Less-known "film noir" starts with interesting artifact

Noir is a genre of movies that are... well.... classically grim, sordid, suspenseful. And on that account there are no better plot subjects than Hollywood itself -- the heartless, soulless people who bring us bouncy, beautiful movies that touch our hearts and fill our souls.

With a title like this, I somehow expected something more touching than sordid -- but it is about movie makers after all and the normal people who get tangled up in their lives
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GExAB2meHE&list=PL940C445FC15CD2D5
In a Lonely Place 1950 Alfred Hitchcock (Humphrey Bogart) part 1

It is most definitely not Hitchcock. The ending packs a powerful message undoubtedly lost on most viewers. I don't really recommend seeing it, but just before 2:30 in this segment, the Bogart character (a screenwriter) introduces a crony as a "big director" -- made all his money before the income tax." Make a permanent note of it, and share it with friends who don't believe your assertion that the "income tax" is a fairly recent development.

.......Strange and not so strange economic items from newsoftheweird.com --

London's Daily Mail reported in March that Spain might have as many as 2,900 recently abandoned "villages" (swaths of land with clusters of houses) deserted by owners forced into cities to find work during the current recession -- and that speculators were buying entire villages at single-house prices and turning them into vacation retreats.

A formal association of sex workers in Barcelona has introduced a four-hour "introduction to prostitution" class for women transitioning from other occupations due to layoffs. Course topics include tax-return help (prostitution is not illegal in Spain) and marketing, as

A trauma victim arriving at a hospital emergency room but requiring specialized intensive care would usually be transferred promptly to a qualified "trauma center," whose success rate with such patients is believed to be 25 percent better than that of ordinary hospitals. However, a recent study from Stanford University researchers found that, among 636 hospitals observed, there was a greater reluctance to make the transfer -- if the patient was fully insured. (That is, the authors suggest, there is a tendency for hospitals to hang onto insured patients, even though their outcomes might be worse, but not to similarly hang onto the uninsured -- who are more likely to be properly transferred.) [NPR, 2-19-2014]

Farming continues to be a noble but grueling existence for rural residents of China, who work for the equivalent of only about $1,300 a year, but in one village (Jianshe, in southwest Sichuan province), farmers have established a co-operative capitalist model, and in January officials delivered residents their annual dividend in cold cash -- the equivalent of about $2.1 million to split among 438 households. Authorities unloaded banknotes in stacks that constituted a 7-foot-high wall of money, requiring villagers to pull 24-hour shifts to guard it. [BBC News, 1-15-2014]

http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/nw140323.html

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