Today, I got my first old geezer’s perk, as a result of using my cane. I stopped for a couple things at my local bag-it-yourself grocery store. Without asking (I certainly wouldn’t have asked) the checkout lady bagged my few items for me. I can only assume it was a gesture of courtesy for the infirm.

I learned about cane technique last night, when I talked to my brother Moloch on the phone. He used to be a nurse once upon a time, and he told me there’s a right way to do this thing. I, needless to say, was doing it wrong.

Most people, he said, naturally assume you hold the cane in the hand on the same side as the leg you’re favoring. Bad left leg–use left hand. This is what I was doing. This is wrong.

Instead, you use the opposite hand. This technique has two benefits. One, it provides a broader base of support for your body weight, making a fall less likely. Two, it allows you to swing your arms in the natural fashion.

I tried it. He’s right.

I hate it when that happens.

One of my very favorite authors, Stephen Hunter, wrote this fascinating and (it seems to me) extremely insightful article on the movie-generated myth of Bonnie and Clyde in an article for Commentary back in 2009. Why The Culture Alliance linked to it today I have no idea, but it’s worth reading.

But taken together they make a point. That point is that the legendary Penn movie that invented the New Bonnie and Clyde was such a ideological crock that it deserves placement in that list of other leftist crocks mistaken by gullible critics and film lovers as somehow great: Beatty’s own Reds, the appalling JFK, and the toxic oeuvre of Michael Moore and his tribe of screwball clones in the documentary field, as well as the recent spate of angry, misguided Iraq war films.

My latest stop on the Virtual Book Tour is this interview at The Writer’s Life. Another interview less truncated than some I’ve done. I appreciate it.