On the advice of Abel Kerevel I searched youtube for Santori and watched some of the earlier portions. One odd thing that struck me was the drummer wearing blackface at one of their performances. I suppose they wouldn’t have a history giving them an allergy to such behavior (although reportedly western Europe is more P.C in that regard than the U.S), but at the same time why would the idea of doing that even occur? Were Al Jolson movies really popular in Iran back in the day?

I feel lucky when I discover an entire movie has been placed on youtube, because I know it likely won’t last. A month or so ago I watched a few Werner Herzog movies placed by a user who has since been banned, and a few days ago found that someone had uploaded a lot of black-and-white classics like The Killers and Gun Crazy. The former is not to be confused with the superior “The Killing” by Stanley Kubrick. The latter has a rather lame protagonist but also a magnificent bitch who picks up the slack. I suppose they had to make the woman irredeemably terrible so you don’t feel too bad about her getting killed. That climactic moment was the only time Lila from Dexter did not get on my nerves. Perhaps it was just a more poorly written character or a worse English accent (which the English actress apparently had to be trained to do because her natural voice didn’t sound stereotypically English enough for the boneheaded casting director) because with Gun Crazy you (by which I mean myself generalized to all right-thinking people) want the trail of destruction to continue rather than put out of its misery promptly.

I don’t really have anything to add on John Maynard Smith’s “The Theory of Evolution”. It’s a good book that I recommend to all and possibly sundry. I wanted to replace it with Trita Parsi’s “Treacherous Alliance”, since Iran is in the news, but apparently the library got rid of it and I found Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” instead.