Last night, we turned on the third episode of the sixth season of Black Mirror, the eerie science fiction show on Netflix. We haven’t watched the first five seasons, but were intrigued with the first episode of Season Six. I wrote about it (“Joan is Awful”) a few weeks ago. We thought that the second episode of the season (each episode is independent – there is no story line) was weak, and we turned off the third episode last night about 15 minutes into it when the arm of the hero who was really a machine got chopped off with an axe by one of the four hippie intruders (it is clear that nothing good was going to happen in Episode Three).

Not only did we turn it off, but we needed an antidote. So we turned on TMC, and watched “The Reluctant Debutante” (1958) with Rex Harrison, Kay Kendall, Angela Lansbury and Sandra Dee. It turned out to be the perfect antidote.

Kay Kendall (the real Mrs. Rex Harrison) and Angela Lansbury are second cousins, twice removed (Rex Harrison wishes they were more removed) and rivals. Sandra Dee is Harrison’s American daughter from his first marriage. She is 17 and coming to England to live with her father and step-mother. Dee and Lansbury’s daughter are both making their debuts to ritzy English society; their mothers hope they each snag a man (in fact, their mothers are after the same man), but Sandra Dee falls in love with someone else – the drummer in the band of the first ball she attends. SPOILER ALERT: the drummer’s 95 year old great-uncle in Italy dies, and the drummer, towards the end of the film, becomes the new Duke of Positano. So all will be well. And Lansbury’s daughter is then paired up with the original target (a young man who can only speak of how to avoid traffic and get the best parking space – Harrison says that talking to him is like “talking to a sign post”).

Parts of the film are just awful – these can basically be defined with great precision by saying that the parts of the film that include Sandra Dee. Not that it is entirely the fault of Sandra Dee (whose acting can hardly be called that); it is also the fault of the screenwriter. The romance scenes are just god-awful. But the scenes involving Harrison, Kendall and Lansbury are terrific. They are fast paced with snippily clever dialogue; all three actors are at the top of their game; and the French farce-like direction adds to the charm. I highly recommend the film. Just remember that the entrance of Sandra Dee means you can put your attention elsewhere.

Speaking of Sandra Dee (and I was), all I remembered about her was her blond hair. So I googled her. Ugh. She died fairly early (I think she was 61), and her entire life was filled with anorexia, drugs, mental illness, sexual abuse by her stepfather, and physical illness. She basically stopped acting when she was in her early 30s, and became a recluse. She was married to Bobby Darin when she was 19, and that too was a disaster – she was expected to devote her life to Darin’s career and to suppress her own, and – to top it off – she had six miscarriages and only one successful pregnancy before they divorced. (Of course, Darin – who died at 37 after heart surgery – fared no better)

Whew! Well, on to other things. The Nationals have now won three straight series – against the Padres, the Mariners and the Phillies (each 2 games to 1) – they are still in last place in their division, but they are playing decent baseball and are interesting to watch. They are of course still mired in this major rebuild – what will happen next, we don’t know. But outfielder Lane Thomas is having such a good year that there is speculation that he will be traded to the Yankees this month; Thomas is getting old at 27, I guess, and the thought is that the Yankees will give up some promising 22 year olds for him. I can’t say that I understand this management philosophy, and trading Thomas will clearly alienate some more of the fan base.

Meanwhile, we do have tickets to tonight’s 6 p.m. game against the Reds, who are having a surprising year. We missed our last ticketed game against the Cardinals because it was 55 degrees with off and on again rain – and the umpires let the game go on throughout the bad weather before a crowd of about 1,000 (obviously, not including us). Today, the weather is projected to hit feel-like 100, but then to collapse in strong storms and thunderstorms this evening and tonight. So once again, it looks like we will stay home and miss another paid-for game, which will probably be played, even if delayed into the wee, wee hours. If they postpone the game, my guess is that they will make Wednesday a day-night double header day; whether we can go to that is also unclear.

What else? I took a break from my Penguin reading after finish Iris Murdoch’s “The Flight From the Enchanter”, and read Bill Browder’s “Freeze Zone”, about the perils and pitfalls of trying to get the Magnitsky legislation passed in the United States and throughout the European Union. For anyone interested in Putin’s Russia and how it really works (or perhaps better to say Russia’s Putin and how he really works – money, retribution, disinformation, etc.), I think you should read Browder’s two books: “Red Notice” (2016) and “Freezing Order” (2022). Definitely. I do. (In case you don’t remember, Sergie Magnitsky was a Russian dissident lawyer, representing Browder’s Russia based hedge fund, when he was murdered in a Russian prison; he was investigating the nefarious activities of Putin and his cronies after they stole the stock of the hedge fund, and robbed the Russian treasury of hundreds of millions of rubles through the filing of fraudulent tax refund applications. The Magnitsky legislation puts sanctions on the Russians involved in that corruption.)

Now, back to the Penguins and John Allegro’s “The Dead Sea Scrolls”.