Easter

We have had a strange late winter and early spring in northern California.  Back in February we had sunny skies and temperatures in the mid-seventies, really gorgeous days when the first buds began to emerge.  Then came the storms and biting cold in March, high winds and record-breaking periods of rain.  In the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, the waters rose to flood levels, threatening the dykes.  In Marin County, heavy rains caused mudslides, and a hillside engulfed a house, killing a seventy-three-year-old man.  The vagaries of nature can have tragic consequences.

In two days' time it will be the centennial celebration here in San Francisco of the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906.  The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are having photo exhibitions of that terrible event, and the newspaper has over the past week published articles about what happened a hundred years ago. Tonight the National Geographic television channel will have a program about the quake. The newspaper's media critic has said that the program is poorly done, but I plan to watch it anyhow, after our Easter dinner.  Everyone knows that it is only a matter of time before California will again suffer a devastating earthquake.  But we live every day trying not to think about it.

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Easter Sunday, and the skies are overcast.  Last night it rained again, quite heavily just before dawn.  The air is still chilly.  Fallen wisteria blossoms cover the wet deck outside the kitchen.

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On National Public Radio a couple of days ago I listened to reviews of a couple of Korean movies that sound interesting.  Here's what the New York Times' critic says about one of them, called The President's Last Bang:

"A head of state, notorious for his womanizing, is gunned down during a night of carousing by his director of central intelligence. In Hollywood this scenario would be a screenwriter's fantasy. In South Korea it's a true story, which Im Sang-soo has transformed into a curious, gripping movie that is part tense political thriller, part chaotic and bloody black comedy. In 1979 Park Chung Hee, who had ruled South Korea since 1961, was assassinated by the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Park, a sometimes brutally authoritarian leader who had overseen his country's economic modernization, is portrayed in the film (by Song Jae-ho) as a sour old man living in a cocoon of elaborate protocol, tight security and self-indulgence - more like a crime boss than a head of state."

I've added the movie to my watch list.