Computers are not revolutionary, smart phones are revolutionary. Said by me, with apologies to Che Guevara who said “Medicine is not revolutionary, sanitation is revolutionary.

I was listening to NPR (in the car while running errands, I think). Two people – a guy and a gal, as my dad used to say – were talking about Social Media and the use of algorithms to drive traffic and how they are changing. The woman said something along the line of, “All of sudden, I’m getting tweets made by some rando guy with only three followers.” The use of some rando guy as a descriptor on NPR took me back, and I am still thinking about it.

I love that our language is still changing so rapidly, that it is so pliable, so malleable, and so alive. I wonder if they still have it – and I’m not going to look it up – but the French used to have an Office of Official French or something like that. I remember it was installed when the French were still coming to grips with English becoming the global language and words like le weekend were starting to contaminate their language. The French establishment feared that the French language would fade in importance on the world stage, joining other languages like Tagalog, K’iche’, or North Frisian, drifting into insignificance.

While I don’t think that will happen soon, France’s power and influence is waning and will probably continue to wane and making an official way to speak French will not help. Nobody thinks English is insignificant because it lifts words like patio, loot, powwow, or cookie, from other languages. Like sharks and Love, culture and its language has to keep moving forward to survive. Something, I’m glad to say, English is still doing.

Several days ago, Michele was talking to me about a couple of young people she is working with on a project. They had been working with several tools that allowed them to more easily collaborate. It occurred to me that they grew up with smart phones and the constant connection to everything that smartphones provide. They are on their phones with their friends or associates – or social media – all the time time and that means they are connected all the time.

I’m starting to hear the expression late-stage capitalism increasingly; now I realize it’s gone rogue and is showing up everywhere. Late-stage capitalism implies a couple of things. Capitalism, like everything else, has cycles and it will die out. Maybe capitalism was great, but it doesn’t work now. The phrase almost always says that capitalism is at the core of the inequality rattling our society right now. But I’m not so sure. I think the problem is not Capitalism, per se, but too much individualism and not enough concern for the commonweal. In many ways, kids being on their phones all the time is a reaction to that individualism and the isolation that individualism promotes. They are not as isolated as their forebearers, they are part of a new, growing collective.

Lastly, without trying to figure it out – which is fairly easy – follow this link to a restaurant and guess what country it is in. I was surprised. https://lucky.ua/en/#0s

At the last minute, over the Easter Weekend, Michele and I drove down to Bakersfield, over to Mojave, and then up to Lone Pine, and finally, to Stove Pipe Wells in Death Valley. We were looking for wild flowers as much as anything else, but we were really trying to get out of the cold.

More later, but Happy Belated Easter for now.

Propaganda: noun 1.information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.”he was charged with distributing enemy propaganda” Google’s English dictionary, provided by Oxford Languages.

One way to look at propaganda is that the propagandist is projecting what he/she/it thinks the propagandee wants to hear. But we may want to hear something else; it’s only their projection. By telling us what they think we value, they are telling us what they value.

In Putin’s case, it’s hard to think of anything, but Putin wants to be a Russian Czar. A Czar who is above the fray, encased in opulence. As an aside, the video obviously comes from Moscow, but the music may have been added later. However, a couple of people in the comments section said that the music was in the Russian original. End aside.

Zelensky, on the other hand, is humble in the metaphorical trenches with the heroes. As an aside, I have never seen a President or any leader of Zelensky’s stature in a room with so many armed people. Every man and woman who came up to be given a medal had an assault rifle casually hanging from their shoulder. End aside.

8:38 p.m. Seven Oscars for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — let the backlash begin! Just kidding. No matter the film, sweeps are always a mixed bag — a bit hard on the live audience (so many films left behind), a bit boring for the television audience (so many speeches by the same people), but it’s always amazing when a movie that is so beloved by the audience finds that echoed at the Oscars. Mary McNamara in the Los Angles Times  

“The world is opening up to the fact genius does not stem from individuals like us, standing on stage. Genius emerges from the collective. We are all products of our context.” Daniel Kwan, I think, although it is possible that it was Daniel Scheinert, one of the Daniels – as they call themselves – during their acceptance speech of the Best Director Oscar for ,

We got hit with another only-once-in-a-hundred-years- storm several days ago; it was one week to the day after the last once-in-a-hundred-years- storm. This time the rain gauge registered four inches of rain over about three days. Until then, I was planning on writing about the Academy Awards, but, both times, our power was knocked out (and the second time, we had no water). Usually, our power outages are in the summer when the days are long, the nights short and warm, and the Diablo winds are blowing from the Sierras to the Pacific. This time, it was very wet and freezing (OK, 44°may is not freezing for everybody, but it is freezing for us, although inside the house, it only got down to the mid 50°s). I don’t remember this ever happening before, but Michele reminds me that about 30 years ago, we were growing? babysitting? collecting? Killifish and we had to heat water on the stove to keep their tanks warm. She doesn’t remember, but the indications point to a winter blackout.

Whether this happened in the winter before or not, we were miserable in the cold dark. At one point, over working on a puzzle by camping light, one of us said, “how could this be more miserable?” The other answered something like, “Well, if we were in Kyiv, the windows could be blown out with it snowing outside.” “And no fireplace or gas stove…” “…and Russians randomly shooting rockets at us.” Trying to put together a puzzle in dim light may not be optimal, but it is almost infinitely more manageable than what some people, my age or older, are going through right now in Ukraine.

We had no TV, but we had the Academy Awards to think about, and I love the Academy Awards even when it is a bit boring. This year, it did help that the only horse I had in the game was Everything Everywhere All At Once, and, this year’s Academy Awards were mostly about Everything Everywhere All At Once.  I have no idea if it was the best movie released last year, but it was the best movie I saw and Michele and I saw several good movies (we even saw Top Gun on the big screen).

Except for Tár and Elvis, both of which we want to see and hope to see soon, we saw all the Best Picture nominees. The Fabelmans, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Top Gun: Maverick were all good movies, but none of them seemed to me to be what I would call Award Movies. Still, they were typical Award Movies back when The Academy used to only like big-budget movies made by prominent directors with big stars. That’s changed, however, this year, Everything Everywhere All At Once won -duh! – last year, the winner was CODA, and before that, Nomadland, and before that, Parasite.

The last two movies nominated for Best Picture did fit the new paradigm, Women Talking, which I thought was excellent, and The Banshees of Inisherin. We saw The Banshees of Inisherin primarily because it was Irish and Michele has been on an Irish kick recently by way of preparation for going to Ireland this summer. Banshees starts charmingly and we – I, at least – sort of expected a homier version of In Bruges but it isn’t. Banshees is more of a parable of the Irish Civil War which we can often hear in the background. Watching the movie, the sad and senseless actions by the characters seemed to only escalate the conflict, so I guess it is an effective parable for war but it was not my favorite movie by far.

The week before the Academy Awards, we watched Everything Everywhere All At Once again and loved it. In a way, it is a throwback to big Hollywood movies like Titanic and Gladiator, but it is also intimate and, in the end, very moving. Michelle Yeoh, as expected, was terrific in the lead, but Jamie Lee Curtis and Ke Huy Quan were also great. If you haven’t seen it, check it out.