Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

Whelp, this will most likely be Ol’ Robbo’s last post of 2017.  Those regular friends of the decanter will need no explanation, I think, when I simply say “Goodbye To All That”.  A few things to get us over the hump:

♦  Ol’ Robbo watched the Cary Grant/Myrna Loy comedy “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” last evening.  I’d seen it once before years ago and thought it “meh”.  I thought it far funnier this time around, perhaps because I’ve been through several home remodeling/updating projects since then.

♦  Speaking of the joys of home ownership, we discovered this afternoon that Port Swiller Manor has been receiving free garbage pickup for the last six years.  Evidently, the company with which we originally signed up got taken over by a competitor and our account got lost in the transfer.  We simply didn’t notice because the trash continued to get picked up all that time anyway, and it was only after inquiry as to why our cans were ignored yesterday that we discovered the glitch.  To their credit, the (not so) new company admitted the error was theirs and will not charge us retroactively (not that we would have paid it, of course).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anschluss

♦  Speaking of the past, this evening Ol’ Robbo finished up the novel The Horse Soldiers by Harold Sinclair.  As I’ve mentioned here previously, it is a fictionalized account of Grierson’s Raid during the Civil War, and is also the book on which the John Ford/John Wayne movie of the same name is based.  I will say that the movie, of which I am quite fond, is (surprise, surprise) only very loosely based on the book (and, I suppose, on the actual historickal facts).

Overall, I think the book is worth a read if you’re a Civil War buff, especially in its details of brigade, regiment, and smaller unit tactical considerations.

♦  Dayum, it’s cold outside!  Personally, I blame ManBearPig.  I’m super serial, y’all.

♦  I can tell you all that I give not a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys about the latest Star Wars installment, because the whole franchise descended into silliness a long time ago.  On the other hand, I am in dread of the evidently impending release of The Incredibles 2.  How do you top the first one for story-telling?  And even more importantly, how do you sustain the traditionalist values of the first in this day and age of cultural Marxist blitzkrieg?  My fear is that the sequel will not even attempt to resist, but instead will succumb passively to the P.C. Anschluss.

God send that I am pleasantly surprised….

Well, enough for now.  As I say, I’ll be back on the other side of the hump.  Don’t stay up too late on New Year’s Eve (I certainly won’t, if I can at all help it) and I’ll see you in 2018!