I Did Something I Pretty Much Swore I'd Never Do

I subscribed to the Disney+ streaming service.

The immediate reason: Some time back, Tamara and I were called away on an emergency right in the middle of Avengers: Infinity War. I had already seen the movie. She hadn't. I've also seen Endgame, but she hadn't, and she also thought she had missed the Winter Soldier and Civil War installments of the Captain America storyline (when I started those two, she immediately realized she'd seen both of them after all).

All that stuff moved behind the Disney+ paywall a little while back, and renting those four movies, or even two of them, would have cost as much as or more than a month of the full service.

So, the weekend before Christmas, I was over at my mechanic's house doing unskilled things in facilitation of his repairs to our family car, and he was re-watching the season finale of The Mandalorian. I tried to make myself not notice, because I didn't want to get hooked on a show I'd have to pay extra to watch.

I don't know if I'll bother watching that show, but it got me thinking: A Disney+ subscription would let me re-watch all the Star Wars movies, and all the X-Men movies, and all the Avengers movies. And I could watch all that stuff in a couple of months, which would be $13.98 in subscription fees.

So that's what I'm doing. We watched the end of Infinity War. Then we watched Endgame. Now we've watched the first three (in story order) Star Wars flicks and will likely watch the other six in the next couple of weeks. And so on, and so forth.

Heck, I even watched the latest version of Mulan just because I could and because they were charging non-Disney+-subscribers something like $20 for it last time I noticed. Not my kind of thing, really, but not terrible.

I Was Just Looking ...

 ... at my Microsoft Rewards redemption history (not an affiliate link).

By using Bing as my default search engine (works fairly well for most quick searches -- I go elsewhere if necessary), I rack up points that I can redeem for Amazon gift cards (or other things).

On a quick glance, it looks like I've cashed in to the tune of about $200 over the last few years.

If you do a lot of casual searching (e.g. just typing something you're thinking about into the browser's URL bar), it's a way to treat yourself to some extras.

You're welcome.

What Endures?

Kevin D. Williamson at National Review:

Can you recite 20 consecutive lines of poetry written by an American in the past 20 years, or name 20 living American poets of any consequence? There is a reason for that. Messiah, composed in 1741, is going on 300 years old. Is there a single musical work by a North American in our time that we expect to be so nearly universally recognizable in the year 2299?

I guess that's an interesting question, but another interesting question is "how could we possibly know -- did anyone expect or predict Messiah to be popular, or considered important, for 300 years?" It apparently got a cool reception in London early on.

While I suspect that Williamson is correct in his specific prediction -- that shoehorning current "identity politics" fads  into old musical/theatrical forms isn't likely to produce much new art of lasting impact -- I also suspect that there will be composers and poets from our era who are as well-remembered 300 years from now as George Frideric Handel (and, say, William Blake) are today.

If I had to pick two such, I guess I'd go with Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg.