So/Farewell then/2020

"A chair, a table, a lamp.  Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath, and in the centre of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out.  There must have been a chandelier, once.  They've removed anything you could tie a rope to."--The Handmaid's Tale

"Who ever heard of a church without walls?"--Hawaii

Christmas and New Year's are past.  On New Year's Eve I watched Cat Ballou again--I first saw it on another New Year's Eve when I was eight or so.  Except for Lee Marvin's brilliant turn as the decrepit gunfighter, really, it's pretty lame. (Lots of "naughty" humor of the sort that would look mild in the near future...)

My watch party showed Scrooge on Christmas and Hawaii on New Year's Day.  Or I would have shown them, anyway, but I'd rented them on Apple TV and for some reason I couldn't share the screen, just the sound!  I had to watch those movies by myself.  Couldn't sit through Scrooge--I'd heard Leslie Bricusse's songs were tuneless, and they were. (The Muppets version actually had better songs!) 

Hawaii, from the James Michener novel (which I saw for the second time), was a long sit but food for thought.  It's about the first missionaries who came to Hawaii in the 1820s, many of whom ended up rich colonists as the indigenous population was decimated by diseases like measles.  The Max Von Sydow character was a non-compromiser--my mother told me her father was something like that.

How do I feel about missionaries?  Well, the missionary movement overall has a mixed record:  in some places it bears responsibility for colonial abuses and cultural genocide such as in Canada's residential schools for First Nations children.  Yet to this day a lot of them have done considerable good.  The missionaries in western China, whom I learned about researching my Ph.D. thesis, come off pretty well.

I've started reading The Handmaid's Tale for my book club. (Several chapters have the title "Night.") In the first chapters Margaret Atwood depicts her fundamentalist dystopia with a dry, almost clinical tone.  Should be interesting!

I'm such a Dragon Ball completist that I've started watching Dragon Ball GT!  I heard it wasn't very good, and it isn't.  A grownup Trunks, a Son Goku who's physically been made a child again, and an annoying girl called Pan are in a spaceship seeking Dragon Balls around the universe.  I miss the wide range of amusing characters like Bulma and Krillin and Piccolo.