12/8/2025

 Monday, December 8, 2025

1996 Geri and I were in Rome and witnessed the Immaculate Conception procession from Via della Conciliazione into St. Peter Square and the bonfire beneath John Paul II's window

2008 Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested by federal officials for attempting to sell the United States Senate seat being vacated by President-elect Barack Obama

2014 CIA Torture Report was released, detailing the CIA's use of torture on detainees between 2001-2006

2019 US officials "deliberately misled" the public on the progress of the Afghanistan war, hid that it was a lost cause, according to The WaPo analysis of the "Afghanistan Papers"

2024 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in the country's war with Russia, with 370,000 injured, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky who estimated the number of Russian casualties at 198,000 soldiers killed and more than 550,000 soldiers injured. 

2024  The Notre-Dame Cathedral in Île de la Cité, Paris, France, reopened and held its first public mass five years after a structural fire damaged the building and destroyed its spire.

In bed at 9, awake around 4, up at 4:25.  13°, w/c 7°, high 26°, cloudy.  

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 6:30 a.m.   

Geri went out to lunch at First Watch with Shirley and Barb.  

Chris and his helper, also named Chris, are installing drywall in the basement all day.  It looks like the whole job, drywall, painting, molding, and flooring, will take about two weeks.  Then we’ll have to deal with all the stuff that was moved into the workroom and the storage area.  I’m daunted at the thought.

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.  Yesterday I wrote about a painting I affectionately called “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid” after the 1987 British movie of the same name.  I liked the movie when I first viewed it many years ago and I tried unsuccessfully to find it on streaming services or on a DVD over the following years.  Yesterday I discovered it on YouTube, and Geri and I watched it last night. The screenplay was written by Hanif Kureishi and director Stephen Frears.  It is set in London in the 1980s   It is a terribly depressing flick and, as I watched it, I wondered what it was that had appealed to me when I first saw it.  I suppose it was the fact that it painted such of grim portrait of Margaret Thatcher’s London by focusing on the city’s have-nots, Bohemians, anarchists, homeless, sexual deviates, buskers, Black and Asian minorities.  There are three main characters: Sammy and Rosie, who are married, and Sammy’s father, Rafi.  Sammy and Rafi are South Asians, probably Pakistanis.  Rafi was an official of some sort in their homeland but it is never made clear what kind of official.  What is made very clear is that he was a crook of some sort, stealing much money and squirreling it away in some London bank.  He was also involved in some way in law enforcement, or intelligence or homeland security work, and had people tortured.  A major/minor character in the film is one of his countrymen whom he had tortured.  He appears throughout the film and in Rafi’s dreams.  

There are a number of subplots in the movie, including the open marriage of Sammy and Rosie, the relationship of Rafi and his former lover Alice,  the relationships of Sammy and Rosie with their respective lovers, the relationship between Rafi and the Black, Danny or 'Victoria,' but throughout the story hangs the alienation of the characters and the abyss between the demimonde in which the characters live and the world of Margaret Thatcher.  I don't offer any generalizations about the meaning(s) or lessons of the movie, because I wouldn't know what to say.   I'm not sure what point or points Kureishi and Fears were trying to make, if any.  The movie starts and ends with the voice of Margaret Thatcher at the start of her prime ministership, starting with her saying they had a lot of work to do, starting with the nation's inner cities (where Sammy and Rosie and their friends lived) and ending with bulldozers destroying the trailer encampment where Rosie's lover lived, featuring a voiceover of Thatcher reciting the Prayer of St. Francis, 'Where there is discord, may I bring harmony, etc.'  I spent part of the afternoon re-watching the last third of the movie to see if I could get some understanding of what the movie's point was,  I failed. 

Notes:  Ghost: You said to Rosie that I was the price to be paid for the overall good of our sad country, yes?  Rafi: Forgive me.  Ghost: how could that be possible now?  R: It was not I that made the mischief.  I was not there, if it happened at all.  Ghost: You were not there, it is true, but you gave the orders.  You were in your big house, drinking illegally, slapping women’s asses, adulterous, sending money out of the country and listening, I’ve heard, to the songs of Vera Lynn.  Rafi: The country needed a sense of direction, of identity; people like you organizing into unions discouraged and disrupted all progress.  Ghost: All of human life you desecrated.  Electrocution   Bulldozers   Alice; is that you, Norman?   Yes, making London a cleaner and safer place.

I've been brain-dead all day.