Category / Bill Bickel

by CIDU Bill

[OT] Darkest Hour

Darkest-Hour-poster

If you’re going to make a movie about Winston Churchill, and you want to fictionalize and trivialize the most important decision he made in his life, one of the pivotal decisions of the twentieth century… then just call the movie fiction, rename the character Wallace Birchill, and have at it.

(It’s safe to assume that the comments section will contain spoilers for the film, if that’s relevant in this case; I always err on the side of extreme caution)

by CIDU Bill

This was sent to me as an LOL; on the other hand, though…

dna

… at least they got it right: if test results I’ve seen are to be believed, a person’s ancestry is very close to random. Which I suspect it is not.

My brother, according to his, has an ancestry entirely different from mine (and no, we didn’t even have a milkman when he was born), while his wife’s is more similar to mine (and no, we are not from the hills of West Virginia).

by CIDU Bill

The Charles Addams Mother Goose

addams-gooseThe Charles Addams comic was accompanied by this comment:

The Charles Addams Mother Goose is pretty much what you’d expect, a macabre take on some traditional nursery rhymes. So what I’m wondering is… What’s the market for this thing? Amazon claims it’s for kids between the ages of 4 and 8, but I’m not sure I’d have given my kids this book when they were 4 (and my kids were hardly sheltered; my younger son, when he was 5, asked me to explain to him the difference between murder and manslaughter) — and a kid old enough to deal with Jack Sprat and his wife being portrayed as cannibals, without several episodes of nightmares, probably wouldn’t be caught dead reading a Mother Goose book even with subversive illustrations.

Just for the record, though (speaking of subversive children’s books), every preschooler should own The Z Was Zapped (the link has been updated)— and I’ve personally made sure that most of my nieces and nephews had theirs.

by CIDU Bill

Seat

seat

Okay, it just seems to me if he’s polite enough to pick up her handkerchief, you’d think he would have offered her his seat in the first place.

Or should I not be trying to make sense of Mutt and Jeff at 4am?

Thinking about this — because, again, it’s 4am — I still offer my seat to women, even though it’s long out of fashion, because that’s how I grew up. But only to adult women: offering my seat to a woman forty years my junior just seems weird (not that this is usually a conscious decision).

You know what really made me feel old? The first time somebody offered me a seat. Maybe I looked particularly aged that day.

Interesting how these things differ regionally: when the extended family was in Boston a few years, I noticed that nobody was offering my octogenarian mother a seat. My son, who lives in Boston, explained that Bostonians rarely offer their seats to the elderly, but seem happy to give them up when asked.

(He himself always offers, because he’s still a New Yorker)