The Berwyn Beat, March 29, 2025

Spring Flowers Come Out  

By Nate Feldman

Towards the end of March, spring flowers have been popping up all over the area.  You can see yellow forsythia bushes and daffodils, along with pink cherry blossom and magnolia flowers all over people's properties and in different parks.  These flowers have been accompanied by warming temperatures, showing that the spring season has truly begun in the Northeast United States.  

A Forsythia Bush turning bright yellow

Film Review: Man of the Year (2006)

Man of the Year is a 2006 Barry Levinson film starring Robin Williams, Christopher Walken, and Laura Linney.  The film is about Tom Dobbs, a comedian with his own TV show, who announces as a joke that he is running for President of the United States.  When it turns out that many in the public support this idea, he in fact becomes a candidate for President.  He runs as an independent, railing against the two-party system.  

To everyone's surprise, Dobbs wins the election, but a worker at the computer company that runs the voting machines says there were glitches in the system and that he did not in fact win.  The computer company wants to silence her.  Meanwhile, she gets to know Dobbs and has feelings for him, making her uncertain what the right thing to do is.  

Watching the film almost twenty years since it was made, I was struck by the idea that people were thirsty for "outside" candidates to bring something different to Washington, DC.  Since that time, Barack Obama and Donald Trump have been enormously successful in promoting their completely different ideologies with the idea that it wasn't business as usual in Washington.