Socialness

Marcel puts up a post this morning about the Wood of Ephraim. I've never heard of it, so off to Google I go, whereupon I am delivered a link to a Facebook page, which just has a one line summary, very similar to what Wikipedia has. Oh, they credit Wikipedia, and, hey, what's this?

Does this mean we have so much storage space available in the cloud that we can just waste it? Yes, I think it does. I wonder how long this page will persist, if it persists at all. If nobody writes on it, it could just be generated anew each time someone asks for it. God forbid anyone comments on it. It will become as graven in stone and persist until the very end of time itself.

Exercise Arctic Tiger

Aircraft painters are getting wild these days.

The Cardigans - My Favorite game

The Cardigans - My Favourite Game “Stone Version”
I think the tattoo was a fake done only for this video. After watching this video umpteen times I believe that the smudge on the car seat confirms it. Why do I think that is important?

I got onto this from tracking down the originals of some Boss Hoss covers. I like the music for both versions equally well, but I like this video better.

Street View of signpost at the corner of Daggett-Yermo Rd. & 'A' St.

Update: This video is 15 years old. Shows how out of touch I am. It occured to me after I put up The Boss Hoss Don't Gimme That video that both videos had a Texas flavor: Cadillacs and cowboy boots. So I went back and watched this one a little more closely and found proof: the van at the end has a Texas license plate. There is also a street sign at the beginning that looks unique, and sure enough it is. You can find it in Daggett, California, just outside of Barstow. Humph. Not real Texas flavor, it's a California fake. Oh, well, Barstow probably has more in common with El Paso than Hollywood. Wasn't able to find the restaurant though, which was the only other clue I could find. P.S. I love the D.J.

Update 2: For some reason when I am watching this video, I don't notice all the car noises (roaring engines, skidding tires, collisions), but if I am just listening to it while doing something else (i.e. not watching the video portion) they are very prominent. Gives a completely different feel to it.

Update 3: April 2017 replaced missing video.

Prison Planet

Kyra  - The Chronicles of Riddick

Exporting convicted criminals to the moon or distant planets has been common theme in Science Fiction stories for years. I always pooh-poohed it because of the enormous cost of putting anything into orbit, but then I got to thinking (always a dangerous thing to do, I know). Looking back to the days of sail when Britain was sending convicts to Australia, a sailing ship was about the most expensive thing you could buy. Then you look at the cost of keeping someone locked up in a modern prison, one that doesn't violate any of their rights, and I begin to wonder if shipping them to the moon might be cheaper.
    There are a couple problems with this idea. The first is that it is still dreadfully expensive to put a man into orbit, much less send him to the moon. Another is that there are a whole bunch of people who claim they want to go into outer space. If we started exporting criminals, we might have a whole new bunch of criminals, people who commit crimes in order to get "transported". A third is that it is a whole lot easier to get back from the moon than it is to get there in the first place.

Tennis Racket Dream

My wife and I are tagging along with an athletic man on his way to play a tennis match. He has a racket, but he isn’t very happy with it.  When we get to the court, he grabs a handful of strings from his racket and pulls them up into a loop. Something else happens and now the strings are cut. He hands the racket to me and asks me to restring it using the old, now very stretched strings. I wonder if this isn’t going to make for an awkward delay in the game, but he seems unconcerned. I don’t know whether the audience, for there is an audience, is his entourage and he has just lost all respect for them, or whether this is a real match, and absurd delays like this are just accepted as normal. There is no mention, or appearance, of his opponent.

   I turn to the task of restringing the racket and right away I can tell it is not going to go smoothly. The strings are like wet noodles. Trying to push them through the holes is going to be a real pain. But never mind that, we have another problem. Seems the strings in the lower section of the racket have gotten individual black cloth covers, the strings themselves have turned to straps, and they have gotten somewhat misarranged. So before I can start with restringing the racket, I need to sort out the existing strings, er, straps, but the covers are in the way so I can’t see which ones are gray and which ones are red, which makes it a little difficult.

Contrarian

Stayed up late last night watching The Yellow Sea, a brutal, Korean crime thriller. Only the cops had guns, which they used ineffectually. The bad guys, and there were a lot of bad guys, used knives, hachets and clubs. The knives looked like the big kitchen knives you can pick up at any housewares department. The clubs were whatever was handy. It reminded me of Old Boy.
    Well, now I'm wound up, I'm not ready for bed, so let's see what we can find to amuse ourselves on the net.

• Decline and fall: how American society unravelled, by George Packer on The Guardian.
• Clinton’s no liberal hero. The former president is suddenly at the center of the 2012 race. Have we forgotten how he screwed the economy? By Matt Stoller on SALON.

I heard Clinton blamed for setting up the situation that led to the great economic disaster that happened during Bush's term. I didn't want to believe it then, I mean, Clinton was a good guy, and Bush was a bumbling fool. Except they are both part of the system. So all this made perfect sense at 2AM this morning. I'm afraid to look at it now.

Yellow Sea locations

Primary locations in the movie The Yellow Sea: Busan and Ulsan, South Korea and Yanji, China. 500 miles of the Sea of Japan separate the two areas. The Yellow Sea itself is on the other side of the Korean Peninsula. Note that Yanji is right near the intersection of China, North Korea and Russia. There is a river along the border between Russia and North Korea, so it looks like China has access to the ocean there. Tenuous, but access. Ulsan is home to Hyundai, as in the biggest shipyard in the world and the biggest automobile factory in the world.
    So. A 500 mile sea voyage to get to South Korea, then sneak into the country in order to find work. That's a little thin. But Ulsan is a booming industrial town, so that makes it a little more believable. Update: Yanji is populated by ethnic Koreans so they would probably be able to fit in better in South Korea than they would in Japan, which is approximately the same distance away, but, well, Japanese.

Update October 2016. Adding a mention of Vladivostok here because it's the nearest Russian city to this intersection.
Update August 2020. Replaced missing map, added link to map of the intersection of the three countries.

Time To Get High

For Roberta. Via Jack.