Well, that would explain quite a bit.

From over at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comes:

It also explains why TV hasn't been worth watching for several decades now.

So... Mustang not enough zip for you?

Well, for not much more than the price of a new high-zoot Shelby you can now have...

Your very own MiG-21.  Twin-seater for, you know, date night.  Sticker price is $69,500.  Buy it now, here!  (and hat tip to Messy Nessy for pointing out the ad)

What's YOUR worst hurricane?

As seen over at xkcd:

Funny, some of those names sound almost like old friends.  Ok, bad friends, the kind who come over at 3am with fritos, cheap beer, and a 12 gauge.  But still.

Movie Review: Lucy

Whatever can be said about this movie, the writer Luc Besson knows his sci-fi, but isn't above putting in some "this is over your head, so let your mind be blown" end-of-2001 (the movie, not the real year) style WTF effects.  And here, I have to give it to Besson, it works.  I mean, how else do you show what happens when someone becomes ten times (perhaps to some exponent) smarter?  Beyond that, Besson shows that he's read Heinlein's Friday, and seen The Matirx, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and (perhaps most pointedly) Limitless.  "Good artists copy, great artists steal" certainly fits here, though the theft is so light handed that it's more of artful pickpocketry.

Having said all that, what's the movie about?  A 20-someting party girl played by Scarlett Johannsen gets unwillingly pulled into a drug ring and made a mule.  A mule with a twist: the drugs are implanted into a pouch in her abdomen.  Not ordinary drugs, these are a synthetic version of a natural compound that normally switches on babies' brains as they develop.  When Lucy gets a swift kick to the ol' drug bag, it starts to leak into her system.  She gets a mega-dose, and what ensues is not so much enhanced intelligence as more like a state approaching godhood.  As you can imagine, subsequently very bad things happen to very bad people, Morgan Freeman's neuroscientist character gives her reassuring sage advice which she chooses to take, and all comes to a cosmically satisfactory conclusion.

OK, so at times there are the "we're effing with the ineffable" scenes of what this super-human is up to.  Profound?  Obscure crap?  Or just the best that can be done in a movie?  I'll pick doors #1 and #3, Monte.  The story worked.  Besson penned a sharp story then competently directed it, while Johanssen and Freeman and the rest of the cast pulled off some difficult acting to make it work, and the special effects team did their job in making it easy to suspend disbelief long enough to swallow the movie. 

Three and a bit more stars out of Four.  Worthwhile movie.

August Blues

Been working.  Garden's still producing, but all the plants are winding down in the August heat, many of them are already there.  Still biking, but it is pretty hot about mid-day.  Definitely the off season.  No new hop-ups for the Mustang in the near future (though I have been looking at a pair of shorty headers).  Going to see some movies this weekend and in the near future, so I'll have some blog material there.  But, in a nutshell, we're into the dog days and there's probably no relief until late September.

So here, have some appropriate music.

King of the QSL Cards

I've got a pretty spiffy ham QSL card.  It's basic, but it does have a retro-action color glossy pic of me up to my ass in alligators trying to catch a mullet.  It's on the funkier end of the the run of the mill QSL cards.  Chat with me on HF, or just listen in on your shortwave and email me a signal report sometime and I'll be happy to send you one.
But this one discussed over at the SWLing post is in a whole 'nother league.  Color images, sure, but audio?  On a postcard?  With digital signals encoded in the audio?  Holy smokes!

Movie Review: Pickup on South Street

Sixty-plus years on, Pickup on South Street still packs a punch.  Having watched it for about the fourth time last night, I'm amazed at how much depth and detail emerges in subsequent viewings.

Without giving the story away, it begins with a young woman being robbed by a seasoned pickpocket on a crowded New York subway.  Unfortunately for her it's not just money that's in her purse, but what she thinks are industrial secrets she's hauling as a good-bye favor for her latest ex-boyfriend.  But the truth is much, much heavier: she's an unwitting bit player in the early stages of the Cold War.  So now everyone's after the pickpocket: the ex-boyfriend, communists agents, the NYPD, and of course the FBI.  With a plot this convoluted it could almost have been played as a screwball comedy, but in the capable hands of Sam Fuller it turns into noir at its finest.

The main characters are extremely flawed but yet still likable: Richard Widmark as the three time loser pickpocket who'll be locked up for life if he gets one more conviction; Jean Peters as the not-too-bright woman caught in the middle of all this; Thelma Ritter as the stoolie with a heart of gold; and of course the usual cast of cops and bad guys.  Every character has a past (even the good guys), everybody's got something driving them.  This movie's got character texture galore, you can almost chew it.  Perhaps the most striking part is how there are the good guys, the sorta-bad guys, and then the really bad guys, and how when push comes to shove the sorta-bads have a line in the sand they just won't cross.  Several lines, in fact.  It makes these characters even more fascinating.  Even minor one-scene characters like "Lighting Louie" (and his chopsticks) stand out.

This is some of Sam Fuller's best.  Recommended!  3.5 out of 4 stars.

Here, watch the trailer at youtube.

You can read more on it at Wikipedia, but be forewarned that there are spoilers in that write-up.  If this review has you wanting to see the movie, just go see the movie.  You can always pick at the details later.