What friendship is worth-the BBC's "Martin Chuzzlewit"

Just finished watching "Martin Chuzzlewit", the 1994 BBC treatment of the Dickens novel, on DVD. Highly recommended. Paul Scofield stars as Old Martin Chuzzlewit. If you've seen other BBC productions you'll recognize Pete Postlethwaite as Mr. Montague/Mr. Tigg. You might also recognize Graham Stark, who played Clouseau's underling in "A Shot in the Dark".

The story centers on Old Martin Chuzzlewit's vast fortune, his disinherited grandson of the same name, and the conniving attempts of others, including the boundlesly hypocritical Mr. Pecksniff, to win that fortune. Since it's Dickens, most of the characters are either pretty much all good or all bad. Two exceptions are Pecksniff's mostly good daughters Mercy and Charity, who are unwitting victims of their father's plot to get the loot.

Also, since it's Dickens, and since it's the 19th Century, friendship is at least as important a theme as romantic love, and this tale's focus on greed. In fact, friendship among the various male characters is more central to the story than who will marry whom. This was an era when men would write letters to each other and mention their love for each other, and nobody looked askance at it. (Actual homosexuals would've been more discreet-remember what happened to Oscar Wilde).


And so the hero of the story is Tom Pinch, who (spoiler alerts) is loyal to a fault (quite literally) to his friends, but who doesn't get the girl (Mary) he loves in the end-she marries young Martin Chuzzlewit. Who gets most of the money.


Major tear-jerker scene at the end, as Tom's sister comforts him, but he says to her that his getting Mary would have been how things work in books-the "justice", as he puts it, of real life is different.

Este u oeste?

"Este u oeste"? The first words that popped into my head, as the day began. East or west, in Spanish.

My Spanish skills are not great, but somehow certain thoughts pop into my head, from some place deep in my unconscious, in that language (I had three years of Spanish in school and have tried to maintain my "abilities" to some degree). The thoughts always seem to be especially important. It's a very strange thing. Sometimes it's bits of prayers, sometimes one-word adjectives describing how I feel about myself at a given moment.

Este u oeste. East or west. Opposites. Where will I go? What will become of me? What kind of person am I? As I thought about this earlier I realized these are all Lenten thoughts.

This is a good time for self-reflection. Do not think merely in terms of what you're "giving up" for Lent.

Dumber than thou

If you want to figure out today's political scene, keep it simple and ask yourself: Who's better at the game?

The Democrats, having drifted en masse into Cloud Cuckoo Land, are the Stupid Party now (they claimed the title when they nominated the unelectable Hillary), so Trump's screwups, large and small, don't really hurt him.

It's not Trump as the Globetrotters vs. the Dems as the Washington Generals-more like a AA minor league baseball team vs. a high school team from Alaska. The minor league team may not be the best, but they'll beat the HS team every time.