RIFLE RANGE BOY

Perfect Days (Japanese, 2023) Director: Wim Wenders (Please note: It is plural, not singular. Every day is a perfect day, and there are many!) This is a reminder to recreational cyclists over 60: Just enjoy every opportunity that comes your way. By the twist of fate or alms from karma, you can go out, pedal, and feel the wind whisk by as you zoom downhill. Only some people are gifted with the privilege to do this. There is no need to outdo a fellow cyclist, go all out for a personal record, or invest in a state-of-the-art, spanking-new machine to keep up with the Joneses. Every completed cycling route happens on a perfect day. There will be many perfect days. This beautifully crafted film gets all my thumbs up. It moves very slowly with apparently no definite direction, but that, in essence, that is the message behind the movie. We should find happiness in the things around us.  The protagonist, Hirayama, is a creature of routine. He gets up to the rhythmic pace of a street sweeper...

So you go around with a chip on your shoulder, with the nose so high up in the air as if you walk inhaling imported air. You straddle around like you are on Yudhistira's chariot, always two feet above the ground, quite full of air. You speak with such confidence convinced that your listeners are impressed with your command of the language. You think you produced a masterpiece that everybody would sing only praises of it. That is until you send it for proofreading. That is when your bubble bursts, your ego gets deflated, and you get down from your mighty horse and is brought down to the ground. You soon realise that the things which you had taken for granted mean more than what meets the eyes. You get an extra 'e' when you are a lady engaged to a man. A fiancée is to a female just what a fiancé is to a man. Everything seems watertight as if you have a foolproof system but your friends tell you that he has full proof that 'fullproof' is not even a word! I gu...

Views from the other side Recently, one of email buddies sent me a powerpoint presentation on the ordeals of the ladies behind the meshed veil of the burqa had to endure in a male dominated society all in the name of man's own interpretation of the religion. Their voices are muffled by the sobbing sounds of their unheard cries in the dark. That got me thinking....  In fact, in our own everyday world close to us, there are many amongst us who walk around putting up a front covering the sorrows that they carry behind the mask that they wear on their faces. Just like they say in show business, "Honey, the show has to go on!", life has to go on... Norman Bates & Bates Motel I know a general practitioner, who is forever ready with his pearly-white teethed smile, was diagnosed with cancer of the urinary bladder about 2 years previously. He is still smiling these days after enduring 12 hours of radical surgery, nauseating chemotherapy afterwards, losing erectile ...