dual personalities

March has entered like the proverbial lamb, but I’m not taking the down blanket off my bed just yet. I know we will experience another hard freeze sometime in the next few weeks. Just you wait and see.

And while we’re waiting and seeing, did you hear that a bear escaped its enclosure for the second time at the St. Louis Zoom? I mean, come on, who is running the zoo these days? Are all the keepers smoking pot while on duty? Now we are having lockdowns at the zoo? Zut alors–I am not amused.

In honor of famed film producer Walter Mirisch, who died last week at 101, I suggest we watch one of his movies, which include: Some Like It Hot (1959), The Horse Soldiers (1959), The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), The Pink Panther (1963), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967) The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Same Time, Next Year (1978). As Elmore Leonard characterized him, Mirisch “was one of the good guys.” I read his memoir, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, and I have to agree with Leonard, although, as I said at the time, it is always amazing to me how smart guys can make some really dumb decisions. But he made a lot of good movies and was, for the most part, a gentleman.

Here are six movies to celebrate NASCAR’s 75th anniversary. I am not particularly a fan of this film genre, but the wee bud is a huge NASCAR fan and of cars in general. When we were driving to church the other Sunday through our new cut-through, his eyes nearly bugged out of his head at the sight of an orange Charger in a driveway. It is his “favorite street” now.

This month is also the “31 Days of Oscar” month on TCM, so there are a lot of good movies to see. Check out their schedule here. We watched The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) last night. Mr. Smith was riveted. (Best. Movie. Ever.)

This is a good one from Sam Bush. “Many contemporary children’s books are fixated on an end-goal (whether it’s encouraging your child to use the potty or challenge the patriarchy), but the classics refrain from telling a person what to think.”

I appreciated this article by an American medical doctor about insufferable patients. He even references Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It is also interesting in light of the horrific state of medicine in Canada and their suicide on demand policy. “We stopped speaking in terms of her merit – as a vagabond who deserved her state and did not deserve our medicine. But this took explicitly naming all I’ve said above, interrogating it candidly in community, repenting over what we had said, disrupting the momentum of morning rounds to point toward a different way of treating and speaking about the insufferable. Amy forced us to ask crucial questions we should have been asking long before: What are we doing here again? Who are we becoming? What is medicine for … and who is medicine for?”

Blessings upon you, readers. Take a walk, pat a dog, read a poem. Maybe one by that scoundrel Roald Dahl:

‘My teacher wasn’t half as nice as yours seems to be.
His name was Mister Unsworth and he taught us history.
And when you didn’t know a date he’d get you by the ear
And start to twist while you sat there quite paralysed with fear.
He’d twist and twist and twist your ear and twist it more and more.
Until at last the ear came off and landed on the floor.
Our class was full of one-eared boys. I’m certain there were eight.
Who’d had them twisted off because they didn’t know a date.
So let us now praise teachers who today are all so fine
And yours in particular is totally divine.’

*A.E. Housman, 1859-1936, “March”