Oct 192022
 

Ronald Reagan chats with a Nazi in “Desperate Journey:”

 

The dialog from IMDB:

 

 Posted by at 2:36 pm
Oct 172022
 

Over the years there have been suggestions of using “lithobraking” as a means of reducing the cost of transporting payloads to the lunar surface. As the name suggests, the idea is to use the lunar surface itself – the lithosphere – to slow the craft. Meteoroids do this all the time, of course, though in their case it’s pretty destructive. But for those rare serious suggestion of using lithobraking, the idea would be to lay out a miles-long “track” of smooth lunar dust; the spacecraft would come in at a *very* shallow angle and touch down at extreme – essentially orbital – velocity, and use skids to brake using friction. The precision required, and lunar infrastructure required, would be pretty substantial. One early suggestion of what a lithobraking spacecraft might look like is this (from HERE):

It might be workable. But it’s not something I’ve seen demonstrated too often, either practically or in animated form. Well, until now. At last, we have a good video representation of what lithobraking might look like in actual practice:

 

 

 Posted by at 3:31 pm
Oct 162022
 

So “Halloween Ends” opened this weekend. On a budget of $20 million, it has made an estimated $41.25 million domestically in the opening weekend, pushing itself to profitability in a handful of days.

The low budget –  $17 million – horror movie “Smile” has, in just a bit over two weeks, made $71.2 million, making it a rampaging success.

That’s nice. How is this newsworthy? Compare that performance to “The Woman King.” On a budget of $50 million, after a month it has made $59.7 million domestically. D’oh.

It seems the strategies of glorifying the actual villains while accusing the potential customers of being bad people didn’t work so great.

Snerk.

One of these days Hollywood types *might* figure out that hating the audience is not a good plan. In the mean time… keep hemorrhaging dollars, dorks.

 Posted by at 5:34 pm
Oct 092022
 

My late cat Raedthinn also knew how to open doors. He figured it out when I briefly lived in an apartment with door *handles*; he watched me use them, figured out what was going on and would reach up and pull the handle down to open the door. When we got back to door *knobs* he knew how they worked, but he could rarely get enough leverage on them to open doors. But “rarely” isn’t the same as “never.”

If your cat is opening doors when you don’t want him or her to do so, don’t get mad at the cat. Cat’s doing what a cat’s *supposed* to do. Be mad at yourself for being outsmarted by a critter with a brain the size of a walnut.

 Posted by at 11:43 am
Oct 072022
 

So long as it was those rubes in Texas and Florida being stuck with the bill, it was fine. But now that New York is getting the *tiniest* fraction of the problem…

NYC Mayor Eric Adams declares state of emergency over influx of migrants

Boo fricken’ hoo. Suck it up and do your part, Mayor Adams. You could start by advocating that illegal aliens be deported when caught, and prevented from invading in the first place.

 Posted by at 8:31 pm