Pun Salad

Finishing up my own saga: I watched original Star Wars at the Uptown Theater in Washington DC with not-yet-Mrs. Salad. We've been to every one since then.

And now it's over (sob).

I am prepared to tell you this movie is OK, but I can't shake the overall vibe I got, roughly: "Well, we said we were going to make this, and here it is." They got their characters into a bad situation, they have to figure out how to wind things up in (checks IMDB) 142 minutes.

I think the previews of coming attractions went on almost that long, too.

So, various mysteries are resolved. We find out Rey's parentage. We find out that (spoiler!) Wedge Antilles is still around and still a pretty good shot in an X-Wing.

As Mrs. Salad observed, there is a lot of fighting. Not a lot of effort went into coming up with coherent character-driven plot threads.

Since The Last Jedi ended so badly, there was unfortunately no act that compared to the thrilling rescue of Carbonited Han Solo in Return of the Jedi. Too obvious? Maybe, but still would have been preferable to whatever happened in the first act in this movie. See, I've already kind of forgotten.

I'll say that I appreciated the references to previous movies, though. And the end is a nice bookend to the entire series.

This 1940 British movie was an unabashed propaganda effort, one primary goal was to lure American into WW2. Not a bad try!

As the movie opens, the German U-boat U-37 has just sunk a cargo ship off the coast of Canada. Some survivors clamber up onto the sub's deck, but they're shoved right back off again. Damn Nazis. (Although I have to admit, I'm not sure how Allied subs would have handled the same situation.)

On the run from patrols, the boat decides to hide out in Hudson Bay. A small group of six is sent ashore to seek provisions and… kaboom, the sub gets blown out of the water.

So now what do those six guys do? Well, first thing is to make it to a fur trading post, where they encounter—I am not making this up—Sir Laurence Olivier, playing a trapper with a Quebecois accent that probably would get him in big trouble in modern Canada.

That encounter turns bad, for both Canadians and Nazis. So the Nazis move on, and on, encountering various Canadians along the way. The major problem is that they can't shut up about their vile ideology, keep getting discovered, getting into violent deadly scrapes, and then moving on.

It's all pretty good, in a 1940s way. Famous actors Leslie Howard and Raymond Massey play Canadian civilians that the Nazis encounter, to their dismay.

Dave Barry has a dog. A nice girl named Lucy. I have a dog, a (pretty) good boy named Barney. Dave thinks he's learned a lot about how to live a better life from Lucy, and he compiled that learning into seven lessons, each with its own chapter. Spoiler alert, here they are:

1. Make new friends. (And keep the ones you have.)
2. Don't stop having fun. (And if you have stopped, start having fun again.)
3. Pay attention to the people you love. (Not later. Right now.)
4. Let go of your anger, unless it's about something really important, which it almost never is.
5. Try not to judge people by their looks, and don't obsess over your own.
6. Don't let your happiness depend on things; they don't make you truly happy, and you'll never have enough anyway.
7. Don't lie unless you have a really good reason, which you probably don't.

Good things: Dave is best when he's being funny and observant of both his dog and his own life. There are a number of good yarns: about his awful band, the Rock Bottom Remainders; his work with the World Famous Lawn Rangers, a group whose members parade with a broom in one hand, pushing a lawn mower with the other; the reason he woke up in hung over in a hotel room with "NO SPLEEN" sharpied on his arm. And dog stories, of course.

But I have quibbles: the "lessons" are pretty much the ones you can derive dog-free, and dogs are optimized for dogginess anyway, not humanness. And, truth be told, when Dave is not being funny, he can be … a little preachy.

In fact, while reading, I was thinking: "Dave's a little preachy." When on page 184 I see Dave admitting that he's "maybe even a little preachy in places".

OK, all is forgiven, Dave.

And it turns out there's one last lesson. And this one is moving and pretty agonizing. I read Dave's blog, and he was absent for awhile. Ah, this explains why. Small spoiler: things turn out OK.

I loved the original animated version of The Lion King. Bought the VHS tape. Bought the DVD. Bought the movie soundtrack CD and the Broadway Cast CD.

And I like the idea of redoing the old Disney animations with live actors and a lot of CGI. Aladdin was fine. Beauty and the Beast was fine. The Jungle Book was fine.

But I didn't much care for this, for some reason. No people. Just talking (and singing) animals. Too weird? Is that a valid criticism for Disney movies? I wouldn't have thought so, but for whatever reason, this just didn't work for me.

I assume you know the plot: it's Hamlet, except different, and it's with lions instead of people.

And it looks fabulous.

• xkcd has a party idea that should appeal to programmers who have to worry about this stuff:

  

  Mouseover: "Off-by-one errors" isn't the easiest theme to build a party around, but I've seen worse.

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• In our "It must have been an easy article to write" Department, AIER's Max Gulker reviews The Year in Bad Ideas. There are ten. Here's number ten:
  National Conservatism – The left has unsurprisingly occupied most of the spots on this list–they’re the opposition and we’re approaching primary season which means plenty of ideas from radicals and one or two from centrists. Given the litany of destined-to-fail hail marys on this list, one might think the right would find it expedient to double down on its perceived affinity for free markets, but that would be easier had the perception ever been true. Events like Yoram Hazony’s national conservatism conference suggest that for much of the right “free markets” always meant what the left assumed it did–a preference for big business and the businessman in his place atop society’s hierarchy. In truth capitalism and conservatism don’t go hand in hand, the former being a force for constant change in society through bottom-up, evolutionary means that, while messy, offer sounder guidance than any hand. Our system may offer the choice between Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren. Bring it on. Never have those in the free-market camp been ceded more ground, but we need to jettison our old bad ideas too. Let’s be clear, libertarians have repeatedly made the mistake that right-populists also want small government. They don’t. They want to be the government. This isn’t a quick-turnaround opportunity, and more elections will likely come and go before we’re out of this hole. A lot of those bad ideas above have the seed of good intentions and those intentions can be met far more effectively by markets, philanthropy, and private governance. It may require patience and some dead-end bad ideas of our own, but the potential is out there to make people’s lives better without making everyone’s worse. That’s a daunting resolution for the new year, but consider the alternatives.

  This is a point Jonah Goldberg has been making in his recent "Remnant" podcasts: Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom to "the socialists of all parties" (emphasis added). It's not great to see folks on "our side" beguiled by the planning fallacies he so ably debunked 75 years ago.

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• The WSJ had a long editorial that deserves your attention if you can breach the paywall: Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan, Oh My. It's a "greatest hits" list of the various proposals she's set out in her "60-some policy papers". The greatest hit will be the American economy, of course. For example:

  • Green New Deal: Spend $3 trillion, including $1.5 trillion on industrial mobilization, $400 billion on research, and $100 billion on a Marshall Plan. By 2030 hit 100% carbon-neutral power and 100% zero-emission new cars. Retrofit “4% of houses and buildings every year.” For “environmental justice,” put a third of the funds into “the most vulnerable communities.”

  • An end to fossil fuels: Ban fracking. Halt new drilling leases on federal land. “Prohibit future fossil fuel exports.” Kill the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. “Subject each new infrastructure project to a climate test.” Give “workers transitioning into new industries” a “guaranteed wage and benefit parity” and “promised pensions and early retirement benefits.”

  Why, no, she's not a big Hayek fan. How'd you guess?

  And, as the WSJ observes, her plans also include getting rid of the Senate filibuster, so that if the Democrats take control of that chamber, and keep the House, they'll be able, in theory, to pass everything.

  Thank goodness a lot of it is unconstitutional. Unfortunately, not enough of it.

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• At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson asks the musical question: Do Celebrities Really Buy the Climate-Change Story?.

  I love Emma Thompson’s acting. I wish somebody would tell her about Skype.

  The great English actress is a climate-change activist, “activist” here meaning “a celebrity who cares about popular causes in public.” When she recently was accused of hypocrisy for jumping on a jet to attend a climate-change rally — international air travel is one of the most carbon-intensive things a person can do — she attempted to justify herself, saying: “For decades now we have been asking for clean energy, and this has been ignored.”

  That is some grade-A magical thinking: The constraints involved in the problem of moving x pounds of people or freight y distance at speed z are questions of physics, not questions of ethics. “Asking for” things to be different does not remove those constraints; for decades now, I have been asking for a way to live off bourbon and cheeseburgers without getting fat and unnecessarily dead but, so far, no dice. Physics always wins.

  It is about power. They say they want to get the climate under control. What they mean is: they want to get people under control. Just like…

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• "Gun control." As Daniel J. Mitchell notes in his third collection of Gun Control Humor. A sample:

  

  Ayuh.