Foolish old people watch

areff says:

July 20, 2022 at 3:39 pm

Daughter-in-law is pregnant and due in September. Just heard from my son that the baby, as revealed by sonogram, has an aortic stenosis. It’s apparently a mild case and, if surgery is needed, it’s a tried and true procedure.

So I ask the fruit of my lines when his wife got her COVID jabs.

Pause on the line, then this:

“Yeah, I thought of that and I figure she was jabbed around conception time.”

Another pause.

“And then she got another about three months later on doctor’s advice”

Jeez.

Which was followed by this supportive comment:

Old bloke says:

July 20, 2022 at 4:01 pm

areff says:
July 20, 2022 at 3:39 pm

Serious question, why aren’t we seeing people hanging from the street lamps yet?

Meanwhile, neither of these geezers, I am sure, think anything is significant about England having its first 40 degree day yesterday. 

Yes I know, cranky old fools who think they know better have been with us always.   The problem is, the internet now lets them find each other and mutually reinforce their dangerous and obnoxious beliefs.  

And what's worse - people like Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Carlson make a worldwide career out of pandering to them.    I honestly don't think there is enough daily outrage about this pathetic and dangerous man:

Update:  a bitter truth - 

 

The problems of cannibalism

From a story at Science, handily listing the main problems with cannibalism:

Eating your own kind is fairly common throughout the animal world, from single-celled amoebas to salamanders, he and his colleagues report in a new review in Ecology. But not as many species snack on their brethren as one might expect—and the team has detailed the reasons why.

First off, cannibalism is risky. If you’ve got dangerous claws and teeth, so do your comrades. Female praying mantises are notorious for biting the heads off of much smaller males during mating, for example, but they also occasionally go toe to toe with an evenly matched female. “I’ve seen one female chew the leg off another,” Rosenheim says, “and then the female who lost the leg somehow manages to kill the other one.”

Cannibalism is also dicey from a disease perspective. Many pathogens are host specific, so if a cannibal devours an infected companion, it risks picking up the same disease. Different populations of humans have found this out the hard way multiple times. One of the most famous examples is the spread of a rare and fatal brain disease called kuru that ravaged the Fore people of New Guinea in the 1950s. Kuru raged across the Fore community through a cannibalistic funerary ritual in which families cooked and ate the flesh—including contaminated brain tissue—of deceased relatives. Once the Fore phased the ritual out, the spread of kuru was stopped in its tracks.

Finally, cannibalism is a terrible way to pass down one’s genes. “From an evolutionary perspective, the last thing you want to do is eat your offspring,” Rosenheim says. That’s a major reason big-eyed bugs limit their population sizes by snacking on their own offspring. If they grow too numerous—as happened with the aphid experiments—they deposit eggs all over the place. And because they can’t recognize their own eggs, they end up devouring their own brood.

Oh, so there's a cannibalism hormone?:

Although cannibalism is far from ideal, certain conditions appear to make the risky behavior worthwhile. Even if you’re eating a friend—or an heir—if you’re starving, you’ve got to protect your survival, says Erica Wildy, an ecologist at California State University, East Bay, who was not involved with the study. In her own work, Wildy has found that hunger makes long-toed salamander larvae more likely to nibble on—and occasionally eat—one another.

In their review, Rosenheim and his colleagues pinpoint specific hormones—octopamine in invertebrates and epinephrine in vertebrates—that appear to be linked to increasing rates of cannibalism. As conditions become crowded and food becomes scarce, the amounts of these hormones spike and “hangry” animals attack whatever they can snatch with jaws, legs, or pincers.

Huh.

Political comedy considered, again

Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey notes that Stephen Colbert ran with Biden age jokes (and attacked him for the Saudi visit) the other night.   He starts:

Has Joe Biden become so unpopular that late-night comics might actually move away from their clapter production and start being funny again? Bill Maher made this transition months ago, but the rest of the late-night comics have been as loathe to target Biden for pointed political jokes as they were with Barack Obama. Or so it has seemed, anyway; late-night TV comedy has been pointless for well over a decade as it went from being funny to being didactic.

Now, this raises something I refuse to believe - that comedians who move to support of the current American Right are actually capable of being funny.   I know, I know - I can readily be accused of suffering from the same problem as conservatives - letting political views influence what I allow myself to find funny.  But I'm certain any objective observer would have to agree with me - with my main evidence being the absolutely woeful "Gutfeld!" on Fox, which I have watched sometimes recently on Youtube.  

Despite getting some attention not so long ago for apparent ratings success (which I think has diminished again), he and the show is painfully unfunny.  And weirdly, I noticed, he seems in his monologues to often try to do self deprecation of the "maybe I'm gay" kind, only to have it fail utterly.  Why would he even try that with the type of audience he has? 

As for Bill Maher - I had been meaning to say that his segments (increasingly frequent) where he just wants to attack the Left for wokeness and political correctness, and not talk much about the Right turning the country into Christian fascism (because that doesn't annoy him as much), have also been poorly written and pretty painful to watch.   I was never a big fan, but he has become much, much worse.

It's not just a current thing - over my life, even when I voted Liberal, I knew that comedy sympathetic to Right wing politics has very, very rarely worked.   I mean, I don't like all Left wing comedy either - I was never a fan of Max Gillies, for example, and more recently, I couldn't stand Tom Ballard's shows.  But Left leaning comedy at least has the capacity (in a way Right wing comedy virtually doesn't) to be funny, even if it didn't always work for me.  Right wing comedy especially doesn't work now, when the worst of the Right (and that's a disturbingly large part of America) has developed clear sympathy to religious fascism.   

   

 

Not convinced

That's a co-incidence:  The Guardian has a very positive review up of Midnight Mass, the (sort of) horror series which has been out on Netflix for maybe 6 months, although I have only recently started watching it.

I'm 3 episodes in, and I'm not convinced.   It's way, way too talky, and the dialogue is often very "stagey" - it feels unnatural to me a lot of the time.  And now that I have seen the apparent explanation for the mysterious young priest appearing on the (admittedly interesting as a location) small island, I admit it wasn't exactly a normal supernatural trope, but it was so novel, I didn't know what to make of it.  I'm probably going to go with reading a synopsis of the rest of the show, rather than devoting time to finding out more about what is going on.  

It's a weird show, and I don't think it's very good. 

That's odd: having Covid has made me want to post really unimportant stuff

 

Back to Lost in Space

While I was convalescing at home with Covid, Youtube kept insisting I watch a series of interviews of the old Lost in Space stars Bill Mumy and Jonathan Harris (aka Will Robinson and Dr Smith).  

Mumy seems a particularly nice person, and a (seemingly unusual?) case of a child actor (he really did a lot of work I wasn't aware of) who grew up normal and not scarred by the experience.  Or maybe by the 1960's, there was enough care of child actors in the studio system - I mean, I guess Ron Howard turned out fine too.

Things I learned from watching these interviews:

*   Jonathan Harris was given carte blanche to re-write his lines.  This meant that Mumy would have to visit Harris's trailer to go over the re-written scripts and re-learn his cues from those in the original.  (I feared for a moment that there was going to be some shocking incident of abuse while alone with him, but no.  In fact, I checked Harris's Wikipedia page to check about his sexuality - I mean, it would hardly be surprising to learn he was gay.  But he was married and had a son, and there are quite a few websites noting that he counts high on the list of actors you thought could be gay, but apparently wasn't.)

* Mumy is an excellent voice mimic.

* Mumy worked for Alfred Hitchcock on a few episodes of his TV show, and really disliked him.

* He explained how he felt sorry for Guy Williams, his fictional father, who was given less and less to do in the show, while the Dr Smith character more or less took over.  And after the show, he went and retired in Argentina, where he was considered a hero because of his role in Zorro (!).

* His first serious girlfriend, when he was old enough to drive, was his co-star Angela Cartwright (Penny).  They remain good friends.

* I thought the anecdote in this clip was pretty funny:

*  Jonathan Harris paints a funny picture of Irwin Allen as a blustering, old style cranky Hollywood producer.

Not much charm

It might just be me - it's not like I watch sport to any significant degree (although last week's State of Origin was very good) to assess the degree of charm of individual sporting champions.  But after watching Cameron Smith's bit of media after winning the British Open, it occurred to me that golf seems to have trouble attracting champions who have any particular charm.   Perhaps people used to think that about Tiger Woods, but then his personal life became a mess and I don't think people like him much anymore?

I wondered if this is more the case with individual sports than team ones?  Maybe - but while there have always been jerk tennis champions, it seems a sport which has always had a reasonable number of seemingly likeable personalities.

Golf, though...

(People used to like Greg Norman, I guess, but he became increasingly weird as he aged.  He is perhaps a symbol of the Right wing character of the sport.  I mean, it is considered a rich person's game in many countries, I guess - although not as much in Australia, perhaps.)  

A familiar refrain, but this time it's deserved: waiting for the next new, cool thing to replace the stale old thing

I'm talking movies and TV.   And yeah, every year or two there's a journalistic burst of "Everything at the cinema/on the streaming service is a sequel and/or a superhero movie.  Where's the mature cinema/TV for adults we used to enjoy?  Why can't Hollywood give us more original stories? etc etc"  Perhaps the Covid break from cinema going cooled down that talk for a while, but now that we are out of that, I get the feeling we genuinely are in a particularly clear "stale idea" crisis.

I don't write this out of particular disappointment with current movies - I still haven't even seen the Top Gun movie, or the new Thor.   The latter is definitely suffering a bit of a Marvel fan backlash (it's too jokey for many, apparently, and feels more like a parody.)  

But more generally, based on watching quite a few Youtube reviewers, it's safe to say that:

a.   it's clear that Disney has milked the Star Wars universe dry. The critical reception to their series is just getting worse and worse, and as I didn't even care for the Mandalorian, it's not like I'm hanging out for anything new from that world.  The universe, as I have written before, has a fatal flaw:  no consistent view of the Force, which was the key appeal of the first couple of movies.  The TV shows are not fixing that.  It's incapable of retrospective correction, probably.

b.  Similarly, the same can be said of their Marvel content, with general dissatisfaction growing with the way the movies and series are messily dealing with a multiverse.   (I also watched a long Youtube video by someone very keen to explain that the Endgame movie, and subsequent stuff, has dealt with time travel inconsistently.  I never did like the Endgame explanation.)

c.  The Jurassic franchise is dead - there are so many terrible reviews for the current one.  

d.  Hard to believe the (not Spielberg directed) Indiana Jones movie will be good. Due out next summer.

e.  Honestly, who cares that there are at least two Avatar movies coming out.   Had no interest in the first movie, less in any sequel.

f.  People went to see (yet another) dark Batman.  But I don't get the feeling it re-started any particular new enthusiasm for the character.  DC based movies, few of which interest me, have a very high "miss" rate.

g.   Has their ever been more knives sharpened to attack a series than those waiting for the Amazon Tolkien prequel-ly show to start?   

It just truly feels that everything has been sucked dry, and everyone can see it.

Sure, there will always be a couple of exceptions such as the surprise quality, apparently, of the Top Gun sequel - although it is not like that is going to be a franchise as such.   There's a good chance the next Mission Impossible will still be good, too.  (Although I found the last one underwhelming.)

But overall, at no time have I have felt that the complaints about lack of creativity from Hollywood were ever more deserved.  

Is it the fault of the culture wars, perhaps?   It probably does have something to do with it, as even allowing for Disney and other studios being super keen to have "representation" of women and gay or trans, it is hard to imagine stories now that are unifyingly appealing to the extremes of politics now.  The world views have become so divergent.   

Heat waves and death in India, reconsidered

Here's a lengthy article looking at the question of why this year's pre-monsoonal heat waves in India and Pakistan did not seem to kill many at all - a bit contrary to expectations, actually.

I've always puzzled at how (many of) the poor in India manage to survive their incredible sounding heatwaves.  The answers are a bit complicated...

Makes Brisbane look cool

These Pub Choir videos, I'm talking about.  The latest is a version of Running Up That Hill, a song I don't particularly care for, but again, it's just the fact that it makes Brisbane look like its full of cool, community minded, and talented, people:

 

(I also believe that Camarata - the ensemble playing strings - is extremely good at what they do.)

The old folding handkerchief trick

Noticed this on Twitter not so long ago, with the handkerchiefs on display in some police museum or other in Malaysia:

 

I can tell you, Googling the topic "folding porn handkerchiefs" or "vintage porn on handkerchiefs Malaysia" has really thrown up a lot of results I didn't want, and nothing useful!

This reminded me of the old Mad Magazine fold in cartoons.   Wikipedia tells me they started in 1964, and were done by the same cartoonist - Al Jaffee - til 2020!  (Jaffee is now 101!  Talk about a long career.)

Anyway, I'm not sure that it took much imagination, looking at the drawings on those handkerchiefs, to see how the right fold could make it look like sex.   But I wonder how common this means of distribution was - just a South East Asia thing, or were they all over the West too?   Can't say I have heard of them before...

Wingnut regrets

Interesting story at the New York Times (gift link for you) about a Trump supporter who has had to go into hiding due to wingnut news sites, and Tucker Carlson, spreading a rumour that he was really at the Jan 6 riot as an FBI provocateur.  

He seems to have regrets, but the article avoids asking him if he still thinks the election was stolen...

When "being yourself" isn't all that it's cracked up to be

Of course, I am broadly sympathetic with the views expressed by Brian Rosner in his recent article

Is it good advice to “be yourself”? Why looking inward is not necessarily the answer 

Common wisdom today has it that there is only one place to look to find yourself, and that is inward. Personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. All forms of external authority are to be rejected, or at least questioned, and everyone’s quest for self-expression should be celebrated — personal happiness is the ultimate goal. Self-determination, once a principle for nations emerging from the First World War, is now the responsibility of every individual. A novelty in the history of ideas, this strategy of identity formation is sometimes labelled “expressive individualism”.

Clearly, there is nothing wrong with looking inward. There are many gains to living an examined life. And the alternative is far from attractive. As the philosopher Charles Taylor explains, the movement of expressive individualism is, in part, a reaction against a 1950s culture of conformity, which is believed to have “crushed individuality and creativity”.

Authenticity is also desirable. It is much better for a person to inhabit an identity that they own and can fully appropriate for themselves; there is something to be said for feeling comfortable in your own skin. Psychologists generally regard authenticity as a basic requirement of mental health.

So, are there any downsides to looking inward and being yourself? I can think of three pretty big ones: it seems to produce fragile selves; it’s failing in terms of outcomes for individuals and society; and it is faulty in its assumptions about human nature. Let me briefly discuss these in turn.

This is how it ends (and I think that second last paragraph needed some editing to make its meaning clearer, when it mention Nietzsche:

There is, in fact, a fourth direction to which you can look to find yourself — a direction that many believe offers a better story. They insist that personal identity requires looking up. Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, writes: “Without the transcendent we shall find ourselves unable, sooner or later, to make any sense of the full range of human self-awareness”. On the other side of the ledger, some have argued that Friedrich Nietzsche, sometimes described as the first real atheist because of his fearless pursuit of the consequences of his antitheist stance, has no place for the notion of personal identity. Does looking up have a role to play in identity formation?

The key to an authentic, stable, and satisfying sense of self is to inhabit a narrative identity that is worth living. One that deals well with life’s joys and sorrows, triumphs, and disappointments, and responds well to injustice.

We can re-build him

I mentioned recently having listened to one of the episodes of the CBC podcast Brainwashed, about the CIA and psychiatrists' attempts to learn how to control peoples minds, in the 50's and 60's.

I went back to listen to another episode, and it was a very incredible reminder about how top psychiatrists got away with just ridiculously unethical experiments on the basis of fanciful theories of how they might work.

Those of us of a certain age (as the idea has been dead for quite a long time) might remember cheesy ads for pillow speakers that would play (say) a foreign language while you slept, and hey presto, it would help you learn with no effort at all.   I didn't know that this basis idea - which even as a child I thought sounded dubious - was in fact given a serious workout by at least one highly regarded psychiatrist working in Canada in the 1950's.  His name: Donald Ewen Cameron, and the experiments he did were called "psychic driving".  Wikipedia explains:

His "psychic driving" experiments consisted of putting a subject into a drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple statements. These experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the Institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postnatal depression; many suffered permanent debilitation after these treatments.^[27] Such consequences included incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents.^[28] His work was inspired and paralleled by the psychiatrist William Sargant, who was also involved with the intelligence services and experimented extensively on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage.^[29]

The Brainwashed episode indicated that the patients slept 23 hours a day, and although awoken to go to the toilet, the ideal result was considered a reversion to early childhood incontinence, as that indicated their mind had reverted to a childlike malleable state, into which positive messages on the tape would be absorbed by the subconscious, and replace those bad thoughts.

The podcast episode paints a much worse picture of how the experiments were done - if I recall correctly, Cameron first tried just playing the tape in the undrugged patient's bed 24 hours a day, which the patient found absolutely unbearable, so it was drugged sleep for weeks at a time, to get around that problem! 

There's a very good and lengthy article about Cameron here, which explains that for many people, Cameron exuded much charm, and his obituaries in 1967 were full of praise.  He apparently was very fond of gadgets and technology, and loved science fiction.   There is a detailed description of "psychic driving", although I would say inadequate attention given to this obvious problem (the failure of successful "rebuilds"):

Cameron reported that once the patient’s resistance had been conquered, the result was therapeutic. Depatterning then proceeded to a final level of “disorganzation” in which the patient experienced utter “loss of orientation as to space and time,” near-total amnesia for his or her identity, often double incontinence, and (relatedly) childlike dependency on care staff. 56 The goal now was to rebuild, to retrain the patient to pursue healthy behaviors and leave behind the unhealthy behavior patterns that had previously vexed him or her. Despite the labor-intensive tasks it generated for nursing staff, the method at its core served to put the whole process at a distance by automating it: “this method of activating psychotherapeutic mechanisms not only created a great deal of time saving for the therapist but also appears to operate much more rapidly than ordinary psychotherapeutic procedures and hence constitutes a time-saving for the patient,” Cameron and his assistant asserted.57 Cameron’s method was at heart an efficient device.

It all turned out after his death that money had flowed to him from the CIA, although it is not clear whether he knew that was the true source.  Somehow, it would seem, he managed to convince himself this was a genuinely successful treatment enough of the time to take the risk of ruining other patients who were permanently broken by it.  In fact, I haven't yet read about that aspect - I mean, it's kind of hard to be believe it was ever a clear success, in anyone.  

The article I linked to talks a lot about the connection of his ideas to behavourism, which has generally fallen from grace. I must admit, I have long found it frustrating that the present popular thoughts on psychology and personality are rarely seen in light of how previous "fashions" for how we think of ourselves have come and gone.   The idea that every person's true goal and only way to happiness is to be "true to yourself"* that now completely dominates much of the western world makes it is well worth reading about other ideas that have come and gone.

 

* What is the best term for that?  Personality - or identity - essentialism?  Someone has probably named it, I should go looking...

Cue Arnold "It's not a tumour"

So, how's my Covid going, asked no one.  Coming up to a week since I first thought I was coming down with something.  I'm still feeling like the tail end of a cold now - still a little bit of post nasal drip, but not much, but twinges of sinus pain, and an actually throbbing head if I have to cough (which I don't need to, often.)  I'm still putting down the head throbs to sinus pain, and I have actually had this at other times over perhaps the last year (periods where I have no blocked nose, but mild pains at various points around the face where I assume my sinuses are, but if I cough, forehead throbs badly.)

 I've actually looked up on the web recently, and I see that headache relating to coughing is described as follows:

Cough headaches are fairly uncommon. There are two types: primary cough headaches and secondary cough headaches. Primary cough headaches are usually harmless, are caused only by coughing and get better quickly without treatment. A primary cough headache is diagnosed only when a provider has ruled out possible causes other than coughing.

A secondary cough headache may be triggered by a cough, but it is caused by problems with the brain or structures near the brain and spine. Secondary cough headaches can be more serious and may require treatment with surgery.       

Primary cough headaches

The cause of primary cough headaches is unknown.

Secondary cough headaches

Secondary cough headaches may be caused by:

• A defect in the shape of the skull.
• A defect in the part of the brain that controls balance (cerebellum). This can happen when part of the brain is forced through the opening at the base of the skull (foramen magnum), where only the spinal cord should be. Some of these types of defects are called Chiari malformations.
• A weakness in one of the blood vessels in the brain (cerebral aneurysm).
• A brain tumor.
• A spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak.

So, this sounds like a condition ripe for hypochondria!  And one where a GP is likely to be uninterested, especially if the pain I am complaining about only lasts - I don't know, 30 to 60 seconds?

Sinuses (which I would say are still my most likely issue) are a real example of one of the body bits which are poorly designed and fixing them becomes guesswork.  Like backs when they go bad.

Anyway, all pretty minor, and I can't say I am feeling any "brain fog" from Covid, which is something I would find annoying.  Am sleeping very well at night, and kind of enjoying that aspect, actually.

 

 

Simple, but amusing

It's probably Covid...

 

Covid at home, continued

Yeah, I didn't even need to sleep during the day yesterday (Sunday).  Throat feels pretty normal again, but a bout this morning of serious cleaning of my bedroom (not physically demanding, just moving around a lot more than I have for several days) made me feel briefly unwell.  Still, the progress is generally in the right direction.   

I saw that Samantha Maiden tweeted yesterday:

and it was interesting to read the comments following, of some noting a similar very mild effect, and others how it was much worse for them, and some with lingering serious issues.   

As I have been saying virtually from the start, it seems a disease that's perfect for making life extremely complicated for public health officials and government:   the wide variety of responses mean that people will extrapolate from their own experience in a way that they shouldn't.  The unvaxed getting a mild response are particularly likely to feel vindicated, ignoring all detailed research on the benefits of vaccination at the community level.   And on the side of "panic", some people can point to legit studies indicating that even an apparently mild case might be causing lingering harm that is so not immediately apparent. But the seriousness of the harm is still up in the air.

It may not have made me very sick, but it's still a terrible disease...

Seems true, and yet...

....I didn't have the impression that Bertrand Russell himself was "full of doubt":

Oh, now that I check again, he actually labelled himself agnostic, not atheist.  Interesting article at The Guardian about the finer details of his thoughts on religion here.

Covid day 4 - and back to Graham Greene

Happy to report that very sore throat has abated considerably.  Was still bad last evening, but after a few hours sleep I medicated at midnight with a couple of old cold and flu tablets I found lying on the bedside table, then started one of the dusty novels* near them, followed by a good sleep, and woke up with throat feeling much better.

Nose still not blocked, just annoying post nasal drip continuing, but I have had worse cases of that from a normal cold.  

Speaking of sleeping habits, this seems an enforced way of getting into a biphasic nighttime sleep pattern.  I currently don't mind it, too, and the midnight reading seemed pleasantly free of distraction.  But I still think it's an anti-social pattern, suitable mainly for hermits.

* Graham Greene's The Power and The Glory.  I was admiring again, in the first chapter, how good he is at scene setting, and wondering how authors get the knack for doing it well.  Because it seems to me quite a talent as to how to slip in details of the physical environment intermittently, at just the right level of detail, so as to not find it intrusive to narrative, but instead letting it build up the mind's picture in a gradual but convincing way.

I see that, as I would have expected, Greene did visit Mexico before writing the novel (and hated it), so  the physical details of locality are not all invented.  Science fiction writers have a harder time, I guess, since they first need to make up something to describe, and it's not as if they can look at anyone else's photos to help. 

Abe reviewed

It's always a shock when a nutter in Japan kills someone, and yesterday's death of Shinzo Abe was a particularly dire example.

To be honest, I had not been certain of his political legacy, but Noah Smith's very positive assessment of him is well worth reading.  

Covid update

This is day 3 of not feeling well, although day one was very mild.  

The worst effect by far is a very sore throat that is only relieved by aspirin or paracetamol every 5 or 6 hours.  I always find aspirin more effective, but I am a bit reluctant to take it for too long.  Mind you, with most illnesses I'm rarely taking anything for more than a day.

But yeah, I don't remember the last time I had a sore throat that meant I had to take something in the middle of the night.  It's been a long, long time.

Apart from that, post nasal drip is a bit worse, but at least I can breathe through my nose.   It's affecting my digestion too: lots of gas and a bit crampy.  

Still don't think I have been running a temperature, but body is a bit achy sometimes.   Or that might just be from lying down so much?   

Anyway, could be worse, but could be better too.  😬

She is awful

I mean, nearly every word that comes out of her mouth is offensive, but this takes some beating...

Feeling positive

The bars, the bars...

I don't feel so bad, though.  Sore throat this morning, nose runs sometimes.  Not running any fever.

Maybe I can post more often!

Feeling unwell

I see that it was July last year that I had a cold, or something, which didn't turn out to be COVID.   Same thing happening now, perhaps: mainly just a thick head with a bit of post nasal drip; throat feels a little sore but not dire; coughing really can hurt the sinuses in the forehead, but fortunately, I don't have to cough often.  Oh, and I did feel not warm enough in bed on a night of sufficient covers that I should have been OK, but I don't think I have felt feverish today.   Lets see how I feel tomorrow...

The tritium problem

I saw mention of this somewhere else - perhaps on a Youtube video I never linked to? - but there's an article in Science which makes it clear that it is a very serious problem for the prospects of fusion as a viable energy source:

A shortage of tritium fuel may leave fusion energy with an empty tank

 Fusion advocates often boast that the fuel for their reactors will be cheap and plentiful. That is certainly true for deuterium: Roughly one in every 5000 hydrogen atoms in the oceans is deuterium, and it sells for about $13 per gram. But tritium, with a half-life of 12.3 years, exists naturally only in trace amounts in the upper atmosphere, the product of cosmic ray bombardment. Nuclear reactors also produce tiny amounts, but few harvest it.

Most fusion scientists shrug off the problem, arguing that future reactors can breed the tritium they need. The high-energy neutrons released in fusion reactions can split lithium into helium and tritium if the reactor wall is lined with the metal. Despite demand for it in electric car batteries, lithium is relatively plentiful.

But there’s a catch: In order to breed tritium you need a working fusion reactor, and there may not be enough tritium to jump-start the first generation of power plants. The world’s only commercial sources are the 19 Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) nuclear reactors, which each produce about 0.5 kilograms a year as a waste product, and half are due to retire this decade. The available tritium stockpile—thought to be about 25 kilograms today—will peak before the end of the decade and begin a steady decline as it is sold off and decays, according to projections in ITER’s 2018 research plan.

The article does mention that there are other fusion fuels theoretically possible, but require something like ten (ok, seven) times the heat to work:

TAE Technologies, a California startup, plans to use plain hydrogen and boron, whereas Washington state startup Helion will fuse deuterium and helium-3, a rare helium isotope. These reactions require higher temperatures than D-T, but the companies think that’s a price worth paying to avoid tritium hassles. “Our company’s existence owes itself to the fact that tritium is scarce and a nuisance,” says TAE CEO Michl Binderbauer.

The alternative fusion reactions have the added appeal of producing fewer or even no neutrons, which avoids the material damage and radioactivity that the D-T approach threatens. Binderbauer says the absence of neutrons should allow TAE’s reactors—which stabilize spinning rings of plasma with particle beams—to last 40 years. The challenge is temperature: Whereas D-T will fuse at 150 million degrees Celsius, hydrogen and boron require 1 billion degrees.

I know it is risky to ever bet against technological advances - but on the other hand, someone in the 1940's who pooh-poohed a science fiction magazine's cover showing flying car highways in the sky in the 21st century  would be looking prescient.  

Hence, I'm strongly tempted to bet against fusion ever being a viable energy source, in any century.

Told you so

I complained a lot about the 2011 Brisbane flood investigation that gave many people the impression that the flood was solely caused by improper operation of Wivenhoe Dam.   Having personally driven around the dam a couple of days before the flood, in remarkable rain, I never believed it.    (We tried to have a day out, and drove up to Mount Glorious for lunch.  The rain started again on the return trip, and it was intense and long lasting.)  What I thought could come out is that lots of houses which were flooded to a certain height may have had the height reduced, but still have been extensively flooded regardless of how the difficult decisions the dam operators were making were made.  Why should those people get any compensation at all?

And it turns out that this is exactly what has happened.   People who thought they were going to get money are getting none, or trivial amounts, and they are  not happy that Maurice Blackburn either  didn't explain (or explain clearly enough is probably more likely?) that winning the case may not mean that everyone who was affected and joined the action would get money.

Law firm Maurice Blackburn said the payouts were determined by the flood adjustment factor, which is essentially how badly a property would have been affected if the dams had been handled properly.

"The case was run on the basis that there would have been some flooding in Brisbane, no matter what, even if the dams had been operated properly," principal lawyer Rebecca Gilsenan said.

"The difference, or the degree of difference, literally differs for every single property.

"About half of the claims in the case wouldn't have flooded at all on the model that the court ultimately upheld.

"People are finding out now and in some really unfortunate cases, they're finding out that the flooding would not have been a whole lot different.

Ms Gilsenan said they were not able to tell individual people what would have happened to their property along the way.

"Because we didn't have a model yet that had been upheld by the court," she said.

"People were told in theory that this would be an issue and damages would need to be adjusted but people didn't know individually what would happen to them."

One high profile guy sums it up like this:

He had to split his interim payment with his ex-wife and received $797.67, despite his Goodna home sustaining $556,000 worth of damage.

"The less you got damaged, the more you're going to get," he said.

"I mean it's laughable.

"We were not told that we may get nothing, even if we won the case.

"[Maurice Blackburn] advertises 'We fight for fair'. Is this fair?"

Well, it is, actually. If your house had 3 m of water through it, and different dam operation could have lowered it to 2 m, you don't deserve compensation.

 

Something to be thankful for

I just found the pair of reading glasses I keep at home, after misplacing them for about a month.

I might write a post soon about the annoying stage my eyes are currently at...

A remarkably cold winter

I've been meaning to post this for weeks now, but this is easily that coldest Brisbane winter that I can recall, probably for decades.

A week or two ago it was waking up to 3 degrees on a Saturday and Sunday, and although it was sunny and clear it still seemed to take to midday to start feeling warmth from it.  Yesterday and today it's like living in a Melbourne (or Tasmanian) winter:  grey, wet and while the minimums are not as bad as under clear skies, never warming up more than 2 or 3 degrees all day.  14 degrees yesterday, and my weather app says that now (1.40pm) it's 12 degrees.  

Remarkable.

American pessimism and optimism

It's pretty remarkable, isn't it, that a mass shooting at a 4 July parade in a well off part of the US comes in at news story number 5 or 6 in Australia this morning (and only a short time devoted to it), because we are so used to such news.  (Yeah, there are local floods crowding it out, but still, it does seem a case of "oh, another outrageously violent event in a nation that is too stupidly in love with guns.  Meh.")    

By the way, I see that the prime suspect sounds like a disturbed young man who has imagined the crime for a long time - just the sort of person who doesn't get to live out his violent fantasies in other countries where it is much, much harder to get the tool necessary to make it a reality.

Yes despite this, I am in a general sense still on side with Noah Smith's overall take on being (kinda) optimistic that the USA will get over its current problems, and the most dire predictions not come to pass.   He sums it well in this free post at his Substack.

 

Filipino style beef empanadas

Inspired about 6 weeks ago by a delicious Filipino style beef empanada bought at West End markets, I tried making them myself this weekend.

There are a lot of difference versions of how to make the dough in particular, and very often with non metric measurements.   For my future reference, this worked fine for a fried empanada (don't know how they would go baked, but frying does make for a more interesting texture, I reckon.  Basically, it's this recipe, although it took a bit more water:

3 cups plain flour

115 g unsalted butter (cold and cubed)

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoon sugar (although I only used one)

1 egg

3 (maybe more?) tablespoon ice water 

You can guess how this is made:  mix the dry ingredients, rub in the butter, beat the egg with water and add to made a pretty firm dough.  Wrap in cling wrap and put in fridge for 15 min before using.

As for the filling:  I just followed an amalgam of a few recipes, but yeah, using 500 g of mince makes more than you can use with that much pastry.   Fried one medium onion, about 4 or 5 garlic cloves, in with the small cubed potato and carrot, then mince.  A substantial amount of tomato paste.  Add raisins (I thought I was overdoing it with 1/3 cup, but no), about half a cup of beef stock, lots of pepper, a half cup of peas, let it simmer and liquid reduce, check seasoning.  Oh, I used a couple of tablespoons of soy too, and maybe a tablespoon of worcestershire sauce too. Sounds a lot of saltiness, if you included the tomato paste, but it was 500 g of mince.

I also put a baton of cheese in the middle of the filing in the empanadas, which doesn't appear in any recipe, but was in the ones I bought at the markets.

They were nice, but not as nice as the market ones.   I have to have another and examine its contents more carefully.

A joke as a sign of sentience?

He perhaps should be spending a bit more time walking rather than sitting and chatting to his ambiguously sentient AI buddy, but nonetheless, this interview with the Google guy who went public with his AI claims is really quite interesting, and makes me feel like we are at least close to living in a science fiction movie:

 

I particularly liked how it was an apparent AI joke that influenced his thinking.   And one about Jedi!

The guy does appear genuinely thoughtful, and not a complete nut.   

Big power project apparently can work

When I first heard about it, I thought that this project sounded fanciful, because I didn't imagine the power transmission over that long a distance (and via undersea cable) would be efficient enough.  But it would seem I was wrong:

SINGAPORE: The company behind a megaproject to deliver up to 15 per cent of Singapore’s energy requirements via a 4,200km undersea cable from northern Australia aims to start construction in 2024.

The project took a step closer to being realised last week, after being deemed investment-ready by Infrastructure Australia, a statutory body that advises the country’s government on key projects of national significance.

This potentially opens the US$20.7 billion intercontinental cable operation - called the Australia-Asia PowerLink - to investment that could include public funds.

Before construction can begin, all financing documents will need to be signed and prior conditions for the availability of financing will have to be fulfilled.

Sun Cable wants to build the largest solar farm and battery storage facility in the world in Australia’s Northern Territory and send clean power to the regional city of Darwin as well as Singapore.

Singapore is currently a gas burning nation, so it must be feeling the pinch at the moment:

It comes as Singapore looks to expand its renewable energy options and moves to import power as a solution to lowering its carbon emissions footprint - it currently generates about 95 per cent of its energy from burning natural gas, a fossil fuel that contributes to global warming.

Anyway, the undersea cable is HVDC, which is maybe the only way it could work?:

“We need that ability to transmit electricity on an intercontinental basis to get from where that resource is abundant to where those large loads are and where they're growing fast. And that's what the evolution of high-voltage direct current submarine cable technology allows,” he added.

This article talks about HVDC undersea cables.  Seems there are only relatively short ones around, so I hope the challenges of 4,000 km of such cable are not too much to overcome.  

Message to Monty

Monty, Monty, Monty.

I see you tried to engage dover beach with your "defending institutions" argument.   

It has gotten you no where, of course, because all he is interested in is institutions defending (or rather, forcing on the citizens as a whole) his conservative Catholic values on abortion, marriage, etc.  

Here's the thing:  people like him who can watch the violent riot and death calls at the Capitol, and all of the evidence from the Congressional hearing, and still think Trump was the one unfairly treated, are just plainly too stupid to bother arguing with.   They are willfully blind and are more sympathetic to Christian flavoured fascism than anything else, because it gets them the laws they want forced on everyone.    

They love you dropping in because it gives them a thrill that you think they are worth engaging with. 

They aren't.  

The only thing I think you should ever say to them is just "you are too stupid to argue with."

To Trumpist idiots, this makes him sound like a hero in an action movie

I noticed on Twitter some people saying that Trump lunging from his seat to try to stop the driver of his vehicle taking him to the White House instead of the Capitol would not be possible, because of a screen between the back and the driver.

The Washington Post is onto that already, and it appears this is not going to work as a defence.   

The most depressing and stupid thing to realise from that article, however, is that Trump getting physical with his staff probably appeals to a significant section of his nutjob base, as to them it makes him sound like an action hero who nearly thwarted his kidnapping:

On that message board, some conceded that her testimony actually showed another way in which Trump had faced unfair treatment. One poster said the story showed that “the Deep State coup plotters” of the Secret Service had “effectively kidnapped the President of the United States of America against his wishes” as part of a “C.I.AMilitary Industrial Complex coup d'etat.”

Some there argued she should be “locked up for lying under oath,” while another poster there suggested her wild testimony was just Washington as usual.

“Even if she’s telling the truth,” the anonymous patriots.win poster said, “where’s the f---ing problem?”

Allahpundit points out, by the way, that it would be unlikely the committee would let Hutchinson give this evidence if it didn't know it was going to be backed up by one of the first hand witnesses.    

The other bit of evidence, not being given enough attention, I think, is that not only did Hutchinson talk about the aftermath of one plate throwing incident, she said he did something similar several times.

Update:  Allahpundit is now going on about how damaging it will look if the secret service isn't backing her up, as some leaks are now suggesting.   Meh.   It was never going to be evidence at a Trump trial, anyway.  

An entertaining dream

Before I start forgetting the details completely, I seemed to have a long, but basically enjoyable, dream last night which went something like this.

I was a younger version of myself, returning at night to the house I grew up in (I think my parents were still alive) only to find that the suburban block it was on was the subject of some sort of military action.  I ran away, but eventually decided to give myself in, finding that the new rulers (of uncertain origin) were putting local residents in trains for re-location elsewhere.  I was worried about how this felt like the Holocaust, but the trains were quite OK.   

We were then on a cruise ship, again quite OK standard, and being shipped to Germany.

The thing was, no one knew exactly who the aggressors were, in what appeared to be a global wide conflict of some type.

Scott Morrison appeared in one scene, and I asked him, in public, that when he was PM he must have had some idea where this threat may come from, so couldn't he tell us who the aggressors likely were?  He said "nope", he had no idea at all, there was no warning of this conflict.

Sinclair Davidson (!) then featured amongst a group of others in front of which I declared I had worked it out:  the orders for this were probably coming from the sentient global AI that the internet had become.   I mean, people were just following orders given via emails on screens - the global AI could easily be producing those.   

I did spend a bit of time asking what the best term for our new AI overlord was, as I thought some science fiction writer had come up with one, but I couldn't remember it.  No one else could either.

The relocations, by the way, were more about balancing where the best places for humans to live for efficient use of resources - there was no evil intent about it as such.

And that's about it...

What a country

A story from the Washington Post, and what an appalling one:

A man fatally shot an employee and injured another at an Atlanta Subway restaurant over the weekend because he had “too much mayo on his sandwich,” police said Monday morning.

The shooter fired a handgun at two workers, a 26-year-old woman who died of her wounds and a 24-year-old woman who was in critical condition, Deputy Police Chief Charles Hampton Jr. told reporters. The injured woman’s 5-year-old child was in the restaurant at the time.

As the top comment says, in the context of the Supreme Court last week deciding people carrying handguns was cool:

This is precisely the consequence of last Thursday's dreadful SCOTUS decision - apparently their "appetizer" for all the dreadful decisions they had lined up for us - and of all the hypocrisy for a right wing that supposedly believes in states' rights and didn't allow New York to protect its citizens from exactly this kind of impulsive fatal violence ... These 'carry' laws are all an unmitigated outrage and yet instead its the protective laws that SCOTUS goes after. The founding fathers would be appalled. This is not remotely what the 2nd amendment was ever intended to allow. And the pretzel illogic that is used by every single Justice appointed by a GOP President on the current court is the most transparent bunk covering their actual Trojan horse cabal to overthrow American democracy, not just from the inside but from the ultimate tribunal of the inside. Two Bushes and a Trump managed to find and plant the most anti-democracy, anti-sanity Justices imagineable for this systematic dismantling of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the majority of us at least.

 

The problem with multiverse movies (or perhaps I should say, stories)

Just a quick note, based on having watched a Youtube video that explained that the Marvel cinematic "Universe" (now really a cable TV plus cinema universe - not to everyone's satisfaction) is doubtlessly heading towards a series of stories (already in comic book form) in which the multiverse plays a key role:

The storyline involves the destruction of the Marvel Universe and various other alternate universes (including those seen in the Ultimate Marvel and Marvel 2099 imprints, the "Age of Apocalypse" storyline, the Marvel 1602 universe, and the "House of M" storyline), with each universe's respective Earth combining with each other into Battleworld, a planet that exhibits the aspects of the various universes. The planet itself is divided in many territories that are mostly self-contained and where a "pocket universe" composed of a specific storyline or universe reside and evolve. Various versions of individual Marvel characters can be present multiple times on the Battleworld. For example, there is a Tony Stark present in many of the territories where the Kingdom of Manhattan has both the Earth-1610 and the Earth-616 versions, and many versions of Thor serve as a peace-keeping force. The stories depicted in the miniseries about each domain's characters' powers and personal histories vastly differ from the ones portrayed in the main Marvel universe(s).  

Now, I'm already not the biggest fan of superhero movies, and my enjoyment is very dependent on them not taking themselves too seriously.   (The next Thor movie looks to be a continuation of the rather comedic last one, so I'll still see it if it has good reviews.)

But even so, isn't it obvious that the problem with multiverse storylines is that when anything is possible, it quickly starts to become boring?    There are too many options.   You might get away with dealing with the multiverse in one movie, or maybe two, but if you keep on going, how can you really keep it dramatically (or creatively?) interesting.  

And is it possible that audiences are already starting to sense that, despite the box office success of the last Dr Strange movie?

 

Great calls

Someone on Twitter noted these today:

 

More from the Douthat column:

....the scenarios that have been spun out in reputable publications — where Trump induces Republican state legislatures to overrule the clear outcome in their states or militia violence intimidates the Supreme Court into vacating a Biden victory — bear no relationship to the Trump presidency we’ve actually experienced. Our weak, ranting, infected-by-Covid chief executive is not plotting a coup, because a term like “plotting” implies capabilities that he conspicuously lacks.

 What a specious argument it was...

James Blunt is very amusing

 

Asia and motorbikes (soon to be electric, hopefully)

The BBC asks Will electric motorbike sales take off across Asia, and gives some interesting figures:

Asia accounts for more than half of all global motorbike sales, and in some countries it is unusual for a family to not own one.

Take Thailand, the nation with the highest per person use of motorcycles. There 87% of households own at least one motorbike. These are typically the scooter variety, whereby the rider sits with his or her feet directly in front.

Thailand is closely followed by Vietnam (86%), Indonesia (85%), and Malaysia (83%) for households with motorbikes. The figures then drop to 60% and 47% respectively, in giant markets China and India, but that still dwarfs the UK's 7%.

The vast majority of Asia's motorbikes currently run on petrol, but transport experts say that a big switch to electric versions is now gathering pace.

I like this innovation:

While the big Japanese motorbike manufacturers like Yamaha and Honda are now making electric models, the Asian market has been led by newer companies.

Taiwan's Gogoro is one such firm. In addition to a range of electric motorbikes, it has come up with a solution to the problem of a rider having to stand around while their bikes charge.

Instead of charging points, Gogoro's users in Taiwan simply need to drive to one of more than 2,200 battery stations, and swap their batteries for free. The outdoor stations run 24-hours a day, and are said to be able to withstand the typhoons and searing heat of Taiwanese summers.

Gogoro is now planning to make this battery-swapping hardware and technology available to partner companies across Asia. These include Hero in India, Gojek in Indonesia, and DCJ and Yadea in China. Gogoro is also working on a partnership with Yamaha.

Horace Luke, Gogoro's chief executive, says the company is trying to become the "Android" of the electric motorbike world, providing the invisible scaffolding for other brands He likens it to the mobile phone system which encourages innovation by giving device makers more freedom to customise phones. In this spirit, Gogoro also intends to share its battery-management software, which helps to extend the life of the batteries.

Cool.

About that Roe decision

One of the most interesting articles about it was this one in the New York Times (it's a gift link so you'll be able to read it) about Justice Alito's life long determination to see it overruled.  

His statements at confirmation fitted the usual deceptive pattern that all conservative judges follow:

Later that year [1985], Mr. Alito applied for another position in the Justice Department, proudly citing his role in devising a strategy for those cases. “I personally believe very strongly,” he wrote in an application, that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”

Years later, when those documents were disclosed during his Supreme Court confirmation, he assured senators that while that statement reflected his views in 1985, he would approach abortion cases with an open mind as a justice, with due respect for precedent and with no ideological agenda.

“When someone becomes a judge,” he said, “you really have to put aside the things that you did as a lawyer at prior points in your legal career and think about legal issues the way a judge thinks about legal issues.”

Amongst other things of note I only learnt since the decision - about 50% of American abortions are via medication now.   How States expect to stop the inter State movement of the few pills that are needed remains to be seen.   But there will probably be States that seek to punish a woman for taking them, despite (I think) most (or all?) States saying they will criminalise abortion providers, not the women seeking an abortion.   Anyway, I still suspect that this method (not around at the time of Roe) is going to reduce the effect of this court decision in preventing access to abortion.

Also - there has been talk around how how American abortion rights were (under Roe) more liberal than those in many European countries.   (Noah Smith was going on about it.)   As many people were pointing out to him, and others, this can be very deceptive, as anyone who has experience of Australian laws would know.   Women might have the right to an abortion for any reason up to a certain time, but if they retain the right after that to have an abortion for their health, and this is broadly interpreted to include their mental health, then you can have de facto liberal access anyway.   

And I am pretty sure that it was long established that, within Australian states, having access to abortion as of right, and having it only by claiming it will hurt your mental health, resulted in virtually the same rate of abortion in each jurisdiction.   

Pro-lifers like to go on about the apparent depravity of having a right to abortion up to birth, without recognising the difficulty of getting doctors to actually agree to a late procedure.   As someone I saw on Twitter said, with rare exception, very late term abortions are about wanted pregnancies in which a serious medical problem with the baby has been discovered very late.   

Update:  Allahpundit notes this:

Once red states ban abortion entirely, forcing local pregnant women to find providers out of state, demand will quickly overwhelm supply and create long waits that will lead to women getting abortions later in their pregnancies. A 15-week national ban would prevent those abortions — but as I say, that won’t pass until 2025 at the soonest. In the short term, the perverse outcome of today’s decision is likely to mean more abortions getting pushed off into the second and even third trimesters, when babies are viable.

That is from a post about Republicans now talking about a Federal 15 week limit on abortion.  He starts:

In December I predicted that the traditional conservative rationale for overturning Roe, that the 50 states rather than the Court are the proper venue for regulating abortion, would expire five minutes after the Dobbs decision dropped. At which point it would shift instantly to “national restrictions!”

I was wrong. It took about two hours after the ruling for that decades-old federalist credo to be dumped in a ditch by House Republicans.

Here’s something I rarely say about these chuckleheads, though. The idea of a national 15-week ban is … good politics.

I think?

He's the only conservative commenter who does nuance well.

This is nuts, too!

Never seen this before:

 A video about the place:

This is kinda nuts

On the up side, I guess, it's a benefit to other Western countries that we  get to see the effects of slack regulation in the US and hence avoid problems before they can happen here.

 I mean, this is just kinda nuts, isn't it:

Although recreational cannabis is illegal in the United States for those under 21, it has become more accessible as many states have legalized it. But experts say today’s high-THC cannabis products — vastly different than the joints smoked decades ago — are poisoning some heavy users, including teenagers.

Marijuana is not as dangerous as a drug like fentanyl, but it can have potentially harmful effects — especially for young people, whose brains are still developing. In addition to uncontrollable vomiting and addiction, adolescents who frequently use high doses of cannabis may also experience psychosis that could possibly lead to a lifelong psychiatric disorder, an increased likelihood of developing depression and suicidal ideation, changes in brain anatomy and connectivity and poor memory.

But despite these dangers, the potency of the products currently on the market is largely unregulated.

In 1995, the average concentration of THC in cannabis samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration was about 4 percent. By 2017, it was 17 percent. And now cannabis manufacturers are extracting THC to make oils; edibles; wax; sugar-size crystals; and glass-like products called shatter that advertise high THC levels in some cases exceeding 95 percent.

Meanwhile, the average level of CBD — the nonintoxicating compound from the cannabis plant tied to relief from seizures, pain, anxiety and inflammation — has been on the decline in cannabis plants. Studies suggest that lower levels of CBD can potentially make cannabis more addictive.

THC concentrates “are as close to the cannabis plant as strawberries are to frosted strawberry pop tarts,” Beatriz Carlini, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute, wrote in a report on the health risks of highly concentrated cannabis.

Although cannabis is legal for recreational use in 19 states and Washington, D.C., and for medical use in 37 states and D.C., only Vermont and Connecticut have imposed caps on THC concentration. Both ban concentrates above 60 percent, with the exception of pre-filled cartridges, and do not permit cannabis plant material to exceed 30 percent THC. But there is little evidence to suggest these specific levels are somehow safer.

I have been saying for a while:  if you're going to legalise cannabis based products, why wouldn't you set regulations about the apparently protective part of it - the CBD levels?   

And really, why would you let such a plethora of cannabis containing products exist in the first place - like candies and cookies, with their obvious potential risk of being eaten by little kids?

 

 

Break out the pre-nup

How did she manage to stay with him for this long, if this is true:

The billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall, a former top model, are reportedly set to divorce....

Before the wedding, a friend of the couple told the Guardian: “They are very sweet together, in a little couple bubble. They act like a married couple already, talking over each other, holding hands.

“She puts her feet up on his legs, they disagree on things like any married couple. She hates Trump, he understands Trump, it’s been like that from the beginning.”

 

French speakers like big animated things

Not sure if I had seen the giant Minotaur of Toulouse before, but it's pretty impressive (and reminds me a lot of something that could be in a Miyazaki film - especially Howl's Moving Castle.)

 

 It also reminded me of some giant puppets from somewhere - turns out it was probably Montreal: