The shorts aren't in alphabetical order

This year's edition of TCM's 31 Days of Oscar has all of the features running in alphabetical order. We started with the A's on Wednesday; we've got a couple of long B movies this morning and afternoon, and by Sunday evening well be in the letter C.

TCM is running Oscar-nominated shorts again this year, but those don't fit the alphabetical order scheme. You can't blame TCM, assuming they'd like to have halfway relevant shorts and want everything to time out properly, with prime time starting at 8:00 PM every evening. That, and the fact they don't schedule the shorts at the same time as the features.

Anyhow, there are two worthy shorts on tonight's prime time schedule, one of which I've mentioned before and the other apparently not. First, a little after 10:15 PM, following The Birds, there's Crashing the Water Barrier. This one is about an attempt to break the world water speed record, by a British daredevil on Lake Mead. The movie would probably look better in its original colors, which have faded over the last 50 years, but is still interesting.

Overnight around 3:45 AM, there's Jammin' the Blues, which I thought I had mentioned before. Perhaps it's that apostrophe that's screwing up blog searches. Warner Bros. had a bunch of jazz artists (although not the names non-aficionados would recognize) in studio for whatever reason, and they did a jam session along the lines of all those musical one-reelers the studios were putting out in that era. This one, however, is noted for its atypical and imaginative direction; never mind that the music is quite good too.