Monthly Archives: April 2018

Kevin Drum has a question:

Here’s the latest [tweet] from the head of the Republican Party:

Democrats hate our President more than they love our country.

Why is this kind of routine smear acceptable? It’s revolting—or should be, anyway—but nobody even notices or bothers to complain anymore. We accept that top-ranking Republican Party officials are allowed to casually malign the patriotism of half the country with no more than a shrug. There wasn’t even a reason for this tweet. It was just something to pass the time.

Oh, sure there’s a reason, Kevin. It’s to tell the Republican base that they’re so much better than any Democrat. This is actually an important message which must be reiterated over and over, like any message which is both vague and untrue. This tells the Republicans they are the select, the smarter ones.

And that’s an important message around Easter.

Next door to the movie set was a rock ‘n roll concert, and this guy strayed from yonder to hither.

The first five minutes of Solarbabies (1986) sets up an intriguing future in which water has become scarce, and society shattered, via a well done narrative sequence.

After that, it’s about how cool it is to travel on roller-skates in the desert and encounter an unexplained alien being, shaped like a crystal ball, which becomes the friend of all the good guys.

The actors give it the old college try, but this story is nowhere near college level. Avoid! Avoid!

Abstruse:

Difficult to understand; obscure.
‘an abstruse philosophical inquiry’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in “A cracking idea: The radical way to open up frozen seas,” David Hambling, NewScientist (10 March 2018, paywall):

It was an abstruse effect that went largely unnoticed until 1974, when the Canadian Coast Guard accidentally discovered what could follow. A team was testing whether an experimental hovercraft could break ice using the downwards pressure jets it uses to get around. But when the vehicle accelerated to just over 20 kilometres an hour as it travelled across the ice to a test site, the crew saw a wave form behind. The wave rose and rose – until the ice started breaking at its crest.