Valentine’s

Abel has cabin fever now. He points at the stroller, squawks, climbs onto my chest, and beats it. Soon, Abel, soon.

Like his brothers before him, he attacks my face and snatches at my glasses when I put them on at night. His little nails must have cut inside my eyelid. When I fold it back I find the scab. It has been chafing my eyeball.

Happy Valentine’s (this time, on the day itself). No celebration for Karin & me tonight. We’ll go out later this week.

I did put on Sleepless in Seattle for the family. There aren’t a lot of Valentine’s Day movies. I’ve seen these others:

My Bloody Valentine and the excellent Picnic at Hanging Rock – two for the horror aisle;

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind;

and:

Some Like It Hot.

Irrespective of general merit or demerit, only Sleepless preserves the spirit of, and does justice to, the holiday. (I’ve not seen An Affair to Remember.)

Happy birthday to my long-dead Great Grandad Valentine, my father’s mother’s father.

February’s poem

Happy St. Valentine’s Day.

Massive Attack, “One Love”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

It’s you I love

And not another

And I know our love

Will last forever

You I love

And not another

And I know we’ll always

Be together

Some men have one love

Two and three love

Four and five

And six love

But I believe

In one love

I believe

In one love

Some men don’t feel secure

Unless they have a woman on each arm

They have to play the field

Prove they have charm

They say, Don’t lay your eggs in one basket

If the basket should fall, all your eggs’ll be broken

But I believe

In one love

I believe

In one love

Oh girl

I believe

In one love

I believe

In one love

Oh girl

It’s not the everyday you find the woman of your dreams

Who will always be there – no matter how bad things seems

Ever so faithful

Ever so sure

No man could ever

Ax for more

I believe

In one love

I believe

In one love

Oh girl

I believe

In one love …

I believe …

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Vocalist: Horace Andy.

Seahawks 29, Patriots 13

A Super Bowl for connoisseurs of defensive football. I’m not one. I understand what’s happening when a DB breaks up a pass or a lineman beats his blocker and troubles the QB. But os and xs, zonal coverage, disguised coverage … I know these things exist, but I can’t perceive them – not in real time.

I like Kenneth Walker’s running. Dude calmly glides toward his blockers, awaits the defenders’ removal, scoots past them. Elegant. Not unlike slow-roll penalty taking (in soccer).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My Facebook friends signal their politics by praising or condemning Bad Bunny’s halftime show. What a stupid time to be alive.

I’ve not previously listened to Bad Bunny.

The sugarcane is good décor. The dancing is efficiently uncouth.

So are the lyrics. I know them only by reading them online. (I can’t understand them sung; I have trouble with Puerto Rican Spanish.)

The apagón song stands out because I know what it’s like to endure frequent apagones (power outages). One extended passage in that song is reminiscent of, if not quite ideologically aligned with, The Vagina Monologues. Is it included in this Super Bowl performance? I’m not sure. I can’t make out enough words, and I’m distracted by utility-pole dancers.

Melania

The title of this post will have raised some eyebrows. Did he watch the documentary? Is he going to review it? And so I must immediately temper expectations. No, I didn’t watch it. Perhaps I shall, some day. I’m in no hurry.

I just want to note what strikes me as an extraordinary response by the public and the critics.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Melania has an aggregate rating of 1.3 from 10 at the IMDb. Some 49 thousand votes have been submitted.

Surely it isn’t that bad? Even Caligula (1979) manages a rating of 5.3.

Ah, here we go. “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title,” the website disclaims.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“Trump Film is a Gilded Trash Remake of
The Zone of Interest”

… The Guardian opines. Quite a good dig, that.

(The Zone of Interest, if you didn’t know, depicts the opulence of an Auschwitz commandant’s household.)

Again, the vitriol is excessive. Or not? Time will tell.

No, it really is excessive, no matter how things turn out. Melania evidently is no Triumph of the Will. It doesn’t show a nation’s diabolic fervor. It’s just a vanity project. This sort of thing has been done before and will be done again. Sometimes, a despot commisions it (cf. Turkmenistan); sometimes, it’s just the excrescence of some rich dude, as when Charles Foster Kane pays for his wife to be an opera lead. I expect Melania is in between.

Here’s a more sympathetic Guardian review.

Timothy Dexter

Ecuador is mentioned in the first sentence of the main body of the Harper’s Weekly Review.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Facebook bots kindly shared a mini-bio, in Spanish, of Timothy Dexter (1747–1806), history’s hombre más suertudo (luckiest man). It was intriguing enough that I went on to read Dexter’s Wikipedia bio. Then I read that bio aloud to Karin.

Certain commonalities with our President suggested themselves. Dexter, however, made money instead of losing it. And he didn’t start out with money from his father; he extracted it from his rich wife, whom he abused.

In business, he seems to have been lucky and devilishly intuitive, e.g. he turned a profit literally “shipping coal to Newcastle” (the proverbial expression for exporting to a saturated market).

I don’t intend to read any full-length biographies of Timothy Dexter. But I went looking anyway. The major ones are from the 1800s. The last notable book, the most recent edition of which is 65 years old, is by John P. Marquand – like Dexter, of Newburyport, Mass. – the author of the “Mr. Moto” fictions and of the Pulitzer-winning, satirical Late George Apley. I wonder how serious his treatment of Dexter is.