A while ago (because, of course, this is a book blog) I did a post about contemporary movie actors being commonly unable to generate a recognizably human expression—due to the ubiquity of Botox use in the Hollywood community.

Yesterday, James Lileks at the Bleat did a review of the movie Wall-E. In it he rhapsodized about the wonderful expressiveness of the main character, a computer-generated cartoon robot.

So it seems to me we’ve come to this—we’re getting more recognizably human performances from animated actors than from actual people actors.

Signs of the times. Chesterton would have had something scintillating to say about it. Me, I just note it in my pedestrian manner, and stroll on.

Nathaniel Peters at First Things linked to an earlier First Things appreciation of P. G. Wodehouse by Joseph Bottum. Well worth reading.

A light went on over my head today (unfortunately it was an incandescent light, so the authorities forced me to switch it off).

I took a moment to look at a news page on the web, and checked the stock market, which as we all know has been weak lately. And I found myself thinking, “My 401-K has lost a lot of value.”

And then I realized that this was ridiculous. I haven’t lost a cent in my 401-K. My loss or gain will only be known when the day comes (a long time from now, I hope) when I take the money out of it.

Since that day is not yet with us, I’m actually in a cycle where the money that goes from my paycheck into my pension plan is able to buy more stock for the buck. I’m getting’ a bargain here. There are many reasons to be unhappy about the economy, but for me personally, that ain’t one of ’em.

This is not to minimize the pain the downturn is causing to many people. The thought of being laid off (it’s happened to me) gives me a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I’m just saying, there are times (rare, perhaps) when looking at the dark side doesn’t make a lot of rational sense. Continue reading In which I move from political to economic pronouncements →

I watched 3:10 to Yuma last week. Excellent. I didn’t know much about it, and I’m starting to think I prefer reading and watching things knowing very little of the story, which isn’t conducive to blogging about them. Anyway, I didn’t know going in (and was told early on) that the story dealt with what they later called the myth of the noble outlaw.

In a DVD documentary, the historians interviewed on film said the American Wild West was not as simple as some have explained it and that the myths far outweighed reality, but there were outlaws who robbed stagecoaches, banks, and railroads for reasons beyond criminal gain. And several famous men were rather civil about it.

For example, Black Bart robbed 28 stagecoaches at night, on foot, without a gun. He didn’t rob passengers, apparently, only the stagecoach company itself, and according to a man on the DVD, he carried a stick carved to look like a gun. At night, no one could tell it wasn’t a firearm and they could not follow him through the canyon in the dead of night because he knew the terrain far better than they did.

The movie didn’t have anything to do with Bart, but it was still good. What do you think of westerns in general? Actor Ben Foster, who played the right hand man to Russell Crowe’s character, said he thought the men in westerns were larger than life, like the men and gods in Greek myths. He said the Greeks had their myths about gods and godlike men, and Americans have their westerns with men who never give up their principles, shoot pistols out of other men’s hands, or draw and fire faster than sight. Do you think that’s a fair comparison?

“Author John Drake, a former biochemist and freelance TV producer, has spent years studying Treasure Island line by line, together with books and essays on 18th-century shipping and piracy,” reports Paul Bignell of the Independent. And that makes him think he can write a prequel. Make him walk the plank. (by way of Confessions)