Refraction

De-icing a Gulfstream IV, Reno, Nevada

It looks like they are using a flame thrower to de-ice the airplane, but I suspect it must be a trick of the light. De-icing a small jet like this costs about $1500. De-icing a large airliner can cost $10,000. Most of the expense is for the fluid.

F35A at Nagoya Airfield, Japan

Given the amount of heat distortion of the background, I wonder if there might be another aircraft nearby, just out of the picture.

Aerospatiale ATR-72-500 departing for Guernsey from Manchester, England

Even turboprops produce a heck of a lot of hot air as you can see from the blurring of the background here.

Vin Mariani

Vin Mariani Poster

Vin Mariani was a tonic and patent medicine was made from wine and coca leaves. It was created about 1863 by Angelo Mariani. It inspired the the predecessor to Coca-Cola.

Pope Leo XII Endorses Vin Mariani

Vin Mariani wasn't successful just because it contained cocaine. Mariani engaged in extensive promotion including sending a case to a number of famous people, including the Pope.

Via Detroit Steve

Close

Close | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
The Hollywood Reporter sums it up pretty well:

"Few actresses portray badassery as vividly as Noomi Rapace. Achieving international fame with the Swedish trilogy of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo films in which she so memorably played Lisbeth Salander, the talented performer has still not found an equivalent breakout role in American films. That unfortunate streak continues with Vicky Jewson's Netflix thriller in which Rapace plays a character inspired by the real-life British bodyguard Jacquie Davis. Rapace gives the film her all, delivering an intense, physically demanding performance, but Close doesn't get close enough to transcending its action-movie clichés."

We have lots of action, and Noomi kicks ass, but overall the story is pretty weak. Noomi is a CPO (Close Protection Officer? Operator? aka bodygaurd) for Zoe, a young heiress. Her stepmom, Rima, is played by Indira Varma, the poisoner Ellaria Sand from Game of Thrones. Halfway through the movie it is revealed the Rima has ordered the assassination of her step daughter (typecasting much?), but then more bad guys enter the picture and at the end we are left wondering what the hell? No matter, the plot was never more than a scaffold to hand the action scenes on. The one in the fish tank in the fishing boat was new, different, cool, bizarre? Can a death be 'cool'?

Casbah, according to Zoe, means 'fortified house'.

Bromides and Bunkum

Sodium Bromide Molecular Structure
Because words do not always make for good pictures

"The word bromide was at first the name of a sedative that physicians used in the treatment of epilepsy, sea sickness and insomnia; but in the early twentieth century its reference was extended to soporific bores and their stupefying conversation.  The implication was that subjection to the bromides of a bromidic man (or woman) was very much like chemical sedation, since it induced the same feeling of numbness, lassitude, and fuddled mind. 

"As one student of the metaphorically bromidic explained, the essence of bromidic conversation is that it is both trite and predictable, and that it therefore lacks the novelty and surprise that are the soul of sparkling conversation.*  People are excited by novelty, whether in content or style, and they express their excitement in laughter, gesticulation and an eager stance.  But they are stupefied when they hear what everyone already knows expressed in words everyone has already heard, and they express their stupor with a slouch, a grunt and a glassy eye." - The Orthosphere

This is just the introduction. It gets better. You can read it all here.

Via Monday Evening

Saturday Night

The Original Dinerant

Cheeseburgers for dinner at The Original ($120 for four, with drinks, out the door) followed by Police Story at the Hollywood Theater.


Police Story - "International Version" Trailer (HD) (1985)
Police Story starts with a car chase through a shanty town built on the side of a hill. Let us be clear - three cars plow three separate paths through the town destroying all in their way. Roads? We don't need no stinking roads. It was just so over the top that I howled. I think the boys would have shushed me, but I wasn't the only one howling.

They broke a great deal of glass doing stunts in this movie. I suppose most of it must have been sugar glass, and then the sound of real glass breaking was added. Otherwise the set would have been covered in blood.

There was a plot, and a villain, and a couple of cute girls, but mostly it was frenetic Jackie Chan stunts interspersed with Jackie Clan clowning. Very entertaining.

I've seen other Jackie Chan movies and he does some spectacular stunts. I don't know if there is anything that will stick with me, besides the car chase through the shanty town. Since I don't remember seeing that before, I suspect I may not have seen this movie before. On the other hand 1985 was a long time ago, and I have seen many movies, so maybe I did see it once before.

Weird Car

Don't think I've ever seen anything like this before.

Via Ross

Msicellaneous

Paid a visit to a doctor today. Talking about a minor chronic infection in the lungs. Shows us some CAT scans, points out the problem areas, very tiny, they look to my untrained eye just like everything else. For comparison, she pulls up some Google images of this disease (broncho-something or other). Huh, doctors use Google. Anyway, in these images the disease is obvious.

Now we are talking about drugs and I get to wondering how many different drugs are there? Zillions, I imagine. Some are very common and are taken by millions of people. Some are really weird and are only taken by a few people. Surely someone has a chart that illustrates this. I should see if I can find one.

Oregon House of Representatives passed a rent-control bill today. Christ on a crutch, effing morons. We continue our slide towards the abyss.

What was the population of bears in North America before the white man came? John Snow (from Game of Thrones) wears a bear skin coat. If everyone who lives in the frozen north wears a bear skin coat, what is the maximum population of people you could have? If you kill all the bears, then everyone gets a bear skin coat, but coats wear out and are going to need to be replaced. So the question is how many bears can you kill a year without having a bad effect on the bear population?

Most of the blogs on my list also have lists of blogs, some are extensive. I poke around there occasionally. A couple of days ago I decided to make an effort to follow some of them, so I have been adding them to Feedly. Once you have added them, it makes it easy to see what everyone else is taking about. Also, you don't have to see if they have posted anything recently. Feedly does that part for you. Looking over these posts the past couple of days I have discovered a couple that I like, a couple I don't like, and several that are okay, but don't really interest me.

One subject that gets my attention is stories about cops behaving badly. There is no end to them and there probably won't be. Meanwhile, for every one of those stories there are a zillion instances of people behaving badly and cops doing their jobs correctly. I don't want to hear about these individual incidents. However, if anyone manages to purge a nest corruption, I do want to hear about that.

I spent some time reading about Maria Butina. Depending on which story you read, you may think she is evil incarnate, or decent person caught in jaws of a political fight.

I really think we need a subscription fee tacked onto our internet access. Fee gets dividy up amongst all the websites you visit. Get rid of these frigging pay walls.