I missed my tin anniversary!

I had so much other stuff going on the past week that I forgot that Monday was my 10th anniversary of blogging here. I looked it up, and the traditional (at least in the US) anniversary gift for a 10th anniversary is tin or aluminum. Obviously, this is referring to tinware or home goods made of aluminum; not just giving people hunks of metal for their anniversary. And I learned that aluminum, despite being the third most common element in the earth's crust, was rare in the 19th century, thanks to the difficulty at the time of extracting it from bauxite.

Having said that, I can't think of much in old cinema that has to do with aluminum, but there's enough about tin that I could do the equivalent of a Thursday Movie Picks post on it. The Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz is probably the most famous, although I can also think of a couple of movies that actually have "Tin" in the title. For those of you who like your overheated Tennessee Williams, there's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof If you like non-English literature, Günter Grass' novel The Tin Drum was turned into a movie in the late 1970s.

Tin Cup is a famous sports movie about golf from about 20 years ago now. If you prefer older movies, you could do worse than to catch The Tin Star. I did not know it, but apparently there was at least one live-action movie based on the Tintin comic books, released in France in the mid-1960s. And does Rin Tin Tin count?

At some point a generation or two back, industry groups got together and came up with a new set of anniversary gifts which seem solely designed to get people to buy gems and jewelry. In this set, the 10th anniversary gift is diamond jewelry. I have no need of any diamond jewelry, thank you very much.