Words, despite my best efforts, pale.

We, The Troika* of La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore, The Fredster, and myself, The Retired Educator, along with two of the four felines, watched American History X last night. The cats in question were Dobby, our little idiot, and Uncle Kitty Big Balls, Dobby's Uncle, the newest addition to the entourage. Dare I say that UKBB is the newest addition to The Troika, or would that just be... silly?

*We use, of course, the European Commission Glossary of Justice and Home Affairs definition of TROIKA: A meeting of ministers of the current past, present and future presidencies of the EU. Except that we are not, at present, current past, present and future presidents of the EU. It may be, for all you know, that we are, rather, a Russian carriage pulled by three horses abreast. Except that we were also that plus two cats. Meh! Probably? Probably, we were a Troika in the simple sense, so like a simple syrup, of three [simple] humans -- the lexically tight version of Princeton's Wordnet, which strictly specifies: Three -- the cardinal number that is the sum of one and one and one.

Were I purposefully obfuscating or trying to buy time so as to buff up something of import to say... I might posit the Wiki that Troika is a chocolate-based confection made by Nidar AS of Trondheim, Norway, using three distinct layers, hence the... okay, okay! Anyway, the top layer is soft raspberry jelly, the middle layer is truffle, and the bottom one is marzipan...

Wiki also breaks the troika down into a Russian folk dance in which a man dances with two women -- given Fred's situation, lodged as he is between myself and The Castafiore, that could be the genesis of the germ.

Or not.

As I was saying, we all professed to be left with the same feeling after the movie – and for once, I found a way of expressing it that was clair comme du cristal, même limpide comme de l'eau de roche: Mwahahahahaha!

In other words -- you know how nouns are introduced, fleshed out, amplified – so that the move to a pronoun is smooth as silk, obvious, not at all a hitch or a glitch? Well, even the ambition of seamlessness was lacking to this cinematic effort. As the vague neutral pronouns were tossed glibly about, it was like, you know, lacking clear internal reference.

I swear, when I said it last night, we all, human and feline alike, nodded – it was a case of deft, classic-prof insightfulness. Honest.

Letting all -- or any -- of that be as it may – Edward Norton delivered a virtuoso performance. The film was worth seeing just to witness his various incarnations at different ages.

But an insightful look at skinhead culture this movie was not. It was as if all meaning had been voided from terms such as neo-nazi, as if a swastika were just an arbitrary intersection of lines.

Maybe insight is not requisite.

Maybe it was enough just to play out an instance of curb stomping... about which words pale.