1. I’m pretty much fully moved in to the new and improved apartment. There are the usual issues, like trying to get the internet working (I don’t think I’ve ever moved anywhere without having internet issues), but those are slowly starting to be smoothed out.

2. Had a bad depression day this week: worst one I’ve had in a while. One of those days where nothing really seriously bad happened, but there seems to be an endless series of petty annoyances and mistakes. By the end of it my insides felt like a wrung-out towel.

3. Whenever I hear someone – of either side of the political spectrum – saying “I will never bow to a king! I would die first!” my reaction is a contemptuous laugh.

In the first place, you’re lying; if you pay income taxes, you’d bow to a king if the law told you to. In the second, that sentiment is what you’ve been taught by your particular society to say in order to signal that you are the free and independent citizen your society promised to make you. In other words, you just did the current equivalent of bowing to the king.

4. This week I viewed the classic noir B-film The Big Combo, a classic crime film about a gung-ho detective’s efforts to take down a powerful criminal organization, while being in love with the head crook’s girl. It’s a stand-out of the genre, especially the B-movie branch of it, featuring Cornell Wilde leading a cast that included his own then-wife, Jean Wallace, as the leading lady (with considerable subtext of her own real-life mental issues) and the sizzling Richard Conte as the criminal mastermind Mr. Brown, not to mention the likes of b-movie mainstay John Hoyt and a young Lee Van Cleef rounding out the cast. Naturally, it’s full of richly literary dialogue (“You think it’s money, but it’s not. It’s personality. You haven’t got it; you’re a cop”) and brilliantly staged scenes, like when Wilde’s detective is subjected to torture via hearing aide.

5. Richard Conte’s performance, by the way, is really a textbook illustration of how to craft an effective villain. Again, this is a pretty low-budget film, so the scope of what they can show is limited (also, this being made in the 1940s by people who actually know how to write, Mr. Brown isn’t going to be randomly murdering people just so we ‘get’ that he’s a bad guy). Partly it’s by showing the reaction of the people around him: the very opening scene is of his girlfriend trying unsuccessfully to make a run for it, followed by a suicide attempt. That gives us all the suggestion we need of what life with this guy is like.

Then Mr. Brown’s own introduction is him laying out his philosophy of life to a young boxer who had just lost a fight. He finishes by slapping the fighter (Conte is not a physically large specimen, by the way) and firing him when he doesn’t hit him back. That not only tells us how he thinks (that power is more personality than resources), but illustrates why he thinks that by showing that he has the force of character to hit a professional fighter and have the guy too intimidated to hit back.

Right there is the foundation for an intimidating and hateful bad guy, despite his unassuming appearance. You don’t need to have him losing his temper or killing random people; it’s much more effective to just show him exercising control over himself and those around him.

6. Of course, the most famous element of the film is, justly, the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography of John Alton, full of ink-black shadows shrouded in mist and cut by start rays of light. The relatively cheap sets (including an ‘airport’ that amounts to three walls and a spotlight) are transformed into A-plus level material simply by the addition of the brilliant lighting. The film would be worth seeing for the cinematography alone, even if it weren’t for the razor-sharp script and performances.

7. An interesting link on owning a tank from Caroline Furlong. That made me think; the reason a tank is perfectly legal in all states is because a tank is a pretty impractical thing for a private individual to own. If someone is going to have it, he is going to have to be wealthy enough to likely be a law-abiding citizen, it requires so much maintenance that unless he has a personal clan to work with, it’s never going to be anything other than a very big toy.

Practicality always trumps legality.