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📽️ I enjoyed “Diplomatic Courier,” dir. Henry Hathaway (20th Century Fox, 1952) this evening, available at archive.org… and youtu.be…. There were airplanes, trains, and cars from Washington to Salzburg to Trieste. One interesting twist for me: One of the leads was Hildegard Knef, who starred in the 1946 DEFA film “Die Mörder sind unter uns” (The Murderers Are Among Us).
💰 I’m old enough to have experienced both stagflation and recession, but never depression. I guess that 🤬🍊💩 is going to give me the opportunity to experience that too. 📉
If Congress doesn’t resurrect itself as a coequal, independent branch of government that doesn’t delegate crucial decisions to the presidency and the judiciary, there will always be another demagogue to tear it all down. This is not a time for legislators who are easily intimidated.
Congress needs to revoke Trump’s tariff authorities NOW.
My son sent me a picture of a blurry coywolf running in front of his house this afternoon. This evening he had my young granddaughter say “April Fools!” during our video chat. The photo was a product of AI.
Our fascination with such fakes doesn’t just go back to Photoshop and before that photocopiers. There were plenty of joke postcards in the early twentieth century, many of them agricultural. There were ears of corn as long as hay wagons, onions that took two men to roll up a ramp into a truck or wagon, a Maine potato that filled a whole flatbed rail car, and so on. The jackalope was also popular.
Image via Bill Lende collection of tall tale postcards, The Newberry Digital Collections, id NL12843G.
I’ve been watching a lot of Cory Booker on the Senate floor since yesterday evening (but getting some sleep myself). Good to see the fire in him. I needed this. 🇺🇸🗽
📽️ After watching Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 “Rome Open City” (Roma città aperta) this weekend, I’ve started on his “Paisan” (1946). This is only the second time I’ve seen this remarkable collection of six stories about soldiers and civilians during the Allied liberation of Italy, and it feels raw.
Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes!…
Galileo: No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.
– Bertolt Brecht, “Life of Galileo,” in Collected Plays: Five, trans. John Willet (Bloomsbury, 1995), scene 13.
I enjoy the short cartoons that @Freeonis makes about Russia’s war against Ukraine. The latest, “The Art of Ceasefire,” is no exception. youtu.be… 🇺🇦
There will be a nation-wide protest on April 5 called Hands Off! Check out the map on handsoff2025.com for a town or city near you. I’m excited because even my town has one. I’ll get to meet locally engaged people. HT Alexander Kern.
Operator Starsky (@starskyua.bsky.social) talks with Ben Hodges about the current strategic situation in and around Ukraine. youtu.be… (19.5 min.) 🇺🇦
#СлаваУкраїні #RussiaIsATerroristState #ПутінХуйло
New York World-Telegram photograph by Fred Palumbo, 1964:
Miss April Lou, teacher at PS 1, Manhattan, with six Chinese children, recent arrivals from Hong Kong and Formosa [aka Taiwan], who are holding up placards giving his or her Chinese name (both in ideographs and in transliteration) and the [American English] name to be entered upon the official school records.
Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/94512334/.
“A lonely Ukrainian stork is waiting for his girlfriend and thousands of people are watching live” https://kyivindependent.com…. 🇺🇦