Month: September 2026

Of Cuckoo Clocks and Harry Lime

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

—Harry Lime, from The Third Man

Harry Lime is one of my absolute favorite movie villains, and this line is the best in the movie.

Graham Greene himself said that, that it was the best line in his movie, and that Orson Welles came up with it himself the night before shooting. Welles later said that Alsatians invented the clock, but if he’d told an audience that, they’d be busy wondering about dogs and miss the point. When Welles said that, he knew quite well that the clock had been invented in Lorraine.

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About the War in Yemen and Iran

This won’t be popular. I can’t help that, but I do want to warn you before you read it, maybe save you some unnecessary rage. Lord knows there’s plenty of cause without this, and I wouldn’t add to it.

This country is doing the absolute right thing about the Houthis in Yemen.

For the benefit of those of you who won’t continue reading anything that isn’t venomously anti-Trump, I’ll add that there’s no particular virtue accruing to Trump over this except that he isn’t royally screwing it up. It’s kind of a no-brainer to any expert on the region. Which I’m not, but I’ve had it explained to me at great length by several people who are. At the risk of oversimplifying, I’ll try to put their arguments into a more understandable form.

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