Delirium - Netflix Series

Delirium - Official Trailer | Netflix
MVSRS

Poor boy gets a scholarship to a rich kids school and he makes the most of it. Rich girl is very pretty but she is not quite right in the head,  hard to say whether it's an inherent defect or living with her bitch-ass mother that made her this way. Most of the time she seems normal, but every now then she acts a little weird. Her mother collects a weird kind of bug, and our girl occasionally has hallucinations of these same kind of bugs crawling on her. The time line is a little jumbled, but three episodes in and we've got it pretty well sorted.

1979 Honda CBX

Our boy finds that his new connections at school enable him to break into the retail drug trade and start making serious money. One of his first purchases is a six cylinder motorcycle. The first name that came to mind was Benelli, but I checked and it is actually a Honda. The Benelli has six individual exhaust pipes, the Honda routes 3 pipes into one muffler on either side.

8 episodes, 45 minutes each.

Crazy

Police Shootings

In the last episode of Wrong Side of the Tracks, a woman gets shot by rogue policeman. The scene didn't really fit in with the plot, the woman was one of the main characters and there was reason for her to be shot. I figured the actress had gotten a better offer for a role in a different show and they needed to hurry up and remove her from the story. Then I'm looking over a story on Aljazeera about Biden, blacks and crime and they mention Niani Finlayson.

So a search for Niani leads me to a story on The Grio, and man oh man, does it sound bad. It sounds as bad as the scene from Wrong Side of the Tracks. So maybe that scene wasn't so out-of-place as it seemed. Bad things happen, that's just the way it is when you are dealing with people. 

Hamas Sympathizers

At first I thought the Americans protesting Israel's war on Gaza were ignorant, deluded fools. I still think so, but I think I understand them a bit better. They are living in country where the major media outlets function as propaganda bullhorns, blasting the government's story everywhere, all the time, and the government has proven to be a big fat liar. So we don't really know what's going on, not in detail anyway. In a situation like this where everyone is lying, who can say one agency's lies are better than another? Well, I can, but who is listening to me?

 

Hate

Umschreibung Munich, Germany
126 piece jigsaw puzzle

When I first caught a glimpse of this, I thought it might be something cool, like someone had put this sinuous staircase in a very staid, rectilinear building. Alas, such is not the case. It is a piece of sculpture. They are stairs, but they don't go anywhere.

Umschreibung Munich, Germany

I don't know why, but things like this really irritate me. Oh, I can come up with any number of rational reasons for not like liking it, like it's a stupid waste of time, materials and energy, but most of everything we do (in the developed world anyway) is that. Maybe 10% of our energy is actually used to produce what we need. The rest of it is spent on entertainment or arguing about anything and everything. But why do things like this grate on me so? I find it hard to believe that anyone gets any enjoyment out of something so monumentally stupid. I suppose some people must, otherwise it wouldn't have gotten built. Unless the sole purpose was to irritate people, and the people who funded this thing enjoy irritating people. That I could understand.

P.S. It took some digging to figure out just where this thing was. Dozens of photos of it all over the place, but most all of the writing was about what a cool picture it was. Idiots.

Caption of the Day

Pictured here is a 5G mobile phone mast in Cardiff, United Kingdom. It is not on fire. The same can't be said about all such towers as 5G phone masts have been vandalized following claims online that the masts are responsible for COVID-19. (Photo by Matthew Horwood/Getty Images) 

Via Forbes

Guns & Mental Health

Came across this on Quora:

There are more teen suicides in a given year in America than people killed in every school shooting in American history combined.

Are you kidding me? So I checked with Wikipedia. 5,000 teenagers commit suicide every year. School shootings since the American Revolution have killed fewer than 600.

 Part of what makes people who they are, and what makes them so interesting is that they are inherently unstable. Most people manage to maintain a semblance of sanity most of the time, but you catch anyone at the wrong time with the wrong stimulus and you are liable to have a violent explosion.

We have a very bipolar view of violence. People pay zillions of dollars to watch violent movies and play violent video games, but if anyone engages in real world violence they are treated as a criminal.

Internet Scams & Browser Cache

Something bad happened to the Chrysler yesterday morning. I won't know how bad until Mr. Heaton takes a look at it. It may be time for another car, which brings us to part two.

Daughter found a couple of big black SUV's for sale really cheap. Both are 2001's with about 80K miles. One is a BMW X5, the other is a Range Rover. Price is $3500, about $10K under what you might think. Big, complicated gas hogs, but certainly cheap enough. Normally I wouldn't think cars like this would be so cheap, but with the economy the way it is, maybe nobody is buying these things and somebody needs to unload theirs quickly. (Silly boy.)

Which brings us to part three. While we were looking one of the ads vanished from the net. Well, it should be in the cache, I can retrieve it from there and harangue the guy about it. So I'm trying to figure out how to pull the file from cache, and I'm not getting anywhere. Seems Firefox has a "new and improved" cache management system - it compresses all the files and stores them in one giant database.

I dig around looking for a viewing tool, but no luck. I finally resort to the Firefox help forum and in a surprisingly short time I have an answer: CacheViewer, an Add-On for Firefox. It installs quickly and easily, though it does require restarting Firefox. It's not readily apparent how to view the file. Pictures show up in the window in the upper left hand corner, but to view html files you have to right click.

I find the ad and with it I get the guy's email address. I write to both of them (the X5 seller and the Range Rover seller), just to see if anybody answers, and they both answer promptly. The first guy is a Master Sargent in the Air Force and is stationed in Alaska, and guess what? The second guy is a Master Sargent in the Air Force and is stationed in Alaska. What are the odds? These guys in the Air Force must be making pretty good money to be able to sell these fancy cars so cheap. I smell a rat. Especially when the first guy wants to ship the car via an Air Force cargo plane to a nearby airport. I know corruption is rampant, but even this is straining my credulity.

Vandals

Report from Kinnaman Elementary School in Aloha, Oregon:

Last night at about 4:20 Amanda came to the office to say her car had been keyed. It had been parked in the north parking lot. We called Washington county and asked if a report should be filed, and the officer said "absolutely, there have been a lot of cars being vandalized in the Aloha area recently." Later in the evening, I noticed that my car had been keyed as well! It was parked on the street yesterday; someone had cut a deep (to the metal), gash in the passenger door. This means the perpetrator was on the sidewalk. I filed a report as well. The officer told me there have been over 60 (!!) crimes like this reported in the area - either keying or tires being slashed. He said the area is from about 175th to 198th and from Shaw street to Madeline. He felt it was "just a matter of time" before this person (people?) were caught, simply because the crimes have been "prolific".

I suspect keys are not the weapon of choice for these kind of things. Most keys have nicely rounded edges, and the paint on modern cars is pretty dang tough. Our criminals are probably using something like a screwdriver or a chisel, or a knife, something which would also be suitable for slashing tires.

A professional body shop would probably have to sand and repaint the entire panel to get rid of a deep scratch like this, which means big bucks. You could paint the scratch with touch up paint, but that would be some tedious work, and it would still be detectable.

What do you do with a case like this, when you catch him (or her)? What a nuisance.

Tweeters

I don't have a cell phone, I don't use Twitter or Facebook or any other social networking software. I still have a landline, though I have been wondering if a cell phone might be cheaper, but that would mean calling Verizon and that would mean an hour of my day shot to heck dealing with their robo-cop menu system, their plethora of conditions and qualifications, all just to find out how much my landline actually costs. And then there would another call to Verizon Wireless to get hooked on with the cell phone network. Bah. And who knows if it would save me any money. With the way they bundle things, there is no telling how much anything actually costs anymore.

Somewhere along the way I ran into the phrase "Everything you know is wrong" and it happened to hit me just at just the right time and I agreed. Wikipedia attributes the phrase to a Firesign Theater album from 1974, and the time frame is about right. A couple of years later I finally decided my old man was right and I went back to college and got a degree.

I think that phrase is what got me started on trying to figure out how the world works. I think I sort of have it figured out now, and it isn't pretty. So maybe I'm a little more serious/highly stressed than most people. Or maybe I'm just Mr. Cranky.

Syaffolee was writing about Twitter and the title of this song popped into my head and the rest, as they say, is history.

Court Time

A guy I know had to go to court because his ex-wife was petitioning for an increase in child care payments. He was there all day long. Not just waiting, but in court with the court spending the whole time dealing with his case. And at the end there was no decision. That will come later.

I could not believe it. I can understand having a hearing, but I cannot understand it taking all day long for such a simple matter. Of course, I wasn't there, maybe it's not a simple matter. Or maybe they don't have much business in that court (it's in a small town), so they drag it out to fill out their day and let the lawyers collect a big enough check to keep them in beer and skittles till the next court case comes along next month. I don't know, it just sounds nuts to me.

Sex Abuse? Or Abuse of Power?

I read a story in the Oregonian today and it got me all kinds of P.O.'ed. Two people, a man and a woman, were convicted of sex abuse of a minor and sent to jail for five years. Well, you say, they got off easy, perverts like that shouldn't ever get out of jail. Then I read the description of the abuse:

Her crime, according to the Supreme Court ruling, was bringing the back of a boy's head in contact with her clothed breasts in a room of 30 to 50 people for about one minute.

and:

Buck touched the clothed buttocks of a 13-year-old girl who was sitting next to him fishing. When the girl stood up, Buck brushed the dirt off the girl's shorts with two swipes of his hand.

WTF? This is sex abuse? I don't think so, it doesn't even sound sexual, must less abusive. Of course this was a newspaper report and we know how newspapers twist things. Still, if this report has any bearing on the reality of situation, there is something very wrong with our criminal justice system. Whoever brought the original charges should be run out of town of a rail. Tar and feathers wouldn't be out of order either.

I know, I shouldn't read the newspaper, it just gets me upset. Probably gonna kill me one these days when one of their stories sends my blood pressure through the roof. If I was prone to hearts attacks, or if I had high blood pressure. Reading these kind of stories makes me want to go out and eat some salt.

Curses & Crime

There was a report about a week ago about a rape that occured in the NYC subway in full view of two subway employees who did nothing about it, other than call the police. You can blame this on any number of factors:

• Employer rules that spell out what employees are supposed to do.
• Employer rules that threaten termination for any employee who violates those rules.
• Employees who are so afraid of losing their job they follow those rules.
• An economy so bad that it makes people afraid of losing their job.
• The natural inclination of city dwellers to avoid any kind of craziness. There is so much crazy stuff going on in the city that you have to armor yourself against it or you will spend your entire life dealing with it.
• The infamous New York rule to ignore your fellow citizens, even if they are being murdered.

Several months ago there was a story about how big box stores prohibited employees from pursuing shop lifters. They even fired a couple of people for doing so. Blame our litigious society. Juries often seem to believe that poor people deserve compensation from the evil rich corporations.

So all this was in the back of my mind last Sunday when my daughter and I went for a bike ride. While we were riding down one street we heard someone inside a house cursing a blue streak at the top of their lungs. The windows were open so we could hear them quite clearly and, boy, they were pissed. It sounds like a man berating his wife, and there is some banging going on, and I am wondering if I should knock on the door, or call 911 or something. My daughter is opposed to interfering/getting involved. Fear of embarrassment is very high. There is a little boy outside in front of the garage and he apologizes, and tells us it's his brothers and they are putting holes in the wall. Well, it's not a man beating on a woman, it's boys and they are hitting the wall, not each other, so maybe we can let this go. It's not like I have never let out a string of curses. Usually I will only do it when no one is around.

Welding Overhead

I remember one specific incident. I was working in Houston as a mechanic. I had a utility trailer hoisted in the air and I was welding some reinforcing to the underside of the frame. I am working in a warehouse, and I was pretty sure there was nobody else there. I had on my protective gloves, mask and a heavy shirt. I also had a heavy folded tarp draped over my lap. But I am welding overhead using an electric welder and sparks are flying everywhere, and I am getting burnt. I can take a few, but the job goes on, the sparks keep coming, and pretty soon I am cursing loudly and steadily. Surprise! Two guys come over from the other half of the warehouse to see who's making all the fuss. I was chagrined. After they left, I went back to welding and cursing but I kept it under my breath.

Update July 2022 replaced missing picture.

Securidad

I got a bug to clean out my office last night and I came across a stack of paper I had gotten from my lawyer last year. They were all preliminary copies of a document that had been finalized. Well, what do I do with this stack of paper? Dump it in the recycling as is, or should I shred it first? I don't think there is anything in there that would be useful to a criminal, but I don't know, I don't want to check, and I wouldn't know what kind of info would be useful. We have a shredder, so shred it.

The shredder is one step up from economy, it claims it can shred five sheets of paper at once, and it can. However, it will choke on six, as I quickly found out. Mucking around trying to get it unjammed and it quits completely. What's going on? I suspect a big clot of shredded paper has jammed the there-is-paper-in-the-slot switch, which doesn't completely explain the problem, but it gives me an excuse to open it up. After all, it is my wife's machine and if I broke it she will be unhappy, so there is a certain amount of panic here.

Root around for a #1 Phillips screwdriver. None in the kitchen, none if the garage, none in the basement workroom. Ah here they are! In my desk, two of them. Figures. Remove six screws and it opens up revealing a second plastic box inside that contains the actual shredder. This inner box is tied to the lid with short wires. To open up the inner box, I will need more wire, so out come some more screws holding the switch, the LED and a cable clamp. Now I have it out where I can look at and I see my suspect switch is right out in the open and there does not appear to be anything wrong with it. Put everything back together and it works. The thermal cutoff has reset.

Start grinding more papers and it quits again. Use this opportunity to empty the basket and clean up the mess. Did you know that when you shred an inch thick stack of paper it will expand to fill your entire living room? Pack it into a paper bag, and pile a bunch of old magazines on top before dumping it in the recycling bin. The idea being that the shredded paper will stay in the bag until it is safely inside the truck. Nothing like a cubic foot of shredded paper being blown all over the yard to make ... what? A mess? I don't want to find out.

Back to the shredding. Thermal cutoff is happy again, so I proceed with what's left, one or two sheets at a time. It's easier to feed one corner of the paper to the shredder than to feed it straight in. It works well enough with one sheet, it just gets dragged in, folded in as it goes. Two sheets together like this and you can hear the motor straining.

Can you feed it as fast as it can shred it? Mostly no, peeling off one or two sheets of paper takes seconds, seconds I tell you, and by then the shredder is done with it's last sheet, is tired of waiting for you to feed it, and has shut off. Which is okay, except it means I am not being as efficient as I could be.

Sometimes I think I screw up just so I can see if I can get out of it.