Loved it. The fact that some segments were a bit strange didn’t detract at all from the whole. Great choice of music. The wagon train episode alone was outstanding.
On the question of whether the bride and groom were involved, turns out early reports were incorrect. Not wedding guests. They were on their way to a birthday party.
In New York and in most, if not all, jurisdictions it is in fact settled law. An engagement ring is a conditional gift. Absent a subsequent marriage it is not hers to keep. Doesn’t matter who broke it off. This is not an unusual case, just the size of it.
Though Spiro Agnew said it, Pat Buchanan wrote it for him. Along with nattering nabobs of negativism came their allies, the pussalanimous pussyfooters, as well as the tomentose purveyors of something or other. Pat had a great time. (Tomentose, sp?, sent reporters scurrying to their dictionaries. It referred to having thickly matted hair.)
As Time Goes By was not written for Casablanca, hence not eligible. It was written in the 1930’s and gathering dust in the Warner Bros. catalogue when Dooley Wilson sat down at the piano. Likewise One For My Baby did not originate in the Sinatra film but was introduced by Fred Astaire about a decade earlier in another film.
The Evil Has Landed by Robert N. Going, a police procedural murder mystery written from a conservative viewpoint. Very cheap Kindle version available. 99 cents last I looked.
In non-fiction you can’t beat David Pietrusza’s 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents. After that read everything else he has written.
I was manning a 1K radio station in upstate NY the day of the Heidi Bowl. I suddenly received dozens of phone calls wanting the result of the game, so I ran into the back room and ripped the feed off the AP news wire. I witnessed many an astonished reaction. At the time I was unaware of the untelevised drama. Quite a few unhappy gamblers in the bunch, I might add.
He did more than enlist. He initially flunked the eye exam so did some eye exercises for a couple of months to improve his vision. Though he was injured in a ship board accident when they may have been in contact with a Japanese submarine, his medical discharge was due to a tropical amoeba he and some other crew members picked up in Panama enroute to the Pacific. He did his duty, and he did his best. All such men are heroes.