I awoke with asymmetrical sinus congestion and a migraine. While I have made it to the day-job there will be no essay posted today.

As I may not be feeling my best in the morning, here is a preloaded video from last week’s Saturday Night Live.

Consider it a Friday Funny.

I awoke with a migraine this morning so here, have a picture of a tiger.

I took a day off from work yesterday staying home and giving my knees a chance to recover. While I was home I watched the French Language movie Elle. It is a controversial movie from Paul Verhoeven about a business-woman who is attacked and raped in her home by a masked assailant. The title character is cold, hard and keep peoples at a distance, making it hard for the audience to sympathize with her situation. I’ll admit that I lost most of my connection to her when at one point in the movie she has a car accident on a wooded road. She calls her best friend, voicemail; she calls her best friends husband with whom she is having an affair more voicemail; then she calls her rapist. (By this point in the film is has discovered his identity.) Not calling emergency services and calling her attacker simply broke the film for me.

We appear to be getting a bit of order in the White House. I do not think it will last. The saying goes that a leopard can’t change his spots and Trump thrives on chaos, it will return. Where the Russian thing I have no idea but once a special counsel has been empowered, as it has, there’s no telling where you will end up. I think this is far from over.

It’s really humid here in San Diego. It’s like mother nature is prepping me for the vacation to Florida later this month. When I climbed out of my air-conditioned car at work this morning I truly regretted not getting the anti-fog coating for my eye glasses, that said I am still looking forward to the trip.

This is a word that is so often abused; intolerable. The strict definition is something which can not be tolerated, but all too often it is used as something is that terrible but still endured. However occasionally something comes along that I think truly encompasses that meaning of intolerable.

Clearly the citizens of the 13 colonies felt that further political union with the British Empire had become intolerable and severed those ties.

The citizens of the Tsar found the war, the starvation, and the corruption intolerable and removed the tyrant, only to replace him with another.

It will remain t be see if the modern GOP can foresee that throwing 24 million or more people off their insurance is a situation that will be intolerable.

The political atmosphere has changed. A majority of American now consider having healthcare, not merely the ability to buy it, but actual healthcare, for all citizens a good thing. The old status quo is no more. Pay note that the current leader of the GOP is making promise after promise, empty ones to be sure but all of his are, to make everyone’s insurance better, to make no cuts of Medicare or Medicaid while his conspirators do the exact opposite. Should the Senate follow the House, and that is something well within the possibility because elected Republicans fear not the general electorate but only the primary voters, then 2018 election could be one in which millions of people have found that they, or someone they know, has been tossed onto the hard rocks of the uninsured by the GOP eternal quest for tax cuts.

Can anyone look on that and honestly think it will remain business as usual for the election?

In my view there are only three core issues that the modern GOP truly care about and will move heaven and earth to achieve; Tax cutting, Abortion, and Gun Rights. Healthcare has never been one of their priorities but now after eight years of beating the war drums over the hated ‘Obamacare’ and lying about the law they have painted themselves into a corner, caught between a changing general electorate and the pitchfork armed primary voters. If any of those three core issues matter to you they I think you should work very hard to stop this madness, because if 24 million or more are tossed off to fend for themselves in this environment the devastation to the GOP and to your issues will be massive.

The situation will be truly intolerable and those that created it will not be tolerated.

I was up until midnight fighting with my desktop at home and it still is not working properly.

Too tired, too cranky to blog.

See everyone tomorrow.

So that time mof the year is at hand. When two squads of big burly men with fight for the skin of a dead pip.

To all who enjoy that sport, I wish you tghe best most exciting game possible.

Me?

I’m off to Universal Studios, Hollywood to explore their new attractions and work out plotting issues.

Because I had to stay home Tuesday to over the installation of our fiber optic ISP I has the rare chance to go see a late film at the theaters on Monday night. Hidden Figures is a historical drama about the early days of the space program when we strapped men to rockets and launched them into space with the figure worked out with pencil and paper.

Figures that it turns out were worked by a group talented, dedicated, and unsung of African-American women. Told through the point of view of three women, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson, the movie is a rocket ride of emotions.

Set in the early 1960s the film I think strikes exactly the right tone in capturing the racial injustice of the era. There aren’t characters hurling crude and insulting insults using verboten words, but rather the film captured the daily indignities the are principally unquestioned by most of the white characters. The grace, intelligence, and perseverance shown by the three women are levels of maturity I doubt I will ever achieve.

As a writer there are plenty of things that can be learned from the screenplay. One lesson I think is that simple human dignity is a high enough stake for your drama. It would have been easy to further fictionalize the story by maker some of the secondary character more militant, a militancy that would not be without cause, but the truth is this story had all the drama it needs.

One of the principal emotions that swept through me as I watched was anger. Of course it’s is no great thing to be anger at the racism and injustice, at the betrayal of the nation’s ideals, but I also became enraged over the waste then and today.

A nation is only as great as its people. To waste human potential is to throw away a nation’s most valuable resource. The human capital it what drives innovation, growth, and invention. Not simply in the areas of science and technology, but in the arts, in ethics, in government. To make our nation stronger, richer, wiser, and better we need people who can do that. I weep thinking about the geniuses we shall never utilize because a foolish shortsightedness.

Is Hidden Figures Oscar™ bait? After last year’s diversity controversy I don’t doubt that in part this film was approved and produced to answer those charges, and it has all the hallmarks of a movie made for the award season, but that takes nothing away from the power of the story, the talent of the filmmkaers, the emotional heft of the performances, and the importance of the themes.

THere’s been a slow down in my blogging this week. I ha d acouple of medical appointments, nothing serious but time consuming, that ate up some time and then yesterday my laptop decided to die.

I’m taking it in today, fingers crosses I can get away with just a new HD or such…