Tuesday Thoughts

• My God!  The horror of the part of the screen that is blank and that I feel encumbered upon to fill with prose.  What am I going to blog about today?
• I was thinking to leave my Casa today, but I feel like I caught a touch of something.  My symptoms are sore and achy joints, and an irritated throat.
• As I was sitting the computer last evening, Tony walked up to me, wrapped his arms around me, and gave me a fervent kiss.  A wonderful moment which made all the other inconveniences of parenthood worth enduring.
• I have so many DVDs and so little time to watch them - surely, a thought I have expressed before in this blog.  Anyway.  Yesterday, I pulled out a few old Hitchcock films, some James Stewart films, and this DVD I bought, lord knows when, entitled The Bad and the Beautiful starring Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner.  I choose to watch the latter.  It wasn't a bad film at all.  It was shot in crisp black and white.  The actors were all dressed to the nines.  The actors all looked like adults.  It was a film about Hollywood that was cynical without being coarse.  My only problem with the movie was Kirk Douglas.  I don't know why it is that he just doesn't appeal to me.  He is not cool like Eastwood or McQueen.  He doesn't seem a real guy like James Stewart or Bing Crosby.  He seems like a guy who is well placed enough in the film industry to get roles -- nothing more.
• Manhole covers missing or having fallen in the manholes.  Sidewalk tiles or cobblestones chipped and cracked in many places.  Cigarettes thrown on the floor of apartment hallways.  Ah! The little details of China!
• I put some U2 songs on my mobile phone.  Tony hearing them, took my phone away from me.  He recognized the songs from a U2 video I had played for him, many times, on the DVD player.
• That politician's budget deal in the U.S. seems much ado about nothing.  They negotiated about cuts that weren't really cuts at all.  The cuts were really agreements to spend less using the bloated 2010 budget as a baseline.  No one could possibly have gained from that.  The leadership of the Repubics was cowardly, the Democrats were playing politics, and Obama was a bystander.
• I also watched yesterday, on DVD, two episodes from Season 2 of Sons of Anarchy.  The accompanying music is becoming more heavy metal -- not that I mind so much, I liked the cover version of The Who's Slipkids which was used in the opening montage of the first episode of the second season -- it was kickass.  The season's bad guys have to be Neo-Nazis, so clearly the writers of the show have a left-wing bent.  Racism, if the writers had bothered to look at the culture, is a Left-Wing thing.   That silliness aside, I am enjoy the show. 
• What a big contrast it was to watch a series about bikers after watching the Bad and Beautiful.  I admire the toughness of the bikers, and I love the way everyone in the Bad and Beautiful dresses.
• Other Chinese details.  Guards and Police at intersections.  There is never just one.  There are usually three or four.  Some of these guards are old and shabbily dressed.  Some of the others do look goonish.
• I made a point of putting the lyrics to Bob Dylan's Blowing in the Wind on my mobile phone for reference.  I read the Cultural Commissars  told Dylan not to play the song in concert.
• A poem by Ezra Pound I have read -- I carry these book of poems by Ezra Pound around with me ** -- a character talks of being in a far off land and homesick for his own kind, despite friendly faces all about.  I don't feel homesick but I long, sometimes, to overhear words that I understand but mean nothing to me.  (** I know about Pound's bizarre behavior during the war.  However, his poems are wonderful and aren't fascist.)