The Thursday Murder Club | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Medium funny movie about old folks investigating old and new murders. Quite the aging cast:
Age
Actor
Character
Role
80
Helen Mirren
Elizabeth Best
MI6 (spy)
72
Pierce Brosnan
Ron
Labor Union Organizer & Rabble Rouser
73
Celia Imrie
Joyce
Nurse
81
Ben Kingsley
Ibrahim Arif
Psychiatrist
46
Tom Ellis
Jason Ritchie
Ron's son, celebrity, former professional fighter,
47
Daniel Mays
DCI Chris Hudson
Copper
54
David Tennant
Ian Ventham
Evil Landlord
78
Jonathan Pryce
Stephen Best
Elizabeth's husband, suffers from dementia
34
Naomi Ackie
Donna De Freitas
Constable
40
Henry Lloyd-Hughes
Bogdan
Polish handyman
48
Ingrid Oliver
Joanna Meadowcroft
Joyce's daughter
68
Richard E. Grant
Bobby Tanner
Gangster
82
Paul Freeman
John Grey
Key role in climax
62
Geoff Bell
Tony Curran
Good landlord
I didn't recognize Paul Freeman, I suspected who he was, but I wasn't sure so I asked Google and Google replied:
In the Netflix movie adaptation of The Thursday Murder Club, John Grey is a retired veterinarian and a resident of Coopers Chase, married to Penny Grey. He plays a crucial role in the film's climax by killing Ian Ventham to prevent the discovery of Peter Mercer's body, which Penny Gray had buried, and then taking his own and Penny's lives with fentanyl to protect her secret. - Google
I'm glad I asked. That's a better explanation than I could have come up with, expect now you wonder who Penny Gray and Peter Mercer are. You'll have to watch the show, it's too complicated for me to explain this late at night.
You name any country in the Mid-East and I tend to think sand, sand and goat herders living in tents. And then I see pictures of downtown areas filled with big buildings and cars and I am shocked. This has happened many times so you might think I would have gotten used to it, but I haven't. I'm still shocked every time I see an image like this.
Okay, this image has a fireball front and center, but with as many conflicts as we have going on in the world and with everybody and their mother carrying a camera around in their pocket, it's not that unusual. Good shot with the camera, though.
Longtail Boat Drag Racing in Thailand is CRAZY!
CB Media
It's monsoon season in Thailand and the sky looks like it is threatening to rain. Don't want it to rain, can you imagine how terrible it would be if it rained and the track got wet? The boats would lose all their traction.
The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) - Bangkok boat scene
MI5MI6GCHQ
If you are old like me you may remember this scene from the James Bond movie The Man With The Golden Gun.
Somehow Israel got all of enemies generals to all be in the same place at the same time which meant that they could wipe them all out with one blow.
"Still, as impressive as the nuts and bolts of the plot were, it's how thought-out this all was that's truly incredible. It's one thing to place fake calls through Iranian back channels. It's another to have every general who answered the phone fall for the ruse.
"How did that happen? The answer lies in how antiquated and authoritarian Iran's military structure was and remains. When you serve at the behest of an Islamic dictator who tortures and kills people who step out of line, you aren't exactly in a position to question an order. When the calls came in to head to the bunker, wondering if things seemed a little suspicious wasn't an option. So all the generals blindly listened."
Our hero, Ferrar, is a Spaniard living and working as a lawyer in Paris, France. A civil war is going on in Spain between Franco and the Republic. Ferrar's sympathies lie with the Republic. Somehow he gets roped into working for the Oficia Tecnica in the Spanish Embassy who are charged with buying armaments for the forces of the Republic. This is a little difficult because of the non-intervention treaty that most western countries have signed.
The war is not going well for the Republic. They are preparing for the battle of Ebro which will be their last chance of defeating the Franco. The Fascists have a big advantage - they have aircraft, the Republic doesn't have any. The Republican forces do have a bunch of Soviet anti-aircraft guns, but they don't have any ammunition. The Soviets, as you might expect, have plenty of this ammo, but they won't sell any. They are hoarding it against the prospect of going to war against Hitler, which is likely to happen any day now. Nobody else has any because they are all geared up for making ammo for their own anti-aircraft guns. The machinery could be modified to make the Soviet ammo, but that would take time, time they do not have.
Ferrar is working with Max, and Max comes up with the idea of hiring some gangsters in Odessa to steal the ammo from a Soviet warehouse. The gangsters are very clever. They pose as agents of Stalin's secret police, tell the warehouse manager this is a secret operation and he is not to discuss it with anyone. And since everyone is terrified of the secret police and dare not question anything they say, the manager gladly complies. And then the gangsters show up with a fleet of trucks and haul all 60 tons of this aircraft ammo to a ship waiting at the dock.
The ship sails to Valencia, the ammo is off loaded and delivered to the army of the Republic, so now they have a fighting chance against the Fascists. The battle does not go well, the Republic is defeated and Franco takes over for the next 30 odd years.
My friend Elliot writes computer programs that displays colorful stuff on computer screens:
"This is creepy as heck, but I am having fun with it. This uses a difference filter that I have written from scratch using Windows Media Foundation. The filter was inspired by some sci fi that I read, which posited that dinosaurs could only see movement. When you stop moving, the image sort of fades away..."
One of the men who went on to found Intel predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every year or two, leading to the continuous, exponential growth in computer power, and a splendid future for the semiconductor industry.
This was not a law of physics, but a fond business projection. Yet, in defiance of physical limitations, the prediction has been sustained into this age of three-dimensional chip stacking, and other neat tricks. Moreover, according to George Gilder’s Law, the total bandwidth of communication systems triples every twelve months; and to Robert Metcalf’s Law, the value of a network increases as the square of the number of its users, every eighteen months. Indeed, by consulting the Internet, it may now be possible to make one’s head explode.
Aljazeera is a weird outfit. They suffer from IDS - Israel Derangement Syndrome, very similar to TDS - Trump Derangement Syndrome - that Democrats suffer from. But for anything outside of that they seem to fairly rational and coherent.
This video might best be described as an exercise in futility. The first look under the chassis is pretty dismal - the rot is extensive. I wonder why he bothers with the exhaust pipe, and why the hell is he patching those rotten fuel lines? I suppose he still had some hope that it could be driven, but when he's vacuuming and starts pulling chunks of rust from a hole in the corner of the dashboard under the windshield, I'm thinking there is no hope for this car. Maybe the engine is still good, but alas, that is not the case.
How can people let their cars deteriorate like this? I mean a car is a substantial investment. Well, no it's not. It's something you can buy with a small amount of money that gives you the power to go anywhere and everywhere and do it quickly, and that's what people want. Who are all those people clogging up the roads outside of rush hour? Not people who are working, okay some of them are, but most of them are just operating on whim. 'I'm gonna go see my friends', or 'I'm going shopping' or, most American of all, 'I'm going for a drive'.
We've been eating peaches lately, and this song came on the radio the other day. Peaches are tricky. They aren't ripe when we bring them home from the store, so we let them sit on the counter for a couple of days, but only a couple, and then you have to gobble them up because once they become ripe they turn very quickly. And how many peaches can you eat in a day? One a day is plenty for me. Maybe two.
Darling daughter moved into a new rental yesterday. Found this very clean installation in the basement. I think this may be the first time I have actually seen a steam heat boiler. The place was built around about 1920 and is still in pretty good condition.
Harvard University Admission Entrance Tricks | Radical Algebra Aptitude Test
Learncommunolizer
There are several YouTube channels with people explaining how to solve various math problems. I enjoy working simple math problems, it's good exercise for my brain. Sometimes, if the problem looks like something I can solve, I will attempt it. Some look like they are way above my pay grade, I ignore those. This one looked like I ought to be able to handle it. My first instinct was to expand the expression and hope that a solution would magically appear. They do, sometimes. But the power of ten meant that the expansion was going to be huge, and I don't want to do that, it would take an awful lot of scribbling. Maybe this guy has a trick up his sleeve, so I watched it. I have got to say his method is pretty clever.
I think I have always loved Alfas. To me, they were the poor man's version of a Ferrari.When I was a teenager, Ferrari's were the very pinnacle of the car hierarchy and were completely unobtainable, but Alfas had the same pedigree (red paint, DOHC, high revving, aluminum engines), but were affordable. Friend of mine was even able to buy an aging spider. He made a mess of it, but that's another story.
They are still affordable, but they require a lot of care or deep pockets to keep they running.
US envoy prompts outrage in Lebanon after telling media to ‘act civilised’
A top US diplomat has triggered outrage and calls for an apology in Lebanon after telling a group of local journalists to “act civilised”.
Tom Barrack, the United States ambassador to Turkiye and the special envoy for Syria, made the comments on Tuesday after meeting Lebanese President Joseph Aoun in Beirut to discuss plans for the disarmament of Hezbollah.
Briefing local media after the meeting, Barrack, who is of Lebanese descent, chided reporters for shouting out questions all at once, and appeared to draw a link between their behaviour and conflict in the Middle East.
“We’re going to have a different set of rules… please be quiet for a moment,” Barrack said.
“And I want to tell you something, the moment this starts becoming chaotic, like animalistic, we’re gone. So, you want to know what’s happening? Act civilised, act kind, act tolerant, because this is the problem with what is happening in the region.”
“In cadence with your kindness, your interest and your thoughtful questions, we’ll give you responses,” Barrack added. “If that’s not how you’d like to operate, we’re gone.”
Barrack’s remarks prompted a swift backlash in Lebanon and farther afield, with commentators accusing the diplomat of displaying arrogance and a colonial mentality.
Alexander Dugan is a Russian political philosopher and alleged Rasputin to Vladimer Putin. You may recall that Dugan’s daughter was not long ago killed by a car-bomb, likely planted by Ukrainian assassins. I have not read any of Dugan’s books—and I understand they are effectively banned in this sweet land of liberty—but I did recently read the transcript of an interview with the man.
Dugan is a man of the right who promotes what he calls the “fourth political philosophy.” He argues that Modernity produced three political philosophies—Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism—and that Liberalism emerged from their contest triumphant because it is the most thoroughly modern of the three.
. . .
Dugan’s fourth political philosophy has no name because it remains a work in progress, . . .
The rest of his post is a little too esoteric for me. Dugan, or Dugin, depending on who you ask, it one of Vladimir Putin's advisors. Putin, the President of Russia, recently met with American President Donald Trump in Alaska. I've never heard of this Dugan before, so I go looking around and found this tidbit on Goodreads:
“What we are against will unite us, while what we are for divides us. Therefore, we should emphasise what we oppose. The common enemy unites us, while the positive values each of us are defending actually divides us. Therefore, we must create strategic alliances to overthrow the present order of things, of which the core could be described as human rights, anti-hierarchy, and political correctness – everything that is the face of the Beast, the anti-Christ or, in other terms, Kali-Yuga.” ― Alexander Dugin
Whoo-boy, that's a different take on things, but what is this Kali-Yuga? Google's short answer is:
The Kali Yuga is the fourth and current epoch in the Hindu cycle of ages, characterized as the "Age of Darkness" or a period of moral decline and spiritual deterioration, leading to increased conflict, vice, and a decline in human virtues and lifespan. It is also known as the age of the demon Kali, and is characterized by societal breakdown, diminished intellect, and a focus on superficiality, though some interpretations suggest the end of its cumulative negative aspects is near.
Kali, you may remember is the demon being worshipped at the climax of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom:
I got to thinking about WW2 in the Pacific the other day. My Dad flew as a tail gunner in a B-24 during the war, but he never told me much about it, so I'm thinking there ought to be some books about it, and there are. This one is pretty great.
Lucky 666 is the story of Jay Zeamer, troublemaker, misfit and pilot enamored of the B-17 bomber. The story concentrates on Port Moresby on New Guinea, Rabaul on New Britain and Bougainville Island. The distance from Port Moresby to Rabaul is 600 miles, the same as the distance from London to Berlin.
The climax occurs when Lucky 666 is attacked by a mess of Japanese Zeros while they are attempting to photograph the west coast Bougainville. The Zeros preferred method was to attack head on as the front of the B-17 has the fewest number of guns available to shoot back and is the most vulnerable with the glass nose. The book tells us that after they have made an attack run, it takes the Zeros ten minutes to circle around and come back for another pass. I'm guesstimating a zero can make a U-turn in about 6 seconds, but that will only put them about 1,000 feet to the side of the B-17's flight path. They will also now be a third of a mile behind the B-17, so they will still be in range of its guns. Zeros fly over 300 MPH and a B-17 taking photos is only flying at 200 MPH, so the Zero will be able to catch up to the bomber. The Zeros don't want to just catch the bomber, they want go way past it so they can turn around and head back towards it so they are heading right towards each other. That tight turning radius means they will only be 1,000 feet away from the bomber as they go by which is well within range of the top, tail, waist and belly guns, so they might want to be a little farther away which means a larger turning radius and more time taken. Now the Zero has to catch up to the B-17, then it needs to get several miles ahead so it has time to make another U-turn and time to line up its sights and fire a mess of bullets at the nose of the B-17. So, yeah, I can see that it could take ten minutes.
Aerial reconnaissance was done using Trimetrogon cameras which were a lash up of three Metrogon cameras arranged so they covered a wide swath of ground. This swath of ground was perpendicular to the line of flight. By taking a set of three photos every few seconds a great deal of land could be covered with one pass.
Metrogon cameras used nine inch wide film. If we assume a resolution of 600 pixels per inch, that's like 30 million pixels. Modern 35mm film might have a resolution equivalent to 3,000 pixels per inch. Funny, I could not find an article that gave a good account of the film versus digital images. They all seem to be tangle of mumbo-jumbo. Seems to me you should be able to make straight forward comparison.
The Fairchild K-17 camera also used nine inch film. I suspect the camera body is the same as the one used with the Metrogon. Near as I can tell, the Metrogon name comes from the fancy, wide-angle lenses they used.
I'm reading Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst. On page 186 our hero, Ferrar, is in Manhattan. After dinner with one of senior partners of his law firm, they are talking about the situation in Europe. Ferrar has family in Louveciennes (a small town just west of Paris), and the partner's son mentions "There's a really good Pissaro painting of Louveciennes." So I ask Google for this painting and find that Pissaro painted a bunch of scenes from Louvenciennes. Wikipedia has a list of Pissaro's paintings and it appears that he painted a couple of dozen of Louvenciennes.
Near as I can make out, the Don Cossack Cadet School is in Novocherkassk.
Novocherkassk is a city in Rostov Oblast, Russia, located near the confluence of the Tuzlov and Aksay Rivers, the latter a distributary of the Don River. Novocherkassk is best known as the cultural capital of the Cossacks, and as the official capital of the Don Cossacks. Population: 168,746. . . the city was founded in 1805. - Wikipedia
There is a new suspect in the Nord Stream pipeline bombing. This time the Germans have arrested a Ukrainian in Italy. They suspect that he and his buddies rented the yacht Andromeda (formerly Ulysses, video above) to sail out into the Baltic and plant bombs on the pipeline. This story on RT is skeptical as the yacht was only 15 meters long. I think they have the wrong yacht. Or maybe I do. This one is perfectly capable to carrying a crew of nefarious scuba divers and their explosives anywhere in the Baltic.
I still blame Joe Biden, even if the CIA didn't do it - he encouraged that rat Zelensky, who encouraged his rat friends to do this.
Spasskaya Tower Military Music Festival 2025: From Zimbabwean rhythms to Russian classics
RT
The announcer sounds just like any modern western, TV announcer. I mean, he doesn't even have a Russian accent. Kind of disappointing. Also kind of weird seeing Africans in Moscow.
The embed code doesn't specify width or height, so the video expands to fill the available space. Have to try that with YouTube videos.
Held in Cologne, the world's largest computer game show had even more visitors this year. Like 357,000 so see photo below of the crowds. That`s 22,000 more than last year. There were 1568 companies showing their wares (including resellers) I'm told, so I didn`t get to see all of the games, let alone play any.
On the downside, statistics show that on average teenagers are spending each weekday 142 minutes indoors playing computer games, rising to 171 minutes daily at weekends. Time that might be better spent playing (sports?) outside instead of sitting hunchbacked indoors. Are games too addictive?
Tickets were 30 € on sunday, which I found overpriced. No pensioner rebates, in fact I might have been the only over-30 there ;-) It was mostly teens and twens.
I am sure that there are some amazing computer games, but I only play stupid, free solitaire games on the net. I suspect it's because I am cheap (and some of these games are downright expensive), and I don't have the patience to learn a bunch of arcane rules. Same reason I haven't mastered any computer aided design programs. I spent years learning arcane rules for building and programming computers and now my brain is full.
I try to keep my game playing down to maybe an hour a day, it is calming. My worst fault is watching YouTube short videos. I might spend an hour a day doing that. This blog, my family and my house consume most of my time.
Unpleasant story about a 13 year old boy accused of stabbing a female classmate to death. Four episodes, one hour each. Story opens with a British swat team conducting an early morning raid on a nice suburban home. It looks patently ridiculous. We've got a nice, white family of four with two teenage kids and we've got half a dozen coppers with assault weapons busting down the door threatening to shoot everyone. Standard procedure, I suppose, you never know what you're going to find behind the door of someone's house and there's no telling what people will do when they've been found out.
It looks like a case of mistaken identity until the cops start pulling out the videos recorded by various security cameras. After that it's just the slow realization that maybe this kid really is guilty.
The school is a disaster, the kids are a bunch of snots. Maybe they are a little more wound up on account of the death, but I suspect they are all just little shits, i.e. typical teenagers. Schools should make good behavior a requirement for attending class rather than trying to enforce good behavior on people who are required to attend to class.
The Buckingham Murders | Official Trailer | Kareena Kapoor Khan
Netflix India
Curious kind of show. It's an Indian production about Indians living in England. All of the leading characters are Indian, but there are plenty of English cops around, but they are all just background. The story is twisted as all get out. School-age boy goes missing and is eventually found dead, by drowning, sitting in a car, so we've got a murder. We also have drugs and a faggot who rather be convicted of murder than sent back to India. There is also have usual panoply of generic misbehavior: adultery, dysfunctional families, and misogyny. Worst of all, there is vengeful a woman. Not a happy story.
Back in the early 1980's, at one my first computer jobs, I took on the task of configuring the Intel's iRMX86 Operating System for a custom Multibus computer system.
We were using Intel Blue Boxes which we were renting from Intel for the princely sum of a thousand dollars a month. These machines had (3) eight inch floppy drives. Generating a version of the operating system entailed firing up a program and then loading a series of floppies and letting the program run. This took hours and inevitably there would be something wrong and the newly generated OS would not work, so I would change something and go through the process again.
This went of for days. Finally we got an Intel consultant (Bruce Warmbrod) to pay us a visit. When we sat down to debug the problem, we discovered that one the of boards in the system, probably our own custom memory board, was not following Intel's Multibus byte-swapping protocol. That was both a Eureka moment and a Mount Vesuvius moment. What spawn of the devil had designed this memory board? Turned out we had stolen the design from the cheapest memory board we could find. Learned a lot about the computer business that day.
Drug Trafficking on the Dark Web | True Crime Reports
Al Jazeera English
How is that I had not heard anything about this? I was aware that Silk Road got busted, but after 2015 it dropped off my radar. I suppose that's what I get for hanging out on the fringe, or maybe I'm just on the wrong fringe.
Continuing to read Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst. Nicholas Morath, our hero, take the night train to Budapest where he visits the Arizona night club. It's kind of a wild place.
Around the corner in the magnificent green-tiled building at Nagymezo utca 20 you come to the Hungarian House of Photography. The first-floor shop displays the depth of Hungary's photographic tradition (think of Kertesz, Brassai and Moholy-Nagy) and the temporary exhibitions are usually worth a look. Before the Second World War, the building housed the Arizona Club, which wowed Patrick Leigh Fermor when he visited. But in 1944 The Arizona's owners were killed in the Holocaust – a reminder that the wartime ghetto was not far away on the other side of Andrassy ut.
What makes this building unique is that the courtrooms are housed within structures resembling giant wine vats—an evident tribute to Bordeaux’s renowned winemaking tradition. - 281archdesign
Look on Google Maps for Palais de Justice, Bordeaux, France and you get a big pile of Tram Stops and no obvious indication of this building. It took some looking to locate it. Google calls it the Tribunal Judiciaire.
