Charm of Yesterday, Convenience of Tomorrow

Ah, yes...

We have a Gallup "spot."

Disney Shenanigans, Part...Something

Now that I got that off my chest...

As we finish up the Disney movies, I'm struck by my Disney+ having most of the special features I would have watched on a DVD. They were cool, and I learned about the stuff that fascinates me. Collaborative art is very different than, say, painting or writing a novel or a poem.

Ever since 2010's Tangled, Disney was back. Toy Story 3 was a masterpiece, and Pixar has been hammering out doubles for a while.

But here are the Mouse releases since:

• Tangled
• Wreck it Ralph
• Frozen
• Big Hero 6
• Zootopia
• Moana

Then the sequels start, with a few original masterpieces sprinkled in:

• Ralph Breaks the Internet
• Frozen 2
• Raya and the Last Dragon
• Encanto
• Strange World
• Wish
• Moana 2

Really, four originals sandwiched between Ralph, Elsa, and Moana sequels. If we ignore the fact that Moana 2 was originally a television program created for Disney+ (which makes sense if you've seen it: lots of side characters with no real background, uneven animation and baddie characters who oscillate between good and bad, seeming to need more time to develop), then we're looking at:

• Raya
• Encanto
• Strange World
• Wish

Such an odd quartet. We're going to give Wish another chance (I only saw fifteen percent, maybe); Raya and the Last Dragon is an excellent homage to South-East Asia, lovingly crafted and full of powerful women. It's great! Encanto may be the best Disney film...and I mention that without qualifiers. It's hyperbole...but maybe not. Strange World bombed at the theaters, but that may have had more to do with Disney and France beefing (so it never opened there) and the fact that any anti-homosexual countries (sadly, there are many) would have banned it, so it never got a chance. Anyway, it's beautiful and grand and full of a nostalgic adventure.

Zootopia may be favorite of any of these, but Ralph is interesting, and San Fransokyo is dope, and Elsa, Anna, and Moana have captured many a young person's imagination.

I had/have another time-suck idea about these movies, or these movies vs Pixar vs everyone else...

Are we doing that or are we enacting civics reform by pitchfork and torch?

What...what's going on?

Taking a break from the freak-out about...I dunno, the gestapo roaming around snatching people up, masked and armed...at least they were ran out of parts of here around the Southland, but they've been showing up to immigration courts where judges are supposed to be hearing their asylum cases? This is America?

Yes. This is America, or some nightmare that only the most cynical of us could have imagined. This is the end result of the world Reagan augured and Dubya anchored and now, after years of defunding education and eliminating civics courses and putting up cartoon characters as candidates, we got the worst version of Elmer Fudd---if he were a wife-raping white-supremacist---while one of our political parties has become the shining beacon for bigotry and anger and hate and fear. The other party is barely better, as they take money from the same donors and have been selling us out for the last few decades, too.

Get the pitchforks and Molotov cocktails ready...I wanted to come here and say something about conclusions as we finish up the Disney canon...but...

Every apologist has to be gone, ferreted out. Allies, it goes without saying, have to be gone. Profiteers, too. FUCK ALL OF THEM. 

The work will be difficult but necessary. Is it too late? We all hope not...

AI wants to put 11 (eleven?) links into this tiny polemic...links without my doing, like it wants to, what, make "Reagan" a clickable link? I'll do this myself, thank you very much. 

Will the robots make ferreting out the capital-B, capital-G BAD GUYS from our government easier?

TOGBIADB!

Construction at the Farm

Corrie's designing and building her folks' new house on the Farm. By next summer it should be done. Check out the awesome windows here:

That corner will have two enormous windows. What I really need is a person standing in the frame to give it scale. Maybe later.

Some scenes are pretty beautiful around here, just like at the Cabin, like:

Other times, you're like: where are my kids? And then you find them, together, both wearing safety glasses, one reading vintage Archie comics to the other:

Roadrunners and horny toads and barn owls...and coyotes and turkeys and deer...it's always something magical out here in panhandle Texas.