And then I wrote...
by Dick Schilling, "Editor Emeritus"
... that I have not taken a photograph since I retired after 44 years of using a camera, but there have been times when I wished I could.
An example came one recent morning, after that overnight thundersneet (snow and sleet) event. What I heard against my bedroom window made me expect to see ice covered utility wires at dawn, but they were clear. However, a day later, as I looked toward the rising sun, I noticed the bare limbs (bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang, as Shakespeare wrote) of two trees between me and the sun were glistening with a thin ice coat, first rose-tinged and then silver as the sun rose higher.
Very pretty.
That storm did deposit a layer about an inch thick of white frozen ice and snow on my driveway, however, which was not so pretty.
Something else I have not done in years is watch the Oscar presentations on television. Guess I am not alone. Did I hear this was the third lowest audience on record?
This is being written around noon on the Monday following last night’s airing, so the news is just over twelve hours old. But from what I heard on radio this morning, there was a major screw-up in the announcement of best picture.
I have not seen any of the nominated movies nor read much about them, since I do not plan on seeing them. But from what I saw in the U.S. Today section of a Sunday daily, the musical “La La Land” was the odds-on favorite to win, since it was essentially Hollywood’s tribute to its own greatness.
Instead, a movie called “Moonlight” was the winner in the voting by the members of the motion picture academy.
I read stories last year about unrest among members of minority groups who considered the nominations too biased in favor of whites, both from the standpoint of the actors and the story lines.
They demanded more diversity of the Oscars.
Well, that same newspaper story says “Moonlight” is about a gay black, so maybe the voters saw a chance to placate two groups of critics with one vote for diversity.
As I indicated, this is being written too soon to get the complete post mortem of what caused the announced outcome of the vote to be so wrong. But I am certain Hollywood will arrive at the conclusion that it was either President Trump or the Russians.
I wrote here recently about the different meanings applied to the use of the word sanctions.
I feel the same way about the use of the phrase anti-Semitic.
When did that come to mean the Jewish religion only? From somewhere in the deep dark recesses of my memory from a Bible history class I got the impression the phrase would apply to all descendants of Shem, which would include a wide range of people including Arabs.
