Spy Game - Netflix Movie

Spy Game (2001) - Official Trailer - Brad Pitt Movie HD
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

Directed by Tony Scott famous for any number of films but I'll just mention Top Gun. He is also the younger brother of Ridley Scott famous for Alien.

The story recounts Nathan (Robert Redford) and Tom's (Brad Pitt) history of working together as spooks for the CIA. Now Tom has tried to pull off a stunt to rescue his girlfriend and gotten himself in a terrible jam. The big-shots at the CIA aren't willing to try and save him because reasons, so Nathan uses his retirement fund to engineer an op to rescue him. It's probably going to land Nathan in hot water, but he's a spook, he'll elude his pursuers. And Tom and his girlfriend will owe him.

Found a more complete synopsis here with the catchphrase: 

A thriller than seems more real than fiction

which is pretty accurate.

Can't tell who wrote it. It's a website with one review of this one movie. It uses the acronym MACV-SOG without defining it, so I asked Google:

MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group)

Espionage is a dirty business. Assets in the spy trade are people who can get the information about the enemy that the agents want. However, to spooks, assets aren't people, they are just objects to use to get what you want and as soon as they are no longer useful or you have gotten what you want, they get dropped. If they fall into a burning pile of shit, well too bad. Good agents are not going to waste any tears for them. No wonder the CIA is so popular.

Cast I recognized:

• Robert Redford as Nathan Muir
• Brad Pitt as Tom Bishop
• Catherine McCormack as Elizabeth Hadley
• Michael Paul Chan is familiar to us for his role as Lieutenant Michael Tao in The Closer
• Marianne Jean-Baptiste is familiar to us because we've seen her is like a zillion different shows.

Volga Hydrofoil 70
Wm Schimmel

Somewhere around the 1:10:00 mark, the Sheik catches a ride from Cyprus to Beirut, a distance of  maybe 120 miles, in speedboat equipped with hydrofoils. Never seen the like. Google thinks it might be a Volga, a Soviet boat.

Putin Goes Fishing on Iturup

Vladimir Putin at a fish processing plant on Iturup - Gavriil Grigorov

This piqued my interest because my niece and nephew are in the fishing business. Those are some big halibut, but where's Iturup? It's an island northeast of Sapporo, Japan:

Iturup Map

Google Maps failed me. Pull up Iturup on Google Maps and it shows you the island, but no cities towns or roads. If you ask it for one of the three airports, it will show it to you, but then it won't shut up about it and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off. New and improved for your viewing pleasure, and for most people, most of the time it probably works very well. Not for me. I might have to start using one of the other free, online, maps of the world.

Wikimapia has pictures:

Not sure whether these apartment buildings are abandoned or not

Town

Iturup Airport with Su35 jet fighters

A World of Miracles and Wonders

A World of Miracles and Wonders

We live in a world of miracles and wonders.

Stolen from Tam.

10 Short Videos #6226

10 Short Videos #6226

1. Kung-Fu Fluffy 🐈‍⬛ is smoking 🚬
2. The Most Dangerous Thing in Space Is Surprisingly Small… 🚀
3. 2 FOOT WADDLER - verse 2 ‪@MenAtWork‬
4. Cats are actually amazing protectors. The way she looked back at ya’ll soon as it retreated
5. The Legendary OTO 76 Italian Naval Cannon
6. UNREAL drag CRASH at Wild Bunch Dragstalgia meeting
7. Precision Grinding a Tata 1210 Cross Joint
8. 10 Years Before SpaceX
9. JENNA ORTEGA & AUBREY PLAZA TURN A DEADPAN AWARD PRESENTATION INTO A VIRAL MOMENT 😂🖤
10. bro is the real GTA character 😍✌️ ||

Funnies

The meme makers are having a field day with Mitch McConnell

More Mitch with Scooby-Doo

Sixth Sense

1929 Packard Cable Special Indy Car

1929 Packard Cable Special #18 driven by Ralph Hepburn - Václav Zapadlík 

Twelve of the cars in the 1929 Indianapolis 500 were front wheel drive. Of the 33 cars in the starting field only half a dozen were not Miller cars.

1929 Packard Cable Special Race Car #18, driven by Ralph Hepburn

Miller 91 Packard Cable Special race car

The engine in this car was a supercharged straight eight with dual over head camshafts. It only displaced 1.5 liters which is the same as 91 cubic inches, hence the 91 label. Pistons were only two and a half inches in diameter. Simanaitis Says has more information about the engines and the superchargers.

Leon Duray in the Miller 91 Indy Special

Report from Bingen

Silent RR Crossing

Iowa Man came to town today so we had lunch at Longbottoms. We were talking about the advantages of living in Bingen (which is across the Columbia River from Hood River) versus living in the big city. Rent, as you might expect, is cheaper. Grocery stores are few, scattered and cost a bit more. 

The thing that caught my attention is the trains - 50 trains a day. There are three crossings where the train has to blow its horn, and if you are nearby those horns are loud. I've been out to Bingen a couple of times, but I don't remember the trains being a big deal. But then I was only there for a few hours. Iowa Man survives by stuffing silicon earplugs in his ears.

Anyway, Bingen is supposed to be getting a Quiet Zone. Iowa Man was telling me a silent crossing involves concrete barriers to keep cars from evading the crossing gates and probably some other requirements. Looking around for a picture, this is the only one I could find. It is the splash panel that shows up when YoiTube displays a list of videos. Play the associated video and this image is nowhere to be found. This is a screenshot that I uploaded to Google Photos to crop because my Windows image viewer won't crop images anymore. All I get is a black image. Probably need more memory. I wonder if older memory would be cheaper that the latest stuff that is costing 10x more than it was a year ago.

Hood River Bridge

The 100 year old bridge over the Columiba River is going to be replaced, or at least they are talking about replacing it. That's kind of the way it goes with people. Before anyone does anything, everyone has to discuss it and discuss it at length.

Hood River Bridge

Looking at that first picture of the bridge reminds me of just how wide the Columbia River is at that point. The bridge is almost a mile long, and remember, this isn't one of your long, lazy flatland rivers, at this point the Columbia is rolling along at two miles per hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It don't stop for nobody or nuttin'.

Insitu FLARES and INTEGRATOR drones

Insitu is building drones in Bingen. It was bought out by Boeing and now it is being absorbed by ACHR, one of the air-taxi guys. Since our skies will soon be filled with flying air-taxis, does this mean that Bingen will become the Detroit of the 21st Century?

Cunningham-Hall PT-6 biplane with Mount Hood

There is a big antique car and airplane museum in Hood River - WAAAM - the Western Antique Aeroplane and Automobile Museum. The museum was founded in 2007 which might explain why I have never heard of it. I don't know how many vehicles they have on display but the list on Wikipedia takes 17 screens. The museum itself covers five acres. Iowa Man recommends riding in the cart.

Custom map of the Hood River area made for this post.

Data Centers

DRAM Spot Price

Looks like the price for computer memory chips has gone up by a factor of ten in the last year. Some people are betting heavily that the Artificial Intelligence / Data Center boom is somehow going to pay off big time.

Evergreen Substation and Constable BESS

For a long time I've been wondering about the confluence of high voltage power lines near Highway 26 and Cornelius Pass Road in Hillsboro. I kind of assumed it was because of Intel's Ronler Acres mega-fab near there. Finally asked Google for map and it turned me on to Open Infrastructure Map, and man-oh-man, it is glorious. Everything I ever wanted in a map. Well, except for railroads, but we have the OpenRailway Map for that.

Anyway, looking at the Open Infrastructure Map I see there is substation devoted to Ronler Acres, but it is kind of small, so that's not what all these power lines are for. But then a short distance away I find the Evergreen Substation (shown on the above map), and it is right in the middle of all the big box warehouse like buildings being built just north of Evergreen Road. I suspect some, if not all, are data centers.

Right next door to the Evergreen Substation is Constable BESS. And what the heck is Constable BESS? It's a 75 megawatt battery. Somebody really wanted dependable power in this area. Decision to construct the battery was made back in 2021, so somebody was planning for this explosion of data centers several years before it got started. I'm pretty sure that three years ago all that land north of Evergreen was empty farmland. 2023 was the year Constable BESS came online. Huh.

Funnies

CIA Realizes It's Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years

Sonar

How the Navy Hears Subs 3,000 Miles Away. (It's Genius)
Second Order Science

Previous related posts:

• SOSUS - my run-in with SOSUS in college
• Star Trek Science - submarines so quiet they can't hear each other

Wikipedia:

• SOSUS
• SOFAR Channel

10 Short Videos #6225

10 Short Videos #6225

1. IDK How Yall Stand It Out There In the Heat
2. The Most Insane Launch You'll See Today 🔥💨 - Teleporting drag racer
3. Fastest Ground Air Defense by Country
4. I Built Her a Giant Teapot House… From Scratch ☕🏡 - A good use of AI
5. 2 wild horses fighting over a girl🐴 🧡
6. Short term rememberery loss - Odyssey bow twang
7. How NUCLEAR Weapons are TRANSPORTED!*
8. Young Samurai Shown True Power | Man News
9. Miss Rebeca doing the lord’s work - What is it now? - Farming while beige
10. Heaven's IT Guy - Biblical Law

1932 French Grand Prix

German racing driver Rudolf Caracciola attends to his Alfa Romeo Tipo B during the 1932 French Grand Prix held at the Reims-Gueux circuit on July 3, 1932.

The field was composed of 16 entries, all Alfa Romeos and Bugattis. Only 3 of the Alfas were Tipo B and they swept the first three places. Rudolf came in third.

Labels

Plants with Labels

Went for a three mile walk yesterday, first time to cover that much distance in several years (two? five?). Guess my body has recovered from the two surgeries I had this year. Anyway, out walking and I notice all these little signs with the names of the plants. I have never been very good with plant names, most of them just sound like gobble-de-gook. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to label these plants. Unfortunately the sun has bleached out much of the writing. Still, a good effort.

DARPA Heavy Lift Challenge

Katana Drone

Defence Blog reports:

Katana carried a 112 pound payload aboard a 29 pound airframe, producing an official payload-to-aircraft-weight ratio of 3.84 to 1, Avidrone said. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had set a 4-to-1 ratio as the goal when it opened the competition in November 2025, a mark no existing heavy-lift drone had reached and one no team in the competition managed to hit. Avidrone’s result was the closest.

This might explain why helicopters with tail rotors are the most common helicopter configuration. 

Russia in Syria

Tupolev Tu-22M3 Khmeimim Air Base in Syria

Just a cool photo. The Tu-22M is a big airplane. Selected specs from Wikipedia:

• 140 feet long
• variable sweep wings go from 112 feet to 76 feet
• weighs 60 tons empty
• 1200 MPH top speed
• Russia might have 500 of these aircraft

Khmeimim Air Base in Syria

10 Short Videos #6224

10 Short Videos #6224

1. Then We Found a Massive Crack in the Block
2. The chicken invasion has finally begun. - Farming While Beige
3. Impact wrenches and the mechanic
4. Firefighters Watched This Airtanker Fly Straight Into the Smoke 😳🔥
5. Kung-Fu Mr. Whiskers Cat 🐈‍⬛
6. High-Speed Machine Counts Thousands of Tiny Particles Instantly
7. Why a gentle touch feels like love - Hannah Fry
8. YOUR ROUTER SEES YOU
9. O bichão é grande! - That beast is huge!
10. THE 1984 TOUCHSCREEN

Relativity

Why Does Time Stop at the SPEED OF LIGHT? Feynman's Mind-Blowing Truth
Imagine the Physics

This video ties together time dialation, distance compression and time compression together. I've heard of all of these before but I don't think I've heard them all combined. Photons are weird.

Funnies

1936 DeSoto Airflow

1936 DeSoto Airflow

The Desoto Airflow was the economy version of the slightly larger Chrysler Airflow. Risky move introducing something so advanced in the middle of the Great Depression. The model only lasted 3 years before Desoto went back to a more conventional design.

323.5 cubic inch straight-eight engine in a 1937 Desoto Airflow

The Chrysler flathead inline engine was manufactured from 1924 through the early 1960s.

10 Short Videos #6223

10 Short Videos #6223

1. This happens every time I use anti seize
2. Did she actually threaten Tommy…or just destroy her own argument?
3. Jeremy is shocked by this farm…
4. Queen of Wok - Farming While Beige
5. THE SLEEP SPIRAL
6. Witness the epic Long March 10 launch with Insta360 X5! 🚀
7. You know what I mean - D. Michael Harrison & wife
8. You can literally see the sonic booms - Double Falcon rocket landing
9. Amish Air Conditioner Runs For The First Time!
10. Inside a High Voltage Laboratory : The Flame Test

Blood Coast Season 2 - Netflix Series

Blood Coast: Season 2 - Official Teaser Trailer | Netflix
MVSRS

Season 2 carries on from season 1. Early on our gang (the police narcotics unit) interrupts an altercation between a couple of thugs from rival gangs. One of the thugs is Mehdi who happens to be a childhood friend of Tatoo, one of the coppers. On account of this friendship Tattoo lets Mehdi go. The entire rest of the show has everyone regretting that, especially Tattoo. While Tattoo has grown up to be a law abiding citizen, Mehdi has grown up to be a wild man bent on gaining respect and he doesn't care how many people he kills to get it. He is a genuine, certified, piece of shit. You know early on that his behavior is going to result in him dying an early death. Unfortunately that doesn't happen, so you are going to have to wait for Season 3 to see him (a) shot down in a gun battle with the police, (b) shot down in a gun battle with a rival gang of thugs, or (c) his older brother Yassine finally gets tired of his shit and executes him. No sign of it yet, his brother is totally devoted, but even there are limits to what even the most devoted will tolerate.

6 episodes.

Programming

the true reason C++ always wins
LaurieWired

When I was in school umpteen years ago, I took a course about oddball programming languages. It was kind of like a survey course. We had to write simple programs in half a dozen weird languages. Lisp was one, I think Snobol may have been another. I remember I had a hard time coming to grips with Lisp. What I ended up doing when I was trying to write a program is - I would step through it mentally, paper and pencil.  There were like two operators, one was CAN and the other was, I dunno, CANT, maybe? Doesn't matter, what did matter was how many arguments there were. If there was only one argument, they did one thing, if there was more than one, they did something else, so in my head, I treated these operators as if statements. By walking through all the possibilities I could see what was going to happen and what went wrong and fix the problem. Seemed like a lot of extra mental effort for not much gain. Just use a normal language that has if statements so you can see the possibilities.

I suppose if you had immersed yourself in the Lisp religion you might learn to think in terms of CAN and CANT, but I wasn't having it.

P. S. The two Lisp operators are CONS and CAR

Funnies

Two Part Dream

Last night I had a little dream. In this dream there was a lovely young woman who played the flute. That's all I remember about that. This morning I am taking a nap. I only got six hours last night which is not quite enough, so this morning I take a nap. My sleep for the last three nights has been miserable, a couple hours of sleep followed by two or three hours of being awake followed by a couple more hours of maybe sleep or maybe just lying still with my eyes closed. Wretched in any case. But last night six hours! And then a nap! Life is glorious! Anyway, back to my story. While I am napping I have a dream. In this dream I go into a shop and get a dish of ice cream. I like this ice cream so much that I go back the next day, but this time I ask for a single scoop of ice cream and half a dozen cupcakes. Once again we have a lovely young woman who looks suspiciously like the flute player from last night. When I ask her is she plays the flute she dismissively denies it, so I ask if maybe she has a sister who plays the flute and, surprised, she exclaims that she does. Ah sleep, perchance to dream.

More Gold

The Real Reason We Left the Gold Standard
Maxinomics

I don't think he ever tells us what 'The Real Reason' is, but he does give us some history, past and current mining, and a look at the world view. Pretty cool.

Gold Rush South Africa/"Forgotten Fortunes: Chronicles of Gold and Glory"
Good Morning South Africa

I looked for a video about current deep (2 miles) mining being done, but I did not find anything I liked. I found a bunch of stuff I didn't like: AI slop, stuff in low resolution, and one long one by Simon Whistler, but I'm not in the mood to listen to Simon today. This video doesn't talk about mining so much as the political history, and that part was significant.

Witwatersrand Basin and major goldfields

Funnies