Good Friday

Grim humor from Liz:

If Jesus had lived in Wales

The Glass Dome - Netflix Series

The Glass Dome | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Small town in rural Sweden. Our girl was kidnapped 20 years and somehow managed to escaped her captor. She returns home to Granas for her adoptive mother's funeral. While she is there, an old female friend of hers is murdered and her friend's daughter is kidnapped.

There is mine operating nearby and there is vociferous opposition to it in the town. The mine's opponents are apparently justified when an alarm goes off in the middle of night, an alarm like an air raid siren. There's been a leak at the mine and apparently the air and ground water are now poisonous.

The murdered woman's husband is a furriner and works at the mine, so he gets a lot of grief from the anti-mine folks. Now we find that the same someone who kidnapped his daughter also paid some dude to sabotage the mine. Plus this same someone is also an artist, a second story man, and he might be the same guy who kidnapped our girl 20 years ago.

Lot's of red herrings. All kinds of clues point to the wrong guy, not once, but twice. And when we finally get to the culprit, it's the guy you would never expect. Hard to believe that he was able to get away with so much for so long and no one ever realized that there was something wrong with him.

The Gardener - Netflix Series

The Gardener | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Elmer, the gardener, was in an automobile accident when he was a kid where he suffered a head injury that leaves him incapable of emotion. Emotionless, he is the perfect hit man. His mother organizes the hits and he executes them. Things are going along swimmingly until another mother, distraught over her sons death, asks Elmer's mom to take out the girl she blames for her son's death. About this time Elmer develops a brain tumor that restores his emotions and he falls in love with his intended target. Distraught mom has offered a large sum of money for the hit, enough money that Elmer and his mom could return to Mexico and repurchase her ancestral home. Hoo boy, whatever happens, somebody is not going to be happy.

The opening title sequence shows time lapse videos of flowers blooming. Pretty cool. And ends with this:

Flower Mask

School of Fish

Giant Schools of Fish
360 Nomads

I'm reading A Flash of Green by John D. McDonald. The story is set in small town on the coast of Florida. On page 121 I run into this passage. This book  was written in 1962 and we've got a couple of grown men talking, so this event probably happened in the 1930s.

"I must have been about eight years old. It was a Sunday in May. There was a school of mullet in there like nobody has ever seen since. I'd say they were schooled up six miles long, a mile wide and ten feet deep."

"Say, I remember that! God damn! We gigged all day long until our arms like to fell off."

"Everybody did. Half the town was out there."

"And the fish house price fell off to two cents, finally, and then they wouldn't buy at all because they had no room. I remember we run a truck down to Naples, but it was a hot day and we had no ice, and the man down there didn't like the look in their eye by then. So we dumped 'em damn near the center of town and took off fast."

"The whole town here stank for a week. That was the last big school, the last one on this coast, Elmo."

 

WSP - West Philippine Sea

Atin Ito fishing boat finds itself between a Chinese Coast Guard ship and the Philippine Coast Guard. - Edwin Bacasmas

Remember how 10 years ago there was a big fuss about China claiming the entirety of the South China Sea? It's still an issue:

President Marcos Should Ride a Jet Ski and Plant the Philippine Flag in WPS - Kyle Dane Ballogan

 

Supercharged Harley Flathead

Left Side

Right Side

Thought this bike was pretty cool, so I went looking for more info. All I found was the right hand picture was posted in 2022.

Who wants to rule the world?

Tears For Fears - Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Official Music Video)
Tears For Fears

Some leaders do a good job, and some are terrible. This applies to both men and women. The Scratching Post opines that bad women leaders are often bad for different reasons than bad men leaders.

What If Women Ruled The World?

... is not a question we need to ask any more. We have the answer in the form of many of our nations as well as international institutions.

Inspired by my experiences fighting with AI (read: ChatGPT) while trying to write Arthurian fiction, listening to Jordan Peterson's descriptions of classic feminine pathologies and recently experiencing a diocesan get-together prepping for a new round of synodality, I began wondering if we're seeing the results of feminine leadership gone very, very wrong.

I sat down with AI and began to explore the topic. The results seemed to fit the data to a T.

Caveat: These days, AI has become a version of Rudolf Hess. I pace back and forth in my cell in Spandau Prison, ranting this or that manifesto and it dutifully transcribes it, embellishes it and punctuates our interactions with praise and support. It has become the perfect toady.

At any rate, dig this.

Summary of the Features of Pathological Femininity

Pathological femininity refers to a disordered, unhealthy expression of feminine traits that prioritizes emotional validation, denial of conflict, and compulsive caretaking at the expense of truth, justice, and responsibility. It is not true femininity, which is rooted in nurturing, beauty, receptivity, and moral strength, but rather a distorted counterfeit that leads to social, moral, and spiritual breakdown.

He goes on for a bit. Read the whole thing here.

 

Word of the Day

Stolen entire from Schneier on Security: 

Slopsquatting

As AI coding assistants invent nonexistent software libraries to download and use, enterprising attackers create and upload libraries with those names—laced with malware, of course.

Aleutian Islands

Aleutian Islands

Bayou Renaissance Man posts about Adak Island. I've posted several times about various Aleutian Islands, so I thought I'd take a look. Right away I found that the Live Walrus Cam was broken, so I fixed it there and here it is: Round Island, Dillingham, Alaska

Adak Island is right in the middle of the Aleutians. It is near the bottom of the loop in the map above. You can see it if you follow the link to Google Earth.

Aleutian Island posts, West to East:

• Attu Island - PBY Catalina Night Attack
• Shemya Island - What Island is this? -and- Yes, we have no bananas.
• Akatun & Akun - Richard H. Geoghegan
• Dutch Harbor - Nick Comes to Lunch
• Amaknak Island (Dutch Harbor in the town of Unalaska) - F/V Kari Marie
• Cold Bay - Shanghai to Chicago

Other Alaskan Islands, West to East:

• Round Island - Walrus Cam
• St. Paul and St. George - St. Paul Alaska
• Kodiak - White Alice
• Baranof Island (town of Sitka) - Fishing Report

R.L. Burnside - Goin' Down South

R.L. Burnside - Goin' Down South (Official Audio)
Fat Possum Records

I bin lisnin to R. L. for a while now, so I figure is dun pass time to post one of his tunes.

Tuol Sleng

Tuol Sleng Sign - Tom Clifford

Stolen entire from The Geopolitics.

Year Zero’s Legacy: Confronting the Horrors of Tuol Sleng by Tom Clifford

It was a bad sign. Not in the sense of omens of misfortune. Just a bad sign. It gave the name of the place I was looking for, but it was not at the correct location. Beside the sign, at a crossroads, was a shop and restaurant. The proprietor, used to giving directions before being asked, pointed 200 yards down the road to my destination … the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum. 

At the entrance kiosk you pay the entrance fee of $10 and get an audio guide to explain, no wrong word*, to present what took place in a former high school in Phnom Penh. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia. Of the up to 20,000 detained here, there were 7, 12 or 14 confirmed survivors (depending on the sources). In 1979 the Vietnamese kicked out the Khmer Rouge from power though shamefully this murderous organisation was recognised by the US and the UK as the legitimate representatives of the Cambodian people (they controlled a tiny slither of land) until well in the first term of the Clinton presidency. Real politik trumped decency long before the Donald. 

Under the Khmer Rouge about 2 million people from a population of just over 8 million died. They were slaughtered, starved or succumbed to disease as the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot told Cambodians it was Year Zero. Modernity was banned by decree. Reading glasses confirmed the wearer, even if a child, was an intellectual and therefore an enemy of the state. The ability to read or write, meaning the person was educated, was a life-threatening faculty. 

Upon entering the complex 14 white painted slabs come into view. When the Khmer  Rogue abandoned what is also known as S-21 there were 14 prisoners still alive. They were then killed and their bodies cremated. Their remains were found by the Vietnamese and they lie now underneath the white slabs. 

A sign next to the slabs chillingly instructed prisoners how to behave. 

• You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away. 
• Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me. 
• Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution. 
• You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect. 
• Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution. 
• While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all. 
• Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting. 
• Don’t make pretext about politics in order to hide your secret or traitor. 
• If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire. 

If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge. 

The jacaranda trees in the central garden offer a respite from this place of tears, as do the coconut palms. They were here when the Khmer Rouge took over and were maintained by them. They were willing and enthusiastic gardeners.  

The former cells, about 1,500 were held here at any one time, have pictures of some of those detained. This was not a death camp though they were condemned as soon as they arrived. Some died, but the priority was to torture prisoners, get “information”, and then transport them to the killing fields around the country. 

The photos on display haunt the viewer as scared, pleading or resigned eyes look out. You want to turn away but bearing witness, especially to those who committed abuses, is crucial.  

About 80 per cent of those held here were Khmer Rouge cadres who had fallen foul of the leadership and had themselves committed atrocities. This was where the revolution, as all revolutions do, devoured itself. 

US bombs were the recruiting officer for the Khmer Rouge. Up to August 1973, the US illegally dropped  2,756,941 bombs on an agrarian society to disrupt the supply route from Cambodia to the North Vietnamese. In the anger and mayhem, Khmer Rouge numbers swelled. Fifty years after the Khmer Rouge came to power, a shopkeeper, selling groceries and canned drinks, gives directions to a former school that is now a symbol of inhumanity.

Tom Clifford is an Irish journalist in Beijing. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.

© 2025 The Geopolitics. All rights reserved.

* Grammer note. I suspect the phrase 'no wrong word' in the second paragraph needs an extra comma, like so: 'no, wrong word'.

Quote of the Day

Innate animosity of inanimate objects:

Husband said the edges of the lawns needed strimming so today I had my first attempt at strimming. Also today I broke the strimmer.

Strictly speaking, the strimmer stopped working when I was using it, so it might not be broken, just sulking. - Liz Hinds

Funnies

Juror #2 - Max Movie

Juror #2 - Official Trailer - Warner Bros. UK & Ireland
Warner Bros. UK & Ireland

Murder trail in Georgia. Jury trial, which means jury deliberations. Except the girl wasn't murdered by her boyfriend, she was hit a passing car, in the rain, by one of the jurors, juror #2. It's kinda slow paced and tedious. Juror #2 is in a bit of a bind, especially when his lawyer tells him they'll send him to prison if he cops to the crime. Pretty sure that's bad advice.

Update a couple hours later: the first video I included wouldn't play here. I had clicked on Share and it had put the trailer in my blog, but it wouldn't play. I go back and look at Embed under Share and it tells me embedding is disabled. Huh. So I used this one.

Quote of the Day

From The Scratching Post: 

Tariffs As An Example

In the tariff wars, Trump said he wanted to eliminate trade deficits. In retrospect, I think even Trump knew that was idiocy. However, it was way beyond where he was willing to accept. Everyone took him at his word and went into spasms of horror. 

Incidentally, I did, too. That's what I mean when I say it's very hard to escape the zeitgeist generated by the Super Smart Set Who Don't Actually Know Much Of Anything And Who Have Been Wrong About A Lot Of Things For Decades (SSSWDAKMOAWHBWAALOTFD).

29 Short Videos

2025 02 10

Collected over the last month.

King of the Hill

Hank Hill, family, and Boomer?

It's freaky how much these people resemble the characters on King of the Hill TV show. Of course, it could all be faked. I choose to think it's real. Looking on Wikipedia to see if they have anything to say about this photo (they don't), and found this absurdly long article about the character Hank Hill.

Cock O' The North

The London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) Class P2 locomotive, No. 2001, Cock o' The North, on the turntable at King's Cross Station, London, 1st June 1934. The new engine has just arrived from the LNER works in Doncaster. Image colourized by David P. Williams. (Photo by Douglas Miller/Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Just looking around the industrial parts of town, I was overwhelmed by the amount of steel that goes into these machines, structures, raillines, tanks and towers, and that's just one town. Every town in the industrialized world is built on a zillion tons of the stuff.

U. S. Steel Production vs. Imports

U. S. Steel Production peaked in the 1970s. Since then it has fallen by half. 

So why did this happen? Why did the U.S. go from a steelmaking powerhouse to an also-ran? As usual, there are a bunch of competing explanations — import competition, bad management choices by steel companies, and unions raising wages to uncompetitive levels. But while these were factors, the biggest reason the U.S. steel industry went into terminal decline was that we stopped building things that used lots of steel. - Noahpinion

Global Steel Production

U. S. and Russia steel production are about equal.

Jigsaw puzzle here.

Federal Deficit

Federal Deficit

This is graph is a little odd, looks like everything is going down when everyone knows the debt is going up. Now look at the scale along the left hand edge and you will see that zero is at the top. So now it makes a little more sense. It's a little hard to read at the scale here. Click to embiggenate and that should make if legible.

Anyway, notice the green line, the one that descends the fastest, the one that goes from 750 billion to 2750 billion in three months. What's that all about? That was the $2 Trillion economic rescue package passed by Congress back in 2020. Thanks COVID lockdown.

Commercial Real Estate

Destiny USA

One Of The Largest Malls In The U.S. Just Defaulted On Its $300 Million Mortgage - ZeroHedge

I don't have much to say about this except that this incident is just the tip of the iceberg. This disaster has been a long time in the making.

Previous posts about Commercial Real Estate.

I especially like my post on the subject from four years ago.

Ten Big Rivers

10 Big Rivers

I don't know about the plastic, this poster might be true, but I thought the way it showed these ten rivers is pretty cool, especially the Niger. I had no idea it curved around until it almost touches the coast. Must be some mountains there.

The sources of the Niger River, the Gambia River, and the Senegal River are all found in the Guinea Highlands. - Wikipedia

Guinea Highlands

Previous posts about the Nile River.

Previous post about the Ganges River.

The Pearl River gets mentioned here.

Previous post about the Amur River.

Previous mention of the Niger River.

This Morning's Chuckle

Aleksey Zubritsky (left), Sergey Ryzhikov (center), and Jonny Kim before blasting off at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, April 8, 2025. ©  Aleksey Filippov / Sputnik

From RT (formerly Russia Today, also known as 'Putin's mouthpiece' according to the Neocons, whoever they are):

Kiev seeking arrest of man aboard space station – media

I am wondering how long it will be before Zelensky is crushed like the bug he is. I expect he will wait until Russian tanks are rolling down his street before he decides to take the Zelenion dollars he has stuffed into his pockets and bolt for the exit. I don't expect him to stand his ground and wait for the hammer of doom, but one can only hope.

Life of Pi - Keller Auditorium

Life of Pi on Broadway
NewYorkTheater

A very entertaining show about a teenage boy lost at sea for 227 days after the cargo ship he was on sank in a storm. The story he relates after his rescue is basically a hallucinogenic dream. The whole thing is fiction, so we have a kid in a made up story telling us his made up story, so, fiction within fiction, but it's a pretty great story.

The kid's story is that there was a tiger in the lifeboat with him. What actually happened (for a fictional version of actual) was pretty horrific, so you can understand how this experience could have deranged him. Anyway, the tiger's name was Richard Parker. Wikipedia gives us Martel's (the author) reasoning:

Richard Parker and shipwreck narratives

The name Richard Parker for the tiger was inspired by a character in Edgar Allan Poe's nautical adventure novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Richard Parker is a mutineer who is stranded and eventually cannibalized on the hull of an overturned ship, and there is a dog aboard who is named Tiger. Martel also had another occurrence in mind in the famous legal case R v Dudley and Stephens (1884), where a shipwreck again results in the cannibalism of a cabin boy named Richard Parker, this time in a lifeboat. A third Richard Parker drowned in the sinking of the Francis Spaight in 1846, with a cabin boy cannibalized during an incident involving the same ship in 1835. "So many victimized Richard Parkers had to mean something", Martel suggested.

Fun with Numbers

Math puzzle – Can YOU find the area?
Math Queen

In my cave, this qualifies as fun. Looking over the videos on display on YouTube, I noticed this one. It looks like a fun little problem, and it was. When I am tired, usually from not getting enough sleep, I'm looking for some mindless entertainment. One of the games listed in the sidebar are my usual choice, but simple geometric / algebra problems can also amuse me for a few minutes. This one didn't take long, but, as usual, I can't tell you how long because once I started working on it time stopped. Below is a shot of my paper with my work. The answer to the problem (why would you care?) is 2.5 pi.

Lake Como, Italy

Power boat on Lake Como, Italy

Lake Como is a lake of glacial origin situated in northern Italy. It is the third-largest lake in Italy, depth exceeds 1,300 feet and it is the deepest European lake outside of Norway. Lake Como's beauty has long attracted the affluent, serving as a favored summer retreat for aristocrats and wealthy individuals since Roman times. - extracted from Wikipedia

Several movies have been shot here (from Google):

• Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002): The romantic hideaway of Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala, including scenes filmed at Villa del Balbianello, is a visually stunning location.
• Casino Royale (2006): The James Bond film features Villa La Gaeta and Villa del Balbianello, with the climax playing out on Lake Como's shores.
• A Month by the Lake (1995):This romantic drama, starring Uma Thurman and Alessandro Gassman, is set at a Lake Como resort.
• Ocean's Twelve (2004): The second installment of the Ocean's series sees the gang stopping at Villa Erba on Lake Como.
• Murder Mystery (2019): The Netflix film starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston features Villa Erba as a chase destination.
• The Pleasure Garden (1925): A silent film by Alfred Hitchcock, with scenes shot at Comacina Island.

Lake Como, Italy

Guns

Why Civilians carry Weapons in the streets
Marcio Tour Guide Israel

I kinda think Israel has the right idea, I especially like the bit about how everyone is trained in the use of firearms. Don't think we could get away with making it mandatory here, but having firearms classes available in all high schools might be a good idea. Might have fewer fools shooting someone by accident.

Funnies

MIRV

Couple of scary photos I came across yesterday.

Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) hitting their targets during a ICBM test as seen from a P-3 Orion

Testing of the Peacekeeper reentry vehicles: all eight (of a possible ten) were fired from only one missile. Each line shows the path of an individual warhead captured on reentry via long-exposure photography.

I suspect the 'long-exposure' was no more than a few seconds. I mean these warheads are coming in a super-, maybe even hyper-, sonic speeds.

Bosch: Legacy - Amazon Freevee Series

Bosch: Legacy | All New Series | Season 1 Trailer
Amazon Freevee

Even though we have Amazon Prime, this show still subjects us to advertisements. There aren't too many and they aren't too long, so it's not too bad. Still annoying, though.

I generally like Bosch, but I'm a little tired of his daughter. This show puts more emphasis on the suffering of the victims and less on catching bad guys than the original, but it's tolerable, and my wife really likes Bosch, so I sip my beer and watch the drama unfold. I do like Mo, Bosch's hacker. His hair and beard are the scruffiest, so he is not particularly attractive, but he cool, calm, collected, and pulls off some good stunts. We also get an inside look at how some criminals operate, and it's not all illegal drugs and murder. More everyday kind of crimes, crimes that don't make the news, but have a big impact on the victims.

This time we have Honey Chandler, former defense attorney, running for district attorney against the corrupt, liberal guy who has brought so much misery to Los Angeles. Her biggest problem is cleaning up the corruption in the police department. She made her name winning big awards from the police department for civil rights violations, so she is not a fan favorite in a large part of the cop shop. On the other hand, her opponent is hated for early release of criminals and his failure to prosecute them, so she has a fair shot at winning the election.

This is another one of those series that is in the midst of release, so only a few of the episodes are available.

Copycat Killer - Netflix Series

Copycat Killer | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix Asia

I don't know why we get sucked into these shows, but we do. I had to put my foot down otherwise we would have watched three episodes instead of just two and I still have my pill boxes to fill.

Bit of a horror show. The villain is so nasty that I despised him.

We don't have just one psychopath, we have a gang of them being directed by the psycho in charge.

He is a master manipulator, He works in TV news, so he knows all about propaganda and how to prey on people's emotions and he uses these techniques very effectively.

He has a line just after the 30 minute mark in episode 9 where he says something like the truth is whatever we say it is, and whoever tells the most convincing story and gets it out there first is going to be the winner.

10 Episodes, 1 hour each.

Graveyard: - Netflix Series

Graveyard: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Woman cop gets promoted to head up a special unit dedicated to investigating murders of women. Seems to be a small but on-going problem in Turkey. Half a million people die in Turkey every year. Honor killings of women may reach 500 in a year, so one of every one thousand deaths is an honor killing.

Turkish society is split between the way of Western Civilization and the old way as practiced by the Mohammedans. Anyway, it means our girl has a tough row to hoe but so far (we've watched one episode) she's doing okay.

This whole investigating-honor-killings is an unpopular experiment. As such, it's very existence is fraught with risk. Our girl gets her promotion, but for office space her group gets a corner of the archives in the basement, a space otherwise known as 'the graveyard'. It's where all the dead cases come to rest. Her crew consists of:

• the archivist, a guy who has been there forever and is due to retire in a couple of years,
• a macho cop who assaulted a couple of other cops,
• a forensic specialist who insists of giving a long explanation of the historical significance of each bit of technology he uses, and
• a tall, thin, tattooed, tough chick who has mastered computer hacking.

The hacker is not actual police, she and our lead girl already know each other. Macho cop gets a scene in every episode where is berating a suspect during interrogation. I can see someone getting this worked up occassionally, but this guy delivers his deranged copper persona on demand.

There first suspect, Ahmet, is the victim's brother. They locate him fighting in a cage match. He was convicted of killing his sister. Turns out it was actually the father, and his son just took the fall for it.

Next suspect is big, macho blow-hard. Our girl arrests him on live TV while he is being interviewed. Turns out that while he is a scumbag, he didn't kill the girl.

Last, and guilty, suspect is the husband of woman who our murder victim befriended. They have no evidence against him so they have to let him go. They give him a ride to his house, but standing in front of his house is Ahmet. The cops have told the suspect who this guy is, so he is very reluctant to get out of the car, Eventually he does. But Ahmet does not know who this guy is or even that he is a suspect. Never-the-less, the killer freaks out, gets back in the car and tells our girl he wants to change his statement.

In episode two we have a fancy new phone that uses a biometric fingerprint scanner, so not only do you need someone's fingerprint, it needs to be from a live finger. In this case, the phone belonged to our murder victim. In order to unlock it, the cornner applied shock paddles to the corpse and gave it a jolt. Evidently this animated the finger long enough that they were able to unlock the phone. There is a curious bit of technology in every episode.

Season 1 has (4) two-hour episodes.

Season 2 has 8 episodes, which is basically the same as Season 1, they've just cut the two-hour episodes into two parts that are one-hour long each.

Dalah: Death and the Flowers

Dalah: Death and the Flowers | Official 4K Trailer | Netflix Premiere February 27
Nitflixz

The very successful son and daughter from two prominent families are set to be married, but the groom gets himself killed the night before, with his fiance's gun. She runs away and hides. 

Our hero is the lady proprietor of a flower shop who was hired to provide flowers for this wedding. The murder occurs in her warehouse. Turns out that umpteen years ago she got fucked over by the two families and she has worked her way into this position bent of revenge. She is very quiet, doesn't say much, but manages to get what she came for.

Mogura - Netflix Series

従うべきは、法か自分か🚨警視庁麻薬取締課 MOGURA ｜豪華ラッパーキャスト解禁🔥1/9(木)23時開始
ABEMA ドラマ【公式】

Google mogura and Google responds:

• The word "mogura" (土竜) is the Japanese word for "mole".
• Based on real events, narcotics officer Shokichi Izanagi goes undercover to infiltrate a group of hip-hop artists suspected of drug trafficking.

There is as least one other show about the same real-life events.

The pacing is a little different from what we get in a top-shelf crime thriller, it has some pauses and awkward moments, but it moves along. Our hero is a 30 year old cop who's gotten in trouble with the higher ups, so he has been shuffled off to narcotics enforcement. While his new, female boss seems to be a straight arrow, it turns our she is in cahoots with the mayor and who is a class A sleazeball. In public he is proclaiming his war of drugs while in private he is the local drug kingpin.

Lincoln Mark V Convertible

What every successful Japanese rapper-come-gangster should have. This car shows up in Episode 3 at the 11:40 mark. It must be custom, because Lincoln never made a Mark V convertible.

The picture is a screenshot. Funny how it looks bright and shiny in the show and so very dim here.

Woman of the Dead: Season 2 - Netflix Series

Woman of the Dead: Season 2 - Official Trailer (2025)
IGN Movie Trailers

Blum, the lady undertaker in an Austrian ski resort, gets caught up in murder and mayhem, again. This time it's a ring of snuff-film aficionados who believe she has a nasty-ass video. She doesn't, but they are willing to use extreme measures like murder and kidnapping to get it back. The show doesn't dwell on  the snuff-film business, they just give you enough to show you that these people are some sick fucks. Most of the show has her running around, trying to solve the case while not getting arrested by the police, some of whom are rotten.

Ducati Monster 797

She rides this motorcycle, or one very similar to it. This one has been customized by Angry Lane.

Season 1 here.

When No One Sees Us - Max Series

When No One Sees Us | Official Trailer | Max
Max

Lots of women in this show. When an airman involved in secret work disappears, a woman Lieutenant from OSI stateside gets sent to investigate. At roughly the same time a resident of the nearby town of Morón de la Frontera commits hara-kiri. A woman sergeant with local Guardia investigates, and a local teenage boy disappears. The sergeant has a female assistant, the mayor is a woman, and then we have the suicide's housekeeper, the missing boy's mother, the sergeant's mother and her daughter.

Morón AFB (Red), Morón de la Frontera (Green) & Algeciras (Blue)

When I heard that the missing soldier's car was discovered in Algeciras, I got to wondering how far it was from the Morón Air Force Base, so, map.

The show is intriguing, the only clues we have as to what happened are paper thin, but scrap by scrap they are piling up. Unfortunately, this is another of those shows that is in the midst of release, so only about half of the episodes are available now.

The Cleaning Lady - Max Series

The Cleaning Lady (FOX) Trailer HD - Elodie Yung series
TV Promos

Cambodian woman doctor from the Philippines is staying in Las Vegas with her sister waiting for her son to be admitted to a gene therapy treatment program. Her visa has expired so she is working with her sister as a cleaning lady, since that is only kind of work they can get since they are both illegal aliens.

She is cleaning the restrooms in a warehouse when a gangster is shot dead on the premises. She is discovered and offers to clean up the mess and talks herself into a new job, working for a gangster.

The show is basically bi-polar: on one hand we have the precarious existence of illegal aliens trying get by, working menial jobs in Las Vegas, along with the heartbreak of having a five year old kid who is liable to die at any moment. I supposed some people enjoy this, me, I've had enough. On the other hand we have our girl stuck between working for a bunch of Armenians gangsters and the FBI trying to use her as an informant. There is no really mystery here, no puzzles to solve. The only mystery is how she is going to get out of her predicament of the moment.

Karma - Netflix Series

Karma | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

This show is just nuts. We've got a whole bunch of very rotten characters who are willing to do all kinds of evil in order to get there grubby little paws on heaps of money.

The show starts off with a degenerate loser who is in debt to a loan shark. The loan shark is a serious dude, he has threatened to cut up the loser and sell his organs, so loser is highly motivated to pay back the loan. Meanwhile, his father gets knocked down by a car. Other than some scraps are bruises, he is uninjured, but he spends the night in the hospital. He sends his loser son to his house to pick some clothes and his son uses this opportunity to rifle through his dad's stuff and finds a 500 million yen accidental death life insurance policy (figure a thousand yen to the dollar and you won't be far off). All this gives dummkoff the idea to hire a hitman to knock off his father. 

After this the show kind of explodes into multiple intersecting stories of murder, confidence games, extortion, blackmail and double dealing. It's pretty incredible. We've watched three of the six episodes and we've got like six story lines that, I expect, will collide in a spectacular finale.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands

Heard Island and McDonald Islands

I hear all the noise being made about Trump imposing tariffs on an uninhabited island. I didn't understand why people were making such a fuss. I suppose they were hoping to embarrass President Trump. No, that's not right, he's not going to be embarrassed by this nonsense. They (the ubiquitous 'they') are just throwing mud on his image, hoping to further inflame 'their' supporters', not that they really need any more flammable fluids. They seem to have plenty on hand.

Then I came across this meme on Midwest Chick's Place:

Heard Island

There we go - Heard Island belongs to Australia. As the map at top shows, it is a long, long way from anywhere. Wikipedia tells us that:

They are:

• 2,500 miles southwest of Australia
• 2,600 miles southeast of South Africa
• 1,010 miles north of Antarctica

The islands, which are uninhabited, can be reached only by sea, and typically require a two-week voyage from Australia to visit.

 

El Rey

1963 Chevrlet Impala Low Rider El Rey

Low riders are one more thing I don't understand. I can understand wanting to customize an older car, but the extremes that some of these guys go to is just mind boggling. Witness this video of the Las Vegas Lowrider Magazine Supershow 2024! Classic Cars  and this  one of the Las Vegas Lowrider Supershow 2021 Classic Car Show

The car is named for the builder's father-in-law's favorite song. I tried listening to it, but failed.

Jigsaw puzzle here.

P. S. Spent some time looking for what I considered a good example of a lowrider and completely missed the fact this car is not lowered. I suspect it has hydraulic suspension and that allows it to be lowered. Also missed the conflict between the description of the Arco-Sport biplane and the image. I was feeling a little low yesterday.

Punctuate

Punctuation marks hanging out
Elle Cordova

I really enjoyed the ominous undertone of hyphen's remarks.

Annabel's

Annabel's

Fancy private club in London, England. Has a page in Wikipedia.

Jigsaw puzzle here.

EAA Super Acro-Sport (N4KH)

EAA Super Acro-Sport (N4KH)

Cool pic.

The Acro Sport is a single-seat aerobatic sportsplane designed by US aviation enthusiast Paul Poberezny in the early 1970s for homebuilding. - Wikipedia

Jigsaw puzzle here.

Koh Rong

Koh Rong - Dara Keo

Koh Rong is a resort island off the coast of Cambodia. Dara Keo has a website.

Koh Rong Cambodia