The crash; Should I marry a murderer?

Karin returned to the office after a week’s vacation. I am at home with the boys – including Samuel, who has been puking – and with the three cats.

“School of Hard Knocks” Dory still fights with Ziva and Jasper. We worry for her permanency in our house.

She is gentle with humans, only occasionally biting them (in self-defense).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Two noteworthy Netflix docs:

(a) The Crash

(b) Should I Marry a Murderer?

I don’t often look at Instagram or TikTok, so these two shows were something of a revelation for me.

Text messaging has for some time been a staple exhibit of the true-crime genre. (See, e.g., Lover Stalker Killer.) But, to my knowledge, only in the last year or so have documentarians made much of compulsive video posting.

The first show’s protagonist is a villain. The other show’s protagonist is a victim/​witness. The former is a teenager just out of school; the latter is a thirty-ish professional – a forensic pathologist (!).

It’s the teen who’s coldly calculating. The corpse dissector is warm-hearted, loyalty-torn, and ultimately heroic.

What they have in common is, they’re always posting video.

And, in the footage they post, using drugs.

(Each program goes to some length to explain that its protagonist’s drug use doesn’t affect the outcome.)

Both protagonists have unconditionally supportive parents, for better or for worse.

One show is as chilling as can be; the other is almost heartwarming. I recommend them both.

The inner ring

It seems these days I have to read the New York Post for good news.

“Woman Rushed to Hospital with Appendicitis, Gets Shock of Her Life: ‘He Just Came Out of Nowhere’”

(She had a baby.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My kindergartener is trendier than I am.

At the library, Samuel started singing “Soda Pop” from Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, and some middle schoolers joined in. Glances of mutual recognition passed between Samuel and the middle schoolers.

It was suddenly clear that I was “out” and they were “in.” It evoked a feeling described in C. S. Lewis’s “The Inner Ring” (which I happened to be reading).

I didn’t mind being “out,” but it was all too gratifying to see my child “in” with his betters.

He doesn’t care about being “out” or “in.” He just likes having friends.

He checked out this book because the girl on the jacket reminded him of a friend.

Karin met other friends of Samuel’s today. She took time off from work and joined his class on a field trip.

“It’s my mom!” Samuel told everyone. “And it’s her birthday!”

Happy birthday, Love.

October’s poem

Ecuador 0, Paraguay 0.

More futility.

The ref and the VAR failed to decree a penalty kick for us.

Such mistakes happen less often in these days of video review. I’ll listen when CONMEBOL publishes the booth officials’ audio.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A rather chilling poem by John Keats:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calm’d – see here it is –

I hold it towards you.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Netflix just released a new Unsolved Mysteries season. One episode shows Britons talking with the dead. These spiritualists, with their fancy electronics designed for listening to bat-calls, first seem nutty … and then, well, they record some strange things.

Most remarkable, to me, is one spiritualist’s less-than-admiring verdict of another: “He’s possessed.”

You’d think they would have considered that risk from the beginning.

An oddball and I practice civic friendship

Two bang-average but worthwhile true crime docs:

Deadnorth (Tubi), set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula;

Lover, Stalker, Killer (Netflix), set in Omaha and its environs.

I watched one right after the other, knowing little about either. There was considerable thematic overlap. The true crime genre is, if nothing else, extremely useful as a catalog of behavioral red flags.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel went to the lake with grandparents, grandaunts, granduncles, and second cousins (an inexact tally). He came home this afternoon, sunburnt.

With just Daniel in tow, Karin & I went out for gyros. As we were finishing our meal, a nerdy, headset-clad man one table over, who’d been talking into his phone all lunch long, asked me to look after his food while he ran out to his truck. I nodded. His truck was a semi. I watched through the restaurant window while he fumbled around in the cab. Then he brought out a cigarette and smoked it outside the restaurant.

Finally, he returned to the bits of onion and tomato on his plate.

He grinned and thanked me. I nodded again.

My good deed for the day.

An ode to Tubi

My father-in-law remarked:

“I pay for all these streaming services, and which do I end up watching? The free one: Tubi.”

Hear, hear. I could go on about Tubi … and Canela, Freevee, Hoopla, Kanopy, Plex, and Pluto (not to mention subscribable services like ViX that provide a surprising amount of free content). But, for now, let me just discuss Tubi.

I’m scrolling through my queue. I’ve added classic cartoons and movies; trashy old TV movies; British TV; Australian TV (Crime Investigation Australia and Crimes That Shook Australia); and a low-budget documentary series, Village of the Damned, about crime in Dryden, NY, some 20 min. east of Ithaca – not a topic of universal interest, but an alluring one for this ex-resident of Tompkins County.

Indeed, to scroll through Tubi’s main page is a revelation. This isn’t Netflix’s conveyor belt of formulaic, in-house content. No, Tubi is still a chocolate box, in the Forrest Gump sense.

Stay gold, Tubi, stay gold.

42 days of darkness

Here’s somewhere you don’t often see on TV: the affluent, beautiful, dismal Los Lagos region of southern Chile. It’s where Netflix’s 42 Days of Darkness is set. I enjoy cloudy weather, or I believed I did; I once thought it’d be nice to live in Puerto Montt. But natural beauty never looked so dreary as in this show.

More precisely, the setting is Puerto Varas, on Lago Llanquihue. A housewife disappears from a gated community. Has she been kidnapped, as her husband claims? Has she been murdered? Has she simply abandoned her family? The police investigate at a snail’s pace. Brisker progress is made by a hustling lawyer and his associates, who are moved as much by the compulsion to snoop as by the prospect of helping the family (and receiving payment). The story is modeled after a true one – I don’t know how closely. Stories of missing persons are the most wrenching to watch. I dread putting each episode on; and then I quickly get carried along, buoyed by the energy of the desperate, shabby lawyer as he struggles against the complacency of other lawyers and the police. It’s as if Ramón Valdés from El Chavo del Ocho set out to solve a crime.

Growth and limitation

Eleven-month-old Daniel, who’d been taking five or six steps at a time, casually walked across the living room two nights ago. He’s learned to climb up our staircases (but not down them). He’s grown tall enough for his head to be whacked by the refrigerator door. Today I caught him playing with the dials on our gas stove.

Samuel received his first YouTube lesson in adding and subtracting. He grinned and squealed and waved his arms. Fireworks of possibility exploded in my brain. Should I buy Samuel an abacus so that he can practice calculating like the Japanese? (Should I buy myself an abacus?) Should I teach Samuel about truth tables? Propositional logic? Quantification? He’d probably get a kick out of seeing “∀” and “∃.”

I’m not even sure I could teach logic to adults. I’ve never tried.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I spent a couple of hours at the whiteboard with Samuel. He can’t add yet. He won’t even count all the dots unless I do so along with him. He does like to yell out the numbers and the operations, but he gets the sums wrong.

“Five plus three equals FOURTEEN!”

No, son.

He is bitterly disappointed. Not because he’s got the sum wrong – I doubt he understands what it is to get a sum wrong (and he never has minded factual correction as such) – but because he really wants the last term to be fourteen. He is an enthusiastic laissez-faire combinatorialist. If South Africa vs. Mexico is a valid possibility, and if there’s another possibility which is South Africa vs. Finland, and if South Africa vs. North Korea is possible … then surely five plus three equals fourteen is perfectly kosher, perfectly respectable (worth celebrating, even), no matter that dot-counting can establish that five plus three actually (therefore, possibly; therefore, necessarily) equals eight.

I believe this is his first brush with theoretical, as opposed to practical, impossibility. It is baffling to him.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Philomena Cunk (Cunk on Earth) is coming to Netflix.

Ecuador 2, Qatar 0; England 6, Iran 2; tornadoes

I had to wait twenty years to see Ecuador play for the first time in a World Cup. I lived through five World Cups before Ecuador ever qualified for one. Oh, the shame and helplessness of those years.

Samuel and Daniel saw their very first World Cup game yesterday, and Ecuador played in it.

Ecuador scored the first goal after three minutes. Stephen and I jumped up and yelled and celebrated. Samuel and Daniel were startled. They cried.

Then the goal was disallowed because a player was offside.

Stephen and I couldn’t see the infraction – not even after the replay was shown. I gather that 99% of the world couldn’t see it, either. That doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. Offside is decreed by technology now. Good thing, because if a human referee had decided that we were offside on that play, FIFA and the host nation would have lost all credibility.

In any case, fútbol-wise, Qatar was doomed. Ecuador was better by about ten miles. The only question, at that point, was whether the referee would permit Ecuador to win.

Then, after twelve minutes, he awarded Ecuador a penalty kick. (He couldn’t have done otherwise, really.) He should have shown Qatar’s goalie a red card, but, understandably, he let the host nation off the hook.

Enner Valencia, who had been missing his penalty kicks in recent games, calmly scored. Stephen and I were quiet this time.

The rest of the game was a walk-through for Ecuador. The Qataris were rattled and simply awful. The Ecuadorians were more cautious than I should have liked. Valencia scored again later in the half, and then Ecuador rested. Or tried to; Qatar kept on fouling.

The Ecuadorian supporters could be heard cheering. Many Qatari supporters left at halftime.

In this video, one of the soberer analysts on U.S. television describes the Qatari exodus. Some of the numbers he cites seem off, but the lesson is clear enough.

How valuable was this victory? We got the points. We regained some confidence after a series of lackluster practice games. Our main scorer regained his form. Were we good? Impossible to say. Qatar was so, so bad. We could have tried harder to score more goals, but it was crucial to rest and calm down. The games against the Netherlands and Senegal will be very hard.

This analysis is fair.

For one day, we led the whole world in the standings – something which also happened during the 2006 World Cup. Then, this morning, England beat Iran 6 goals to 2. Iran looked miles and miles better than Qatar.

Here is Un mundo inmenso’s take on this World Cup.

Now, something different. Samuel asked to watch more tornado videos, so I put on Netflix’s series Earthstorm. It has the best tornado footage I’ve seen. I highly recommend it.

Harlan Coben’s Netflix

I continue to hunt for free books, resolving – ruefully – to borrow more from the Internet Archive. Yes, this will require me to read from a screen. But the books on that website are free.

Maybe I’ll stop carrying four or five volumes to bed with me.

My mother reads from a screen. Today I showed her how to search in the Internet Archive. We quickly found a few cherished books that she hadn’t read in years.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

One guy I won’t be reading onscreen is Harlan Coben. No need: his books are in the library.

And I don’t like them.

Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve been fascinated with Coben, or the idea of Coben, since I read this Atlantic article fifteen years ago.

He was popular then; now, he’s stratospheric. He and Netflix have contracted to turn fourteen of his books into different shows. Fourteen. How does such a thing occur? Netflix has been transposing these stories to England, Poland, France … just about anywhere outside of New Jersey, which is to Coben World what Britain is to Middle Earth.

The good news is, the shows are a hoot. Safe was all right. I liked the family of strivers who, out of sheer social panic, keep a body in their freezer. But the series that hooked me was The Stranger, with its “good kid” teenagers who go on a candy-colored drug trip and cut off an alpaca’s head.

Right now, Karin & I are watching Stay Close. Why are so many scenes set around a huge statue of a skinny, white head – a statue reminiscent of a certain Pink Floyd album cover? Why has this statue been erected in a clearing in the forest? Why do the characters not seem to notice it much? (Who writes this into a crime show?)

Why is the grizzled lead detective saddled with his ex-wife as his investigative partner? How could their boss allow this? And why does the boss look like he’s twelve?

And how does the ex-wife get away with letting her son ride around in the back seat of the police car? (“Childcare issues,” she vaguely explains.)

Why do so many perfectly manicured middle-class marriages have ridiculous secrets? How are the wives and husbands so oblivious to one another’s pasts? Why do these pasts involve things like embezzling and stripping and committing manslaughter?

How do such outlandish tropes get repeated in story after story?

Karin & I get a kick out of all this.

Coben World – the Netflix variety, anyway – is different from any I’ve encountered.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Today, I started to read Babbitt. This year is its centennial.

Some lessons in geography

Today was warm and dry enough for strolling – Samuel was pleased.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve been watching Capitani (Netflix). It’s a typical cop show, but the episodes are just 24 minutes long. That’s about all I can view without having to pause to look after Samuel.

The show’s location isn’t obvious at first. The language is sometimes like French, sometimes like German.

Switzerland?

No, not mountainous enough.

(The land is hilly and lushly vegetated, like my beloved upstate New York.)

Then I figured it out. Luxembourg. Aha.

Apparently, there are stark regional differences in that nation. The show’s “northerners” and “southerners” constantly disparage one another. So do city and country folk.

This show is set in the country. Village life is comfortable and modern. Houses aren’t especially rustic.

The army is always conducting maneuvers in the forest.

Everyone knows everyone else. Even so, it’s possible for citizens to disappear from the police.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Disoriented from this excursion into such a vast and untamed land, I put on some YouTube videos of San Marino, another country I’d never visited on TV or in the flesh. San Marino is easier to comprehend.

The government is seated in a castle at the top of a mountain – the country’s highest point. From there, one can easily gaze out, across ten Italian kilometers, all the way to the Adriatic.

Also, there are tourists everywhere.

I look forward to viewing the cop shows of San Marino.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It would be remiss not to also mention Un mundo inmenso, my favorite geographical YouTube channel (Samuel is fond of it, too).

Finally, I recommend these photos of a yellow penguin. HT: National Geographic.

The dig

Poe wrote “A Valentine” …

But, for a more affecting Valentine’s Day poem, see the previous entry.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

For our own Valentine’s Day, Karin & I watched The Dig, a new Netflix movie about the excavation at Sutton Hoo upon the eve of the Second World War.

(Was the theme of searching in Britain’s “lonely earth” suggested by the TV show Detectorists? The actor Johnny Flynn is a link between the two productions.)

The Dig is an imperfect movie with some transcendent moments. Its success is due to its two lead performers. Ralph Fiennes plays a humble “excavator” – he lacks an archaeologist’s formal training – and Carey Mulligan is the widow who hires him to dig on her land.

He is a true craftsman who works for the love of his art, expecting to pass unnoticed, uncredited.

She is a person of steely resolve. Even so, she is unsettled by a presentiment of death – of oblivion.

The recovery of the ancient gravesite has existential resonance for them both. So does connection with the past. They live in a moment when their culture faces a terrible threat.

Artifacts turn up; other interested parties jump in. The dig becomes a bit of a circus. Fiennes and Mulligan retreat into the background. This is a letdown after the beautiful simplicity of the opening, in which the two lonely principals together survey this bleak land under its striking sky.

But the supporting characters – some of whom are cultural gatekeepers and preservers, others whose lives will be upended by war – do reinforce an important point. Oblivion beckons to civilization, also. The threat recurs above the level of mere individuality.

This is an anxious time in our own history. Not only are things very bad, the old foundation seems about to disintegrate. Though The Dig is a period piece, it feels up-to-date; it takes the pulse of our moment more cannily than most new movies do.

Puffin rock

A day in the 40s (F) – a nice temperature because the snow melted and I didn’t have to shovel. The next days will be in the 20s, so I made sure to go strolling. I’m afraid Samuel doesn’t enjoy these cold-weather strolls. When he saw I was going to put his coat on him, he tried to crawl away, which he’d never done before. But, of course, I caught him.

Though the temperature wasn’t piercing, the wind was. Samuel was glad when we came home.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel’s favorite TV show is Puffin Rock. Karin & I have begun saying “P-U-F-F-I-N-R-O-C-K” to one another because if Samuel hears the words “Puffin Rock” he gets a little wild. The show itself is not very wild. Two pufflings, Oona and Baba, live with their parents and various other small animals – foxes, frogs, owls, bunnies, shrews, hermit crabs, etc. – on an island off the southwest coast of Ireland. Their gentle adventures are narrated by Chris O’Dowd.

Oona is a kind soul. Baba is so infantile that he looks like a fluffy white tennis ball with big eyes. He expresses himself in a lively but inarticulate fashion (he reminds me of Woodstock, Snoopy’s bird friend in Peanuts). I wonder if Samuel is in especial sympathy with Baba; in any case, he laughs and laughs whenever the puffins carry twigs or fishes in their beaks.

Here is a scene in which the puffins guide a lost frog back to its pond.

Tonight, Karin & I put on an episode of Wallace and Gromit – A Matter of Loaf and Death – and, alas, Samuel was terrified. Which was a proper reaction, since it really is an unsettling little movie.

Movies of the 2010s

The honor roll, continued.

1. Tabloid (dir. Errol Morris, 2010)
2. We Are the Best! (dir. Lukas Moodysson, 2013)
3. L’illusionniste (dir. Sylvain Chomet, 2010)
4. Another Year (dir. Mike Leigh, 2010)
5. It Follows (dir. David Robert Mitchell, 2014)
6. Bridesmaids (dir. Paul Feig, 2011)
7. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (dir. Brad Bird, 2011)
8. Hail, Caesar! (dir. Ethan and Joel Coen, 2016)
9. The Trip (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2010)
10. 56 Up (dir. Michael Apted, 2012)
11. Queen & Country (dir. John Boorman, 2014)

Several of these movies were released in the previous decade, in the last weeks of 2010. So, clarification is in order.

To qualify for the list, a movie needs to have ended its first run in U.S. theaters no earlier than January 1, 2011. This is a fair criterion because I wouldn’t have been able to see several of these movies as soon as they appeared in theaters, in 2010.

Besides, if I hadn’t adopted this criterion, this would’ve been a sorry list indeed. Like the previous list, this one makes it clear that I stopped paying attention to art and culture halfway through the decade. I guess I no longer view the world with wide-eyed wonder.

Or maybe the new stuff really does lack freshness. A common complaint, nowadays, is that too many movies are sequels or prequels or adaptations. As it happens, this list includes three sequels: Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, 56 Up, and Queen & Country. And the first two of these would go on to have sequels of their own (as would The Trip).

But the three sequels on the list are pretty darn cool. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol revitalized an ailing franchise. Queen & Country, which seems never to have held much commercial promise, is a self-contained appendix to Hope and Glory, which was a minor hit in 1988; its very existence is miraculous.

56 Up is, of course, a part of the greatest string of sequels in documentary history; that they are sequels is their whole point.

Tabloid is not a sequel, but it’s quintessential Errol Morris. This means that it’s what 75% of those true crime docs on Netflix are trying to copy. They are Tabloid’s spiritual sequels, or they would be, if they were good enough.

Tabloid is my no. 1. I thought long and hard about making either We Are the Best! or L’illusionniste no. 1. They may as well all be tied.

The Trip and 56 Up first appeared on British TV.

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More sleep trouble (a cautionary tale)

You might think that the trouble is with Air Supply, my CPAP machine. Indeed, for a couple of weeks, the mask was too tight, and I was getting terrible headaches. But I fixed that problem.

No, the trouble is that our mattress is wrecked. It has been for years.

When we bought it, Karin & I thought we were being clever, trying out mattresses in the store and then using the Internet to order a model that was similar to what we liked. Well, the joke was on us. Now the springs are damaged and we sleep in enormous craters.

I awoke with a backache that would persist all day. It was the final backbreaking straw. A few hours later, we ordered a new, more expensive mattress. This one is renowned for its firmness and has a lifetime warranty. It also will require us to make a lifetime of payments (or at least a year’s worth).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

David Attenborough’s Our Planet – a Netflix production – is free to stream on YouTube. Samuel and I watched Episode 8, “Forests.” Samuel was quite taken with the animals. He squawked at the TV several times.

The little prince

Netflix has released a sixty-minute documentary, Antoine Griezmann: The Making of a Legend – an appropriate title since its depiction of that player’s World Cup triumph is dishonest.

Recounting Griezmann’s “Man of the Match” performance in the World Cup final, the movie focuses on his successful penalty kick, which gave France a 2–1 lead over Croatia. The movie completely ignores how, earlier in the game, Griezmann fooled the ref into calling a nonexistent foul for him. His ensuing free kick resulted in France’s first goal. (For brief commentary on that “foul,” look here and here.)

Griezmann is a wonderful player to watch. He succeeds because of brains, not strength or speed. Despite not caring about the French team, I rooted for him all through Euro 2016.

But his is no “underdog” story (even if, when he was a youngster, the French scouts overlooked his quality and he had to go learn his trade in Spain). As the movie makes clear, he was given sufficient opportunity. He certainly wasn’t shy to seize it.

The movie shows him weeping after France’s defeat of Belgium in the semifinal. “That’s when I knew we’d be world champions,” he says. “There was one match to go, but I thought, ‘It’s okay, it’s mine.’”

The Belgians comment: “We lost to a team with no real game.”

To which Griezmann replies: “If it came from the other team, I’m pleased. It’s what I want, for our game to get to them, nobody able to find a solution.”

But I was a neutral viewer, and I agree with the Belgians. France had loads of talent but no real game.

In this world, you can win a lot without having any real game. You need a sense of entitlement, which the Belgians lacked against their larger neighbor. That is what Griezmann has in spades.

Waiting out the polar vortex

Today is the midpoint of a three-day weather holiday for me. Karin had to go in to work (alas). Precious few clients have been passing through her credit union.

As I type this, the temperature is −18°F in my Zip Code area, with a windchill of −41°F. Or so it says on the Internet. It doesn’t look especially windy outside, but what do I know.

My plan for today is to post this blog entry, to dissertate, to read, and to watch one or two movies.

Others in my predicament might be interested in these classic movies that are due to expire from Netflix on February 1:

Children of Men (also expiring from Amazon Prime);

Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and

Touch of Evil.

Karin & I have begun watching Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence, a series in three parts, through Amazon Prime.

Karin has just sent a message that her office will close at 3:00 this afternoon and open at noon tomorrow.

I continue to rest my ankle. I can now limp without crutches around my apartment. I’d not previously detected any bruising on my ankle, but now there is a considerable amount.

Chile 0 (3), Portugal 0 (0)

I recall those shocking days when Russia and Qatar were awarded the hosting rights of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Everyone in the West screamed bloody scandal. Especially the English. … And now, it’s reported that Prince William, his Prime Minister, and their cronies negotiated an illegal trade of votes with officials from South Korea (another bidding nation).

Gloat, gloat, gloat.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Today, Portugal and Chile played the first semifinal game of this Confederations Cup. I turned it on and viewed it for ten minutes. “No goals in this game,” I foresaw.

I watched Netflix. Then I turned the game back on and viewed during minutes 83–90. Still no goals. I regretted my decision to report on the tournament.

The announcers kept saying what a good game it’d been. Maybe they were right. I couldn’t tell.

The thirty-minute extra time started slowly and finished with a flurry of attacking. The Chileans should have been awarded a penalty kick, but VAR did not intervene. Then, twice, they struck the goalposts.

The shootout was more straightforward: three shots, three goals for the Chileans; three shots, three misses for the Portuguese.

Trump syllabus

The U.S.’s presidential election is just around the corner. Trumpie has been lavishing us with the spectacle of himself. But I believe that he’ll lose, and that Clinton will maintain a “business as usual” regime for at least four more years.

The academic folks at The Chronicle of Higher Education also believe that Trump will lose. Though the election is yet to be held, they’re treating Trumpie as a seminar topic – as a puzzle to be leisurely studied – rather than as a plague to be dealt with. They’ve recruited some of their all-stars to write a “syllabus” in order to “explore the phenomenon that is Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.” The items on the syllabus include utopian and dystopian writings (Plato’s Republic; Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here; Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America); very, very old historical writing (Thucydides); thinly-disguised, fictional portraits of real-life demagogues (Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men); and exposés of how Trump rose to prominence. A lot of these items are for lulling one into a comfortable sleep in front of the fire, not for lifting one’s ass up by lighting a fire (under it). Well, that’s to be expected, I guess. Professors would have everyone just sit and read.

Last night there was a debate between Clinton and Trump, but I didn’t watch it – it began at 9:00pm or some such hour when schoolworkers ought to be in bed. The truth is, though, I love to watch Trumpie in the debates. I read that last night he had a good line about a “400-lb. guy lying in his bed.” Brilliant. If only Clinton would talk like that. … No, it wasn’t because I listened to any of the debates that I decided that Trump was incompetent. My mind was made up by a short documentary from 2009 – an entry in ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, on Netflix – Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?

Not that the CHE would’ve asked me, but that movie is what I would have put on my Trump syllabus.

Basically, Trump is the guy who shows up at the playground and insists on everyone playing according to his schedule and rules, at his house, and with his toys; and who gets enough suckers to join him so that he is able to ruin the game for everyone. Trust me, sports lovers: you don’t want this guy calling the shots. Watch Small Potatoes – which was broadcast years before Trumpie decided to run for the presidency – and you’ll want to stop whatever you’re doing and go stand in line for the next month, so that you can be sure to have a place at the polling station to vote against Donald Trump.