Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We have a family get together on Saturday and I was looking for a movie for the grandkids in case things get too quiet. By luck I had recorded this monster themed comedy movie back in October. Now of course I’ve seen this movie many times. One of my local tv stations back in New York City during my childhood would cycle through the Abbott and Costello movies on Sundays. Annoyingly, the movie always coincided with church which really made me wonder about God’s priorities and sense of humor.
So, I put it on tonight. And just as I remembered, it’s the perfect movie for boys between the ages of seven and eleven. All of the jokes are corny as hell and the monsters are about as tame as rabbits. But Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolfman still look the part. And Lou Costello sells his constant hysterical fear with his signature screams of panic and running around in circles.
The plot is laughably bad. Dracula and the Frankenstein monster have been shipped to America disguised as exhibits for a “House of Horror.” Bud and Lou work for the company that is supposed to deliver them. The Wolfman is in America to foil the plan and Lou’s girlfriend Sandra is a mad scientist who is working with Dracula to re-energize the weakened monster. In addition, she has selected Lou’s brain to be transplanted into the monster’s body to give it a more controllable personality for Dracula’s plans. Of course, Lou doesn’t know about these plans.
Add in a beautiful insurance claims investigator named Joan who is searching for the missing monster exhibits and a non-evil medical doctor who is assisting Sandra and you have a showdown at the island castle laboratory with Sandra, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and Lou in the operating room when Larry Talbot (the Wolfman), Bud Abbott and the Doctor break in and stop the surgery. Eventually the Wolfman grabs Dracula in his bat form and the two of them fall from the castle heights into the ocean. The doctor rescues Bud and Lou from the monster by setting on fire the dock that the monster is trapped on. In the last scene Bud and Lou are in a rowboat and are rejoicing that Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolfman are dead and they don’t have to be scared anymore. Suddenly the Invisible Man chimes in that he wants to join the fun and the boys jump overboard.
I didn’t give a spoiler alert because the plot really doesn’t matter at all. It’s just an excuse for Universal Studios to cross-pollinate their monster movie franchise with their most successful comedy team. They would follow this up with several of the other monster characters (the Mummy, the Invisible Man and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) meeting the “boys” but I would say this first effort was the most successful and most enjoyable. It works as an Abbott and Costello comedy and as an homage to the Universal horror movies of the 1930s and 1940s.
I’m very hopeful that the younger grandkids will enjoy this ancient comedy. I’ll report back with an update.
God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment — but many other things ceased as well! Woman was God’s second mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We got five or six inches of really wet heavy snow last night so of course the power goes out and also the cable, internet and phone lines. The generator faithfully kicked in so Camera Girl and the dogs were warm and cozy while the male contingent was tasked with clearing the snow. Of course, the snow blower is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome so the snow had to be cleared the old-fashioned way.
To add insult to injury the electrical failure is less than five hundred feet from my driveway and so there are the trucks and electrical crew and even some fire fighters standing around looking puzzled. I thought about going and talking to them but reconsidered. I’m guessing some of my neighbors already have and I figure the more times you bother those guys the slower they’ll fix it.
It’s about eighteen hours in and I’m sort of resigned to a world without connectivity. The only phone is an old flip phone that we keep around for emergencies. I charged it up and Camera Girl called the kids to let them know we’re alive. I called work and said I was declaring a snow day. When the driveway was clear I went to a wi-fi location and checked to make sure OCF was up today and that has been the extent of our electronic communications for the day.
No news sites, no X, no nothing. All things considered, it’s not so bad. I guess if the utility reliability continues to decay out here in the hinterlands of Dunwich, I’ll have to ask Elon Musk to provide us with our own dedicated Starlink satellite, a small nuclear power plant and maybe a spaceport. Dunwich is located at the nexus of the Terran/Great Old Ones dimensional rift so a small dedicated interdimensional port makes a lot of sense. If he’s not too busy with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) role-playing game maybe he could get working on that.
Well, whatever the New England states have done to the power grid it doesn’t bode well for the future. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a generator with a cut-in switch that can handle the full electrical load of a home is now standard equipment around here. You can be without power for a week in the winter at any time. So natural gas or a large propane tank is what you need. Getting enough gasoline might not be a safe bet if everyone is without power and out searching for fuel.
Well, anyway, while I sit here isolated from Al Gore’s world wide web and information superhighway, I think about how the Democrats want to cut away the last links of reliable energy we still have. The blue states are going full speed ahead to criminalize the internal combustion engine and anything else that uses fossil fuels. I guess that Trump’s term will be a decision point for some parts of the country. Without his support, all of the promised charging stations and other green energy rigamarole won’t be there to allow for the fossil-fuel-free-wonderland they envisioned. It may turn out that their deadlines are not be feasible. And if they insist on them, there may be some serious blowback from the voters. It might become quite interesting for Gavin Newsom. Instead of the bullet-train future he promised he might be leaving on a different rail, one that includes tar and feathers.
When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When I was a lad back in my high school days, Brother Columbkille would lecture us on the Age of Enlightenment and the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution as separate phenomena. But ultimately, they were the various manifestations of Europe getting its feet under itself again after the various crises of the “Dark Ages.”
Probably one of the biggest disruptions was the chaos that resulted from the Rise of Islam in the south and east and the expansion of the Scandinavian and Slavic peoples in the north. The wars and disruptions from all this jostling around kept stability from taking hold everywhere from the British Isles to the Iberian Peninsula to the Balkans for almost six hundred years.
But once the Spaniards, English and French finally got their domestic problems ironed out they pretty quickly got with the program and began modernizing their commercial and military methods and before you knew it, they were even modernizing their governments. Well, some of them did. The Spaniards lagged behind, the French went mad and burned their government to the ground and the English found a relatively balanced approach that experimented with revolution while maintaining the trappings of tradition.
But here we are, six hundred years into Renaissance civilization and something is changing. European civilization has overwhelmed every other culture, scientifically, militarily and economically. It created a global network that exported the humanist “creed” to every corner of the planet. But in its latest iteration humanism has become nihilistic, anti-human and specifically anti-European.
This can be seen in the latest wave of self-hating anti-white propaganda that has swept across Europe and North America. And in the effort to flood the countries that had a majority of European population with third world refugees and declaring that this was a necessary and desirable outcome, regardless of the chaos and hardship this inflicted on the citizens of these places. Apparently, these people needed to be punished for being prosperous and law-abiding.
It can be claimed that Donald Trump is a reaction to this policy that the Left has instituted. He is the clearest symbol of a resistance to this desire by the Left to destroy the people who build the modern world. He seems to have been the only one in the elite class to speak the truth about what those in power in both the Democrat and Republican parties were intent on accomplishing. And because of that they did everything they could, up to and including assassination to stop him.
Hopefully they’ve failed and Trump will get a chance to reverse as many of the nihilistic policies as he can. Here’s hoping he takes a chain saw to the FBI, CIA, IRS, the Departments of State, Justice, Education and Defense and altogether shuts down things like NPR.
But even if he does all that he wants to do, there is something genuinely wrong with our culture. The people who teach in our schools and colleges, run our corporations, and preach in our churches look at the world in a nihilistic way. They think there is no difference between a family where a man and a woman raise their biological children and an arrangement where two men adopt someone else’s children and try to convince them that all of that is normal. They believe that people whose skin color happens to be white but whose ancestors only arrived in this country a lifetime after slavery are somehow responsible for any disparity in economic condition between them and the descendants of slaves, one hundred and sixty years after emancipation. Social Justice has become a religion and the teachers in our schools are the evangelists. That’s got to stop.
What seems clear to me is that the most important change going forward is one of education. The stranglehold that the teachers’ union has over public education must be broken and alternative schools must be given equal funding to that provided to the public schools to break the spell that public education has cast on the young people of this country. If Trump can repurpose the Education Department to provide real school choice he will have performed a great service to the nation’s children.
I see the beginnings of this with states providing vouchers for school choice. And I see that Texas and Florida both have some higher education choices that avoid DEI and other anti-white discriminatory programs that abound in most colleges.
It’s hard to know if things are turning around yet. I think Trump’s term will be the test. If he fails, I think we will see resistance at the local and state level become the only solution and that may involve open defiance of the federal government. But I’m just speculating because a failure of Trump to turn around the Left’s agenda would be a terrible blow to conservatives everywhere. It would herald a dark time for us.