1. We’re approaching the part of the year where I start shifting from thinking how I can make this year better to thinking how I can make next year better.

2. Last week’s movie night, courtesy of one of my co-workers, was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. To say “they don’t make them like this anymore” has become so commonplace that I’m starting to think it goes without saying, but this film in particular combines several elements that have all-but vanished from modern cinema: a simple, almost bare-bones story founded on core mythic principles (in this case, the civilizing role of women in relation to men); allusions to classical history and myth (the story is based on the Sabine Women, who are explicitly mentioned. In song, no less); extended dance numbers that involve finding spectacularly talented people and just pointing the camera at them, sometimes for minutes on end; and it’s entertaining as all-get-out.

3. It also couldn’t be made today because the sequence of the brothers abducting their brides, Sabine-Women style would be screamed off the screen before it even hit theaters Though the film is very clear that what they’re doing is wrong and they’re made to pay for it before the girls warm up to them. Which, again, is part of the point: men having to learn gentleness and selflessness through the experience of love and forming a family.

Sadly, the fact that they don’t make them like this anymore means we don’t get wholesome, civilizing lessons like that anymore.

4. I also pulled up some clips of El Cid, starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, to show to my students. The film has its pluses and minuses, but is overall very good, and Heston is ideal to play a medieval knight. I showed scenes from it specifically to illustrate the kind of men these would have been: they may have been ‘the rich’ of their day, but these were not pampered or soft men by any stretch. These were warrior-magistrates who had to be at once at home on the battlefield, far-sighted managers at home, and understand the dynamics of power and diplomacy in dealing with their fellows (not to mention that most were also farmers a lot of the time, since they had to manage their land). Heston is a comparatively rare actor who legitimately comes across like a man who could do all that at once. There’s a reason his take on Moses is still definitive; the man feels like someone people would want to follow.

5. I love this clip, by the way; how El Cid goes from forcibly compelling the king to call death upon himself if he has lied to kneeling and kissing his hand in reverence in the space of an instant. That’s pretty much Medieval kingship in a nutshell.

6. I watched part of the State of the Union. Anyone who wants to write AI code for imitating the Gauche Gracchus’s speeches would have a pretty easy task; just have an if-than loop that switches between “really incredible” and “never been anything like it” every few sentences.

(I also realized that, given his ‘pseudo-absolute monarch’ leadership style, another suitable nickname for Trump would be ‘T-Rex’)

7. On the other side, given that the Democrats somehow thought auction-paddles with slogans would come across as an impressive statement of defiance, or that they would not be memed and mocked into oblivion, or the fact that they failed to realize they could have made Orange Julius Caesar look ridiculous just by standing up and clapping at any point during his speech, I have to assume their strategists are all DEI hires.