Silly sailor, the law is applied differently for your betters. You should know this!
The future should provide a whole lot of examples of people using the “Clinton defense.” I imagine the great majority of them will still wind up getting prosecuted… because they’re not Clinton.
A collected edition of the extended versions of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit on Blu-Ray certainly sounds like a reasonable idea. This October, just such a collection will be released. Some of the official description:
– The Limited Collector’s Edition includes 30 discs featuring all six Middle-earth films in their extended edition forms, housed in six stunning faux leather books and a collectible Hobbit-style wood shelf. The one-of-a-kind wood shelf is crafted from solid wood with design selected by Peter Jackson.
– In addition to the extended edition release of every film, the collection also includes all previously released bonus content from both the theatrical and extended editions.
– Exclusive premiums designed for the collection include: · Spectacular 100-page sketch-style book with replica The Red Book of Westmarch, filled with original film sketches and new artwork · Original reproductions of exquisite watercolor paintings by acclaimed conceptual artists Alan Lee and John Howe, framable and wall-ready
So… as far as the actual movies and extras, it’s nothing new, same stuff as already released. But it comes with some kinda spiffy physical extras. So that’s cool. But there is one minor problem:
Ummm. How about no.
Apparently Peter Jackson wanted to create a bunch of new documentaries for this collected edition, but the studio shot that idea down. If you can explain why this is actually worth $800, congrats… you’re doing better than me.
In the era of Netflix and other ways of easily obtaining movies this might not be so useful, but Sunday morning at 2AM Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will air “Chain Lightning,” the 1950 movie with Humphrey Bogart as a test pilot flying something pretty rare at the time… a futuristic airplane that was actually built in mockup form for the movie. Much more common was for a real aircraft to be painted for the flick… or for simple stock footage to be used. While the stock footage option was cheap and lame, the fact is that the late 40’s into the 50’s produced so many aircraft prototypes that many could be introduced in a movie and most people would have had no idea what it was.
Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve never seen this before. Hurrah for DVR.
UPDATE: finally watched this this morning while working on other stuff. As far as plot, dialogue, characters… meh. Usual 1950’s stuff: Morons With Something To Prove act like idiots, people die, derring-do, blah, blah, blah. The movie had a lot more visual effects than I expected; and while pretty awful by current standards, they were probably fairly impressive at the time. The “JA-3” aircraft is never described as either a jet or a rocket, but given the apparent lack of an inlet, it must be a rocket. But one with truly astonishing performance; standard range for this thing was 4,000 miles.
The JA-3 was represented in three ways… the full scale mockup for closeup shots, a scale model for in-flight shots (photos of the model as it existed some years ago just before being auctioned off are available HERE) and a North American F-86 for distant in-flight shots. the F-86 stock footage wasn’t all that bad, in context.
The mockup was built on top of a P-39, so scaling the design should be straightforward.
Doesn’t seem to be on Blu-Ray, but it’s available on DVD.
*If* true (it seems to actually be more in the “rumor/not-quite-ready-for-scientific-publication” stage… not helpful is the “anonymous sources” aspect of the story), this could be FRIGGEN’ SPECTACULAR. An Earth-like planet only 4.25 lightyears away puts another Earth within practical starship distance. Sending humans there is still a prospect for some generations down the line, but tiny laser-pushed probes could get there within the careers of people currently working in the space industry.
There are undoubtedly problems. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf; this means that the habitable zone around the star is quite close-in. That in and of itself if not a problem, but problems do arise:
But even with those issues… *IF* this turns out to be an accurate find… giggitty!
I just won on ebay an auction for an Avro Canada report on a concept for a mobile Minuteman launcher:
Since it’s being sent from Canada, it could be a good long while before it gets here. But when it does, it’ll end up on the APR Patreon catalog. Want a copy of the report? Sign up!
I know you’ll all be stunned, but the State Department has essentially admitted that that $400 million cash payment to the mullahs in Iran was actually a ransom payment:
Let me think: did the current Administration say something that indicated that it *wasn’t* a ransom payment? Hmmm…
Groovy. Expect to see Americans get kidnapped around the world at an accelerated pace now that scumbags across the globe know that the US government will pay up to $100 *million* per hostage.
The San Diego Air & Space Museum uploaded a 1958 Convair film showing tests of two air launched ballistic missiles carried and launched from B-58 “Hustler” bombers. The first test was a failure, the second a success. The ALBM is a capability we don’t have anymore, but could almost certainly use… prompt hypersonic strike systems are always going to be in fashion.
The video could use some TLC. The audio is rough and the film itself was old and faded, turning everything reddish. I suspect cleaning that up would require little more than pushing a few buttons now…
A similar report was produced a year later in 1959. This one is of better audio/visual quality.
Now that it should be clear to everyone that decades of diligent effort by anti-nuclear activists have resulted in the proliferation of carbon-burning powerplants and thus rampagingly successful global warming, fire season in the southwestern US is going to become an increasingly interesting time. This seems to have been true out here in Utah this year. It’s also true in southern California where they not only have many, many acres of nicely flammable scrublands, but they’ve also parked a whole lot of stuff and people in those places.
One place that’s currently on fire is San Bernadino county; the “Blue Cut Fire” has presented the world with this fairly amazing bit of helicopter footage:
https://www.facebook.com/bakersfieldnow/videos/10154398186879935/
Facebook videos don’t seem to automatically integrate into the blog, so here’s a differently edited, lesser version of the footage (the Facebook video is better and longer):
So unless climate changes in a direction that results in consistently *more* rain in this quarter of the continent, I expect we’ll be seeing more of this sort of thing… at least until everything burnable has been burnt. About the only alternative is to steamroll the anti-science Left and start cranking out the terawatt breeder reactors, hooking them up to massive desal plants and monstrous pumping stations and creating a vast irrigation system across the western half of CONUS. Which is worth doing anyways.
Well, that’s spectacular. For those not in the know, “flakka” is a synthetic drug that apparently can cause people to go whacko.
And at the same time that Better Living Through Chemistry is putting a strain on the legal system, the Drug Enforcement Agency is demanding that marijuana remain a federally banned “Schedule 1” drug, punishable with years in prison and SWAT teams shooting your dog. The DEA claims that pot has no medicinal value, a claim that is pretty easily scoffed at.
On the one hand, I’ve got no dog in the pot fight. I use it as often as I use cocaine, nicotine or vodka… i.e. never. If all the pot on the planet suddenly vanished, it would make no material difference to my life. And as with any other intoxicant, I see a lot of downsides to its use and abuse. That said… if someone wants to smoke a joint… who the hell cares? People stoned on pot are a much greater danger of eating all your Doritos than eating your face off. The DEA would do better to leave pot alone and go after drugs that are actually troublesome.
The movie “Arrival” comes out in November and actually looks pretty intriguing. The idea seems to be: aliens arrive, we can’t communicate with them, and humanity promptly starts angling to blow itself to bits. Sounds… sadly plausible. It looks suitably creepifyin’.