Something About Everything

well

Make your future | Sergio Mora  Magic Paintings

the military.

Which is honestly a place you would expect fatalistic humor to be common and used as a coping method. You’re one “oops” away from death on the flight deck, one inch to the left and you don’t have a head anymore because the jet that just landed now owns it as a wing-tip decoration. So you joke about it because lowkey you’re fucking terrified it’ll happen, but you’re also desensitized to the danger itself because you face it every single day for 12 hours at a time.

One of my favorite movies is Singing In The Rain which came in out 1952, right on the tailcoat of two world wars and a looming cold one, and for all it’s a cheery happy musical, it’s got this really bleak witty humor too, things like “call me a cab!” “okay, you’re a cab!” or the scene where Don says he’ll be homeless by the next day and Cosmo cheerfully tells him not to be ridiculous…the bank bailiffs don’t open till Monday.

And then quite probably one of my favorite opening lines, where two young girls are watching Lina on screen and one says  “She’s so refined. I think I’ll kill myself.”

Which really resonates with a lot of the things we say now when talking about people we find personally attractive, meaning not only is fatalism not a new trend, but those two girls at the starting sequence of Singing In The Rain are totally there for Lina, not Don. 

Coping mechanisms aren’t necessarily good things. They may relieve stress temporarily, but one must develop long term strategies to relieve stress or address what’s actually causing the stress.

So a while back (I can’t remember exactly when but I think it was some time around the 40s/50s), a bunch of penguins escaped. A keeper left the gate open so a bunch of penguins just… followed them. And the people loved it. Look at these adorable birds outside their cage just following that guy around! So they get all the penguins back inside and realise that none of them really ran off, they just followed the keeper and went back inside and crowd thought it was amazing, so why not make it a regular thing? Get enough people there that if one of them goes to make a run for it (which at least one has in the past), they can’t get past the people, and let the ones who want outside have a little wander. So every day, they get a crowd, they open the gate, and whatever penguins want to get out can go, waddle about, squawk at people, and then hop back inside.

Rainbow

Arthur Ferrier