1) I usually dread spring here in lurvely Daegu, because it means in a few weeks we'll hit the unbearable summer heat and humidity. In fact, it's freezing here today. I'm in the college library sitting next to a space heater because it's so frigid.
2) I guess I get to claim Virginia in the Final Four since I went to a lowly Division III school for actual college and UVA for graduate school. As usual with American sports though, as much as I try to follow them it's just not the same watching Youtube clips the day after. That said, UVA's win over Purdue was pretty insane.
3) I think my last word on Us is this -- I don't buy that it's a straight-up parable about class. I think that's part of it, but I'm much more convinced it's a statement on duality, light versus dark, psychological splitting, what Freud called "das unheimliche." It there's any "political" reading of the film that makes sense to me, it's pretty simply -- America's Trumpian id has violently overthrown everything and there's no going back. (Spoiler: In the final scene, why are those attack helicopters holding back instead of blowing the shit out of thousands of mass-murders?)
4) I'm making slow but steady progress through Playing At The World. If Stan Lee capitalized on (stole?) the work of Jack Kirby, then arguably Gary Gygax capitalized on (stole?) the zany, open-ended Blackmoor campaign of Dave Arneson and tamed it into the rule set that became the original Dungeons and Dragons. (Arneson sued Gygax in 1979, five years after D&D was originally published.)
5) An older adult student is insisting we have cow-blood soup for lunch next week. (This dish is too gnarly for most of the other adult students in the class.)
How can I say no?
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