Positives & Negatives

RIP Rutger Hauer, 75, equally adept at playing hero or villain. Born in the Netherlands, he went on to international fame. There are 179 titles under his name at IMDb, the most notable, of course, Blade Runner (1982). He was haunting as the last replicant to be “retired.” That inventive film may live forever, and with it Hauer’s uncanny portrayal. Here’s a quote attributed to him: “I don’t know what the appeal is. I can see I’ve got blue eyes and I don’t look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame but I can’t understand the fuss.” Well done, sir. Thank you.

Here’s an encouraging headline from foxnews.com: “Idaho high school football team attends autistic boy’s birthday party after only one classmate accepts invitation.” And here’s a pic:

Also from FN: Little Jace Vega saluted troops, and the pic has gone viral:

And here’s the latest in political correctness, plucked from an article by Newt Gingrich at FN, edited by yours truly: The San Francisco Board of Ed. has voted to spend $600,000 to paint over a 13-panel, 1600-square-foot mural called Life of Washington at George Washington High School. It was painted in 1936 by Stanford University art professor Victor Arnautoff, who had migrated from Russia and was a devout communist. He included slaves and a dead native American precisely to show that Washington was not perfect and that there were deep problems with the Founding Fathers that historians had ignored. It was part of FDR’s Works Progress Administration effort to get money to painters and artists during the Great Depression. So, now a Russian-born communist professor at Stanford paid by the federal government is no longer acceptable to the San Francisco school board. Here’s a bit of the offending art:

My thanks to the kind folks who bought and donated books on this glorious summer day, especially the young man who wiped out the cook books section, and Shelley, who purchased the last three kids’ books on display; and Wolf, who showed up despite severe back pain and took the time to translate many of the newly added titles in Russian, and bought three. Here’s some of what else sold: Papillon by Henri Charriere, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes by Elizabeth Bard, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, a couple of other novels in Russian, and a work of non-fiction on the business world, the title of which escapes me.

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