The Not Dayton Trip, Part One: San Antonio to Arkadelphia, Arkansas

Well this could be the last time
This could be the last time
Maybe the last time
I don't know
Oh no, oh no

--Mick Jagger & Keith Richards,

The Last Time

 

There is a museum in Dayton, Ohio, that I went to a few years ago called the British Transportation Museum. I've decided to give them my little English convertible, because I'm getting too old to enjoy it and nobody else in my family wants it -- it is, after all, more than 20 years old now, and a little expensive to maintain in the style it's accustomed to. Just like a trophy wife, come to think of it, and all the members of the next generation of the family are a little too intelligent to want to take on that burden. Plus, it's really not their style. They're more the Back-Country Vacation types than the fading-luxury touring-car crowd. So it'll go to a museum devoted to cars of similar parentage, where it will be appreciated for its lineage and lines: the fine materials used in its construction, the achingly beautiful sweep of the hood, the sexy swells of the wheel arches, the evocative grille, the little Pegasus melting on the dashboard (which the museum will probably remove). 

 This trip started off as a final wander in my beautiful car that would end at Dayton. But it turns out that the group that owns the museum doesn't have its tax affairs in order just now, having suffered the lot common to many small volunteer-run charitable organizations: its tax-deductible status has been suspended until its paperwork is brought up to date.

 

 That was enough of an excuse to prompt me to put off my donation until, oh, next year. But in the meantime, I had already planned the trip to the point of arranging to visit someone in New York -- since I was going to be in the area -- that I had not seen in some years. I was committed. So now the plan is a round trip: San Antonio to New York and back, and as long as I'm going all that way and probably will never be going back, I may as well tick some boxes on my bucket list. To that end, I will, on this trip, go through the last two counties in Tennessee, the last eight counties in Kentucky, and some of the many remaining counties in Georgia (on the way back, if I actually stick to the plan. I have a history of not doing so, but I still make the plans).

 So this morning I headed off for what could well be my last wander in my convertible. A bittersweet thought. I cut across Texas today from San Antonio to Texarkana, and have pulled up for the night in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. This morning I listened to a short (2-hour) audiobook written and performed by the late TV personality Steve Allen, a sort of quickie murder mystery involving the Japanese mafia in Las Vegas. I enjoyed it, and since I was just zipping along highways in broken weather I had the top up all day and could actually hear it all. (Didn't get any rain to speak of despite the forecast.) I met my friend Hank in College Station for an early lunch, and we spent a pleasant hour making plans that may or may not ever come to pass. You know how it is. After lunch I started another audiobook, Every Crooked Nanny, another light-weight murder mystery. And since I'll be on freeways until after Memphis tomorrow, I should be able to finish it before the top goes down and audiobooks become an iffy proposition.

 I'm hoping to get through Little Rock before the rush-hour traffic gets too bad in the morning, and I hope to get through Memphis in the mid-morning lull; though drivers are so bad in Tennessee that I fully expect to hit back-ups and slow-downs caused by accidents before the city limits are behind me. Then, when my audiobook is finished and I'm off the freeway, the top will come down and, I hope, stay down until Westchester. The forecasts are good -- clear skies and moderate temperatures -- and I have more than enough time for a relaxing, laid-back voyage, with lots of winding mountain roads and a smattering of interesting stops noted along the way. And even if I do make it down to Georgia on the way home, I will still have a week or so to decompress before we pile into the Subaru and go off to the Lake for the annual Huntsman Trip.

 Fingers crossed.

The Republican Ticket: Cheeto and The Porch Light

So! The Republican ticket for the 2024 election is set. Their presidential candidate, chosen more or less by acclamation by the reactionaries in attendance at the convention, has annointed the next target for the mob -- a fate that has thus far awaited all his vice-presidents -- Ohio senator J.D. Vance, best known for writing a book about what's wrong with the hicks in Appalachia, and for being super-rich and tied in to the super-rich.

J.D. Vance. Wow.

Who is this guy?

For those of us who don't live in or near Ohio and so don't pay much attention to their politics, Vance is the guy who 

said he would rather vote for his dog or a Democrat than for Trump. [Vance] also then referred to Trump as a “total fraud,” a “moral disaster,” “reprehensible,” an “idiot,” “cultural heroin,” “unfit for our nation’s highest office,” “a cynical as**ole” and “America’s Hitler.” 

Since that time, of course, Vance has apologised to the frothy-mouthed wing of the party and kissed the Don's ring. Don Jr, ever the best judge of character, likes him.

So the Cheeto has chosen as his running mate one of those color-changing LED porch-light bulbs that you get for holiday nights. Fine.

 

 

Grannie Will Love It

Thelma

starring June Squibb

  Fred Hechinger 

  Richard Roundtree

  Parker Posey

  Clark Gregg

  Malcolm McDowell

written and directed by Josh Margolin

 This is a cute little movie about an elderly lady who gets taken in by a scammer, and decides to seek revenge. At some point in the writing of the script, Josh Margolin decided what he had was good enough, and ran with it. Too bad: it could have used another two or three read-throughs for a little punching up. And when he put on his directing hat, it would have been nice if he hadn't been in such a hurry to get the thing done. 

 For example: in one scene Thelma (June Squibb) forgets to engage the handbrake on the scooter she's stolen from Ben (Richard Roundtree). She left it on a sidewalk as the two of them argue. When she turns to go back to it, it's sitting in the roadway, and of course gets hit by a passing car. It's an amusing bit, but I was distracted by the fact that, even if it had really rolled away unattended, it could not have ended up there, as it would have had to go uphill past a deep-ish gutter to its final perch on the crown of the roadway (where any driver not in a movie would have had plenty of room to go around it); and it was oriented in the wrong direction, neatly stopped perpendicular to the curb, as though, upon its improbable arrival on the crown of the road, it executed a sharp ninety-degree turn before coming to a stop. Here it is hours later, and I'm still thinking about that. It would have been so easy to get right in the filming.

 The performances were uniformly okay. Except for Malcolm McDowell as the villain, who delivered at a higher standard, all the capable actors (and the ones that I only assume are capable) were half a beat slow on the dialog. That consistent flaw makes me suspect the editor (who is, probably not coincidentally, also the writer and director), Josh Margolin. 

 If there were such a thing as dollar movies these days, this would have been perfect, As it is, though, I was disappointed at having paid full matinee price to see it. Now, if I hadn't read any of the promotional material for this movie I might have liked it a whole lot more than I did.The promos promised "a clever spin on movies like MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE..." That is a promise far beyond this production group's ability to deliver; and a couple of shots of Tom Cruise and a clip from one of the films in that franchise don't take the place of intricate high adventure. 

 The audience, when I saw this movie, consisted of me, one husband-and-wife couple, and about two dozen elderly women, attending in pairs and small groups of up to four. I found the film amusing, if a bit trying of my patience for oft-seen tropes and stereotypes. They, however, hooted and laughed like kids at their first circus. Everything in the movie resonated with every one of these women. 

 So take your grandma to see Thelma. She'll love it.

A Modest Proposal

 The Supreme Court, seemingly determined to force US law back to a time before FDR's court-packing scheme, has decided that the President is not to be accountable for any "official" action taken during his tenure in office, even after he leaves that office. The Court's radical-right majority evidently believes that no one in their right mind would take the sort of actions that the Maga Cheeto is propounding in tweets and speeches; and they're not worried about him, even though he's not in his right mind, because, of course, he only threatens people they don't like anyway.

 Maybe ol' Sleepy Joe should surprise them, by embracing their ruling while he still has a majority in the Senate. Maybe he should order the FBI or whoever one would order to do such things inside the territory of the United States, to shoot the six members of the Court that moved such abominable actions outside the scope of the law's review. He could then quickly nominate six replacements and get them confirmed, and the entire court could then revisit the question. Having taken this action -- this official action -- in furtherance of his obligation to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution from the sort of unprincipled interpretation that produced such a ludicrous holding (not to mention a score of other, similarly unprincipled interpretations of the law), the Court would then be able to overrule itself, and return us to the rule of law. Of course, since Biden's official action was performed while immunity was in force, he wouldn't be subject to any accountability for that.

 I'd say that's a win-win. And if he were to take out the big Cheeto too, well, that'd just be the icing on the cake. And I couldn't object if he were to deal with a few of Putin's Senators, too.

/s, with apologies to Jonathan Swift