Hi readers. Thanks for coming by.
For the past while my physical prowess has been challenged enough to force me to find alternatives to just reading and meditating, while Jeanne’s pointed out my brain might be failing me from lack of oxygen. So, she introduced me to Mahjong online to exercise my brain cells. Which she has no confidence will help.
http://www.freegames.ws/games/boardgames/mahjong/freemahjong.htm
But I’ve been enjoying it. Online Mahjong makes for a middling good way to pass some time so long as you make it clear you’re not going to put up with any BS from it. Just hitting the reset button when it tries to throw near-impossible tiles onto that right side and top will keep it towing the line.
Similarly, computerized chess will throw a lot of BS at you, but there’s no easy way of escaping it. Conceding the games early, immediately after it takes your queen, does cut down of the time wasted, but even that finds a traction point eventually.
And all work and no play leads me to movies. A place I haven’t been in decades. Jeanne’s son, Andrew, subscribes to Netflix and allows me to use unlimited streaming video [cheeze I love that phrase] access to their movies.
Watched out movies I haven’t seen except as a kid or teenager, watched movies I loved as a young adult, movies filmed in times a lot different from these. And sated myself out. Huk, starring George Mongomery during the early 1950s is an example. Movie about a ‘native’ Filipino uprising after WWII against the US plantation owners. If we allow the moviemakers to tell us whom to root for we’ll be cheering for the plantation owners every time a little brown brother gets himself shot.
What I’ve learned is there are one hell of a lot of independently made low-budget movies out there capable of providing a type of entertainment I don’t believe movies and television have ever before quite managed. Maybe the funniest I’ve seen yet was an independent titled, “A Fork in the Road“. I’d never have had the pleasure of it if I’d not been blessed by a failing vehicle.
Another hilarious one was “Unidentified“. And a number of Russian ones, Pakistani, Chinese and Korean made movies have offered themselves up for my admiration and piddling around waiting to die or whatever it is I’m doing.
As for good reading material, I’m getting more of it than I can absorb. Jeanne’s library jobs are fine that way. Catching up on Terry Pratchett novels, a nice history, Quantrill at Lawrence, The Untold Story, by Paul R. Peterson, One Summer, America 1927, by Bill Bryson, Prescriptions for Herbal Healing, by Phyllis A Balch, CNC, and Trials of the Diaspora – A History of Anti-Semitism in England, by Anthony Julius.
To name the ones I’m in the process of reading right now.
Saw Harry and Tonto with Art Carney a couple of weeks ago on Netflix. Reminded me of how differently I viewed it when I saw it sometime in the early 1980s. And I resonated far too much with it, Hydrox and myself, to watch it through without dropping a few tears.
Hydrox is hanging in there day by day, for those interested. Who will outlive whom is up for grabs.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 