Small Town Crime

Small Town Crime Trailer #1 (2017) | Movieclips Indie
Movieclips Indie

A pretty great crime thriller set in small town (quelle surprise!) somewhere in the northern Rocky Mountain region. I would have guessed Montana or Wyoming, but Wikipedia says it was shot in Utah. They drop a couple of names, but I'm pretty sure they are all red herrings. It is definitely not Orange County. Lots of wide open spaces and nearby big mountains. 

John Hawkes is an alcoholic ex-cop who is just a disaster. He's not far from hitting bottom. It must be set in back in the 80's because bartenders are still letting guys get drunk and drive home. I mean back when we had the big campaign against drunk driving courts ruled they were responsible, right? Anyway, he is so bad we almost quit watching it, but then he finds a badly injured young woman by the side of road and he starts picking himself up. From there it's pure noir, lots of shady characters telling all kinds of bullshit stories. The body count starts rising and the show culminates with a couple of well done gun fights. Best show I've seen in a while.

Variety has a decent review, but they seem surprised that the old rich dude (Robert Forster) living in a Rocky Mountain state has a high powered rifle and knows how to use it. I think that is more the norm in those areas. I would be surprised if he didn't have one.

Jeremy Ratchford as Orthopedic and James Lafferty as Tony Lama, hired killers in Small Town Crime 

There is a pair of hired killers, and while they aren't given a lot of dialog, Jeremy's character is memorable, and not just for his name. We only learned that through the subtitles. I mean what kind of name is 'Orthopedic'? I don't think it is ever mentioned. Reminds of previous duo's of hired killers I've seen in the movies.

Netflix, hour and a half long.

Dominoes

The Reverse Domino Effect
Action Lab Shorts

Cleaning out my email and I found this clip. You would have to be fairly precise in locating those bricks I would think. Just kind of cool.

Rummikub

Rummikub

We play two or three hands of Rummikub most evenings these days. Sometimes just the wife and I, sometimes with the kids. It's a fairly simple minded game, much like gin or rummy or gin rummy (if you tell the difference between them you're a better man than I). The trick is that after someone has played some tiles, you can rearrange them into new combinations as long as when you are done all the combinations on the board are valid.

When the game starts it goes pretty quickly, people are just drawing one tile after another. Eventually people start laying down tiles and when you reach a critical mass of played tiles is when it gets interesting. People have fewer tiles in their hands and are looking to go out. Rearranging may involve multiple steps, taking tiles from one sequence, building new sequences and using the left over tiles to build another sequence. There might be dozen of these steps involved in a single play. Osmany is a master of it. Anyway, when we are in this stage of the game, when a player's turn comes, they may sit staring at the board for a long time, long enough for you to fall asleep, take a nap, catch a ball game, go to the beach. I exaggerate, but it might be several minutes. It doesn't really help to plan ahead because a single tile played can alter the entire situation.

It keeps us amused.

P.S. Rummikub showed up in an episode of Behzat Ç.

Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)

Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)

A bunch of countries in east Asia are working on a free trade agreement. The people in these countries make up 30% of the world's population. 

I'm reading Tyler Durden's post about this and there is a chart of numbers and I don't like the format. The numbers are all left justified, makes it hard to see what's going on, so I muck around 

(save the image, run it through a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) service, edit with a text editor to clean it up a bit) 

and then import it into a spreadsheet. Now I can play with it. Lists of numbers like this call for a graph, but none of graphs I call into existence really show me anything useful. Then I realize what we need is GDP per person, so I add that column. Now we have some numbers that mean something.

The top five are no surprise. Number six, Brunei, is kind of a freak, a tiny country on the island of Borneo that just happens to be "the fourth-largest producer of oil in Southeast Asia". Then we have China, Malaysia and Thailand that seem to be doing okay. And then we have the bottom six, who maybe aren't doing so well. That the Philippines are below Vietnam was kind of surprise, but maybe not. Filipinos make up a third of the crews of most of the cruise ships in the world. Working on a cruise ship is not far from slave labor. If that many people are looking for slave labor gigs overseas, things can't be too good at home. Plus we've got a jihadist revolution percolating there.* 

Seems Capitalism worked in some of these countries (the top five again). A couple suffered Communist revolutions (China and Vietnam) and are making progress. You'd think that the Philippines would be doing better what with it being a mostly an English speaking, Christian country with strong US backing, but maybe that's the problem. South Vietnam's corrupt government had US backing as well.

* It took me a while to find this post. Searching for philippines missed it. Searching for philippine would have found it, but Blogger's search function is rudimentary at best and I didn't think of it. Searching for winning finally turned it up because I remembered that from the blurb I quoted.

P.S. The chart in Tyler Durden's post was an image of the chart in Visual Capitalist's post. The chart format in Visual Capitalist's post is still piss poor, but at least it was text, so I could have copied it directly instead of going through the OCR business.

The Wedding Guest

The Wedding Guest Trailer #1 (2019) | Movieclips Trailers
Movieclips Trailers
My first instinct when I saw the blurb on Netflix was no. I don't need another movie about how Muslims oppress their women, but we watched it anyway. The forced marriage was in there, but it was just the trigger that set everything in motion. A rich Pakistani girl went to England, studied at the university and got a degree in pharmacology. While she was there she picked up a boyfriend. Now she's back in Pakistan and her family has arranged a wedding for her. She is opposed and her boyfriend, another rich kid, comes up with a plan to get her out. He hires a not-rich guy, Pakistani or Indian, who's living in the UK. He seems to be fully westernized. Anyway, he hires him to kidnap her and spirit her out of the country.

Our kidnapper-for-hire executes his plan and he and the girl get away, but he kills a guard at the family's compound and the three of them are splashed all over the news. Now the boyfriend reveals himself to be a complete flake. Things go downhill from there.

On the plus side we've got wonderful scenes from half a dozen cities. It's almost a travelogue. As a bonus for all you gun nuts, the movie opens with a visit to the Weapon Shops of Isher, er, the weapon shops of Darra Adam Khel.

There were a couple of glitches regarding money. The boyfriend has paid the kidnapper 35K, presumably US dollars or British pounds. If it was in Rupees it would only be like $500 which certainly wouldn't cover all the expenses he's racking up. But then they are strapped for money. The boyfriend got some jewels from his family and they try to sell one at local jewelry store. The owner tells them it is 'too rich for me'. He estimates it is worth $100,000. 100,000 Rupees maybe, it wasn't all that big.

COVID-19

I've got a theory about this whole COVID-19 and Fauci's fumbles. Rumor has it that the US was funding a research laboratory in Wuhan China to conduct gain-of-function experiments on certain virii. Then a new virus starts making people sick in that same Wuhan China. Now you're the guy charge with protecting the health of the 330 million people living in the USA, whatchya gonna do? Shit, if this shit that's making people sick came from that lab, this could be really bad. Bad as in 14th Century Black Plague bad. Better go to the public health equivalent of DEF-CON 4 and close all the windows, bolt the doors, and proclaim panic: the bugs are coming!

The problem with any new disease is you don't know how bad it's going to be. Is it going to be annoying or deadly? How contagious will it be? How will it be transmitted? By intimate contact?  By droplets floating in the air? They might only be dangerous until they dry up. Or maybe even dry particles could transmit the disease. Nobody knows until somebody does some research, or until people a bunch of people start showing up dead, and then it's pretty much too late. Better to clamp down early and clamp down hard. Better be safe than sorry.

Turns out that COVID-19 is not all that deadly, maybe 50% more deadly than the regular flu, so in hindsight, the draconian lockdowns and mask requirements were overkill, and there seems to be some doubt that they had any beneficial effect at all. And what about the regular flu? Haven't heard a word about it. That strikes me as kind of weird. Might just be an effect of our distorted news reporting system. Nobody cares about old stuff that might kill you, we want to hear about the new stuff that might kill you.

Back before COVID-19, there was a new variety of flu every year and every year you had to get a new vaccine. You were supposed to anyway. I never got one. I thought it was stupid. Maybe because we didn't have flu vaccines when I was growing up, of maybe I had the flu once when I was a kid and I was sick for a couple of days but it was so long ago I forgot how bad it was. Whatever. But now it's 2021 and I just got vaccinated for COVID-19, a bug that is two years old. Of course we've got new varieties of COVID popping up here and there and I expect we're going to start seeing new vaccines showing up here along with noisy obnoxious campaigns to get everyone vaccinated with the latest and greatest goop. No thanks. It's been five days since I got my second Pfizer jab and while I am walking and talking, I am still not right. I have a low grade headache all over the outside of my head, what feels like a sinus infection behind my left eye, my left eye is prone to watering and I have a red spot on my cheek. I only mention the last because my family noticed and pointed it out to me.

I had no intention of getting the vaccine, but I had a conversation with my wife about it. She is a bit anxiety prone, so I agreed to do it to alleviate her concerns. So all this trivial suffering is my own fault for being agreeable.

P.S. I remember hearing about gain-of-function when I was reading The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston, which was about the campaign to eliminate smallpox. It's kind of fucked up.

Rubicon Trail

I had all kinds of posts in mind, but I'm draggin', so here's this video:

Trying to keep all WHEELS on the ground at the Historic RUBICON Trail -- Part 1
Fab Rats
Marc and I drove the Rubicon Trail in his Isuzu Trooper umpteen zillion years ago. I've been watching Matt's Off Road Recovery videos for a while now. Paul from Fab Rats shows up there occasionally and I've seen a couple of his videos. I enjoyed watching Matt and his crew build the Morevair.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I have been abandoned. Daughter has moved to days shifts after working nights for 2 or 3 years. Same sort of erratic schedule though,  3 days on, 2 days off, 3 days on, 6 days off maybe? 12 hour days. So Osmany has adopted the same schedule. Wife is off to whoop it up with her girlfriends and I have the house to myself, except for Gus (the cat), and he can pretty much keep himself amused. By sleeping, the lying dog. (Look at him lying there like a dog. Sleeping.)

I got a supply of Coors in the fridge, I merged the engineer's PDF with the extract from the kitchen designer's plans and sent them to Mr. Wood at the Portland Building Department, which was my chore for the week. Aside from getting my second shot of Pfizer and being miserable for 3 days.

'

Where was I going with this? Ah! The video! I might be a redneck. I really enjoyed this video, long as it is (30 odd minutes). I figure that these guys, running their own businesses, need to be grossing between $300 and $500K a year. They also need a lot of energy and it's apparent that they have it. I suspect that the big difference between them and me is that I never learned, of liked, to deal with people. Is that innate or because of my experience with people? Great, another question that has no answer. Not good for someone who thinks of thoughts as data.

Back to the video. Sorry, I keep getting distracted. Around about the 17 minute mark, Paul drags the rear differential of his SUV (heh) on a big rock, not once but several times. It was most distressing. These guys, being as they built these rigs, are probably thinking about how much strain the axle can take and whether all the supporting components can handle the stress. Me, I just shuddered.

Fab Rats Journey to the Rubicon

Here's Google's driving route from Hurricane, Utah to the beginning of the trail in Tanoma, California.

Rubicon Trail

Scale is 40:1 larger compared to above map. I'm posting the maps because I went to the trouble to look them up, and just in case anyone else wants to see where this is. The Rubicon Trail link takes you to a page that shows the elevation of every stinking bit of the trail. It ranges from like 6,000 feet to a shade over 7,000 feet.