The headline in yesterday’s Washington Post says: “The FBI’s new headquarters should be in Springfield”. It does not tell you that the article was written by Virginia’s two senators and its governor. For those who only read headlines, this is misleading.

Same with the headline of this post above. It may surprise you to know that I wrote the headline, not one of my millions of anonymous readers. But I probably fooled you, right?

Enough with just the headlines. Let’s go to text: I rarely read about March Madness, because I care absolutely nothing about college basketball. At all. But I happened to read the top first page article on today’s Washington Post sports page, about sixteenth seeded Fairleigh Dickinson beating first seeded Purdue, something that hadn’t happened since the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, beat Virginia sometime in the 16th century.

Here are some quotes from the article: “Alongside Virginia in all future references and winces will mope Purdue”, Purdue had an “emphatic Big Ten regular season”, this is a rare event “since this seeding construct in this delirious annual event began”, Purdue “croaked in disarray”, and Purdue underwent “a gathering disintegration as the Lilliputian opponent kept gathering mustard”. I did not follow the article onto page D5 for its continuation. Well, OK, I did go to the very last paragraph where I saw that “doom looked nigh for Purdue”.

The article was written by Chuck Culpepper. You think this is really what he wrote? Or do you think someone on the editing staff was playing a prank on him? Or are all college basketball columns written like this?

A couple of other things.

First, my reading is really suffering. Having read about 70 Penguin paperbacks last year, and getting off to a good start this year (remember, I have about 700 to read), I got stuck. My next book, one I never read before, was Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed” or “The Devils” (depending on the edition). The books has about 650 pages; the print is very small, as are the margins. When we went on our Florida/SC trip, I took it along, figuring over 12 days I had a chance to get through it. Of course, I never picked it up. We have now been home about 2 weeks, and I am only half way through it. Sure, other things have come up, and it’s true that I don’t much care what happens to any of the characters, but it isn’t a bad book (I realize this every time I open it). Maybe this weekend – where we have relatively little scheduled – I will get through it and go back to my regular reading habits.

Finally, we do want to see some of the movies who won Oscars, or were nominated. This year, we had only seen The Fablemans, Tar, and The Quiet Girl. So we have a ways to go. We started last night with RRR, the Indian film whose frenetic dance song won it an Oscar. We started rather late, and didn’t realize that the film is over 3 hours long, so we decided to watch half last night and will finish it this evening. It’s been a while since we watched any Indian film (I know there are thousands of them – maybe thousands produced every year), and this one is a kick and a half.

All I will tell you today is that it takes place in India during the Raj, and the castes of society seem to be the Beyond Awful British (except for one very pretty young lady), and the Indigenous People of the Indian Subcontinent. A Beyond Awful British Lady decides to kidnap a cute young Indigenous girl, who is an expert henna artist, taking her away from (and perhaps killing) her mother, and bringing her to a heavily secured palace in Delhi. Now we have a super-human Indigenous guy from the village who travels to Delhi to save her, and another super-human Indigenous guy (who has sold out to the Beyond Awful British) who is hell bent on making sure that the girl is not saved. Halfway through the film, and we don’t know which of the two Indigenous guys will prevail.

In addition to Beyond Awful British and Indigenous major actors, there are thousands of residents of Delhi who appear in various scenes. Are they real people, or are they computer constructs? That I don’t know, although the wild animals (and there are many, each with their roles to play) are created through AI (so says the information statement at the beginning of the film, where we are assured that no real animals are suffering).

It’s on Netflix. See if you like it.