Why is it wrong to be happy?

We caught the last 40 minutes or so of “Singing in the Rain” on TV the other night. A couple of things really struck me about Gene Kelly’s performance, his body language, and his actions. The first bit that caught me was when they’re dubbing the vocals for the film-within-the-film. Debbie Reynolds is singing, and Gene Kelly comes to sit at her feet and gaze up at her adoringly. It’s completely sappy, goopy, delightful, and sweet. I cannot imagine seeing it in a modern film. I can’t imagine seeing the…

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Children’s books piss me off.

We have a baby book called “Time for Christmas”, starring Duck and Goose. It has rather charming paintings, each depicting a wonderful, fun activity–building snow forts, making snow angels, having snowball fights, skating on the frozen pond, sledding, etc– –and the text for every page is “It is NOT time for sledding/skating/building snow forts”, until finally you get to the last page and it’s TIME FOR CHRISTMAS. What kind of stupid book tells children not to play? Because that’s what this does, as far as I’m concerned. And no, I…

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Repeat Rant

I have another climate change/politics/green rant building, but I do not have time to write it, so I went and looked up my Temper Tantrum Rant of a few years ago and discovered it… …fails to apply to many of the things I want to say, but also manages to, so just go read that and assume I’m still as livid, or possibly more so, than I was that day. The follow-up political manifesto also still applies. The infuriating thing, the really infuriating thing, is that I have no doubt…

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apparently this is that health care rant I’ve been storing up

I started this post to say I’d just checked my Walk to Rivendell mileage sheet. I actually only have the last two 150-ish mile bits of Aragorn’s journey to complete for all the outward-bound stuff. I’ll finish that this /year/! But then I got dragged in another direction, which may be largely preaching to the choir. Perhaps I’ll put it behind a cut tag, to spare the masses.

excuse me while I have a temper tantrum.

The following political rant is brought to you by the no-doubt actually innocuous article about an attempt at record-breaking cyclists in Dublin. It is not, despite the launch topic, really a diatribe about Ireland.