In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.
Of course, Flight 12 is the 12th test flight of the Starship vehicle, which
flew for the first time in 2023, but the first for this year, and the first
Starship test flight since
last October's Flight Test 11
- 7 months ago.
"New rocket, new pad, we're learning a lot about these new systems as we
execute them for the first time," SpaceX's Dan Huot said in live commentary.
"We are expecting to be able to make another flight attempt tomorrow."
The exact issue wasn't mentioned in that Space.com article linked at the top,
but about an hour after the stand down from attempting the launch,
Elon tweeted this to X:
The aspect I wasn't prepared for was when pop singer Nicki Minaj showed up on
the SpaceX coverage in a Starship Tee shirt. I barely know who she is, don't
know a single song of hers, but I did see her visiting with President Trump
and acting like she thought he was a good guy.
L-R, Kate Tice, SpaceX Quality Manager, Nicki Minaj, SpaceX's Jake
Berkowitz - Lead Propulsion Engineer.
EDIT 05/22/26 0720 EDT: to correct the name of the SpaceX team member on the
right. Thanks to an email from a reader.
As if that's news, but as they say, "the best laid plans of mice and men go
oft astray." Friday didn't go as planned and at 9:00 PM I'm not finding any
stories that look like big Space news. I'm ordinarily well into the next day's post
by this time.
So since we're short of space news anyway, I'm going to shift gears and get
into something I thought I'd write about over the weekend. A visit to a movie
theater. Our first in more years than I can think of.
On Wednesday, we took a break from the endless spring of "what needs
expensive work done on it now?" to go see what comes across as a surprisingly
popular movie, Project Hail Mary. It's long movie based on a complicated story by Andy Weir, who wrote the
book The Martian was based on. The movie is primarily Ryan Gosling on screen,
although that's an over simplification. It seems to be that rare combination
of a sci-fi movie that tries to get the science right for a story that's long
and involved.
Gosling plays biologist Ryland Grace who was essentially kicked out of his
science career when he published something that was poorly accepted by big
names in his field, and he's working as an elementary school teacher. It was
the only kind of job he could get. But you don't know that fact when the movie
starts. The movie opens up with Grace coming out of an induced coma, on a
space ship in deep space; lost and not remembering where he is or why he's
there. Everyone else on the ship is dead. The movie bounces back in time to set up the answers to that and it
starts with him being told someone had discovered an unexplained stream of
something going from the sun to Venus. Researchers then discovered this
mysterious thing was actually slowly destroying the sun and calculated that
within a short time (20 years, I think) the sun will stop working and the
entire population of Earth will die off. Every one and every thing will die.
They go farther to point out that every star in our part of the galaxy is
showing the same effects except one, so why is that star unaffected? The name
of the movie comes from realizing their only hope is to stop this thing which
is pretty quickly determined to be some exotic microbe they call astrophage
(star eater). Astrophage needs to be exterminated and they've found no way to
kill it. It comes down to this mission named after the desperation hail Mary
pass from football. Humanity can build a one-of-a-kind ship that can go nearly
lightspeed and get a crew to that star to find out why it's different, but
it's a one way flight and the crew is expected to die off because they don't
have enough fuel to get back home.
If they go, the world may have a chance. If they don't go there is no chance.
Either way, the crew is expected to die.
I found it a very well done movie and enjoyed it a lot. Gosling is the only
person in the cast I recognized and know I've seen in movies before. If you go
watch trailers and other videos on YouTube, you'll see that featured
side to the story is that he meets a sentient, rock-creature (alien) from
another planet. After they learn to communicate coarsely, Grace calls the rock
alien "Rocky" and Rocky calls him Grace. The story goes back and forth between
the past and present situations to explain why some parts are setup the way
they are; I found those transitions fairly easy to get used to.
A large crowd scene from one of the memories before the launch of their "Hail Mary" mission. Next to Ryan Gosling (Grace) is actress Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt, one of the project leaders, and seemed to be the one that tracked down Grace for the mission.
The news broke last week that the famous 1960s biologist and apocalypse
fearmonger Paul Ehrlich had shuffled off this mortal coil. I've written about
Ehrlich many times over the years, but didn't feel particularly moved to write
something about him. Frankly, people who make predictions about the future and
are wrong far more often than right don't interest me much.
First published in May of 1968, I was 14, I recall it being talked about
widely and seriously. It was by a scientist after all.
The Stanford University biology professor famously claimed that population
growth would result in resource depletion and
the starvation of hundreds of millions of people. I recall conversations about "hamburger wars" as people fought to
the death for dwindling supplies of food.
Ehrlich prophesied that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the
1970s (and that 65 million of them would be Americans), that
already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that most probably “England will
not exist in the year 2000.”
In conclusion, Ehrlich warned that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end
will come,” meaning “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to
support humanity.”
Doomsday prophesy sells, and doomsday from someone with a handful of letters
after their name (MS, PhD etc.) sells even better. The future didn't
turn out quite as dismally as Ehrlich suggested; he
famously lost a bet
where he picked a "basket of commodities" and bet that these five metals would
go up in price in 10 years (1980 to 1990) - they declined in price an average
of 57.6% while the population increased. Nevertheless, he influenced a
generation or two of policy makers.
And that's the basic problem with fearmongers like Ehrlich. It doesn't matter
how many times people create demonstrations that argue against their
predictions and the fearmonger's predictions don't materialize, they keep
getting published. You can look up virtually every prediction he advanced and
they don't come true. The first article I ever wrote about him was five years
before that one,
June 2013, about how many people could fit on Earth.
It starts with a simple idea. First off, I recall hearing around 25 or 30
years ago that the entire population of the world would fit in Jacksonville,
Florida, without resorting to high rise apartments: just the square feet of
Jacksonville divided by the number of people. It would be highly
impractical, each person only gets about a 2' by 2' square, but did you ever
think the entire population of the world would fit in a single American
city?
That 2013 post
has a graphic of how many states of the USA would be required to house the
entire population of the world and goes one better by showing the number of
states required for different population densities. It shows, for
example, if we housed every single person on earth with the population density
of Paris, they would fit into the area of three states: Louisiana, Mississippi
and Arkansas. If we used the population density of New York City, the
entire population of Earth could fit into the area of Texas. Likewise if
we used the more generous suburban spread of Houston, the whole population of
the planet would fit in the middle states of America.
But none of that is the point of tonight's post.
By the time 1970 rolled around and I was in high school, one of my favorite
bands was
the Moody Blues, a progressive rock group that had been creating some big hits over the last
few years of the '60s and on through the '70s. In 1968, a couple of members of
the band wrote a song called Legend of a Mind about another popular figure of
the late '60s/early '70s,
Timothy Leary. That song is probably remembered by most people who heard it at the time
using the song's refrain, "Timothy Leary's dead".
Legend of a Mind
The Moody Blues
Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in
Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in
He'll fly his astral
plane
Takes you trips around the bay
Brings you back the same day
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in
Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in
He'll fly his astral
plane
Takes you trips around the bay
Brings you back the same day
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
Along the coast you'll hear them boast
About a light they say that shines so clear
So raise your glass, we'll drink a toast
To the little man who sells you thrills along the pier
He'll take
you up, he'll bring you down
He'll plant your feet back firmly on the ground
He flies so high, he swoops so low
He knows exactly which way he's gonna go
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
He'll take you up, he'll bring you down
He'll plant your feet back on the ground
He flies so high, he swoops so low
Timothy Leary
He'll fly his astral plane
He'll take you trips around the bay
He'll bring you back the same day
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
Yesterday morning as I was waking up and getting up to start the day, this
music was playing in my mind. And then my brain did something I never
expected. It turned "Timothy Leary's dead" into "Little Paul Ehrlich's dead" which
keeps the meter of the song and the number of syllables the same.
Now I just need to come up with a couple of lines for the other places:
Little Paul Ehrlich's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in
Little Paul Ehrlich's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in
He'll fly his astral plane
Takes you trips around the bay
Brings you back the same day
Little Paul Ehrlich
Little Paul Ehrlich
Cover art for the Moody Blues "In Search of the Lost Chord" album, 1968. The source of the song Legend of a Mind.
This evening over dinner Mrs. Graybeard and I did something we haven't done in
quite a while. We used our streaming subscription to Disney+ to watch a
movie we didn't catch in the theater, the new Marvel Cinematic Universe movie
based on characters that have been cast since the Infinity War, and End Game
movies about Thanos killing half of humanity. It's called
Thunderbolts: The New Avengers.
If you've been a reader for a while, you know I like movies that aren't
serious human drama. I had enough Shakespeare in school and enough real
life drama years ago. No typical, Hallmark-channel, romantic comedies,
and not much in the way of dramas that don't involve sci fi, whether that
means a super hero movie or some programmed super soldier like a Jason
Bourne. As a general rule, I've liked comic book movies, although I've
liked the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) more than the DC movies.
I've said many times that
Thor: Ragnarok
has been my favorite of the Marvel movies and just tons of lighthearted fun -
for a topic as serious as the end of the world for Thor's planet,
Asgard. There really hasn't been one that I think unseats Ragnarok, but
that's not to say none of the newer MCU movies have been enjoyable or
fun.
With a couple of exceptions, all of the characters in Thunderbolts are
familiar from other theatrical movies or streaming series in the last few
years and of those exceptions only one major character is completely new
addition to the MCU. The main characters are Yelena Belova played by
Florence Pugh a role she first played in Black Widow, Bucky Barnes by
Sebastian Stan, Alexei Shostakov who is Yelena Belova's father played by David Harbour, John Walker by
Wyatt Russell, and Ava Starr by Hannah John-Kamen. All of these
actors/characters have been in at least a few movies except I think Hannah
John-Kamen was only in one movie, Ant Man and the Wasp (AKA Ant Man 2) as
someone who could slip between universes. The one completely new major
character is Robert Reynolds (pretty much just called "Bob") played by Lewis
Pullman.
Without getting into too much detail the movie is about them coming together
to form a new team. All of them have problems they need to work with (or
around). All of them talk about depression and the hard, lonely lives they find themselves in. They have a big problem to solve, caused by another actor and
character in previous movies, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine played by
Julia Louis-Dreyfus a Washington DC insider who's trying to get more power for
herself by using other people.
The main "New Avengers" from a publicity shot. Left to right: Ava Starr
(Hannah John-Kamen), Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman), John Walker (Wyatt
Russell), Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh),
Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan)
Image credit: Marvel Cinematic Universe
While the movie had its opening in theaters in the June time frame, and played in theaters for a while, I don't know if it was considered a success. ScreenRant considered it one of the 10 best movies of '25, with most of the year past. Like I said, we watched this on Disney+ which is part of our streaming service, Hulu, so it was no money out of pocket to watch. We're paying for these things no matter what. To my mind it was a respectably good movie and like the writer at ScreenRant, I think it's evidence Marvel movies have recovered. I'll grade it a B.
My brain fart of the day was thinking it was the fourth on Saturday and not the
third. I caught on fairly late in the day when I had to actually think
about the date.
It just got to be time to say, "May the fourth be with you," and all.
I was going to say that I haven't seen any Star Wars content since the last
trilogy, episodes 7, 8 and 9 - excuse me, episodes VII, VIII and IX - with
Daisy Ridley (Rey Skywalker), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), John Boyega (Finn)
and many more. That's what I originally thought, but it's not really all. I watched the Rogue One "prequel" movie,
the original Andor series on Disney+/Hulu streaming, the Obi Wan Kenobi series, the first two
Mandalorian series and probably more that I can't remember now. I see the
second Andor season is playing, although I haven't caught a minute of it, and something called the Mandalorian and Grogu
looks like a full feature film that's coming in 2026.
But Kylo Ren is the only Star Wars character that has an internet meme about him. The existence of Kylo
Ren implies the existence of a Kylo Stimpy.
The biggest was that the trio of SpaceX launches in four hours 38 minutes
wasn't completed. When that was posted, the first launch had happened and I
was waiting for the rest. The second one was delayed but went off and was
better visually here than the first. The third, the Starlink 7-18 group from
Vandenberg was delayed a couple of times, and when the fourth delay moved it
from Saturday night after 11 PM (my time) out past midnight, I decided it didn't sound
like it was going to go and went to bed. It didn't go.
That launch was originally rescheduled for Sunday night but as the day went
on, it was moved to
Monday night at 10:30 PM
my time.
It's not the only one delayed.
The final Delta IV Heavy launch had originally been moved from last Thursday
to Friday, March 29, but quickly got pushed out to today, Monday April 1st.
That schedule only held up for a few trillion nanoseconds before it was changed again. The currently scheduled
time is for
next Monday, April 8 at 12:57 PM Eastern here from CCSFS SLC-37.
Commenter
Igor remarked after the reschedule to today, "Put off until Monday the 1st. Probably didn't have the necessary part on
hand." That's most likely the case because after the computer called the count
abort on Thursday, ULA CEO Tory Bruno
Tweeted
that a "Pump failed again." It sounds entirely possible that the part needed to get
the pump working wasn't on hand at the Cape and couldn't be shipped
overnight here.
(Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla., March 28,
2024) – The launch of a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy carrying the
NROL-70 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office was scrubbed today
due to an issue with a liquid pump failure on the gaseous nitrogen
pipeline which provides pneumatic pressure to the launch vehicle systems.
The team continues to troubleshoot the pipeline and more time is needed to
instill confidence in the system. We will continue to work with our
customer to confirm our next launch attempt and a new date will be
provided upon resolution.
I should add that the ULA site just linked to above the indented (copied) text does NOT list the April 8 date and time for launch. That date was from Next Spaceflight.
The final Delta IV Heavy on the pad at Cape Canaveral. ULA Photo
And now for something completely different, completely unrelated to anything I've written about in years.
We went to the noon showing of Dune 2 at our usual 10-plex movie theater today. The crowd was unusually small for our movie visits, the two of us and another couple. The crowd is often six to 10. This is a movie that has been out a full month, long enough that I was concerned that if we didn't get to see it, it would end up on some streaming service we don't subscribe to.
Thinking I might have written about watching the first of the Denis Villenueve Dune movies in 2021, I did a search and found it easily.
I could lift much of the review of that one wholesale without changing the review. I was more impressed by nearly everyone in this movie than the first. Both Timothée Chalamet, who plays the lead in the movie, Paul Atreides, and Zendaya, who plays the Fremen girl that befriends Paul, leads him into their culture and eventually becomes a lover, impressed me far more than they did in the first movie. I was very impressed with a new character in this movie, Stilgar, played by Javier Bardem. Stilgar is a major character in the books, leader of the Fremen tribe Paul stays with, and Bardem was excellent. Rebecca Ferguson, who plays Paul's mother Jessica and Bene Gesserit member also impressed me more than in the first movie.
I was simply blown away by the visual magnificence of the production, special effects, CGI, scenery and more. As I said back in '21, because of how long it has been since I've read the books, I can't say much about how faithfully this new version follows the story arc;
all I can tell you is I recognized virtually every scene in the movie
from the books and understood unspoken things about the scenes. Like the first one, it's a long movie at 2h 46m. Don't get the theater's 55 gallon drum of Coke.
Around the time I was finishing last night's posting with some filler, I was
watching the Rocket Lab launch of the TROPICS satellites, "Rocket Like a Hurricane". The launch itself was successful and that was known by that time, but the
two satellites hadn't been deployed and their conditions were unknown.
Deployment wouldn't take place until almost an hour later.
“We’ll be getting data we’ve never had before, which is this ability to look in the microwave wavelength region in the
storms with hourly cadence to look at the storm as it forms and
intensifies,” said William Blackwell, TROPICS principal investigator at the
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, during an April 28 media call. “We hope to improve
our understanding of the basic processes that drive the storms and
ultimately improve our ability to forecast the track and intensity.”
More accurate forecasts of track and intensity? I've been beating that
long-dead horse
for years. I know I'm not the only one.
Long time readers may recall that last October, within 24 hours of closest
approach, the NHC forecast Hurricane Matthew to be over my head as a Cat IV
storm. Actual closest approach was about 50 miles away and a much weaker cat
II. We didn’t get hurricane force winds. That’s an enormous difference in
the risk from the storm, since wind damage scales as velocity squared.
I'd like to see them more accurate at 24 hours, let alone at 10 days.
Let me restate that. I'd like to see them as accurate at 10 days as they are
at 24 hours now (which isn't very accurate) and become more accurate on every
forecast. That may not even be physically possible; these systems are modeled
by complex sets of partial differential equations. The alternate technical
term for chaotic systems is "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" and
the initial conditions are anywhere on Earth. You may have heard of that
as "the butterfly effect" - as in a butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and
that change in initial conditions causes a difference between calm and a
tornado a week later and up to a hemisphere away.
Meanwhile, if you want to watch the launch and as much sitting around as you
can stand, you can always
click here.
As for the Not News, this weekend was the worldwide opening of the Guardians
of the Galaxy Volume 3, the self-proclaimed last episode of the GotG series
of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Mrs. Graybeard and I had long ago
decided we'd go see it and early on in my retirement we settled on going to
opening weekend as a midday matinee on Monday. We always do our best to
avoid too much information and spoilers, so I won't read reviews and
"highlights" unless it's someone we know and trust about their opinion.
Which means we went to the noon showing without having seen anything except
for the trailer and a few interviews from Premiere Night. As always for these
opening weekend Monday matinees, there might have been as many as 20 people in
the theater (part of a 10-plex), but I didn't count.
We've both come to consider Guardians 2 as one of the funniest MCU movies they
made, if not the funniest, and this was the return to the MCU by the same writer/director, James
Gunn. I think there's more just plain silliness in Guardians 2 than any
other movie they've done. After 2, Gunn was said to be moving to the DC
movie universe, and it looked like there'd be no replacement. I don't really
know (or care to know) what happened but I had heard he was back for this one
when they started working on it, 1-1/2 or two years ago.
GotG 3 doesn't have as much silliness as 2 did. It suffered from a
common affliction we've seen in other movies since Endgame: a bit too much
story going on, which means they need to tell and resolve them without leaving
too many loose ends - they've said quite openly that this is the last episode
with this cast. That meant it was entertaining but not in the same league as 2. We
see whole new sides of Nebula and Mantis, with more personality out of both of
them. (Nebula was more developed as a character than Mantis, so there
was less about her.) Both characters were fun to watch. We both
thought the movie was fun but both of us said there were places where we felt
like we did in other movies where we wondered "what are they telling me and
why?"
For the uninitiated (who probably won't care) The Guardians are the four people
right behind the Guardians logo. And the vaguely tree-looking thing right
behind the middle two; the gray and red guy standing beside the green woman. Tree-guy is a Guardian, too. Make
sense? Marvel Studios image, of course.
There are new characters and (of course) it's a new story. I don't want to get into too much at the risk of dropping spoilers, but there are lots of characters from the previous two movies. Ayesha, the queen of the ... ? gold-spray-painted people who wants revenge on the Guardians, is back. Zoe Saldana plays a different version of Gamora (who was killed off the last time we saw her onscreen), but the movie is largely centered on Rocket the Raccoon and a totally new story line. That involves a tyrant who wants to make a more perfect universe but kills off every step along the way that doesn't please him.
Now that Elon Musk has finalized his takeover of Twitter, maybe it's time to
open an account. I've quoted from Twitter or posted screen captures of
tweets innumerable times, but I've never felt the need to open an account. How
they treat us visitors is only moderately annoying. Depending on things
I don't know about, sometimes I can read screen after screen of tweets and
sometimes the screen freezes and I get a "sign up to see more" message.
I've avoided social media for a few years since I shut down my Facebook account, and,
yeah, I know blogging is considered social media by some, but when
things like this happen, story on Twitchy, it's tempting.
The mere fact that a random person who calls himself ‘Catturd’ can talk to
the richest person on the planet is mind-boggling. It’s also possibly the
biggest reason the Twitter platform has become the force it has.
One side effect of that openness is that self-important media elitists
appear to be just a bit jealous when people who are actually doing important
things pass them over.
We’re looking at you, Keith Olbermann. Seriously, if you had the choice
between reading something Catturd said or something Keith Olbermann said,
who wouldn’t choose Catturd?
Look at this masterpiece by Olbermann. If we’re parsing his tweet correctly,
Keith is willingly tweeting from the ashes of urine-soaked dumpster fire.
You could just leave, Olby?
Catturd had this to say in reply.
I have URLs bookmarked for a few Twitter accounts; Elon Musk, SpaceX, and a couple of others. About all I can see is the most recent couple of posts. I've got to assume that having an account would allow more. Plus, I've got to like someone who uses this as their title to the world.
EDIT TO ADD at 10:45AM on 10/29: Judging by the first bunch of comments, I didn't emphasize my reasoning well enough. The point of starting a Twitter account isn't to follow Olbermann (not in a billion years), or even Catturd (who I usually find funny). The point is to get more access to twitter feeds that I'd find useful, like SpaceX, Musk himself, NASA Spaceflight and lots more without giving credit to the previous stack of morons and liars who were in charge. It's also to reinforce that selling to Musk was a good move to get more people involved with Twitter. If a bunch of people who have stayed on the sidelines out of a desire to not support Twitter now sign up, financial analysts will say it was a good move.
Not completely different, but pretty different from what we've been doing.
On Monday, Mrs. Graybeard and I went to see the latest Marvel movie, Thor: Love and Thunder on a Monday midday matinee. As usual here in the Silicon Swamp, the movie house, while a 10-plex with shows in several theaters staggered throughout the day, wasn't in the least bit crowded.
I've said many times that Thor: Ragnarok has been my favorite of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies and just tons of lighthearted fun - for a topic as serious as the end of the world for Thor's planet, Asgard. Love and Thunder challenges it on many levels and is the most fun of what the MCU folks call phase 4 movies. There's a tough reality of rating movies if you try to be consistent; I've seen Love and Thunder exactly once while I've seen Ragnarok on TV often enough that I practically know much of the dialog. Given the novelty of the experience with Love and Thunder compared to Ragnarok, I'll say Love and Thunder is every bit as good as Ragnarok.
The reason is pretty simple. The same three people who had the biggest impact on Ragnarok are the major contributors in this movie: Director/Writer/Actor Taika Waititi, along with stars Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson.
L-R, Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi and Natalie Portman. In the movie, Thor Odinson, King Valkyrie of New Asgard, Korg (the sentient pile of rocks) and Jane Foster.
Natalie Portman was in the first couple of Thor movies and is a well-known, A-list actress, but was missing from Ragnarok and the movies in Avengers story arcs. As part of developing the backstory for the movie and character development, they explain how Thor and Jane "grew apart and broke up."
I honestly think that for those of you likely to see this movie what I have to say won't mean much, and if you wouldn't see it at any price because of contributing a penny to the companies involved, what I have to say will mean even less than that. Like absolutely nothing. I had heard some rumors of wokeness and other silliness but I honestly didn't see anything. No in-your-face, obligatory, LGBQWERTY characters. Just a lot of fun. Taika introduces visual elements that are apparently intended just to be silly. There's lots of that. The MCU is so big that big name actors, like Russell Crowe, play bit parts or even play bit parts but keep their name out of the credits, like Matt Damon.
It's two hours of pure entertainment and good story-telling. Despite the arguably dark story it's telling. As others have said, - if you have superheroes you need to have bad guys with superpowers to challenge them. In this one, it's actor Christian Bale as Gorr the God Killer, set out to kill all the ancient gods; not just Thor and the Asgard gods but Zeus and all the rest. Along the way, there's lots of superhero and good vs. evil stuff with flashy CGI. There's a very dark story line buried not far below the surface that I won't touch.
Last week, Mrs. Graybeard and I went to see the new Top Gun:Maverick
movie. Yeah, we liked it. Good, solid, entertaining, movie. Minimal
wokeness, a story about good people doing hard jobs the best they can and always
challenging themselves to be "the best of the best." I think you all know that. It's not important.
Today, I stumbled into a factoid that I couldn't resist posting.
In any big budget movie like this, the people who are prominent on the screen are not newbies. They're all going to have big resumes of increasingly important roles. If you don't know particularly recognize them, that just doesn't mean much. They're rising stars; you'll recognize them in their next movie.
Despite the minimal wokeness, movies today seem required to have (as humor columnist Dave Barry first said in the 1990s) a mandatorily diverse cast. The fighter pilots in the movie fit that requirement, including a woman fighter pilot. Yes, I know there have been some women driving fighters. No, I don't know how many have been to the Top Gun school. Furthermore, going into the climactic scenes, you can spot the characters with the most diversity points and tell yourself, "they're not killing off that one."
The woman was actress Monica Barbaro, playing Lt. Natasha Trace, known by call sign Phoenix.
Something happened today (which I honestly don't remember) that caused me to look up her bio on IMDB. As expected, she has a long resume there, 34 credits covering over two screens full of roles big and small. Expected because she has one of the biggest roles in the movie and plays it well.
Down toward the bottom of the list, in 2013, only her second year listed on IMDB, was a short called, "It's Not About the Nail." I almost spilled my tea. I vividly remembered watching that video back in '13 and have long thought this was one of the funniest concepts for a video I had ever seen. I may not remember her as Phoenix in a year or two. I think I'll always remember her in this video.
Mrs. Graybeard and I went to see the new version of Dune today at the local 10-plex. As is usually the case, it was a Monday matinee and there were six of us in the theater. The movie essentially set the hook in me within the first few minutes. Visually stunning, excellent CGI and sets; it's getting so hard to know where one stops and the other starts these days. I don't throw around the word masterpiece everyday, and I hesitate to use it here, but the book's story arc is epic and the screen does it justice.
Let me stop for a minute to talk about the books. I read the first three-book series around 1979 to '80, so an early to mid-20s guy learning about working for a living. A friend recommended them as an allegory for the middle east, with oil being replaced by the spice melange, "the most valuable substance in the galaxy," and the Fremen on Dune replacing the problems with militant Islamists starting to show up for the first time. I read the second three books a bit later and I'm hazier on the dates. I think it was around 1990 or the early '90s. To better understand the second three, I reread the first three as well. To some degree. I simply don't remember enough of the details.
I also saw the 1984 version of the movie, with Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides, Sean Young as Chani the Fremen girl, Patrick Stewart and Sting. I thought it did a reasonably good portrayal of the book story arc, but it's such a big arc.
Because of how long it has been since I've read the books, I can't tell you much about how faithfully this new version follows the story arc; all I can tell you is I recognized virtually every scene in the movie from the book and knew what the scene was about. All of the characters that are mentioned I can recall from the books, even those that have minor roles in the books.
This version is the mental offspring of director Denis Villeneuve, and while he has a long list of work there on IMDB, the only one I'm sure I've seen was Blade Runner 2049, from back in '17, and I find I wrote about that possibly being the most visually stunning movie I'd ever seen. The movie includes many familiar faces from other movies I've seen and it was fun to see them play different roles. Chani is played by actress Zendaya, who I've seen in the Marvel Universe in the most recent Spiderman movies; The Beast Rabban Harkonnan is played by Dave Bautista of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies; Duncan Idaho (one of my favorite characters in the books) is played by Jason Mamoa of the Aquaman movies; Duke Leto Atreides is played by Oscar Issac from the last three Star Wars movies; and finally Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is played by Stellan Skarsgård from the first three Thor movies. I shouldn't say "finally" - there are more.
The title screen said, "part one" and IMDB is telling me that part two is in "pre-production." Unless they did lots more shooting while they had everyone on location, I read that to think the theatrical release would have to be more than a year out.
Left to right, Duncan Idaho (Jason Mamoa), Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Issac), Paul Atreides (Timothe'e Chalamet), Lady Jessica Atreides (Rebecca Ferguson), Stilgar (Javier Bardem), and Chani (Zendaya).
It's a two and half hour movie, and that's setup for at least one more movie, possibly two.
This post is going to places that I've never gone before, and say things I've
never said before. I know this isn't going to appeal to all my readers,
but I thought it was worth posting.
About a year ago, we switched our streaming TV service to Hulu's offering,
called "Hulu + Live TV". The base Hulu subscription includes their own
produced content and lots of things to watch, but while the "Plus Live TV"
add-on is much more expensive, it's the only way to get live channels if you
want to see things that aren't on the streaming service version. I'd say
over 90% of Hulu's productions don't appeal to me in the slightest, but we've
watched a few of their things. I couldn't care less about their
interpretation of The Handmaid's Tale, or anything about young adult
angst. On the other hand, we watched their re-introduction of
Spielberg's
Animanics
and we're awaiting the next season of that. Plus, there are consistent
reports they'll be carrying The Orville later in the year or in
'22.
This week, we watched a show that I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I
did. It's a 6 part (six half-hour shows with no commercials) called
McCartney 3, 2, 1, a three hour visit with Paul McCartney to talk about the Beatles, Wings and
his solo career after the Beatles. All six episodes are in black and
white, and all simply feature Paul McCartney and music producer Rick Rubin
talking. Many times, Rick or Paul will use the mixing soundboard they
have to isolate tracks and point out things about the songs that I've never
heard. Other times, Paul goes to a handy piano or guitar to demonstrate
something. They talk mostly about how many of the songs we've all heard
many times came to be. To borrow a little from the McCartney project
link earlier in the paragraph:
“Never before have fans had the opportunity to hear Paul McCartney share, in
such expansive, celebratory detail, the experience of creating his life’s
work – more than 50 years of culture-defining music,” said Craig Erwich,
president, Hulu Originals and ABC Entertainment. “To be an observer as Paul
and Rick Rubin deconstruct how some of the biggest hits in music history
came to be is truly enlightening. It is an honor that Paul chose to return
to Hulu to share this one-of-a-kind series.”
In the series, Paul McCartney sits down for a rare in-depth one-on-one with
legendary music producer Rick Rubin to discuss his groundbreaking work with
The Beatles, the emblematic 1970s arena rock of Wings and his 50-plus years
as a solo artist. In this six-episode series that explores music and
creativity in a unique and revelatory manner, the documentary gives a
front-row seat to Paul and Rick in an intimate conversation about the
songwriting, influences, and personal relationships that informed the iconic
songs that have served as the soundtracks of our lives.
The Beatles were the first band that appealed to me way back when I was a
little kid. When I first learned to play guitar maybe three years later,
some of their songs were in the first things I tried to play. Within a
year of starting guitar, I was playing in a garage band that mostly did
Beatles songs. I thought I knew a lot of the stories, but I was
continuously surprised by things Paul was revealing about the band, their
relationships and how songs came to be. Paul talks about being a school boy of
middle school age, riding the school bus and meeting George Harrison on the
bus. Both of them played guitar while neither knew the other one did; it
led to not just working together but a lifetime friendship, with George dying
20 years ago.
Paul talks about when the group broke up and getting depressed about it;
moving away from his old life, starting a farm, and discovering he still had
the urge to create music in him. He talks about John Lennon going from
being one of his closest friends in life, to being so estranged that he didn't
even know John had called him one of the best and most influential bass
players in the world. He talks about going from the Beatles being his
job to being a band he's now a fan of, something that only happened after
years of not being sure, and going from John being a guy he was extremely
close with and worked with to thinking, "I got to work with one of the best
songwriters and musicians in history."
If you're a Beatles fan or a Paul McCartney fan, definitely watch this.
If you're just curious about how some of these things came to be, watch
this. AFAIK, no other service is carrying this besides Hulu, but keep an
eye out. It could well get more widely available after some time
exclusively on Hulu.
Last night as I'm getting ready to draft a post, I hear an unknown sound, but somehow a familiar sound. It was clearly an alarm of some sort, but it didn't sound like anything I knew and could identify. It was loud enough to make the cats run for cover, and I quickly localized it to the kitchen, but what was it? An alarm from one our wireless freezer alarms? No, the digital displays looked normal. The door ajar alarm from the refrigerator? No. It took me a while to realize it was an alarm that we'd set up in 2016, but that had never gone off - and I didn't know what it sounded like. It's a water detector with its sensor under the dishwasher, along the back wall (lowest point) so that if there's a leak back there we have a better chance of knowing it before we have thousands of dollars worth of damage. Like we did in 2010. Or just 3-1/2 years ago, summer of '16 (not as bad as '10).
It was almost like this:
The alarm did its job. I don't know how much water was down there, or still
is, but we shut off the dishwasher, and using the 2-1/2" hole cut through the cabinet base for the alarm sensor, vacuumed up or absorbed water with
towels, sponges or whatever I could cram back there. My little battery powered shop vac got
very little water out of there. With luck, it didn't soak plywood, and once we figure out why it's leaking and fix it, the whole thing will be over with. Meanwhile, the major inconvenience is washing dishes by hand, and if washing dishes by hand is your biggest problem in life, you've got a sweet life.
As long as I'm using column space for some “Me Me” stuff, after a few weeks of putting it off, we went to see Star Wars 27: The End of The Universe (just kidding). Our local multiplex has an early morning special that gets the two of us in for under $9, and going for that price was part of the decision. There might have been 10 people in the theater, which isn't bad for a starting time just before 10AM.
I'm a bit of two minds about it. If you're just going to a movie, it's fun and worth the
price. Space opera type adventure. Lots of flash, lots of CGI, lots of
action. I've read bits and pieces about a few of the actors here and
there: Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver and John Boyega, for a few, and they seem to come across as basically good kids, not “Hollyweird snots.”
On the other hand to millions, it's not just a movie, it's part of the Star Wars universe and story lines. First off, if you go to this without having any idea of who the characters are and what they're talking about, you'll probably be too lost to make sense out of it. If anyone can make sense of it, because as a coherent Star Wars universe story, they kind of stretch
the ideas beyond recognition. I'm sure you've heard that - Bayou Renaissance Man did a piece on that including a Bill Whittle video. Like any movie, there's
willing suspension of disbelief and then there's that point where (at least) my
brain says, "WTF was that?" It's fun unless you're
looking for a coherent Star Wars story.
At times, it seemed like a collection of short stories that are written by entirely different authors, yet somehow sold as one book. We all know these movies are written as distinct acts and scenes; it's like each act is a sub-movie but the integration of those acts into a coherent whole wasn't quite there.
So I say that there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours, like lying on the floor working on a dishwasher, and it's even a decent movie. It's just got a lot to live up to and falls short. Still, I walked out of the theater entertained and diverted for a couple hours, and that's a pretty good way to spend those hours.
And, listen: since the current version of Darth Vader is Kylo Ren, and the most twisted cartoon show in the '90s was Ren and Stimpy, you might want to do an image search on Kylo Ren and Stimpy. That's all I'll say.
The principal characters in the movie (more or less). In the background, Poe - Oscar Issac, and Finn - John Boyega. Foreground Chewie - Joonas Suotomo and Rey - Daisy Ridley. Disney photo. (The original Chewbacca, Peter Mayhew, retired in 2015 and passed away last April, 2019)
Just about two years ago (it was March 3 of '18), I started the story of Mrs. Graybeard and I cutting the cord; the term for dropping cable TV. In brief, while we put up an outside antenna (we're in the fringes for over the air TV), we went with a streaming service. These are done entirely over an internet connection, so we kept our cable internet hookup but dropped cable TV. There were two main reasons for going to a streaming service; the big one was that the channels we absolutely wanted to see aren't available over the air. The second reason was that the services we looked at (and signed on with) offer a virtual Digital Video Recorder so we didn't need to buy one.
Streaming services are sort of midway between cable TV and 100% streaming. 100% streaming would be getting every channel you want on its own. We initially subscribed to YouTubeTV, a streaming service from YouTube/Google/Alphabet as the name implies. They had the channels we wanted to see and offered an “infinite DVR” - there are only time limits (in months) to watch something after you record it; other services limit you to a certain amount of memory. In the bottom line view, though, we still don't watch 75 to 85% of the channels that are offered, just as with cable we didn't watch 95% of what was offered. It's just that we pay $55/month now versus $130 back when we paid for cable TV. (I took out the price we pay now for our internet connection from the old cable bills)
FEE - the Foundation for Economic Education - has posted some updated statistics on all this that are quite interesting for you numbers geeks in the audience.
One of those “everybody knows” statistics is that Cable TV is dying.
Of course, the big thing that everyone is talking about now is Disney+. With their very deep content library, including the Star Wars and Marvel Cinematic universes, they're a monster-big draw. It's being reported that ten million people signed up for Disney+ the day it launched. That will not go without competition in 21st century America! Apple is preparing to unleash its own streaming service. Meanwhile,
AT&T’s WarnerMedia has its own super package in beta: HBO Max, which
reportedly will feature a Friendsreunion. These media companies are spending billions on content, from Disney's Mandalorian to HBO's Watchmen to Apple's upcoming project on singer Billie Eilish. Netflix isn't sitting by idly, they're working on more new content, too. All of this is great for consumers.
In 2018, Americans streamed eight billion hours of content per month. That’s equivalent to nearly a million years (912,635 to be precise).
Surveys show that 148 million Americans say they watch Netflix “at least once per month.” That’s followed by Amazon Prime (88.7 million).
Apple, which doesn’t even have a streaming service yet, reportedly has already spent $6 billion on original content.
Disney+ and Netflix offer streaming services for roughly 50 cents per day ($16 per month).
HBO Max will charge even less for its streaming service—$15 per month—reports say.
When HBO was launched in the 1970s, its service typically cost $6 a month ($37 in 2018 dollars).
In 1995, cable cost $22 a month ($38 in 2018 dollars), on average. By 2015, cable providers were charging $69.03, on average. That's almost 3x the official inflation rate. On average, cable prices went up 5.8% yearly for the past 20 years. Inflation clocked in at 2.2% per year, on average. Which means cable has gone up at about half the actual inflation rate.
Surveys show that nearly 60 percent of Americans are cord-cutters (people who once had cable but chose to cancel).
Just as a side note, we've never subscribed to Netflix and haven't subscribed to Disney+ or any of these other services. Since I do have an Amazon Prime account we get their streaming service. We've mostly watched movies that aren't on the other services and a couple of documentaries.
This article is all aimed at the entertainment market - the segments called direct to Cable or DVD and the first run of movies on streaming after a successful run in the theaters - but there's more to it. The news services are running to streaming - Fox News started a few months ago, CBS and ABC News are there, and more. I know Fox is a monthly bill, while the others appear to follow their broadcast model of having commercials support the service. CBS has a streaming version of their network TV, where they have some shows that only appear online, Star Trek Discovery and soon, the new Star Trek Picard. That's a monthly bill. How many monthly bills do you want? In this last case, it's almost one bill per series I'd watch.
The point is that this rush for everyone to put their entertainment on their own streaming service brings to mind the old anti-cable TV ads from the late 60s, when the movie theaters were afraid of services like HBO, and were saying the cable company wants to put a coin deposit box on your TV. Streaming services like Hulu or Sling or YouTubeTV follow the old cable model of putting a lot of channels in a package but having one or two in any group that you'd pay for. How many news channels can there be when CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Cheddar, Young Turks and so many more are all saying virtually the same things? If you pay for one TDS news channel, are you going to pay for all the others? I'd be perfectly happy with a smaller selection of channels at $2 to $5 each.
HBO or Disney+? ... Daenerys from Game of Thrones or the Mandalorian. Choose one?
