OK. 

 Yeah, I remember that now.   I remember seeing some You Tube segment that picks out this little clue and that one and "explains" why Vito says "it was Barzini all along."   Thanks. 

 God save me from academia.  

 Dirty Harry Syndrome.  Do women not have the same urge?  I suspect that they do.  

 I'll try to get there.   Somehow this reminds me of a joke that Michael Dukakis made after he lost the race for President.  "People said I was a technocrat.   But only 37.8% of the public felt that way."    

 Thank you.   The Twitter audience skews younger. . . probably not as young as it did ten years ago.  

 I wouldn't attribute any of it to Al 2 Bellies without specific evidence of a causal connection.  If Ivie said in an interview somewhere something like "Two Bellies was great for me.   He always gave me clues that I should focus on for each pitcher" or "Alto always had confidence in me, and just wanted me to focus on doing well what I could do well". . . .Well, something like that, that you would normally just ignore as happy talk, would become something you would pay attention to when attached to the statistical record.   But divorced from one another, they're just something that happened.  

 I don't know one from another.   I think they're all a little overrated.  

 Absolutely.   Junior people don't speak up in business meetings, because doing so reveals divisions within the company.  

 

I don't think the Godfather refers to it as "dirty business" IN THE MEETING YOU DESCRIBE.   He says "It makes no difference to me what a man does for a living," and attributes his reluctance to participate to the fact that this would cost him his connections to politicians and cops who help him cut corners.  

 Thanks.  I think that is both true and false, somewhat true but also self-serving propaganda designed by mobsters to legitimize what they are doing.   Tony Soprano at one point says something like, I think to his psychiatrist, "We are SOLDIERS.  We kill soldiers from the other side, we risk our lives to feed our families."

 

When I was in Boston there was a soldier from the Whitey Bulger gang, a guy named John Marazano, not sure I have spelled that right.  Anyway, I like it was Marazano who had made a deal with prosecutors in regard to the murder or the businessman in Oklahoma that, in exchange for his testimony in that case, he could not be prosecuted for any OTHER crimes in which he implicated himself while testifying in that case.   His lawyer spotted the opening, and, in cross examination or possibly re-direct, led him through all of the murders he had committed. . . and did you kill THIS guy, as a part of this ongoing criminal enterprise?   And did you kill this other guy?   Got him to confess to 20-some murders while on the stand in that case, making the prosecutors unable to prosecute him for those crimes.  (They eventually, years later, came after him for some RELATED offenses, so he did do SOME prison time for the crimes.)

 

Anyway, while I was living in Boston Marazano was free and clear, and he would occasionally appear on talk shows, not exactly talking about his murders but in general about his crimes.  He was church-going man, seriously, and gave off the appearance of a normal laborer, somebody you would hire to fix your electricity without giving it a second thought.   He HATED being described as a "hit man", and insisted that he never killed anyone for money.  He wasn't paid to kill any of these people; he just did what he was told to do to protect his friends.  

 

But if you follow it through. . .while it may be true that he was not directly paid to kill any of these people. . .it is NOT true that all of the people he killed were engaged in the same business.   Some of them were killed because they WOULDN'T engage in the business, they wouldn't play ball.  

 

 

********************

 

The point I should have made yesterday, and above. . .this is where I started to go but didn't get there.   

 

The popularity of gangster movies is largely explained by the fact that they live outside the rules of normal society, and when those rules are destroyed, anything becomes possible, becomes plausible.  It opens up the landscape.   At the time that I first became "aware", MOST popular movies and most popular TV shows were Westerns or World War II movies.   Why?  The same thing.   The West was a  place were the Law had not been clearly established-which it really was--and, because the law did not place parameters on how people could act, anything was possible.   The same thing with World War II movies; wars occur at the breakdown of civilization, which makes it possible for things to happen that don't happen in ordinary life.   People can be killed; relationships can form and melt in the space of the show.   

 

By the 1970s. . .after some nitwits decided to make "realistic" war movies. . . by the mid-1960s World War II movies were falling out of fashion, replaced by "Space" movies and "Space" TV shows. . . Star Trek and Lost in Space and Star Wars, etc.   Science fiction, The Twilight Zone. . .the same thing.  It creates a place which is outside the normal rules that we all live by.  Or, going backward, the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and onward; "Tarzan" creates a space which is exempt from the normal rules of civilzation, although it has it's own rules.  The last Tarzan movie I am aware of, about 1980, postulated a "more realistic" Tarzan.  Morons; nobody wants Tarzan to be realistic.  Making it realistic kills the genre.   

 

Teen Sex comedies often involve the protaganist(s) going on car trip or going to summer camp or going on a family vacation to Brazil, going to some place where the rules don't apply, so anything becomes possible.   The same with gangster movies; it simply creates a space where the normal rules don't apply, people don't live on a budget, etc.  

 

MOST movies are crime movies in some sense.  

 Sure.  Makes sense.   The Man from the Train, although he was probably professional burglar, never took ANYTHING from a house where he had murdered people, probably for the same reason.   It's the easiest way to get yourself hung.   

 1924 is toward the end of relevant period.   Once home runs became more common, starting really in 1920, stolen base attempt frequencies declined gradually.  I can almost quote directly from Casey Stengel's 1961-62 autobiography, not sure exactly when it was, but I remember the quote because it made an impact on my thinking.   Read the book 40-some years ago.  He wrote/said to his co-author "One reason they quit doing it is that they finally figured out that it helped the team only when the base stealer was successful almost every time, like Max Carey." 

 The problem is in the word "largely".  If you had suggested that they were "at least partially" a result of that, I could certainly agree.   "Largely", I just don't know.  

 I don't intend to find out.  

 Who the hell is Barzini?