Some people are pretty good at funnymaking:
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxPSn4PnDmA
It turns out that the passenger in question is an immigrant gay Asian convicted criminal. So we’ve got *four* check marks on the Social Justice Outrage Cheat Sheet. If a major airline monopoly is capable of being harmed by public outrage, this should do it.
Well, calm yourself and resign yourself to a lifetime of disappointment, because it ain’t gonna happen. But here’s the next best thing: the old Jimmie Stewart movie “Strategic Air Command” is now available on Blu Ray. The image quality is surprisingly good, as is the audio. Absolutely nothing in the way of extras, sadly, but the ability to see some great footage of the B-36 in glorious Technicolor is worth it on its own.
Because the world is an unjust place, I don’t have the ability to take screenshots from Blu Rays. So… here are some craptacular cel phone photos of my TV screen showing, if not the resolution, at least the formatting of “SAC.” The frame fills the screen top to bottom, but *not* *quite* from side to side. I *assume* that this was the original aspect ratio of the film… nothing looked out of place or cropped.
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Also newly available on Blu Ray is another Stewart aviation classic, “No Highway in The Sky.” A surprisingly prescient 1951 tale of metal fatigue taking down brand-new four-turbine-engine airliners, this one features Stewart as an aeronautical engineer studying the failure of the type of airliner he happens to actually be on. Stewart used to play a lot of eccentric or downright screwy characters; this one must have been one of his oddest back in the day. But today his character – and that of his characters daughter – would probably be readily recognized as being pretty deeply steeped in Aspergers. “No Highway” is pretty distinctive not only in having a seemingly autistic engineer as the hero (of course, at the time the character would not have been seen as being “on the spectrum,” but rather just “absent minded” or “weird”), but also in spending a fair amount of both effort and money on building a filming model and a full-scale-modified-real-aircraft. Sure, the “Rutland Reindeer” doesn’t make a lick of sense, and the claim that the metal fatigue is due to *atomic* issues is pretty silly, but ya gotta give ’em props (get it?) for making an extra effort in an era when major motion pictures were happy with stock footage. “No Highway” was based on a novel written by Nevil Shute, author of the fun-filled, laugh-packed, sunshine, puppies and bunnies-filled “On The Beach.” It was also made into a radio play starring Jimmie Stewart and Marlene Deitrich, and since this is the internet and all, it’s available for downloading as an MP3.
This one’s a bit different. Instead of shockingly awful mens fashions, this here is an ad for some form of cologne. Now, I have no idea if this particular brand of stink-pretty was good or bad… but the package it came in is, ah…. ummm….
Dude, naw. Naw, dude.
See this packaging travesty after the break.
So, a United Airlines flight was overbooked, and they needed to stuff four more UA employees on the flight so they could be where they needed to be. This is an irritating and unavoidable fact of the current system. One could obviously argue that overbooking should be banned, but for now, it’s still a thing. Anyway, United offered the passengers bribes to take a later flight, but they weren’t able to get enough volunteers. So, they boarded the plane anyway and *then* decided to randomly select some poor saps to yank off the plane. Well, one guy didn’t want to go. So what did United do? They called the cops. Which, strictly speaking, is the legal course… once they told the passenger that he was no longer on that flight, and he refused to leave, he was technically trespassing. But what did the cops do? They beat him so bad he was yakking up blood and they had to take *everyone* off the plane in order to clean up the mess.
Yeah. I’m thinking what we have here is an insta-millionaire in the making. The situation is, one one level, entirely of United’s making…. *they* are the ones who overbooked the flight. And anyone who has flown in the last, oh, sixteen or so years knows it’s an excruciating nightmare; you just want to get it over with, so it’s understandable that the passenger didn’t want to get pulled off a flight he was already seated on. But we’re in an era when every other passenger will be filming anything unusual on plane… and a passenger beaten so badly he’s literally begging for death while spewing blood all over? Yeah, that’s what’s called “bad optics.” Crack open that checkbook and start scribbling zeros.
#flythefriendlyskies @united no words. This poor man!! pic.twitter.com/rn0rbeckwT
— Kaylyn Davis (@kaylyn_davis) April 10, 2017
One is left to wonder just what would have happened if other passengers had leaped to this guys defense. Now, *maybe* he was being a jackass, and initiated physical combat with the government employees who gave him a pounding. *Maybe* he had this coming. But you know… *maybe* you shouldn’t have violent thugs as minor functionaries for the Feds, and *maybe* airlines shouldn’t overbook. If it comes to a lawsuit and goes to court, and if it turns out that this was just a guy who wanted to go home (he apparently claimed he was a doctor who had patients to see), then I’d recommend this settlement: find out how much United Airlines saves annually by overbooking rather than underbooking. Then double it, and demand that. And then demand an equal amount from the law enforcement agency that did the actual thrashing.
#flythefriendlyskies my husband was on that flight. Screw you United!! @united pic.twitter.com/4EcxrMy5jZ
— Kaylyn Davis (@kaylyn_davis) April 10, 2017
So not only is *this* guy turned off United Airlines, so is probably everyone who was on that plane. I know I sure s hell wouldn’t want to pay money to a company who could at the drop of a hat make me a trespasser, then set goons upon me. Hell, this is why I don’t fly anymore. I’d much rather drive 1500 miles than fly it.
All that said, imagine another competing airline sees this story, and they decide to reverse course on the last couple decades in aviation trends. Instead of less legroom, they reduce the number of seats and give you more. Instead of overbooking, they intentionally underbook, then make the last empty seats available at a discount in the last few minutes. And then they run a series of TV ads showing this incident in glorious technicolor, saying “Don’t fly United, cuz this might happen. Fly with us! We’re more comfortable and hardly ever beat paying customers into bloody pulps in front of small children going on vacation.” Seems like that’d be a winning ad campaign.
Thor: Ragnarok looks like it makes a hash out of the Ragnarok out of the Eddas, but it nevertheless looks like it’ll be a very entertaining flick. Aspects of it definitely have a “Guardians of the Galaxy” vibe, so I won’t be surprised if there’s a crossover.
Remember Dee Snider? He was famous for approximately fifteen minutes, more than thirty years ago… first as the lead singer of Twisted Sister, then, more importantly, for smacking Al Gore around on the floor of the Senate. Together with Frank Zappa and – it’s still hard to believe – John Denver – Snider stood up to Tipper Gore’s prudish “Parents Music Resource Council” inspired Senate hearing and argued in favor of freedom of speech. Since then… well, time has not been kind to the vast majority of the metal and hair bands of the 1980’s. The early 90’s came along, grunge and Nirvana came along, and what had seemed so dominant just a few years before vanished in a puff of occult and overly made-up smoke.
So imagine my surprise when I listened to Snider’s relatively recent remake of his most famous song, “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” He’s in his sixties now… and he sounds better now than Way Back Then. Sure, he looks like hell, but he did back then, too.
In general I’m opposed to remaking movies that were done right the first time. And most of the time remakes stink. But every now and then a remake comes along that is at least OK. One such was “Flight of the Phoenix.” The original didn’t need to be remade. A lot of people don’t like the 2004 remake, but I think it’s reasonably good. But there was one scene that pushed it past the finish line for me. Our Heroes have crashed in the Gobi desert, far from rescue and essentially doomed unless they can get themselves out. Fortunately, they have among them Elliot (Giovanni Ribisi), an aerospace engineer who knows how to turn their wrecked twin-engined C-119 into a functional single engine aircraft. Problem: they’ve just tangled with armed local nomads who have a demonstrated history of shooting at them and stealing their stuff. So after a brief gun battle, some of Our Heroes stagger back to camp dragging an injured enemy with them.What does a group with extremely limited supplies in an extreme environment do with a captured and grievously injured enemy combatant? It looks like we’re in or a lot of arguing and perhaps even fighting among Our Heroes… until Elliot steps in.
Elliot is a good engineer, but is slightly lacking in tact. But under the circumstances… tact is a minor concern. He is depicted as either an Aspie or a sociopath; my vote would go for Aspie. In either event, he quickly does the math, draws the logical conclusion and performs the needed tasks. It was a thing of beauty. Few have been the times I laughed that loud in a theater.
Anybody else ever notice how common headlines like this are? “He was an activist for X, and it turns out he was actually…”
And because why not, the world ain’t half weird enough:
And on the subject of Russia… if you still have a LiveJournal account, it’s time to close it out. LJ was sold to the Russians years ago and in December the servers moved to Russia; you are now subject to Russias laws regarding censorship and control over the internet. You are not allowed to post political discussions without first getting LJ’s approval (i.e. the Russian government), and if you have more than 3,000 views per day you’re supposed to register as a media outlet.
Yet another truck was hijacked; this one was driven into a crowd outside a department store, killing four.
Probably Europe’s “new normal.”
“Generation Tech” is the YouTube channel of the very best kind of nerd: the kind who over-analyzes Star Wars and tries to apply logic and rationality to it. Some people think it’s silly to try to make popular science fiction or fantasy franchises such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings or the last eight years of the White House make sense, but I find it to be a good way to exercise the brain. With Star Wars, things are complicated by decades of officially licensed novels and comic books and the like that are now officially considered non-canonical, but which still slip into the new canon (witness Grand Admiral Thrawn now being wholly canonical).
Still, some interesting conclusions can be drawn by taking some widely separated, and almost certainly unrelated, hints (hints that were never meant to be linked together by the various authors) and drag them kicking and screaming into some sort of grand unified nerd theory. For example, several details hint at the idea that Emperor Palpatine wasn’t just a simple one-dimensional Bad Guy. Instead… early on in his career he had visions of the galaxy being invaded by an extremely dangerous foe, one that the hidebound Galactic Republic would have been utterly incapable of fighting off. So his obsession with building up a remarkably pointless military (honestly, who was the Imperial navy, with those tens of thousands of star Destroyers supposed to fight?) wasn’t just a pointless obsession, but was a buildup to prepare the galaxy for incoming foes. The Death Stars turn out in this scenario to not be one-off weapons of internal suppression (though that’s what most of the people involved with them thought them to be), but basically the first of a new class of really big battleship to fight off the incoming world-sized enemy ships. There are rumors that this scenario just might ply out in the future Star Wars flicks, presumably the Episodes 10-12 trilogy.
And then there’s the question of “how does a regular schmoe take on a Jedi?” And the answer is the same that I thought up decades ago: shotguns.
Let’s face it: there are few enough situations where “shotgun” is the wrong answer. But against some self-important magical jackass with a laser sword, a shotgun would be extra-handy. Sure, they can use their Force-powers to accurately place their blades to reflect an incoming blaster bolt, which will bounce right off. But what happens to a chunk of lead, copper, steel, or depleted uranium flying at a Jedis face if said Jedi intercepts it with a light saber? He *might* vaporize the projectile. And I’m not sure than an ounce of uranium *vapor* heading at his face it going to be a whole lot safer for him. Not mentioned in the video: grenade launchers. Shoot projectiles at the Jedi that are designed to explode when struck with a light saber… and at no other time. Maybe he can hurl them back at you with the Force, but big whoop. If they go *kerblam* if he uses his blade on them, then he’s got a grenade going off at arms length.