The Superman Sunday Special newspaper strip, April 1, 1984 (written by Bob "The Answer Man" Rozakis)

According to the Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

"What is April Fools’ Day?"
Although the day has been observed for centuries, its true origins are unknown and effectively unknowable. It somewhat resembles Hilaria, a festival of ancient Rome, held on March 25.

"How did April Fools’ Day start?"
Some suggest it originated in France with the Edict of Roussillon in 1564, while others believe it relates to the equinox that occurs on March 20 or 21 (the Northern Hemisphere’s vernal equinox and the Southern Hemisphere’s autumnal equinox), a time when people are fooled by sudden changes in the weather.

"Unknowable"? Very funny, Britannica. Superman can travel through time, so I'll be taking his word over some mere mortal encyclopedia editors.

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DAD: Do you think they'll play all Elite Eight NCAA basketball games in one day this weekend?

ME: No. They'll spread them over two days as usual.

DAD: I suppose they want us to be able to watch them all?

ME: Yes, but your viewing pleasure is a secondary concern. The NCAA is primarily interested in maximizing the broadcast window so that they can increase advertising revenue. Sports broadcasting decisions are all about the money.

DAD: You mean to tell me that if they broadcast a meteor falling to earth, the money caused that?

ME: No. That's totally different. No one is paying for meteor strikes.

DAD: So broadcasting decisions are not all about money.

ME (raising voice): No! I mean, meteors are not sports. Those are Two! Different! Subjects!

DAD: Now you're yelling. That's my fault. You don't take it well when I point out when you are wrong.

...

I don't wonder why some children abuse their parents; I wonder why more don't.

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I just spent the last three hours trying to play a video game called Disco Elysium. If you haven't done that, don't.

Mechanically, the game is part painfully dull point-and-click roleplaying game, part existentially crushing choose-your-own-adventure visual novel in which your character's health is measured by both physical and mental punishment absorbed. That description makes it sound more fun than it is. In my first attempted playthrough using the game's predefined "Thinker" archetype, my hungover protagonist, a depressed police detective, encountered the decaying corpse he'd been assigned to investigate and promptly quit the force. Game over.

In my second playthrough, I knew to avoid the body and instead questioned some witnesses. There was only one that can be interacted with: a stoned kid throwing rocks at the body. The brat belittled my detective skills, and I lost my will to participate in society. Game over. Gee, this is fun.

Deciding that the game had suckered me into playing a character with starting Morale that was too low ("Thinker" being the default option in the menu), I decided to start over with a customized character. Only, the user interface doesn't really hold your hand through this, and pressing the wrong button twice, I was suddenly starting the game again, going through the same startup dialog with the same shitty Morale as before. I have to give the game credit for making the menus as irritating as the in-game environment. That's commitment!

So I started a fourth time, this time successfully placing all of my available stat points into the two key survival attributes, Psyche and Physique. I also decided to chose only roleplaying dialog options that seemed to be delusionally optimistic. And it worked! When I got to the body, I successfully pushed through the first round of gag-reflex vomiting and was rewarded with a short quest to find some ammonia to mask the decay. But the stench was still overpowering, and I lost Morale. Calling into my precinct, I truthfully reported I was missing my badge, was ridiculed by my squad mates, and lost Morale. In between insults, I discovered I had also lost my gun and lost Morale. Pushing on with the case, I spoke to the person who reported finding the body, who was rude to me, and I committed suicide. Game over. Game deleted.

Seriously, what's the point of something like this? I only played the game because it was A) critically lauded and B) free. But I paid too much. While, yes, this game has a unique artistic vision, that's not enough to declare it a worthwhole (much less recommended) gaming experience. Who are these video game critics whose lives are so amazingly satisfying that they enjoy "playing" fatalistically depressing video games? Life is awful enough without this kind of masochistic shit in it.

Am I ranting because I'm angry? Damn right, I am. If nothing else, I should praise Disco Elysium for making my blood boil at the time I wasted on it, because that red-hot rage against the dying of the light is life-affirming in ways that Disco Elysium is very much not. It needs psychiatric help and deserves my pity, but narcissistic emotional terrorist that it is, it has gone out of its way to make me hate it. I hope it goes and fucks itself.

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19/2589. Vice Squad (1953)
Another day-in-the-life police procedural with hints of Dirty Harry. Edward G. Robinson plays a police captain willing to play a little dirty if it gets a cop killer off the streets. I liked it very much.

20/2590. The Enchanted Cottage (1945)
You know those movies where the girl who is supposed to be "ugly" just has a bad hair cut? Literally this. To be fair, it's supposed to be a fantasy for romantics, which I am not. But c'mon, try a little harder, Hollywood.

21/2591. Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain (2023)
This does not get great critical reviews, and I get it. Plenty of people claim to love The Enchanted Cottage, and comedy is extra subjective. But this is funny. It's not after an Oscar. The silliness is the point. And I enjoyed it.

22/2592. The More the Merrier (1943)
I'm usually lukewarm on screwball comedies and romantic farces, and I'm especially tepid on Joel McCrea, but Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn are once again as delightful as they were in The Devil and Miss Jones. It's a winner.

23/2593. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (2023)
I repeat once again that I am a sucker for coming-of-age stories, especially ones that feel so relatable to my own era, when I read this book. I'd've liked it even without Rachel McAdams. (But I also did like Rachel McAdams.)

More to come.

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One week ago today, while stuck in typical Saturday afternoon traffic on the Connector in Atlanta, I listened to the 1998 pop song "The Way" by Fastball. That has proven to be a terrible, terrible mistake. No matter what I've tried, I have not been able to get that song out of my head.

On Sunday, I enjoyed it; it's got a good beat, and you can dance to it. By Monday, it was annoying. Tuesday, I was starting to think I had a real problem. Wednesday, I watched the music video about a half dozen times in a row in an attempt to burn it out, and for the rest of the evening, I thought I had it licked. But the very first thing I did on Thursday as I pulled myself out of bed was start reciting the lyrics again. In the car Friday, every time I let my attention wander, I caught myself humming it.

Is this madness? Could the sequence of notes in the song have triggered something in my brain, like a sonic virus? Can you sing someone into insanity? They say music is like mathematics, right? Do I suddenly have A Beautiful Mind? What kind of doctor do you see for ear worms? Damn you, Fastball!

Because I refuse to suffer alone, I'm embedding it here:

youtu.be/X5jlTlUTWfQ

You will listen. Whether you know it yet or not, there is only The Way.

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Yeah, I read the reviews, which is a significant part of why I waited so long to see it. Now that I have, let's talk about

27/2597. Babylon (2022)

I adore writer/director Damien Chazelle's La La Land. I like old movies. In fact, I probably prefer them. I'm familiar enough with their work to recognize the pastiches of Clara Bow and John Gilbert and Ana May Wong. I've read Hollywood Babylon and Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. This movie is aimed squarely at people like me. And I didn't care for it.

The narrative, scattered as it is, is at its core the same story as The Artist or, even more explicitly, Singing in the Rain. But it actually has more in common with Citizen Kane, by which I mean Chazelle has reworked the legends of sordid Hollywood stories into a stylish (and mean-spirited) fictional history morality play. And like the epics of yesteryear, it's also too long, containing too many shots that seem to be in there just because someone didn't want to admit to wasting the money they spent filming them. Here you really feel the length because of how uncomfortable it is to spend time with any of the scenarios or characters. Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are the stars, but the minority characters are more engaging, if only because the racist system pushes them out before it can grind them down.

To be clear, Babylon is impressively well made (even if by its nature it can't help but feel derivative), but its core problem is that it was made for an audience of one. It feels as if Chazelle is exploring for himself whether the Hollywood Magic is a Faustian bargain, and his ultimate answer, appropriate for someone the film medium has already made a star, is an unsatisfying "yes and no." If anything, the real lesson here is that just as you can't make a war film without glorifying war, you can't criticize Old Hollywood by repeating all its worst excesses.

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For the last few years, we've had a Jeopardy! page-a-day calendar. This year, Mom opted for a History Channel This Day in History calendar because she got a great price on it... in February. I'm starting to think the price markdown was for more than just the expiration date.

This Day in History for March 5, 1770, was the Boston Massacre. Maybe you've heard of it? It's pretty famous. According to the calendar, British Private Hugh Montgomery "slipped and fell, discharging his musket into the taunting crowd." Though this makes it sound like an accident, eyewitness testimony at the trial indicated that Montgomery shot only after recovering his dropped rifle and regaining his feet. That, plus the fact that he more or less confessed, is surely why Montgomery was one of only two of the eight soldiers found guilty of manslaughter.¹

The calendar also explicitly states that "John Adams and Josiah Quincy Jr.² defended the colonists." Both of those men would like to assure you that they defended the prosecuted soldiers. In point of fact, there were three trials related to the massacre, the first two against soldiers (Rex vs. Preston and Rex v. Wemms et al.) and the third, much lesser known, against colonists (Rex vs. Manwaring et al). There were no defense attorneys in the third trial, so the calendar is flatly wrong.

(Technically, I suppose, so long as we're being pedantic, we should say that there were four trials related to the Boston Massacre, as according to the 1771 summary of the trial published in The Trial of W. Wemms, J. Hartegan, W. McCauley, H. White, M. Killroy, W. Warren, J. Carrol, and H. Montgomery, Soldiers in His Majesty's 29th Regiment of Foot, for the Murder of C. Attucks, S. Gray, H. Maverick, J. Caldwell, and P. Carr, the sole witness for the prosecution at the third trial, Charles Bourgat, was found not credible and was later brought up on charges of perjury. I don't fault the calendar for omitting this fact. But it is a fun bit of Americana legal trivia.)

Now that I've caught This Day In History making these mistakes, I'm doubting the accuracy of everything it tells me. Sure, these may have been honest editorial grammatical errors, but in this day and age where Google's terrible search AI is giving me factually incorrect answers to everything,³ I think it's more important than ever that the people who claim to be authorities in their fields know what they're talking about. Why should I learn facts about history from people who don't know the facts of history? If you can't trust a discount page-a-day calendar, who can you trust?

¹ Montgomery's punishment was having the letter M "for murder" branded on his thumb,⁴ which is very The Scarlet Letter indeed.⁵

² These days, it seems historians usually refer to the father of 15th Harvard University President Josiah Quincy III as Josiah Quincy II. However, when the son published a posthumous biography cobbled together from father's "journals and letters" in 1825, he titled the book Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Junior, of Massachusetts Bay: 1744-1775. And who is the History Channel to argue with a former president of Harvard?

³ DO NOT READ GOOGLE AI RESULTS FOR ANYTHING. Seriously, people, I cannot tell you how unhelpful Google AI responses were in researching this topic, a famous incident in American History that has been extensively researched and documented. The responses were so astonishingly wrong, you're just as likely to get correct responses to queries if you asked the teenager at the window of your local Burger King drive-thru. Which, I suppose, does mean that in all the ways that matter, Google AI successfully passes the Turing Test.

⁴ According to Wikipedia, the "benefit of clergy" defense used to save Montgomery from the gallows was abolished in the United Kingdom 1827 and from United States federal law in 1790, though the possibility exists that it may still be recognized in some state courts. I recommend consulting a lawyer before trying it yourself.

⁵ Though it takes place in the 1640s, The Scarlet Letter was published March 16, 1850. I've already peeked ahead; March 16, the calendar tells me, marks the day in 2006 that the "First Lady of Drag Racing," Shirley "Cha Cha" Muldowney, was inducted into the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame, which at least fits the National Women's History Month theme. Weirdly, despite explicitly mentioning four other Halls of Fame she belongs to, Muldowney's Wikipedia page does not mention this induction, though the Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing which sponsors the IDRHoF does. Why does the calendar endorse this one in particular? I guess that's just another one of history's mysteries.

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Recently, (as one does) I was perusing the Tustin (California) Area Historical Society website (tustinhistory.com) devoted to the closed (but not decommissioned) Marine Corps Air Station Tustin, commissioned in October 1942 (as Naval Air Station Santa Ana) to house "non-rigid lighter-than-air" airships for Navy Fleet Airship Wing Three, Squadron Thirty-One (ZP-31) in two wooden 17-story 1,088-foot long blimp hangars (one surviving), listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1975.

That's where I found an image of this aging stencil painted on an interior wall of the (surviving) south Hangar 2 (Building 29):

A little more research teaches me that these are the fourteen leadership traits taught by the United States Marine Corps. Even more research reveals that the Marines borrowed those fourteen traits from the Army, specifically from the 1961 Department of the Army Field Manual FM 22-100: Military Leadership, which ordered them alphabetically. When the Marines integrated the traits into Department of the Navy Marine Corps Warfighting Publication MCWP 6-11 in 1995, they kept the alphabetical order, though the 2014 version of that publication (now designated MCWP 6-10) re-ordered them into the very sensible mnemonic "JJ DID TIE BUCKLE".

(In point of fact, a fifteenth trait, "Empathy" was added in the 2024 version of the MCWP 6-10, which now calls them "JJ DID TIE BUCKLEE". I'm not going to tell the Marines their business, but that's a terrible mnemonic. I assume they were sticking by tradition—Semper Fidelis!—but why just tack on an extra E when "KID BLED JET JUICE" is right there for the taking?)

However you order them, I have to say that I find them to be very good traits for effective leadership. Pretty good traits for everyone, actually. Too bad I don't see many of those traits being exemplified by the current Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States. Maybe someone should give him a tour of the South Hangar at MCAS Tustin.

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My latest painting:

I wanted a photo of me punching that Mystery Box, and I couldn't take it myself, so I enlisted Mom's help. She has never played Super Mario Bros., and she didn't quite understand what I was after or, apparently, that you can keep pressing the shutter button on my phone to capture a whole bunch of images (because, you know, there's not actually a roll of film inside the phone). And that is how you get an expression like that on my face.

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7/2577. More Than a Secretary (1936)
I keep confusing this movie with Skyscraper Souls, which was the last movie I watched in 2025, probably because both are about a professional woman who falls for a cad. In this one, Jean Arthur gets her man, but he's really not worth it, Jean.

8/2578. Cinema Paradiso (1988)
A very well told story about the early life of a man who falls in love with cinema itself. I read there's a director's cut that adds a bunch of story about the man's later life, but that could only possibly make this worse. Sometimes less really is more.

9/2579. Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Jean Arthur again (TCM's Star of the Month), here with Cary Grant in an adventure tale about the early days of flight. Very entertaining.

10/2580. The Love Light (1921)
Less entertaining. It's kind of a silent version of The English Patient if that movie had been duller and taken place in the shadow of a light house. The last reel, with its a kidnapping and shipwreck, may have been necessary for a "happy" ending, but as much as I dislike The English Patient, it certainly knows that some endings shouldn't be happy.

12/2582. The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)
Not the one from the Golden Age of Porn. That's The Devil in Miss Jones. This one is a thoroughly delightful romantic comedy (starring Jean Arthur again) that is definitely worth watching. But be very careful when you're googling it at work.

More to come.

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