David Sedaris wants to go to the Post Office.

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ADDED: This reminds me of my favorite passage in my favorite movie, "My Dinner with Andre," quoted numerous times on the blog, such as here, in 2013, in "What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?":

"Do I really want a fifth person in my house? Not really. Do I, rather, want to feel as if I were the kind of mother who could handle another child..."

"... even though I know, thanks to the COVID years, that I’m likely not? Wanting to feel like you can do it is, it goes without saying, a stupid reason to have a kid. I remember telling a friend who was appalled at my desire for a third that I craved a repeat of that big explosion of Technicolor feeling that came with a new baby.... Our society is designed to enable and reward parenthood for some women and guarantees a thriving existence for basically no children. The work we do to fight these systems is reproductive labor even when there’s not a single baby in your house. So, really, the question I need to ask myself is not Who was that phantom baby? What might our life have been? It’s Who am I, now? And what can I do for the people who are already here?"

Writes Lydia Kiesling, in "Yearning for a Third/Did I really need another baby for my family to be complete?" (New York Magazine).

That's how the essay ends — with commitment to a cold left-wing platitude and italicized wistfulness about the life she decided the "systems" had denied to her. 

The author calls herself away from the question "Who was that phantom baby?" That felt so sad to me.

I don't know if this really connects, but what swirled up in my mind was the last thing Andre said in "My Dinner with Andre": "People hold on to these images: father, mother, husband, wife, again for the same reason: because they seem to provide some firm ground. But there’s no wife there. What does that mean, a wife? A husband? A son? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?"

"...people hold on to these images: father, mother, husband, wife, again for the same reason: ’cause they seem to provide some firm ground. But there’s no wife there. What does that mean, a wife? A husband? A son? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?"

"Bitching about a season of TV that's not even written yet....gotta love the internet."

Says one comment in a Reddit thread about the HBO series "Rooster," after a line of dialogue in the first season finale episode that suggested a new narrative for one of the secondary characters.

Somebody else says: "Wouldn’t be the first time a studio monitored fan reactions on Reddit and took them into consideration while working on future seasons."

What were the other times? Well, back in 2017, there was "Reddit users correctly guess ‘Westworld’ season 2 plot twist/Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan says he's had to re-write the script" (NME). Nolan said: "It’s annoying sometimes when people guess the twists and then blog about it, but the engagement is gratifying, on one level, because if someone guesses your twist, it means you’ve done an adequate job.... You can’t complain when people are that engaged. It’s very gratifying — but stop doing it, please."

Stop doing it? Ridiculous! If there's one thing people instinctively do with any new material that comes their way, it's try to predict the future. If we weren't designed to do that, we wouldn't be drawn into stories with plots in the first place. 

Here's a neuroscientist talking to Joe Rogan about her study of the capacity of the human mind to predict the future, which she seems to believe in:

"But as real celebrities and influencers try to be perceived as more 'authentic,' many A.I. influencers like Miquela and Mia Zelu are leaning into their unrealness..."

"... proudly claiming their robot monikers in their bios and having no shame about posting in Hong Kong at 3 p.m. and in New York an hour later. In fact, the teams behind them feel the lack of a corporeal form may be their best selling point. 'From a brand perspective, we are able to create a very dynamic story line,' Ms. Kahn said. 'So Miquela can be, for example, in London one day supporting an art gallery opening, and in L.A. the same day to support a new coffee shop that she really likes, right? I think brands love that she can be anywhere... I think the next generation isn’t really thinking as much about is this person real or not?... It’s more about: 'What does this account stand for?'"

I'm reading "They’re Famous. They’re Everywhere. And They’re Fake. Influencers like Lil’ Miquela and Mia Zelu have millions of followers and generate serious income, despite being created with artificial intelligence" (NYT).

1. Who's "Ms. Kahn"? Who cares?

2. I like how they put "authentic" in quotes.

3. What's the difference between A.I. "influencers" like Miquela and old-time ad mascots like Tony the Tiger and the Trix rabbit?

4. You know who else can be in Hong Kong and then in New York an hour later? Santa Claus. Kids have accepted his dictates as long as I can remember. At least Miquela isn't demanding that we be "good" and threatening us with a list. Or is it only a matter of time?

5. Here is what reality must compete with:

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6. Maybe she and her ilk are saving us all from the trouble of striving to excel at fakeness. We're free at last. Now, what?

7. What if the people you met in real life were like Miquela, putting their plastic cup on their head and affecting an expression of inane ecstasy? And maybe they already are... and have been for a long time. I went running to find this passage from "My Dinner With André," a movie that came out more than 40 years ago:

... I turned the television on, and there was this guy who had just won the something something, you know, some sports event, some kind of a great big check and some kind of huge silver bottle, and he, you know, you know, he couldn’t stuff the check in the bottle, and he put the bottle in front of his nose and pretended it was his face, you know, he wasn’t really listening to the guy who was interviewing him, but he was smiling, huh, malevolently at his friends, and I looked at that guy and I thought “What a horrible, empty, manipulative rat.” Then I thought, “That guy is me.”

8. Writing #7 — "What if the people you met" — made me think of an old song that I gradually realized was "Who Are the Brain Police?"

"I'm going to start referring to Donald Trump as the thinking man's President."

Overheard at Meadehouse.

I'd asked Meade (and Grok) about the adjectival phrase "thinking man's," which came up this morning in the comments on the post about Donald Trump's pardoning of Pete Rose, baseball being, some say, "the thinking man's sport."

Googling jogged my memory: "The Thinking Man's" is a Playboy phrase (apparently, you need to think to deal with women):

"But now a USC film professor says that he plays My Dinner with Andre for his undergrad classes, and his 19 year old students love it because it seems contemporary to them."

"It can be hard for them to watch old-fashioned films with characters and plots like Atlantic City or Raiders of the Lost Ark, but two fellows shooting the breeze for two hours is so 2025!"

Steve Sailer likens "My Dinner with Andre" to "The Joe Rogan Experience," in "The Film of the Future: 'My Dinner with Andre'/Who knew in 1981 that in 2025 the dominant form of entertainment would be dudes sitting around talking about far-out stuff?"

Thanks to everyone who emailed me this link. A lot of people know that "My Dinner with Andre" is my favorite movie. It's been my favorite movie since I first saw it, in a movie theater in 1981, long before before podcasting got off the ground. "The Joe Rogan Experience" began in 2009. I love "The Joe Rogan Experience," which might seem odd — I'm a 74-year-old female — but it's not at all odd that I fell in love with "My Dinner with Andre" when I was 30, so it all makes more sense now. Like those 19-year-old students, I too find it hard to watch "old-fashioned films with characters and plots." 

"They say that the film is based on my book. But the film has virtually nothing in it that’s from my book."

"There are hundreds of moments [in the film] that didn’t happen. The film is fiction."

Says Eric Wald, quoted in "For Bob Dylan’s biographer, 'A Complete Unknown' is a dream come true — even if it’s mostly fiction/Elijah Wald’s 'Dylan Goes Electric'inspired the new Timothée Chalamet-led Dylan biopic" (Forward).

Wald starts ticking off movie scenes that never happened in real life — Dylan arriving at Newport on a motorcycle, Van Ronk telling Dylan that Woody Guthrie is in the hospital... Joan Baez... being part of the Greenwich Village folk scene (no, Cambridge, she hated New York)....

“The example that keeps coming back to me, though,” Wald continues, “is the morning after the whole craziness goes down at Newport — with Dylan riding off on his motorcycle past the fairgrounds where Pete Seeger is helping put away the folding chairs. Dylan did not have his motorcycle at Newport and I don’t think Pete Seeger was out that morning putting away folding chairs.”...

That example says a lot about cinematic art. It's good to show specific, concrete things that carry a lot of meaning and evoke strong or delicate feelings. Wald says the movie is "poetically accurate." Yes, Bob with the motorcycle and Pete with the folding chairs replaces what in the book is extensive examination of Pete's devotion to communalism and Bob's individualism. A movie could just have Bob and Pete talking about these concepts and how they apply to events in their lives. That could work in live theater or even in a movie (as in my favorite movie, "My Dinner With Andre"), but movies are expected to be highly visual. If they're not, what was all the money for?

Dylan tweeted his approval of the movie, but he hadn't seen it yet. Wald says: "My sense is that he likes movies and he has never had any hesitation about fictionalizing his life." That sounds right.

"She was hanging from a rope on the side of Mt. Everest, four hours from the summit. The night was frozen...."

"She focused on exactly where to put her foot, her hand, alongside her fellow climbers. Then, peripherally to her right, she saw an orange flash. 'I see this sunrise that I will never forget as long as I live,' she reflected. 'The colors — it is just red, and then it is orange, and then it is yellow, and then the blue is coming. It was so incredibly spiritual for me, and beautiful.'"

So begins a NYT article that is not about going all the way to the top of Mount Everest or about taking the tiny trouble of gazing at a sunrise. It's about tomorrow's solar eclipse and the elusive human capacity to achieve awe:

“The whole thing is very awe-ful. A-w-e,” she said, meaning full of awe.

Ah, yes. Thanks for the sledgehammering. We might not have figured it out, just as we might not have experienced the spiritual dimension of the sunrise unless we were hanging from a rope on the side of Mt. Everest.

The article must mean for us to laugh at her, no? Or is it sincerely attempting to maximize the deeper benefits of tomorrow's celestial event? Here's the article — by Elizabeth Dias, the NYT religion correspondent: "Gazing Skyward, and Awaiting a Moment of Awe/Millions of people making plans to be in the path of the solar eclipse on Monday know it will be awe-inspiring. What is that feeling?"

"Make mental note to watch 'My Dinner with Andre' again soon."

That's something I blogged on July 6, 2005, in a post called "My declining NYT habit."

I was stunned to see that in the top post of a search of my archive this morning, 2 days after re-watching "My Dinner With Andre," and one day after blogging "A big theme in this movie is whether, when things connect up, it's not just a coincidence but something mystical and important...."

What do you think? Mystical and important?!

I don't know, but what I was searching for was the topic of habit. In the movie, there's some discussion — blogged here yesterday — of the problem of doing things out of habit. There is, one person thought, "a great danger" of "fall[ing] into a trance" and no longer "seeing, feeling, remembering."

Well, I was just wishing I'd created a tag for "habit," because it would collect some good material, and it's a topic I want to think about. I like my habits. I think my habits are good.

At the Wednesday Night Café...

 ... you can write about whatever you want.

***

Am I too much of a creature of habit?, I wondered as I put up this post, capping off another day of blogging by putting up an open thread. It made me think of a line from "My Dinner With Andre" (which as you know I rewatched last night):

But ROC used to practice certain exercises, like for instance, if he were right-handed, all today he would do everything with his left hand. All day, eating, writing, everything — opening doors — in order to break the habits of living. Because the great danger, he felt, for him, was to fall into a trance, out of habit. He had a whole series of very simple exercises that he had invented just to keep seeing, feeling, remembering. Because you have to learn now. It didn't used to be necessary, but today....

"It may very well be that 10 years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something."

Says Andre Gregory in "My Dinner With Andre" — page 59 of the screenplay — a 1981 movie. 

It's not 10 years later. It's more than 40 years later. But think of the things we're doing now just in order to be affected by something.

For example, there's Zoraya ter Beek, 28, who "expects to be euthanized in early May" (The Free Press):

She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder. Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats.

Wake up and smell the instant coffee....

Yesterday, at 2:18 PM, 3 posts down, I was talking about "talking about instant coffee," and then, that evening, I was rewatching my old favorite movie "My Dinner with Andre" and that line jumped out: "we drank instant coffee out of the top of my shaving cream."

A big theme in this movie is whether, when things connect up, it's not just a coincidence but something mystical and important, such as when Andre — after feeling he's heard the voice of The Little Prince — runs across a copy of an old surrealist magazine with a page of handprints from 4 eminent men whose names begin with the letter A and 3 of them are Andres and the other one is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Wikipedia has this about Saint-Exupéry:

In The Little Prince, its narrator, the pilot, talks of being stranded in the desert beside his crashed aircraft. The account clearly drew on Saint-Exupéry's own experience.... On 30 December 1935, at 2.45am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert....

See? A random Andre.

We were just talking about instant coffee — how you don't really need to go through a whole elaborate brew-your-own coffee ritual at home.

It's an easy choice for me because I don't have enough of a sense of smell to notice the difference, but now Meade has switched to instant. How did we all get so convinced that we needed so much equipment and fooling around to make coffee?

Back in the 1970s, there was an ad campaign aimed luring young people into the then-dying practice of drinking coffee. Coffee, we were told, was "the think drink." One thing led to another I guess, and we became way more wrapped up in coffee than the International Coffee Organization could have imagined. Do you ever stop and wonder if it's worth it, this long strange coffee trip?

Today, I run across "The Case Against 'Good' Coffee/Instant coffee tastes … just OK. And that’s fine by me" by the novelist Peter C. Baker in The New York Times.

"After college, [Eboni] Thompson started annotating because she missed the feeling of analyzing texts and taking notes."

"One day, she went to the bookstore and bought 'Sense and Sensibility,' by Jane Austen, and as she started reading, she realized how much she wanted to remember about the book after she was finished. 'It wasn’t as intense or as thorough as I do now,' she said of her early annotations. 'It was mostly just little quotes here and there, maybe a word I had never known before, a star next to it, or an idea that I was like, "Oh, I want to come back to that."' Thompson began chronicling her annotations on Instagram and TikTok.... Thompson... recently finished reading and annotating 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame,' a book she said she was glad she read carefully. Annotating slows down her reading process, but the output is worth it.... Annotating feels a bit like homework — an assignment you give yourself that allows you to use special pens and highlighters, colored sticky notes and whatever squiggles and doodles you desire. Maybe it’s not scholarship in the traditional sense, but it’s studious, nonetheless."

From "On Instagram and TikTok, annotating books is an art/A historically academic pursuit is attracting hobbyists who delight in marginalia" by Hope Corrigan (in WaPo).

The first post ever on this blog was about marginalia, and for a day "Marginalia" was the name of the blog. And as for "'Sense and Sensibility,' by Jane Austen," I can't read that phrase without recalling this line from my all-time favorite movie, "My Dinner with André": "I mean there must have been periods when in order to give people a strong or meaningful experience, you wouldn't actually have to take them to Everest.... I mean, there was a time when you could have just, for instance, written — I don't know — 'Sense and Sensibility,' by Jane Austen...."

"This is beyond bizarre. Is some woman about to falsely accuse him of something?"/"You have an irrational hate of women and I'm sorry your [sic] so lonely."

From the comments section at "HBO pulls Larry David documentary hours before premiere so comedian can 'do it in front of an audience'/The Larry David Story was supposed to premiere tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT."

Now, the more interesting question is how can you do something live after you already have it filmed? Before you say maybe they never did film this documentary but were always planning to say we're doing it live, look at the trailer, which seems to be evidence — albeit not conclusive evidence — that there was a documentary already made:

Key line in there: "I'm a total fraud."

It's said to be an extensive interview — Larry Charles interviewing Larry David — so what I'm hoping is happening is that they are following the "My Dinner with Andre" method. To make "Andre," 2 men had extensive, rambling discussions, then they edited it into a very tight conversation, which became the script, that they — actors, now — performed.

In this case, perhaps Charles and David filmed long interviews, and the idea may originally have been to edit the footage into a documentary, but then they decided it would be cooler to make a transcript of the edited footage and perform it as actors in one continuous live show. 

"My Dinner with Andre" became a classy as hell movie, but LD is a comedian, so, for him, the highest form is speaking to a live audience.

"Most of us have gone on some sort of spiritual or existential odyssey in the last 19 months. Some were André, burning it all down..."

"... in the name of growth (and broadcasting it to anyone who would listen). Others were Wally, hiding under electric blankets, an anodyne to the suffering of the world because 'our lives are tough enough as it is.' Most of us were both — self-aware enough to know what’s coming but not yet brave enough to get out. Over a digestif, André concedes that his experimental antics have gotten old in the same way his past life has, and he has ended up with more questions and torment than before. His struggles to find meaning have been in vain, like interrogating an unexamined life, or a forever war or a plague. When the check arrives, André pays, Wally splurges on a cab home and nothing is resolved. No moralizing or grand resolutions — just malaise, the kind you’re left with after you meet up with an old friend who talks about himself the entire time."

From "'My Dinner With André' at 40: Still Serving Hot Takes The film was a feature-length conversation. And it is still stirring up plenty of chatter today" by Mariella Rudi (NYT). 

The movie — my favorite movie — premiered 40 years ago yesterday. I don't watch movies that often these days, but I did watch 2 movies in the last 2 days, which I rarely do. One was a movie that gives me a similiar experience to "André": "Coffee and Cigarettes." The other could be compared to "André" in that it's about the loss of the soul in a world of media: "To Die For."

ADDED: In the closing credits to "Coffee and Cigarettes," we hear Iggy Pop's version of "Louie Louie," which contains the line: "Turn on the news/It looks like a movie/It makes you want to sing/'Louie Louie.'" Iggy appears on one segment of the movie, consuming coffee and cigarettes with Tom Waits. Both men have quit smoking, and the celebrate quitting by having a smoke. 

The last thing you see in the credits is "Long live Joe Strummer." I had to google to try to understand what that was about. I don't really know, but I found this:

 

And this — from a 2019 interview with the director, Jim Jarmusch:

You cast musicians frequently in your films and one of my favorite bits of casting is Joe Strummer in 1989’s Mystery Train. What drew you to Joe Strummer as “Elvis”? 

Joe Strummer is a friend of mine, someone I deeply admire. He’s quite an interesting actor, he’s very focused. He and I were sort of like brothers in a way. Joe Strummer, in the most minimal way, taught me one of the most valuable things I’ve ever learned about human expression. That is what all of Strummer’s friends know as “Strummer’s Law,” these four words: no input, no output. You see that in The Clash, you see that in their openness to rockabilly, to reggae, to soul music, to hip-hop. You know, see that openness. In that way, The Clash are the antithesis of the Sex Pistols, who were super great in their style of reduction down to the essence. The Clash were open … like “Throw open the doors, see what the wind blows in on us.” Strummer was a very important person in my life. He’s someone who I miss a lot. I try to ask him advice sometimes, even now, and see what channels back to me. A remarkable person. I was so honored to know him.

Ah. Joe Strummer died in December 2002. "Coffee and Cigarettes" came out in 2003. Elvis died in 1977.

Squunched.

In last night's Snow Walk Café, I wrote:

I love trying to read a book in Kindle — after hours of reading this and that on the web — and arriving at a word — in this case “squunched” — clicking on it and, via Google, escaping back onto the web, going here and there, liberated by “squunched,” defying the order of things once again, not reading a book, unless you call that reading a book. But I will squunch myself back in there, in that Kindle book, just playing at trying to read until I see the sign for the next off ramp.

What I was reading was — as mentioned yesterday — "The Suffering Channel" (found in this collection):

They often liked to get two large tables squunched up together near the door, so that those who smoked could take turns darting out front to do so in the striped awning’s shade.

When you take the off ramp marked Squunch, you get to a discussion of another sentence by the same author, and I have that other book in Kindle too and can tell you "squunch" comes up in 3 sentences. Taking a gander at the first of the 3 sentences should give you a feeling for why I read fiction looking for off ramps.

"What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?"

This is something I originally posted 4 years ago, at a time when I had the comments turned off. I wanted to read it again and think about the subject, and since I never exposed it to comments the first time, I thought I'd post it again here today:

"I think a tourist is usually someone who is on a time budget. A tourist is out to see sights, usually which have been enumerated for him in a guidebook. I think there’s a deeper degree of curiosity in a traveler."

So it's a continuum, and if you want to move to the extreme good side of that continuum, perhaps you ought never to leave your home town. The quote is from Philip Caputo, author of "The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, From Key West to the Arctic Ocean," and he's dialoguing with William Least Heat-Moon, author of "Blue Highways: A Journey into America."

Heat-Moon reframes the tourist/traveler distinction in terms of destinations: "let’s pick Arizona — those tourists are likely to head for the Grand Canyon, whereas a traveler in Arizona might light out for Willcox. Why somebody would want to visit Willcox, I don’t know, other than to see what’s there. Ask questions: Who was Willcox? What kind of place is it? A tidy little place, by the way."

You go to all that effort to drive way the hell out somewhere, and then you just check out some little towns? Why didn't you just go to all the little places within a close radius of your hometown? That's what doesn't make sense. Heat-Moon comes right out and admits he sees no sense in his own idea.

Shakespeare had to wonder "Where am I going to get a human skull?" and, Bob Dylan says, "Some things never change."

Let me take you to the heart — the skull — of Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize speech. He says that when he got the "surprising news" that he'd won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he started thinking about William Shakespeare....

Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells
Speaking to some French girl
Who says she knows me well...

That's just me, quoting a Bob Dylan song. That's not from the speech. Here's the speech, the part I want to show you:

I would reckon [Shakespeare] thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”...

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. “Who are the best musicians for these songs?” “Am I recording in the right studio?” “Is this song in the right key?” Some things never change, even in 400 years. Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, “Are my songs literature?”

That bit about the human skull got me thinking about something in "My Dinner with Andre," a movie in which 2 men talk mostly about theater. At one point, Andre Gregory is talking about directing the Euripides play "The Bacchae":

Pentheus has been killed by his mother [Agave] and the Furies, and they pull the tree back, and they tie him to the tree, and fling him into the air, and he flies through space and he's killed, and they rip him to shreds and, I guess, cut off his head. My impulse was that the thing to do was to get a head from the New Haven morgue and pass it around the audience. Now, I wanted Agave to bring on a real head and that this head should be passed around the audience so that somehow people realized that this stuff was real, see, that it was real stuff. Now, the actress playing Agave absolutely refused to do it.

And the songwriter Bob Dylan refused to show up and receive the prize. There are always questions about life’s mundane matters.  

Am I recording in the right studio? ≈ Is this speech meant for reading out loud in a Swedish ceremonial hall?

You've got to think about the right thing in the right place...

Well, he can be fascinating, he can be dull/He can ride down Niagara Falls in the barrels of your skull...

11 Shades of Obtuseness about Donald Trump's Dirty Words.

Let me give an example of something I am seeing. With 55K shares on Facebook:



That's so obtuse, in so many ways. Let's count:

1. "50 Shades of Grey"? Hadn't seen that talked about in a while. (Wait. There is this.)

2. Boasting of committing what sounds like criminal sexual assault is not the mere saying of words. The size of the outrage isn't about the words as bad words, but the words as evidence of actions allegedly taken.

3. The outrage isn't limited to women. Men, too, are outraged.

4. Many people — women and men — are fine with using the words "fuck" and "pussy" in private conversation.

5. The words "fuck" and "pussy" can be used in sentences that express contempt and disregard for other human beings, and the outrage against Trump's words has to do with what the words express in the sentences actually spoken. Many excellent sentences can be made using those words — sentences that can be received with favor by women who hate what Trump said.

6. People read novels and see movies about all sorts of things, including horrible things. Stories about murder and torture and all kinds of physical and psychological abuse are very popular. The effect is titillating, but that doesn't mean people want these things actually to happen to them.

7. You may love a particular character in a story, because he's interesting and exciting and transgressive, but that doesn't mean you want him to be President. I love the movie "My Dinner with Andre," but Andre Gregory would be a terrible President. Last night, I watched the movie "Willard." Willard is a fascinating character. Watching him bond with rats, train them, gather them into suitcases and carry them into the office to unleash havoc was fascinating... oh, watch out, pussy!...



... but Willard would not make a good candidate for President. Neither would Hannibal Lecter.

8. It would be interesting to see those rats overrun the White House... in a movie. But not in real life!

9. Fantasy time is over. Put down the novel. Turn off the movie. Face the grim reality of picking a suitable President.

10. I said it 2 years ago: I'm for boring. I mean for President. I'm not talking about novels and movies and sexual fantasies.

11. "OK. Yes, we are bored. We're all bored now..."



"... but has it ever occurred to you... that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money, and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks, and it's not just a question of individual survival... but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say no?"