A few tabs to close….

Here’s some stuff that’s been languishing in open tabs on my browser:

::  Matt Zoller Seitz on Clint Eastwood’s current movie, both as a movie and as a data point in how movies are exhibited and marketed these days. The movie biz has always been a cynical one run by people who would steal the coins from a dead man’s eyes, but sheesh. Read the article for more. (The article has spoilers for the actual movie, but they’re forewarned and they come pretty late in the piece.)

::  There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of buzz in the fact that Americans are currently slated to launch a crewed mission to the Moon in less than two years, does there? But Swapna Krishna has thoughts on the likelihood of that mission launching as scheduled. Spoiler: she is not optimistic. (I highly recommend Ms. Krishna as a source for space science news. She’s excellent.)

::  I remember years ago when my mother had me read Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World (still a favorite of mine), and one detail in that story (set in rural England sometime in the mid-20th century) that always stuck with me was when Danny and his father eat a couple of apples. The apple they eat is called a “Cox’s Orange Pippin”, which is apparently a very special variety of apple indeed. (To this day I’ve never had one.) See, at the time, the whole idea of special varieties of apples was alien to me: you had Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, and Granny Smith. That was it. Nowadays, the apple is an astonishing source of variety and joy. Here’s why.

::  Sometimes I have a tab open so long that I can’t remember why on Earth I had it open in the first place. Here’s one such thing: 11 places that have the same name in Britain and America. I assume this topic came up on one of the social media sites, but damned if I can remember the context.

:: Here’s a video. I’ve written on the subject of roundabouts before, but this video goes a bit into why Americans have been so slow to adopt what is clearly and objectively a superior way of managing traffic at intersections. I’ve come to rather cynically view roundabouts, train travel, gun control, and universal healthcare as my main Exhibits for the Prosecution when making my case that Americans are stubbornly resistant to obviously good ideas that clearly work better than what we’re doing.

::  I hate to close with a bitter pill about this past election, but here we are. Roxane Gay writes in the New York Times (I think this piece is unlocked, but it might be paywalled now, I’m not really sure how that works) about what the odious results of this election say about us. Spoiler: it’s nothing good.

Mr. Trump’s voters are granted a level of care and coddling that defies credulity and that is afforded to no other voting bloc. Many of them believe the most ludicrous things: babies being aborted after birth and children going to school as one gender and returning home surgically altered as another gender even though these things simply do not happen. Time and again, we hear the wild lies these voters believe and we act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. We act as if they get to dictate the terms of political engagement on a foundation of fevered mendacity.

We must refuse to participate in a mass delusion. We must refuse to accept that the ignorance on display is a congenital condition rather than a choice. All of us should refuse to pretend that any of this is normal and that these voters are just woefully misunderstood and that if only the Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. While they are numerous, that does not make them right.

I have nothing to add to this, other than to note my view that this election represents a collective failure of citizenship in this country. My thoughts are now increasingly tilted toward the possibility that America has entered her inevitable and irreversible decline.

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