Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Well, I noted in the post below my bout of flu and my intention to spend all of Saturday just reading in front of the fire.
Of course it didn’t work out that way.
By midday I was feeling so much better that I decided to take the dog for a long walk. But I failed to accurately judge when the weather was going to close in. While we were at the far end of our circuit, it started to rain. By the time we got back, I was soaked and freezing.
As you might imagine, it was back to bed for another 48 hours for Ol’ Robbo. We’ll try getting back on track tomorrow morning.
In the meantime, I took advantage of my enforced idleness to watch some new-to-me programming in the form of two movies and a Nat Geo teevee show.
The first movie was “The Mouse That Roared“, a 1959 comedy flick in which Peter Sellers plays multiple roles. I had tossed it into my Netflix queue and forgot about it. Basically, a small European Duchy that depends on wine exports for its economic life gets cheated out of the market by a California cabal. So it decides to declare war on the United States, knowing that it will lose, but expecting that we will give it lots of economic aid because we’re such magnanimous winners. Owing to a secondary plot involving the secret development of a new Super Bomb, however, the Duchy winds up winning. Hylarity ensues.
It was all right, I suppose, although I am no fan of Sellers’ America-bashing, especially where nukes are involved. (This is why I don’t really care for “Dr. Strangelove”.) Pete, baby, we get it! Nukes are scary and awful! And ‘Muricans are knuckle-dragging, bombastic, Bible-thumping hypocrites! Clang! Clang! Clang!
Matter of fact, probably the most entertaining thing about the film was the Duchy’s military, which consisted of nothing but a company rigged out as 14th Century longbowmen, marching about 1950’s Noo Yawk.
I don’t think I’ll bother with it again.
The other movie was “The Outlaw“, a 1943 telling of the Billy the Kid story. This was on TCM, I think. I came in a bit late, but it seemed to be one of the more romantic portrayals of the Kid, in which he has a Code of Honor that just sometimes doesn’t mesh with the corruption and cheating of the “Real” world. Walter Huston plays a rather inexplicable Doc Holliday, who is Billy’s partner here. (Wyatt Earp called to say “Whut?”) One of my favorite character actors from the time, Thomas Mitchell, plays Pat Garrett, who in the end fakes Billy’s death so that Billy can ride off into the sunset with the love interest of the story played by a very young Jane Russell (her first role, I believe).
Now Ol’ Robbo isn’t going to say that Jane Russell is the main attraction of this film, but they do manage to insert a gratuitous scene in which she falls into a stream and emerges with her dress clinging pretty tightly to her…assets.
Yes, I’d probably watch it again.
Finally, Robbo noticed last evening that one of the Nat Geo channels was running a documentary in which Michael Palin goes to tour North Korea.
I thought I’d give it a try.
I lasted about ten minutes.
During that time, Palin, shadowed very carefully by two Party monitors, goes to the DMZ and talks to a Nork lieutenant. At one point, the lieutenant notes that it was the Americans who started the Korean War. “Oh,” says Palin (and this is paraphrased from memory). “Well, um, it’s funny because when I was very small we were all taught that it was the Koreans…..I guess everyone has their own interpretations…”
Then the lieutenant says that of course all he wants is World Peace. “Gosh, me too,” says Palin. “Maybe when two people like you and me can just get together and talk, better things could happen!”
That was about all I could take.
I don’t know whether Palin was being diplomatic because he knew one wrong word would land him in the gulag, or else whether he was being idiotically naïve. I do know how it came across…….
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