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But we in it shall be remember’d

10/25/2022 Olivier is fine and all, but give me Branagh any day of the week.  Yes , a different time, different audience expectations, and different intent: The Olivier film was shot near the end of the Second World War and dedicated to memory of English military sacrifice, specifically to the "Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has humbly attempted to recapture." A film explicitly and unapologetically of the moment of its production, its audience a war-weary Britain in need of an emotional boost, it understandably portrays Henry and his war as benignly patriotic, eliminating any moral or ethical ambiguity in the king and any sense of fractured will among his troops. Gone are Henry's seemingly sadistic threats to the citizens of Harfleur (3.1). Gone is the traitor scene (2.2) -- replaced by expansive pageantry and a dumb show of Henry's pious devotion before the troops set off to storm the beaches of Normandy. Gone is t...
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"I always make sense. I'm a rational, reasonable man."

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 08/12/2023 We therefore have great cause of thankfulness, and shall forget the office of our hand sooner than quittance of desert and merit according to the weight and worthiness. - Henry V 'spose I should create a standard disclaimer when I'm about to go spelunking into the dark and twisty caverns of our judicial system, and just link to that.  If it isn't clear by now, your humble blogger likes exploring this stuff, but since I am not a lawyer nor did I take any classes on law, I approach this subject with keen interest and a layman's understanding (watch me furiously google terms of art like " motion in limine ").  So if you find yourself under Federal indictment, do not rely on me for advice and please hire yourself competent counsel like Matlock (I'll stop mixing my media motifs now). And now to our French causes... With all the pre-trial stuff going on in Trump's small handful of indictments thus far, there's a lot of dumb non-lawyers l...
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You Still Have About Ten Minutes. How Do You Feel?

03/15/2025 A cousin mentioned recently that she was aiming to re-read Arthur Koestler's  Darkness at Noon .  Oddly enough, I've read that only once, unironically on the train from Helsinki to Leningrad back in '86 (I had   this paperback edition ).  I feel no compulsion to give it another go because the final paragraphs have haunted me ever since: What had he said to them? "I bow my knees before the country, before the masses, before the whole people. . . ." And what then? What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either. But he had been allowed to see it, from the top of the mountain, spread at his f...
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