I'm back at Pearl's. Much chillier tonight, feels like it's gonna go down into the low 40s, maybe upper 30s. So far this Fall and Winter, I've been getting by with sweatshirts and Pendletons. Haven't had to wear a jacket even once. That may not last if this keeps up. Plus the Gale Force Winds are back. This afternoon, I met my sister Vickie and our friend Parham ( a student she tutors) out at Lake Balboa. We had a nice walk around the lake but nearly got blown away in the process. The water was so choppy from the wind that small waves were crashing into the cement banks. The large flock of coots in the water were bobbing all over the place, up and down, up and down.....(underwater).....then up and down again. We cracked up because it looked like they were enjoying it.
Elizabeth, I saw your Instagram photo from Minnesota, the snowy Christmas shot overlooking the North Shore. Very much in the wintry spirit of the Holiday, and I hope you had a nice Christmas. You have a lot of courage to position yourself on cliffsides and peaks as you do. I could climb up there, but you would only get me ten feet from the edge, lol (and in the snow, make that twenty feet!)
I Googled some info about Instagram, and I see that it is a medium for iPhones, hence the "instant" aspect of posting photos. I will not be able to post any myself, but I discovered I can do "likes" by double clicking my Chromebook mousepad, so I did my first Instagram "like" this afternoon. Guess which pic it was for....... :)
Tonight I watched a WW2 documentary film called "The True Glory" (1945). I had never heard of it but found it in a library database search for director Garson Kanin, whose name came up in some way that I can't recall. Anyhow, the film was sanctioned by the United States government as an end-of-war statement on the D-Day Invasion of Normandy in June 1944 and how it led to the defeat of Germany 11 months later. The entire film was edited together from battlefield footage shot by military cameramen. That must have been a new phenomenon at the time, to have motion picture cameramen recording the horrors of the war. These photographers must have had some training, too, because they not only capture the immediacy of what is happening all around them but their shots are well framed and tracked. There are no close up scenes of firefights, mostly the camera operators seem to have been situated with artillery battalions or on battleships, but they still photographed the magnitude of what was taking place. A few scenes from Bergen Belsen will shock you to your core.
As one who has tried to make a long and ongoing study of the war, because I think it has been the pivotal event in our modern history, and I also think that it seems to be fading away as an event of major consequence for today's young people, I find that the images shown in the footage of this film and in the famous television documentaries like "The World At War" pretty much say all that can be said. The scenes shot as they were happening far outweigh any words I could write in an attempt to describe them.
When I was a little kid, I was steeped in the war, because my Dad had participated in it. He was a sergeant in the Air Force as you know, not in combat but right behind it, and he was in Germany as part of the occupying Allied force for six months after the war. He saw what is shown in this film, the citycapes bombed to smithereens. Corpses lying by the rubble. I don't know if Dad saw those, perhaps not, but what you see in this film is what The End Of The World would look like from the point of view of one country, Germany, whose crazed leadership started the war. They got bombed "into the Stone Age" for their troubles, as the cliche goes, and you see this in the film. I sometimes find it hard to reconcile the idea of modern life with what happened only 75 years ago, which was a battle for whether the world was going to continue or not. As you know, I strongly believe in the idea of good vs. evil, as far as spiritual forces are concerned, and at that time, evil had established a very strong human presence in the persons of Hitler, et al.
This is no joke, nor conjecture. All one must do is watch the footage that was actually shot during something called a "World War", as if such a thing was just one more inevitable human event. This war ended only fifteen years before I was born, which also blows my mind, because when I was little it seemed like ancient history, but it wasn't. It was recent, and it still is, and 60 million people died.
Sorry to be gruesome. Last night I was writing about the uplift of "Little Women", and now you see why I believe that women should run the world, or at least be given the chance to try.
But I give "The True Glory" Two Huge Thumbs Up for it's depictions of the horrors of war, and for the evidence it shows that the war was just. Many wars aren't just, but this one was, because of what was occurring in Germany. I am of the opinion that neither that country nor Japan should be allowed a military for a good long while to come. Sorry, but that's what I think. Gotta protect the world.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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