Okay, yes, it was my fault that the propane ran out before I ordered a refill. It was not my fault, though, that the internet went down, forcing me to watch a bit of the Olympics.
People love this year’s Budweiser commercial. I get it: it’s beautifully filmed and feels good when so much is angry, ugly or both. It is also real to a surprising degree: the commercial was filmed with cameras, not constructed with computers.
As it turns out, if it snows a lot, then rains a little on top of it, it won’t go away until things get warmer.
That’s my theory, anyway. I won’t be able to say for sure until things get warmer, if they ever do. Hope is found in it always having gotten warmer before. But we live in strange and troubling times.
Simba-sama made it to 2026, but just barely. It matters. His real name was just Simba, but he was wise, so it made sense to add “sama,” an honorific signifying high rank and wisdom, to that name. “Sensei” would have worked, too, because he taught the several other cats in Risa’s house how to be cats.
Hook, the absolutely star-studded film directed by Stephen Spielberg, has received mixed reviews from critics since its release in 1991. I still can’t figure out why. One could have given the Academy Award for Best Actor to Dustin Hoffman, and Best Supporting Actor to Robin Williams.
Time passes quickly in a busy life, so it oughtn’t surprise me that 1989 was as long ago as it is. But surprise me it does.
I suppose there is a psychological essay to be written about it, on the order of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. In both, the first stage is denial. “No, I’m not really getting a cold…”
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, as you probably know.
I have a little trouble with Thanksgiving because it suggests that we don’t need to give thanks every other day, which we do. Nor is proper gratitude to our Creator conveyed by eating too much, drinking, and watching large men beat each other up over a football.
George Washington, we are told by Ken Burns’s latest documentary series, was a (mostly) great man and a terrible general. He was inspiring, yes, but an awful tactician. Oh, and unforgivably he was a slaveholder.
When I was small, living on a small farm near a college town, my father fell for an idea proffered by the Ralston Purina Company of Checkerboard Square in St. Louis.