YouTube Free Movies: WarGames

Really, I should turn in my Gen X Card for this: I have never seen WarGames.

Oh, I've seen bits and pieces of it, to be sure. But never all the way through. Until today.

And really, I missed out.

This is a terrific film. A tight tale with just enough character development, perfectly cast with every player you'd expect from a military-centric early 1980s film, with enough character actor surprises tossed in to make each new character an adventure in "Where Have I Seen Him or Her Before?"

It might have been advantageous to wait until 2022 to see this 1983 film, because I get to play the Place the Character Actor game. But it still feels weird to hit this Cold War '80s milestone so late. Almost 40 years late.

The story, in my mind, holds up. The tech is, clearly, a bit old, but the film itself could take place at any time and still be a pertinent tale of the nihlism of "acceptable losses" contrasted with the callowness of putting off learning how to swim because the world wasn't going to end before you got around to it.

This, of course, translates easily to today:

And the Now Generations talking to those who have passed, or are passing on, or who are already dead at age 41.

This is one I'd definitely watch again.

And the film itself led our nation into some interesting directions. Thank heaven we had a president at the time who had his finger on the pulse of Hollywood more than others might have.

Where Are You, Appliance/Absinthe Chicago Lonely Boy?

Twenty years or so ago, in one of my explorations of Internet rabbit holes, I stumbled across a personal blog written by a young man living and working in the Chicago area.

He lived, I thought, a rather empty and lonely life -- but also one in which he appeared to have a lot of disposable income. Almost every post was about his purchase of a new bit of consumer appliancery, from humidifiers to lamps to coffeemakers. The posts not about appliances were about long drives he took in cars he rented as he figured out what kind of car he wanted to buy for himself.

One New Years' Eve, he celebrated with absinthe in a post in which he basked in utter civility.

I've long since lost track of the blog, and wonder if I found it now if he'd still be writing, either about new appliances or new rental cars or absinthe or all of these in context of a family or perhaps he's just an older version of the lonely young man who wrote those messages long ago.

That's the kind of thing you think about when your brain remembers them, is what I'm getting at.

French Weather Reports and Martha Stewart Was Fat: A Brief Exploration in My Email Inbox

Chalk this up to the list of the many things I do not understand.

Over the past few months, spammers have started using creative fonts and emojis in their email subject lines. That would make one assume that they would stand out more on phones, but a cursory look today shows that isn't the case.

Let's look at this one first, because I'm an old man with nothing better to do, that's why:

This is a phone screenshot. Looking at it gets you the typical sea of question marks, maybe marking that my phone couldn't interpret the subject line. But then there's the weather-related gibberish below the question marks. That would make one think it's a weather report.

But this is what the same email looks like on my desktop:

Ah, a Sam's Club-related scam. Which indeed is what it is when I open the email.

Why the tomfoolery, I wonder? I guess to get us to open the emails. Which I did. But Sam's Club knows my name isn't Misterfweem. So, sayonara.

Here's another oddity:

What's going on here? Again, it's a mystery, particularly for those who don't speak French. I do speak French, but when I opened the email on my phone, I got a weight loss schpeil tangenitally related to Martha Stewart.

But on my desktop, it's a bit more straightforward:

But why make things appear inconsistent, device to device? I don't know. Maybe I'll see if there are studies on spam email on the ol' Internet.

Found this gobbledygook that says in some ways it might depend on the email client or the browser used. But since the browser on my phone doesn't render everything in French, there's probably more than that going on here.

This was only a cursory search using the term "why are spam emails inconsistent across devices," and I didn't find much. There's probably more out there. Or not. Just something odd to think about.

Si Stultus Est et Operatur, Non Stultus Est

 

Here's the story, if you want to know: When we moved into this house, we had a gas furnace installed. That meant a lot of exposed ductwork in the basement. I took advantage of that and strung a CAT-5 cable from one wall of the study to the other, so I could have a hard connection to a printer on the other side of the room. That's Phase 1.

Phase 2 came about after I began working from home and needed a hard connection between the router and my work computer. The short term, almost two-year solution was to have the cable on the floor, but my wife kept tripping over it. So today I strung cable from the router to a wall near the original cable setup, and ran the cable through the wall to the old system outlet. Thus the odd connection. But it solved that tripping problem.

It looks really stupid, but it works. And as a friend says on Facebook:

YouTube Free Movies: Dimension 5

Today's offering:

Dimension 5

A rather bland, confusing tale of espionage and time travel from 1966. But is the time travel device a ring? A watch? A multidimensional utility belt that really clashes with the hero's checked sports coat?

Yes. Maybe. And indeed. Behold:

Starring Jeffrey Hunter, of Star Trek Capt. Christopher Pike fame. Who also brought over some of the door whooshes and computer noises from Star Trek for this film. May have been trying to borrow some goodwill from the show to help the movie. Certainly borrowed Oddjob from the Bond films for some good karma as well, as the baddie in the wheelchair.

If you want babes, this is a good film, as far as '60s babes go. But if you want explanations of the technology, or of the motivations of some of the characters, well, this probably isn't your kind of film because that kind of stuff they just don't bother with. Or at least they didn't bother with it as I was watching; I was kind of distracted.

Here's the Facebook live summary:

To summarize: A kinda cool sleep-fest. Elements of it were rather snappy, but they don't make up for the undeveloped parts that left me confused.

YouTube Free Movies: Capricorn One

Capricorn One. One of those movies you hear a lot about, but never get around to watching until you see it on YouTube Free Movies and say, "What the heck?"

This film -- either from 1977 or 1978, depending on the source you go to, is borne of the distrust in government that the Watergate scandal brought on. Peter Hyams, who would later bring us less paranoid space fare in "2010," pitches this one sentence to ITV, and had a deal and $4.8 million to make the movie after only five minutes:

"There was one event of really enormous importance that had almost no witnesses. And the only verification we have ... came from a TV camera."

That one event, of course, is the Apollo moon landing. So in a very big way, this film helped fuel the "we didn't land on the moon" conspiracy theories that dog us even to this day. Of course, the only good thing that came out of that theory is this video, of conspiracist Bart Sibrel getting punched in the face repeatedly by Buzz Aldrin.

The film I found to be two things:

1. Rather entertaining

2. A good education on how a conspiracy to fake such an event would fall apart rather rapidly.

The film basically has three storylines, interwoven. There are the NASA conspiracists, shattered enough in finding out that the life support systems meant to keep the astronauts alive to, on, and from Mars won't cut it who then are under agency and political pressure to have a success, so much pressure that they decide to fake it all. There are the astronauts, brought into the conspiracy at the last minute -- rookie mistake to be sure -- and are forced to fly right or have their families threatened. There is the noob investigative reporter -- for a newspaper or television network, it's not clear -- who finds out and does invesgitatory work in rather stupid and straightforward ways.

I live-thought the movie today on my Facebook feed. Behold:

(We'll see if that Facebook embed works.)

Conclusion: I rather liked it. The story is shaky in spots, but it does go to show that to fake a story of this magnitude, either a lot of people have to be in on it and all keep their fat yaps shut, or you have to have a system of government so terrible and frightening that the populace is kept in line out of real fear. We didn't have either of those conditions in the post-Watergate years, and even now we don't have them, though you have to wonder why conspiracy theories still get bandied about.

So definitely one I would watch again.

A Woman Thinks She is Thirty, A Requiem

A Lady who Thinks She Is Thirty

by Ogden Nash

 

Unwillingly Miranda wakes,

Feels the sun with terror,

One unwilling step she takes,

Shuddering to the mirror.

Miranda in Miranda's sight

Is old and gray and dirty;

Twenty-nine she was last night;

This morning she is thirty.

Shining like the morning star,

Like the twilight shining,

Haunted by a calendar,

Miranda is a-pining.

Silly girl, silver girl,

Draw the mirror toward you;

Time who makes the years to whirl

Adorned as he adored you.

Time is timelessness for you;

Calendars for the human;

What's a year, or thirty, to

Loveliness made woman?

Oh, Night will not see thirty again,

Yet soft her wing, Miranda;

Pick up your glass and tell me, then--

How old is Spring, Miranda?

Been thinking about this poem a bit lately. For no reason whatsoever.

Fiber, Finally

It finally looks like we're going to get decent Internet in the neighborhood.

No thanks to any commercial enterprise -- though a business will be involved, eventually -- but through the civic application of (gasp) SOCIALISM, as the city of Ammon brings its fiber optic network to the neighborhood.

Behold, we're part of a scattered local improvement district in the city that should have us knee deep in fiber before the year is out.

They've already started installing fiber on John Adams, but that was before all the snow fell, so I'm not sure how much they'll be able to do until spring.

But I don't care. I'm just tired of the crappy Internet options we have.

There are three options in the neighborhood -- or at least we've tried three; one may no longer be an option. These businesses get bought out and change names so often it's just hard to keep up.

There was Cable One -- now called Sparklight. It is true what they say about cable Internet: When everyone's using it, it slows down. Way down.

Then there's CenturyLink, which we've used the most and found to be the most reliable. That's a relative term best defined by Clay Shirky, who noted that we put up with poor service because that's about all we expect from our ISPs. I have to give them credit -- even with their creaky old network, they've been almost able to keep up with demand here, with four to five in the house almost always on a device or streaming something. But we still get service hiccups.

I don't even remember the name of the third provider. We still have their microwave antenna on the roof. Maybe one of these days I'll take it down.

But there's fiber. Out at the RWMC -- out in the middle of the freaking Arco desert -- I had a fiber connection. Lightning fast. I miss it. And to think we'll shortly have that option in the big, bad city is something to think about.

Cost? With the LID, right now with the number of people who've signed up, they're estimating we'll have to pay about $2,500 to get a hookup. Then there are fees every month to the city and a fiber-capable ISP. But the combined fees add up to not much more than what we're paying for our current Internet service. And I don't see any of the private businesses making any kind of investment in infrastructure to make better Internet, so I don't even mind the $2,500 hookup fee.

I'm sure there's someone complaining that the city is taking business away from private business. Well, when private business makes the kind of investment the city is willing to make, maybe that argument will hold weight. But I don't see any of the current ISPs going around and getting people to commit to better service and asking them to invest in the infrastructure; they're just going to have us limp along with el cruddo Internet because, hey, what else are we going to do?

Anyway, looking forward to it.

 

Info Sought on the Monuments Men and the Great Depoopening of Dampierre

So I’m reading “The Monuments Men” by Robert Edsel, and came across something stunning.

U.S. Army Lt. James Rorimer, one of the Monuments Men working in the Ile de France region, discovered the following:

At Dampierre, the Germans had installed a cocktail bar in front of Golden Age, one of France’s most celebrated murals. But all in all, it had been a good trip. Damage was minimal; spirits were still high. Another story from Dampierre seemed to epitomize the situation. The Germans had used the library’s renowned Bossuet letters for toilet paper, but after they left, the caretaker found the letters in the woods, cleaned them off, and returned them to the library. Now that was dedication. That was service!

What would prompt this clearly dedicated individual to clean letters – and I assume not just a few – of German excrement? I wanted to know more.

It’s proving a little harder than I thought.

The “Bossuet” letters referred to must be those of Jacques-Benigne Lignel Bossuet, a 16th century theologian, widely considered “one of the most brilliant orators of all time and a masterly French stylist,” according to Wikipedia.

But the Wikipedia entry makes no mention of this World War II incident – clearly a significant event in the history of these letters. So I keep looking.

Dampierre is a commune in the French department of Yvelines, located to the southwest of Paris. Bossuet himself was Bishop of Metz, nearly four hours by car from Dampierre, south of Luxembourg and north of Nancy.

He was a student at the College de Navarre in Paris – where you’d think it would be natural to find a respository of his letters. The Wikipedia page mentions Bossuet as a student, but nothing about the letters – through it does say this: “The college was suppressed at the time of the French Revolution, its library dispersed and its archives lost.”

And who knows where such letters and archives were further distributed during World War II, when French authorities were moving national treasures all over the place trying to keep them out of the hands of the Germans?

And to me it makes sense that this Bossuet is the Bossuet in the book. Still, I’d like a firm confirmation. And to know the name of the caretaker who undertook this depoopening.

I even came up empty-handed at the Monuments Men Foundation website. Bummer.

(Not that their search engine is all that great; I searched for “Bossuet” and came up with results for basset hound and boquet. So . . . )

I Googled the mural mentioned, and found on Pinterest someone has collected the art mentioned in the book – or at least I assume that’s their goal. WARNING Pinterest.

If anyone out there can point me to more information, I’d appreciate it.

What's All This? What's All This?

I don't know what's going on right now. I kinda feel like Mr. Banks in "Mary Poppins" when he's being "what's all this-ed" by the chimney sweeps suddenly invading his abode:

I do know I'm talking about this: I usually get a seasonal depression this time of year. But thus far, it's a no-show. Maybe I'm jumping the celebratory gun a bit, as January and February still loom large. But I'm hopeful something's turned the corner this year. We'll see.

What prompted the uplift in spirits? Can't be any change in health habits as I haven't made any. Well, I'm drinking more Pepsi, if that's a thing. But maybe some prayers are being answered. Whatever's going on, I'll take it.