Smart Car Test Drive!

Smart Car Test Drive!
Click for Robin's review of this little dandy.

Robin in Television News

Robin in Television News
A trip to Bahrain at the end of the Gulf War was one of her assignments. Those characters were the secret police assigned to keep their eye on her. Fascinating place, the Middle East. Click for more on Robin's years in television.

Liz Taylor's Legacy

Liz Taylor's Legacy
Click for Robin's piece on the best and the worst of Taylor's life in film.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Best Offbeat Christmas Classic Films




1. The Thin Man (1934): Wealthy Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) check into their favorite Manhattan hotel for the Christmas holidays, only to have a murder mystery interrupt their drinking. Based on a story by the great Dashiell Hammett.

2. The Shop Around the Corner (1940): A sweet and gentle movie starring Jimmy Stewart and fragile Margaret Sullavan, it takes place in a world that never was of magical Budapest before World War II. A love story in which all is revealed on Christmas Eve.

3. Beyond Tomorrow (1940): Sometimes called Beyond Christmas. Three lonely, rich, old men toss three wallets full of money out the window of their Park Avenue brownstone on Christmas Eve, betting nobody will be honest enough to return them. Instead they bring together two impoverished young people who fall in love. Little seen and lots of fun. Starring Richard Carlson and Jean Parker with C. Aubrey Smith as one of the gents.

4. O. Henry's Full House (1952): John Steinbeck introduces five O. Henry short stories. The best is the last, based on the "Gift of the Magi," in which Jeanne Craine and Farley Granger play a young couple, each of whom gives up his most valuable possession to buy a gift for the other.

5. The Apartment (1960): An ambitious junior executive (Jack Lemmon) loans out his apartment to his philandering bosses, only to discover that one of them is after a girl he really likes (a gorgeous young Shirley MacLaine). He cares for her at his apartment over Christmas weekend as she is recovering from what she thinks is a broken heart. Love triumphs by New Years' Eve.

6. The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941): During the Christmas holidays a small town family is forced to host obnoxious New Yorker Sheridan Whiteside (Monty Wolley) and his secretary (Bette Davis) when he comes to town on a speaking tour and breaks his leg. This is a very funny movie and if you are sad this Christmas you'll feel better knowing Whiteside didn't come to stay with you.

7. Battleground (1949): The mostly true story of what Christmas was like for Americans soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. Van Johnson stars in a movie that showcases the humor, boredom and confusion of war as well as its dangers. Directed by Oscar winner William Wellman, himself a decorated veteran.

8. Stalag 17 (1953): Not exactly a Christmas weepy, but the story does hinge on a load of ping pong balls mistakenly sent by the Red Cross to some hungry Americans in a World War II German prison camp at Christmas time. William Holden won an Oscar for his performance as the cynical American prisoner with the heart of gold.

9.Three Godfathers (1948): John Wayne leads three bandits as they flee across the desert. Crafty old Irishman, director John Ford, has the men redeemed by a baby as they follow a star to a town called New Jerusalem. All that thirst in the desert is bound to make the eggnog look especially good.

10. White Christmas (1954): Not offbeat, I know but so incredibly 1950s. Worth seeing for songstress Rosemary Clooney in her prime (aunt of George), not to mention Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye (who doesn't completely overact, for once) and Vera Ellen, the woman with the smallest waist ever seen on film. It is corny but irresistible.
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Friday, November 21, 2008

Sweet Potato Casserole from the 1950s


I saw this in a small advertiser last year and had a real success with it on New Year's Eve. Since you know I'm challenged in the kitchen that must mean this is a cinch. Why not give it a try?

Ingredients:
6 medium sweet potatoes
1/2 cup of sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup milk
1/2 cup butter
1/3 cup finely chopped pecans
1/3 cup brown sugar (firmly packed)
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
2 tablespoons butter

Directions:
Boil sweet potatoes for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until tender. Let cool; peel and mash. Combine sweet potatoes, vanilla, sugar, eggs, milk and 1/2 cup butter and beat until smooth. Spoon into a lightly greased 12 x 8 x 2 baking dish.

Combine brown sugar, pecans, flour and 2 tablespoons butter; sprinkle over caserole. Bake at 350F degrees for 30 minutes. This is a great side dish for the holidays!

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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Seeing Central Florida from the Water

When you're in Florida and would like to spend one morning or afternoon doing something that isn’t in all the guidebooks, drive just three miles north of Orlando into Winter Park, and visit the Winter Park Scenic Boat Tour. Driving into Winter Park, it is difficult to tell that this historic little berg sits on three lovely lakes. That’s because the lakes are surrounded by gorgeous, expensive homes that block your view. There is only one business on the local lakes and it’s the Boat Tour, and through it you can see the real beauty of this part of Central Florida.

The Scenic Boat tour was inaugurated in 1938 by Captain Walt Meloon, and the little business has survived in spite of the fact that homeowners on the lakes would rather the whole thing went away. But its historic legacy always wins the day so it has endured.

The boats are now flat like “party boats,” and have skippers that are well-versed in local history. They will tell you how the lakes were instrumental in the development of Central Florida and its early timber industry: in the 19th century pine logs were floated along the lakes to narrow gauge railroads and then to market.

You are also bound to see some beautiful wildlife, great clue heron, snowy egrets, osprey, and even great bald eagles make their homes on these lakes. Once, going through one of the canals between Lake Osceola and Lake Virginia we watched as a barred owl on a low branch dozed and watched us as we motored by.

You’ll also see award winning Rollins College from the lake side, which is the prettiest way to see it, and you will see some stunning homes. The boats leave every hour on the hour from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., every day of the year except Christmas Day. It is an inexpensive family-owned operation and I highly reccommend it. When you stop in say hello to owner Ron Hightower. By the way, the boats are open air, so bring a hat if you want some shade. Click on the headline to visit the Boat Tour's site on the Web.
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Sunday, November 16, 2008

Cornbread Dressing: Deep South Style


Thanksgiving isn't really about a bountiful table groaning with food. It is the one American holiday that brings the family together to say thanks for our many blessings as a nation. If they come together and eat quite a lot of good food while they are at it: well, what better way to enjoy the day?

My grandmother Chapman was a terrific cook and this cornbread dressing for turkey comes from her family, who had been in the United States one generation after immigrating from the lowlands of Scotland. So, though I don't know it to be true, I suspect this receipe is something modified from my grandmother's own celtic culture, with a lot of Alabama thrown in.

Ingredients
1 3/4 Cups corn meal
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoot baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs (beaten)
3 cups buttermilk
3 tablespoons shortening (melted)
1 cup diced onions
1 cup diced celery
poultry seasoning (about 1 tablespoot)

Sift corn meal, soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl. In another dish combine eggs and buttermilk and add to dry ingredients, stirring until dry ingredients are moistened. Melt shortening in a skillet and saute onions and celery. Stir into cornbread batter and dump bak into the skillet. Bake at 450F degrees for about 20 minutes, until firm and golden brown on top. If you do this the night before, you can let the cornbread cool overnight.

When the bread is cool, break it up, ad some more chopped celery, a little milk and some poultry seasoning. If you have pecans, you can add them here. Make the stuffing damp with the milk so that it sticks together a little. Don't make it too wet as it will be moistened with juice from the turkey. You can add anything that suits you to the mix, even cranberries if you choose.

Mash it together with you hands and stuff the turkey using a large spoon. Cook the turkey as directed, and your dressing will be the hit of the gathering. My sister, the best cook in the family, has proved this on many a holiday. Enjoy!
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Monday, November 10, 2008

The Tale of A Strange House in Portugal



One year my work took me to Lisbon, Portugal, where a group of us were sent to cover Expo 1998 Lisboa, a sort of in-between-and-almost-but not-quite a full-blown World’s Fair. The real World’s Fair would take place at Expo 2000 in Hannover and the Lisboa event was a sort of prelude to that.

A gaggle of us were going—perhaps as many as thirty or more during the month of September—and, as it often happens, no one had thought to make hotel bookings early enough. There was not a room to be had anywhere within a day’s drive of Lisbon during the time we needed all those rooms.

So my boss, who was a very creative person, reached into his desk for a big tome titled Grand Estates of the World for Rent (I’m not sure of the real title but it was something like this.) He thumbed through the Portugal section and found a house in Sintra, a hillside village of estates about thirty miles outside Lisbon. The one he liked was called Quinta (Portuguese for farmhouse) do Biester. It had eight bedrooms, four bathrooms and a full staff and the whole thing rented for $10,000 for the month. What with all the people coming and going during the thirty days we would be at the Expo, we figured that price was no more expensive than a bunch of hotel rooms, so booked it we did.

I was sent first to get the key and open the place up. I was in Sweden at the time on another assignment, so I arrived early of an evening in the lingering dusk of later summer Lisbon. Lisbon was at that time, an odd city. Recently moving out of the dark ages of its communist/socialist years, hidden from the economic growth of Europe by its politics and the mountains that isolate it from Spain, it was the Land That Time Forgot. Men all wore suits and ties everywhere and chain-smoked cigarettes. Beautiful and slightly seedy buildings with magnificent facades of Moorish tiles sat adjacent to sidewalks full of rubble and trash. Drinking a cola as you window shopped caused a sensation, since this was just not done in Portugal. People sat down to drink and eat and that was that. And they took their time at everything. No matter when you started dinner, it went on for hours and never ended until after midnight.

A driver took me up into the nearby hills to find the Quinta do Biester. The dampness from the nearby ocean wrapped around the particulates in the evening air (Portugal was still using leaded gas) to create a Londonish-Sherlock-Holmsian fog as we drove the hairpin turns up to the Quinta. Above us rose the ruins of a Moorish castle. When we arrived at the gates of the Quinta I could only hope no other cars were coming in either direction because we had to stop and get out to open the gate and there was no shoulder of the road at that point and there was only room for one car.

We got the gate open and entered the grounds as the darkness fell. This was the strangest house I had ever seen. Gothic doesn’t begin to describe it. The front door was made of iron and leaded glass, but one of the glass panes was broken and had been replaced with cardboard. The front yard was beautifully landscaped and had a gravel drive, but the central fountain wasn’t working and was filled with brackish water. On the balcony above the door the pillars were held up by the wings of concrete bats.

It was gorgeous, though, when you entered. Paneled pine everywhere, gargoyles on the banisters, real art on the walls, a huge living room that overlooked the valley below. It was stunning and it was strange. There was a chapel upstairs and I figured, if you lived in a place like this, what with the bats and the gargoyles, you probably would need that chapel indeed.

The place looked as if it had been furnished by a gay decorator from San Francisco. Lots of Victorian pieces and ruffles and interspersed with that were some really good antiques. The bedrooms looked comfortable and mine had its own fireplace. The housekeeper was nice. Her husband was the gardener and their son waited table (if you wanted to eat supper there). But as in the movie the Haunting, they didn’t live in. So there was nobody to hear you if you screamed in the night.

It turned out to be a delightful stay in spite of the strangeness of the house. We were all busy shuttling back and forth to the Expo where we exhausted ourselves walking on Portuguese cobbles and breathing in all that lead in the air. There was a maid who washed and ironed my blouses (I liked that part especially), and when we dragged home in the evenings we ogled the gargoyles, the bats and the chapel but saw no ghostly apparitions. I did wonder why nobody cleaned the fountain in the front or put a new piece of glass in the front door, but I realized after a time that this was just kind of a Portuguese thing. They didn’t seem to notice stuff like that. On the other hand, there were always great bouquets of fresh flowers in the entry hall. Rich strong coffee with real cream and fresh homemade bread in the morning. In the elegant living room, with its Victorian aspect, there was a plastic 1970s radio, which, when switched on seemed to play only tunes by Neil Diamond.

On the last morning, several of the guys were working on their laptops in the cavernous dining room. I was sitting on the front steps with my luggage dreaming of taking a nice hot bath back home, waiting for our driver. I wandered back into the house at one point, and the housekeeper, Senora Gomes said to me in her almost incomprehensible English: “Doo joo meet zees deeerectoore Roman Polanski?”

“Have I met Roman Polanski? No, I never have. I believe he is in exile from the U.S. after an unfortunate incident involving an underage girl.”

“He ees coming jeer.”

“He’s coming here. To the Quinta Biester?”

“Jees.”

I pondered that for a minute and she continued.

“He ees making zeee mooovy at zeez Quinta with Johnny Depp.”

Oh right. I nodded my head and rolled my eyes and went back out front to wait for our driver, who, in Portuguese fashion was always about forty minutes late for everything. The house was so weird and the staff somewhat unusual so I figured Senora Gomes was just out of her mind like the rest of the country.

As I pondered how I would rehabilitate the front garden, had it been mine, a little white van drove up. Out of the car came a driver and a group of other men who looked, as it were, somewhat European.

One of them was a very small man, with shaggy gray hair, and round frameless glasses. He looked an awful lot to me like Roman Polanski.

“Hello,” he said with his European accented English. “I am Roman Polanski. I so apologize for coming now. But you see we are scouting locations for a movie with Johnny Depp, and I so wanted to see this house.”

“Uh, yes, yes, of course,” I said. “Please make yourself at home. We’re just getting set to leave so Senora Gomes will show you around.” I hoped my head wasn’t spinning around the way Linda Blair’s did in the Exorcist.

Later, after the little white van departed carrying inside it the man who had once been married to Sharon Tate, and he was now smiling and waving goodbye to me--the guys working at their laptops in the dining room came out with dropped jaws to talk to me on the front steps. “That was Roman Polanski!!!” they said. “He just walked around saying hello to us, apologizing for intruding into this lovely Rosemary’s Baby-type house. What the heck was he doing here????”

I just smiled. I still wasn’t sure I had seen what I thought I had seen. It must have been the house.

About a year later I learned, somewhat to my relief, we had not all seen a ghost. Mr. Polanski’s movie with Johnny Depp actually appeared in theaters and you can see the Quinto do Biester plain as day in it. The movie is called The Ninth Gate, and as Depp approaches the front of the Quinta, you can see that they still have that piece of cardboard in place of the broken leaded glass in the door. Inside, the filmmaker removed all the furniture, which is a shame, because I was especially hoping to see that plastic radio again. I wish you could have seen it. But you still get the creepy aspect. I would tell you that I wouldn’t want to spend a night in that house.

But I already have.

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Sunday, November 9, 2008

Coming This Week: A Veteran's Day Tale About Missing Letters From the Front & A Tale About a Strange House in Portugal


What happened to his missing letters home? When they didn't come, his father in Homewood, Alabama assumed he was dead.


The strange house in the Portuguese mountains near the town of Sintra: what was the exiled film director doing there?
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Thursday, November 6, 2008

Voter Turnout High: But Still Far Below Predictions


I fell for it. I saw the long lines and believed a local volunteer at the polls--and those "experts" on TV--who said they thought the voter turnout in the 2008 election would approach 85%. New figures show the estimated voter turnout in this presidential election ran about 64.1%. This turnout is the highest since the 1908 election when 65.2% of the people went to the polls, but it still doesn't come close to those wild predictions.

We haven't had even an 80% voter turnout in an American Presidential election since 1876. So it just goes to show you: a lot of Americans may have gone to the polls this year but more than a third of them stayed home, didn't vote by absentee ballot, didn't vote early, and just didn't show.

If you look at the records of the turnouts in all U.S. Presidential elections, the average number is about 50%. So--if you didn't vote, don't complain during the next four years. Twenty percent more voters at the polls--which would have brought turnout up to that 85% number--could have pushed the election either direction in a very big way. (For more info on voter turnout in American elections click on the headline to go to "infoplease".)
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Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Long Lines at the Polls Turned out to Mean Florida Went for Obama!


"Do you think the election has been decided yet? Let's click on the headline and read Robin's blog to find out what happened while we were waiting in this line."
"Okay. Want to use my Iphone, or your Blackberry?"
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Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Long Lines At the Polls Could Mean a Surprising Night

"I sure am glad we brought these chairs!"
Line at my precinct at 10:30 a.m.
One fellow used his bike to roll with the flow.

Lots of time to chat with neighbors.

For the first time in all the years I've been voting, I waited an hour and forty-five minutes in line to cast my ballot in a presidential election. The long wait wasn't due to any inefficiencies at the polling place: the system was working well. There were just a heck of a lot of people.

My Florida precict has 1900 registered voters, and the staff and volunteers were processing about 100 voters per hour, or about 500 total since the polls opened at 7:00 a.m. In addition, about 700 had already voted by absentee ballot or in early voting. That left only 700 more registered voters unaccounted for at 12:30 p.m. when I headed home, and about 100 of those were standing in line as I departed. The polls will be open until 7:00 p.m. in Florida (one hour later in the Florida panhandle, which is in Central Time) so it is possible, at least at this rate in this one precinct, that turnout could be above 75%.

I had been pooh-poohing all the gab on TV about how this would be a high turnout election. As a reporter, I've been hearing that prediction my entire career, and it has never come true. The last time--in my lifetime--that the voter turnout level reached even 60%, was in 1968--and back then I was in high school. After 1968, the percentage began to drop every four years until finally settling in at a low of 49% (1996) and a high of 55% (1992 and 2004).

And that's been the rule for most of American history. You would have to go back to 1840 to find a voter turnout of 80.2%, and in that race voters were anxious to defeat incumbent Democrat Martin Van Buren and replace him with war hero William Henry Harrison. Tunrout fell for two more decades then rose again to 81.2% in 1860, when the pre-Civil War drama brought voters to the polls in record numbers. Numbers fell again until 1876, when the turnout rose to 81.8% and America had its most disputed election of all time--(Rutherford B. Hayes vs. Sam Tilden). In the next most disputed election of our history--the election of 2000--the voter turnout was just 51%.

A volunteer at my precinct said he had been told to expect a turnout of 85% and at noon, they were right on track to meet that prediction. If that's true, this truly will be a history-making election. Americans exercising a precious right in record numbers: that is big news. Especially since it is a right we've neglected so long. A right my father and millions of others risked their lives to ensure. Whatever happens today, it is a great day for America.

And it will mean one more thing: a turnout of 85% would blow away all of the "models" pollsters use to predict elections. So we could be in for a very surprising night.

(For voting statistics in U.S. elections go to this very helpful web site http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html
and please email me with experiences you had on voting day.)

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