Signing off For Lent

I can't remember if I've ever stopped blogging for Lent, but today-- just about an hour ago-- I decided I was going to do just that.

We're well into Lent already. I haven't really got into its spirit at all. I actually had an opportunity to attend a Lenten sort-of retreat, which would be the first spiritual retreat I'd attended since 2012, and something I really wanted to do. But circumstances militated against it.

Aside from the fact that we're supposed to enter into the spirit of Lent, I think it's good to have seasons of austerity-- some kind of austerity. (I'm never in the slightest danger of overdoing it.)

I've long observed that such seasons of austerity are remembered almost as fondly as seasons of celebration and feasting. Even a mild privation can throw a distinctive atmosphere over a period of time, perceived more in memory than at the time.

Not blogging is a real privation to me, even if it's not quite black tea and dry bread.

If you find yourself missing my posts (hey, it could conceivably happen), remember that I have a massive archive going back to 2011, at the bottom right of this screen (on the desktop version).

I asked Google Gemini to estimate how many words I've written on this blog. (I use A.I. sparingly, but it's good for that kind of query.) It answered:

Post Frequency: Since 2011, the blog has amassed over 1,400 posts (averaging roughly 100 posts per year).

Average Post Length: Most entries are thoughtful essays or commentary ranging from 500 to 1,500 words.

Total Estimated Word Count: It is highly likely the blog contains between 800,000 and 1.2 million words.

To put that in perspective, that’s roughly equivalent to reading the entire Harry Potter series or War and Peace twice over.

My Lenten cessation might not be absolute-- I reserve the right to break it for a good enough reason. Maybe on St. Patrick's Day, which is itself a traditional "break" in Lent in Ireland.

Or I might keep it going all the way to Easter Saturday.

Either way, I wish you all a fruitful Lent.

US and Iran Begin Talks Seen as Crucial to Prevent Conflict

 That's a headline on the BBC website today.

I know I'm just a stupid blogger, but I had the impression that there is considerable conflict between the US and Iran and there has been for a few decades now. I saw Argo!

I wish the talks well, of course.

(By the way, what is the explanation behind the anti-uppercase tendency so widespread today? I had to add capitals to the headline which I used as my post title, since it wasn't in the original that I copied and pasted. It seems to be the fashion to eliminate them wherever possible.)

Does Anybody Love Bad Food?

A question prompted by my thousandth encounter with this sort of statement: "He loved good food and good wine..."

Favourite Movie Scenes #5: Naked Gun 3, The Opening Dream Sequence

I'm stretching the term "favourite" more and more with each one of these posts, but here goes anyway...

Recently, I've been watching the original Naked Gun trilogy, since they're all on Amazon Prime at at the moment. I started with the third, since it's actually my favourite, despite getting the worst reviews. (But in all honesty I think they're all much of a muchness.)

There are so many brilliant scenes in the trilogy that there's something a bit arbitrary about choosing one, but it's hard to beat this one. I've always seen it described as a spoof of two different scenes, from The Untouchables and Battleship Potemkin. I've never actually seen The Untouchables. I did watch Battleship Potemkin many years ago, and found it so boring I was literally falling asleep.

The scene is funny even if you don't know what it's spoofing, though.

My favourite moments in the scene:

1) When Frank Drebbin runs out of bullets in his gun, but in the next shot suddenly has a machine gun instead. (Since it's a dream sequence, this is quite realistic.)

2) "Look! It's disgruntled postal workers!" (You may not get this if you didn't live through the nineties. If so, do an internet search for "going postal".)

3) Norberg catching the falling babies and doing a victory dance.

4) The sudden appearance of the President and the Pope, along with their entourages, who both just happen to be walking down the steps of the train station at the same time.

The fact that the scene is beautifully shot (quite a set-piece, in fact) is in character for the trilogy. The brilliance of the Naked Gun films is that they combined the silliest, most throwaway humour with such high production values. The viewer's brain is engaged on two tracks: the humour, and the underlying story which you can't help taking seriously on some semi-conscious level.

These films seemed to constantly be on television when I was a kid, and into my teens. I laughed at them but I never thought of them as classics. I do now. They all get the maximum of five stars in my "movie seen" spreadsheet, an honour restricted to only twenty-eight films out of 1380.

I went to see the recent remake in the cinema. It was surprisingly excellent, refreshingly non-woke, and fully in the spirit of the original trilogy. But not quite up to their standard.

One final thing: I've always loved the phrase "dream sequence", and hearing film critics talk about "the dream sequence". It seems so portentous. 

Are you a Nationalist?

Very often, I hear people talk and write about nationalism as if it's some rather extreme doctrine, like anarchism or communism or complete pacifism.

Personally, I don't think this is true of nationalism at all. I think most people have been nationalists throughout history, even if they didn't use the word.

In my view, if you can answer "Yes" to the following two questions, you're a nationalist:

1) Do you think the nation-state should be the basic unit of international politics, rather than a World Government, or supranational organizations, or empires, or some other system? Do you think nations should have fundamental sovereignty?

(People sometimes quibble about sovereignty, pointing out its inevitable limitations. Everything has limitations. I don't think this is a serious objection.)

2) Would you prefer that national cultures should persist? That the French should continue to speak French and make celebrities of bad philosophers, that the Irish should continue to play hurling and apologize every six seconds, and so on?

(Tiresome objections that "you can't preserve a culture in aspic" are often advanced here. The question is not: "Would you prefer that national cultures should never change or evolve?". The question is whether you would prefer them to substantially persist through those changes.)

I think most people would answer in the affirmative to these two questions, and that most people are therefore nationalists. 

Unseasonal

I tried to change the blog's colours to purple for Lent, but for some reason I've lost the ability to do it. At least, I can only do it partially.

Which reminds me. Here's a word that never ceases to delight me-- season. I think there's immense poetry in the word. I would write a meditation on it, similar to my meditation on the word "midnight"-- but I don't have time right now.

Poem for Shrove Tuesday

Our Blessed Lord, the Man of Sorrows,
Went to the Cross for every man's sake.
So let us start our fast tomorrow
But for today let's have some pancakes.