Onion Watch: Done; The Boot, Day 12

[pameladean]

The Onion Watch is over. Both Cassie and Saffron are fine.

I am very tired of this boot, and yet two weeks is really a very short time to be wearing one of these. It's better since I got the shoe balancer. But that can't be worn outside at this time of year. I ventured out yesterday sans shoe balancer, but with a lot of help from Eric. Fortunately, my winter boots have slightly thicker soles than my regular walking shoes, so the imbalance was less. But my hips, back, and knees set up a huge complaint all the same.

We saw "The Last Jedi" so we could stop avoiding spoilers all over; went grocery shopping; had a late dinner at Pizza Luce, splitting an order of roasted Brussels sprouts and a small spinach salad and then going our own way for the entrees; and went back to his house and conversed and cuddled the cat.

We enjoyed the movie a lot, though the sound balance was such that we missed some dialogue, including, almost certainly, some punch lines. It is thoroughly and unabashedly a "Star Wars" movie; not one of the prequels, but harking back in ways great and small to the first trilogy only with a lot more different kinds of people in it. Of course we had a lot of quibbles. I am gobsmacked, however, at the reactions of a certain group who hated the movie. What they are objecting to is so mild, so nearly anodyne, and yet they can't stand it.  If anybody is moved to discuss any aspect of the movie in the comments, please clearly mark any spoilers. And I'm very short on patience with certain lines of argument.

Being outside was fine while the temperature was above freezing, but when things started to ice up I became a paranoid mass of apprehension.

On Wednesday morning, I will get up, and I will not have to put on the boot. The clinic says that if I have no residual swelling or pain, I'm good to go; otherwise they will refer me to physical therapy.  I am hoping very hard for the former outcome. The swelling is almost gone now, but there is still some twinginess right around the ankle bone.

I'm still reading Anthony Price, and wanted to note down one place where history caught him up, through no fault of his own. In an earlier book, Our Man in Camelot, a bunch of younger agents in Price's imaginary intelligence department, Research and Development, are arguing with David Audley about, well, everything; but Frances Fitzgibbon, my single favorite character in the entire series, refers to "the rot at the top" of the Nixon Administration. Audley shuts her down by saying that it was the rot at the top that brought the boys home from Viet Nam.

This line never did sit well with me, but this time, I thought, "Wait, wait, wait, didn't Nixon act to delay the negotiations that would end the war so that his anti-war presidential campaign would not have the wind taken out of its sails, and so that he could get the credit?"  Yes. Yes he did. The tapes were released in 2013. Lyndon Johnson knew what Nixon was doing, but he figured that Hubert Humphrey would win the election, so he didn't do anything. STOP WITH THAT NONSENSE YOU SELF-SATISFIED BLUNDERING POLITICIANS; IT NEVER WORKS OUT THE WAY YOU THINK.

I want to grab David Audley through the page of the book and give him this information. More than that, I want to give it to Frances.

Pamela

Edited to make an errant sentence have some sense in it.

Comments

[pameladean]

It never occurred to me that Rey could have sprung from Skywalker loins. I did find it painfully evident that Han and Leia would have been much better off with a daughter than with a son, and they got one for a little while, which was sad and lovely at once.

But I can see that having very specific expectations might have fed all the complaints and betrayed feelings. It's too bad. I think this is one of the best Star Wars movies. Not perfect, certainly not, but such an improvement in so many ways while still nodding at the previous ones.

And I feel that Luke's character arc is really just consistent and reasonable, given his conduct in the original movie and sequels. He does grow up, it just takes him a really long time.

P.

[kore]

I did find it painfully evident that Han and Leia would have been much better off with a daughter than with a son, and they got one for a little while, which was sad and lovely at once.

//SOB

Man, when Han wanted her to go with him, I was like "GO, JUST GO, GET OUT OF THE MOVIE, GO FLY AND BE HAPPY." So bittersweet.

[rj_anderson]

The devotion of Reddit fanboys to the Rey Skywalker theory has to be seen to be believed. Some are still hotly insisting that TLJ was a mere misdirection and that in the final film the Truth Will Be Revealed. Because there is just no way Rey could come from nowhere, and not be related to any of the legacy characters, and still have a satisfying narrative arc. There is no way she could find or build a family that doesn't depend on her own genetic heritage and have it mean anything. So if she isn't a Solo (which some thought before TFA came out, and some even thought afterward) and she isn't a Skywalker, she has to be a Kenobi or a cloned daughter of Palpatine at the very LEAST. But really she has to be a Skywalker because Kylo proved himself irredeemably evil by killing Han and will surely be killed in the third movie and therefore doesn't count. THE SKYWALKER LINE MUST NOT DIE.

I love how Rian Johnson repeatedly stuck it to the people who think bloodline matters by showing how messed up Kylo's (and Luke's, and Snoke's) ideas about legacy were, and how much pride and folly and devastation were caused by everyone telling Ben Solo that he had a great destiny to live up to because he was the son of Leia Organa and the war hero Han Solo, and the nephew of the great Luke Skywalker, and the grandson of Darth Vader. Bring on Rey Nobody and the message that the Force belongs to everyone, no matter who their parents were.

[graydon]

All of that fits in beautifully with Daoist notions of humility -- did you do a good job? No? why do you think you're special? Thinking you're special makes doing a good job much more difficult, and you obviously need something less difficult, you've failed already...

My take on Rey is that the Force went, well. This Skywalker thing was an abject disaster. Time to try again. I wonder if I can turn "has a lick of sense" up somehow?

Rey acknowledging they're nobody really bothered a fair number of people; I think _in the context of Daoist humility_, that thing essential for right action because you're not trying to do what makes you happy, you're trying to identify the correct thing to do, recognizing that you're nobody is the beginning of enlightenment.

[rj_anderson]

That's a very Christian concept too -- the least being the greatest and so on. But I'm certain that the filmmakers, and Rian Johnson in particular, were looking closely at Daoism and other Eastern philosophy for this film. There has been quite a lot of meta written on the yin/yang symbolism in TFA and especially TLJ, for instance.

[pameladean]

Oh, good grief, this reminds me VERY STRONGLY of the anti-Shakespeareans. No, he can't have been the middle-class son of a glovemaker with a reasonable grammar-school education and a mind like a magpie's, NOOOO, he had to be nobility and have gone to Cambridge or Oxford.

P.

[rj_anderson]

That is absolutely apropos, and a delightful comparison to boot. Exactly.