Dandy Cat

It’s baffling to me that access to birth control and bodily autonomy is still an issue in 2020. I can’t fathom the hatred that men and those in power have for women. I understand that religion can be meaningful for some people, but mostly it just feels like a never-ending cancer.

It took over an entire month to get here, but I now finally have a Logitech webcam for my computer. Ordering anything from China (seemingly the only location in the whole world that had sellers that weren’t price gouging) during a pandemic is rough business.

Every time I think I can’t take any more of the “Mayor of Flavortown”’s bleached, spiked ‘90s hair he ends up doing something like this. Guy Fieri appears to be one of the really decent ones among us.

From Lauren Collins at The New Yorker: Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation. I never thought that I would feel so grateful to have been able to be there when my dad died. I feel so sad for all those who can’t be there for the loss of their own loved ones.

I feel like I might be starting to develop some RSI in my hand. I’m now very worried that I’ll either become someone with a deformed claw hand or soon not be able to move through my living space because it’s filled with ergonomic, split mechanical keyboards with RGB lighting.

I’ve done so many show notes for podcasts today. My ears are starting to feel pretty sore from wearing headphones for so long. I wonder how people are able to wear over-ear headphones all day without getting a headache. Do I just have a huge head?

My refrigerator makes the same ominous droning sound from the song The Beast featured in the Sicario soundtrack when its compressor starts up. It makes getting food kind of an eerie process.

This last weekend I was perusing the list of the winners for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. As you do. I ended up following a rabbit hole that lead me to one of the nominees in 2004: Downfall (or Der Untergang, as it was originally titled).

It’s a story about, among other things, Hitler’s final days in his Berlin bunker. It‘s a challenging and powerful film. Very well-made, with a remarkable performance by the always brilliant Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler.

Going down this rabbit hole has left me feeling troubled about the way it was received by some. As seen in the “Controversy” section of its Wikipedia article, several commentators, film magazines, authors, and the like question the appropriateness of how some of the Nazis are portrayed, specifically Hitler. German tabloid Bild asked,

”Are we allowed to show the monster as a human being?”

Let it be known that I do view Hitler as a monster. His cruelty and the terror he brought to this world will always sadden and hurt. He’s among the worst this world ever produced.

But he was still a human being.

The film’s director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, on the criticism given to his film, said,

“They just got it wrong. Bad people do not walk around with claws like vicious monsters, even though it might be comforting to think so. Everyone intelligent knows that evil comes along with a smiling face.”

My concern about the criticisms leveled toward this film is about questioning the portrayal of monsters. I feel doing so is an important step for us to learn how not to become an evil person. George Santayana, the Spanish-American philosopher and writer, famously wrote,

”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We should not shy away from the horror of this man. We should not turn him into a phantom from the shadows of the past. Doing so blinds ourselves to the darkness we, as humans, can create. In that way, I feel those who criticized Downfall for this particular reason were wrong to do so. However, I can understand why they might. They were afraid to admit that, in one regard, there’s a similarity between them and the subject of the movie. If Hitler is a human being, that means we are also capable of becoming like him. If there could be one, then there could be more, and that’s a terrifying thought.

To willingly try to ignore or want to change the reality of history is to allow evil to grow again. Doing so will only result in the creation and spread of new evil. Instead, we should strive to study the past, learn from it, and use what we discover as a tool to help make us better people.

Indeed, a better global community of genuinely good people.

We should not endeavor to paint over the past, no matter how terrible and painful that past may be.

Those film criticisms got it wrong. Hitler was not some monster from a mythological story. He was a monster of a real human being.

I’m very proud of the fact that my inbox only has a single email in it right now. It never really gets worse than this. I feel like I should tour this thing across the country.

“See the miraculous, marvelous clean inbox! Come one, come all!”

Wealth, shown to scale. This is a remarkable and sobering creation by Matt Korostoff (his website may be on the fritz). As he writes, no single human needs or deserves this much wealth.

The dumbest question I’ve ever asked was to a nutritionist shortly after I went vegetarian at 18. In reference to some chicken broth that was listed on a nutrition label, I said, “Wait, does chicken broth have chicken in it?” 🙄

There’s smog hanging over the city again, obscuring the view from my house of the mountains in the distance. It’s a sorry thing to see.

One of the most prized possessions I have in this world is my original mac.com email address. I shall treasure it forever.