If the art form known as anime received the attention and credit it deserves, you would already have heard of a series called “The Holy Grail of Eris,” or in romaji Japanese, Erisu no Seihai.
I watched it Tuesday night, all 12 25-minute episodes. It is a masterpiece.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it was obvious, wanted to be as far away from this stinker as he could get. He didn’t, it seemed, want to be soiled with whatever the Secretary of Defense (“secretary of war” in his own delusions of grandeur) had been rolling in.
It’s doubly tragic that just days before Easter there’s need to address the appalling fact that more and more countries in the world, and a dozen states, now have laws that allow the killing of their citizens and residents.
The mood in the CBS Radio Networks newsroom was grim, depressing, and tense.
There had recently been buyouts, with longtime employees being offered cash and benefits to . . . leave. Many, including longtime employees who didn’t accept the buyouts (or ones who for some reason weren’t offered them), were laid off, never to return.
You might have heard of an article published by Reuters late last week in which after extensive research and what I guess they’d call shoe-leather detective work they identified the famous British stencil-graffiti artist known as “Banksy.”
It was among the most welcome phone calls I’ve ever made. The call was to Frontier or Verizon or whatever it is they currently call themselves. I was calling to tell them that after 21 years, one month, and five days I was done with what in my estimation is the worst phone company ever.
If there is anything as embarrassing as confessing one’s sins it has to be confessing one’s stupidities.
Yet here we are. Instead of describing how well my cool new Starlink-based phone-internet setup is coming together, I’m obligated to detail how I fell for a swindle so obvious that there’s no escaping the fact that my mind must have got disengaged for a while.
It seems that the sycamore has been granted a reprieve. For now. The great and awful tree had been destined to attain horizontality as soon as I could find someone who would do it. That was necessary to give my cool new satellite dish a clear view of the sky. The tree is still under a death sentence, but the latest and most urgent reason for sending the thing to the wood-chip pile seems not to have existed at all.
If only I can get the dish on top of the stick!
As I wrote that I was suddenly reminded that a few decades ago it was popular for performers on variety shows to spin dishes on the tips of what looked like pool cues, the trick being to get many dishes spinning on many pool cues at once. At some point the studio audience would applaud. We were more easily pleased in those simpler times.
Okay, yes, it was my fault that the propane ran out before I ordered a refill. It was not my fault, though, that the internet went down, forcing me to watch a bit of the Olympics.