A middle-aged generic black truck pulled in to Gary's shop as I was going by. It had the license plate "Galoot" which struck me as perfect and recalled every western I saw on Saturday afternoons as a kid, usually in the phrase, Ya Big Galoot. Google shows me the incidence of its use over the years. It looks like its use is spiking again although I never hear anyone but me use it. It's not a harsh term; you could call someone a big galoot and still be friends.

Sugar is an 8 episode series on Apple TV with what the NYT calls a "congenital vulnerability to spoilers." For 5 episodes it is a classic noir detective store complete with voiceover narration and interspersed with sampling of nostalgic scenes black & white scenes from famous noir films. An education in noir films might consist of watching every film referenced in Sugar. Then in episode six, everything changes and it's a different kind of movie. There were tiny hints early on, but still, it was shocking. In short, it's an interesting combination of two different genres.

-- "It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist."
-- "It’s come to shape the way I think about every country, every community: Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?"
-- "Years later it dawns on me that the immigrant class, which in one form or another describes (or will come to describe, in the looming cataclysmic decades of the Anthropocene) most of the world, is segregated by many things, chief among them narrative. Some are afforded the privilege of an arrival story, a homecoming. Others, only departure after departure."
-- "The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?"
-- "Alongside the ledger of atrocity, I keep another. The Palestinian doctor who would not abandon his patients, even as the bombs closed in. The Icelandic writer who raised money to get the displaced out of Gaza. The American doctors and nurses who risked their lives to go treat the wounded in the middle of a killing field. The puppet-maker who, injured and driven from his home, kept making dolls to entertain the children. The congresswoman who stood her ground in the face of censure, of constant vitriol, of her own colleagues’ indifference. The protesters, the ones who gave up their privilege, their jobs, who risked something, to speak out. The people who filmed and photographed and documented all this, even as it happened to them, even as they buried their dead"