortunately, some of the thoughts of the lunatic fringe made it in as well.

Anyway, the Bible reading was from the Gospel of Matthew. The evangelist quotes Jesus as saying to his followers: “Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself.” (Matthew 6:34.)

And if I was in a more evangelical kind of church, I would have shouted, “Amen.” But Catholics aren’t into public displays of emotion and so I remained silent. But it seems to me that these are words to live by for us over-50 folks. We need to be present. We need to not put off anything we can enjoy now to the future, because the future is growing short, and what there is, is not guaranteed.

Now, I know that Fleetwood Mac urged us to “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.” But the message of that song was not to dwell on the past because “Yesterday’s gone …” It’s the same sentiment that Little Orphan Annie expresses in her “Tomorrow,” where the sum will come out. It’s okay to look to tomorrow optimistically; it’s wrong to worry about it.

Recently, I was looking out at the backyard of my mother’s house in suburban New Jersey. Suddenly about 10 deer appeared, all foraging for food in the snow. Sadly, this has become an all-too-common sight, as human developments have encroached on traditional deer habitats.

But these deer live day to day. They don’t worry about tomorrow. Finding food today, and staying warm is their focus in these winter months. And it occurs to me that our cave-dwelling ancestors did likewise. They may not have lived as long as we do now, but I’ll bet they enjoyed every minute they had when they weren’t working to feed and clothe themselves.

I know that some people can’t help worrying about tomorrow and everything else. Will the 401(k) be enough to live on? Will Medicare allow me to see the doctors I want to see? Will I be able to stay in my house? But even those people can resolve to enjoy today, and be present enough to notice the details like the beautiful scene the snow has created in the trees, or the rosy cheeks on a three-year-old playing in a park on a cold winter’s day. Being present means enjoying what is before you, and not thinking about what’s next. Because tomorrow will take care of itself.

I’ve Come to Be a Man for All Seasons

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

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BY BOB SMITH

Friends of ours from Sydney, Australia visited us recently and, true to form for this miserable winter, it was 30 degrees with intermittent snow showers all day. And they loved it. In Sydney, they explained, it never gets cold enough to snow. In fact, during their warmest months (January and February), the temperature ranges from 66 to 79 degrees Fahrenheit. In the cool months (July being the coldest), the temperature ranges from 46 to 61. So their seasons aren’t differentiated by extreme temperature variations or cold-weather events like snowstorms. As a result, they said, in retrospect, they have a hard time distinguishing one year from another.

So, for example, if a noteworthy event in their lives were to occur on a day when the temperature was 64 degrees, they couldn’t later readily distinguish the season when it happened, because it could as easily have been a cool day in January or a warm day in July. They can’t automatically think back on the day, and recall, as we might, that we were wearing gloves and scarves and heavy leggings, and say “Oh yeah, that would have been last winter, when it was bitterly cold.”

Or remember that the event occurred, or that the happy (or sad) news arrived, just as they were finishing up raking leaves on a crisp fall day. Let’s be thankful for the clear mental marker this season gives us to define this point in our lives. Someday Maria and I may fondly recall this as the hard winter when Simon and Monica from Sydney first came to visit us at the shore, when we shared dinner and a lovely pinot noir at a deserted restaurant on the Asbury Park boardwalk, then went home, and played guitar, and sang until our fingers hurt, and our throats were raw.

Winter descends, plants die, birds flee, and the days grow short – sobering harbingers of mortality. But the dark days blossom into buds on trees, and longer twilights, and spring’s timeless cycle of renewal, followed by a riotous explosion of exuberant life, and activity in summer.

Which, dying too soon, morphs into wistful fall. The wheel is always turning, and with our starkly different seasons, we see tangible evidence of it every day. As my 50s recede into the past, each change of seasons seems a touch more poignant, colored by a greater sense that, indeed, we will each see only a finite number of them. Whether we curse that reality or embrace it, we cannot change it one whit. As this long winter draws to a close (whenever that finally occurs), I vote for embrace.

Ukraine Crises Stirs Memories of 1960s Russian Showdown

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

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russia 5BY MARGO D. BELLER

Anyone who grew up during the 1960s remembers “duck and cover.” At an alert, crawl under your desk and put your arms over your head, and hope the nuclear bomb lobbed by “the Russians,” as we called what was once the Soviet Union, would miss and hit elsewhere.

There was a time my boomer friends and I laughed at that memory. Today, watching the 24-hour coverage of the Ukraine crisis, we are not laughing. We’re back to fearing the Russians again.

Those of us who study history, or in my case is married to someone who does, see a strong parallel between Vladimir Putin sending Russian troops into Crimea to “protect” the ethnic Russians there, with Adolph Hitler sending German troops into the nascent nation of Czechoslovakia to protect the ethnic Germans in 1938.

You might remember what happened a year later when Hitler’s troops went from “protecting” to invading, this time Poland.

In today’s world, we have instant and constant bombardment. You can watch an invasion as it happens, not wait as our parents did to read about it in the newspapers. There are tweets, blogs and Facebook posts.

I find it overwhelming on a normal day, and these are not normal times.

Back in the 1960s, I did not understand the implications of what we were doing when we went through the “civil defense” drills and hid under our desks. But there was a real fear in the adult world the “Russians” would lob missiles at major cities, as the Cuban missile crisis showed.

My parents and their generation were finally feeling some economic security after growing up with immigrant parents trying to “make it” in the new world. They feared another world war, only this time with nuclear bombs.

“The living will envy the dead,” the Communist USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev supposedly said, perhaps mocking as he quoted from Revelations in the Bible.

Boomers, until recently, have had it easy. We grew up comfortable, and took it for granted we’d go to college and live better lives than our parents because that is what they wanted. The USSR disappeared. The US “won.” We spent our money, and buoyed the economy.

We’re older now, and times have changed.

Wages are stagnant, unemployment is high (particularly for us over 50), and those who can’t afford to retire keep working. There is fear of another economic recession. Now, like our parents, we might fear a nuclear war with the Russians.

Perhaps we can ignore the crises in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan (unless we have a personal connection, of course.) But for me and perhaps you, Ukraine puts us face to face with the Russians again, the “Evil Empire.” At a time of economic instability, that only heightens the tension.

We’re beyond “duck and cover.”

Remember, it wasn’t Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that ended the Great Depression, it was World War II. If Ukraine escalates, that economic “lift” could happen again.

We boomers won’t pay that price. My nephew and his generation will.

Oscar Musings

03 Monday Mar 2014

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One is missing.

One is missing.

BY JULIE SEYLER

There are no doubt thousands that turned a blind eye to the Oscars. They have no interest that Jennifer Lawrence was wearing a strapless red Dior, or that she was up for her third Academy Award nomination in four years, and she’s all of 23. But there were millions of others who had one foot in the door, anticipating tucking into a fun night of watching who’s wearing what, and wondering whether this year’s host, Ellen DeGeneres redux, could top Billy Crystal’s Hannibal Lecter skit during the 1992 awards show, when some of us had not even reached 40 years old. Geez Louise, it seems like yesterday. All in all I thought Ellen DeGeneres was a mighty generous, relaxed and comfortable host, although the morning after comments from friends have weighed in with “too much”, “boring”, and “not edgy enough”.

I adored watching Angelina Jolie accompany Sidney Poitier to announce Best Director (Alfonso Cuaron for “Gravity” – that movie swept up). The man who starred in “A Patch of Blue” (1965), “To Sir With Love” (1967), “The Defiant Ones” (1958) and “In the Heat of the Night” (1967) is 87 years old. I can watch Sidney Poitier movies over and over again. He’s such an incredible actor.

I was in complete agreement with Bill Murray about Amy Adams dress. It was a knock-out.

It’s always a trip to check out the cosmetic surgery procedures, and this year, Goldie Hawn sort of made me gasp. I recently watched “Butterflies Are Free” (1972), for the first time and I think she may be 27 in that movie – a real pixie. I guess she is still going for the pixie look – don’t think it quite works at 68. Her smile was the same though.

I rarely relish the acceptance speech because it can be so predictable – the winner rattles through the prepared list of thank-yous, while at the same time making the PC call out to their fellow nominees. Yawn Yawn. However, I applauded Jared Leto for his for Best Supporting Actor for “Dallas Buyers Club” and Darlene Love for singing thanks for “20 Feet from Stardom.” Definitely want to see that movie.

I had seen all of two of the nine nominated movies. “American Hustle,” which I found captivating from the moment you see Christian Bale’s oversized exposed belly, and “Her,” to me a puzzlement as to why it was even on the list. Love with an operating system? I guess the novelty, along with the possibility that, yes, it really could happen in the not so distant future, kept it in the game. It turned out I do not have my hand on the pulse of the voters. Her won for best original screenplay. It was original, even if I found it a bit enervating.

The whole month of February had been one big celebration on TCM because every movie aired was, or starred, an Academy Award nominee or winner. In fact I saw a few starring Jean Hersholt. I mean they always give out the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. It was nice to put a name to a face.

But my favorite part of the evening is when the room goes silent, and the film is rolled for the tribute to the persons that have died during the past year. It is a trip down Memory Lane to see the actors, directors and other legends of Hollywood lore, some of whom I grew up with, that are now cast in movie heaven. In a weird way, it marks how quickly time has flown, and will fly. While I knew Shirley Temple and Philip Seymour Hoffman, both of whom passed away in the past month would be honored, I’d forgotten that Joan Fontaine and Julie Harris and Peter O’Toole had also died this past year.

So now we know that “12 Years a Slave” won Best Picture, and Cate Blanchett won Best Actress, and Matthew McConaughey’s hero is himself in 10 years. I’ll definitely be tuning in next year to see who are the winners for the 87th Academy Awards. I love them!