Bits and Pieces 4/26/2018

I got the cover art for The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, and it looks terrific. Fits in perfectly with the previous books. I’ll likely do a cover reveal before long.

Now that business is out of the way, let’s talk about some other stuff.

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After watching a series of mediocre-to-terrible movies, culminating in the execrable ordeal titled Get Out, I got concerned that I may have just grown tired of movies in general. If tastes change, why can’t interests?

Pleasantly, I found that this is not the case after watching and enjoying Baby Driver. This was a fun movie. A bit long in the last third, but I couldn’t help but like all of it. It straddled the line between comedy and drama, not taking itself too seriously, and did what movies are supposed to do first and foremost: entertain. Not sure why John Bernthal got top billing; he was in the movie for five minutes at most. John Hamm rose above his Mad Men role to become a great guy to watch. Ansel Elgort was likable and vulnerable without being weak. Lily James had an ethereal, vintage beauty and charm that she used like a bludgeon, making you want to watch her and only her. Everything fit together well, everything was neatly done. (I even liked Kevin Spacey. Is that bad?) Overall, this is a rare film that lives up to the hype.

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The story of Alfie Evans is absolutely brutal, and it underscores four important points:

There is a pernicious and disturbing tendency for far too many of us to place vitally important decisions wholly in the hands of “experts.” Experts have become the new royalty, now that social media has proven that the previous royalty, politicians, are as buffoonish and ineffectual as we always suspected them to be. Medical experts in the UK are starving a baby boy to death. If that’s the value of expertise, I want none of it.
This would not happen in the United States of America. Other citizens of other countries are subjects. We are a free people, born and bred. Rarely has such a distinction been so sharp.
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights precisely because of situations like Alfie Evans. Gun-grabbers love to talk about gun-free Utopias like those found in Europe, but they don’t seem to understand the vast cultural differences between the U.S. and, say, the United Kingdom.
History has ended for Europe, and its death throes are terrible to watch.

I pray God Alfie Evans can leave to find treatment. I pray for his family.

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The entire Starbucks situation is so bizarre, so ludicrous, that I can’t help but think we’re all being experimented upon by aliens studying human behavior in the 21st century. What happened is that two black men walked into a Starbucks and wanted to use the bathroom. The store manager told them they had to buy something before they could use the bathroom. They refused to buy anything. They stayed inside the establishment as non-paying non-customers. The store manager asked them to leave if they weren’t going to buy anything. They refused to leave. The store manager then asked the police to remove them. The police came and asked the non-paying non-customers to leave. They refused to leave. The police then handcuffed them and escorted them from the premises. The race card was thrown, successfully. Starbucks will now close down over 8,000 stores for an afternoon to teach their apparently racist employees how not to be racist anymore.

I have a few questions about this situation that I’d like cleared up:

Who refuses to leave a private business when asked to by a representative of that business?
Why couldn’t one of them buy a $2.00 cup of coffee and defuse the entire situation? At that point they’d have gone from non-paying non-customers to paying customers. They could’ve then used the bathroom and sat there as long as they’d have liked.
Who refuses to comply with a police officer’s instructions?
Why is this a company-wide Starbucks problem instead of an individual problem? It’s like shutting down an entire town for a day because someone’s car was broken into. It makes no sense.
Is there anything better than washing down a hate-chicken sandwich with a hot cup of racist joe ?

Starbucks’ self-immolation is very much a red-on-red situation, and it’s fun to watch. And yet…kind of pathetic, also.