This is a famous 1953 play by Samuel Beckett that is in the absurdist tradition. It features two older men who have been together for a long time and have clearly seen better days, as can be discerned by their current shabby clothing coupled with their highly sophisticated use of language and their recollections of good times in the past in various parts of Europe. A man named Godot has told the two of them to wait for him by a tree on a desolate road. The two dutifully wait, clearly expecting their fortunes to improve once he arrives.
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I must admit to a fondness for the world that was created by the Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers books, that of murder mysteries set amidst English village life where the crimes are of the ‘by the bishop with the candlestick in the library’ variety rather than the fast-paced guns, car chases, and fist fights that are the norm in more modern crime dramas. I recently came across a long-running British TV series called Midsomer Murders that depicts just such a world, though the murders in this series are not solved by private investigators but by the police in the form of Chief Inspector Barnaby and his assistant Sergeant Troy, the latter playing the obligatory role of the sidekick who acts as a sounding board for the detective and jumps to the obvious but wrong conclusions and thus causes the sleuth’s deductive powers to shine even more brightly.
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Last weekend was extremely rainy and thus required staying inside the house the whole time. So my Puritan work ethic took over and I spent the time doing all the indoor chores that naturally accumulate over time and which get postponed because there are better things to do.

Ha! Of course, I did nothing of the sort.
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The actor died yesterday in London. He was 91.

There are some actors who leave an indelible impression because of one particular role and this was undoubtedly true in the case of Moody’s appearance in the musical Oliver! that was based on the book Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens that was first a stage play in London and Broadway before being made into a film in 1968.
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Steve Buscemi is a fine actor, often cast in quirky roles, whom I first saw in Fargo. He often makes cameo appearances in films and has such a distinctive face that when he does, you never think “Where I have I seen that actor before?” (as so often happen with other actors) but immediately say “Hey, there’s Steve Buscemi!” This is actually a good thing for me because often my mind gets distracted by trying to place who an actor is and where I have seen them before and I miss some of the film that I am watching.
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I recently saw the film version of John Le Carre’s classic cold war spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011) starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth. Here’s the trailer:

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