(1) Let’s first talk about the weather. Yes, people say that everyone talks about it and no one does anything about it. But that is an overstatement. Think about this: the Washington area has been in somewhat of a drought. That drought ended yesterday with the first of what promises to be several days of moderate to strong rain. Why did the drought end yesterday? Because Edie and I took action.

What did we do? We got tickets for the 4 pm Nationals/Cardinals game. You don’t need to thank us. It was just our way of helping out the world.

By the way, they played the entire game in the rain and the Nats won 3-0. Normally, this game would have been canceled, but the schedule this year has each of the 30 teams play each of the other 29 teams, meaning that if a game is canceled because of weather, coming up with a replay date is difficult if not impossible. So expect more of this. I did turn on part of the game. How many people were actually sitting in the 40,000+ stadium? Not 40,000.

(2) One of the recent Penguin books I read is “The Cinema 1950”, a book that no one but I have read since approximately 1950. But the book, an anthology, has several interesting articles, such as one by Robert Flaherty on the 18 months he spent in the Arctic filming Nanook of the North and the 24 months he spent in French Samoa making Moana, two early and well received documentaries (I saw Nanook at the National Gallery of Art several years ago).

Another of the articles ask six English critics what they thought the best films of the previous year were. One critic said, without a doubt, it was “Cry of the City” with Victor Mature and Shelly Winters, among others, “an American gangster film”. We saw that it was available on YouTube and….why not?

Well, I should have read further in the article itself: “Indeed, it has been a surprise to me that Richard Murphy’s script, Robert Siodmak’s direction and the finely balanced playing of Richard Conte as the killer and Victor Mature as the detective have not been more enthusiastically received by the critics as well as the public.”

And then I looked up Victor Mature on Wikipedia, and found the following comments by David Thomson under “Critical Appraisal”: “Simple, crude and heady – like ketchup or treacle – he is a diet scorned by the knowing, but obsessive if succumbed to in error. It is too easy to dismiss Mature, for he surpasses badness. He is….a barely concealed sexual advertisement for soiled goods.”

The other favorite movies of the 1950 critics were, by the way, “Bicycle Thieves”, “Whisky Galore”, “Jour de Fete”, “The Third Man” and “Louisiana Story”.

(3) My Thursday morning breakfast group presentation and discussion this morning was on the topic of Artificial Intelligence (I think I gave my views on this in an earlier blog post). But to reiterate, one day, a 400 pound man (to quote Donald Trump) living in his parents’ basement in Bangladesh (I know, there are probably very few, if any, basements in Bangladesh that haven’t long ago been flooded) is going to figure out how to use AI to detonate a series of nuclear weapons and wipe out humanity and several million other species in the blink of an eye. And with this, all the great benefits that AI will have otherwise brought to society will obviously come to naught.

In the meantime, we can use AI to create a haiku:

A man in Dhaka

In the house of his parents

Sets the world on fire.

Or a limerick:

There once lived a man out in Dhaka

Who wanted to give us a shock-a

He created a mesh

In old Bangladesh

Bombing Brazil and Morocc-a.

(4) As my readers today are all saying to be in unison “Enough already”.

OK, I had more to say, but it can wait. Happy Chocolate Eclair Day.