I don’t care what anybody says. The dust bowl is lousy entertainment.

I just escaped from the family room where Sam is watching The Grapes of Wrath, the most wretched, joyless and demoralizing movie on God’s green earth. The first ten minutes are enough to make me suicidal but most of the time I can’t even get past the CREDITS.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is based on John Steinbeck’s novel about destitute Oklahoma sharecroppers forced off their land by meanies during the “dust bowl” (in the early 1930s) and how they shlep to California crammed in a Beverly Hillbillies truck to look for work as migrant farm laborers. Grandma and Grandpa are lucky enough to die along the way but everybody else eventually gets to pick oranges for 2½¢ a bucket while being tormented by evil cops and snotty vigilantes, and if you bruise any of the fruit they HANG YOU. Okay, maybe not, but it’s definitely terrible with no sanitation or running water, everybody’s starving, and poor Tom Joad (played by Henry Fonda), who spent the best years of his life in prison, is always on the lam from one sheriff or another because he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer and everything he does — even the good stuff — turns out like crap. Henry is third from the left in the photo (above). I can’t remember the name of the goat.

Click here to purchase this sparkling comedy from Amazon.

Today’s pet peeve. Pointless concepts like “Navy pilots.” I mean, why would a person join the Navy to fly? Isn’t this basically just as stupid as “An RKO Radio Picture”?

I guess that about wraps it up for tonight since it’s time to head back to the kitchen to wash a frying pan and make a sugar-free banana cream pie. Due to the late hour, however, I’ll probably just eat the last piece of cake and make my pie tomorrow.

Thank you for reading this.