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But your walls are falling down, so you got to face me now
Rabbit, rabbit! Our miserable forced-air heating system gave me an eight-hour nosebleed last night, so the old year should consider itself satisfied with its sacrifice and give us something better in the new one, like a maximum of successful democracy and a minimum of authoritarian unrest.
I was delighted to read of the un-extinctness of the great fox-spider, whose name should tell you whether you want to click through for the photographic evidence. I was not delighted to read of the death of Sean Connery. It reminded me that I keep failing to write about The Hill (1965) because it's such a brutally relevant case study of the operation and perpetuation of abusive systems that I could just read the news if I wanted to feel that bad, but Connery gives a damn near performance of a lifetime as a model soldier realizing like a nightmare that the cruelties and absurdities of the desert glasshouse to which he was relegated for refusing an unjust order are not a perversion but merely a distillation of the mangled imperialism, racism, and toxic masculinity of military life whose authority he can no longer accept but which it may break him to fight. It was the only role in which I had seen the actor let himself be vulnerable and it fascinated me. I got onto social media and found much of my friendlist either posting or processing the 1965 Playboy interview where he defended a man's right to hit a woman ("An openhanded slap is justified—if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I'd do it") or the 1987 TV follow-up with Barbara Walters where he doubled down on his words. I fell into the latter category. It upset me. I ended up writing on a friend's post: "I hadn't had this information until earlier today and I was sorry to find it out: it is an attitude perfectly in keeping with Fleming's Bond, but I would have hoped that Connery himself grew out of it. I don't know that he did and now the dead don't change. People are complicated and people make art and art is complicated, news at eleven." I later found this remembrance by Matt Zoller Seitz, which felt useful.
I did not know until just now about the cats of the British Museum.
I was delighted to read of the un-extinctness of the great fox-spider, whose name should tell you whether you want to click through for the photographic evidence. I was not delighted to read of the death of Sean Connery. It reminded me that I keep failing to write about The Hill (1965) because it's such a brutally relevant case study of the operation and perpetuation of abusive systems that I could just read the news if I wanted to feel that bad, but Connery gives a damn near performance of a lifetime as a model soldier realizing like a nightmare that the cruelties and absurdities of the desert glasshouse to which he was relegated for refusing an unjust order are not a perversion but merely a distillation of the mangled imperialism, racism, and toxic masculinity of military life whose authority he can no longer accept but which it may break him to fight. It was the only role in which I had seen the actor let himself be vulnerable and it fascinated me. I got onto social media and found much of my friendlist either posting or processing the 1965 Playboy interview where he defended a man's right to hit a woman ("An openhanded slap is justified—if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I'd do it") or the 1987 TV follow-up with Barbara Walters where he doubled down on his words. I fell into the latter category. It upset me. I ended up writing on a friend's post: "I hadn't had this information until earlier today and I was sorry to find it out: it is an attitude perfectly in keeping with Fleming's Bond, but I would have hoped that Connery himself grew out of it. I don't know that he did and now the dead don't change. People are complicated and people make art and art is complicated, news at eleven." I later found this remembrance by Matt Zoller Seitz, which felt useful.
I did not know until just now about the cats of the British Museum.
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Includes the legs, according to this other article. So not orb-weaver magnitude, but still not diminutive.