This and That

Ross and I went skiing two weeks ago up at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. I was going to take Johnny up this weekend, but I had too much going on and couldn't cope, so we postponed it till next weekend.

Stayed home and took it easy this weekend. Spent all last weekend hooking up a computer network in our house. We now have four computers all connected to the Internet using one DSL connection. Still have to set up Email and printers and file sharing, but it will have to wait.

We had a visitor at work from Australia for a couple of days. He likes one of our products so much he is working on an improved version for us. I'm not quite sure whether this means more work for me or less, which makes me a little edgy, because I seem to have more work to do than can possibly be accomplished in the next hundred years.

Ross's basketball team had a tournament this week. They won the quarter-final on Tuesday, and the semi-final on Thursday night. The final was on Saturday. What a game! My Dad went with me to watch. I was hoarse from yelling by the end of the game. It was neck and neck the whole game, one team not managing to get more than a few points ahead of the other. At the end of the fourth quarter is was tied. Ross's team finally won in the second overtime period.

Ross and I watched a Science Fiction movie called 'Avalon' Saturday night. Movie was made in Poland, had English subtitles and Japanese computer graphics. The movie was about a woman involved in playing a virtual reality computer game. Most of the movie was shown in not-quite-black-and-white, and had a gritty Eastern European flavor to it. But when the heroine reaches the top level of the game, everything turns to full color, full sound and full
of life. Just a little odd.

John prepared a Science Fair project about electricity. His teachers were so impressed that he is one of five students from his school selected to go exhibit at the science fair at Liberty High School. Good job, Johnny.

Daughter and Anne spent all day Saturday at a dance clinic in Northeast Portland. Left the house at seven AM and didn't get home till after six at night. Finally got the Christmas lights down off the house yesterday.

Who was a good President and who wasn't?

As for Bush, I'm of two minds. Environmentally, I think he's a stinker. As far as foreign policy goes, I think the War in Iraq is the first good thing the US has done since WWII, or maybe Korea. As for his deception, I never cared. He was going to get rid of Saddam Hussein, which was a good thing all by itself. All the rest was just window dressing.

Who was a good President and who wasn't?

President Kennedy was "good" President, but he failed to support the Bay of Pigs invasion after he promised to do so, and then it failed. This was bad. He got us into Vietnam. This was bad.

Nixon was a bad President, but he got us out of Vietnam, which was good. Henry Kissinger was his Secretary of State. I can't stand the man, but I can't tell you why.

Carter was a President, but he canceled our participation in the Olympics, which was bad.

The old Bush had a chance to liberate Iraq, but he blew it. Killed a couple of hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers just to put Kuwait back in our pocket. Encouraged Iraqis to rebel, but when they did he didn't support them. The reprisals were bad. This was bad.

Reagan was an actor and he put on a good show, he got the battleships out of mothballs for a while. He sent the marines to Lebanon and when they got killed, he gave up. Yassar Arafat is a thug. Maybe the Palestinians are finally coming to understand that.

The Republicans hated Clinton so much they gave us Kenneth Starr and his show trial. What a load of horse hooey that was. And now poor Ken can't get a job. I read one article that said everything Clinton might do was analyzed for the potential political advantage, so he never did anything out of principle. This was bad. He got more gun control laws passed. This is bad.

I suspect Bush of being deeply in the pockets of big business. I suspect he is an environmental menace. This is bad. But he is liberating Afghanistan and Iraq. This is good.

Kung Fu Fighting

I went to the video store Saturday and picked up a movie. I thought I was getting some typical action packed cops and robbers shoot-'em-up: "China Strike Force". Well it was and it wasn't. It was made in Shanghai, not Hollywood. The actors, almost all Chinese, were speaking English, it wasn't dubbed. The writing was abysmal. The stunts were amazing, so over the top that I laughed, harder than I have in a long time. The one non-Chinese actor was an old rapper by the name of Coolio. His character was abysmal. I don't know if he did a good job of playing a complete idiot, or whether he really is one. But he got in some Kung Fu fighting. Not as good as the Chinese, but not bad for a rapper. It was like they were trying to make a Jackie Chan movie, but they didn't quite. Some good shots of Hong Kong and Shanghai, which is one of the attractions of James Bond movies and the TV series Alias. And then there were the Arnold Schwarzenegger quotes. I can't recommend it, unless you really don't have anything else to do for a couple of hours.

Kelly's Cobras

Update August 16, 2011: This Internet link to Kelly's Cobras, my Dad's old army outfit, seems to be dead.

http://kelleys_kobras.home.att.net/

Here's a couple of other links that are live:

http://www.historyofwar.org/air/units/USAAF/494th_Bombardment_Group.html
http://bunting.com.au/vj60/citation1.htm

PBS: Bridge on the River Kwai

I saw your show tonight. Interesting, but it didn't answer my one big question: did the Hollywood movie have any basis in reality? i.e. was there any kind of commando team sent in to blow up any of the bridges? Or were all the attacks from the air? Did the Allied prisoners stage a strike? Did the locomotive plunge dramatically off the destroyed bridge into the river? Strike that last question. The one thing I learned was that the bridge in the movie wasn't built using the same construction techniques as the real bridge on the River Kwai, but it appeared to be similar to other bridges on this railway line.

A little more geography would have been nice. Like what did the railway line connect? If it was such a good thing for the Japanese, why did it fall into disuse? Did it ever operate after the war? Did it ever operate during the war?

While I'm at it. I have another question. I'm curious as to why you differentiate between "us" and "them". Is it a tribal thing? A marketing thing? A racial thing? A political thing? The show focused almost exclusively on the 16,000 Allied deaths, and just mentions at the end the 80,000 Asian deaths. That's almost 100,000 PEOPLE.

I see the same thing in the my local newspaper ("The Oregonian"). They report every single American death in Iraq in headlines on the front page, but hardly ever do I see any mention of how many Iraqi's died. They are people too, aren't they? What gives? We killed some large number of Iraqi's in the first war with Iraq. I've heard rumors of 100,000 to 300,000, and that barely got a mention.

Movies

Watching "The Hard Word" Friday night, the accents were almost indecipherable. So we go to setup and turn on the English subtitles. Helped a whole bunch. Except for the backwards speak. Some of the characters were convicts in prison and they had developed their own secret language which involved pronouncing words backwards. For instance "money" became "yenom" (rhymes with venom). The subtitles helped with some of that, but in some cases, even if we paused the movie so we could study the text, the message remained indecipherable.

Watched "Finding Nemo" with daughter Monday night. They sold $100 million worth of DVD's the day it was released.

Bomarc

Dad worked on the Bomarc anti-aircraft missile when I was a kid and we were living in Seattle. Recently I discovered the it carried a nuclear warhead. Manfred (one of the guys that I worked with at Stevens) was an electronics technician in the military working on Nike anti-aircraft missile systems. While he was in the military he took a course in thermonuclear warfare, and the Bomarc was one of the weapons they covered. Seems that the Bomarc was to be used against a group of enemy bombers. The Bomarc would be set to detonate above the squadron of enemy bombers. The explosion would knock the wings off the planes and they would fall into the sea.