First, a repeat of my post from the day after election day, 2016.

Trump failed to repeal Obamacare (though he did his best and did make it way worse), and the “Wall,” while expensive and ineffective, was not built. The Supreme Court went even worse than I feared. He did replace NAFTA, but not with anything radical. NATO held (barely), environmental treaties were thrown out.

The deficit went from $585 billion in 2016 to $3.1 trillion (!) in 2020 under Trump — but that includes a lot of Covid spending. Without Covid, it probably would have been more like $1.1 trillion. Fiscal responsibility! Does anybody but me remember in 2000 when we ran a surplus of $236 billion and it looked like the debt would be paid off before 2010? Instead, we gave hundreds of billions to the rich and blew perhaps $2.4 trillion on the Iraq War. Nice job, W!

I never imagined the level he would use the office of the president to enrich himself, the laughingstock he would make of himself and our nation to the rest of the world, the crimes he would commit in office, or his audacity to attempt a violent coup when he lost the election.

Still, on the whole, I’d say pretty good predictions. High five, Joe of 2016!

My favorite movie of 2021 was, by far, Dune. Visual spectacle, thought-provoking, and emotionally stirring. It’s possible that the 2024 sequel will slip and make me regret this choice, but there really was little competition.

Other good movies of the year: Pig, Licorice Pizza, The Black Phone, Last Night in Soho, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and The Mitchells vs the Machines. And West Side Story by Spielberg is still queued up for me.

The weirdest one was the French movie Titane.

I’m sure there were some terrible movies out there, but I didn’t see the worst.

Tenet (****) was pretty much the only movie I saw in theaters that year, the only one in the entire theater on opening night. We might not have been on lockdown at the moment, but nobody told Citrus Heights.

Other vaguely notable movies I caught on the small screen: Soul, Promising Young Woman, Palm Springs, and Freaky.

Nothing really worth singling out as “The worst of the year,” but I’ll go with Deadlocked, a dumb zombie movie set in an elevator.

Movie theaters have been in decline for decades. They hide it by total box office revenue increasing, but once you adjust it by ticket price increases and overall population increases, the percentage of people that partake in the big screen has been in perennial decline. And I can’t help but suspect that the Year of No Movies will speed its demise.

That said, there is sometimes something special about a crowd watching together that one can’t duplicate on an 85 inch 4K TV watching Netflix in your living room. My next few posts will be about some of the most magical moments I’ve had in theaters, in no particular order.

To remind myself later: Star Wars, Anguish, The Sixth Sense, Re-Animator, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Boyz in the Hood, Robocop 3…

Maybe 2019 wasn’t all that bad, because of the over 100 movies I watched, most weren’t that bad, either. The overall average wasn’t much different from previous years — there just weren’t any standouts. It will be a forgotten year, if it isn’t already.

Worst movie I saw: Unplanned. Tedious anti-abortion propaganda.

Other turkeys include Hobbs and Shaw and IO — neither of which are really in the league of Unplanned, but which are still best avoided.

2019 was not a great year for movies.

I’m going to go with Yesterday, a movie that would not make the top ten in a better year. Yesterday tells the tale of a man transported into a parallel dimension in which The Beatles never existed. He plays their music and wows everyone with his plagiarism. The movie is charming, and makes more thoughtful points than you might guess.

Its closest competitors were Avengers: Endgame (comics!) and Longshot, with Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen.

I am dumbfounded that Parasite won the Best Picture Oscar, though it was occasionally amusing.

There were quite a few good TV shows in 2019.

While we’re waiting for building permits, we’ve started to run some of the exterior plumbing lines. With three acres, it’s nice to have water faucets scattered liberally, so you don’t have to drag hundreds of feet of hose to all the plants that need moisture.

I always used to do this with PVC pipe, which I was never very good at. Somehow, I was sloppy enough with my gluing that about one time in 20, a joint would leak and need to be redone. Since hundreds of feet of pipe means many, many joints, it was a tedious affair.

Now I use PEX. It’s a sturdy flexible hose, and the crimp fittings on the end seem nearly foolproof. And since the hose can be as long as you want, there are very few connections to fail. On top of it all, it’s pretty much freeze-proof — if the water inside the tubing freezes, the plastic will just flex a little without failing.

We originally thought that 1/2 inch PEX would be sufficient, but it turns out that over hundreds of feet underground, it knocked the water pressure lower than we hoped, so we knocked it up to 3/4. They make up to 1 inch. I don’t think that 1 inch will be sufficient to drive all three buildings, but we’ll have to see. 1/2 will be fine inside each house, so the bonus 600 feet I have laying around won’t go to waste.

Given how easy it’s been to work with, we’ll probably do almost all the plumbing in the house we’re building ourselves.

My letter to Kraft:

I recently purchased a squeeze bottle of Kraft Mayonnaise — or so I thought. Upon unloading my shopping bag, I found that the “Kraft MAYO” wasn’t, in fact, Mayo, but “Egg White Dressing.” (UPC 021000 077458) Its flavor is reminiscent of the disgusting Miracle Whip. I can’t help but feel intentionally deceived.

While I imagine your skirting of the FDA rules on what can be called “Mayonnaise” may be technically legal, it is deceptive and unethical and unworthy of a great brand.

I hope that in the future you will refrain from calling things “Mayo” when they’re not.

Thank you for your attention.

I believe that advertising is mind pollution, poisoning our brains to create an emptiness in our lives that a product can fill. We tolerate it because it has been the most efficient way to let individuals share the tiny cost of viewing media.

When I watch a TV commercial, the advertiser pays about a penny on my behalf to the network. That ads up to my ad-watching time I’m effectively being paid about $1.20 per hour to let them poison my brain. They’re hoping that some of us, over time, will repay that by buying beer or cars or whatever that we otherwise wouldn’t have.

Most people say, “Advertising doesn’t affect me.” Sure. Companies spend billions on it because it doesn’t work.

My favorite way to regulate advertising would be to tax the holy heck out of it, as I would other forms of pollution.

Barring that, what if we could buy the ads targeted at us as individuals? I could have, “Hey Joe, be a better person!” pop up instead of somebody pushing crap down my head — for only a tenth of a penny per hit, and my favorite web site would get more money than they do now.

Just a thought.

Burger King got in trouble for its tweets last week:

Women belong in the kitchen.

If they want to, of course. Yet only 20% of chefs are women. We’re on a mission to change the gender ratio in the restaurant industry by empowering female employees with the opportunity to pursue a culinary career. #IWD

We are proud to be launching a new scholarship programme which will help female Burger King employees pursue their culinary dreams!

Clearly, their overall message is not misogynist. Yet we all took delight in taking their opening sentence out of context and ratcheting up the outrage.

Have we nothing better to think about? Why are we more worried about their intentionally outrageous statement than the point they’re trying to draw attention to: Why are all chefs male?