Mr. Spock Fails to Understand Trump

The Alternative Fact(or); or, The Alternative (F)actor
Anyway, this is a real line from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Alternative Factor" (1967):
SPOCK  (to Trump): " I fail to comprehend your indignation, sir. I have simply made the logical deduction that you are a liar."

(by me, but feel free to take it away) 
Spock has met Trump before.

Original screencap at Trekcore.com

"Never has there been a presidential candidate who stands in such complete opposition to the ideals of the 'Star Trek' universe as Donald Trump…"  
--"Trek Against Trump" letter signed by 100 members of the Star Trek cast and crew, including Zoe Saldana (new Uhura), George Takei (Sulu prime), and Eugene Roddenberry (son of creator Gene and actor Majel).

Arts & Crafts Resistance Group: Fire Trump on the Ides of March

collage by me

My efforts to start an art group at the church I was going to last fall never came to anything, and I'm not going to that church anymore, anyway. After my initial distrust, I'd come to like the pastor, Jeff, and he was a good speaker, but every Sunday service just felt like another religious TED Talk by Jeff. So... nah.

But now bink has started an Arts & Crafts Resistance group, out of her neighborhood political resistance group. 
Yay!
The first meeting will include making postcards for the #TheIdesofTrump--a campaign to mail postcards to the White House on March 15, informing the president, "You're Fired!"
Pink postcards, or whatever you like. I wouldn't waste mail art on the White House, but it'll be fun to see them posted on social media (FB, Twitter, Instagram, with the hashtag). And the Ides group is planning more postcard protests too. My sort of thing.

I just discovered the Resistance Calendar --heartening to see some of the many actions going on every day. 

Space Children

What I did this weekend. More collages by me.

"Ready for Space Travel"

collage by me
Octopus or squid jar design from the Knossos Palace in Crete (ca. 1500 BC) [a few others like it]

Saturday Morning (chat)

Good morning! After a week of crazily warm, T-shirt weather (the nice side of scary climate change), it's normal February weather again: a cold & windy 21ºF this morning.

I'd met with J & D almost one-year-to-the-day ago to talk about my idea for a fandom project before I went up to Duluth with Marz before my 55th birthday. And that week, the publisher said yes, they were interested in seeing a proposal on that topic.

So, for the entire past year, I've felt I should be researching or writing, even when I wasn't (for long stretches of time). And even when I wasn't, I was musing on fandom.

Now I have nothing I should be doing until the editor sends my ms back in a week. In fact, I've had to taper off fandom stuff because I kept wanting to add more to the ms., while the challenge had been getting the thing in slightly under word-count, a triumph! when I had material for 10x as much.

There're lots of things I could do--get a hair cut? start looking for a job!
But it occurred to me it's Saturday, and I don't usually treat the weekend like a weekend, since it's all the same when you freelance.
(That's not entirely true--other people's energy is different on weekends--I can tell it's Saturday by my neighbors.)
Anyway, I thought I'd officially grant myself a weekend off. Whatever that means. 

I'm feeling quite happy sitting here in the sun at the coffee shop, but I felt weird all this past week after coming back from WI. Laura said I sounded like the Peggy Lee song, "Is That All There Is?"
Yeah, kinda. 
I hadn't expected anything to change, I swear I hadn't, but when it didn't, I felt like,... really? That's it? 
It was freeing, as I'd written (unfettered), but in that existential free-fall way... always a little stomach-dropping.
I'm back on the ground now. It's OK.

Uh, yeah, so, what now? What do people do on Saturdays?
I googled it and found a pretty neat list,
"102 Things to Do on a Money-Free Weekend".

Write your will!
Blog! (heh)
Edit Wikipedia! 

That reminds me--I did a little editing on US Senator Amy Klobuchar's Wikipedia entry this past week--specifically about her calling for an independent commission to be formed along the lines of the 9/11 Commission to investigate Trump & Co's ties to Russia.
It was a really good thing to do: 
I know so little about how government works, I had to puzzle out a lot even to add one sentence, which was fun. (How did the 9/11 Commission work?)

I even went to the library to get Klobuchar's autobiography, The Senator Next Door. I read half of it--very nice, well written--before I decided it went much like all the other political autobiographies I've tried to read:

"I was born, and then I started to work, work, work. I don't like to sleep! In kindergarten I organized the neighborhood kids to stack sandbags for flood relief; in second grade, I converted the school newspaper to entirely recycled paper; and every year I trick-or-treated for money to donate to UNICEF..." 

[Klobuchar actually did that last one.]
You know?
Admirable! And, oh, unworthy me to say so, boring.
I so appreciate these people––Leslie Knope!––but please don't make me pay close attention to the hardware.

I don't know why I have to keep proving to myself I am not cut out for politics. All that administrative, systems work just... zzzzzzz

(Oh, yeah, I know why I had to check that out again. 
These times. It's a sign of political break-down when people who aren't suited to politics start to think they should be, right?
Good representative government should work so people who are bad at it don't have to do it, and the people who are good at it can be effective.)

So, I'm sticking with adapting the stuff I like to do anyway to slightly more political application. Besides editing Wikipedia, which is genuinely useful for spreading information, I will keep making thank-you cards, though when I read Klobuchar's book, I realized she wouldn't think much of the water-colored Rebel Alliance card I sent her. 
I hope some aide enjoyed it. Anyway, it keeps me from feeling hysterical and isolated from the important political work going on.

Oh, hey--I did get a sweet e-mail from an aide to the state attorney general! (Also a Wikipedia edit of mine. I didn't even know what the AG does.) It was––fair enough––mostly a form letter, but she did address me by name, and the first sentence did refer to my note. So, that was cheering.
__________________

P.S. A really neat thing I learned reading about Amy Klobuchar: her dad Jim was a pioneer in long-distance biking:
"Born to ride: Jim Klobuchar and the birth of the Minnesota bike tour"

In 2013, Sen. Amy Klobachar and her father, Jim, re-enacted a popular photo taken in 1981 before she and her father rode from the Twin Cities to the Grand Tetons.

Despair Management

Discussing with J& D this morning how we position ourselves politically these days, I talked about how important Despair Management is to me---limiting my exposure to overwhelming amounts of horribleness and upping my intake of smart silliness.
So, in the interest of Keeping One's Spirits Up, I offer a little political nose-thumbing:

I. Mock a Nazi
You've seen the original 1967 Producers, right?  
If not, the joke here is, Zero Mostel & Gene Wilder's characters are trying to produce a Broadway show so terrible it closes on the first night, thereby allowing them to write it off as a loss and keep all the (excessive) money they raised to put it on.
They choose the most tasteless show they can dig up, one that features this demented Busby Berkeley–style number, "Springtime for Hitler":


"Deutschland is happy and gay,
We're marching to a faster pace,
Look out, here comes the Master Race!"

Today I found an amazing, real historical fanvid-style remix, made  during World War II:
"Lambeth Walk - Nazi Style" (1941), by Charles A. Ridley of the British Ministry of Information:
 


Posted on youTube's POLITICAL REMIX channel:

Ridley re-edited footage from the German propaganda film Triumph of the Will to make it appear Hitler and Nazi soldiers were marching and dancing to "The Lambeth Walk". He used the song because members of the Nazi party had called it "Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping". The short was distributed uncredited to newsreel companies in the US and UK. It is regarded as one of the first political remix videos.

II. "It's all resistance now." 

Ha! Political Remix included one of my favorite Star Trek slash vids, "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps," by Killa, as part of their history of political remix before youTube--Killa made it in 2005, the same year youTube launched, so it just made the cut-off: 


 
I had to think a minute why it was political. I mean, that wasn't fandom's main motivation in editing together clips of Kirk & Spock giving each other come-hither looks, but sexuality is inherently political. I've just gotten so used to LGBTQ+ being part of pop culture, even if on the edges, I've started to take it the slightest bit for granted. 
But equality seems awfully shaky all of a sudden...

Until January 20, 2017, I'd been writing about fandom with the young Tumblr users I got to know last summer in mind. Tumblrites are not representative of all fandom (hardly!), but I did write as if young fans' (and my) general comfort with fluid identity and its concern with social justice were normal.

When I was working on the ms before the presidential inauguration, that all felt normal--the inevitable evolution of a democracy founded on the ideal of liberty and justice for all.
One (1) minute after inauguration, however, I felt like I was writing a radical political document.
I was talking to bink about this, and she said, "It's all resistance now."

Pig Popp for Pisces

My birthday is still ten days away and I got another excellent present: a Pig Popper! from bink, like the one Mr. Spock gave Captain Kirk (in my story of the Search for Spock's Present).
It makes a most satisfying air thwock noise, so I recorded it.

Hm. Its peasing plosive sounds more like a hard thwack there. Oh well.
In case the video doesn't play on your device, here's a photo:

Lighting Up Pisces

My first birthday present this year, from Marz. (According to her, all my toys are Pisces.)
I love this mouse---the light is too bright to see its expression here, but its smile is guileless. I'm rereading David Copperfield--the mouse is like one of the sturdy, likable characters in that--Peggotty? Mr. Dick? (But nothing so treacly as Oliver Twist! I hate Oliver Twist.)

7-Up, Again

I made an invitation to my collage & card-making party for my approaching 7-Up birthday.
7 x 8 this time.

_________________________________________
I'd put together a little photo-review of my life in 7-year increments, back when I turned 7 x 7 in 2010:
"Fresca, 7-Up"

(Time to update it, but not today.)

a free man, unfettered and alive

My plan to act like Frederick Douglass (as a man who got himself free) worked. My father and I exchanged pleasant good-byes this past weekend, with no rancor or resentment.

I spent a pleasant afternoon with him. (I was staying at an airbnb private apartment.) He's clearly at peace. He's had a good and long life, he said. 

Last month when he was staying in the hospital, he told me, a chaplain, an older black woman, had come by, though he'd put down "none" for religion.  She'd stayed just a few minutes. 

She came back and said, "I know you." 
He was the professor who'd led the Upward Bound program she'd attended as a teenager in the summer of 1966. She told him it had meant a lot to her that he'd told her she could do what she wanted. She brought him a knitted prayer shawl. 
I like knowing that.

Before I left, I thanked my father for giving me life, and feeding and clothing me. I reached in my pocket to give him a "special" quarter--something my mother always used to do with me. 
I didn't have one, but I had one of those new Jefferson nickels. That was more fitting, since the Constitution is like my father's Bible. He put it on his bedside table. I asked him if he needed anything from me, and he said no.
He asked me nothing, as usual.

The doctors say he might live many months yet. Dying of liver cancer is not supposed to be too bad.  With hospice he can die at home.
I'm glad and grateful that two people who adore him want to and will lovingly attend his final months. A dear friend will take his two cats, which was maybe his biggest worry about dying.
 
I walked away in the late afternoon with the image of him standing in the sun outside his house, smiling and waving at me. I replace all our previous endings with this.
I don't think I'll go back again.
I felt like Joni Mitchell's free man.
Unfettered.

It's Good

I turned in my ms yesterday.
I finally read the whole thing in one sitting, and it's really good. 
Whew.

I'm stunned. It was my scaffolding all year, and now it's done. But I'm pleased too.

And now I'm off to catch the megabus to go see my father for a few days. (Pray for us, or whatever.) It's the right thing to do.

Like the children  downloading NASA climate data at Berkeley last weekend. To save it in case the government wants to disappear it.
(Thanks, bink, for the link.)

This is my favorite photo.
Partly because they brought snacks. Look; you can see an orange on the floor next to a backpack--right in the center of the photo.

Red Bear Confab

Rice Pudding, Red Bear, and 'Robat

 confer on Important Bear Things

of which we know naught

 

What I'm Reading + 3 Movies

Can't take time to write much now--ms due this coming Weds-- just the right amount of pressure to make this final stage fun! 

Out of the pile below, I'd most highly recommend Troll: A Love Story, by Johanna Sinisalo, translated from Finnish. 
It's starts like a normal fellow-finds-wild-pet story, like Rascal or Born Free, except it's a gay man who falls in love (? sort of) with a young troll,  and it gets progressively more unsettling, and yet never loses that "this is the normal world" feel.

Also "Nobody Asked for a Toaster Critic" < links to the opening essay in cultural critic Ian Bogost's How to Talk About Videogames.
He starts off saying videogames are like toasters--just mechanical things we use--and then he considers how they are also soooo much more. He says a bit about toaster design and how toasting is the chemical process of amino acids interacting with sugars. "I am among my tribe," I thought as I read. So nice. 
QUOTE:

"How to talk about videogames? Like a critic, not a reviewer, for one, but also: like a toaster critic, not just a film critic. To do game criticism is to take this common-born subject as toaster and as savior, as milk and as wine, as idiocy and as culture."

3 Movies: Monsieur Lazhar is so lovely, it could serve as a reason not to destroy humankind.

Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains is a documentary about Carter's book tour in 2006 for his book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.
It was fascinating & inspiring––also downright shocking to consider the difference in US presidents and their opinions on walls. Recommended.

Blazing Saddles made me laugh, but I got bored after 20 minutes.

A Little Comic Relief: "Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed"

 I am working! 
I'm writing about this remix vid as case of legal Fair Use of copyrighted material. Forbes covered it  in 2013: "Copyright In The Twilight Zone: The Strange Case Of 'Buffy Versus Edward'"

I've never seen either Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the Twilight movies, but that doesn't matter. This hilarious remix shows Edward's "romantic" behavior through Buffy's clear eyes.
He tells her she's his own brand of drug. 
She replies, "Oh my god, are you twelve?"

"The Trickster Is Not Playing"

"The fool, fundamentally, belongs to the world of orthodoxy, 
his comic play acting as a lubricant of the status quo.

The trickster, however, is not playing."

--"Transformations of the Trickster," by Helen Lock*

Three people, two of them friends, have told me they think the call to "punch nazis" is not bad, or even good. That surprised me, so I wanted to get to the bottom of why the signs in my neighborhood to "stay calm & punch nazis" bother me so much. (The video going around of the act itself is a different thing.)

You know? What am I seeing that alarms me?

The Trickster character is a chaotic force that upends normalcy.
It can be a force for evil (the Joker in Batman),
neutral  (Captain Mal Reynolds in Firefly),

or good--Jesus, for instance, literally turning the tables on the established order.

"Christ Overturning the Money Changers' Tables"by Stanley Spencer

This used to bother me because Jesus is not nice. But Tricksters are not nice. 

The Trickster energy in itself is amoral: it doesn't care. And you can't control it.

That's why I'm so alarmed to see it called up as a political strategy. 

I believe politics ideally should be rational, Apollonian, not chaotic, Dionysian. That this usually is not, in fact, the case isn't a counter-argument.

And the signs in my neighborhood were put up by a local political group, I've discovered. 

Here's a thing: the group's very lack of creative originality (that tired old "stay calm" meme, the cliché of nazis) makes me think they are unwitting tools of chaos. Of course propaganda is not trying to be creative, it's not, you know, trying to convey complicated realities. It's stupid, on purpose, and it appeals to our stupid selves.

I get its appeal, but I object to it.

I'm like: Guys, no! DON'T release the Kraken!

Chaos is slippery like mercury---it doesn't stay in the channels you make for it. (The god Mercury is a Trickster.)

From Carl Jung:

"The trickster figure is represented in normal man by counter-tendencies in the unconscious that appear whenever a man feels himself at the mercy of apparently malicious accidents; this character component is the shadow."

That is exactly what I'm seeing in the posters: 

they are calling for chaos [chaotic violence] in reaction to the maliciousness we feel ourselves subjected to.

The poster-makers think they are calling up chaos for the good.

But chaos doesn't work that way. As Heath Ledger's Joker says:

"You know the thing about chaos? It's fair."

_________________________ *Helen Lock, (author of "Transformations of the Trickster") is an associate professor at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, where she teaches and writes on American, African American, and ethnic literature.

Make a Heart with Laura Borealis

I don't know that many readers live in town, but just in case, I can heartily recommend my friend Laura Borealis as a teacher and artist of polymer clay. She's teaching a couple Valentine-themed classes this coming week, so I thought I'd pass along the info.
 

Hearts with Mokume Gane

TEXTILE CENTER OF MINNESOTA: HEARTS, HEARTS, HEARTS IN POLYMER CLAY Textile Center, 3000 University Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414 Wednesday, February 8, 2017    6:00-9:00PM Learn the polymer clay technique of mokume kane – for which you make many thin layers of different colored clays and then slice through them to reveal intricate designs. Make three different kinds of hearts using cookie cutters as templates: a puffy heart pendant, flat heart disks, and heart-shaped beads or buttons. Baking will be done in class. Materials fee $10, payable to the instructor. $52 – Textile Center Members Receive 10% Off Registration REGISTER NOW

And at Courageous HeArts: heARTS!Hearts,Hearts
2235 E. 38th St., Mpls 55407
Sunday, Feb. 12 | 1-4pm
Adult Price: Regular $50 | Member $42.50 | Scholarship $35
All materials provided.
REGISTER NOW

Frederick Douglass: "I have since heard of his death."

 "I have since heard of his death."

No, that's not President Faux discovering that Douglass is in fact, dead. [From the New Yorker: "Trump Says He Heard Frederick Douglass Was Alive from Betsy DeVos"]

It's Frederick Douglass writing about the deaths of a man and his son who had held him in slavery, writing with what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls an odd, human gratitude (!) and lack of vengeance.

It's part of a long quote, so I'll just link to Coates's article in the Atlantic (from 2011--nothing to do with present idiocy): 
"I Have Since Heard of His Death'".

Douglass was so Buddhist-y there! He was able to drop his attachment to justified resentment--even to his right to hate, which seems to me one of the hardest things to do.

Desmond Tutu says that's what it means to forgive:
it means to walk away from your perfectly justified right to revenge. It means to freely choose to walk away, to say, I choose not to demand an eye for an eye. 

It's complicated of course.

“To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. It is also a process that does not exclude hatred and anger. These emotions are all part of being human. You should never hate yourself for hating others who do terrible things: the depth of your love is shown by the extent of your anger.”
-- Desmond Tutu, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Of course, it made all the difference that Frederick Douglass had gotten himself free.
He was not a slave in his mind, nor in body.

He had gotten himself free.


HOW DO I DO THAT?

Facing nothing like the intentional cruelty Douglass endured, I have a really hard time. But this article gave me courage to go visit my father in a couple weeks. I'd already volunteered to go, and then I felt all quavery. I needed the reminder that I go as a free woman. Remembering that, I am not afraid. 
I am not twisting on the hook of resentment.

Related and helpful, this article, "How We Get Hooked and How We Get Unhooked" by American Buddhist Pema Chodron:

"The Tibetan word for this [hooked feeling] is shenpa. It is usually translated “attachment,” but a more descriptive translation might be “hooked.” When shenpa hooks us, we’re likely to get stuck. We could call shenpa “that sticky feeling.”
It’s an everyday experience. Even a spot on your new sweater can take you there.
At the subtlest level, we feel a tightening, a tensing, a sense of closing down. Then we feel a sense of withdrawing, not wanting to be where we are. That’s the hooked quality.

That tight feeling has the power to hook us into self-denigration, blame, anger, jealousy and other emotions which lead to words and actions that end up poisoning us."

II. Violence Works

Along these lines, I've been disturbed lately by calls to "punch Nazis in the face." (Posters with this instruction are up on street poles a couple blocks from my place.)
I get it!
But I can't get behind it.

I'm not opposed to violence because I consider myself above it.
Ha! No. Just the opposite. It looks really tempting.
I recognize the impulse in myself (even the desire--maybe that's what really worries me) to lash out and to demonize people I fear––and fear for good reason.

But has the time for this really come? Have we tried everything else yet?

Sometimes violence becomes necessary--I'm with Dietrich Bonhoeffer there. And with Douglass, who writes that his acts of defiance rendered his most brutal master suddenly powerless. 

Mr. Covey, the callous “nigger-breaker,” “tremble[s] like a leaf,” when Douglass unexpectedly fights back. Douglass finds “assurance” in this display of fear and continues to do battle with Mr. Covey though he has no hope of ultimately winning.
Frederick Douglass defines a particularly moment of violence as “the turning point in [his] career as a slave.” --from "Breaking the Cycle: Violence, Control & Resistance in American Slave Narratives"

If I had to punch someone to save someone else or myself, I would. I'd probably love it, in a way.

I recently read Townie by Andre Dubus III--a memoir in large part about how he started lifting weights as a teenager to make himself strong enough to physically fight back against his childhood tormentors.

"Kids roamed the neighbourhood like dogs. The first week I was sitting in the sun on our steps, I made the mistake of watching them go by as they walked up the middle of the street, three or four boys with no shirts... the tallest one, his short hair so blond it looked white, said, 'What're you lookin' at, fuck face?'
'Nothing.'
There he was on the bottom step. He pushed me hard in the chest and kicked my shin.
'You want your face rearranged, faggot?'"

Getting violent worked.
Dubus catches how scarily, greatly fantastic it is to literally punch bullies in the face. It made me want to join a gym. (And then I remembered I belong to a gym.)

From a v. good review from the Guardian:
 "With a single blow, Dubus floored someone who had previously terrified him, knocking out two of his teeth.

"'You fuckin' nailed him,' a friend said admiringly."
I nodded and smiled, then I was laughing and I couldn't remember feeling this good about anything in my life ever before.

At some point, it became a lose-lose proposition. Dubus is lucky: he is able to become a writer instead.
But if violence is your only way?
(Moonlight is very much about this too, choosing violence when there is no love and it's your only way out.)

To choose violence before we have to, this is to choose to give up a freedom.

Don't we who want to resist the new administration have a whole lot of non-physically violent kinds of resistance we haven't even tried yet? Kinds of spiritual "violence" even? I mean, willed, chosen acts of exerting one's own power and freedom, even when other, stronger people deny it?

Have we really personally and collectively explored "the various forms of resistance that might render violent oppression ineffective" *?

I haven't.


______________________ 

I have so much editing to do. But I'm so glad I wrote this out--this whole thing about violence and reconciliation has really been nagging me, personally (because of my father's cancer) and politically. 

* "Representations of violence also allowed slave narratives to evaluate how violence destroyed both master and slave and to explore the various forms of resistance that might render violent oppression ineffective." --Breaking the Cycle 

Mr. Spock's Brain Hat

Star Trek's Science Officer Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) wears a brain hat in support of the upcoming (or, from his pov, historical) March for Science.

photomanip by me, screencap from the 1967 episode "Return of the Archons"from Trekcore.com.

And I made my Science March sign with a quote from "Space Seed":
Spock: "Insufficient facts always invite danger, Captain" (with a Dalek's imaginary reply on the back).

More Spock & Trump

Brain Hats... for Science!

I feel like I'm living inside what fanfiction calls an AU---an alternate universe. In fic, that's when the writer, say, sends the young Captain Kirk to school at Hogwarts with Harry Potter (or Harry to Starfleet).

In my (our) case, it's like I'm living in a world where Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.
EXCEPT IT REALLY HAPPENED.

I gotta say, I'm still reeling. It helps to see all the fun, creative ways others are trying to adjust to––and resist––this wack-o new reality.
The latest: brain hats! to wear to the March for Science on April 22, Earth Day. [NY Times article.]
This goes right into my HINAB file (humanity is not all bad).
 
There are many variations. Here's a knitted one by Alana Noritake, pattern on Ravelry:

Yay! The Science March is definitely on in my town. I don't knit, but I'm excited to paint a sign of Mr. Spock. [UPDATE: I painted it.]

More patterns from Studio Knit.
And a tutorial for brain hats with caulking--like you use to seal your tub. 
Printable brain hat templates.

Minnesota Sues Trump

I'm so proud of my state!
I was just wondering who to send my next thank-you cards to. Now I know: Attorney General Lori Swanson. < wikipedia

From today's Star-Tribune newspaper:

"Minnesota suing Trump administration over refugee order"

In a statement, Attorney General Lori Swanson called the executive order banning refugees and travelers from a list of predominantly Muslim nations "unconstitutional."

John Keller, executive director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, said,

“I don’t think the public understands the degree to which the legal community believes [Trump] has crossed constitutional line… Having someone like the attorney general, who I don’t think has done anything like this in her tenure, to weigh in should speak to the general public about the gravity of what was done to Minnesota residents.”

My ms is due in two weeks---it's written, but it's 2 to 3x too long, so there's LOTS of editing ahead of me, but I'm going to take a minute to add this to Swanson's Wikipedia page

Kamala Khan, Superhero

Kamala Khan became Marvel Comic's official new Ms. Marvel in 2013. 
She is an American-born, Muslim high-schooler, living at home with her parents who came from Pakistan.

March for Science: Earth Day, April 22

It's happening! I like this march because it's so... logical (even if it's crazy insane that such a thing should need to happen).

I don't know if we'll have one here––I would think so––I'm working on ideas for signs. 

Not really great for a march, but this one's a take-off on Galileo's eppur si muove:
it doesn't matter what the Powers That Be say--if it's moving or melting, it's moving or melting.

Moonlight

Ah, there. A movie that's not like a salad you consume because it's good for you, but like braised Belgian endive, bitter & serious, with a little melty sweetness.

Moonlight––its title comes from the play, "In moonlight black boys look blue"–– is about a black boy growing up gay in crime ridden Miami. Its tenderness is as hard to take as its brutality.
   
Representation of black lives matters, but it's not a message movie like Hidden Figures; you would want it no matter its nutritional content. As a film, it reminded me of Force Majeur (2014), by Swedish director Ruben Östlund who, like Moonlight's director Barry Jenkins, uses the medium to tell a massive story delicately.

The film's music is part of its complexity:
From "Every Nigger Is a Star" (1974!) to a cello piece I thought was Bach, but is by the contemporary composer who scored the film, Nicholas Britell.

The main character Chiron (pronounced Shyrone) is played by three actors: the boy Alex R. Hibbert, teenager Ashton Sanders, and as a grown man, Trevante Rhodes. Also, above, Mahershala Ali as Juan teaching Chiron to swim, and Jharrel Jerome as teenage Kevin (white T-shirt).

 Interview about scoring the movie with composer Britell here.
Soundtrack here. 

Moonlight trailer

The Perfect Tool

Lucinda (bink) made this political cartoon of Bannon & T. [NYT article: "President Bannon?"] Note T's tie.