Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Just saw Aquaman.  It was not bad, it was fun, it was a typical superhero movie with almost non-stop fighting and some cool special effects.  I’d rate it as a “wait for it to come to television and you won’t really be missing anything, but go ahead and see it at the movies if you really enjoy going to the movies.”
The original plan was to go see Mary Poppins’ Reven…. no, wait, it’s “Mary Poppins Returns,” I think, which I thought was kind of a ridiculous choice as she’s never seen the original yet, but then, after my  wife had left the house, Isabel said “or we could see Aquaman” which I was perfectly happy with.
Then, she pulled a fast one on me.  I suppose it  may have been an  honest mistake, but we’re in line waiting to get our tickets for the 6 o’clock show and I see on the char.t that that’s the dubbed version.  If I’d insisted on seeing it in English, we would have had to wait two hours and I figured it was really her night out anyway and I could look at it as a Czech lesson.
Which it was.  I understood what was going on, and could figure out most of what they were saying, because superhero movies  are super formulaic.
So, in summation, go see it…or don’t.  Whatever.

Nostalgia is an admission  of memory loss.  When I see people waxing nostalgic about old fashioned phones, or record players, or typewriters, I don’t get it.  I do, a bit.  I suppose it’s mostly a reminder of when we were young, and it’s good to be young.  You feel energetic, alive, the sky is the limit.
But I remember using a typewriter.  You put one piece of paper it, finoodle it so  the bottom  lines up, roll it around until it comes up on your side, like reverse toilet paper, tuck it under the bar, and start typing.  Sometimes a key would jam, or the ribbon get tangled – oh, changing the ribbon, that was always fun – and if you made a mistake, it wasn’t as simple as backspace delete, no, you had to use white-out, let it sit for a while, then go back and type over it and it still looked like shit.
Then, when you were done, you had….whatever it was, on a sheet of paper, in your hands.  You could show it to other people in your house.  You could not post it on the internet for anybody in the world to see, because the internet didn’t exist yet.
I took part in a conversation on Facebook this morning, about different styles of real life communication, and the rift between people who  hate being interrupted, and want conversation to proceed in an orderly fashion, with only  one person  speaking at a  time, and the others (the majority within  this particular group) favoring the more Judeo-Mediterranean style of everybody just saying what they had to say, and talking over each other freely.  The example  of this  dichotomy that always springs to my mind is in ‘Annie Hall,’ where she takes him home to meet her parents, and they show a split screen of the different conversational styles employed by their very different families.
But it struck how those are two old styles, which have somewhat been transcended by modern media.   Now we can all be talking at the same time, but our comments do not disappear into the air as soon as they are uttered.  They are timeless, and become a permanent fixture of the never ending conversation.
It’s all good.  Use the one person  at a time format in a job interview or a classroom, the more anarchic just let it fly method when you’re at an Italian restaurant with lots of good friends and the wine is flowing, and this one here for whatever you think is good enough to go into the permanent record.

And we’ll keep on talking until we’ve got everything figured out.

Whenever we (of the Berniecrat persuasion) say we will not vote for candidates who accept donations from oil companies, or pharmaceutical companies, or PACs who essentially are fronts for the oil and pharmaceutical companies, the DNC accuses us of wanting ‘purity tests.’  And they say it in a sneering tone of voice.
When we say that we won’t vote for a candidate who doesn’t support universal, single-payer health care, or when we say we won’t vote for a candidate who  doesn’t support a Green New Deal, they sometimes call it a litmus test, which they object to just as strenuously as a purity test.
How, then, would they have us vote?  They are saying “Do not pay attention to which policies the candidates support.  Do not pay attention to where they get their money.”
Well, screw that.  We have a right to know how they voted on every issue, we have a right to know who they’ve received money from, when, and in what amounts, and the ‘purity tests’ they are objecting to so strenuously are only the tip of the iceberg.
All persons holding public office should be automatically  audited by the IRS, every year.  Their offices should have cameras and recording devices.  TV crews should be following  them around 24/7, like on reality TV.
Would this discourage people from running for public office? Some.  Mainly it would discourage those who are running for public office so they can get rich by accepting bribes.
Which would leave the public to choose between candidates who may have different views (no avoiding that) but who, at least, all have the public interest at heart.

You know those animations that you see on Facebook occasionally, which starts with a Van  Gogh painting and then  moves through it and onto another landscape and it goes through lots of his paintings like a walk and it’s almost like a story?  I’ve seen three or four of those, but it seems it’s always with Van Gogh, and I  don’t see why.
It’s like with that stupid ‘Cups’ song  from ‘Pitch Perfect.’  It’s a cool  technique and all, but why isn’t it ever used with a different song, a different arrangement.   It’s like  a whole instrumentation that hasn’t been properly explored, much less exploited.
Same with Van Gogh.   He was a  great artist, sure, and well worthy of all the adulation he did not receive in  life, partly because his art was ahead of his time, and partly because he was a creepy  dude, a little bit nuts and super hard to get along with  and even other people in  the art community didn’t like him much.  But, he is not the only artist the world has ever produced.  I’d love to see that animation technique applied to Monet, although it might be mostly water lilies and a girl with  an umbrella here and there, and Gauguin, now there would be an interesting trip, or Toulouse Lautrec, ooh, la, la, or Manet… hell, yes, Manet, you could do one just with Dejeuner Sur l’Herbe, there’s a full  length film of vignettes on that canvas.  You couldn’t do it with any abstract artists, but that’s O.K., because I don’t find their work interesting any way.
Surrealists, though….wait a minute, I think I have seen one with Hieronymus Bosch.  A weird, little hellscape.
Anyway, it’s a very clever technique and I look forward to somebody actually making a feature length film in this style one day.

…and now comes my favorite part  of the year.  Not my favorite season, because it’s still winter, and winter is cold and miserable.  Pretty when it snows, but I live in the city so most snowfalls turn to slush, crushed under the wheels of cars  and heels of pedestrians, within half a day.  We might get a couple of weeks a picture postcard  beauty in February or March, but by then everybody  just wants winter to hurry up and be over with.
My favorite season is spring, or  maybe autumn, because it’s not too hot and not too cold but rather comfortably in the middle, but I’ve got to  give the nod to spring, because in spring we’re all looking forward to summer, which is glorious, and in autumn all we have to look forward to is winter, which I don’t look forward to at all.
What I mean when I say my favorite part of the year is the part that starts on December 26th and runs until about the middle of October.  That 10 months or so of the year that hasn’t been totally co-opted by Christmas, and capitalist Christmas at that.  I don’t really hate Christmas.  The kids had a great time, their cousins are here as well, and it was really great today as they all  went upstairs together, played with their new games (a VR dance thing was the most popular) and laughed great shrieks of laughter.  I ate a lot, and it was all O.K., but I’m glad it’s over.
We’ll be able to  watch things on T.V. which are not Christmas themed and we have not seen dozens of times already (I am really totally sick of Love, Actually.  It is a good film the first time you see it, it may be worth seeing twice, but it has moved into that rare category of “I wish it had never been made.”
Anway, tomorrow we will be back in Prague, and I will probably write some bitchy, sarcastic political blog, and I will be damned happy to do it.