I haven't left the building.  My computer caught a virus and spent Wednesday afternoon to this afternoon at the computer doc's office.

I have not seen, and will not see, A Clockwork Orange.  I heard the gratuitous violence would be more than I could take.

I suppose you liked Reservoir Dogs, too.

I watched your Reservoir Dogs but half way through remembered I had seen it before. The ending wasn't any better the second time than the first. A movie made for American audiences and full of violence.

Break down and rent Empire of the Sun, you will thank me that you did.

Try Bridge over the River Kwai. The best Jap prisoner film made.

I would say it's good but liked the Unbroken which is another Japanese camp movie.

Give you all a little hint, it's a true story about an America Olympian star and who joins the America air-force and gets shot down and gets picked up by the Japanese and gets put in one of their death work camps and the movie shows just how brutal they were treated. an Excellent movie and it's playing on Tubi right now. Tubi is a free channel with a lot of free movie.

 Also would say Empire of the Sun was better movie that The River Kwai.

Now I will be marching around & whistling all day, Major. Damn you for bringing up that great movie. 

He'll destroy them as he probably stars in them. 

marquis, don  archy and mehitabel 1927. Sorry for the lack of capital letters and punctuation.  Archy is a vers libre poet who died and was reincarnated as a cockroach.  He can't work the shift key.  To the point, this is a line from one of archy s observations while in London and encountering ghosts:

one of the most pathetic

sights however

is to see the ghost of queen victoria going out every

evening with the ghost 

of a scepter in her hand

to find mr lytton strachey

and bean him.....

I googled Lytton Strachey but I couldn't find a reason why Queen Victoria would want to bean him.  Is he a character in British nursery rhymes or something?  Don Marquis is pretty accurate in his other historical mentions.

He published a biography of Queen Victoria in 1921, I've not read it but the reviews say it isn't particularly controversial, although he does claim that Prince Albert wasn't in love with Victoria when they were married but did become so later, perhaps that's why. 

He'll destroy them as he probably stars in them. 

You’ve got a particularly venomous strain of TDS Mark but no, he won’t be in them, no matter how many times you click your heels and say, there’s nowt like a good moan.

Elon Musk suggests otherwise. 

So he did Mark on X. He lost billions yesterday over his Tesla's stocks dropping thanks to D. Trump. Trump also want's to cancel all of America's contract with him but he can't says the Lawyers.

An interesting passage from the novel I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Set in England the mid 1930s two girls are dining with two American men. Does it ring true?

"It appears that in America it is polite to cut up each mouthful, lay down the knife on your plate, change your fork from the left hand to the right hand, load it, eat the forkful, change the fork back to your left hand, and pick up the knife again - and you must take only one kind of food on the fork at a time: never a nice comfortable wodge of meat and vegetables together. 

'But that takes so long' I said.

'No it doesn't' said Neil. 'Anyway, it looks terrible to me the way you all hang on to your knives'"

An accurate observation?  

What a strange lot you are! Here everyone, myself included, keep hold of both knife and fork throughout, only putting one down to pick up a drink. Mixing items on one forkful is OK too, a bit of beef and some cabbage etc.   

It had never occurred to me that there was a different way of using a knife and fork until I read it in Dodie Smith's novel.   

Because we are a melting pot nation, there are always exceptions to every rule, depending on the household and family traditions.  Sopping is a matter of personal preference.  I think it's instinctual.  

I recommend I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith - set in the 1930s, an eccentric English family living in a leased tumbledown castle are faced by the arrival of the new owners, two American brothers.