“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
— Noam Chomsky
Oil on canvas.
Seriously. The annual influx of little brown bunnies has arrived. There’s a warren somewhere under my backyard.
I gotta get some video for you guys. I tried last year, but those little fur-twerps are quick and shy. I felt like a paparazzi last spring zig-zagging around my yard with my cellphone camera. Neighbors thought I was nuts.
[Update: a “warren” is a rabbit burrow, right? I can never remember my “Watership Down” accurately. I don’t mean that a guy named “Warren” is buried somewhere under my backyard. This is Roanoke, not New Jersey.]
Department of Posts and Telegraphs, Irish Government.
[MINOR “GAME OF THRONES” SPOILERS BELOW. ]
This is what makes me worry over Arya’s fate before the show ends. I think a lot of people would think of Jon as the “lone wolf” of the family, being a putative “bastard” and being relegated to the Night’s Watch, etc. I, for one, always imagined the prognostication applied to him. (I think it was a verse Ned recited to Sansa in Season 1?) But … being marginalized, vilified or betrayed doesn’t mean Jon has been alone.
Jon’s has always had friends near him. He became a King, for god’s sake. But more than any of the other Stark children, Arya has usually walked alone. Her primary motivation is personal revenge, whereas Sansa, Jon and Bran are respectively motivated by their duties to House Stark, Westeros, and all of humanity. (I myself am slightly befuddled about Bran’s importance, including during the Battle of Winterfell. He’s … “the world’s memory?” I thought we had books and maesters for that. But whatever.)
Arya doesn’t exactly leave the Faceless Men under the best of terms. Even when she encounters Nymeria in the woods on her way back to Winterfell, her own former pet turns down her invitation to join her.
Then, even when she’s back among her siblings at Winterfell, she keeps to herself. Upon her arrival, she slips by the two guards who were supposed to escort her. When Jon asks where she is, Sansa says something to the effect of “She’s lurking around here somewhere.”
Besides … [MAJOR SPOILERS FOR SEASON 8 AFTER THE JUMP BELOW]
Continue reading “The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.”
1944 – 2019.
[Update: I didn’t create this meme, and I don’t know its author; I shared it from Facebook.]
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it.
Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. —Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfallen?
Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.
— William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act V. Scene 1
“Hamlet and Horatio at the Cemetery,” Eugène Delacroix, 1835
DC Comics.
March of Dimes.
Because I can’t sleep, and you’ve been dying to know. Here they are, in no particular order:
1) “Memento” (2000)
2) “Fight Club” (1999)
3) “American Psycho” (2000)
4) “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968)
5) “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975)
6) “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975)
7) “Natural Born Killers” (1994)
8) Lucio Fulci’s “Zombi” (alternately titled “Zombi 2,” 1979)
9) “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982)
10) “The Big Chill” (1983)
And … worst of all … I’m kinda on the fence about the first two “The Evil Dead” films (1981, 1987), Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) and John Carpenter’s original “Halloween” (1978). I am hanging my head in shame here over those last two. I know Kubrick’s film is considered a masterpiece. I saw it twice when I was a college student (once in a psychology class!), soooo … maybe I just wasn’t mature enough to grasp it? Mea culpa, people.
I left “Citizen Kane” (1941) and “Ben Hur” (1959) off the list, because I haven’t seen them in their entirety. I was nonplussed enough to turn those off after 40 minutes or so, but I’m weird about never saying I dislike a movie unless I watch the whole thing. You can add 1979’s “Phantasm” to this category too.
I know, I know … there’s nothing wrong with any of these films (except “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” of course, which is terrible). There are just basic ingredients in them that I somehow fail to appreciate.
Now one of you needs to e-mail me a cure for insomnia.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 