Yesterday afternoon Robin and I went to the Wednesday matinee movie to see “Where The Crawdad Sings.” In spite of a few plot holes, like … really … how does a 12 year-old survive completely on her own in the North Carolina marshes, we liked it. Mostly because Daisy Edgar-Jones and David Strathairn are such appealing actors.
I ask you, friends, is this a face or what?
I learned this morning that crawdads don’t sing, because I looked it up. They don’t even hum, although they have been known to move their lips if a lively tune is playing. But the meaningless phrase nevertheless still conjures up visions of the back of beyond in my head.
It was so interesting that the audience on Wednesday was nearly 100% senior citizens, until I thought more about it and realized -what group is most free to go to afternoon film showings and is attracted more strongly by the $5.00 ticket price? Righteous geezers like yours truly, that’s who.
Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it an uninspiring 34%, while the audience came up with a quite different score of 96%. It was that kind of movie.
But there was that one thing. On our recent camping expedition the weather had been warm and humid in the daytime, cool and damp in the evenings. Two days of this stuff without a shower gave me that creepy-crawly feeling, because living in a semi-desert I have grown happily accustomed to a dry epidermis. So the steamy cinematography and seeing all that laying about in the damp Carolina sand made me feel sticky and in need of a rinse-off even though it had only been a few hours since my last shower.
It turns out that I am attracted to movies that have swamps in them. Swamp Thing, Return of the Swamp Thing, Southern Comfort, In The Electric Mist, Beasts of the Southern Wild, et al. There’s just something about all that hanging moss, those gloomy over-arching trees, and all that dark water that could contain all manner of slithery, scaly, toothed things. Yep, give me a good swamp movie over a film shot on the Arctic tundra any day. So many more unseen threats and hazards (at least in the mind).
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The header photograph was taken yesterday, during a hike in the Mosquito Range. I thought it was such a friendly gesture on the part of the mountain goat to pose like that while I fumbled for my camera and managed to get it pointed in the right direction.
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From The New Yorker
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I will admit that I haven’t given Kansans their due. It’s a flat land populated by flat people was my usual line of thinking. If it weren’t for the Wizard of Oz, I wouldn’t have thought about Kansas much at all.
But this week those folks surprised us all, by voting 60:40 to protect the rights of women to their own bodies. They cut through all the horse-pucky and voted for sanity over dogma.
Let’s face it. Most of the time it’s just too easy to become pregnant. Absolute dolts can do it just as well as any Rhodes scholar can. Momma Nature set it up that way on purpose, because she is always always in favor of more of the species. (Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem as interested in quality, as we have noted ad nauseam over the past few years.) The whole process follows its own logic. A male sees a female, a female sees a male, their hormones make a calculation for them, the back seat of a car provides a comfortable platform , and voila! Sperm meets egg.
It is at this moment that it gets loony. Some laws are beginning to appear that give full personhood to this single sperm and egg combination. My apologies to any folks who think that way, but that’s just crazy. To think that we should balance this microscopic implant against the rights of the owner of the body in which this is all occurring is a brand new level of bonker-ness, even for members of our tribe. (And which tribe is that? Why, homo not-always-so-sapiens is who us are)
There are days when I despair, but not today. Kansas have turned the light back on.
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From The New Yorker
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This clip of Robin Williams is from a performance in 1986, or thereabouts. When I first saw it back then I was hit with two thoughts. The first was that I’d never seen anything like it in my life (still haven’t). The second was that no one could live with a mind running this fast for very long. Fortunately I was wrong about the second part.
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This morning I am not too hopeful for our tribe. I get that way on occasion. I know that my generation bears its share of blame for the mess that the world is in. But there were a few generations that came before mine that have blood on their hands, and the ones that have come after … are they really doing any better? They continue to make the same mistakes while bemoaning the errors of others. It’s a stance gets our tribe exactly nowhere.
There is such a lot of blaming and finger-pointing going on that there are moments when it seems that the specialty of younger generations is whining. The boomers did that or the boomers did this are repeated refrains, without the speakers showing any insight into the fact that they are the New Boomers and are doing the same damn dumb things over again.
Could it be that they too are using way too much of the world’s resources and paying way too little attention to their own individual roles in the maintenance of this monstrous climatic mess? Could that possibly be the truth?
Well, let’s just perish that thought immediately, they say, and then get back to basics which is finding out which finger is best for pointing.
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Harrumph, balderdash, and humbug! Now where is my afghan and slippers?
Little Home In The Valley 