You’ve all been wondering what happened to Milo Yiannopoulos, I’m sure. He wants to tell you about it.

You ingrates! He’s responsible for getting Trump elected!

OK, let’s thrash him some more.

OK, so my wife was interested in seeing Christopher Robin, so we did. It’s mostly harmless, a silly children’s movie, that mainly suffered because it was predictable and didn’t have much of a sense of humor over a patently absurd situation.

But it got me wondering about teddy bear movies. There’s a surprising number of them for what is actually an extremely limited genre. There’s this one, and two Paddington movies, and the bro-dude version, Ted. Why? And when you think about it, their plots are painfully similar.

There is a family. The male figure is a bumbling jerk who doesn’t appreciate the importance of love and family (Ewan McGregor, or Hugh Bonneville, or Mark Wahlberg), and the movie is entirely about his redemption as he learns to love others. The female figure is an attractive, interesting person (Hayley Atwell, Sally Hawkins, Mila Kunis) who is totally wasted in the role — she’s there to prop up the male figure’s character development. In all but Ted there is a sad, wise child or two, pining for their poor daddy. The magic bear shows up, who is basically a kind-hearted naif who keeps screwing up, and there are a series of misadventures that lead to Ewan, Hugh, or Mark growing up and becoming a more mature, doting husband/papa/person.

No one actually questions the existence of a talking, sentient stuffed animal. It is simply accepted. This is weird, and in addition to the predictable plot, kept drawing me out of the movie universe. I mean, even the endless string of superhero movies have moments of self-examination, where people wonder why these super-beings are here, and there are even plots where normal humans struggle to control them. But walking, talking teddy bears? How sweet! Let’s have conversations.

I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d do if a favorite childhood toy showed up one day (it doesn’t help that my childhood favorite was Horrible Hamilton), and started bumbling about, giving me life advice.

At least that’s an easy one to answer. I have a lab! I can never understand why these sentient stuffed animals aren’t being whisked off for a detailed analysis.

I guess that means I wouldn’t grow and develop as a functioning, socialized human being, but at least I’d be a step closer to understanding consciousness, the mind, and alternative patterns of cognition than you are, so there.

Evil Cat and I are made for each other, I guess. She follows me all over the house, and during the day, she lurks in my office glaring at me. She likes to lounge about on the carpet, like so:

But here’s the amusing part: she has those curved needle-like claws, like fish-hooks at the ends of her paws, and even though she must monitor me, that carpet snags her claws fiercely. She sometimes sits there, staring me down, and starts flexing those claws, in a hostile, intimidating way.

I wait for that and then leap out of my chair and stride purposefully from the room, as if I have something important to do, like opening a can of tuna, and she tries to follow, but she’s hooked — and then there follows lots of yowling and thrashing about as she tries to get free. Sometimes she rolls herself right up in the carpet with her struggles.

And I laugh, evilly.

See? We’re a pair.

We are very pleased to now have a two screen theater here in Morris — it means that first-run movies don’t clog up the sole screen for weeks and weeks, so we’ll get a more regular roll-over of movies. Most importantly, it means that that horrible Mission Impossible crap has already been shunted off to the mini-theater, and we get a brand new shiny horrible piece of crap already.

This week, we get The Equalizer 2. I have fond memories of the old TV series from the late 1980s, in which Robert McCall, played by Edward Woodward with a bit of class, would take on the problems that the police wouldn’t — and there’d be some twisty little plot where he’d use his vast sums of money, his network of talented characters, his mysterious background as a spy, and a clever scheme to cunningly give the bad guys their comeuppance. My wife was particularly fond of the show, probably because the protagonist was a handsome distinguished older gentleman with a nice English accent.

This movie is a little different.

In this one, Robert McCall, played by Denzel Washington, uses his mysterious background as a spy to track down the bad guys and brutally, bloodily murder them to death with his bare hands, or sometimes a wicked little knife. The movie opens with an irrelevant side plot in Turkey, in which McCall slaughters four big bruisers in a train car, and then we go off to Belgium, where a woman is being murdered in front of her husband, and then her husband’s brains getting blown out, and it kind of takes off from there — bones are broken, faces are punched, women are brutalized (but they fight back ferociously…I don’t think that makes it OK), bombs go off, a guy gets shot in the face with a harpoon gun, another guy gets his guts blown out with a cleverly made bomb in a bakery, one more guy gets slashed multiple times and bleeds to death slowly, and another one gets a similar slashing, but he gets off easy because he then falls from a great height and goes splat on some rocks. Lots of blood. Lots of nasty sound effects. Not quite what I expected. The talented Melissa Leo is totally wasted in her role, but I was surprised to see the ancient Orson Bean is still alive and played a significant part in the movie. He wasn’t any good at it, but it was impressive that someone who was in TV and the movies in the 1950s is still kicking.

Fortunately, I’d invited my wife to join me, but she begged off because she had better things to do. I don’t think she would have liked it at all.

Oh, hey, I think I had better things to do, too. I don’t know what, but just about anything would do. I could have eaten spiders for two hours, I’d probably feel less queasy.

Do you need one, too?

I want to face the day like this every day.