As I’m confident that my readers have been waiting with baited breath for word from me since my last post, I offer my apology for being so negligent…

With the present post, I will have seemed to have gone full circle, from feeling that it is slightly gauche to carry on about one’s maladies, to putting it all on display.  The accompanying illustration stolen from the Mayo Clinic website shows the procedure I underwent on the twenty-first of this month.

Since my trip to the hospital in January, in spite of several medications, my heart was beating at a constant 130 beats per minute.  It is now beating at +/-50 BPM.  I have a followup this coming Tuesday with the doctor who performed this procedure.

Though one of my readers — a physician himself — described this procedure as “rather ho-hum” (see last post’s ‘Comments’), as I pointed out to him, “All very well and good for y o u to say!  It wasn’t y o u r heart they were cathetering around in;-)”

But enough of that.  I’m going to resume my speed walking tomorrow.

And since tomorrow is Easter Sunday, I include the following text exchange my friend Will W and I engaged in last week, which got started over an incidental mentioning of George Steven’s (Shane, Giant, A Place in the Sun) movie ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ — a movie massively panned in 1965 in part because of cameo-casting of nearly every star in Hollywood at the time.

Including Pat Boone.  I’m serious.

This exchange includes references only two movie buffs — one 65 and the other 71 — would understand.  I simply will not inflict historical explanations upon the junior reader.  Feel free to thank me.

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“Speaking of ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’, I saw it in Atlanta in 1965 in Cinerama with my longtime friend Tony, who begged me (well, he floated the idea) to leave at intermission.  Our friendship was on the decline at that juncture as I recall, and this may well have pushed it over the edge.  A major review at the time said the premiere in NY was enlivened only by the souvenir books sliding off laps and hitting the floor with a thud as attendees nodded off.  This remark is right up there with the white corpuscle attacking the mini-sub in ‘Fantastic Voyage’ being described as resembling ‘a large aggressive hominy grit’.  Unsurpassed in movie criticism.  Sadly, ‘TGSET’ has the best art direction in any ‘Biblical epic’ before or since.  And, sadly in a different way, Shelley Winters touching the hem of Max Von Sydow’s garment, and exclaiming “Oi’m healed, oi’m healed!” in perfect Brooklynese.

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So did you leave at Intermission or not?

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The only two movies I think I’ve ever walked out of are Elvis Presley’s ‘Double Trouble’, and a second feature (which Disney used to pair with reissues of animated features) about the Vienna Boy’s Choir.  What was I doing at ‘Double Trouble’?  I was in basic training in the Air Force seeking any escape, but ‘DT’ proved too much even under those circumstances.  Saw Francis Coppola’s ‘You’re a Big Boy Now‘ at that time, too.  You win some, you lose some…”