Logic
Interesting headline from foxnews:com: “MLB requires photo ID to pick up tickets from Will Call, but boycotts Georgia for voter ID law.”
While checking the statement of one of my three retirement accounts, I noticed that Coca Cola was in an IRA, not a trading account. I have not bought the product since the company put “Be less white” on the side of its can. Now they have sided with those who dub Georgia’s voting law, which is the same as that of more than 20 other states, racist. The only reason I held onto my shares was to deny the government tax money. When I realized they were in an IRA and therefore not subject to taxation, I pulled the trigger. I bought 25 shares more than 20 years ago. They’d accumulated to 249, a handsome profit. Several mutual funds in my portfolio probably contain shares of Coke, but I’m not going to look for them. If that makes me a hypocrite, fine. I stopped watching baseball, hockey and basketball long ago, so I can’t say I’m boycotting them, but I did stop watching NFL highlights on youtube, and I loved those. Who or what is next?
Monte Hellman, 88, was born in NYC in 1932 while his parents were on vacation, birth name Monte Jay Himmelbaum. He grew up in L.A. and has had an unconventional film career, writing, editing, producing and directing. His first stint at the helm was for schlockmeister Roger Corman’s Beast from the Haunted Cave (1959). His most notable work is probably Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), a road movie starring James Taylor, Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys and Warren Oates. I’m sure I’ve seen it but do not recall a single thing about it. It is considered a cult classic by some. His second most famous flick is The Shooting (1966), a bizarre western best categorized as avant garde. It ran last night at eight and eleven on the Circle channel, 63–2 on OTA in NYC. It’s the story of a mysterious quest across the desert starring Oates, Jack Nicholson, Millie Perkins, who played Anne Frank, and Will Hutchins, TV’s Sugarfoot. I nodded off during each showing — not a reflection on the film but a fact of life at 70 — so it would be unfair to rate it. There are only 21 directorial credits under Hellman’s name at IMDb, which include three shorts and two documentaries. His last came in 2013 and focused on Venice. He directed a few action scenes for the original Robocop (1987), which I really like. He was an executive producer of one of my all-time favs, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992). His most amusing credit is directing Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989), which he also wrote and which went straight to video. Here’s a quote attributed to him: “I believe the best movies are road movies. The road is very enigmatic. The road is life.” Here’s a still from The Shooting, which shows why some cite existentialism when discussing it. It reminds me of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), also starring Nicholson, another film I hardly remember anything about, pic to follow the first.
My thanks to the kind folks who bought stuff today at the floating book shop. Here’s what sold: eleven Do Wop CDs; Darker Than Amber, a mystery by John D. MacDonald; Digging for the Truth: One Man’s Epic Adventure Exploring the World’s Greatest Archaeological Mysteries by Josh Bernstein; Say No More, a thriller by Karen Rose; The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russel; The Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code: A Challenging Response to the Bestselling Novel by Richard Abanes; The Art of Logic in an Illogical World by Eugenia Cheng.
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