Unfinishable movies: “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”

 AARRRGH, blather, cats, Gah., youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 132022
 

In the past couple years as I’ve been buried under a mountain of CAD drafting, I’ve also found myself with access to a lot of streaming content. So I’ve been watching a lot of old movies that I had never seen before… some good, some bad, a lot indifferent. A week ago I watched “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly;” a few days ago, “Pale Rider.” Those were good. Then yesterday I decided to give “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” a shot. Got less than halfway through it when I decided that, even as background noise, I had far better ways to waste my life.

Let’s get this bit out of the way. As y’all may know, I’m pretty anti-woke. But, *wow,* that trans-racial Mickey Rooney character was freakin’ *painful* to look at and listen to. Yeeeeeesh.

But that wasn’t my problem with the movie. The movie is about one “Holly Golightly,” who turns out to be an incredibly shallow, vapid, materialistic gold digger with no apparent redeeming value. That’s pretty much *exactly* the sort of thing I’m not interested in. And the movie was also *boring.* So somewhere around a third of the movie, a new character was introduced. I looked at him and went “Huh. Is that Buddy Ebsen? It looks like him, but the voice doesn’t sound like him.” So I looked on IMDB, and, yup, that was him. As for the voice, I went to the “trivia” section pf the IMDB page for the movie and tried to find reference to whether Ebsen was dubbed by someone else. I didn’t read that, but I did read this:

Audrey Hepburn said the scene where she throws Cat into the rainy street was the most distasteful thing she ever had to do on film.

Wat.

Quickly losing patience with the film, I looked up “breakfast at tiffany’s” and “cat” and “rain” on YouTube, and found the scene in question. It’s the ending scene of the film, and it shows Holly driving away in a taxi in the rain with her pet cat Cat. She gets in a huff for some reason, stops the taxi, opens the door, and puts the cat out onto the street and has the taxi driver drive away. She doesn’t actually throw the cat, but not only does she dump the cat, she dumps the cat onto a busy street; not only that, onto a busy rainy street. That results in this shot:

The main character of this movie casually discards a cat into the rain.

Nah.

ᚠᚢᚳk ᚣᚩᚢ, ᛒᛁᛏᚳᚻ

So, onto something else with more sympathetic characters.

 

 Posted by at 12:02 pm

Nope.

 art, Hmm..., science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
Feb 132022
 

The first Jordan Peele movie that looks like something I want to watch:

Looks like the basic idea is “alien abduction.” I suppose, though, coming from Peele, it’ll turn out to be white racism.

 Posted by at 2:33 am

Proxima d

 awesomeness, news, science  No Responses »
Feb 122022
 

New planet detected around star closest to the Sun

The newly discovered planet, named Proxima d, orbits Proxima Centauri at a distance of about four million kilometres, less than a tenth of Mercury’s distance from the Sun. It orbits between the star and the habitable zone — the area around a star where liquid water can exist at the surface of a planet — and takes just five days to complete one orbit around Proxima Centauri.

The star is already known to host two other planets: Proxima b, a planet with a mass comparable to that of Earth that orbits the star every 11 days and is within the habitable zone, and candidate Proxima c, which is on a longer five-year orbit around the star.

Proxima Centauri is a small star, with seemingly a decent collection of planets. This *may* be evidence that planets should be pretty common. And while there is a roughly Earth-sized planet within the habitable zone of Proxima, it is very unlikely to be congenial to life. Proxima, like many red dwarfs, is a flare star. And while the Sun also spits out some substantial flares from time to time, with these itty-bitty stars, the habitable zone is *real* *close* to the star. The flares that on the sun  would be barely detectable on Earth, would quickly strip the atmosphere from an Earthlike planet orbiting a red dwarf.

 Posted by at 9:24 am

This does not bode well

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., news, nukes, politics, science, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 122022
 

For the most part, I’m satisfied to let people be who they want to be. Do whatever you like in the privacy of your own home, so long as you’re hurting nobody else. But the fact is, some things (and people) really are nuts. Mental illness is a reality. And being mentally ill in one area could well mean you are not likely to make good judgements in another.

Behold who the Biden administration is hiring to help plan for the future of nuclear waste.

Biden Puttin’ On The Dog

Tolerance goes just so far. And then it gets pushed *too* far and it snaps back. Are we at that point? near that point? beyond that point? I dunno, but if I was *kinda* like this person, but nowhere near as nutty as this person, I’d be *real* worried about the inevitable pendulum swing in the other direction. I would post the photos that this person happily and willingly puts out onto the internet, but I at least *kinda* try to keep this as a safe for work, safe for family and safe for life blog. If I included the photos, parent groups across the land would try to get my blog yoinked from public school libraries… and they’d be right to do so.

Apparently he has the right degrees, the right education to technically work in the field of nuclear waste handling. But imagine being a standard, normal engineer tasked with working alongside this guy in his dresses and dog-play. Yeeeeesh. If nothing else, he is making everything in his life all about him. There are reasons why “professional attire” is what it is… and conformity is part of that. It is not strictly from an authoritarian desire to make everyone conform to some arbitrary standard, but to make everyone focus on their *job* not on their attire, or on what Bob’s wearing today. The physical sciences are hard enough without having to deal with loonies that you can’t respect. The job needs to be about *the* *job.* Intentionally dressing bizarrely as a way to garner irrelevant attention to yourself seems to denote massive narcissism, if nothing else.

 Posted by at 9:10 am

Bell nuclear powered helicopter

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., Monthly Historical Documents Program, nukes, Patreon, projects  No Responses »
Feb 112022
 

One of the odder concepts from the 1950’s was this circa 1959 Bell Aircraft concept for a nuclear powered helicopter. Very little has come out about it in the decades since; some crude schematics of how the reactor and propulsion systems would be arranged, a bit of text, and this one piece of art. Supposedly this vehicle would have a fuselage some 300 feet long (including rotors, it would be much longer), have a top speed of 200 miles per hour and weigh 500,000 pounds. The artwork looks more like the result of turning the artist loose on the idea of “giant nuclear helicopter” than an interpretation of an engineering study; nuclear reactors powerful enough to lift a half million power helicopter and neither small nor minimally radioactive. A heavily shielded reactor would have to be fitted within this vehicle *somewhere,* and there would doubtless not be windows in that region. This design, though, has windows along the whole length of the fuselage, with little space for a shielded reactor. This design seems to have been designated D-1007.

 

The full-rez scan of the art has been uploaded to the 2022-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox. This is available to all $4 and up Patrons and Subscribers. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.



 

 Posted by at 10:16 pm

Gun Jesus and the Gauss Gun

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., science, weapons, youtube  No Responses »
Feb 112022
 

The one where Forgotten Weapons takes a mass driver to the range:

 

I think I’ve mentioned this “weapon” hereabouts before. It remains interesting-yet-meh, shooting a half-inch diameter slug of steel at seventy some meters per second. This is *really* subsonic (something like Mach 0.2) and unlikely to prove fatal barring a good head shot at close range. Still: it’s early days for this technology. Jack up the muzzle velocity by a factor of ten (require a factor of >100 more energy being dumped into the projectile, a non-trivial task) and they’ll really have something… a “firearm” capable of proper firearm performance, requiring no gunpowder and, by the time it becomes available, largely 3D printable by the average home printer… with the non-printable bits being distinctly non-firearm components, thus unregulated.

 Posted by at 2:33 pm

Funniest diatribe you’ll see all day

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., humor, Worldwreckers, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 112022
 

Where you get to be lectured by a seemingly unceasing string of woke talking points about how humans, who owe our usefully capable brains to eating meat, need to become vegans in order to not be racist and misogynistic because… reasons.

It must be *amazing* to live in a brain like the one on display below. Eating meat is white supremacy. Somehow. Apparently popular culture is filled with depictions of “sexy fish” who want to be consumed. Fortunately, a lot of her more insane gibberings are met with laughter.

 

 Posted by at 2:20 pm
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