Monthly Archives: May 2018

The New York Times reports on the passage of a “right to try” law, which is a law which permits terminal patients to bypass the FDA mandated testing process and try unapproved drugs for their conditions directly from the suppliers:

A program known as compassionate use, or expanded access, has been in place since the 1970s. It allows patients with a serious disease or condition to obtain experimental medicines; the Food and Drug Administration says it authorizes 99 percent of the requests for expanded access that it receives.

The new national law — like similar laws in more than three dozen states — allows patients and doctors to ask drug companies directly for access to the experimental drugs, rather than wait for approval by the agency.

Yet these laws “do not ensure that manufacturers will provide the drug or that insurance companies will cover the cost,” according to a policy report from Rice University. Obtaining the medicines from manufacturers can be more cumbersome than going through the Food and Drug Administration’s existing program, the report found.

President Trump’s prediction:

“We will be saving — I don’t even want to say thousands, because I think it’s going to be much more, thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands. We’re going to be saving tremendous numbers of lives.”

The commentary of the blind anti-government ideologue. And the same article supplies a quote from an advocate:

“It’s impossible to tell how many people will be helped by the federal right-to-try law,” said Christina Sandefur, the executive vice president of the Goldwater Institute, the conservative group that spearheaded the effort.

But “if it saves one person, it’s worth it,” she said, adding, “For the patients who are turned away from clinical trials and who are unable to navigate the complex expanded access process, right to try will give them a last chance — and the right to hope.”

Which is naive thinking. Perhaps one life is saved, while another 99 die prematurely, even with their already terminal conditions, and in agony. Would she still stick with her statement? The problem is: she won’t know about the 99.

We’re potentially in a big ol’ social experiment here, and it’s important that we be prepared. Toward this end, we should be collecting data – who and how many people are applying for these unproven drugs? What are the outcomes? How does the fact that this is a transitional process affect the outcome, and how can we compare that to a scenario in which the FDA is little more than a rubber stamp?

In other words, if we’re going to walk down this path, let’s get as much information on how it works out as compared to historical FDA process of having to meet safety and efficacy targets before it can be administered to the general patient population. If I’m a sober citizen of this country, I don’t need to have a few effing anecdotes about how it helped your brother Jose survive his cancer – I don’t even know if Jose exists, I don’t know if had an unpredictable remission, a mis-diagnosis, or if he’s just a figment of someone’s malignant imagination.

No fucking anecdotes. Got it?

Good research studies are the order of the day, no matter how much that might turn the stomachs of the advocates. It’s the only way to find out if the old FDA way of doing things is good, or if letting the desperate plead for drugs of unknown quality is the better way to go.

If you set store by honoring those who fell in defense of the nation with something tangible, submariners can be a difficult lot, much like the whalers of old. However, Eternal Reefs may be what you’re looking for:

The “On Eternal Patrol Memorial Reef” will be the first-ever undersea memorial to honor the United States submarines and their crews that made the ultimate sacrifice and never returned from duty. Imagine 66 reef balls, one for each US-manned submarine lost since 1900 and a single reef ball honoring those lost in non-sinking incidents, forming a patriotic reef off the coast of Sarasota, Florida. It will forever pay tribute to those “On Eternal Patrol” and replenish the precious marine environment in which they served.

It’s crossed my mind more than once that humanity really should clean up after itself, even to the extent of raising wrecks and salvaging the hulks. Of course, this couldn’t possibly be done with current technologies, and some wrecks are actually beneficial, on balance, at their final locations.

Memorializing the lost submariners in this way sure seems appropriate. If you’re so inclined, they’ll accept donations.

Interregnum:

1. an interval of time between the close of a sovereign’s reign and the accession of his or her normal or legitimate successor.
2. any period during which a state has no ruler or only a temporary executive.
3. any period of freedom from the usual authority. [Dictionary.com]

Heard on Dr. Who last night. We’re hopping around seasons these days, since I neglected Dr. Who in my childhood.

Looming through the gloom of House On The Rock was certain bits of machinery, some of which we never did really make out.

Deborah MacKenzie in NewScientist (19 May 2018, paywall) meditates briefly on the damage done to democracy by President Trump’s decision to abrogate the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Deal) and then reports on the technology under development which would permit the detection of cheating by any nation that is being monitored:

Load monitors being developed at Oak Ridge would let the IAEA measure how fast uranium enters and leaves the enrichment process, says [Robert Goldston at Princeton University]. Tools being developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, automatically measure the mass in cylinders of material entering and leaving the plant. Together, these could keep tabs on all the uranium passing through enrichment. Cameras with pattern recognition focused on pipework and detectors watching for unusual neutrons, gamma rays or chemical release could also reveal illicit changes to the enrichment process.

All this can be made tamper-proof using technologies the IAEA has already developed for monitoring plants that store or reprocess spent nuclear fuel, ranging from paint or welds that reveal when monitoring equipment has been opened, to backup electrical power that cannot be unplugged. Data would be sent securely to the IAEA. Anything unusual could trigger an “unannounced access” inspection.

Although the technology isn’t quite ready yet, the 2031 JCPOA deadline would give the IAEA time to put a stringent monitoring regime based on these devices in place, says Goldston. But if the deal collapses, Iran will at best go back to the infrequent monitoring that allowed it to work on a bomb before – and will have little incentive to trust international promises again.

Along with the damage done to our reputation by President Trump’s moronic decision, he has also lost an opportunity. These technologies would greatly increase our chances of detecting cheating, yes? With them in place, if Iran did cheat, we could have caught them at it, broadcast it to the world, and thereby damage their government system’s reputation.

Another opportunity thrown to the winds by an idiot who flapped his mouth and thereby wrecks his nation, and his staff, who are far too immature and self-important to be aware of how this could have worked out.

HuffPo reports on a state-level politician’s analysis of the school shooting phenomenon:

Does anyone know what kind of porn Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) is watching?

Whatever it is, the 67-year-old Black, who is running for governor of Tennessee, said it’s a “big part” of what is driving the spike in school shootings.

During a meeting last week with local pastors, Black raised the issue of gun violence in schools and why it keeps happening.

“Pornography,” she said.

“It’s available on the shelf when you walk in the grocery store. Yeah, you have to reach up to get it, but there’s pornography there,” she continued. “All of this is available without parental guidance. I think that is a big part of the root cause.”

No reasons given. So does this mean the streets are full, I mean absolutely packed, with potential school shooters? If she’s saying that, then she’d better ask what will happen when that porn is removed from the Internet and 95% of young unmarried men (I’m less certain of the percentage of unmarried women watch porn) become frustrated and enraged.

More shootings?

Just for fun, I pulled up the FBI stats on violent crime in the United States.

Via Wikipedia

Hey, look. Violent crime starts to go down as the Web becomes popular – and we all know that porn is one of the biggest components of Web traffic, and always has been.

Now, this is all very specious reasoning on my part as well as her’s. Correlations are often just coincidences, and I’d have to see more data before I’d believe my own assertions about porn and crime.

But still, perhaps the good Representative should sit down and think about that for a bit. At least, with guns we know they’re a favored weapon of the whacked out. Not to mention people like me, the terminally clumsy.

Excuse me, we’re looking for someone willing to explore the story a little deeper.

Aardman Productions has done better work in the past, and I fear the entire problem will be laid at the scriptwriters’ feet in the case of Early Man (2018). If you want the executive summary, my Arts Editor laid it out most directly: I don’t care for any of these characters.

Let’s take another Aardman creation as a comparison, the venerable Chicken Run (2000). Their plots are basically the same – a group of creatures face doom unless they can cleverly find a way out of their dilemma. For the chickens in Chicken Run, they are prisoners on a chicken farm, a farm that executes non-producers and, in the course of the story, is about to be converted into a chicken pie production facility, leaving our heroes to be the filling.

Similarly, the primitive cave-men protagonists of Early Man face the loss of their Garden of Eden-like valley at the hands of a group of Bronze-Age aggressors, who want their valley for their mining operation. They have invented avariciousness and a hierarchical society, unlike the more socialistic and equable cave-men, and the cave-dwellers teeter on the edge of extinction.

Both stories have the leader intent on saving their group, but here is where the stories begin to diverge in terms of efficacy. Ginger, the heroine of Chicken Run, is fiercely loyal and intent on saving her band of chickens, even when those seem to be running around as if their heads had been chopped off. The storytellers illustrate her drive to succeed, her willingness to leap any obstacle, to literally jump up and dust herself off after every set-back, no matter how many times she is imprisoned in ‘solitary.’

Her counterpart in Early Man is Dug, a young member of the band who dreams big – he wants to move up from hunting rabbits to taking down a mammoth. But, well, that’s just about it. He’s not the leader of the group, and his best friend is a fairly smart hog. We’re given little reason to admire or even bond with the little guy, outside of the fact that he’s, well, little.

Each story also has its outside element that brings salvation. Rocky Rhodes of Chicken Run is an American rooster, driven to escape the circus in which he performs by being shot out of a cannon, and when he does escape by being blown into the chicken farm, he’s willing to do nearly anything to gain the freedom of the world, including lying, cheating his suppliers – and abandoning the chicken flock that has befriended and saved him. In short, he’s fully fleshed out, a character with a drive and goals of his own, and half the fun of Chicken Run is watching as the needs of the flock, and the idea of justice, of doing the right thing, slowly bends that primeval drive into something useful and communal, rather than self-centered and narcissistic.

Rocky’s counterpart in Early Man is the Bronze Age villager woman Goona, who brings her special skills to the aid of the cavemen. But is she driven? Well, sort of. She wants fame, but she’s not really all that driven. She hasn’t the charisma and attitude of Rocky Rhodes. She’s more or less just a wrench where the plot needed a wrench, not the living, breathing creature that brings a sense of Where is this going? to the story.

And, of course, there’s the doom staring each group in the face. In Chicken Run, this is brought starkly home through an execution scene as a non-producing chicken is beheaded and eaten. In Early Man, though, there’s a far more diffuse threat of being enslaved and made to work in the mines that produce the material for the bronze coins. But little work is done to bring home just how dreadful this might be. There are no mine scenes, there are no cavemen dead from working the mines, there’s nothing visceral to make the skin crawl. It’s more or less a statement from the bad guys.

There are quite a few other parallels, from the big plot mechanisms, to the little bits of cleverness to get over obstacles, to the substantial silliness that all Aardman movies feature, and of course the stop-action and animation is virtually flawless and sometimes admiration-worthy. But in the end, the story fails in Early Man because there’s no willingness to drive the plot points home into the granite of our souls. We have no real attachment to Dug or any of the other cavemen. We don’t have any inkling how bad being a miner might be – heck, maybe they’ll turn into dwarves and re-emerge in Lord Of The Rings, wouldn’t that be fun, eh?

I could see an audience member saying that, and that’s the problem with this movie. That’s actually a plausible plot turn in Early Man. And that’s just not a good sign.

Margaret Sullivan of WaPo remarks on the latest trend on how to rate news sources:

Entrepreneur Elon Musk thinks journalism needs fixing, and he’s got just the answer.

Enraged last week by negative media coverage of Tesla, his car company, the tech billionaire proposed a rating system in which the public would vote on the credibility of individual journalists and news sites.

As with all things Musk, the sketchy idea brought rave reviews from his obsessive fans, even though his explanations (by tweetstorm) of how journalism works show that he’s way out of his depth.

“Problem is journos are under constant pressure to get max clicks & earn advertising dollars or get fired. Tricky situation, as Tesla doesn’t advertise, but fossil fuel companies & gas/diesel car companies are among world’s biggest advertisers.”

It doesn’t work that way. Journalists are not under pressure to earn ad dollars through their news stories and in fact go out of their way not to write favorably — or at all — about their company’s advertisers.

The obvious problem with Musk’s idea is that voting is easily contaminated by entities with agendas that have little to do with honest evaluation of these media entities. Either he’s not thought it through, or he’s being quite dishonest because, as Margaret notes, he’s angry at the news coverage.

The hidden problem with Musk’s idea is that we’re asking people with no skin in the game to play. What is their motivation to act honestly?

None.

The best way to evaluate the worthiness of a news source is finding subscribers who are willing to put up some cold, hard cash to not only buy the news, but to also invest their time, one our most precious commodities in today’s busy world, to read that news.

The act of subscribing to a paper is a contract and a conversation between the subscribers and the people who are trained to be journalists concerning the news events of the day. By paying that buck directly to the news media, you’ve gained the right to criticize their methods, or compliment them, to give them tips, and to learn what’s happening in your community and world-wide. It’s a contract about delivering news, about honesty – going both ways.

All those free sources that you and I sup at, have you thought about them? Why should they pay attention to you? To honesty? Their funding comes from advertising. Not that the subscription services don’t also benefit from advertising, but because subscribers demand a certain level of honest journalism, the influence of the advertisers is mitigated – and, if they do have undue influence, that can be detected and corrected by subscribers complaining, and walking away if necessary.

So think about those free news sources we all read, HuffPo and Vox and USA Today and Fox News and CNN. Are they really as substantial as the struggling hometown newspaper that Margaret writes about, perhaps in a death spiral even as we speak? Or are they more like McDonald’s and Burger King, all sodium and greasy french fries which seems so tasty … and will ultimately kill you?

Naturally, we have some outside shots at House On The Rocks, and they had some nice forests and whimsy, but nothing like the insides.

My Arts Editor wants these lions for our front steps.

My Arts Editor really liked the ironwork on this gate.

Jordan favored the use of natural elements.

Even if they call it an orange azalea.

The pundits are upset today over a speech given by President Trump over the weekend to the U.S. Naval Academy’s graduation and commissioning ceremony. Why? The usual: perceived lies. From The Week:

He also patted himself on the back for giving troops pay raises “for the first time in over 10 years,” even though the military receives pay raises every year. “I fought for you,” said Trump of the raises. “That was the hardest one to get. But you never had a chance of losing. I represented you well. I represented you well.”

So what’s going on? FederalPay.org has some information. First, their leader:

President officially authorized a 1.4% pay raise for 2018. View 2018 GS Pay Scale and localities now!

So how about previous years? Well, according to the same site, from 2004 on to 2017, there have always been raises. It’s never been less that 1% (2014) and never more than 4.6% (2004). Furthermore, Steve Benen states without source that raises have occurred in every year of the Bush and Clinton Administrations as well.

FederalPay.org states this:

At the end of every year the federal government determines if, and by how much, the basic pay tables will increase. The increase is calculated based on the annual increase in the Employment Cost Index (ECI). Our current estimate of the upcoming 2019 military pay raise is 2.6% (see below for details).

If I were to bend over backward, it’s possible that Trump’s 1.4% pay raise is on top of the ECI adjustment mentioned above, but that requires an extremely generous reading of the quote – and is probably untrue.

It’s more interesting to wonder why President Trump is trying to gather up praise for an action that is not generous and nearly automatic. The easy read is that he simply lives for praise.

However, I think there’s more than that going on. By ingratiating himself to the military and its more fervid supporters and, more importantly, implying the Democratic Administration of President Obama did nothing for the pay of the military, he seeks to widen the divide currently savaging our society. Let’s face it: if you are not an independent (like myself), slanted information which fits our preconceptions can be easily accepted without verification – especially if you’re a working stiff with little time for verification, or are not particularly interested in politics, a position I’ve taken for many years. In cases such as this one, this then leads embitterment and a refusal to use the news media associated with the political opposition. Soon, the audience becomes isolated and distrustful of fellow Americans who may, in fact, share their values and interests – but, because of statements and claims such as President Trump’s, they have been mislead into becoming ever more hardened into a position they might not otherwise accept, if they had full facts.

The lesson here? Don’t trust a politician implicitly, whether their name is Trump, Obama, or your local. A little fact-checking, especially when a statement seems divisive, is always a wise move.

Along with everything else, HOTR has a resident population of animals straight out of the imagination.

In this WaPo article concerning the Vietnam War and the role journalism played in it, Joel Achenbach writes a paragraph of painful content:

Cronkite’s great persuasive power emerged from his long history of not attempting to be persuasive at all. That allowed him to fly to Vietnam like an intercontinental ballistic missile of objectivity. But the past half century has seen a steady erosion in the trust Americans place in institutions such as the news media. Partisan journalists, wielding verbal flamethrowers, view their “objective” counterparts as retailers of false balance. The media culture no longer requires or wants someone with the authority to say, as Cronkite did every night at the close of his broadcast, “And that’s the way it is . . .”

A partisan, at its heart, is someone with a viewpoint of what is desired, not what is. A partisan denies or wishes to reshape reality. And that makes the statement partisan journalist, at best, a misnomer; at worst, it’s an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, a phrase embraced by those who should deserve no trust at all. They can be pundits, opinion column writers, honorable to greater or lesser degrees, but journalists should be dedicated to gathering and disseminating factual material.

A couple of weeks ago my correspondent continued our discussion of drawing voting districts:

I guess I don’t have much trouble with just imposing districts of approximate geographical travel time on people. If they’re highly partisan, too damn bad. Maybe it’s time they learned the fine arts of cooperation and compromise? Seriously, partisanship is ruining our country.

And perhaps that’s the best sentiment for an imperfect world. I simply wonder how much a representative in a party-bound state can actually represent members of the other party in her district, particularly in an era of corrosive team politics. It all leads me to wonder if approaches not based on geography would be more appropriate.

NewScientist (19 May 2018) reports on a potential key upgrade in the process of the creation of fertilizer:

FEEDING billions of people around the globe takes a lot of energy, and much of it goes into making ammonia, the key ingredient in many fertilisers. To do this, we rely on the Haber-Bosch process, invented a century ago by German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. No one has yet come up with anything that can compete with it on a large scale – until now.

Xiaofeng Feng and his colleagues at the University of Central Florida in Orlando have created a process that uses water, nitrogen from the air, electricity and a catalyst to help turn the ingredients into ammonia. It works at room temperature and regular pressure.

The current technology used for this step involves temperatures of 500°C and high pressures, which in turn implies consumption of large amounts of energy. If this discovery can be scaled up, it’ll certainly make it easier to support increases in population.

Alex Jordan enjoyed his lamps, and so did we.

Unfortunately, these are mostly slightly out of focus, and during the tour there’s really not much time to check the quality of the pics and reshoot.

Is doing well, as it usually does in the spring. It’ll burn out in late July.

The Pope’s favorite scene at his personal screening of Deadpool 2.

We speak of “breaking the fourth wall” when a theatrical production acknowledges the audience. Deadpool 2 (2018) gleefully shatters it and dances on its remains. This sequel of Deadpool (2016) follows the continuing life of the eponymous anti-hero, a former criminal subjected to genetic enhancement who now has greatly enhanced healing capabilities and reduced reaction times.

For the storyteller, Deadpool presents a challenge because his enhanced physiology puts him beyond the reach of just about any opponent, and, unlike Superman, his alienated position with respect to greater society leaves him more or less invulnerable to leverage. However, he has a girlfriend, and, as might be expected, she makes an early exit in this movie at the hands of assassins.

This leads to Deadpool’s violent disarticulation of himself while conversing with the audience concerning the vicissitudes of his life. Let it not be said that removing limbs from body from head puts a stop to the monologue, but merely lends it a bit of color not often achieved in other stories.

But this is to emphasize the problems the storytellers face, and so, in response, they introduce two elements to heighten the tension. First, the “authorities” can repress mutant capabilities through a simple collar secured around the neck. Once Deadpool, knocked unconscious, is so secured, he becomes nothing more than a man with Stage 4 cancer. And, once in this condition, the redemption of his life appears in the form of another assassin, a man who breaks into the prison containing Deadpool – and attacks a fourteen year old mutant instead of Deadpool.

With weapons from the future.

I will leave my reader to work out how an assassin is a redemption, or to attend a showing of Deadpool 2. As with the first in this series, the sensitive member of the audience may be offended, even rendered insensible, at some of the crudities issuing forth from the mouth of our protagonist. Or at the suggestion that regrowing limbs has, well, perhaps I shan’t go there.

But, in all the fun and games, there is a certain hollowness. Rescuing one’s girlfriend may seem a heroic and logical maneuver, yet it actually removes any gravitas attendant upon the story to realize that a real loss is not a loss, that the story is infinitely malleable in order to render a happy ending – and that breaks the implicit logic of the story.

In the end, it’s a bit of highly entertaining fluff.

Alex loved the diorama, depicting the idealistic real life scene, and we took pics of those as well.

Clerisy:

[usually treated as plural] Learned or literary people regarded as a social group or class.
‘the clerisy are those who read for pleasure’

[treated as singular] ‘he makes Coleridge’s ambitions for a clerisy exclusively conservative’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in “Progressophobia: Why Things Are Better Than You Think They Are,” Steven Pinker, Skeptical Inquirer (May / June 2018, print only):

Epithets aside, the idea that the world is better than it was and can get better still fell out of fashion among the clerisy long ago.

Old friend Kevin McLeod discusses current trends and what they portend (full post follows from FB):

I’m starting to see more news sources enforcing paywalls. There are efforts like Texture that offer a subscription deal with all you can eat access to their sources, and they have many. Access to The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, could conceivably become a feature of Amazon Prime membership. I’m fine with paying for access to quality news sources – we did that daily in the print news era.

But paying fails to solve another problem; paywalls break sharing. I can’t share paywalled news sources in social media because it automatically cuts off people who don’t subscribe to that source. I’m afraid we’re entering an era where only those who can afford it will have current events literacy, and those who can’t will be saturated with trash sources like Fox.

Good journalism costs money. I don’t want to see reliable sources dry up and blow away. But I also don’t want to see society become further polarized and segregated than it already is. If income determines quality of access to information it will lock in existing inequalities.

Maybe it’s time we considered the BBC’s funding model. Add a very small tax to bandwidth, something comparable to the universal service fee applied to phone bills, and use that to fund a public corporation that supports news reporting. Subcontract specialty reporting on complex topics – finance, education, global conflicts. Create a strong firewall against oligarchic and political interference in coverage. Get back to reporting metrics on the economy using plain language, realistic figures and formulas.

Are there better ideas? Main thing is, let’s not limit ourselves to doing things as they’re done now. Maybe there are fair and effective solutions that don’t require funnelling money to a handful of people running news conglomerates.

While I recognize the problem, I should like to point out that this is not truly a new problem. Prior to the advent of cable television, quality news came in two forms: print and broadcast, where the latter consisted of radio and television. The former category generally charged for their service, although the charge was not onerous for folks.

When cable came around, now one needed both a television and a cable subscription, which generally transformed it into a third category, because the charge covered all the channels. The broadcast category paid for itself through ads. While ads were also an important part of the print category, they also charged readers for the right to read their papers.

The supposed charms of cable were two-fold:

1. No commercials. That’s right, that was one of the come-ons I vividly recall, as I was growing up when cable first became available. One of my dislikes of cable these days? commercials.
2. Far more choices. Of course, more choices sounds like a consumer’s dream, but there’s a hidden implication here concerning the competitors in broadcast. Those competitor face a physical limitation more severe than the cable competition because the electro-magnetic spectrum can only support so many channels. Oh, we can be clever about it, and have been, but there are physical limitations. This has resulted in the government stepping in, over the years, to regulate who can use what where, as well as the content of those channels. For example, the Fairness Doctrine, since rescinded, required broadcasters of political (or controversial) content to also broadcast opposing content. (This may explain why I once ran across Lyndon LaRouche giving a political speech on broadcast TV. Just listening to him made my stomach churn. An early purveyor of national division, I suspect.)

I think Kevin’s worry, while admirable, is perhaps a little off the mark. There are sources of inexpensive, even free news. The real question is whether they are quality sources. Fox News may make itself easily available, but as long time readers know, their coverage of critical issues is flawed – as measured by conservative critics of the current radical GOP.

And I do have to wonder if government funding of news gathering is a wise thought. Granted, the BBC seems to do a fine job, but I’ve never really studied them, nor read relevant studies (which, if I’m honest, is a far more likely activity I would undertake). And how does the BBC funding differ from that of NPR or PBS? (Yes, I send money to our local public news organization, Minnesota Public Radio, since I listen to them on the radio.) Frankly, a little competition is a good thing, if the proper goals are recognized and guide the development of the news organizations. That is, profit, while necessary in most cases, is not the measurement of greatness that most corporate managers would like to think. The goal must be consistent excellence in the news gathering and communication efforts, with aggressive neutrality and fact-checking – we needn’t give credence to Flat-Earthers, amusing as they can be, just as Creationists should also be ignored, no matter how outraged they might be at relegation to the fringe areas of society.

So I think it’s not the access, but the quality of the organization, which is at question here.

Theodicy:

Voltaire was satirizing not the Enlightenment hope for progress but its opposite, the religiouos rationalization for suffering called theodicy, according to which God had no choice but to allow epidemics and massacres because a world without them is metaphysically impossible. [ “Progressophobia: Why Things Are Better Than You Think They Are,” Steven Pinker, Skeptical Inquirer (May / June 2018, print only)]

This is George after driving in Chicago traffic.
Or maybe it was me. I’ll have to ask my wife.

Rampage (2018) is a monster movie mixed with another monster, actor Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock of professional wrestling fame. Johnson plays Davis Okoye, former Special Forces military member turned primatologist. His favorite subject? George, an albino gorilla he rescued from poachers after the poachers killed George’s mother. George now leads his troop and communicates with Davis in sign language. And tells dirty jokes.

In orbit, a research experiment in genetics has gone awry, and as the space station explodes, the essential genetic material exits and returns to Earth in re-entry capable capsules. Three of them. One of them lands near George, who – unfortunately – ingests part of it.

Very quickly we have mutated critters wandering about, and – much like those monsters in Pacific Rim (2013) – the humans are quite underwhelming in their response to the challenge. Adding to the fun are some ridiculous bad guys, a few plot twists, and Okoye’s fantastic run of luck, not to mention his turn of phrase:

Of course the wolf flies.

Unfortunately, this movie fails to explore any new thematic territory. The bad guys are motivated completely by financial gain, with no consideration that those to whom they would sell their discovery might use the information to destroy the bad guys. It’s all about a simple-minded quest for cash, which, as you might guess, ends badly – if creatively – for them.

And that’s the heart of the problem with this movie. If the bad guys had some depth to them, this could have been far more interesting and fun. But instead of exploring a rich vein of new, intriguing conundrums, we’re stuck with a played out vein of monsters rampaging – excuse me – across the landscape, and Duane Johnson once again demonstrating he’s more than just a monster from the ring.

But we knew that already, and as fun as that talent can be, it just can’t carry this movie. The acting is fine, the special effects are competent, the science sucks, and the thing that comes from Florida must have been moving faster than a tsunami. It’s a bad sign when the audience is enumerating the science and reality faults of a story. A good story will make you not notice them, but we were noticing them.

It might be a good head-cold movie, or post-fencing tournament movie, when you’re too tired to examine it closely. Then just sit back and enjoy the mayhem.

Perhaps only second to the Carousel, the Maritime exhibit was the most awesome House On The Rock exhibit. Featuring a life-sized diorama of a whale in combat with a gigantic octopus (unfortunately, none of those pics seem to have come out – it was quite dark and unfriendly to my little smartphone camera), that particular exhibit was under construction when Alex Jordan passed away; it was completed by his staff.

But there was much more to the exhibit than just a couple of plaster critters, and those pictures, of model ships and various associated materials, did come out.

I thought this Chinese ship was fabulous.

A bit of scrimshaw, I believe.

Another Chinese junk.

Some mundane sailing ships behind glass. Loved the scrimshaw.

An attention-getting Titanic model.

More beautiful scrimshaw work.

Not exactly sure.

And finishing up with some lovely models of sidewheel paddleboats.