Beautiful Words :):) + "Mary's Mosaic" + "Deepwater Horizon"

Happy Late Night, my Darling,

I saw your post this morning via Patrick, and - assuming it was meant for me - I have to tell you that it was very beautiful, and that it made me feel very happy all day, so thank you. :):) I also saw a post about a friend's grandma, and so I thought maybe you were visiting your own grandma? Just a guess, of course.

I was glad to hear from you, and especially in such a wonderful way, and I hope all is going according to plan for your screening tomorrow. It will be great, and it will also continue to build your resume.

Today was Tuesday, so no hike - and anyway it rained this afternoon - but I began a new book, "Mary's Mosaic" by Peter Janney. This book was mentioned by Phillip Nelson, the LBJ author, and it deals with the 1964 murder of a woman named Mary Pinchot Myer, who was having an affair with John F. Kennedy. Kennedy, alas, though a great President, was far from perfect as a man, and had many, many women in his life, even though he was married to Jackie. Mary Myer was one such woman, and she and JFK were particularly close. Well, she was murdered just a few months after the Kennedy assassination, likely because she knew who was involved. So it's one more piece of the puzzle. Last year I worked on the Tim McVeigh/Oklahoma City bombing case and read four major books about it; this year I am doing LBJ and Kennedy.

Tonight's movie was "Deepwater Horizon", one of the best disaster movies I've ever seen. You know the story : the BP Oil Spill of 2010. We all saw that for months on end on CNN, but what we didn't see was what happened on the oil rig, which was truly horrific. It's a wonder anyone survived. The movie spends the first hour setting up the situation, which starts out bad and gets continually worse, as BP company men on board the rig keep pushing to bypass safety regulations in order to speed up a drilling project. Those guys were indicted in real life, and they should have gone to prison.

Films like this are where Hollywood comes in, with it's big budgets and technical know-how. While my favorite films are always the art cinema and old Hollywood I so often talk about, there are a few things that New Hollywood specialises in, and that is a big, thrilling technically perfect blockbuster like "Deepwater Horizon". When they do it right - and you can always count on Peter Berg as a director - the results are first rate.

So that was all the news today. You will have a great seminar tomorrow, so congrats in advance! Post if you can about how it went. :)

I will see you in the morning.

I Love You.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)