There is a restaurant a few miles from my house that is built in a literal pit. You can barely see the marquee sign from the road level, and, if you aren't already on the lookout for it, the building might as well be invisible. The property was built many years ago for a now-defunct family dining concept, and in the years since, one business after another has occupied the property for a brief couple of years, gone out of business, and been replaced by another business.

Driving past the building this weekend (and seeing only two cars in the parking lot), I caught myself wondering how much longer it could possibly stay open before it closes and the pattern repeats itself. Then I realized that the current business, a steakhouse, has been in place since 2020. That's six years, actually about average for the lifespan for a restaurant and even more impressive considering the Pandemic and malingering economic concerns.

Should I pretend that I didn't notice its longevity? When it does inevitably close, as all restaurants eventually must, should I still roll my eyes and quip that I was correct that their location doomed them to failure? Do I need to be right so badly that I'll ignore reality to salve my wounded ego? What would that sort of denial accomplish?

The restaurant is a success whether I want to admit it or not.

Let that be a lesson to myself: you need to recognize when you've allowed your biases to corrupt your thinking, because otherwise, in addition to the loneliness of living in your own alternate reality, you also just might stave to death.

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One week ago today, while stuck in typical Saturday afternoon traffic on the Connector in Atlanta, I listened to the 1998 pop song "The Way" by Fastball. That has proven to be a terrible, terrible mistake. No matter what I've tried, I have not been able to get that song out of my head.

On Sunday, I enjoyed it; it's got a good beat, and you can dance to it. By Monday, it was annoying. Tuesday, I was starting to think I had a real problem. Wednesday, I watched the music video about a half dozen times in a row in an attempt to burn it out, and for the rest of the evening, I thought I had it licked. But the very first thing I did on Thursday as I pulled myself out of bed was start reciting the lyrics again. In the car Friday, every time I let my attention wander, I caught myself humming it.

Is this madness? Could the sequence of notes in the song have triggered something in my brain, like a sonic virus? Can you sing someone into insanity? They say music is like mathematics, right? Do I suddenly have A Beautiful Mind? What kind of doctor do you see for ear worms? Damn you, Fastball!

Because I refuse to suffer alone, I'm embedding it here:

youtu.be/X5jlTlUTWfQ

You will listen. Whether you know it yet or not, there is only The Way.

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Yeah, I read the reviews, which is a significant part of why I waited so long to see it. Now that I have, let's talk about

27/2597. Babylon (2022)

I adore writer/director Damien Chazelle's La La Land. I like old movies. In fact, I probably prefer them. I'm familiar enough with their work to recognize the pastiches of Clara Bow and John Gilbert and Ana May Wong. I've read Hollywood Babylon and Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. This movie is aimed squarely at people like me. And I didn't care for it.

The narrative, scattered as it is, is at its core the same story as The Artist or, even more explicitly, Singing in the Rain. But it actually has more in common with Citizen Kane, by which I mean Chazelle has reworked the legends of sordid Hollywood stories into a stylish (and mean-spirited) fictional history morality play. And like the epics of yesteryear, it's also too long, containing too many shots that seem to be in there just because someone didn't want to admit to wasting the money they spent filming them. Here you really feel the length because of how uncomfortable it is to spend time with any of the scenarios or characters. Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are the stars, but the minority characters are more engaging, if only because the racist system pushes them out before it can grind them down.

To be clear, Babylon is impressively well made (even if by its nature it can't help but feel derivative), but its core problem is that it was made for an audience of one. It feels as if Chazelle is exploring for himself whether the Hollywood Magic is a Faustian bargain, and his ultimate answer, appropriate for someone the film medium has already made a star, is an unsatisfying "yes and no." If anything, the real lesson here is that just as you can't make a war film without glorifying war, you can't criticize Old Hollywood by repeating all its worst excesses.

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13/2583. Kitty Foyle (1940)
Ginger Rogers is Kitty Foyle, a muddle-headed girl who falls for the wrong man and continues doubling-down on her bad decision. Ginger is very good even if her character is irritating. (The Wrong Man is played by Dennis Morgan, who I never much care for, so you'll excuse me if I was against him from the beginning.)

14/2584. The Big Combo (1955)
A film noir police procedural is right up my alley. This doesn't disappoint, especially with Lee Van Cleef playing a rat-like heavy in a homosexual-coded relationship with a fellow mobster. Good stuff.

15/2585. The Harder They Fall (2021)
I'm not sure why they unnecessarily borrowed the names of a bunch of real-life Black Wild West characters for what otherwise feels like a Van Peebles Blacksploitation Western. But whatever. It's still a lot of fun (at least until some third act shenanigans aiming for misguided pathos).

16/2586. Greased Lightning (1977)
First off, let me say that there's a briefish Coca-Cola drinking scene in the middle of this very loosely adapted biopic staring Richard Pryor and Beau Bridges, but I did not get a screenshot at the time. I'll try to correct that next time I see it's coming on TCM, which seems to run it about once a year. It sticks pretty hard to the traditional sports movie cliches, so if you like that sort of thing, you'll probably like this.

17/2587. A Letter to Three Wives (1949)
Maybe because Kirk Douglas is in this stylish tale of love and betrayal, it kept reminding me of The Bad and the Beautiful. I liked it, especially Linda Darnell (who was the love interest in Zero Hour!; if you know, you know).

More to come.

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For the last few years, we've had a Jeopardy! page-a-day calendar. This year, Mom opted for a History Channel This Day in History calendar because she got a great price on it... in February. I'm starting to think the price markdown was for more than just the expiration date.

This Day in History for March 5, 1770, was the Boston Massacre. Maybe you've heard of it? It's pretty famous. According to the calendar, British Private Hugh Montgomery "slipped and fell, discharging his musket into the taunting crowd." Though this makes it sound like an accident, eyewitness testimony at the trial indicated that Montgomery shot only after recovering his dropped rifle and regaining his feet. That, plus the fact that he more or less confessed, is surely why Montgomery was one of only two of the eight soldiers found guilty of manslaughter.¹

The calendar also explicitly states that "John Adams and Josiah Quincy Jr.² defended the colonists." Both of those men would like to assure you that they defended the prosecuted soldiers. In point of fact, there were three trials related to the massacre, the first two against soldiers (Rex vs. Preston and Rex v. Wemms et al.) and the third, much lesser known, against colonists (Rex vs. Manwaring et al). There were no defense attorneys in the third trial, so the calendar is flatly wrong.

(Technically, I suppose, so long as we're being pedantic, we should say that there were four trials related to the Boston Massacre, as according to the 1771 summary of the trial published in The Trial of W. Wemms, J. Hartegan, W. McCauley, H. White, M. Killroy, W. Warren, J. Carrol, and H. Montgomery, Soldiers in His Majesty's 29th Regiment of Foot, for the Murder of C. Attucks, S. Gray, H. Maverick, J. Caldwell, and P. Carr, the sole witness for the prosecution at the third trial, Charles Bourgat, was found not credible and was later brought up on charges of perjury. I don't fault the calendar for omitting this fact. But it is a fun bit of Americana legal trivia.)

Now that I've caught This Day In History making these mistakes, I'm doubting the accuracy of everything it tells me. Sure, these may have been honest editorial grammatical errors, but in this day and age where Google's terrible search AI is giving me factually incorrect answers to everything,³ I think it's more important than ever that the people who claim to be authorities in their fields know what they're talking about. Why should I learn facts about history from people who don't know the facts of history? If you can't trust a discount page-a-day calendar, who can you trust?

¹ Montgomery's punishment was having the letter M "for murder" branded on his thumb,⁴ which is very The Scarlet Letter indeed.⁵

² These days, it seems historians usually refer to the father of 15th Harvard University President Josiah Quincy III as Josiah Quincy II. However, when the son published a posthumous biography cobbled together from father's "journals and letters" in 1825, he titled the book Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Junior, of Massachusetts Bay: 1744-1775. And who is the History Channel to argue with a former president of Harvard?

³ DO NOT READ GOOGLE AI RESULTS FOR ANYTHING. Seriously, people, I cannot tell you how unhelpful Google AI responses were in researching this topic, a famous incident in American History that has been extensively researched and documented. The responses were so astonishingly wrong, you're just as likely to get correct responses to queries if you asked the teenager at the window of your local Burger King drive-thru. Which, I suppose, does mean that in all the ways that matter, Google AI successfully passes the Turing Test.

⁴ According to Wikipedia, the "benefit of clergy" defense used to save Montgomery from the gallows was abolished in the United Kingdom 1827 and from United States federal law in 1790, though the possibility exists that it may still be recognized in some state courts. I recommend consulting a lawyer before trying it yourself.

⁵ Though it takes place in the 1640s, The Scarlet Letter was published March 16, 1850. I've already peeked ahead; March 16, the calendar tells me, marks the day in 2006 that the "First Lady of Drag Racing," Shirley "Cha Cha" Muldowney, was inducted into the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame, which at least fits the National Women's History Month theme. Weirdly, despite explicitly mentioning four other Halls of Fame she belongs to, Muldowney's Wikipedia page does not mention this induction, though the Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing which sponsors the IDRHoF does. Why does the calendar endorse this one in particular? I guess that's just another one of history's mysteries.

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