Review: Welcome to Braggsville

Amazon

From Welcome to Braggsville, by T. Geronimo Johnson:

It's not that the Davenports had never had black people around their house before, or even a Chinese guy once, but never a Malaysian who looked Chinese to some and Indian to others, fancied himself black at times, and wanted to be the next Lenny Bruce Lee; a preppy black football player who sounded like the president and read Plato in Latin; and a white woman who occasionally claimed to be Native American. They were like an overconstructed novel, each representative of some cul-de-sac of idiolect and stereotype, missing only a handicapped person — No! At Berkeley we say handi-capable person — and a Jew and a Hispanic, and an Asian not of the subcontinent, Louis always said."

Those four diverse characters are the self-identified "Four Little Indians." They meet at UC-Berkeley and travel together to rural Georgia on school break. An "incident" there changes all their lives.

After the jump, my review.

Gleason (2016)

IMDB

Gleason (2016): Documentary of former NFL player with ALS. Raw and relentless as real life, clichéd as movie. Needs more of wife's story. C+

Fences (2016)

IMDB

Fences (2016): Denzel Washington in a Willy Loman role, raising questions about what it means to be a husband, father, man. Oscar-worthy. A+

OTBR: South Mountain Creamery

Latitude: N 39° 27.918
Longitude: W 077° 36.498

A child on a road trip with his family asks, "Where are we?" and the father answers, "Let's check the map. We're off the blue roads [the Interstate Highways marked in blue on the road atlas]. We're off the red roads [the US and state highways]. We're off the black roads [the county highways]. I think we're off the map altogether." It was always my dream to be off the map altogether.

After the jump, a few of the random places (and I mean random literally) that I visited vicariously last month that are "off the blue roads".

POTD: This Guy Needs a Beer

Today's photo-of-the-day is was a panorama from the Liberty of the Seas, a cruise ship out of Galveston that cruises the Western Caribbean. (The blog's ability to display the panorama was, sadly, lost during some website update or other.)