Sunday, January 26, 2014

Climate Change

When asked about "climate change" I often say I don't trust the English word "climate", which means something like "long term weather".  It's so restrictive.

People "Borgify" the world, such that it shines at night, with a cosmopolis from Boston to DC, to name one of the bigger ones, and as long as CO2 doesn't increase that's considered "no change in climate"?  Yet the world has been anthropogenically terraformed.  The biosphere is super-obviously different.

So I like "Biosphere" better than "Climate" for its meaning and contribution to conceptuality.

Does that make me Russian?  At least it marks me as a GST proponent.

To make something like "global average temperature" the one point of debate is to dumb it down a whole lot.  Lets talk about peak oil?

The Gibbs Phase Rule is the common core topic we should get back to in STEM education.  The 21st century is still shedding.  1900s muck ("dead skin") must be forgiven (or what else might we do with it?).

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Anchorman 2 (movie review)

I started my afternoon thinking to watch Bronies, a new documentary about the subculture of mostly males who like My Little Pony cartoons.  But it wouldn't boot in my DVD player.  I watched a Ground Hog Day special feature I'd never seen instead, this DVD being in my permanent collection, then returned the bum DVD for a trade, which I'll review later.

Having returned to Movie Madness a second time, I walked on to Horse Brass, an Olde English Pub style place, and had some yummy beers while reading Willamette Week, about what it's like to work at Voodoo Donuts (well written) and some movie reviews.  One of the reviews persuaded me Anchorman 2 might be worth the price of admission and I was at Lloyd Center faster than you could shake a stick, whatever that means.

I was disoriented for whatever reason and stumbled into two cinemas showing different Disney cartoons (Nut Job and Frozen) before I finally found Cinema 1, as in One.  Anchorman 2 had just started.  The old team was getting together and heading to New York to help GNN take news to the new 24 hour format.  CNN was to some extent the target, but also Fox in that the CEO was "Aussie", but closer to Crocodile Dundee.  Not much like Ted Turner either.  Idiocracy in general is a target... I started to snore (literally) during the later climactic scenes involving Jaws allusions (lots of shark footage).

What the film reminded me to write about, however, is another documentary I saw while down for the count with a lung-related illness: Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie.  Believe it or not, I don't believe I caught a single episode of this talk show, though I did see a few of Oprah's and Donahue's. This documentary chronicles better than most the arc of US television, at least in one of its dimensions. Moral:  don't smoke so many cigarettes, it's not even cool.  Quit completely if you can. The animation, which added a lot, reminded me ever so much of Ralph Bakshi's.  I used to live in Jersey City, which would be your stereotypical source of audience members (that show owed a lot to its audience, its level of participation).  Again, not really on my radar at the time (Universe being non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping).

Monday, January 13, 2014

More Espying

I think in Olde English you still had that E in Espying.  In any case, thanks to my generous science-minded friend Patrick, I have an infrared web cam in my attic, motion activated.

I was hoping to brag to bored listeners about the opossum, i.e. possum, in my attic, but I'm thinking that myth has been veritably exploded by now.  Lowly rats are to blame for all that noise we've been hearing.  Not poltergeists either.

/locationhistory is boring on Google these days as I'm a home body for the most part, managing my medical conditions and getting my work done.  This is about as other end of the spectrum from James Bond as it gets (continuing the spy theme) though I suppose a Le Carré character / Friend could be this puttery, a good cover for something-or-other, and suitably English-seeming (constant gardeners, those Brits).

I'm committed to not killing the rats.  They're being entertainment, talent on TV, and so deserve payment if anything.  On the other hand, they lower my property value so I'm intending to trap and release.  I hope to get to it shortly.


silly_squirels
actually these are squirrels -- the rats went away