Consortium of Seven: Year 2

        I'm not sure what's completely gone into my personal brew this week, but I'm feeling low, sad, regretful and particularly mortal. I'm sure getting into a sudden binge of the first season of Criminal Minds - a 15-season crime procedural that ran from 2005 through last year, but which I'd never bothered to watch while it was running - hasn't helped. You'd think I'd remember from Chicago Hope and Dead Like Me that spending too much time with Mandy Patinkin playing a non-conformist authority figure overseeing grim matters isn't conducive to good emotional health. Live and hopefully learn. Nah, I can't blame it completely on Patinkin, but the rest of it are things for me to work out. At least (so far) they haven't let him sing.       A hodgepodge this week. If I mention something new-to-me that you've seen, any reinforcements or warnings are (almost) always appreciated.       This week Disney+ wrapped the fir...

         Happiness, control, and reality . The connections between them, their nature, and the subjectivity of each are a set of themes I realize I've come back to again and again all my life.       I turned ten in 1971, the year that James Goldman's 1961 play, They Might Be Giants , was released as an occasionally absurdist, ultimately sentimental film starring George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward.        In it, Scott plays a man who believes himself to be Sherlock Holmes. I was immediately taken by its wrestling with the question of the subjectivity of reality, happiness, and which of the two is more important. The title plays on Don Quixote - which also looms large in the film itself - and that benighted knight's view of the world, and in that specific instance, windmills. The film was released fifty years ago last week. Time continues to hammer me with reminders.        Here's a trailer f...