Journal of the Plague Year 4-10-2020

Not much going on here in our safe Minneapolis enclave. Our decluttering efforts resulted in a trip to the equivalent of the dump—the city’s south transfer station where you can bring items that the weekly trash pickup service does not handle. City residents get six free visits a year; your tax dollars are at work! 

We took a good but ancient futon mattress and metal frame, among other things. The mattress had a relatively new cover that was festooned with cat hair, but otherwise quite nice. We ditched the cover along with the mattress. Getting it off would have been a big job; I remember how we struggled to get it on. And now I feel quite guilty, as someone, somewhere, could have used it after giving it a little TLC. It’s a disposable society, and we boomers are contributing to it in major ways as we declutter and downsize. 

In other news, like most of our fellow Americans, we enjoy many hours of screen time. Among the shows we have watched since completing the available episodes of Better Call Saul are:

• ·       How to Fix a Drug Scandal, about two chemists whose mishandling of seized drugs resulted in the overturning of more than 40,000 drug convictions in Massachusetts

• ·       Long Shot, about a young man wrongly accused of murdering a 16-year-old girl and how a defense lawyer used footage from a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode filmed at a Dodgers game and cell phone records to exonerate him

• ·       Emma, the 1996 version, about a young woman who meddles in the lives of her friends but finally finds true love, as do the friends

• ·       Diamonds Are Forever, by far the worst Sean Connery James Bond film (and I have seen them all)

• ·       Fantasia, a Disney version of Young Peoples Guide to the Orchestra (kind of)

• ·       Aladdin, with Robin Williams as the genie. It’s quite wonderful

• ·       Dumbo, my favorite Disney film, with the Salvador Dali animation and the politically incorrect crows

There are others, but we dropped them after one or two episodes. I am currently working my way through Unorthodox, which tells the story of a young woman who runs away from her Brooklyn ultra-Orthodox husband and family to Berlin for reasons that I haven’t figured out yet. I wanted to watch it while riding the exercise bike, but I can’t read the subtitles from that angle. Much of the dialog is in Yiddish, German and Russian, none of which I understand. It’s slow going.

I am now subscribed to various media “What to Watch…” features that identify suitable viewing fodder. What are you watching?