The backdrop is dramatic enough. Tony aggressively seeks any means to get he money for his dance floor, wood isn't enough especially in the poor place he has decide on, to dance like his American idol. Manero would frequent a Chilean movie house and mouth the words that would come out of his screened friends but in the end it seemed to be a struggle to get ahead of his peers, to be different from the rest. This was part of the subtext lying underneath the fulfillment of his aspiration to be like those Hollywood favourites but he had to escape the malicious environment he set himself in.

The movie has a hint of being a historical commentary on the period, is graphic n some parts and could use better editing in others especially during the violent moments where one wants to know how the hero came across a dead near a railway yard. One realizes he has been involved in drug dealing but wants to know at what level. In other words the editing should have been smoother and one really has to know how to use a jump cut to make it effective, otherwise the viewer things he is missing some necessary detail, when he is not.

Oddly enough the environment he pitted himself against would be subliminally stronger always baiting him to work harder to reach his goal through elicit means and that meant killing the obstacles along the way. This is a movie of desperation, of killing the hero figures of the past and those who stood between Tony and celluloid success. Being red in Pinochet's did not mean having the means to get where he wanted to and one can see the aversion to socialism through the way Tony's dancing troupe handed their material needs. How does one become a hero by peddling glass bricks for a make shift dance floor in a disordered social system? Certainly not by showing any emotion to the women you desire according to the hero here. They were all looking for a way out of the turmoil, so maybe it helped to dream and believe that Tony would be their passport to a better future.

His style of the book is itself entertaining, making the reading enjoyable; an older man's final moments are seen externally as he spends his last moments at a fair site. Instead of going through the classical death scene, Eddie is struck suddenly and wakes into another world. With a light conscience, he is aware that his surroundings have changed and he is projected back in time, as he is about to meet the first of five heavenly characters. Each one will remind him of something in his past, either metaphorically or not and a small inconsequential happening takes on a new perspective; the man lived to an old age but there were people who gave their lives so that he could get older. One lived before he was born but still set influenced his life  before he worked at the fair site where he lost his life. This is a reminder of how he was connected to people little more than strangers whose time was up when Eddie was a child or growing up. If Eddie thought that he was disadvantaged, here were people much less fortunate, including show people of the circus who felt unloved.

This is excellent reading for those who like to reflect on life itself. Many will still take life for granted given the opportunities we have in industrialized countries while others are much less fortunate and are analogous to the "freaks" or the tragic souls  that came alive through Eddie's meetings in heaven.

The daughter went with her dad to a secluded island where he wanted to perfect his specimen and there she encountered the assistant who had his own design of gaining access to the doctor's fortune. He wanted to marry the girl and gain wealth on the hope that the doctor would get mortally injured during one his encounters with the creatures he created. The assistant saved the girl from the hands of one of the beasts to offer her an alternative plan of being safe. He wanted to marry her but she suspected that he was only looking after his own interests.

It looks like the ending might be filled with a bunch of monster escapes, which will capture the girl again and kill the assistant or the doctor in the process. Or perhaps just one of the creatures will kidnap the daughter again. Maybe this thrilled audiences years ago. Today one wonders how a girl would have survived in a home of a maniac and had never discovered what his demented interests were. I mean she had enough sense to know when someone was being deceitful, so what kept from getting to the root of her father's deceit?

If I knew the answer, this would not have been the horror/thriller it is.

The author of the book decided to elaborate on a principle after travelling around the world and getting facts on what certain peoples are doing to adapt to the changing availability of fish. In Japan for example people are farming the blue fin tuna because its stock has been dangerously depleted. They are working with raising the fish from the larval stage. Large fish like the tuna, swordfish; sea bass have been caught in excessive numbers such that the numbers of fish they live on have been able to multiply more. In other words we have been so busy eliminating the predatory fish that we have forgotten what it does to the fish food chain. The average person could not care less about the check and balances of controlling wildlife or fish.

The author suggests that we should be able to consume larger numbers of the bottom dwelling fish, which are generally smaller and would have accumulated a smaller amount of pollutants like lead and mercury. This would be a healthier alternative to eating an equal amount of fish from those living closer to the water's surface. Sardines are healthy alternative according to the Portuguese and some other populations where fish is a major part of their diet. The fish is much smaller than the tuna and will contain less contaminant. Perhaps then if people change their attention to bottom dwellers like the sardine their predatory fish populations will be able to recover sufficiently that we will be able to consume them as before. In my opinion we should monitor how much we consume so as not to remove this food supply from their predators and contribute more to their disappearance.

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I am referring to a collection of shorts that goes back to before the last war and was put in paperback in the mid-fifties. One story touches on the relationship between a producer and an actress that he helped financially. She leaves after telling him he can always call her for the few bucks he gave her, in order to get it back. One does get a sense of the fact that the producer comes on as a complainer at the beginning and one sees a hint of the fact that he looking for an excuse to hook up with the actress. One gets a hint of her awareness over the issue and critics would say that this is what O'Hara was heralded for; the fact that he would not open up on what lay behind the scenes between people in his stories.

I do not see though how that would content the reading public today who would be looking for more meat on the bones of the story like what were the underlying circumstances between the producer and the actress. All we know was that had a business relationship and one can suppose that he fantasizes about her but there are too many questions left unanswered that would not make this a good short story by today's standards.

I would compare this to shorts by the science fiction writers like A.C. Clarke, Asimov and others who were also quite capable of developing a complete tale without leaving the reader too much in the dark, without being too sketchy. There is a very big difference regarding the quality of those stories.

Younger people are apparently “wired” differently because they have still to recognize how it would be better to keep some friends before dropping them. Many make hasty decisions on ruining friendships before realizing that dialogue often solves problems that can be worked out. That is why so many lose friends very quickly when they later realize how valuable that friendship could be. They may be rash in their decisions rather than pragmatic as their less volatile adult parents are. Not all teenagers fit this label and many are more mature than their parents but generally there is a period of acquiring information that takes time and that means going through a maturation process. Part of this is due to their not having assimilated information that had been acquired when they learned that a certain behavior is going to turn people away.

We do something that we know is wrong because of the frontal lobe saying it is wrong but the old part of the brain says its cool. So a person who knows that doing something risky will often continue to do so even though he recognizes that there is a danger to his health.

We are also distracted very easily. As species we are quite easily lead astray from what we concentrated on. That may be complicated by having a lot more sensory input than we have been able to keep up with on an evolutionary scale. We also do not remember as well as we would like when we get older. Many of us apparently occlude things as we get older and short-term memory disappears.

The play could have been tighter at points especially when boy meets girl or when the girlfriend discovers that her boyfriend has had a mysterious past. I mean that as he is writing a book which turns out to be his memoirs on his past, she might have been informed of his so called haunting experiences with a woman who he got pregnant. The author and playwright might have wanted the public to be in the dark about how far he got involved with this German woman whom he learned little about. Again there could have been a tightening on his revelation of her as being a spy or at least suspicious of her presence on the coast during wartime. By that I am referring to Jacob's younger self. When he meets a strange woman who he falls in love with as a teenager.

I am glad to see the work of a more creative and daring artistic director than his predecessor. Demonstrating one's skills comes out better through risk taking as far as I am concerned. The set design was superb and with a burning cross on stage, quite daring, but was that really necessary since this was the unfolding of a hidden love story and not a story of racism in itself? A certain amount of realism was added that went very well with the story such having an actual boat in a pool on stage with a lovely actress pretending to swim in it. An undertone of Myrtle's acceptance of racial intolerance and her reaction to the granddaughter of a Nazi criminal was well integrated into the play as well.

We seem to be depicted as idiots trying to purposely confront the intruder as if he would accept us or we would naively think that extraterrestrials are in human form at least. Such is the case for the opening of War of the Worlds. The piece however is timeless in that we would still be awestruck and dumbfounded if such an event were to occur. If there would be no white flag raised in the face of danger as had been raised to greet the threat then we would deploy another means and that to would probably be just as inefficient.

Working is now an integrated part of greater London but that was the stage for a meteorite hit that proved to be more of a flying saucer crash landing, in the late 18 hundreds. One can appreciate the slow detailed effort at the unraveling of the mystery landing and the coming alive of whoever inhabited the ship. One can appreciate the obscure point of view detail of the heat ray being deployed against the crowd of curious observers. It all tells us of what would actually happen were there ever an accident of that magnitude somewhere on the planet. Then again there are avid readers who believe we have already been visited.

This opening sets the stage for the fireman's discontent, at the beginning Montag can only see himself as being restricted and unhappy but he it is not apparent why he is so.

The reader can see outside the bubble that he is living in though thanks to way the author wrote and of course he did not have to spell out the causes of discontent. The fireman lived in a sterile world which probably affected his wife so that even she could not see the root of the malaise. So she popped some pills and had her stomach pumped clean without even remembering why.

The encounter with the girl who calls herself crazy at the beginning is essential for the reader to use as a point of reference for the fireman because she refers to what the role of firemen were in the beginning and she also refers to the appreciation of ones senses that have also been eradicated. Indirectly or unknowingly she was referring to the changed society which did not allow freedom of expression and that had to do with reading books. Montag would have to realize that he would be acting contrary to his own will for the story's plot to unravel.

Somehow this unknown comet combined with Neptune to take it out of its orbit so that it would head towards the earth and onto its collision path with this sun. There was tumultuous seismic activity on its way to the earth, which ebbed on its way past this planet. According the short story there were innumerable amounts of dead along the way.

One wonders what would happen once his unknown combo of Neptune and this fireball would cause with the center of our solar system but according the story so many would actually not care in the least. If I can extend their attitude to today a very small amount of people would ever wonder of how the end of the world would ever affect them.