SCAN THIS! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JIM EMERSON!

 

I started my adventures in blogging nine years ago, in November 2004, writing and doing my thing with no expectations that anyone other than very patient friends and family would ever read anything I posted. Then somewhere during those first few months the estimable Jim Emerson ran across the first of the SLIFR quizzes, wrote a glowing recommendation of it on his blog Scanners, and in the process kick-started a very happy time for me writing about an art form I loved and introducing me to a whole new world of people who loved it just as much as I did.

Jim and I quickly became friends even though, incredibly, we still have never been in the same room together at the same time, and he’s been a very generous supporter of my writing through the various joys and sorrows, enthusiasms and disagreements that watching movies closely over a lifetime will bring. (He *still* hasn’t seen the light on Speed Racer!) He’s a brilliant writer and film analyst and a very generous man whose influence I can feel every time I dare to try and put two words together. And if not for Jim and the curtain he lifted for me, I would not know many of the people who might be reading this right now.

It’s his birthday today, and I hope you will join me in raising a hearty (virtual) tankard of mead in his honor, wishing him the very best of days, today and every one that dawns after it, days full of love and happiness and, of course, movies to satisfy the mind and the soul.

************************************************