Cash Stuffing & More

May Day UK bank holiday parade, photo from Reuters:

Headline from nypost.com: “Extra taxing: Two-mile homeless camp takes over in California’s posh Marin County — and tax dollars help fund it.” Seems the last acceptable form of bigotry is that against the rich.

Reminder to those pushing for the banning of gas stoves: 90% of the electricity in the USA comes from coal, a fossil fuel.

New terms seem to pop up so often these days. From an article at foxbusiness.com by Erica Lamberg: “Cash stuffing is the current take on the age-old ‘envelope system’ of budgeting — taking cash and stuffing envelopes, or folders, or whatever you want to use, for different categories of spending in your monthly budget.”

Friday night’s movie fix, courtesy of Netflix by mail, was a slice of life from Norway, The Worst Person in the World (2021), which received Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Film and screenplay. Set in the beautiful city of Oslo, it covers four years in the life of a woman who turns 30 during the narrative. Working in a book store, she’s trying to find her role in life. She moves in with a successful, soft-spoken mid-forties cartoonist of offbeat, in-your-face fare, the antithesis of his personality. She leaves him for a restaurant worker/environmentalist her own age. I’m not sure who the title refers to, as these people are far from horrible, especially by modern standards. It’s the sort of work I was keenly interested in until age 60 or so and have perhaps maxed out on. I didn’t think I would make it through the two-hour running time, but I became more intrigued as the story progressed. Despite subtitles, I enjoyed the performances of the three main players. The dialogue is interesting. My one quibble is that it is more sexually explicit than I prefer in mainstream cinema. It was directed by Joachim Trier, born in Denmark, his ninth title. He co-wrote the screenplay with Eskil Vogt, a frequent collaborator. 79,000+ users at IMDb have rated The Worst…, forging to a consensus of 7.8 on a scale of ten, too high in my view. Still, it’s more than a solid film, accurately portraying the mystery of life, the lack of answers to the important stuff. It more than doubled its production cost at the box office worldwide. Add revenue from streaming and DVD sales and rentals, and it’s quite a success. Here’s Renate Reinsve, who has 26 titles under her name, film and TV, none American:

I put in an extra hour at today’s session of the floating book shop, so demoralized and stunned at the lack of sales despite stellar inventory. It paid off. My thanks to the young man who purchased Mayo Clinic on High Blood Pressure by Sheldon G. Sheps, and a travel guide to Philadelphia; and to the woman who bought the large Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary; and to the young woman who took home Newberry Award winner Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis, and three volumes of R.L. Stine’s Nightmare series; and to the couple who selected a CD in Russian. My own definition of cash stuffing.

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