last tina tuesday of january

"Peanut butter jelly time!

Peanut butter jelly time!!

Peanut butter jelly with a baseball bat!!!"

hahahaha!

Seriously, there's one in the 'gift' closet.

No, silly, the baseball bat, from a Savannah Sand Gnats game.

The sandwich was breakfast today! 

See the cup of coffee?

(smile!)

 

I've been on a peanut butter jelly kick for most of the month, having one as a snack, as breakfast, as dinner, but, oddly, not for lunch.

I wonder: when February arrives, will the craze fade?

Who knows?

Oh, look!!!

Squirrel!!!

Hahahaha!

No, really, just look at that gorgeous tree!

The Japanese magnolia has recovered so nicely!

It was in bloom for Christina on January 9th.

Then that horrible, horrid, hard freeze came...

and everything became crunchy and brown.

I really feared for this harbinger of spring...

but, no need!

It's busting out all over in pink and purple!

(smile!)

What a happy relief to see it dressed up so brightly!

I was on my way to the AMC to finish off my A*List with a last viewing of "Wonka".

I do so enjoy that musical!

As good fortune would have it, I was the only one in the screening room, so I stood up and danced several times - hooray!!!

What an excellent movie.

So was "Godzilla Minus One Minus Color", seen on Friday with Barbara.

As she said, "Godzilla has to be seen on the Big-D"... and it was!!!

Somehow, the black-and-white version made it even more poignant and I found myself crying several times while watching those valiant men take on such a monumental task...

like saving Tokyo from a creature capable of nuclear blasts...

all while dealing with a "war that was not yet over" for them.

Wow.

Barbara was there with me on Monday, too, for that one in the middle.

Genie Lawson, an HVJ alum like me, was in the movie and we had arranged for us to see it that day, but then she had to back out.

So, what do I have to say about "Origin"?

Well, the scene with the husband's funeral was filmed at Asbury Memorial Church.

There's another scene, a party, that took place at the Rotunda in the Telfair Museum.

There are other scenes that I recognized the place, but not the name of it.

And was Genie in it?

Yes, she was, though I didn't realize it was her; she was one of a group of "Jewish" women getting their heads shaved by the Nazis.

What about the meat of the movie, the story weaving these bits together?

Let me just say this: for a movie that was not supposed to be about race, it sure did have a lot of incendiary racist events along the way.

This was meant to be a semi-documentary - i.e., biographical drama - about how Isabel Wilkerson, the author of "Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents", developed her hypothesis and wrote her book.

I have to believe the book is better.

Barbara was taken with the movie, but she buys into the whole "white guilt" thing.

She was taken aback that I not only never intend to see the movie again but that I would not have seen it this time had I realized what it was about.

Perhaps the emphasis on race, rather than caste, is the fault of Ava DuVernay, who wrote the screenplay and directed "Origin".

I had a very good discussion with Carolyn a few minutes ago about that.

She had just seen it and wanted my take on it.

We talked for over an hour.

Some of the talk was about the scenes of Savannah in the movie.

Some of our talk was on the overly-long, overwrought, emotional scenes that held back the motion of the film and simply added to the time stamp.

However, most of our discussion was about the race-on-race issues overlooked by the movie, issues such as whites on Jews, whites on Catholics, whites on Irish, whites on Chinese, whites on Asians, et cetera - and that's just in this country.

I'm not even including the black-on-black issues, such as dark-skinned versus high yellow or high yellow versus red.

The movie didn't go into any of that; did the book?

I don't know.

Here's what I do know: caste didn't come into existence until people started living in social groups that included strangers.

That system to differentiate arose when ancient peoples changed their lifestyle from hunter-gatherer, consisting of roaming families intent on staying alive, to farmer-animal husbandry in a fixed locale with other, nonfamilial, groups of people.

That fixed-place lifestyle gave people more time to develop artistic items and to notice what each of them had... and to covet those items.

That began "the haves" and "the have nots" classes.

Amazingly, by coincidence, I had just read an article written for Smithsonian magazine and published last summer.

Right place, right time.

Had I read the magazine when I received it, I might not have remembered the article.

"When Did Humans Start Settling Down?" was the title, and it was all about a years-long archaeological dig in a 12,000-year old village near the Sea of Galilee.

It's interesting to me that it took two hikers - one a self-taught archaeologist, the other a scholar - to find the village remains and to realize the importance of the artifacts. 

That was in 1963.

It would mostly wait until 2010 before anyone would take up the excavation of the site.

That person was a woman, Leore Grosman, of Hebrew University.

Here's the intriguing basis: the people who settled there stayed for 200 years.

There's evidence that they practiced animal husbandry and grew some plants.

There's evidence that they developed tools for making yarn and made artistic items.

There's even evidence that they had housing subdivisions with a model layout, as well as a nearby cemetery for their dead.

Then, all of a sudden, they were gone.

And all of that transpired 2,000 years before evidence of such social behavior and settlements were found anywhere else in the world.

Wow, right?

But Matti Friedman, the author of the piece, had some ideas that centered on one concept: the trade of egalitarianism (with everyone in the family having the same status as part of the band working for the sustaining of the others) for inequality (with others in the settlement not taking care of the whole population, just the ones in their family).

Ah, there's the rub.

As found in this ancient village, when people are in a large social group outside their family, they see a need to differentiate themselves and to signal their status.

That's why some of the houses had fancy, hard to make, white tiles, while most did not.

Some of the graves also had those same white tiles, but most did not.

What had been the reason for that differentiation?

That will be a hard puzzle to solve.

This village greatly predates humans recording their history.

However, it does make me wonder: are we inherently flawed, jealous, covetous, animals, or is that behavior a reflection of our living in close quarters with strangers and forced into competing for the same limited resources?

How are we influenced by the artificial families we adopt in society, such as sports teams, religious beliefs, alma maters, fraternities and sororities and clubs?

That's definitely a discussion for a fresher mind, not one for this late time of evening.