It’s always a pleasure to see Walter Brennan as a musical geezer with no teeth.

Ah, Friday! What a glorious day with nothing special to do, not counting a laundry-folding marathon planned for sometime after lunch. At the moment Sam is having fun at Wal-Mart, where he’s retrieving prescription refills and a nice container of sour cream providing it’s NOT manufactured by Kraft. Their “Simply Kraft” brand simply sucks. It’s tasteless and soupy and the crappiest sour cream on earth. I might use what’s left in the container for onion dip, but I’m not promising anything.

Very welcome thunderstorms were predicted today for the Dallas area but once again the lying sacks of poo at Weather.com blew their opportunity to help us fight the drought. When I checked the online forecast at lunch time our 60% chance of late afternoon storms had evolved into a 30% chance of showers around 2, at which time we experienced 15 minutes of light rain from an insignificant cloud that moved through here so fast it’s already on the outskirts of Texarkana. I’m not even sure our grass got wet.

And now for a quick movie review! This time it’s Banjo on My Knee (1936), a weird little film starring Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Brennan, Buddy Ebsen and — of all people — adorable crooner Tony Martin in one of his first roles. So here’s the plot. White trash newlyweds Ernie and Pearl Holley (McCrea and Stanwyck) are a pair of hick Mississippi River dwellers whose wedding (on a houseboat!) gets wrecked by a brawl that sends an obnoxious neighbor overboard in the dark. Thinking he killed the big jerk, Ernie flees into the night and leaves Pearl stranded at home with his dad, toothless Walter Brennan, for half a year while he sails all over the world as a merchant marine. Trouble is, the aforementioned neighbor didn’t drown at all and shows up about an hour after he fell into the water. By then Ernie is long gone.

So, while Ernie’s on the lam Pearl goes nuts stuck on a rickety houseboat with his pop and heads to New Orleans to work for a photographer played by screwy Walter Catlett, pictured at right, whose intentions are less than honorable (we all saw this coming except Pearl), therefore she quits after her first day and lands a job scrubbing dishes at the Creole Cafe down the block. Within a week she’s also an entertainer, singing duets with Tony Martin (see previous paragraph). This is actually unfortunate, because Stanwyck’s vocal talents hover slightly below Marlene Dietrich’s. In the middle of all this, a buddy named Buddy (played by Buddy Ebsen, oddly enough) from back home on the river stops in and winds up singing and dancing with Pearl as well. Personally, I’d like to know which Hollywood Einstein thought it was a good idea to cast Stanwyck in a musical alongside pros like Tony Martin and Buddy Ebsen. Take a look at the video clip below and judge for yourself. Incidentally, the geezer playing the one-man-band contraption is Walter Brennan, who shows up at the Creole Cafe with all of his hillbilly instruments about the same time as Buddy. If this makes no sense to you, either, welcome to the club.

To wrap it up (at last, right?), Ernie eventually comes back from his travels, finds Pearl in New Orleans, suspects she’s been having a fling and starts a big brawl at the Creole Cafe that lands him in jail. A neighbor bails him out, Pearl and his dad pay for the damages, everybody shleps back to their rickety houseboats on the river to live happily ever after, not counting a huge storm that looks like a hurricane. You know, with TIDAL WAVES on the Mississippi. This is all a big confusing waste of time, talent and money, although it’s always heartwarming to see Walter Brennan as a musical geezer with no teeth.

And finally, some breaking news from world of physics, where a group of researchers is almost convinced that our universe may exist within a computer simulation, something like the 1999 movie The Matrix, and a team at Cornell University has devised a system to test whether it’s true or not. This is all far beyond my comprehension and exceeds the scope of my journalism abilities, but apparently if “energy signatures” in the simulations match those in the universe at large, there’s a good chance that we, too, are living within a simulation.

University of Washington student Zohreh Davoudi says whoever made our simulated universe might have made others as well. She asked, “Can you communicate with other universes if they’re running on the same platform?” What a concept. Hard to believe that pot has only been legal there since November!

I think I need a nap. Wake me when it’s over, okay?