Wake Up Dead Man (movie review)

Like with Hunger Games (we saw a preview -- for November 2026), this Knives Out franchise snuck up on me. This was episode two of three said the blurb I checked before going. Seeing the word "standalone" was reassuring. No priors required.

Hey, what a well-made movie! A whodunnit murder mystery that pokes fun at itself and the genre, while milking for all it's worth (which is a lot when the handling is expert). 

I didn't kick myself for not solving it beforehand, just based on the clues, Sherlock Holmes style. I'm not a superman. Yet the plot steered refreshingly clear of the supernatural elements i.e. any cheap ex machina plot devices (so-called miracles).

Mostly, the film developed my hunger for a bully pulpit; to have permission to unleash like that, the way those Catholics do, it least in the movies (a lot of them B-grade black 'n whites on late night television). 

Quakers in my lineage (unprogrammed) don't do fire and brimstone like that. I was called back to est -- which was never "like Tony Robbins" gimme a break. More like EBN (OK, Tony is part of it).

RIP Wikieducator

Archeological traces:

• WayBack Machine 
• Flickr Album

Spaghetti Monster

More Noiring

Viale Parioli 25 on Google Earth

At the time, musing on the FX2 (articulated bus), listening to tunes, probably minimalist techno, I thought seeing Nuremberg would mark my break, from the noir streak. I'd been binging on noirs.

Well, contrary to my expectation, I'm back to noir-ing. Last night it was The Harder They Fall, Bogart's last. He passed away shortly after that.

Let's remember I came in in the 1950s, and I recognize those cars (the ones in the movie), but back then Bogart seemed impossibly old to me, and that's the relationship I canned: me the little guy, Bogart the craggy old man, right up there with Rod Steiger, but even craggier.

Rod Steiger was in this one too, by the way, and I'll get back to a story about him.

What amazes me is although I've always seen Humphrey Bogart as so much my elder, now today I'm ten years older than when he passed. "I'm older than Humphrey Bogart" says the wondering homunculus, the one who asks what time it is.

As is characteristic of a person my age, a senior as we've agreed to call us, which has resonance from high school, and also college, I'm given to perspectivals (made up word; retrospectives) of one kind or another, in my case reminiscing about Wanderers during the decades we'd meet almost weekly, alternating mornings and evenings for the convenience of different lifestyles.

I'd go to almost all, regardless of time, because the venue was so walkably convenient in my case, whereas others would need to cross town. Given I've been an avid blogger this whole time also, you'll find many of these meetups written up herein (check out Grain of Sand and BizMo Diaries for the other 2/3rds).

The way I tell local history is in terms of concentric spheres:

1. Pauling House; boyhood home of Linus Pauling is in..
2. Asylum District, a business / marketing name in keeping with...
3. Keep Portland Weird, so Greater Portland (GP), also known as Metro (several counties)...
4. Silicon Forest has a big presence in GP, we could even say origins, but spreads...
5. throughout Cascadia, distinguishing us from Silicon Valley, a parallel but different universe centered around the Bay Area

To recap my own bio: born in University of Chicago but we Urners moved to Portland, Jack and Carol having met in Seattle at U Dub. Jack's career as a planner took us to Rome, Manila (where I vectored off to college and a life on the east coast), them on to Cairo, Dhaka, Thimphu, Maseru. I vectored back to the west coast to resume living in Portland (1980s) where I've been ever since.

So, with that as context, my Rod Steiger story: we were told (but is it true?) that he and Claire Bloom were among the previous tenants at our Rome address of Viale Parioli 25.

Also, back to the Bogart movie: it features a boxer, a big, gentle Andre the Giant type guy who can't box worth beans but he's big and looks dangerous, so they build him up as Toro of the Andes. When they introduce him to the boxing ring, the announcers says he weighs in at some 270 plus pounds, a heavyweight. Except not only am I older than Bogart, I'm heavier than Toro.

Rod Steiger really made an impression on my younger self with his performance in Illustrated Man. Claire was in that one too.

Watching Noirs

Dr. D (exNASA) and I watched another noir last night: Murder Inc. (1960), wherein Robert Falk, soon to reincarnate as Columbo, the detective, is here a believable villain. 

The film itself is surprisingly choppy in how it shifts voice to documentary narration, pushing its “true to life” mystique. We the spectators feel we’re being made privy to the gangland badlands of the times (1930s-40s). 

Not unlike now. Prohibition continues, throughout the Union, ensuring a criminal under-culture profitable to prisons.

This was one more in a series of noirs I’ve been renting from Movie Madness.

Two of the noirs, one a Bogart-Becall, had the trope of a villain falling to their death, by accident, at the height of exposure for their crimes (making the death fall cathartic). 

Two had the pattern wherein the male fuckup, caught by police, tells the girl to forget about him, she’s still young and can start over. Murder Inc. was one of those.

These films are informative on several levels, in part simply for their windows on history. My earliest memories dovetail with some of those old Chevies they show us. 

“This is about where I came in” I’m thinking, “just a few years later”.

Building more consensus around lifestyles worth prototyping (the EPCOT mission) stays in focus here in Cascadia. 

Another theme is how scaredy-cat the academics are being, as more GST-informed thinking continues reforming the cyber talk, the often cryptic hubbub on the various channels and meetup networks, where various influencers have juice. 

We continue to look back on the Alaska Accords as another step forward for our World Game grid.

Of course the term “Murder, Inc.” takes me back to the Fletcher Prouty corpus, wherein he quotes LBJ regarding what it’s like around a president. We’re a gangland after all. Bodies happen. Very noir.

The grisly business of packing young men off to war came across as gratuitous violence (mostly self inflicted) to a younger so-called "flower child" generation, folks with an intuitive sense of why outward war was becoming obsolete and therefore farcical going forward.

The 4D Philosophy of Buckminster Fuller

As we enter the final lap of 2025, the above YouTube wins the race for the most views to date, garnering about 3.3K. 

It's not the most viewed overall; it's the runner up in that respect, with the most views overall award going to Learn Python, a 45-second pilot test of a cartoon generator controlled by single letters (I think the underlying app has gone away).

However, let's remember these are accumulative buckets that go online at vastly different times. The 45-second animation is sixteen years old, whereas the embedded lecture on Synergetics, and the concept of Dimension therein, is only six years old, posted October 19, 2019.

As we round out 2025, with a new New Year's ball on Times Square, let's look back on the race so far. Many milestones.

In terms of hypertoons, I've been cycling through the noirs, thanks to Movie Madness, picking up on the tropes and how they interconnect. A noir movie features erotic attraction through several layers of deception, and a happy ending is oft construed as a kind of getting away with out over the border, beyond the scope of enemy reach. 

In two movies now, a conniving female has plunged to her death after her crimes were confessed and/or exposed (one was a Bogart, Dangerous Passage, the other was called Too Late for Tears wherein she'd made it over the border already).

The Geometry of Melodrama might be an interesting way to introduce some Spaghetti Monster approach to history, by which I mean to allude both to the Pastafarian deity, and to the "partially overlapping scenarios Universe" meme familiar to Synergetics readers, the latter (Universe) being "eternally aconceptual".

You get this from the military-minded quite a bit, when this or that face-off reminds them of this or that other wartime situation. We tend to prophecy by analogy, another way of saying we're akin to Bayesian inference engines doing our best to predict and adapt. Engineers debate over when to say "engine".

I've been preparing a Winter Term pathway through the world's fairs and expos again, starting with a couple AI aksings and a YouTube documentary on the World's Fair in St. Louis, which came after Chicago's and featured the same Ferris wheel.

We make our way, as if in a theme park dark ride, to Montreal 67, and thence to EPCOT. We're not taking the maudlin line (already explored) that Fuller got gypped somehow, in their not having him cut some ribbon or whatever. 

He was close enough to the Spaceship Earth operation by then to know he was no more in danger of being forgotten than Mickey Mouse.

Inca Brain Surgery (meme)

Facebook Post

Link to blog post

Autophagy: Comparing T2G Engines

Orange and Black Pilled

Fall Term Recap 

(YouTube vid)

Curriculum Design

Solar Power

The idea of solar power is sometimes dumbed down to mean solar panels and circuits driven by same. The idea of circuits is not wrong, it’s just that the big wheels were all turning long before humans inserted their rotational requirements, in the form of water wheel driven millstones and so on. The sun has been powering evaporation, condensation, rainfall and flows through streams to rivers to the ocean since time immemorial. 

We need not fixate on the sun as our one and only power input. The traveling of the planet through space in an orbital rotating formation, in tandem with our moon, is owing to the sun in a different sense, we could put it. Instead of radiated energy as a result of matter fusing to itself, the mere presence of that mass results in precessional patterns in its surroundings, such as ocean tides, and per the formation of a solar system in the first place. 

Furthermore, we have the geothermal throbbing of the planet itself, again owing to gravity, but also to geological chemistry, which includes melting and boiling points. We have vulcanism, lava flows, geothermal sources of heat.

What solar energy powers is our whole “terrarium” which is likewise our “aquarium” in terms of heat but also circuitry, pathways, channels. 

Photosynthesis turns soil minerals farmed through bacteria into the root systems of seedlings able to sprout stems and leaves, engines of self regeneration. Carnivorous life preys upon the herbivore layer. We get our pyramids of self actualization, our Ponzi schemes, our carnivals. Thanks to gravity squeezing out energy.

Whereas photosynthesis is naturally occurring, with humans yet to duplicate it artificially, where biomimicry achieves the most is in a parallel physiology done in metals, plastics, conductors and insulators, current generators. Conductors through control panels to actuators keep us within cybernetic loops of our own design. 

Consciously implementing experimentally trial-by-error designs, new schemes within nature, is our signature activity.

In the School of Tomorrow curriculum, we look a lot at the hydropower economy of the Silicon Forest, as Cascadian Synergetics is deliberately place-based. Oscilloscopes and trigonometry, energy conservation, alternating and direct current, series and parallel circuits… these are topics one expects in a bioregion focused on metrology, the science of precise mensuration, ala Tektronix and ESI. 

What impedes the flow of current and how? How does resistive impedance differ from capacitive impedance, in terms of waveforms? 

We’re allowing the practical elements of Motherboard Earth to stay in focus even is we probe the generalized principles (the so-called “natural laws”). We’ll be thinking about hydropower dams, what they do, how they work, as early as we think about astronomy more generally, and our civilizational context. Geography may begin with a local grid, a Dufur, but then we zoom out to see where our Dufur is, in relation to, say, Mars. Martian Maths is one of our four maths in our Digital Mathematics.

Picking on Mickey (MIC)

Given I play for the pacifist team, as a Friend and all that, it's not only allowed, but expected, that I sometimes vilify or otherwise mock the MIC (military-industrial complex) or Mickey. 

My approach has been to zoom in on this word "complex" and to make sure we know it refers to a mental pathology; it's a medical term, less than a business or economic one (not that these categories are mutually exclusive).

Zoltar is a stand-in (one might say stunt man) for the individual in the sense of homunculus, within my brand of (spin on) the active inference lingo.

Study Hall

If we were to look at my YouTube viewing history from last night, what would we see? 

A curious number of videos devoted to topics of concern to so-called linesmen, the men and women who have to work in high places sometimes, safely out of reach to most people, with dangerously high voltage equipment, such as transformers and so on.

The first topic I got into was ferroresonance. Your transformers may overheat if your capacitive inductance from the underground feeder cables cancels the magnetic field induced resistance in your delta wired bank. Magnetic inductance is a key feature of transformers that we don't want to inadvertently undermine with a compensatory resonance.

The second topic, related to the first, was leaving an open corner when doing a three transformer delta wiring, and measuring the voltage across this corner before closing it. If the circuit is correctly wired, the voltage will be pretty low, not some household number like 120 or 240, or even higher depending on the complication.

Why am I concerning myself with these topics?  Because I'm a "grid nut" -- someone interested in electrical grids rather generally. I admire those brave linesmen who are sometimes tasked with maintaining or constructing high tension lines at high altitude. If you're looking for ways to be brave, there's no shortage of scary jobs. Don't feel you need to become a soldier, if bravery-testing is your deal.

My Hypertext Trek

My story around hypertext starts with my recognizing myself as “a browser” by nature, when it came to open stack libraries and book stores. I’d browse, taking a somewhat wandering but not entirely random path through the collections, the classic bookworm. However as I became more exposed to computer consoles, what later we called monitors, my dreams took a familiar turn: fantasies about hypertext and the internet, ala Vannevar Bush (USG NSF) in the 1940s (As We May Think).

Princeton gave me the opportunity to feed my appetite for browsing big time, a big step up from our tiny yet respectable Media Center at the International School of Manila (IS we called it, usually ISM today). I was learning APL and other computer languages, and thinking how I’d redesign high school. We moved to Jersey City (myself and some friends) and my fantasies about hypertext ticked up a notch, as the internet was becoming a reality, for me in the form of New Jersey Institute of Technology access, to what later became known as PeaceNet and the IGC (Institute for Global Communications).

Around this time is when I first encountered Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib / Dream Machines. I grokked his Project Xanadu, but wasn’t so invested in the details that I felt a need to counter what eventually emerged from CERN and what became W3 i.e. HTTP/HTTPS and all the rest of it. That was all fine with me. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol was born, and was not proprietary in any way that would prevent its viral spread. “Going viral” could be a positive, oddly enough, given viruses are usually best known for being negatively impactful. To this day, post covid’s peak, Gen Z sees the point of “going viral” in that special upbeat way.

Given my predilections, I was quick to find an ISP and start making web pages when this became practical. Chris Fearnley and I were two of the first to publicize the Bucky stuff. He and I both did ray traced polyhedrons, plus he put out his famous FAQ, which quoted me quite a bit. We were off to the races, so to speak (I think of dogs racing, different breeds, as hand drawn or computed anime maybe). I created Synergetics on the Web on the Teleport platform, pdx4d my public facing user account. You will find my old URL under GRUNCH in the Encyclopedia of Conspiracies (RAW). Later I moved Synergetics on the Web to grunch dot net, where it resides to this day.

Retro Futurism

:: stochastically generated (casino math) ::

BridgeSpace: A First Visit

Judy, my sis-in-law, phoned me as I was awaiting the 14, heading home from a location scouting expedition. Would we want to rent BridgeSpace? Definitely maybe! 

We talked through my earbuds as if to an imaginary friend all the way home. October 18 is her late husband Sam's birthday, my late wife's Dawn's brother. Carpenter, poet, writer, thinker. 

We talked about Dawn's high school days after she and Sam moved with their mom to a new life with her new stepdad, Bud, in Satellite Beach, Florida. 

I was fortunate to get to visit with this side of the family while Bud was still alive. I never managed to meet Dawn's mother in person as she had passed away unexpectedly, in the hospital, after a supposedly successful procedure, not long before we met at CUE.

Cascadian Synergetics: Tips for Presenters (School of Tomorrow)

Western Young Friends Gathering

:: internal decorating ::

Regarding my near-beer fasting experiment, remember it's "guinea pig me" that we're talking about and I'm free to fuck up and to be a cautionary tale and yada yada. I'm actually running several experiments at once and have to weigh tradeoffs. Another goal is to sample a huge variety of near beers, so I can't afford to slack off on that front.

I was out testing blazers, as in jackets, at the thrift stores yesterday, more to get a sense of how to calibrate. I didn't study grooming at Princeton and at the Catholic school, my female students offered lots of counseling. When I showed up the first day in a three piece suit (as I recall) they said I was overdressing for the part, and so on.

However, worry not, and allow me my mental model, however misguided, of my insulin-ketone system as like that of a Honda hybrid: it flips back and forth effortlessly between "gas" and "battery" and at a higher frequency than you might think. 

One could say that's BS and the inertia is actually way higher (one near beer will trigger hours of glucose fueling), but I'm working that out proprioceptively, more like a juggler. You can't learn juggling from reading books or watching YouTubes, the problem being you're in your chair and not learning juggling.

Speaking of juggling, some of the finest physical specimens I met in terms of their level of coordination and gracefulness in body movement, were actually Friends, meaning Quakers. One might stereotype that group one way or another. Mine were like circus performers, arriving from Hippie Land California (the way I thought of it) and teaching me all kinds of stuff that I'd missed, living in Rome and then Manila. I also knew stuff they didn't of course. That's why we enjoyed these gatherings of western young friends near Myrtle Point, Oregon, in mid-winter, over the New Year. 

You might wonder why, if I was of that young age, I didn't marry into my clan and find my future wife at this annual winter gathering. I almost did, a couple times. However where I did encounter my wife-to-be was no more off the beaten path: at my place of work, as a new hiree (the bookkeeper) since I'd taken a working break in Bhutan. Dawn and I would then attend the gathering together, I forget how many times. She would also join me in Bhutan, where my parents were then living, on a next visit. 

"Guinea pig me" is of course a play on "Guinea Pig B", Bucky's perspective on his own avatar as well. He was doing a Flowers for Algernon experiment wherein he reached a point of dynamic equilibrium that buoyed him up, as it were. He just needed his "lab rat" to stay healthy, and he managed that with various experiments, exploring the paleo diet, and jogging (loping wolf ganter), before either were mass-adopted.

I've blogged about our Gathering of Western Young Friends previously, as a part of my life's story. The Camp Myrtlewood site has been an influence in my projections of Project Earthala. We had a large well equipped kitchen with a walk in refrigerator and all that. Our logistics team procured food in bulk for the whole group enroute, and "fooding" (a Himalayan term) was a big part of our experience, as we could practice meal prep and cleanup together, team activities that don't preclude social interaction as much as race car driving might. We had some experienced chefs amongst us. This all became a precursor to Food Not Bombs in my case (a later chapter).

Reviewing a Filed Proposal

One could read my originally filed proposal as consistent with what many of the developers want (gentrification, with or without genocide), whereas I was suggesting with the right of return, the same as Israelis have when persuaded their place in Haifa, or wherever, is safe to reoccupy. 

Probably not now as the news keeps signalling more immanent hostilities.

In the meantime, however, the historical precedent is civilians are allowed to leave before hostilities begin in earnest, between militias. That protocol was obeyed in Ukraine and to some extent in Syria. Today I was sharing the above synopsis with a WILPF listserv. More in my blogs and elsewhere. 

That's a joke about Florida although I do recall its governor saying Palestinian refugees were unwelcome. That's before people realized the plan was to keep penning them inside their Gaza ghetto. This was to be more like a Punishment Park scenario.

First World Problems

Given this is a personal journal, kept in public, a chronofile of sorts, or log -- we say blog -- I sometimes bring up the minutiae of daily living. 

For example I joked about losing my credit card (I still had the debit card), during that "trust the universe" experience at OMSI, and having to rely on (as in trust) internet banking infrastructure to lock it.

Earlier, I talked about my eyeglasses breaking, and getting new ones made. Mundane stuff like that, and a window into my life. Some guy in Portland.

In follow-up to that credit card story, I did end up declaring it lost, with the bank issuing a virtual replacement right away, over the web, and following up with a plastic card by snail mail, which I needed to activate, and did last night. 

Well, the next day (meaning today) I was returning two movies to Movie Madness, on foot, and noticed I  couldn't listen to any YouTubes on my iPhone through my connected AirPods. 

I was eager to listen to some of my favorite influencers. Also, I've been indulging in Electro Swing as a genre, sometimes with a spooky Halloween aural seasoning. Listening to music while walking has always been a favorite pastime. No such luck.

I quickly (well, maybe not that quickly) put two and two together and realized I had a first world problem: the new card activation coincided with Verizon attempting to take it's ahead-of-time monthly payment. 

I don't think these two events were tightly connected even though they happened but hours apart. The old lost card was already lost, and Verizon's monthly draw was inevitably going to get stopped, meaning my Verizon account would be as well, until I updated my Verizon account with the new bank card number and paid my bill.

Whereas I might've done this updating task using Verizon app on my mobile (or in my web browser, from home, as my WiFi through CenturyLink was not interfered with), since I live but a short drive away from a Verizon-authorized store near Powell (Hwy 26) and Chavez (SE 39th), in that strip mall with the car wash (a you-wash design), across from Safeway, I decided instead to get some help from a real person, in person. 

So upon returning from my walk to Movie Madness to return the Christian Bale DVDs, and after doing some blogging (I'll blog more than once a day sometimes), I took off in Maxi Taxi (the jalopy muscle car) to address my problem.

As it turned out, I arrived a good forty-five minutes before the Verizon store would open, at 10 am. After walking around for a bit, confirming I was indeed cut off from the internet (my test text messages to Dr. D. wouldn't send), I realized I could wash MaxiTaxi in the me-wash. 

The you-wash slots have all been upgraded to take only credit cards whereas we used to have to use quarters, lots of quarters. I swiped the new "bizplat" (nickname), more than once, my first use of it ever, and the charges went through. I gave the car a much needed high pressure soap 'n water treatment. She'd gotten a bit moldy.

The Verizon guy at first said maybe I'd need to call customer service and/or even get a new SIM card, but I persuaded him that the situation was much simpler: the lost card, backing autopay, needed to be replaced with the new card. 

Again, this was something I probably could of done myself. He did it for me, using my phone and my face. He handed it back to me so it could do the facial recognition step, and I handed it back to him. In a couple minutes, the task was complete, and service to my cell phone was restored.

The other thing going on is I'm trying out a near-beer fast, meaning I'm just sipping fluids and doing a kind of system reset, but allowing myself fluids other than water, including the occasional can of non-alchie beer. I just had two. 

I've had no solid food since Sunday. It's science. I'm the guinea pig, or rat, as the case may be.

Meanwhile, forced food deprivation is the name of the game in depraved dirty wars (the only kind anymore).