Thriller

One episode away from wrapping up The Night Manager as our dinnertime entertainment. Apparently after two failed movie projects, this six episode series was deemed long enough to give the original 1993 novel by John le Carre a proper treatment.

My quibbles are minor things. Some of the hardware seen on the list of smuggled arms is a little fanciful (I don't care how big and well-connected a billionaire black market arms dealer is; he's not peddling Trident missiles) and the uniforms and equipment on the US troops appearing briefly in episode 5 drew a chuckle, but it's not like I'm expecting a BBC production to get the gun stuff right anyway.

The plot twists and turns satisfactorily. The protagonist is both enigmatic and sympathetic, which is not an easy combo to pull off.

The choice of the leads, Hiddleston and Laurie, is brilliant. I had no idea that Hugh Laurie could be so... so... malevolent.

The series is free to watch if you have Amazon Prime. I'm definitely down to read the novel now.

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Deepfake...

Given the credulity of the average person, the future is going to be super annoying for those who keep grains of salt handy.
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Overheard in Indianapolis, 2019...

The bicycle cab stopped briefly beside us on the sidewalk, until the synthesized voice from the traffic signal said "WALK NOW. WALK NOW. WALK NOW..."

I said to Bobbi "It's 2019."

She replied "If only it were raining."
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Overheard in the Office...

The traffic lady on the morning news has said there's a wreck at Banta Road...

Me: (talking to Huck) "Did you heard that? They ride their Banta Roads in single file to hide their numbers!"

RX: "What?"

Me: "I'm talking to your cat."

RX: "I thought it was 'Bantha'?"

Me: "It is, but 'Banta', 'Bantha', close enough."

RX: "There's been linguistic drift."

Me: "'Banta' is how Cockney sandpeople say it."

Just riffing...

Bobbi's post about the famous sticker on Woody Guthrie's guitar gave me the idea to put a sticker on Woody Harrelson's banjo...




Somebody who's a more dab hand with the software should be able to take that ball and run with it. ;)

The Life Of Barry

Joanna sums up the current occupant of the Oval Office in one single Monty Python quote.

I LOL'ed.

I'll take "Kevin Bacon" for $500, Alex...

So, my pal Joanna is going to be on Jeopardy! on Wednesday, June 3rd. Jeopardy! is, of course, hosted by one Alex Trebek, who also appeared in the X-Files episode, "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" with Charles Nelson Reilly, who was in Cannonball Run II with Burt Reynolds, who was in Striptease with Demi Moore, who was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Bacon.

Movie Idea:

Since Disney has always shown a willingness to pilfer the classics for their next movie, I'm proposing an animated Moby Dick. Of course, children these days all know that whales are harmless creatures who sing and that hunting is bad, so we'll make the viewpoint character a young Moby.

He'll be a moody and misunderstood kid who gets abused by mean sailors after accidentally bumping their ship. Some introspective preteen mopery follows, complete with a song, maybe "Why Do They All Chase Me, Mother Gaia?" He'll also need a sidekick/voice-of-wisdom character. Perhaps a talking albatross, who can explain that sailors are a touchy lot; why, once one shot at him with a crossbow!

In the climactic scene, he accidentally sinks the Pequod due to adolescent clumsiness while trying to make amends for the earlier encounter, but finally makes himself clear to a floundering Ahab, who can't swim so hot. The peg-legged differently-abled captain rides on his back, singing a duet about friendship with our whale as Moby swims into the sunset, towing a raft with the Pequod's sailors aboard, who act as the chorus for the song.

Whaddaya think? Will it sell? I'm thinking the royalties from plush whale toys and Ahab action figures ("With Real Harpooning Action!") alone would be a mint. And the ending is wide open for sequels if we wind up with a real money machine on our hands...

Overheard on the phone...

Shootin' Buddy: "So, you want to see Valkyrie?"

Me: "Duh! Machine guns and dead Nazis?"


People are whining about the plot. People are whining about the lead actor. People are whining about how it's kinda hard to make a suspenseful thriller when everyone already knows the ending.

Me? As far as I'm concerned, enough machine guns and dead Nazis will cover for nearly any movie-making sin. I can't think of a single movie, from It's A Wonderful Life to Mary Poppins, that wouldn't be improved by a whole bunch of machine guns and dead Nazis. (And with the release of Defiance, I'll be able to get a double dose this month!)

...and I haven't even finished converting over to DVD.

VHS is officially kaputski.

I should have sensed it coming when I tried to give away my VHS copy of Way Of The Gun. Everyone I knew had a copy, except for one or two people... and they didn't have VCRs.

Waitaminnit...

...Will Smith was supposed to be Neo?

Tactical mustaches and sideburns...

I'm sitting here watching a cool DVD re-issue of Jeff Cooper's Defensive Pistolcraft video set. It was recorded at Orange Gunsite back in the day, which in this case means 1987.

Lots of mustachioed instructors, Jeff Cooper in the classroom and tooling around on the tactical trike, 2-tone 1911s with Bo-Mar low mounts.

It's interesting to see how much has changed (pure Weaver v. Modern Isosceles, tritium sights are a gadget, the old-school drawstroke presentation,) and how the basic principles remain the same, from "Front Sight, Press" to the Four Rules being presented in their natural habitat.

He hasn't said "rabbit people" yet, but we're only halfway through disc one, so I'm holding out hope.

Here's a sample: Vidjo.

In what has rapidly become a weekend tradition...

...I'm sporting a blister on my trigger finger from several hundred rounds of double-action revolver work. Soon the callous there will return.

I shot a little over 100 rounds of .22LR through my Model 34, and put probably 200 rounds or more of .38 Spl downrange. Some of it was shot through my Model 64 snubbie, but the vast majority was fired through what is probably going to be my new pin gun: my pre-war 5" .38/44 Heavy Duty. I replaced the target stocks in the picture with linen micarta smooth combat stocks and a Tyler T-grip. Most of the ammo run through the gun was from the case of Federal 147gr +P+ Hydrashoks I have left sitting around, to see how it would handle and shoot with the kind of loads required for clearing a bowling pin off the table with anything like alacrity. I was pleased.

We met Brigid at the range, and she joined my friend and I for lunch at Rick's, and put pictures of the foray up at her blog. From there, my friend and I went off on a gun store crawl before returning to Broad Ripple for dinner at Sam's Gyros, and then to the theatre to see the new Ridley Scott flick, Body Of Lies, which is teh awesome. (When did Leonardo DiCaprio stop looking like Doogie Howser? He was all growed up and stuff in this movie, and very believable. BTW, am I the only one who thinks that if Caleb rocked a goatee there would be more than a slight resemblance?)

Movie Day at Roseholme...

Went with Roomie yesterday afternoon to see the matinee showing of An American Carol down at Circle Centre.

Not too bombastic, surprisingly funny, and worth the price of admission for the unexpected zombie scene alone.

(The reviews gathered here are priceless:

Parents need to know that this independent comedy from one of the directors of Airplane! is designed to articulate politically conservative ideas...

Yeah. Bundle the little tykes off to see something wholesome, like Saw XLVII, instead. This is me, rolling my eyes.)

WTH am I doing awake?

Anyhow...

Went with a friend to the new Batman flick yesterday. The three-word film review?

Go. See. It.

Just, uh, leave the kids at home. It's a pretty grim movie, like Frank James said, and not just visually. Then again, that seems to be the trend. We got to the movie theater Just In Time, which means that we had to sit through only half an eternity of animated popcorn tubs flying into Death Star-sized trash cans and finger-wagging announcements about cellphones (which the boorish audience probably didn't have time to sound out anyway, judging by the evidence,) before the eleventeen trailers of coming attractions started up.

My movie companion pointed out that every single coming attraction was seriously short on romantic comedy, puppies, or rainbows; it was all SWAT teams, global conspiracies, alien invasions, and grim death. Hollywood's in an apocalyptic mood of late.

Maybe when their messiah gets elected they'll cheer up and we'll have some whistle-while-you-work musicals with show tunes like "A Boy And His Hybrid Tractor" or "The Hills By The Seaside From Where The Wind Turbine Farm Can Be Seen" to keep us happy on the collective farms...



EDIT: Link added after Charles at Dustbury demonstrated Epic Win of a Rogers & Hammerstein nature this morning.

I love to ride my bicycle...

So, I bought a bike today. A cheapie from Wally-World, using the theory that I often used to advise people interested in taking up a new shooting sport: You want to get into shooting sporting clays (or whatever)? Don't blow a mint on a Perazzi. Buy a used Remchesterberg shotgun and see if you like it first. There's nothing worse than blowing a ton on a new hobby and finding you're no good at it or it bores you, and now you're stuck with a gigabuck's worth of gear you don't need. (I also bought a cheapie WalMart bike because I'm poor, but that's a whine for another day...)

Anyway, we took a four mile spin on the Monon Rail Trail and, despite not having been on a pedal bike in, oh, twenty-two years or so, I had a great time. I guess it's true that you never really forget how.

RobertaX did up some steaks & shrooms with corn on the cob and lovely tossed salads for dinner and we watched The Man Who Knew Too Little, which she hadn't seen and I'm always up for watching again. It's a brilliant farce, with one of the cleverest scripts in movie history.

And now I'm going to put myself to bed to the gentle susurrus of fireworks outside, which will lull me to sleep with the soft sounds of Stalingrad in early 1943. It hasn't been a bad Independence Day at all.

The definition of insanity.

Sen. John Warner (Idiot-Va.) is calling for a study on the efficacy of reviving the 55MPH speed limit. He claims that studies show that the National Maximum Speed Limit, or "NMSL" (rhymes with "numbskull") "saved 167,000 barrels of oil a day, or 2 percent of the country's highway fuel consumption, while avoiding up to 4,000 traffic deaths a year".

What he doesn't mention is that the NMSL also bred a generation of scofflaws, turned once-respected highway patrols into revenue-collecting jokes, spawned the radar detector and CB industries, and gave us awful Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise movies, C.W. McCall songs, and vanity plates saying "55HAHA" & "PU55Y". I think four thousand human lives per annum is a small price to pay for never having to watch another Cannonball Run with eleven long-hair Friends of Jesus in a chartreuse Microbus.

So very cheerful. Only not.

Reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Very well-written, but... Boy, this makes the ending of Ol' Yeller look like H.R. Pufnstuf. Maybe I'll follow up by re-reading All Quiet On The Western Front and 1984. If you did that, you'd probably need to be cheered up just to commit suicide.

In other news, watched the movie Sunshine the other night. Lush cinematography ("light" is practically worthy of nomination for Best Supporting Actress), great effects, interesting story, not a physics textbook; I loved it. Think Alien meets The Enemy Stars.

That's odd, because...

...Ben Stein doesn't look like Michael Moore.

(H/T to the Mad Rocket Scientist.)

Beautiful obsession.

So I mentioned the film Better Off Dead in a previous post, which is a favorite '80s movie of lots of folks. Then TD mentioned primered Camaros.

That led to Google, which led to a man with a dream...