With so little to be sure of

 I think the moment when I heard the lambs screaming was (checks watch) fourteen minutes ago.  That's when I came across this post at Joy Reid's blog reporting that intergalactic cockroach envoy Paul Gosar was scheduled to be the star of the American Populist Union gala in Tempe on April 20.  Guests didn't need to be reminded of the significance of the date, of course, and once it was revealed as a Hitler birthday event Gosar promptly wimped out.  The APU can find any number of replacements without crossing the state line.  The Demon Dentist helped organize the January 6 insurrection, but this was a Putsch too far, I guess.  

I then made the mistake of looking for more news.  Like:  the Buffalo police will not be punished for their callous, unprovoked assault on Martin Gugino, fracturing his skull and putting him in the hospital for weeks.  Like:  millions of French people with full access to news about Ukraine nevertheless voted for neo-Vichy candidate Marine le Pen.  Like:  David Mamet, who once was a good playwright, has transformed into a Qcumber, telling Fox News that male teachers are probably mostly pedophiles one way or another.  Like:  the US Bureau of Prisons is advertising for mental health professionals to come work for them because prisons are an exciting place to experience every pathology in the DSM.  Like:  people in Taiwan are organizing and learning self-defense and survival skills with no support from their government (mustn't upset China).  Like this:

So I decided that's enough. 

The Guardian has a lovely appreciation of Singin' In the Rain by Guy Lodge in honor of its seventieth anniversary --seventy years!  I have decided to concentrate only on the things that make me proud to belong to the human species and ignore all the rest before somebody gets killed.  That's not a figure of speech.  I have a cane and I'm willing to use it.

Mr. Lodge says, "The film's first full-scale musical number comes nearly half an hour in, with Donald O'Connor's 'Make 'em laugh.'"  He must have been taken in by the low-end vaudeville setting of "Fit as a Fiddle" and the audience's negative response.  I think it's wonderful.

And in less than three minutes we're away.

Has it stood up better than An American in Paris or Gigi?  I think so.  American is too long and tries too hard, and while we're on the subject, why is Fred Astaire castigated for his blackface tribute to Bill Robinson in Swing Time while Gene Kelly gets a pass for portraying Toulouse-Lautrec's Chocolat here?  It isn't even germane to the plot, like disguising himself as a third Nicholas brother in The Pirate.  As for Gigi, we must now see it as the story of a girl being trained as a courtesan, and even though marriage occurs instead, this can never be all right.  A man in his seventies thanking heaven for little girls is equally queasy-making.  It's like blackface.  Times have changed.

So although its plot turns on an impossibility (post-recording was not available until the 1930s), Singin' In the Rain deserves its place on everybody's best-films list.  It helps that Cyd Charisse dances but is not called upon to speak.  Like Lina Lamont, talking was not her strongest skill.