It's been nearly a month since I returned from The Trip.  I'm ready to write about something else.


How about the end of an era?  Specifically, the 25-year era of Netflix DVDs.


As you may have heard, Netflix is shutting down that part of their business.   This coming Friday, 09-29, they will ship their last DVDs.  After that, the streaming service will be the only way to get your Netflix on.


I'm one of the (only one million) last holdouts: I've kept my DVD service going until the end.  It's a sad occasion for me.  I realized weeks ago that I felt the need to grieve it in some way, and I've devised a small ritual that will be my way of doing that.


You may scoff, not thinking such an event to be a big enough deal to grieve about.  I'll postpone saying why I'm doing it anyway.  First let me tell you about the ritual itself.


Background: Netflix has also announced that for any single subscriber, the last DVD that one receives need not be returned: you get to keep it.  This was the springboard for my plan: my ritual will be watching that last DVD.


Or actually, the ritual began with choosing that last DVD.  This became a non-trivial process; I considered many candidates.


It needed to be something I would want to watch more than once.  To be sure of that, it should probably be something I've seen before.


But there was another criterion, specific to the ritual per se.  To set the right tone, it needed to be a sad movie.  (Sad, not depressing.  To me, these words are very far from meaning the same thing.  If something is sad, then it isn't depressing.)


I chose Dead Man (1995), directed by Jim Jarmusch, with Johnny Depp in the title role.  (Okay, clarification: his character is not really dead, not in our white-people sense ... until the very end.)  If you're not familiar with this film, there's a pretty good plot summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Man.


Reading about the movie--or, better yet, seeing it--should give you some idea of the kind of "sad" I had in mind.  In turn, this hints at why I'm not perturbed by the scoffer's saying that the end of the Netflix DVD era is not a big enough deal to grieve about.


You see, as the idea took shape, I realized that I would not be grieving only the DVD business.  To some extent, yes, but it would also stand in for other things that, in my universe, need grieving.


By the way, I'm pretty sure that this idea (that a ritual can be explicitly about one thing, but also about other things, which may not be named out loud) is nothing new; it might even be quite familiar.  To those in the ritual biz, anyway.


I don't even think that I could explicitly name all the things that I feel the need to grieve about.  But here's a hint ....


Nothing lasts forever.

This is a follow-on to my previous journal entry …

You don't own me.

… with particular reference to the comments thereupon.

Here is my own attempt to answer my own question: why did "You don't own me" elicit such sad pictures?

What's sad is not the fact that he doesn't own her.

What's sad is the fact that she finds it necessary to say that he doesn't own her.

Whew.  After all that, all three of us (you, I, and Craiyon) deserve to end this journal entry on a less somber note.  So here you go:

The Borg were the original flash mob.  Or, if you question the historical accuracy of that statement, try this one: they were damn good at it.

The Borg were the original flash mob.

Yesterday was a trial run.  Today's is the first case where I was truly impressed with the nonatych [Google it] that Craiyon gave me in response to my [prompt / title] (which you can see just above the pictures).

As a bonus, doesn't the Nosferatu face in the upper left remind you of Rudy Giuliani?

If any of y'all are in touch with Anthony Hopkins, the actor, I'd be obliged if you'd ask him a question for me.  The question is:

When you were making "The Two Popes" [a "Netflix original" released in 2019], did it occur to you that it was essentially a remake of a film you had made years earlier?

If you aren't personally acquainted with Mr. Hopkins, there's still a way that you can participate in this inquiry.  That is to see whether you can come up with the name of the earlier movie to which the question refers.

To make it a little easier, here is the bare-bones plot summary which the two films share.  In each one, Hopkins' character has not only a name, but also a title.  There is also a costume associated with the title. 

And in each film, his character chooses someone to succeed him.  Then he helps that person to prepare: to become (and feel) ready, and worthy, to assume the title (and wear the costume).

Please submit your answers as comments on this journal entry.  Thank you.

January 2025

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