I capitalized the subject cuz I wanted to ITALICIZE it but it was not allowed.  No Place Like Home is a movie title.

In 1972 Perry Henzell made the first ever Jamaican movie.  It involved an entire non-actor cast and was at first
met with negativity when he first presented the idea, but he got Jimmy Cliff to play the lead and it included much
top local music and it was as Perry had always dreamed, "A movie about Jamaicans, by Jamaicans
with Jamaicans."  If you haven't seen it, you should.  It's gritty, raw, timeless and a thrill ride.  The film
is called The Harder They Come.

Upon finishing the film -- Henzell planned a trilogy -- he shot pt. 2 titled No Place Like Home, about an American
film company that comes to Jamaica to shoot a commercial.  And that is the intro to Nigri, a 7 mile strip of beach,
still pristine, which will become overrun by hotels and BABYLON and tonight in LA 3/18, Friday night, the film
premiered for the first time, outside of  the Nigri showing, before Henzell past away not long ago.

Apparantly, after shooting the film, PH sent the cans of film to NY to a storage facility and basically, they lost
the cans and it wasn't until 30 years later that the film was recovered.  PH was so devastated, he left film. The
third part of the trilogy was a novel titled, Power Game.  The film was recovered in early 2000's and PH was able
to edit it before he died.  The film premiered in Nigri in 2006 and now tonigt it showed in LA.

The American actress, who plays the actress who is in the shampoo comercial is PJ SOLES, AKA Riff Randel
from Rock and Roll High School, AKA Norma from Carrie, AKA Billy Murray's love interest in Stripes --
remember the egg beater scene?  She was there at the premier as was the daughter and widow of Henzell
and the biggest film person in Jamaica and many people closely associated with the film, including the guy who
found the film cans and was in on the editorial process.  He'd seen The Harder They Come and knew that the
footage he was watching could've only been shot by one person and located Perry.

The host of tonight's premier was a producer, who was the photographer who was sent by Rolling Stone mag to
cover the first ever in the west Reggae Story.  He spoke of shooting Marley in his studio and also shooting another pop reggae dude called Country Man,
and that Country Man got the cover of the Rolling Stone!

I love LA.  Yesterday, I never knew any of this two days ago. Oh yeah, I'd seen The Harder They Come 25 years
ago and many times since and PJ Soles I've loved since high school days and I got to meet her and she gave me
a hug and we spoke for a few minutes and she is still beautitiful.  Sophia Lorean Beautiful!

No Place Like Home is a beautiful movie, PJ Soles in a beautiful woman and a dynamite actress, and the
Egyptian Theater in Hollywood is still a great place to see a movie and the AFC people or who ever they are are
doing a great job.

And I love Cat Stevens.  And Kat Dennings is this generation's PJ Soles.

I've changed the design of this site for the first time since I began writing it in 2006. I've always been more concerned with the content than the layout, but I want to do some new things now which the old design wouldn't support, and I'd run into some problems with my old template which were messing up the fonts on some of the posts.

So sorry about that, I hate it when website and software designers change things and tell you it's for the better because it hardly ever is, but I take comfort in the fact that there are so few people reading this blog anyway it should pass by largely unnoticed :-)

Due to the wonders of web standards and lack thereof, the site now looks slightly better in Firefox, Chrome and Opera as opposed to Internet Explorer, and I've tested it under Windows and Ubuntu but not Mac OS (apologies Mac fans). If there are any obvious problems - let me know.

My friend, the Port Coquitlam Odysseus, and some people at the BBC, feel that E-book readers, like the Kindle, will never replace paper books.  The main reason they give, as befits what a simple, Colonial-type Canadian thinks of the BBC, is highbrow:  When reading a book, it is difficult to add annotations and marginalia to an E-book version.

“Oh, I’m at the BBC.  I’m reading important books. I sometimes disagree with the author and feel compelled to make such known to… myself by writing in the margins.”

Here is my refutation (I don’t see any special reason to embiggen these pics, but you can, if you wish, by clicking on them):

I don’t normally read books on my phone, and only to stage a photo would I read from my phone at home.  But, I do read from it when I am on the go and find myself waiting.  Today, I read a few hundred lines while my little guy was playing at a playground.

What am I reading?  A Princess of Mars, by Burroughs, from the Gutenberg Project.  Highbrow, this is not.  And, the display sucks.  Words ar

e frequently split in the middle (as I have just demonstrated).

Still, my phone, an old Motorola, allows bookmarking, so that when I close my phone and return to the story some time later, it reopens to where I left off.

To take the pictures above, I set my tripod on my bookshelf, which is loaded in many places two-layers deep.  In my advancing years, I find myself more interested in non-fiction.  I don’t know if I am reading BBC-quality Important Books, but I am reading books that I will take notes on.   Still, I suspect I will never write inside these books.  I did with textbooks, but I have also thrown out most of my university texts after a few moves.

I want a better reading experience than my phone offers, but that is not a high bar to jump.

Another pro-ebook voice can be found on Odysseus’ blog:  commenter Jon felt that his child or grandchild will be surprised that we would ever cut down trees to make books.  I wonder about this point. The rare-earths that go into computer chips are not all that environmentally friendly to produce either.  Paper books could be considered carbon storage, I suppose.

I don’t know if E-book readers will replace paper books, but they will be become far more popular than Lisa Jardin at the BBC imagines.

—–

somewhat on topic, the Korea Herald can be read on E-book readers now.  Perhaps they offer an ad-free version because the E-book version costs 7,000won per year.  That isn’t much , but the online version is free.

There is a two month free trial version. “Subscribers to the service can use it free of charge for two months. Now that the service is in an open-ended special promotion period, the subscription service will be available for 4,900 won per month after the initial two-month free trial,” said Cheung deck-sang, director of new media.

The Textore service is currently available only for Samsung Electronics’ e-book reader SNE-60K, which has a six-inch screen, wherever Wi-Fi wireless networks are detected through the device….

Last July, Samsung Electronics and the country’s biggest bookstore, Kyobo Book Center, joined forces to kick-start the growing e-book market, and the SNE-60K is the second e-book reader born at through that partnership, following the SNE-50K.

The device is being sold for 420,000 won ($370.90). Other features of the device include bluetooth, MP3 support and hand-writing recognition. Kyobo aims to sell around 15,000 e-readers by the end of 2010