Yes.  I want to know the truth of all this. 

R. Craigen: you're absolutely correct. I certainly don't expect that my own personal experience with the family prior to this story has any evidentiary qualities. I know it doesn't. I don't know what happened.  

My question is whether people believe the story contains everything one possibly needs to know to form a reasonable assumption of guilt. Do you trust AP got it right?    That's all. 

T-Fiks: would mentioning Dreyfus' innocence be just as relative? No. 

Note:  this is not a critique of the ideals of libertarians, just their ground game. I mean, you can try to tell someone who's just spent a church-sponsored stint at a homeless shelter that they're just fostering dependency, but it's not going to take. 

Interesting. In my community, there are no visible, obvious manifestations of the Federal Government, except - perhaps - funds to replace a crumbling bridge over the creek. The city government isn't exactly laissez-faire, but all of the public manifestations are attractive and useful, inasmuch as the boulevards are clean and verdant, the streetlights historically appropriate, the new median in the commercial district sprouting a line of new trees that will grow to provide beauty and shade.

The churches are liberal and well-attended. The moderately-conservative church has a cop on Sunday to parse the traffic. Aside from a few stubborn locales, business vacancies are rare. The elementary school boasts exceptional student scores; parent participation in all the schools is high. 

It's a clean, safe place, and probably 94% Democratic. It's a marvelous community. Affluence + bedrock Midwestern values means the residents are insulated from the meta-scale consequences of their voting patterns, but good luck trying to convince them that benevolent statism doesn't work. It does. For some. For a while. 

Also, people around here really volunteer. Because they're liberals. The liberal churches are big on charity. No "Ayn Rand Foodbank." Just sayin'.

Forgot one: "Peggy Sue Got Married. " The titular character, fully grown, has found herself back in time as a teen, and she goes home on an ordinary day, seeing everything that was lost over the decades.  The old house; Mom in the kitchen; grandma on the phone. Her incomprehension over finding herself inhabiting her younger self melting away to emotions of joy she can't express.

It's a five-hanky scene on its own; John Barry makes you reach for another dozen. If you're susceptible to this sort of thing, that is. It starts out high and slow and simple for the first minute and a half, but I think you can tell when the emotions finally overwhelm Peggy Sue. 

Really? Well, to each his own, but I read "joyous" as "thrilling," and the music tracks with the action perfectly.

Three more notes: agreed on Bear; he's great, and I'd add Jeff Beals in the genre of great TV composers.

Can't stand Elfman anymore. Oompa-oompa oomph-oompa.

Mentioned "Aliens" above - one of the most satisfying pieces of classical reuse came at the end of "Alien," with Howard Hanson's "Romantic" symphony played at the end. It let people leave the theater without feeling completely dismantled.

And then there's this. Fighting the fight for the whole world to save.  When they pour it on after 1:30 . . . well.

Every deed. Everything thought. 'Tis for thee. 

As a friend of mine once said: "the best states have the worst themes." 

As effective music for the scene, there’s the action category: James Horner wrote something for “Aliens” called “Bishop’s Countdown,” which pasted everyone back in their seats in the theater. Ditto those who noted Horner’s “Battle in the Mutara Nebula,” for the same reasons. Horner’s work in the last few years has been hit and miss - there’s the same 88-key piano glissando and four-note trumpet tattoo in every - single - score. 

His "Titanic" score always felt like a missed opportunity, but the music he wrote for the sinking is pretty terrifying - and was almost completely drowned out in the film. It's a wordless chorus of horror rising like the voices of everyone ever drowned at sea. 

If you liked Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire, well, he was just getting warmed up. This is movie music. By which I mean “Ferrante and Teicher meet Enigma.”

Berrnnard Herrmann, of course. I believe he invented science-fiction music with this one.

It’s not just the theramin, it’s that twinkling ostinato behind it that summons up the stars.

1. It's been a long time since I've had Jack Daniels. Back in DC my post-work bump was a Jim Beam 7; now my Friday brown-likker preferences rotate between Maker's, Bulleit, Bulleit Rye, and Buffalo Trace.

2. If you were wondering what my reference to pulling the chain across the Golden Horn meant (there was lots of crosstalk) - in Byzantine times they closed the harbor with an enormous iron rope. All I know about the place and its history comes from a book called "Lost to the West," an account of the Roman Empire in its Eastern incarnation. A great read; it's like stumbling across a parallel universe where the Roman Empire soldiered on for another thousand years. Which it did, in a sense. 

3. Those are two of my favorite podcast guests. The rest of the day was an anticlimax.

The subject of my most recent National Review column, I do believe. (Print only.)

Certain strata of society have no confidence in Western values because they either produced, allowed, or encouraged slavery, imperialism, ecological spoilage, sexist institutions, and so on. The fact that these sins are hardly unique to the West, and that the values of the West pushed us to reject them, is irrelevant. What we once took as our distinctive birthright is now Original Sin. 

The religious factions argue for an expansive definition of personhood; their opponents want to use the instruments of the state to narrow the definition of personhood. When has this worked out for the better? As with most progressive constructs: the next time. Because that will be totally different. Because.

As readers of my site are probably tired of hearing, I'm trying to revive appreciation of a humorist who worked in radio from the 40s to the 70s. Her name is Peg Lynch, and she wrote AND starred in a daily sitcom called "Ethel and Albert" and "The Couple Next Door." (Same show, more or less; same co-star and tone.)

She didn't write punchlines. She wrote amusing stories and scenarios, tidy, economical, deftly drawn; the acting makes it funny and often hilarious. Thurber was a fan, among others. (They were neighbors.) I hope to interview her in person this summer; she's 96 and still bright.

And still very funny. 

I really don't look happy about where this is leading, do I. 

Aw, c'mon. The slave girl - er, differently-emancipated woman - was just speaking truth to power. That's all you really need to know. 

Thanks, Tabula - that line just popped out while I was figuring out what to say this week. Turns out that was it. 

But of course, they wanted 932 more words, so.