Left-over Thoughts: George Jones ~ Chernobyl

A couple of unrelated thoughts left over from last week:

#1 ~ RIP George Jones. He died Friday aged 81. That was a good innings for someone who reportedly had hit the bottle hard for much of his life. I was an avid country music fan for years, and living in the UK, at that, where country music fans were looked on then as something of a lunatic fringe. George Jones' style never did grab me as much as Merle Haggard's, Waylon Jennings', Kris Kristofferson's and a few others', but I was always fascinated by one particular song of his, first recorded in 1970: A Good Year for the Roses. Some rare lyrics there (written by Jerry Chestnut) which ought to, and probably did, fire up feminists. Actually, the song just makes me laugh, especially lines I've highlighted. The guy in the song had no doubt contributed to what had brought about his utter despair, he then he says, "Well, dang.....to hell with it all - anyway, the roses have been nice this year". Sometimes in life, that's the only way to remain sane.

I can hardly bear the sight of lipstick
On the cigarettes there in the ashtray
Lyin' cold the way you left them
At least your lips caressed them while you packed
And a lip print on a half-filled cup of coffee
That you poured and didn't drink
But at least you thought you wanted it
That's so much more than I can say for me

But what a good year for the roses
Many blooms still linger there
The lawn could stand another mowin'
It's funny, I don't even care
And when you turned and walked away
And as the door behind you closes
The only thing I know to say
It's been a good year for the roses

After three full years of marriage
It's the first time that you haven't made the bed
I guess the reason we're not talkin'
There's so little left to say, we haven't said
While a million thoughts go runnin' through my mind
I find I haven't spoke a word
And from the bedroom those familiar sounds
Of our one baby's cryin' goes unheard

But what a good year for the roses
Many blooms still linger there.....etc.


Here he is singing it:






#2 ~ We watched what turned out to be a truly horrible movie on HBO Thursday evening: Chernobyl Diaries. Next morning I realised why the film had been included on HBO's schedule: 26 April was the anniversary of the disaster, it happened in 1986. The movie had not a single redeeming feature. I'd hoped it might be at least educational, but no - well....it warned teens and twenty-somethings not to go off on hare-brained excursions to potentially dangerous places. A movie to be avoided, not even in the category of "it was so bad that it was good"!

From a piece at The Independent Blogs, by Thom Davies (July 2012) The Real Chernobyl Diaries: Notes from Ukraine

......What struck me the most about the film ‘Chernobyl Diaries’, which I had put off for as long I could, was the shameless insensitivity it shows towards the hundreds of thousands of people who have suffered and continue to suffer from the 1986 nuclear disaster. The film portrays Chernobyl’s victims as deformed flesh-eating zombies who haunt the abandoned city of Prypiat, which lies near the destroyed reactor in north Ukraine.

They skulk in the darkness, and in a plot-less mess of disaster-porn, devour a group of annoying American tourists. However, for people like Olga and many others I have met over the last few years, Chernobyl is a very real and very painful part of their lives.

In some ways it is no surprise that a bad-taste horror flick has been made about Chernobyl. The facts themselves read like a classic dystopian science fiction novel; nuclear meltdown, post-apocalyptic abandonment, scientific unknowns.

Except Chernobyl is no fiction.

It led to the forced-relocation of over 350 000 people. That’s more than the entire population of Iceland. The myriad implications for these environmental refugees have been devastating, with severed social-networks, divided families and joblessness. Many people I have interviewed even suggested that “the stress of evacuation is worse than the threat of radiation”, with some choosing to move back to their polluted villages.....