So Many Deaths

I guess this is what happens as you get older, so many of the celebrities that you grew up with start passing away.  Nonetheless, it seems like an awful lot lately, including Shelley Duvall, Richard Simmons and Dr. Ruth!  Curiously, the Guardian had run a feature on Duvall's best films (very controversially listing Popeye higher than Nashville, which is completely risible).  I'd actually seen Nashville for the very first time less than a week ago, so it is quite fresh in my mind.  What an achievement, and it is even more amazing when you realize that the actors wrote nearly all the songs in the movie!  I really do need to get around to watching 3 Women (which is indeed probably her greatest role) and Gosford Park, just because I never have seen it (though Duvall is not in this one, with its almost entirely English cast).  I wonder if perhaps the Paradise can be sweet-talked into running 3 Women as a bit of a memorial to Duvall.  Her part in Nashville is interesting, though a bit one-note.  I think someone summed her up as the heartless chick in hot pants, and that's pretty accurate... 

Anyway, there was one death deferred.  There was an aborted assassination attempt on Trump at a Pennsylvania rally.  I'm not going to mince words.  I am not planning on denouncing political violence in this case.  Trump will get it sooner or later, and I certainly won't be sorry...  A recent Guardian article pointed out that fully 10% of Americans are willing to resort to violence to prevent Trump from becoming President, and a large number of them are armed of course.  This is what happens when every guardrail (that in a sane society would have simply disqualified him from running again) has been systematically discarded by the GOP and even more appallingly the Supreme Court, who simply made shit up, for instance, to say that the 14th Amendment is completely toothless, and then more shockingly saying that any official act, if carried out by the President, is completely outside of the realm of law enforcement.  It is batshit crazy stuff, and would get most of them tossed out of law school, but this is typical of the Right and their complete lack of morality nowadays (and that scumbag Alito no longer bothering to hide the fact he is trying to usher in a theocracy).  As noted there hundreds of thousands of people (and actually probably closer to 10 million angry Americans) who simply will refuse to accept him in the White House again, especially as Trump has made no bones about acting like a mafioso in his second term and lashing out at all his enemies.  If this hastens a Civil War so that the Blue States can throw off the yoke of the Red States, i.e. the Electoral College and its skew to smaller states, so much the better.