The Gideonse Bible   With the beard? Yeah, you!

Since I have to exert a great deal of effort to feel patriotic — the last time I un-ironically embraced the flag was after 9/11, when I had one sticking out of my messenger bag — I do not get very excited about the 4th of July. We were invited to only one party on the 4th this year, and I couldn’t be bothered to go. That might be because the 3rd of July party we went to resulted in me falling asleep at 9pm and possibly embarrassing myself at 7pm. So, I wasn’t in the mood to socialize the next day. But since I went to bed at 9pm, I got up at 8am. And that meant I had a full day with which to do something. So, I did a lot. Or some.

I had my first cup of coffee while browsing through Facebook and the Times, both of which were full of delicious Sarah Palin bashing. I especially enjoyed Gail Collins’s slam:

“And a problem in our country today is apathy,” she said on Friday as she announced that she would resign as governor of Alaska at the end of the month. “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’ No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time … to BUILD UP.”

Basically, the point was that Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter. Or a deceased salmon.

Eventually, I ended up in my Netflix queue. Now that I’ve finally declared Lars and the Real Girl “missing,” we’re going to start getting movies again, so I needed to freshen it up a bit. I also was reminded that I have an instant queue, too, and that it works with my Tivo. Though not always well. Well, it didn’t work well in the old place; the wireless connection was somewhat useless, choppy and prone to “loading” notices, so I had to run a cord from the router in the study all the way into the living room to make it work. I decided to test the wireless connection with Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which I somehow had never seen but which I knew enough about to be an ironic 4th of July choice. I learned two things: The wireless connection is great, and Dr. Strangelove is, yes, actually as good as everyone says it is.

This was my favorite scene. It’s so profoundly ridiculous and yet also sweet, and Sellers’s timing is perfect. I had been chuckling through the movie and then I started cackling here. I was afraid I was going to wake Rob, but he didn’t stir, even during the rather loud machine gun scenes. (He slept til 12:30pm.) I loved how weird and scathing and anti-American and avant garde the movie is, especially for the time. I mean, hello, it lost the Oscar for Best Picture to My Fair Lady, which is silly dreck. The Wikipedia entry has some great details, such as how Sellers based his President Muffley on Adlai Stevenson and improvised Strangelove’s Nazi salute at the end. Also, the end was originally supposed to be a giant pie fight. But it didn’t work out. Sort of like the release date of the film; it was supposed to come out a week after JFK was assassinated, but they thought that would be inappropriate, so they waited a year. I guess that’s sort of patriotic.

After the movie was over, I woke up Rob. I didn’t realize that after I’d fallen asleep, he’d gone out and didn’t get to bed until after 3am. So, sleeping past noon wasn’t totally weird. Still: It was time to get some unpacking done. We had moved all of our things to the new place on June 21, and unpacked all of the books last weekend. We have way too many books. Way, way. This weekend was all about hanging pictures. While Rob gave Hermia a bath — since Hermia, after almost being crushed a by a falling futon and hiding in her litter box after the move and then surprisingly becoming perky and well-behaved and curious about her new home, still gets poop stuck to her backside — and watered the plants and shopped for dinner, I hammered nails into the walls and arranged photos. It took forever, since I kept redoing the composition and transferring pictures from frame to frame. But finally, by 5pm or so, I’d managed to finish the living room and dining room.

We decided to break out the new Weber — thanks, Sarah! — since it was the 4th. Rob grilled sausages and peppers, and he made sauerkraut, since he is so in love with the kraut at the Linkery. I made my white bean salad (that I had also made for the aforementioned 3rd of July party), and we settled onto the couch with a few beers. And we watched Babes in Arms.

God, that movie is so annoying. I saw the theatrical version at the City Center Encores! in 1999 and loved it, but the film version has two main problems: a histrionic and bizarrely Oscar-nominated Mickey Rooney and the absense of the Rodgers and Hart songs that made the show actually good. What’s the point of seeing Babes in Arms if no one sings “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Johnny One Note” and “I Wish I Were in Love Again”? Especially if you’ve got Judy Garland. It’s just bizarre that they cut all of the original songs except for the title song, which is sung during a ridiculous Busby Berkeley-meets-Les Miz march and burn, and “Where or When,” which is sung by the dreadfully boring and soon to be wed Betty Jaynes and Douglas McPhail, the latter of whom was soon to be dead. (Poison.) While the story is touchingly Depression-era uplift, with the kids of down-on-their-luck Vaudeville performers putting on a show to save their families, there are two other Depression-era parts of the film that are difficult to take, to say the least: the horrifying, neverending minstrel show number with both Rooney and Garland in black face (ARGH!) and the closing number, “God’s Country,” which is a paen to nationalism that made me want to barf. The film is patriotic, and in just the way to make me loathe patriotism. I’d provide a video, if either were on Youtube.

That said, there was one lovely number. Judy! Oh, Judy.