Look at this — before Jackie Robinson, they didn’t let black guys play major league baseball!

Right . . . that was 70 years ago, in the 1940s. Let’s move on already.

You know what else they did in the 1940s? They rounded up Japanese Americans, just took them right out of their homes and their jobs, and stuck them into “relocation camps.”

When’s the last time you heard a Japanese person talk about relocation camps? They don’t talk about relocation camps because they’re too busy being engineers and doctors and businessmen and raising their families and sending their kids to top universities.

You can focus your mind on what other people did a long time ago or you can focus your mind on what you’re doing right now.

Let’s move on already.

Rating:

Footnote: We’ve come full circle on blacks in baseball. The defending World Series champion San Francisco Giants don’t have a single black player on their current roster (although some of the Latin players are pretty dark). Black men can play baseball if they want to but they don’t want to.

My wife and I rented Ocean’s Eleven and enjoyed it, so we rented Ocean’s Twelve and enjoyed that too.

After we watch Ocean’s Thirteen, we’re planning to rob a bank.

Jon Provost and Lassie

A new study from the American Council on Education shows that the percentages of black, Asian and Hispanic provosts have declined over the past five years.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this story under the headline “Falling Diversity of Provosts Signals Challenge for Presidential Pipeline, Study Finds.”

FALLING DIVERSITY! LOOK OUT BELOW!

Ha ha . . . but seriously, who even knows what a provost is? I don’t. I’ve vaguely heard of it as an academic job title but that’s about it.

I know that Jon Provost played little Timmy on the Lassie TV series. I know that Marie Prevost was a one-time Mack Sennett bathing beauty and leading lady in the 1920s whose screen glory had faded by the time she died of acute alcoholism in a small Hollywood apartment at the age of 38.

By the way, I notice that Asian students are continuing to excel, even in the absence of Asian provosts. Go figure.

Within a week or so, we’ve had Jovan Belcher, the mall shooting in Oregon and 26 people killed at a school in Connecticut. I’m hearing that maybe we should do something about guns.

But we’ve always had guns. Since the country was founded July 4, 1776, Americans have had guns, and for most of that time, we’ve managed to live with each other without a mass murder a week.

It can’t be just the guns.

One of the most appalling things to me about modern American society is the way increasingly graphic violence is peddled as entertainment. Turn on the TV: mass murder is entertainment. Grotesque, violent death is “great television.”

Serial killers in movies are the heroes. They can’t be killed off because they’ve got to come back and kill more people in the next sequel.

I know John Wayne used to kill people in movies, but when the Duke shot people, they just grabbed their gut and toppled over. It couldn’t possibly have been more fake. Now when someone gets shot in a movie, they have to be shot in the head. Shooting someone in the head is horrific. And there has to be blood spatter on walls or bystanders or both. And this is entertainment.

It diminishes humanity. It’s bad karma to pretend to kill and be killed for public amusement. It’s bad karma to trifle with death.

My favorite poem of the week — again from Modern & Contemporary American Poetry – was “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” by Bernadette Mayer, especially the final image of the stressed-out new mother reading The Wild Boy of Aveyron, about a feral child raised by wolves.

A colleague says, “Are you talkin’ to ME?” Oh, and he showed up at work this morning with a shaved head.

Jack Elam (Photo credit: Père Ubu)

“Who’s Jack Elam? Get me Jack Elam. Get me a Jack Elam type. Get me a young Jack Elam. Who’s Jack Elam?”

— Jack Elam (1920-2003), interviewed in 1976

Nora Ephron

Annie Hall is a Rembrandt. When Harry Met Sally… is a Thomas Kincade. Rob Reiner is horrible.

R.I.P. Nora Ephron

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan -- PE]

Next year I’m going to live tweet the Oscar In Memoriam segment so I can tell you which celebrities are in Hell.

See you at the movies!

There comes a time when our eyes are opened and we come to realize that mercy is infinite. We need only await it with confidence and receive it with gratitude. Mercy imposes no conditions. And lo! Everything we have chosen has been granted to us. And everything we rejected has also been granted.

This movie brought a lot of joy to my weekend.

Highly recommended!

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain . . .

Now I know how Santa delivers all the presents in one night!

By the way, if you like to avoid the crowds, Thanksgiving night is a great time to go to the movies! Everyone’s either in a food coma or resting up for Black Friday shopping.

We went to the 9:30 show at the Irvine Marketplace. There was no ticket line, no one in the lobby, one girl working the box office and one at the snack bar.

The box office girl had to work double because there was no ticket taker on duty. Instead of just selling the tickets and handing them to us, she also tore them in half and said, “You’re in Theater 2.”

“We’re in Theater 2,” I repeated for the boy’s benefit.

“Are you sure she didn’t say we’re the only two people in the theater?” he asked.

Recommended!

A movie about making a movie . . .

The director says, “Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the old west. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive.”

Highly recommended!

Michelangelo apparently once said that if people knew how hard he worked, they wouldn’t call him a genius and I think with me, it’s sort of the opposite, you know. I think that if people knew how little I worked on this stuff, I don’t think they would say that I suck.

— Henry Phillips

Cannot recommend this movie highly enough!

Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood before the premiere of Howard Hughes’ 1930 film Hell’s Angels.

Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you; spend a lot of time with them and it will change your life.

— Amy Poehler, Harvard commencement 2011

Great advice from Amy Poehler, whoever she is. (A little research turns up the fact that she’s been in TV shows and movies with Tina Fey.)

Thank god my kid isn’t going to Harvard! Do you have any idea what it costs to send a kid to an Ivy League university?! After which you get as a commencement speaker, not Tina Fey — which would be merely terrible, because at least people have heard of her — but Tina Fey’s sidekick.

I’m reminded of the story of the SpongeBob and James D. Watson bobbleheads. SpongeBob has almost 23 million Likes on Facebook. Amy Poehler is giving commencement speeches at Harvard. James D. Watson is alive but unknown, not invited to commencements, and hardly anyone likes him on Facebook.

Lesson learned: If you want to be liked by a lot of people, provide them with juvenile escapism. Don’t bother accomplishing something like, say, winning a Nobel Prize for unlocking the secret of life itself, because — who cares?

My son comes back from watching African Cats for “field hours” . . .

“How was the movie?” I ask.

“Pretty good. Samuel L. Jackson was narrating it.”

“He was? Did he say ‘Get these motherf-ing cats off this motherf-ing plain’?”

“No.”

“‘Plain’ — get it? A flat expanse of land?”

It has come to my attention that Northwood High kids can get “field hours” for Environmental Science by visiting zoos and watching movies at the Spectrum.

How lame is that? Shouldn’t they have to rescue a seagull or something?