Gerritt and I went to see WALL-E over the weekend. Like people have been saying, this movie is a lot better than any description of it makes it sound. A post-apocalyptic robot love story told as a Disney-Pixar cartoon? Yeah, it sounds bad on paper, but somehow this film got made and the world is a better place for it.

I want to talk about the ending credits. In the movie, humans have been living in a Wal-Mart space ship for 700 years. They have forgotten how to make art. The ending credits shows the re-evolution of human art after they have returned to Earth. It runs from cave paintings to Picasso, but with robots tucked away in most the paintings, as if they are no more unnatural than trees. It’s one of those great ideas that feels like something you’ve always had in the back of your head, but at the same time seems like it’s never been done before.

I think of Hershey’s Miniatures as the Chevrolet of candy. Good enough, but nobody’s first choice.

Somehow (thanks to a church event where we had a surplus of candy) I ended up with a bag of these little chocolate bars in my apartment. A few weeks ago, when it was very hot, I tossed them in the freezer to keep them from melting. I forgot about them until a few days ago, when I rediscovered the frozen candy and started snacking on it.

Wow! Frozen Hershey bars are better than they have a right to be. Who knew you could turn iffy chocolate into something wonderful just by freezing it?

Since I don’t subscribe to cable, I’ll need a converter box to keep getting over-the-air TV when the digital switch happens next year. This has to do with making more spectrum available for big telecom companies that are paying billions of dollars to the government.

Throwing us a bone for this inconvenience, the government is offering $40 coupons to offset the cost of digital converter boxes. I got my coupons in the mail last week. I wondered: Would all my channels come in crystal clear? Or would I now get no TV whatsoever?

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Garfield Minus Garfield

So simple, so much more than the sum of its parts.

What’s the difference between a guilty pleasure and something that has no right to be good?

A guilty pleasure is something you can’t enjoy without also feeling bad about. It could be something you like but that’s unhealthy, or that fills you with shame. Think meat loaf. Or Meat Loaf.

But something with no right to be good starts out no ambitions to be great, but achieves greatness by accident. Since it is genuinely good, it is no cause for guilt. It’s when low art crosses into high art, or when a corporate production machine somehow blunders into something sublime. Like Rufus Wainwright recording “Hallelujah” for the movie Shrek.

Campbell’s condensed tomato soup is a great example. Somebody once told me that the paper-mill-like odor in Tacoma, Washington, (the “aroma of Tacoma”) was actually the smell of the Campbell’s tomato soup factory. I don’t think that’s true, but it seems believable enough. Campbell’s tomato soup is a marvel of food science, a recipe for gelatinous red slime that probably hasn’t changed since the 1950s. But it is the absolute apex of tomato soup, and no one has ever improved upon it. Served with a grilled cheese sandwich on a winter day, it’s the prefect lunch. Why is this stuff so wonderful? It has no right to be good!