Gloom, despair and agony on me

Lately I've been watching an alarming number of documentaries about awful stuff. Nuclear proliferation. The Zimbardo experiment. Rwandan genocide. And of course Nazis and the Holocaust. Rewatching Blood in the Face left me particularly curious about how such obvious marginal stupidity could ever have ensnared an entire nation. Surely the German version in the 1930s must somehow have been more appealing than the Michigan version from the 1980s.

To test the question, I sat through Triumph of the Will. And no. It has more polish on it. The choreography is better. It's considerably larger. But otherwise it's painfully obviously the exact same blend of overdeveloped ability to hate and underdeveloped ability to think.

And worse, as a hideous side effect I now have the Horst Wessel Song stuck in my head. Thank goodness I don't actually know the lyrics. So it goes something like

Lift up the flag
And rotten Nazi bullshit
Don't know the words
So yakka blabba blah

On a happier note, last night at dinner I got a fortune cookie fortune that said "Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film." Normally I like fortunes to be fortunes, something more like "You will make a journey over water." But this one was actually fine with me.

Buck: I'm a pickin'

Roy: And I'm a grinnin'

All: Nyah ya ya nyah nyah, nyah ya ya nyah nyah nyah

Roy: Hey Buck, did you know I've got a photographic memory?

Buck: Yeah, Roy. Too bad you forgot to buy film for it.

All: Nyah ya ya nyah nyah, nyah ya ya nyah nyah nyah

And for those of you fortunate enough to have no idea what that last bit just was, feast on the bygone video horror that was Hee Haw.