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The Counterfeiters (2008) When Germans of the current generation face their past, they do it with utter honesty. For all the Hobbesian bleakness inherent in this movie’s subject — “continual fear, and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” — there’s a weak ray of triumph at […]
Is it just me, or does anyone else think this Hero Pilot stuff is spinning out of control? I dunno, it hits me as wrong. Mawkish, lowest common denominator, on-display-for-your-beer-guzzling-delectation wrong. I’m surprised Sullenberger’s going along with all this. It’s like Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche: real pilots don’t strut around like peacocks when they […]
Two Sundays ago, we took Schatzi with us on a rugged hike in the Rincon Mountains east of Tucson. She hashes with us and handles four- and five-mail trails with ease, but there were a lot of big rocks on this trail, rocks two or three times Schatzi’s size . . . to make a […]
One of the men I flew with in the early 1980s, Dave Baker, died last Thursday. We called him Bull; I blogged about him a few months ago. Bull had been a prisoner of war; captured and held after being shot down in Cambodia near the end of the war in Vietnam. They teach you […]
From 1981, a news report both touching and chilling: touching in its enthusiasm for the future, chilling in its failure to recognize an implicit threat. Oh, and I loved the part where the guy talks about being able to print what he sees on the screen! Why, you can PRINT IT ON PAPER! God we […]
God, the things you have to do if you want to blog! When you first start, you think the blog program itself is enough for you. It formats your entries, automatically archives them, and allows readers to add comments. The package looks professional and slick . . . but it’s not really yours, is it? […]
It’s in the dictionary, somewhere between “shit” and “syphillis.” Two quick reviews of movies whose main characters I could not sympathize with: Secretary (2002) My wife got up and stomped out of the room halfway through, mumbling about perverts . . . and the seriously perverted stuff hadn’t even started yet! Self-mutilation and sadomasochism, the […]
Every year a local car club puts on a car show in Tubac, a resort community halfway between Nogales and Tucson. I started to aim my camera at hood ornaments and grills, as I did at the Barrett-Jackson auction last week, but there were always people in the way, so I gave up and just […]