Yes And

 The most amazing thing about Catherine O'Hara was not that she made her comedy seem effortless. When you watched her perform, you could see the effort. And you might be amazed at how daring and difficult being that silly really was. 

Seeing her walk a very fine line between tribute and parody, her Katherine Hepburn impression was flawless in that it made the viewer consider "what would it be like if Kate Hepburn did..." It was as if she was real life intelligence channeling a spirit to take our imagination along for the ride. 

I used to stay up into the wee hours of the morning to catch Ms. O'Hara and her Canadian Crew on SCTV after Saturday Night Live had finished up. I watched Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas in the Great White North, and John Candy bursting through any and all scenes he shared with anyone else. I reveled at the wry smarm of Eugene Levy and Joe Flaherty, and the goofy charm of Andrea Martin. Eventually I was able to marvel at the kinetic silliness of Martin Short. And then there was Catherine. 

It was easy to get the idea that she had been hustled in as "the pretty one," the one who would take all the parts for the "pretty" ingenues who would be put off or frightened by the chaos that surrounded her. Not so. Catherine O'Hara could bring the goofy and her characters were always carefully drawn and often very brittle. But hysterically funny. 

Some will remember her for her role in Home Alone, a wacky tale of parents who should have been put in jail for leaving their child behind when they run off to Europe. But she was also the mom in Beetlejuice. And she was also the autoharp half of the folks duo of Mitch and Mickey in A Mighty Wind. In the midst of all the arch and sometimes sarcastic moments in this film, the pair's final number, A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow, brings an emotional catharsis to a film filled with memorable performances but none as tender as Mitch and Mickey. 

Catherine's gone now. She will be doing improv nightly somewhere in the ether I'm sure. But she won't be forgotten. She stomped on the Terra for seventy-one years and made me laugh for most of it. 

She will be missed. 

Tin Soldiers

 What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground - How can you run when you know? Ohio, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

No one knows exactly who fired the shots that killed four students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. Sixty-seven shots rounds were fired in thirteen seconds, killing students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Schroeder, were killed and nine more were injured. Eight of the twenty-eight National Guard soldiers involved in the murders were eventually brought before a judge. They were all acquitted. 

Lawrence Shafer, a sergeant in the Ohio National Guard at the time, admitted to firing his weapon, stating he felt his life was in danger and firing in the direction of demonstrators.

"In the direction." Hold on to that. 

Event though the soldiers were acquitted, the judge said in his decision, "It is vital that state and National Guard officials not regard this decision as authorizing or approving the use of force against demonstrators, whatever the occasion of the issue involved. Such use of force is, and was, deplorable."

"Deplorable." Hold on to that as well. 

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. Four dead in Ohio. 

Fifty-six years later, ICE soldiers and Trump is coming. How many more will have to die?

All these years later, it's time for a change. 

I leave you with the words from another Neil Young song: There’s one more kid that’ll never go to school - Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool. - Rockin' in the Free World.

What Could Go Wrong?

 Don't you worry about incipient trillionaire Elongated Mush. He might still make it to that thirteen-digit plateau, even if his plans for jury rigging the government of the United States government have fallen by the wayside. 

To get to that place where no one else can touch his wealth, the genius behind MechaHitler is hoping that it will be humanoid robots that will move his company's stock out of the red and into the black. He's asking that we put away our foolish notions about electric cars saving the planet as Tesla will stop manufacturing their models S and X in order to free up factory space to construct droids. No specific mention was made about the future of what was touted as the future, the industry punchline known as Cybertruck. Soon, we are told, those electric vehicles will be just an afterthought as Mister Mush moves on to creating an army of automatons to serve us. 

Avoiding for just a moment that a great many of Mush's projects seem to blow up and/or burst into flames, can we focus on the science fiction trope that swirls around any endeavor such as this? I would imagine that someone inside Tesla has a copy of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot stashed in a drawer in their desk, next to some twelve-sided dice and a few Rush CDs. Or maybe one of the flesh and blood employees has spent the ninety minutes it takes to watch Westworld. The movie, not the HBO series that would take far too much of their precious time. 

We could spend time here discussing the merits of the HBO version versus the 1973 original, but the sentiment expressed in Michael Crichton's amusement park gone nuts follow-up, Jurassic Park stand as a reminder to all of us when we start putting too much trust in our droids. “Yeah, but John, If the pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists." That was Ian Malcolm, an expert in chaos theory, speaking to John Hammond whose clever idea to turn dinosaurs loose on a remote island turned out rather poorly for many of the invited guests and spawned a seemingly endless number of sequels. Very rich people seem to have a penchant in these movies for messing with the defined order of things in order to expand their wealth by bringing about the aforementioned chaos. 

Judging from the track record of Mister Mush, I would expect things to head in the direction of cannibalistic pirates. Or maybe he's hoping that by making a legion of humanoid robots he can finally build something he never had: a friend. 

Here You Are Again

 Most, if not all of the things I am telling you are not news. I am no reporter. I am a filter. 

I believe that everyone who reads more than six words of Entropical Paradise gathers this in. The most obvious reckoning of this is the way it takes three days for "current events" to show up here for your reckoning. This digestive cycle allows me not only the chance to stay ahead of the daily demands of writing a daily demanding blog, but also gives us all a chance to reflect for ourselves on what is laid out here for readers to consume. Once it creeps inside your brainpan it's entirely up to you, dear reader, to choose what those freshly fired synapses do. 

You might nod in quiet agreement. 

You may wonder where I get the impressions that I serve up. 

You may skip to the end just to see if I ever stop talking about my marginally misspent youth. 

I do not expect to change any minds here. The evidence I present is primarily of the "have you heard" variety. I understand that this is the choir to whom I am preaching, and I don't expect any actual blowback when I say that the pedophile-in-chief ought never to have been elected in the first place and the effort it will take to remove him from office is wholly out of scale with the seemingly effortless way he slid down that escalator into our political lives more than ten years ago. This event alone should have shown the convicted felon up for what he is: A grown man afraid of stairs. Why walk when you can ride? 

Perhaps you drop by this corner of Al Gore's Internet to see if my opinions on things have shifted in some dramatic fashion. This might be disappointing for you. If instead you stop in to see if you want to hold the ax while I grind, then we've got a pretty good thing going. 

And maybe, just maybe, you're tired of reading about how much I detest the dark places this world is sliding. Which is understandable. I just write this stuff. 

I don't have to read it. 

Crossing Over

 I don't know if it was someone's pet or just a stray. Just like a year ago, when I rode past the lifeless body of a cat who had apparently made an ill-fated attempt to cross the street, I stopped. 

As I did a year ago, I moved to the sidewalk and got off my bike. Then I waited for the traffic to pass before I went out and made the worst possible rescue of a black and white cat that was not as lucky as I have been all these years on that hundred yards of High Street. It is the busiest stretch of my commute, and I try not to experience it too often during the rush of the day. The nocturnal amble this feline took didn't seem to keep him safe, and it is quite possible that whatever or whomever struck him was blissfully unaware of the collision. Radio on, thinking about the coming day, on their way to or from work.

Or simply out for a drive that ended tragically for a cat. 

I picked up the carcass and laid it on the sidewalk, only a few feet from where the end came. I thought of some words and was suddenly thrust into a world that doesn't always stop when someone dies. 

I thought of Alex Pretti, and how a nation stopped for him when he was struck down. I wondered, not for the first time, how many others had been abused, beaten, tortured and killed when there wasn't a sea of cell phones tracking the tragedies in real time. I thought of Renee Good whose last words to the officer who seconds later ended up shooting her three times in the head: “That's fine, dude. I'm not mad at you."

I'm not guessing my little Oreo Kitty friend was harboring any ill will toward the driver of the car or van or truck that stopped him in his tracks. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He used up one of his nine lives trying to get across the street. I didn't want whoever loved this cat to find an ugly mess where their pet had been. Just like I wish that those who knew and loved Alex and Renee want to believe someone or something will help them get to the place where they belong. 

Wherever that is. 

Haunted

 I read somewhere that Denver Broncos' coach Sean Payton is haunted by a decision he made during his team's loss to the New England Patriots. For those of us whose next six or seven months will be spent wondering if choosing to go for a touchdown rather than a field goal was what kept our team from a trip to the Super Bowl it's good to know that there is a conscience associated with the alternatives presented to someone in charge in the heat of the moment. Or in the middle of a blizzard. 

But I didn't come here today to discuss professional football. I will have an offseason for that. Instead I present Coach Payton's response to making a decision that did not work out well to that of the Trumpreich's various and sundry misfires over the first year of their second term at the controls of this big machine we call democracy. 

Shall we begin with the "twenty-four hours" needed to end the war between Russia and Ukraine? I don't get the impression that our Dear Leader is losing any sleep over that hyperbolic promise. Much in the same way that things in Gaza continue to deteriorate. Add to that the millions of barrels of oil that he stole from Venezuela after kidnapping their "president," or the continuing flurry of threats directed at various established world leaders who were under the mistaken impression that they were dealing with a rational human being. Spoiler alert: They were wrong on both counts. 

Then there is the domestic situation. Eggs continue to cost just a little more than they did the week before. The promised "concepts of a plan" to bring health care to Americans continues to hold little or no metaphorical water. 

And people are being murdered in the streets of our country by federal agents. The supreme irony being that this program of "enforcement" is intended to weed out the "worst of the worst." Yet another ugly reminder of looking for trouble and finding it in the mirror. His own "justice" department has driven past the deadlines set forth by law that he signed to ensure the release of all the Epstein Files. By more than a month. And no particular sense of urgency to get those accounts of sexual trafficking by our Dear Leader out in public view. 

For now we have to be content with imagining just how awful the contents of those files must be to keep stacking up invasions of other sovereign nations and murdering his own people in the streets. The worst part of all of this is that there is no offseason to reflect. Just another day in these "united" states. 

Feelings

 From the relative safety of my perch here on the West Coast, I wondered how poorly someone could handle the vicious snowstorm that descended on the opposite side of the country. A million people were without power as cold ground the Southeast United States. 

And the clown with a golf club in Florida says, “Record Cold Wave expected to hit 40 States. Rarely seen anything like it before. Could the Environmental Insurrectionists please explain — WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???”

Sorry about the excessive punctuation and all caps, but that's the way it comes out of the tiny brain that tore down the East Wing of the White House. He can hang out and wait for the snow to melt without ever bothering to imagine that climate change is what is bringing all the severe weather to that side of the country. It's science that confounds the convicted felon who seems to also be unable to distinguish right from wrong. 

It also highlights one of the key features of human understanding that is completely absent in the dark place we refer to as the "president's" brain: Empathy. Who cares if millions will suffer and possibly die because of severe weather? This doesn't affect his golf score. This is also on display when he insists that the people pouring out into the streets in spite of the subzero temperatures are paid protesters. He simply cannot comprehend that other human beings care for other human beings beyond the cash on the line. Could it be that watching Americans being kidnapped, beaten and murdered is enough to bring us out to the point of rising up against the powers that be. 

Whatever happened to checks and balances? 

Whatever happened to due process? 

Whatever happened to free speech? 

Whatever happened to being a nation of immigrants? 

Whatever happened to The United States Constitution? 

Environmental Insurrectionists? How about the plain old insurrectionists thumbing their noses at the American people right now?