To start with, Will at View From the Foothills has tagged Lars and me with a meme. Lars did this last week. The rules are as follows:

1. Link to the person that tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

I have to ask how one can tag random people. What would make my picks random? Nevermind, here’re my six:

1. I have worn contacts in the past. I wear glasses now, and I’ve been thinking about wearing contacts again.
2. I dislike mowing my yard, but I do enjoy planting flowers and vegetables. I may buying a tiller for our garden, because I don’t think I can borrow one. I probably won’t buy a tiller, but I’ve been thinking about it.
3. I took my little family to Disney World last September, but we didn’t go in. We tried to do several free activities available outside the parks. We failed to interest the children much, but the ice cream parlor and candy store were hits.
4. I like to try new foods, but I’m not keen on meeting new people.
5. I don’t share the usual beefs about the clichés people use when they pray. In fact, it irritates me a bit to hear people gripe about other people’s prayer habits. I understand the need for teaching us to pray better, personally and publicly, but let’s smear some more grace on this problem and avoid whining about it. Just trying to be a blessing.
6. I enjoyed watching Double Indemnity last night. That Edward G. Robinson is fantastic. I have to see him in another movie.

Now, I’ll post this entry and tag a few people later today. Feel free to volunteer.

It was a long, low-energy weekend for me. I’m still trying to fully shake loose from the flu, so I mostly sat (or lay) around, getting nothing useful done. I did vacuum the house on Saturday, because my brother Moloch and his wife were coming Sunday evening (as shall be related anon).

On Sunday, as has been my habit, I watched a couple old mystery movies from my renter’s collection. The most interesting was The Stranger, starring Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young.

It’s the story of an escaped Nazi war criminal (played by Welles) who is tracked down, in the New England town where he is living under a false identity, by Robinson, who plays a U.N. war crimes investigator.

I found it an interesting study in Hollywood culture. The movie was released in 1946, when World War II was newly over. The moviemakers were still in full Allied propaganda mode. There’s no question of good and evil here. Nazis are evil, period (which makes the portrayal of the war criminal, even by a genius like Welles, pretty one-dimensional). It occurred to me as I watched it that evil had not, in fact, ended in the world on VE Day. Even as the movie was being filmed, Stalin in Russia was systematically murdering millions of people for whom he had no use. And doubtless many of the people who worked on the movie were huge fans of Stalin. But, you know—Stalin murdered people for progressive and internationalist purposes. So that was different.

Another hangover from World War II was that the film was unabashed, non-ironic, all but Norman Rockwellian in its American boosterism. The town of Harper, Connecticut, where most of the action occurs, is a wonderful, edenic place. Everyone’s friendly. Everyone’s honest. There appear to be no bigots (even a stranger with a plainly foreign accent, coming to town, elicits almost no special notice).

At the center of the community is a church, and—get this—the church is portrayed as a positive institution. Although Orson Welles’ villain attempts to mess with the church (or rather with its antique clock, which he’s repairing) the building itself rejects him, as it were, and finally visits on him his final doom.

If this film were re-made today, I’m confident the church would be made into a haven for fascists, and somebody would point out at the end that the people of the town, in their mob anger over having a Nazi among them, aren’t really all that different from the Nazis themselves.

That evening Moloch and Mrs. Moloch showed up. They spent the night here, so we could get up at 4:00 a.m. and I could drive them to the airport. Even as I write, they are winging their way to China, to visit The Youngest Niece, who’s teaching English there.

I envy them the travel.

I don’t envy them the twenty-hour plane ride.

Can the day be far away when everybody finally agrees that the only sensible way to fly, from the point of view of security (as well as comfort and personal dignity), is to just put us all to sleep and stack us in containers? The after-effects of the sedative can’t be much worse than jet lag.

I have to pass on this metaphor alert from the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web:

“We hit the ground running. We’re at the bottom of the food chain but . . . we have really made a dent up here.”–Sen. Jim Webb (D., Va.) on his time in the Senate so far, quoted in the Washington Post, March 21

The pope baptizes a prominent Italian Muslim.

Italy’s most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service.

No doubt this will lead to violence somewhere, as does anything that offends “the religion of peace.” But that’s no reason not to celebrate a soul coming home.