2022 Movies and Books List (Part I)

You know the drill. Here are the movies, series, and books I loved in the first half of 2022.

Burger Happy

I’m of the opinion that no one needs to hear my pretentious thoughts in an odds and ends post even as often as once a month for all of 2022. So for a change, I wrote a (very) short story for my April blog entry. This is only the second time I’ve written fiction and I have no idea what I’m doing, but I hope you enjoy it!

Odds and Ends – March 2022

Gettin’ this posted just under the wire with…two and a half hours until it’s April.

War

It seems impossible not to comment on the war in Ukraine though I don’t have anything profound to say. There was a time when I was more hawkish in my (completely uninformed) foreign policy opinions, (oh wait, they’re still uninformed) but these days I just can’t see an iota of good in war. I recognize that we live in a fallen world, that Putin is the clear aggressor and this was imposed upon the people of Ukraine who were left with no choice but to fight, but war always brings death, destruction, corruption, and hell on earth to all parties involved regardless of which side is in the right. And sadly, it’s the vulnerable who suffer the most – traumatized children, people without the physical or economic resources to flee, the women who find themselves newly single mothers in a foreign country, the poor who are poorer than ever as their country’s economy collapses under the weight of sanctions, the victims of war crimes perpetrated by the victor du jour, the list goes on.

Odds and Ends – February 2022

If there’s a through line in this post I suppose it’s books? But that’s not saying much because in the immortal words of Josie Gellar, “Words are my life!”

Anyway, this month I write about two kinds of sleep and rereading books.

Odds and Ends – January 2022

In Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography of Leonardo da Vinci, I learned that much of what we know about that 15th Century polymath comes from a number of da Vinci’s surviving personal notebooks. These were no ordinary journals. Da Vinci would fill as much available space as he could with all manner of items – a few lines of poetry, a detailed drawing of a human organ from a cadaver, a list of personal goals or financial expenses, and a sketch for a mechanical stage prop might all be contained on a single page. These notebooks were a blank canvas for his insatiably curious mind where he doodled, planned, questioned, drew, and ruminated.