Movie reviews you didn't need

From my Netflix viewing:

*  tried to watch 1922, based on a Stephen King short story.  It got mostly good reviews, it seems, but I couldn't stick with it.   My biggest issue was with the lead actor:  his Southern drawl was actually hard to understand at many points, and his acting generally seemed to be just "too much".   I didn't like the narration, either.    As I have explained before, I am, generally speaking, a Stephen King sceptic - it is pretty rare that I find any project sourced in his stories to be anything more than just passable.   (The one exception - Kubrick's version of The Shining - King hated.)   This movie did nothing to swing my judgement about his oeuvre.

*  Johnny English Strikes Again:  the first two Rowan Atkinson vehicles were much better than I had expected.  The third outing, form 2018, shows that they have run out of ideas, and Atkinson's acting seemed more desperate and Mr Bean than in the previous ones.   (I am not so keen on the Mr Bean character, incidentally.)  Not offensively bad;  just a case of a franchise out of steam.

*  Veronica:  a Spanish 2017 supernatural thriller, this story of a teenage girl who seemingly has invited a haunting into her apartment by virtue of use of a ouija board with friends is actually pretty good, despite that set up sounding like it owes too much to The Exorcist or various other films whereby teenagers invite supernatural trouble into their lives that way.   It's well directed, and well acted by its mainly young cast.   (The movie made me realise -I think that Spanish movies often do very well with their child actors.   Now that I think about it, it also confirmed another thing about Spanish language films - they have probably the least reluctance of any culture to showing full frontal - adult - male nudity.)   The only slight downside is that it was said to be "based on a true story" which was well known in Spain (because of police involvement), but checking later revealed that the movie had exceptionally few actual similarities to the real story.   Oh well.   

Rare sights in Japan

Just stumbled across a site with links to live Youtube feeds in Japan.

This one which I find the most remarkable:  a near deserted looking entry to Sensoji Temple in Asakusa.   Just the occasional person walking through what is probably the busiest tourist temple in Tokyo:



There is another live feed, with a nice view of the actual temple area, but I can't embed it.  The link is here though.

The relative lack of pedestrians, and depleted vehicle traffic, at the famous Shibuya crossing is also worth a look:

Consequences

A headline at Vox:

Governors say Trump’s disinfectant comments prompted hundreds of poison center calls

Governors from both parties warn that people take what the president says seriously, even if he doesn’t.

He's got an excuse and he's sticking to it

Seems pretty clear that someone around Trump has said "It's easy - whenever you make a silly mistake or want to walk back from something you said, just say you were being 'sarcastic'", and he is sticking to that for all it's worth.   (Which is, nothing.)

 

Excess deaths noted

This is important:

And here is the link to the story:  

According to the FT analysis, overall deaths rose 60 per cent in Belgium, 51 per cent in Spain, 42 per cent in the Netherlands and 34 per cent in France during the pandemic compared with the same period in previous years. Some of these deaths may be the result of causes other than Covid-19, as people avoid hospitals for other ailments. But excess mortality has risen most steeply in places suffering the worst Covid-19 outbreaks, suggesting most of these deaths are directly related to the virus rather than simply side-effects of lockdowns.

Track me

I have downloaded the government's COVID 19 tracking app, with my only concern being how much battery use it takes when you leave Bluetooth on all day every day.   

However, given that I am itching for a new phone amyway, this may be the perfect excuse.  JB Hi Fi should be running some ads along those lines...

A perfect cartoon

I see that in lieu of Trump getting his face on TV at his useless briefings, he has been rage tweeting about the media overnight.  Which led to someone re-tweeting this cartoon.  It is a near perfect summation of why Covid-19 is politically hurting him:

And what about this:

Confirmation of another thing we already knew

It appears from this article that John Roskam, long standing IPA head who can't get a Lib nomination to Parliament when younger twerps in his organisation have, has long been personally invested in attacking the COVID-19 semi lockdown.

He is a wanker, and a dangerous one at that.

I would still like to know, though, whether he is being prodded by a wealthy donor into aggressively campaigning on this.   Or is it just his own very bad idea?

COVID and graphs

If the COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated anything convincingly, it's that analysing information, in particular with graphs, is rife with potential to mislead.  I guess we all knew that, but still.

I thought this thread on the issue was pretty interesting.  (Link is to a threadreader compilation.)

A brief interlude from other topics...

I have an urge to write about Android and mobile phones.

Every 6 to 12 months I post about how astounded I am about the improvements in mobile phones, especially in low to mid level range where my buying choices have always been.   (Carry an easily breakable $1300 computer in my pocket every day?   No thanks.)

I remain pretty happy with my Moto G5 Plus, but I am a bit puzzled about Android and the way apps seem to rapidly accumulate memory.   My phone has 16GB internal memory, and after my last phone had, what, 4 or 8GB?, this sounded like a luxurious amount which would take a long time to use up. 

However Android apps seem to take up quite ridiculous amounts of memory for what they do.  Photos and video go to the sd card, so they can't be blamed, but my internal memory is now always hovering at about 15 to 15.5GB, meaning I am forever being urged by my phone to delete files and apps I haven't used for a while.

When I check on my phone as to the size of certain apps, I just don't understand why they can take up so much space.   A couple of hundred MB used to be considered an enormous size for a program of any description.  Now, to take an example, the Flipboard app, which I quite like as a sort of news and magazine aggregator, takes up 42 MB plus 179 MB of user data, and 51MB of cache.   I can delete the cache, but I presume I lose my topic preferences if I delete the user data. 

Line, a chat and call app that I sometimes use, but not that often, takes up 220 MB in the app itself, plus has 342MB in user data!  That's huge.   But even the internet browser I like to use now - Brave - takes up 112MB and shows 70MB of user data.   Why so much?

Anyway, this has made me consider a new phone, just for the internal memory increase.   I see that I can now get $399 phones with 128MB of internal memory - again, a huge leap forward in the space of a couple of years. 

I do love Android, and would never consider going to Apple.

But as I say, I still would like to know how Android Apps have become the incredible memory bloat software that they are.

One other thing:   it's really weird what sensors various phone companies choose to put in their phones, and how they can be completely inconsistent across their range.    There are two Moto phones I was considering buying, which until one went on sale recently, were both $399 and both in the same series.  Yet one has NFC capability, and one doesn't.  My current Moto, which is getting up to 2 years old now, had one and I don't think it cost more than $400.

OPPO phones, which are very popular in Asia and my son loves his, at the cheaper end at least, do not seem generally to have NFC (needed to use your phone in lieu of your credit card), and a lot of other cheaper Chinese phones don't have it either.  Yet when I checked the specs on a cheaper OPPO model currently on sale at JB Hi Fi, it does have it. 

Then the other day I wanted to put a compass app on my phone, only to discover it doesn't have the magnetic sensor to allow that.  Websites written years ago say that nearly all phones have it, but not Moto in their midrange.   It seems all OPPO phones in the mid range have it, but even the new Moto with 128GB I am considering buying - a 2019 model - does not.

It is really odd the way companies seem to play around with what they can provide.   All part of the fun of buying Android, though, I guess.  


   

We live in extraordinary times

He also went on about sunlight and heat killing the virus quickly, which led to this (via Hotair):

The really funny part was when he circled back to it later and put Birx on the spot. What do you think, doctor? Think we can scrap the vaccine and hit this virus with a little internal heat and light instead?

I am half expecting Trump to endorse nudism, at least for women, as a protective measure.

Update:  there are going to be many funny tweets about this.  Here's one:

As noted before...

Update:   David Serwer has this right:

A genuine QAnon nutcase on the Gold Coast

I was looking at a Twitter thread about Tom Hanks giving a typewriter to a boy when I saw this:

Unusually, for a nutter, he appears to put his face to his account, which is good in that it gives all of us who live close enough to the Gold Coast to step to the other side of the street if we think we spot him.

Here's his twitter account.  He appears to be as big an un-ironic believer in the most lurid, religiously tinged, American based conspiracy theories as it is possible to be.   I wonder if he is American? 

Jerks worried about bias against uber jerk

Honestly, the cesspit for obnoxious commentators, ageing crank climate change denialists and Trump cult membership has become the most risible joke on the Australian internet.   I offer as proof a post by uber Catholic CL in which he expresses concern about bias in The Australian for the biggest and most obnoxious jerk to come to the nation's attention in at least a decade.  And nearly every comment following agrees with him.   Many are willing to suggest blame on the police, even though the full details of how the deaths happened are not yet 100% clear.  (As far as I can tell, though, the police and stopped vehicle were in the emergency lane, and the truck that killed then did veer from a normal lane into the emergency lane, suggesting the "medical episode" of the driver may well be behind his actions.)

The Daily Mail, from which CL routinely gets his news, gives a lengthy history of Richard Pusey's history of awful, sometimes criminal, behaviour; yet this is the guy they decide to go all "hey, let's be fair" about?

I think there are two threads of motivation here:   first, lots of people at that place, from Sinclair Davidson down, hate the Victorian Police in particular with a passion, so of course they are inclined to look for a way to blame the police themselves.     Second, just as it has long been clear that a lot of wingnut enthusiasm for Trump is because he gives jerks a thrill when they hear someone at the top of political power talk openly like they wish they could, jerks just feel drawn to defend other jerks.

Update:  there's a comment in the thread by a guy who's avatar is a MAGA cap, who claims to be ex police, which includes this line:

At best, they had a guy in a Porsche turbo doing 140 which isn’t that fast on a quiet freeway

The accident happened late afternoon, not at freaking 3 am.  There's more from MAGA man:

Sure: morally he’s bereft. But legally, and barrister worth his salt will have this guy walking and he will get bail. What threat to the community does he represent?

I note on the ABC, after Pusey's court appearance this morning:

Mr Pusey has been remanded in custody and is expected to reappear in July.

The cap is the label of an idiot.

Tweets worth noting