Category: Entertainment

Here’s a simple Texas-themed construction. I was inspired by pictures that I found online for a 1977 set called ‘Texas Rangers’.

I went to see Love, Simon, on the spur of the moment today. It is a coming-of-age film, a romantic comedy-drama about a closeted gay high schooler called Simon. (He is forced to come out of the closet – of course. He makes mistakes in the process, hurts people, but his parents and friends are supportive).

I see some film critics wonder if the movie is already too little, too late, for today’s kids for whom being gay is – finally – O.K.  So they don’t need this movie.  Well, I think I disagree.  The movie will be watched by old guys like me, and by parents, and by gay kids that have a rough time where they grow up. And it will mean an awful lot to them.

I did not buy the big T-Rex I saw at Toys-R-Us (my post a few days ago), but this red one at Walmart was on sale for just $1.97.  Besides, the dinosaur – the terrible lizard * – goes nicely with the garage that I added to my Lego house.  It’s all just for fun. I will eventually box up these toys and donate all of it to Goodwill.

*Dinosaur comes from ancient Greek δεινός (deinos), meaning ‘terrible, potent or fearfully great’, and σαῦρος (sauros), meaning ‘lizard or reptile’.

 

I scan through the Wall Street Journal almost every day, at the public library here in my neighborhood. The weekend edition has puzzles in, and the two puzzles below are from this last weekend.  (This is the link to the WSJ puzzle blog).

Update Fri 4/6: Well, the solutions have been published. I got the first one right: 9 links can be drawn. Trying to solve the ‘Seven Points’ problem was a humbling experience, and I got close, but no cigar.  I knew the solution had to involve equilateral several connected triangles, but I should have applied more rigor, and maybe used a compass to arrive at the solution (as shown in the figure with the circles, from Math Stack Exchange).  So depending on the way one looks at it, the solution is a regular pentagon, with two points carefully added to it, equidistant to three other points on the pentagon .. OR two diamonds pinned at a shared vertice (bottom left on the first diagram), and the other vertices a unit length apart.

The Wall Street Journal had a little report about Oscar enthusiasts that watch all 59 movies before the big night, driving many miles to art theatres for the foreign films or documentaries. (That’s not me!).

I still want to go see Darkest Hour with Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Winston Churchill in WW2, though, and also on my list: The Shape of Water, Call Me By Your Name and animated film winner Coco.

Nice to see Bladerunner 2049 winning in Visual Effects as well as Cinematography.

Someone noted on Twitter that none of the movies directed by women, won any Oscars: a disappointment.

Harvey Weinstein, and several other men in the Hollywood industry accused of sexual harassment, now persona non grata, were nowhere to be seen.

 

Black Panther is ‘a movie about what it means to be black in both America and Africa—and, more broadly, in the world’ says Jamil Smith in TIME magazine. Of course, it does not hurt that it is also a great action flick, full of beautiful people and gorgeous scenes of the utopian world of Wakanda.

The movie is not not devoid of racism – in more than one scene, a white character finds out what it’s like to be in a world in which black people have wealth, technology and military might.  (A world where white people are not allowed, in fact!).  Overall, the movie has a great message, though: in the real world full of different nations and ethnicities, we are all our brother’s keeper.

We went to see the new ‘Bladerunner 2049’ movie on Saturday, and I liked it a lot.  Ryan Gosling is Officer K from the LAPD and hunts down replicants (robots that look and act like humans), then discovers he might be a very special replicant himself. Are his memories real or not? is a big part of the movie, as is the destroyed Earth backdrop. There was a Blackout (electromagnetic pulse) event in 2022 that destroyed all digital data records on Earth, and as a consequence Officer K has to knock on doors and ask people (and replicants) questions, to get information.

I loved the enormous fields of solar power generation stations in the opening scene, the massive seawall that protects LA from the sea, and the flying cars. There is also Officer K’s holographic girlfriend Joi (says she: ‘I missed you, baby sweet – what a day, hmm?’), and a cool holographic jukebox player. But in the final analysis, the movie is about what makes us human. A perennial science fiction question seems to be: could artificially intelligent (AI) creatures be made human, say, with implanted memories? What is illusion, and what is ‘reality’, anyway? As Albert Einstein famously said: ‘Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one’. 

 

It’s World Mental Health Day today.  I see a Japanese company is marketing a 2-lb robotic cat-pillow-thing called Qoobo. The sensation of stroking the furry fabric, and the wagging ‘tail’ reaction is going to have a soothing effect, and make the day’s stress go away, they promise.  Well. Granted : no kitty litter box is good, but no cute cat face and paws, and no ears to tickle – no good.

We watched Bladerunner (1982)* last night, since we plan to see the new Bladerunner 2049 that just started running in theaters.

The movie showed its age a little (of course), but it became a cult flick and one that has been extensively discussed on the internet.

Anyway – I see the chess game from the movie is actually borrowed from one of the most famous games in all of chess history, called ‘The Immortal Game‘.

The game was played by Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky on 21 June 1851 in London, during a break of the first international tournament. Anderssen gave up both rooks and a bishop, then his queen, checkmating his opponent with his three remaining minor pieces.

*From Wikipedia : Blade Runner is a 1982 American neo-noir science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos. The script was written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, and is a loose adaptation of the 1968 novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ by Philip K. Dick. Set in a dystopian Los Angeles in 2019, the story depicts a future in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on off-world colonies. When a fugitive group of replicants led by Roy Batty (Hauer) escape back to Earth, burnt-out LA cop Rick Deckard (Ford) reluctantly accepts one last assignment to hunt them down. During his investigations, Deckard meets Rachael (Young), an advanced replicant who causes him to question his mission.

Alright, here is the completed picture. (Very idyllic, not?). There is a red cardinal (bird) that on the garden bench on the right .. watch out for that cat, it probably watches you! And the pièce de résistance was finally found – the edge piece in the top right corner.  The straight edge on the piece was so short that it was difficult to spot earlier.  

And here is an update on my progress of the puzzle!  The stone bridge was fun to build. The black and white kitty kat is a nice detail (see it?).

Finnish President Sauli Niinistö was in the White House this morning. He was low-key, saying that he is not here to give advice (such as – ahem – how to handle Russian aggression), but that Finland do what they can to maintain the peace.  I did not know that Finland and Sweden are actually not part of NATO. Even so, NATO is stepping up cooperation with Finland and Sweden in the Baltic region.

P.S.  Related to Nordic themes: Sunday night I started on a 1,000-piece puzzle called Nordic morning.

Bryan, Gary and I watched a movie called ‘Snowpiercer’ on Saturday night.  It is loosely based on a three-part French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette, published in 1982.  It became a cult sensation after being published. The story is set in the near future (2031) and tells of a dystopian world destroyed by a new ice age (due to atmospheric engineering by a coalition of nations that had gone awry).  The last of humanity rushed onto a special train 1,001 cars long and are endlessly circling the globe.  The tail section of the train is where the poorest people live in cramped conditions, and are kept there by force.  In the first-class section in the front (of course!), the richest live in luxury.  The film is not for the faint of heart, with its violent hand-to-hand fight scenes and bloodshed.  These scenes are all precipitated by an uprising lead by Curtis (portrayed by Chris Evans) to get to the front of the train and seize control of the engine.   But the movie certainly makes important commentaries about social injustice, class, privilege, power, limited resources, survival and the environment.