SR-71 Blackbird

SR-71B Blackbird trainer over the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1994
180 rotated piece jigsaw puzzle

The SR-71 has appeared here before.

The Berlin File

The Berlin File (베를린) - Official Main Trailer with English Subtitles
CJEntertainmentUSA
This movie was a little hard to follow so it didn't make much sense. We have North Koreans, South Koreans, the CIA, Mossad and some unidentified Arabs in Berlin to make an illicit arms deal. Well, some of them are there to make an arms deal and the rest of them are there to either watch what happens or to stop it. In any case there is some skullduggery going on and every few minutes a violent fight erupts. Some involve hare brained chases, some are just action packed karate battles and some are full-fledged machine gun shoot outs. There were a couple of unexpected bits, like the voice recorder that self-destructs after playing the message. Haven't seen that trick since Mission Impossible. Also, first movie featuring a North Korean agent as the protagonist that I've seen, or at least that I remember.

There was a spectacular stunt where our hero falls through a glass roof, bounces off of several beams, gets caught in some electrical wiring that proceeds to get ripped loose from the lights, which leads to him swinging like a pendulum into the wall, and if that's not enough, more wire comes loose and he swings away and into another wall where he finally comes to rest. For two seconds and then he's off again.

Netflix, subtitled, 2 hours.

Update June 2023 replaced missing video.

Update July 2024 replaced missing video.

Wordle

I play Wordle most every day, it's just my speed. Some days the answer appears as if by magic, other days I am wrought with anguish. Today's puzzle was super-annoying. On my second guess I got three of the letters in the right place. Do you know how many words there are with the letters placed like this:

_ O _ E R (highlight to read)

I thought of nine right off the bat, and I've only got four places left to use. Well, what I need is a word made entirely of letters that haven't been used yet, but that doesn't help much. I've still got 16 letters to choose from, I may as well be starting blind. If I am lucky, sticking in some random word would help, but would it be enough help to be worth one of the four places I have left? I decided it wasn't and instead tried to eliminate as many words as I could from my list. Two words had a B and two words had an N, so with two guesses I was able to eliminate four words from my list. It wasn't enough. The answer was the name of a fictional TV persona. 

(H O M E R) (highlight to read) 

It was on my list, but I had discounted just because of the name association. Too late I realized it also referred to a baseball play, and it's spring, and all right thinking people's thoughts turn to baseball. If you're not thinking about baseball, that makes you some kind of commie. Wasn't that the standard test of suspicious persons during WW2 and the Cold War? Guess I flubbed that test.

Pic of the Day

Man Fall From Tree - Geert de Taeye
204 piece jigsaw puzzle

The fashion world is a strange and wondrous place.

Industrial Green Energy

Aerial view of Enviva Biomass facility in Northampton County [Courtesy of Dogwood Alliance]

On one hand it seems like a good idea, on the other it just seems a little shady.

People are trying to be 'green', so they are burning wood pellets instead of coal, the idea being that growing trees suck as much CO2 out of the air as is produced when they are burned, so burning wood is considered carbon neutral. If you are one of Greta's acolytes, you might think that's a good thing.

Problem is the world burns about 8 billion tons of coal a year. I don't know if there are enough forests on the planet to compete with those kind of numbers. Whatever, demand has been growing and now there are a bunch of wood pellet factories operating in the southeast United States, cutting down forests, grinding the logs into wood pellets, and shipping them all over, including Europe.

Here's the shady part:

Biomass is contentious not just locally for the adverse impacts on those who live near wood pellet plants, but also globally for the unusual way its carbon emissions are tallied.

Under global accounting rules, emissions from burning wood are calculated where the trees are harvested, not where the material is burned.

That means countries can avoid counting emissions from their wood-fired plants while reporting the coal displaced as a greenhouse gas reduction. - Aljazerra

Wood pellets also cost more than coal:

Anthracite coal costs a lot less than wood pellets per unit of heat (BTU). A pound of Anthracite coal has almost twice the heat as a pound of wood pellets, therefore pellets have to be almost 1/2 the cost of Anthracite coal to be at the same cost per unit of heat. The cost of pellets would have to drop to $140/ton to be equal to the cost per unit of heat (BTU) of Anthracite coal that cost $250/ton. - Heet

Coal, if you buy it by the trainload, is much cheaper, like $40 per ton.

Jaguar XJ

Jaguar XJ
291 piece jigsaw puzzle

Oooo, a Jag. Not a bad looking car, but it doesn't really look like a Jag. That might be due to my only seeing old style Jags for most of my life. This version of the Jaguar XJ was produced from 2010 to 2019. Used, they cost about as much as a pickup truck, so I could have bought one instead of the used truck I did buy, but how would I have hauled the sheets of drywall?

Diet

I've been trying to lose some weight this year. I am having some success, but it's slow going. Something I've noticed is that if I restrict my diet enough to lose weight, I am always right on the verge of being hungry. What is supposed to be a full meal is not really satisfying. Being a little hungry is not bad, but combine that with being tired, I am liable to become apparently angry. Internally, some little thing will irritate me and I will start making rude remarks, remarks that people around me interpret as anger.

So now I'm wondering, if this is a common phenomena, and I think it is, how is this different than for us that it was 50 or 100 years ago? Was life not so irritating back then that we were able to absorb a little irritation without lashing out? Or were we all not such pansies back then, and a little rude behavior was not something that bothered us? Or is it that modern life has become so much more irritating?

Teacher don't you fill me up with your rules, don't you know that smokin' ain't allowed in school.

BROWNSVILLE STATION SMOKIN' IN THE BOYS ROOM
Keith McDonald

Now that I think about, smoking was ubiquitous 50 and 100 years ago, and one of the common complaints we hear from people who quit smoking is that they gain a bunch of weight. Could it be that nicotine is an appetite suppressant? I hear kids these days are wearing nicotine patches, not because they are trying to quit smoking - they never started, but because they appreciate the calming effect of the drug. (Seems to be a real thing.) The few times I tried smoking, I never noticed any such effect, but that might just be me. Or maybe I enjoyed being cranked up all the time and wasn't interested in any calming effect.

Smokin' in the Boy's Room is like a high school anthem. Turns out there are at least three versions of this tune. 

There's this one by Brownsville Station from 1973 (don't remember them, though I should), 

the one by Mötley Crüe from 1985 and 

a recent one from LeAnn Rimes from 2014.