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.