Here's my one-phone-screen review of Dune*

* This is nothing original. In fact, this is highly influenced by a bunch of stuff I read about it from several writers of color, mostly before the movie even came out. However, this is shorter. And our interest in several of the stars and enthusiasm for great cinematography prompted me to spend some time mulling over it.

Dune Checklist

✅ Grasped that jihad isn't a good thing

✅ Grasped that Paul Atreides isn't a hero or white savior

✅ Captured the mood and conveyed the themes of the novel

✅ Everyone wasn't white, at least

🔲 Understood that the Arabic and North African racial and cultural identities and contexts in the real history that the story explores are an integral part of the story, carefully and deliberately constructed that way and signaled with unmistakable signs throughout by Herbert

All Saints' Day (Observed), or: Puppy & Ignominy

Yesterday was the day All Saints' Day (actually Nov. 1, as anyone Catholic or whose personality was indelibly imprinted with the Night on Bald Mountain segment of Fantasia knows) is observed in the Finnish state Lutheran church, and Wax's brother and his wife (who is also their fourth cousin) and their four teenagers came to the church along with BIL's MIL (who was a lifelong friend of my recently deceased MIL). (Swedish-speaking Finland is very tightly interconnected. They call it the duckpond.) You can't take dogs inside the church, so they left Luci the Havanese puppy with us for about half an hour first. She was overjoyed to see us again and we gave her lots of petting and belly rubs. She tried to steal catfood (failed), cat poop (failed), and bunny poop (succeeded, because it can't hurt her and it's not even stinky) and spooked the bunnies, but the cats still remember her and were chill. I mean, Tristana hopped up above her reach but I think this was mainly to avoid being sniffed? She came down later. Snookums ignored her completely.

After the service (? maybe it's just a ceremony? seemed short) they all invaded our home for a few minutes - long enough for everybody to pet the cats and for BIL's MIL to have a brief tour of our house, where she's never been before. Then we all walked to the jazz café - which is dog friendly and has a resident dog, but our little coronapuppy is still a bit undersocialized and embarrassed everybody by growling at her, and we had to hold her under the table - and then up the hill to the graveyard to light a candle at the family grave.

Wax's ancient great-aunt-in-law had given us a packet of candles and said we might want to take over the care of it a few months ago, because she used to go there and do it regularly and I guess she's now retiring; but Wax and I have not been there once since, and we normally don't care about these things, but on the spot the lack of plantings did look a bit sad. Maybe we'll plant some heather there when we get the car back. Like, not out of belief or respect, but the graveyard is a nice little place and the stones look nicer with little plantings.

Speaking of which... we had a great time strolling around the graveyard and visiting all the family graves, even though we were a little bit haunted by a small group of extremely old, sad, solemn men in expensive formal dress with white scarves and bald heads who were apparently mourning a bunch of people who just happened to be near the people we were mourning - well, visiting anyway - or at least, trying to, while our family group was laughing and carrying on three conversations at once and messing up their group photos. Every time we noticed them near us it was like "Psst!" "Shit!" and then we'd try to move on to the next grave someone wanted to see, but it kept happening.

Anyway, we walked home and then we walked to the garage to pick up our car. We had dropped him off last weekend - 'him' because our car is Bernie the Berlingo, an elderly white cargo minivan - because of the steering giving little jerks pretty much constantly as long as the accelerator was pressed, and Google listed like ten things that could be and told us we had to get it checked out. But the garage said they tested him and couldn't find anything wrong, so they guess we can just come pick him up. So we walked two and a half kilometers to the garage parking lot, shortly after sundown, and got lost three times on the way there because the neighborhood looks different in the dark... only to discover they apparently forgot to leave us the key. So we had to walk back, and we also had to buy the bare minimum of groceries, because we had to carry them with our hands. We were already too tired to prepare food when we got to the store though, so we bought trays of sushi from the in-store sushi chef. That was nice at least. One is glad that the Finnish-Japanese sympatico has extended to trained sushi chefs spreading out to supermarkets in every little corner of our land, including the island towns of 15k.

Hopefully we'll recover Bernie on Tuesday and also hopefully when we text the chimney sweep tomorrow he'll say he is free to sweep our chimney soon so we can start lighting fires. It was only 3° above freezing today!