Mr Beagles will not be with us this morning. Once again the bots of google recognize him not and he is unable to enter the hall and don the robes of contemplation, so it shall be just me and Old Dog waving the flag of truth against the winds of I don't know, whatever.
I thought it was Old Dog who first hinted that pencils are on the wane because little fingers could no longer grasp them and even if they could, were not so interested in them because of the lure of our plinka plonka cyber world. The products of the real world are often dirty or dangerous while in the cyber world everything happens safely and reliably on the other side of the screen.
Eversharps, that's what we called them back in the day, and the lure was supposed to be that you never had to sharpen them, but the real lure was that you could take them apart and you could fool with the little leads and all those gizmos, the downside of that being that they didn't work right because you were fucking with them all day long instead of learning how to spell or putting Suzy's pigtail down the inkwell.
At Tonti and I'm sure that at Beagles' Sawyer School, we had actual inkwells on our desks though they were past their usefulness. But fountain pens still existed, you dunked them into your little pot and raised a tiny lever and that sucked the ink into the pen, not unlike, I imagine, an oil tanker loading up off the coast of Dubai. Myself I liked the cartridge ink pens.
The Darkest Hour is in my queue though the thought of patriotic speeches while the music swells troubles my mind. I did see Dunkirk. It was okay, not as bad as I expected it to be, not as much of There Will Always Be an England as I had feared.
I don't mind the silliness of the Oscars, or the fashion or the lame jokes. I never watch it and if that wasn't on there would be something else just as crappy so who cares? But I do watch tv news and read newspapers and it is all over them like a school shooting and there is nothing else to hear about. I like movies and if it was about how the story was told and how good such and such an actor was, that would be okay, there is an argument I would enjoy being a part of it, But it's not. It's all about how many people of color were on it and what the lead actress said about feminism, and by the way isn't it a shame she wasn't paid as much as the leading man, and about how we, the public, are supposed to be proud of how brave these stars for standing up and saying what everybody else in the damn theater believes.
Old Dog is right that these issues need to be addressed, but must it be like twenty-four hours a day, and every incident evaluated on how it relates to racism and feminism and queerism? Some people think nagging is the way to achieve social change but I think it is just a way for them to feel good about themselves and look down on others, just the way the Hays code enabled the prigs to be smug and celebrate the bad ends that come to those who broke the corset-tight strictures of the forties and fifties.
I don't see the difference between elevating and uplifting, but what I really meant was do the arts make us more moral, do they improve our behavior, and influenced by them do we go on to create a better society? And intertwined with that question is should they, is that the purpose of the arts? Should we go all Soviet Realism or should we do art for art's sake?
I will leave that for tomorrow's Hall of Truth because the hour is getting late and I want to tackle the final issue. The Swedish Bikini Team shilled for Old Milwaukee. When Old Dog speaks of a guy in the ranks of the Fantanas I think he saw the video that followed right after the one I linked on the way YouTube slips in one after another to keep you watching instead of doing other stuff. The reason there is a guy in the second one is because of gender equality, and note that one of the women appears to be black, and there is some kind of story line about a school of dance. Because the second one was made later, when the original Fantanas would be seen as too exploitative of woman and probably Latins as well, so they had to clean it up for today's taste. Note how funny, and ok, dare I say it, sexy, the first one is and how bland and boring the second one is. See, this is what I am talking about.
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