Interests and irritations to a guy on a red horse.
Quotes
"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"
"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain
Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”
If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill
"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero
As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”
"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan
"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler
"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day
"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown
"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"
Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples
“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift
Last weekend Hurricane Irma clobbered Florida, and we offered by way of aural consolation a special edition of our Song of the Week dedicated to "Songs in the Keys of Florida". It included this 1980s hit by Bertie Higgins:
We had it all
Just like Bogie and Bacall
Starring in our own Late Late Show
Sailing away to Key Largo...
Which made me think maybe it's time for Key Largo as our Saturday-night movie date. And then I thought some more and decided that the Bogie/Bacall film I really
liked from that neck of the woods, or seas, was set in another patch of
Irma-devastated real estate. So we're going to do what Howard Hawks did
when he bought the rights to Ernest Hemingway's original novel of To Have and Have Not:
Hawks relocated the story from Key West to Martinique, and likewise
we're swapping Key Largo for Martinique, where we have at least a couple
of readers, whom I hope are holding up okay. And, if you're one of our
Keys readers, well, Humphrey Bogart's fishing boat in this film retaines
its Florida origins: the Queen Conch, registered in Key West.
It started as a dare. Howard Hawks bet Hemingway that he could make a
picture of his worst book. Hemingway said: "What's my worst book?"
Hawks answered: "That bunch of junk called To Have and Have Not."
"I needed the money," pleaded Hemingway, before declaring that nobody
could make a decent picture out of it. So Hawks called in various old
hands to work on the script, including Hemingway's longtime novelist
rival and now penniless loser William Faulkner. And by the time it
opened in late 1944 Hemingway's story had turned into Casablanca
sideways: This time not French North Africa but the French West Indies;
not Claude Rains as the cynical Capitaine Renault, but Dan Seymour as
the cynical Capitaine Renard; not Mr and Mrs Victor Laszlo as the famed
Resistance figures who need to be spirited out of Casablanca, but M et
Mme Paul de Bursac as the famed Resistance figures who need to be
spirited out of Fort-de-France; not Rick's Café but the Marquis hotel,
where sitting at the piano is not Sam but Cricket. And through it all
there's Bogart, playing the world-weary politically indifferent American
who remains studiously neutral before being forced to choose sides.
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