Somehow I do not associate a photo of a man holding a knife to a woman’s throat with the words “comedy” and “fun.”

It may or may not be helpful for you both, but every year I celebrate Halloween with the usual dressing up/candy but mainly in the Irish tradition of honoring the beloved dead. I set an extra place at the table for those who have gone before, put up photos of my late ancestors, parents, and husbands, and often have a…

This not really a propos of anything except some recent musings while looking at a photography book titled “People of the Twenty-First Century”, but for some time I’ve wanted to pose this question to a general audience:

Some people working from home may be ustilizing their personal Apple computer. I have the capability of remotely connecting to my office PC, but I wouldn’t bother to do that just in order to have a Zoom meeting, whether it is work-related or not.

You are probably a distant cousin of mine.

I must be turning into a Star Wars geek, because I disagree that there was anything romantic about Mando’s previous relationship with Xi’an. It *might* have been perfunctorily sexual. I’m more curious about what sort of brutality he had committed in the old days, according to her. I don’t know what nefarious actions…

I have had a blast following The Popcorn Champs and catching up with the movies I had never seen before. (Only half a dozen so far. Yes, I’m old enough to have seen West Side Story when it came out.) I can see, however, that Forrest Gump may be the last human-level, non-explosion-driven spectacle in this series.

Your daughter probably could handle it, but it’s a pretty long slog and if you see it on video you might want to skip some bits from the first hour or she might not want to stick around for the actual disaster part.

I’ve seen the German version on video. It’s not bad, actually, albeit it makes much of the British company’s greed. Hearing the officials on board furiously shouting in German did give me turn, however - too reminiscent of Nazi villains. Interestingly, it was suppressed in Germany during World War II because they…

To clarify, when I said “bullet holes” I meant from the Revolution. In the cathedral in Nantes you can still see the destruction wrought at that time also. And curiously, next to the cathedral there is a wall from Roman times. To think of the centuries of history it’s seen.

Who was the Republican senator who was going on about the Democrats being like the Jacobins?

Technically, you are correct. However, when I was a child World War II was so present in our culture that I felt that I remembered it even though I was born five years after its end. In the French town where I stayed there were still bullet holes in the church. I saw “Les Guerres de la Vendee pour les Nuls” (The Wars…

A couple of years ago I visited the Vendee region of France, around Nantes, where in 1793 there was a counter-revolution (initiated by people who opposed the post-Revolutionary prohibition on cemetery crosses). A quarter of a million people died, and the locals still remember it the way some Southerners remember the…

Jess joyously embraced the girls in a previous episode, indicating that they were her daughters. i don’t know who the older girl is played by, but she sure looks and talks like Katherine Waterson.

If you are unemployed, have little money of your own, and your spouse dies it’s nice to get $20,000 to tide you over until you can get a job.

I got life insurance at 25, at my mother’s behest or I wouldn’t have thought of it. That was over 40 years ago and it would pay out less than $10,000. Insurance is a must if you have debts or dependents, as the author advises; my stepfather’s opinion was that most people have too much and “you only need enough to put…

I did my John Lennon duty and watched a PBS “American Masters” on his years in NYC and LA. Very sobering, as it would have been his 80th birthday.

Sounds like fun, though...

My friend Tom’s foolproof method, from the stoned Seventies:

He really was a national treasure. Fun fact: one of the co-stars of “The Masque of the Red Death” was Paul McCartney’s then-girlfriend, Jane Asher.