Lewis Hamilton won the Formula One Drivers’ Championship title a couple of weeks ago. It is his fifth Championship, a feat that is matched only by the great Juan Manuel Fangio in the 1950s and Michael Schumacher in the late 1990s and early oughts. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve tried to write a post about it but I’ve been stalled for reasons that I’m having trouble explaining, so before it becomes old news, here is a video of Lewis on The Daily Show. Enjoy.
We are inundated in bad news but the world really is getting better. Some things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving:
The percentage of people in the world living in extreme poverty has dropped from 85% in 1800 to about 9% today;
in 1800, the average life expectancy of a human was 31 years, today it is 72 years;
in 1979, there were 636 oil spills from tanker ships, in 2016, there were 3;
in 1900, only 3% of the world was protected in national parks and other reserves, today, 15% is protected;
worldwide, 90% of grammar school age girls are in school;
and the list goes on and on.
(The above facts are from Factfullness; Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling. Check it out.)
If you don’t get into the mind of the person you are talking to, you can say whatever you want. It won’t be heard. Norbert Haug, former Vice President of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport
When Trump started running against “an invasion” of Latin American immigrants, I thought he was wrong, thinking he should be running on the economy (which is, after all, booming). It turns out that I was wrong and I should have realized it when The New York Times ran a major article on white women Trump supporters saying that Trump is protecting them. At some point during last Tuesday night, Mark Shields commented that the only times the party in power didn’t lose seats in the election after the presidential election was Kennedy in 1962 and Bush in 2002. In both cases, we were, seemingly, on the cusp of war, the Bay of Pigs with Kennedy and Iraq with Bush. Trump campaigned on immigration being an invasion that the Democrats would allow and only he could, or would, protect us from, he turned himself into a sort of war-president – on the backs of helpless and hapless immigrants, I want to add – like Kennedy or Bush. Anybody who thinks Trump is stupid is fooling themselves.
The Democrats won the House and that is a big deal. I think. A lot of progressives, running as progressives, won but a lot didn’t. I had a big emotional – and small financial – investment in Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, and Stacey Abrams, and all three lost. I hadn’t expected that – I guess because I was too emotionally attached to be realistic – thinking that the three could expand the electorate.
I hope the new house doesn’t get bogged down in the Russian collusion bullshit. Yeah, the Russians helped Trump – or tried to – but, so what. Don’t get me wrong, I do think that Trump is a crook and a con-man but I don’t think the help he received rises to the level of an indictable crime and spending a lot of time on that will end up being as self-destructive as Newt Gingrich trying to impeach Clinton. Although it would be fun to see the new House investigate the Georgia governor’s election.
Where the Democrats made the biggest gains seem to be the suburbs and I think that is a reflection of suburbanites being increasingly more identified with their cities. it is where the action is and where people go there on big nights out.
First Man and Free Solo are strangely alike: both are about how far two very similar men have driven themselves beyond anything even resembling normalcy, and how that drive affects other people, especially their significant others. They are also very different movies; First Man is a Hollywood spectacular about one of the most famous men in the world, Neil Armstrong, the first human being to step on the moon, and Free Solo is a small budget portrait of an almost unknown climber, Alex Honnold, the only man to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope. First Man was good – but not as good as I wanted it to be given that it was about one of my favorite subjects, the Space Race and going to the moon the first time, a trip in which Neil Armstrong’s sticks it with the gutsiest landing of all time – however, I liked Free Solo better.
First Man stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong with Clair Foy as his wife and is directed by the great Damien Chazelle, of LaLa Land fame. What the movie does well is to show what a big risk going to the moon was. First Man is shot – primarily – from Armstrong’s point of view and, because of that, counter-intuitively, we don’t get a good sense of Armstrong as a person or the Space Program as history. Free Solo is shot by and directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. They are friends of Honnold – and openly worry if even making the movie increases the danger – and the movie is shot from their point of view. To my of thinking, that point of view presents both Alex Honnold as a person and puts his feat in context better than First Man did. Are the feats comparable, I think so.
Check out their trailers, or, better yet, check out both movies.
Last week, Michele and I celebrated our 25th Anniversary on the East Side of the Sierras. We had a stellar anniversary dinner at the Lakefront Restaurant – elevation 8600 feet – and two days of anniversary wandering around. We are soul mates but it has not always been an easy 25 years – for either one of us – but being together has always outweighed being apart. And for a couple of soulmates that love the desert, the mountains, and each other, this was a delightful place to be. 
