The last couple of weeks dissolved in the acid bath of poor weather, people being sick and having emergencies (how dare they?), and the school schedule. The upshot is that garden clean up ceased entirely, and won’t resume until the floods recede. Spring accelerates, caring not one whit for the cooler days, the high winds, or the rain.

Lilac Buds

Last night Grishnákh met his doom. I’m looking forward to the interlude with Fangorn.

Stuff

Donald Trump, who requires a very expanded definition of “Republican” to fit under that already large tent, is planning to engage in pump priming. Oh dear. With what money, I wonder.

“We’re also going to prime the pump,” he said. “You know what I mean by ‘prime the pump’? In order to get this” — the economy — “going, and going big league, and having the jobs coming in and the taxes that will be cut very substantially and the regulations that’ll be going, we’re going to have to prime the pump to some extent. In other words: Spend money to make a lot more money in the future. And that’ll happen.”

The same President Trump threatens Freedom Caucus Republicans for their opposition to a very incomplete reform/replace of ACA.

In both of these, he’s displaying the typical Progressive fondness for action, any action, and lots of it. Coolidge, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Meanwhile, Mike Pence is being laughed to scorn for taking sensible actions to protect and nourish a marriage he values. Is something wrong with that, or for realizing that men in public life are subject not only to temptation, but to innuendo, gossip, rumor, and downright lies? All this is enough to tempt me to say that it’s past time for The Benedict Option.

Beauty and the Beast

We took the granddaughter, who like it. Though she likes the Animaniacs version better. If you want to see Disney get a really good mocking, try their version of Pocahantas. Do not, I repeat, do not, watch their version of All the Colors of the Wind.

I thought the live action innocuous, mostly, and a little boring. It had amusing bits, and it was fun to guess at the origins of some of the set pieces – I detected the Act 2 scene from La Bohème, Busby Berkeley, The Sound of Music, and Singing in the Rain.  Miss Watson wasn’t encouraged to actually act, and so didn’t get much chance to do anything with what she was given. During some of the longueurs, I realized that, stripped of its older, more mythical implications, Beauty and the Beast is the same as Pride and Prejudice. We all love P & P, of course, but we didn’t need another remake, slightly transposed to pre-Revolution France. I see Disney has launched a musical version of Aladdin, something incomprehensible without Robin Williams’ manic genie. Tolkien famously disliked Disney’s versions of fairy tales for being vulgar and simple. He wasn’t just being cranky.