There was a zoom call in 2020 with a number of the major players in the saga of the Kenosha Kid. And what makes the video below awesome is that one of the villains of the piece, the Commie granny-basher with the illegally concealed firearm, suffers a furniture fail on camera. Behold as Rittenhouse and his lawyer try and fail to restrain their laughter. It’s like watching Jeffrey Dahmer or Stalin slip on a banana.
A guy takes some wood, rubber and ingenuity and makes a “trebuchet” that flings a projectile at about 490 meters/second, or about Mach 1.4. Practical applications? Ummm… answer unclear, ask again later.
And yet, the most awesome. Two AM-180 fully automatic weapons somehow merged together sending a very large volume of .22 LR downrange at a stupidly high cyclic rate.
Well, my panties are ruined. pic.twitter.com/Pb9KhzAVj2
— Appalachian '4DoorsMoreWhores' /K/ommando (@ActualFixer) November 30, 2021
This time it’s being pitched as a streaming movie, not theatrical. This would have the advantage of not having to cling to the usual Hollywood “blockbuster” formula, which ATMOM would not have done well with. With luck, it can be set in the 1930’s with a cast that makes sense, without the “need” for stunt casting, superfluous romantic sub-plots (there were *no* women in the original), and the ability to be slow and creepy and weird where it needs to be.
But in the world of looney anti-gun nuts, especially those trying to cover their own butts, guns are sentient evil beasts that act without human involvement:
So, Ridley Scott’s film “The Last Duel” opened in late October. So far it has raked in nearly $29 million ($11M domestic, $18M foreign)… on a budget of about $100 million. This is by any metric a disaster. It’s odd: both critics and audiences seem to like it according to Rotten Tomatoes. So why did it fail? I dunno. I haven’t seen it; I saw the trailers and they’re… ok, I guess. Didn’t really inspire me to get off my keister and into a pandemic infested theater where five cents of sugar water costs six bucks and a handful of kerploded corn is another seven.
But Ridley Scott know exactly why it failed. Those darned kids!
“I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these ᚠᚢᛍᚴᛁᚿᚵ cellphones. The millennian [sic] do not ever want to be taught anything unless you’re told it on a cellphone,” Scott said.
Yeah, uh-huh.
Personally, while I don’t *know* why it failed, I would *guess* that after a year of lockdowns and panic mongering, people have kinda lost the thrill of the moviegoing experience. Yes, “No Time To Die” apparently made bank, but Ghostbusters has so far only made $118 million worldwide… another disaster, though obviously not as bad of one. Going to the movies is more of a hassle than it once was (fewer theaters, for a start) while being more expensive; if you’re going as a family or a group of friends, you could *easily* spend more for a couple hours than for a whole month of some streaming service. TV’s these days are *huge* and the resolution is greater than the human eyeball can take in; easy to have quite a number of people over to watch some movie or show, all with cheap snacks and no mask mandates or shrieking Karens. Going to the theater was probably always going to go into decline thanks to streaming and 4k wall-sized TVs, but the Commie Cough only sped that along.
Looking at the top worldwide movies of 2021 on box Office Mojo, it looks like if Ridley Scott wants to make the big money he needs to go straight to the Chinese market. Top two grossing movies of the year were Chinese flicks, with the highest grossing being a movie about the Chinese military “volunteers” sent to fight at Chosin reservoir during the Korean War.
The most recent APR rewards included a CAD diagram I created of the “Disney Bomb.” This little known weapon was created by the British in WWII, but dropped by USAAF B-17’s in the last months of the war in Europe. The reason for the unusual name: in 1942 Disney produced an animated propaganda film on the history and potential or military air power. This film included sequences of the war to come, depicting some kinda-sorta sci-fi thinking. Included here is a bomb with a rocket motor, used to penetrate the reinforced concrete roof of a submarine pen. This gave some British engineers ideas… and they made it reality. The Disney bomb was imperfect, but damned if it didn’t work. Next time someone argues that sci-fi doesn’t actually directly inspire engineers to create the future, remember the Disney bomb.
The YouTube version of “Victory” linked below is pretty awful in reproduction quality, but it’s the best I’ve seen (it was released on DVD some years ago).
Heh.
I bet someone’s gonna get called into the office.
The rewards for November, 2021, have been sent out. Patrons should have received a notification message through Patreon linking to the rewards; subscribers should have received a notification from Dropbox linking to the rewards. If you did not, let me know.
Document: “Galactic-Jupiter Probe Program Concept:” 1967 NASA-Goddard brochure describing a Pioneer/Voyager type of space probe
Document: “Mixed Mode Rocket Vehicles for International Space Transportation Systems,” 1973 paper describing modified Shuttles and other launch vehicles
Document: “Nuclear Physics Made Very, Very Easy,”1968 NASA NERVA test operation publication that summarizes nuclear physics
Diagram: Navalized Advanced tactical Fighter (Northrop NF-23) general arrangement
CAD Diagram ($5 and up): “Disney Bomb,” British designed and built, American dropped rocket-boosted submarine pen penetrating bomb from the end of WWII
If this sort of thing is of interest, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. *ALL* back issues, one a month since 2014, are available for subscribers at low cost.
Yikes: