Suddenly, it all makes sense.

Do you ever wonder why you like the things that you do? I actually spend a lot of time mulling this over, as well as a related questions- If I like all of these things, surely they must have something in common? And, if that is the case, surely there must be a concrete connection between them? Well, as it turns out, there is at least one case where there is a tangible and specific relationship between some things I like.

If you've spent any amount of time reading this blog, or if you've even just read through my profile, you may have picked up on the following.

• When it comes to literature, I like "hard-boiled" crime fiction. The work of Dashiell Hammett, for example.
• When it comes to film, I like "spaghetti westerns" (especially those featuring Clint Eastwood) and samurai films (especially those by Akira Kurosawa and/or featuring Toshiro Mifune).

Well, check this out:

Hammet's novel Red Harvest is considered by some* to have been the inspiration for Kurosawa's film Yojimbo, which, in turn was the direct basis for Serigo Leone's A Fist Full of Dollars, starring Eastwood. This isn't just the speculation of critics and scholars either, both Kurosawa (privately) and Leone (publicly) acknowledged the connections.

So, the connection between these particular things that I like is concrete, but what do they have in common? They all deal with "moral certainty" of the kind discussed by Aristotle in Nichomachean Ethics, not in the legal sense. Why I'm so intrigued by moral certainty is a whole different question...

*Others contend it was based on the novel, The Glass Key, but that's by Hammett too, so my the argument remains valid.