Family

Dune

I've been reading Dune for last couple of weeks and it's pretty great. It must be, I am nearly finished with it, unlike the stack of books on my table that I haven't finished.

Anyway, I am nearing the end of this 500 page Science Fiction thriller when I encounter this bit of dialog between Paul, the hero, Jessica, his mother, and Chani, his wife.

In that instant, she [Jessica] knew.
"You drank the sacred water!" she blurted.
"One drop of it," Paul said. "So small . . . one drop."
"How could you do such a foolish thing?" she demanded.
"He is your son," Chani said.
Jessica glared at her.

I howled. I dunno, maybe you had to be there.

I read the book once before, likely 50 years ago when it was new. I remember quite a bit of the story, but then I also saw the movie, so many of my memories are visual ones from the film. The only thing I am sure I remember from the book is the evil Baron unplugging the heartplug of one of his minions,  but like I said, I am almost done with the book and there has been no mention of any heartplugs, which means I must have got it from the movie. So much for eyewitness testimony.

The copy I am reading is the 50th Anniversary Edition (paperback). The closest thing available from Amazon is the 40th Anniversary Edition. Odd, don't you think?

The Widow

The Widow - Official Trailer | Prime Video
'Crazy people running around with blood in their eyes' pretty much sums it up. The story jumps back and forth in time and between Africa and England. Some of the jumps make sense, but most of them are just there to leave a little cliff hanger, which I must admit, I kind of enjoy. Oh, it irritates me, but it gets me stirred up which is a good thing. My emotions need their exercise, you know.

Africa seems to have no end of horror stories to tell, but from this movie, it appears that most of the people are just going about their everyday business. I mean we have big cities with skyscrapers and international airports. Yes, there are men with guns running around in the bush just outside of town, but it's a big country and there aren't all that many men with guns, so you can avoid them, and as long as the militia are not right there in your neighborhood, life goes on as normal as in any peaceful country.

The lead characters are all varying degrees of wacko. It's understandable as they have all been through some pretty horrendous events, most of which they instigated themselves. Most of them end up dead, which is kind of telling.

A miner shows a bag containing coltan in Katanga Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Aug. 2008. ALFREDO FALVO/CONTRASTO/REDUX

There is a thin line running through this whole story, and that is smuggling coltan out of the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo). There are some scenes of a coltan mine scattered throughout the series, but it's a pretty feeble operation, a few dozen people working in muddy pools on the surface, much like the picture above. But in the beginning of the last episode they take you on a tour of how it it mined, bagged, transported, combined with the output from dozens of other mines (must be dozens or even hundreds if they are all as small as the one we were shown) and smelted. They skip the part about how the metal is made into capacitors, but then they take you to a modern smart phone assembly line and deliver that phone to one of the characters in the show who is ranting about something to do with coltan production. Clever.

Only about a thousand tons of tantalum are produced each year, so it's not like coal where a thousand tons are mined every second.

8 episodes on Amazon Prime Video

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - Trailer
Watched this the other night. It's still pretty great, though it wasn't as overwhelming as when I saw it the first time in the theater, 19 (?!?!) years ago. This time I was able to follow the story a little better and now I realize the princess is psycho. She is very talented at martial arts and can defeat a whole tavern full of men with one hand tied behind her back, figuratively speaking. But she is like a loose cannon, spreading discord and mayhem wherever she goes, and as near as I can tell, for no purpose other than to satisfy her own impulses.

The fight scene between the two leading ladies was pretty spectacular. I figure that it's all choreographed and well rehearsed, but it's still pretty amazing that nobody got hurt with all that steel flying around at close quarters.

I remember my mother didn't like the flying bits (the rooftop chase scenes), too fantastical for her. I took it with a grain of salt. 'People flying over the rooftops' sounds exactly how some guy staggering home after a late night of whooping it up with his buds would describe seeing people running over the rooftops. So it's not an unrealistic fantasy, it's an alcohol induced fantasy, which is much more realistic.

On Amazon Prime Video

Empire Relic

SS Empire Heritage

That's a military war machine, a tank. Going by the amount of crud covering it looks like it has been down there a while. Given that we can see color and the background isn't totally black, it might not be too deep. Plus we have a SCUBA diver, but that isn't a good indicator because SCUBA divers can go very deep with special equipment. This picture sparked my interest, so I did a little checking. The tank was cargo on the Empire Heritage, which had a string of bad luck.

Empire Heritage, a 15,702 GRT tanker, was launched in 1930, hit a mine in  January 1941 and beached. Refloated in March 1941 and beached, but broke in two and declared a total loss. To MoWT, repaired and renamed Empire Heritage. Torpedoed September 1944 and sunk by U-482. - paraphrased from Wikipedia

MoWT is the Ministry of War Transport. Empire Heritage was one of about a zillion Empire ships:

An Empire ship is a merchant ship that was given a name beginning with "Empire" in the service of the Government of the United Kingdom during and after World War II.
. . .
New Empire ship construction represented an enormous undertaking that included classes of freighters, tankers, aircraft carriers, fast cargo liners, tank landing ships, Deep Sea Salvage and Rescue Tugs and several other categories. Total production numbered in the hundreds.
Empire ships were supplements to Britain's normal peacetime merchant fleet, swelling its wartime numbers to 12,000, then the largest merchant ship fleet in the world. Approximately 4,000 ships on the British register were lost between 1939 and 1945, a considerable number being sunk during the Battle of the Atlantic. - Wikipedia

Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

Sargeant Preston

Meet Iditarod-Winning Sled Dogs
The Iditarod started yesterday. Safe and warm in my basement hidey-hole, I think it's great. Reminds me of Jack London stories and Sargeant Preston, whom I haven't thought of in a zillion years.


Sergeant Preston of The Yukon (1955) - TV Intro.
P.S. There seems to be some confusion over the spelling of Sargent. Spelled that way, it's a person's name. Spelled with a second 'a' (Sargeant), it's the military rank. Usually.

P.P.S. Joe points out that there is only one A in Sergeant. How did I miss that? Perhaps too many years of reading Beetle Bailey and hearing about "Sarge".

The American Health Care Racket

From Our World in Data
If you click on the play button (the little triangle down by '1970' near the bottom), it will show you the increase in spending as time goes by. When it is done playing, if you mouse over the graph it will highlight the record of individual countries.

Why do we spend so much more than everyone else? Perhaps because we think we like to think we are sick and we like spending money on doctors and lab work and drugs. Perhaps because we are willing to spend the money and the medical establishment is willing to take it. In any case, I suspect it's just our mind set: charge on until we are stopped, and then bust down the barricade and charge on some more. i.e. Crazy people run up bigger medical bills, and we Americans might be the craziest of all.

I dunno, but I suspect most of our health care dollars are spent on old people, and a lot of that is spent on people who are not even mentally with us anymore. It is easy to foist unnecessary treatments on people who are barely aware of what's going on. But hey, medicare will pay for it, so it gets done.

Via Detroit Steve

Politics

Wondermark by David Malki

I am trying to avoid hearing any of the bullshit emanating from Washington D.C., but even with all my shields up, some of it still gets through. This cartoon is like totally apropos, man.

There are three factors affecting politicians. One is their beliefs, another is practical matters and the third is playing to the crowd. Playing to the crowd is necessary as that is part of the job, representing your constituents is what you are supposed to do, and if your crowd of constituents is howling for blood, well then, you too are obligated to howl for blood.

But all that noise is just entertainment to keep the masses entertained while the congressional staff hammers out the deals necessary to actually get anything done, like build stuff, or keep useful services running. Or stealing all the monkey biscuits.

Beliefs, well, they may be in line with what you are saying, or they might get lost in the shuffle of all the shouting and horse-trading. But if you are a talented person, you can probably come up with some rationalization that shows how your beliefs align with your words and actions. And the people will love you and you will get elected to another term.