Digger

Tom Cruise as Digger - ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett C

I'm not sure why this picture triggered me. I mean, I like Tom Cruise, but I didn't recognize him right off. In any case it prompted me to take a look at Variety's review of Cruise's new movie Digger which starts like this:

“Digger,” starring Tom Cruise as a Texas oil tycoon who unleashes forces even more powerful than himself, is a movie that thinks it’s delivering something bigger than a mere message; it thinks it’s bringing us the word. Cruise, under pounds of jowly make-up and thinning disheveled white hair, plays Digger Rockwell, an ancient Southern fossil-fuel titan who doesn’t just lord it over his company. He’s a man who rules the oil industry, and therefore rules America and maybe the world.

Both the movie and the review are kind of nuts, but I did read a science fiction disaster story where something  (nuclear bombs maybe?) had unleashed a titanic amount of methane (from seabed mineral nodules, maybe?) and to combat this they set the methane on fire (using more nuclear bombs, maybe?), reasoning the CO2 is less of a greenhouse gas than methane.

Funnies

10 Short Videos #6270

10 Short Videos #6270

1. Круто, ловко, синхронно! - Cool, clever, synchronous! - Horse & acrobat
2. This Furnace Spins 20 Tons of Molten Glass Into a Telescope Mirror
3. The Ultimate POV Rally Driver Experience
4. 5 inch 38 as WWII's most effective AA gun - thanks to the proximity fuse
5. Sticky Tape Can Make X-Rays
6. Samboan, Cebu Island, Philippines 🇵🇭 beautiful beach 🏝️ - beautiful woman
7. 1000 VS 5000 Rounds per minute - anti-aircraft weapons
8. 环塔SS10卡玛兹大猛兽 - Ring Tower SS10 Kamaz Great Beast - Truck crossing sand dunes
9. They tested whether Leonardo da Vinci’s design actually worked 💀
10. He flew onto a navy ship - using a jet pack

Ultrasound Surgery

What Is MR-Guided Focused Ultrasound?
Northwestern Medicine

Jack has been suffering from essential tremor. A week ago he went in for ultrasound surgery to stop the tremor in his right hand. I had no idea there was such a thing. 

MRI-guided focused ultrasound surgery for essential tremors was first used to treat a patient in 2009 during proof-of-concept clinical trials, and it later received FDA approval in 2016.

Surgery was done at OHSU. It apparently worked. I stopped by to see him the next day and he was fine. They told him if he wants to, he can come back next year and for the other hand. Right now he's thinking the procedure was so arduous (tightening the bolts that hold the frame to his head) that he's not interested in repeating it. After all his good hand is working fine now. We shall see what he has to say next year.

Spaghetti

Old Spaghetti Factory

Went for a walk down in South Waterfront this morning and found myself by the Old Spaghetti Factory. It's an impressive building, somebody was obviously having grandiose thoughts. I think it's kind of cool, so cool that I thought we should get the family together and go down there sometime for dinner. Then I noticed signs attached to the inside of some of the big plate glass windows. The signs faced inwards and read Do Not Touch The Glass. I suspect the reason is that families bring their rowdy kids there and the kids smear their grubby little hands all over the glass and the manager isn't willing to pay someone to stand by the windows and keep them clean. Is this related to the elimination of corporal punishment in schools? Anyway, if that's the situation, I don't think I wanna go. I'll go to Giovanni's instead.

The picture is from Google Earth.

My Watch Stopped

Of all the gin joints in all the world
Andrew Barbin

I'm reading A Gentleman in Moscow, a novel by Amor Towles, and on page 398 I find this passage:

But having snuck into the room of this American and arranged for a message to be delivered, it suddenly struck the Count that Humphrey Bogart would never turn down an offer of a drink after midnight. In fact all evidence suggested that Bogart preferred his drinking after midnight - when the orchestra had stopped playing, the bar stools had emptied, and the revelers had stumbled off into the night. That was the hour when, with the saloon doors closed, the lights turned low, and a bottle of whiskey on the table, Men of Intent could speak without the distractions of love and laughter.

P. S. The volume on the above clip is very low, so I looked around for a do-dad that could boost the volume and found YouTube Volume Control 2.4.1, a Chrome browser extension. Coincidentally, the Ctrl-Shift-Left Arrow key combination quit working. (I use this when I want to highlight several words.) Was it a coincidence? I have run into problems with the keyboard before where something that used to work just fine quits. Surely I would have made a note in this blog about it, but look as I might, either here or on Google, I could find nothing that would explain it, which seemed really odd. And then I came across this piece, and boom, we're back at the volume control extension. Turn it off and Ctrl-Shift-Left Arrow resumes working normally.

P. P. S.  My watch has also stopped, but I still wear it. If I don't wear it my hand feels funny. It was never a very good watch for telling time, it's a chronometer with some extra dials cluttering up the face which makes telling the time kind of iffy. I use my phone for the time now, so my watch is just jewelry. Some people like gold and diamonds because of their value. I like my Aluminum watch as it is a lovely example of  the fine art of mechanical engineering.

10 Short Videos #6269

10 Short Videos #6269

1. Eagle power attack
2. Nobody would believe that if it weren’t for the camera 🤣
3. infinite floor
4. The power of doubt (and an announcement) - African mountains
5. Not Your Typical Landing… IL-76 Edition 😳
6. Glad this guy managed to get a job - parking fines
7. Do you like this mini turbine engine model? - transparent jet engine
8. This “New” Chinese Jetpack Demo 🚀
9. When southern ppl FINALLY go to the doctor
10. Launching a fighter jet with a button.