Requisite virtue signaling: I didn’t like Trump. Didn’t support him, didn’t vote for him. And while I don’t think he’s an idiot, I think he often does a damn fine impression of one. That said, his inauguration hit me with a massive wave of “Oh, was that today?” and then I moved on with the day.
Other people reacted to the inauguration with a bit more enthusiasm. Such as the person in the video below. Give it a watch and just go ahead and try to convince yourself that it’s not side-splittingly funny.
Turns out that most (all?) of us have been wrong. At the end of Star Wars, the Rebel fighters fly down the length of a trench on the Death Star to deliver a warhead to an exhaust port. And for the past nearly 40 years, just about everybody has believed that the trench they flew down was the equatorial trench. But it turns out that it was a smaller longitudinal (north-south) trench. And it turns out that this is an obvious fact, once pointed out.
Weather has been rather aggressively wintery of late. For example, I am getting a serious uncomfortableness about the amount of snow and ice built up on my roof. Conditions on the roads have been similarly dodgy from time to time. So it wasn’t entirely shocking to hear on the news this last weekend that a Fed Ex truck got smacked by a commuter train in Salt Lake City.
But today the police released some dash cam footage that put a bit of a different spin on things. There was a police car *right* *there* when the incident occurred and good footage was obtained. You might think the truck driver is an idiot for pulling out in front of the train. But pay attention to the train crossing signals and barriers. More importantly, pay attention to the *timing.*
Ruh-Roh…
Note that there’s no audio. I *really* want to hear the audio. I bet it’s entertainingly expletiv-riffic.
Because racially divisive Identity Politics worked out so well for the Dems in the last couple of elections, DNC party chairman candidate Sally Boynton Brown doubles down and tells fellow Dems that she’s running to become the head honcho of their party so that she can shut down white Democrats who speak up.
A new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Space Weather reports the discovery of radiation “clouds” at aviation altitudes. When airplanes fly through these clouds, dose rates of cosmic radiation normally absorbed by air travelers can double or more.
Wunderbar.
The hypothesis is that radiation is getting trapped in geomagnetic “bottles” which sometime burst and rain rads down towards the surface.
You really gotta watch out for radiation clouds when flying around.
I got a kick out of the 2008 Giant Monster movie “Cloverfield.” I would have preferred – a lot – if it had been a standard movie format rather than “found footage” with shakeycam, but you get what you get, I suppose. But what was presented left the door open for prequels, sidequels and sequels, and I though that that was a concept that could actually do well with further exploration. But such films were not forthcoming.
In 2016, the movie “10 Cloverfield Lane” came out. The producers said that it was kinda-sorta a sequel to Cloverfield; but the relationship between the two movies is really not apparent. Sure, both feature aliens, but they are apparently fundamentally different and there’s no obvious link between the two.
But the thing is: the producers went buggo on producing *tiny* scraps of evidence and scattering them hither and yon to be found by people with *way* too much free time. One such intrepid soul has put together a YouTube video that goes through a lot of *excessively* detailed analysis of the hints that J.J. Abrams & Co. spread around. in the end, if the analysis is even halfway correct, then the movies really are linked. In short… the events of “Cloverfield” pissed off Mom.
This sort of thing – lots of tiny details dropped here and there that link two apparently separate stories into a single narrative universe – is not new. “Necronomicon,” anyone?
Here’s an interesting illustration of the Polaris sea launched ballistic missile, taken from a technical manual. I’ve uploaded the full-rez version to the APR Patreon Extras Dropbox folder for 2017-01, so if you are interested, consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
H.P. Lovecraft is one of the more important authors in the history of horror fiction, yet there have been relatively few attempts made to film his works with anything resembling a “big budget.”Still, there have been a few times where Lovecraftian ideas or themes have been incorporated into original movies; “Hellboy” is one of the more obvious examples. Another example, perhaps less well known, is the 1991 HBO TV-movie “Cast a Deadly Spell.” This is not based on a Lovecraft story, but instead is sort of an “homage” to Lovecraft. The main character, Harry Phillip Lovecraft (played by Fred Ward), is a private eye in 1948 Los Angeles… a Los Angeles where magic is an every day, commonly used tool. “Cast” is, in a word, damned entertaining, in much the same way that “Deep Rising” was. And it’s a friggen’ crime that HBO has never released this on DVD or Blu Ray.
“How long is that in dog years?” still gets me laughing a quarter century later.
