Author Archives: Hue White

The explosions are merely metaphorical expositions of the heartburn caused by the artificial coffee.

Free Guy (2021) is a mild-mannered exploration of a topic that’s long interested me: what happens when “artificial intelligence” actually becomes self-aware – and self-interested? In this case, it’s a video game in which the human players interact with each other as well as the NPCs – non-player characters who form the background to the city in which all exist. An artificial intelligence feature permits the NPCs to interact more realistically with the human players.

But then Blue Shirt Guy begins questioning why he does the same thing every day. And then he gets a hold of a pair of glasses that lets him see what the human players are seeing.

Mind blown. And he does seem to have one.

And then he stumbles across a human player who happens to have a grudge against the provider of the game, because she helped write the artificial intelligence and feels it was stolen. But she has to prove it’s present in the game, and she’s searching for it. Guy swirls about in her wake, learning, trying to help.

And being an instantiation of her goal.

It’s all a bit silly, but undeniably fun as well. While it doesn’t have any great insights, it does raise the most important question of all: does an artificial intelligence have any sort of right to existence?

Too bad the potential for a completely exotic “reality” is wasted here, but the real point of this movie is to make money, not explore one of the more outre questions potentially facing humanity. Have a laugh.

Those plates appear to be shifting, which can only be a good thing for the folks involved, legitimately or not. Andrew Sullivan has a summary (paywall):

An unusual thing happened in the conversation about transgender identity in America this week. The New York Times conceded that there is, indeed, a debate among medical professionals, transgender people, gays and lesbians and others about medical intervention for pre-pubescent minors who have gender dysphoria. The story pulled some factual punches, but any mildly-fair airing of this debate in the US MSM is a breakthrough of a kind.

Here’s the truth that the NYT was finally forced to acknowledge: “Clinicians are divided” over the role of mental health counseling before making irreversible changes to a child’s body. Among those who are urging more counseling and caution for kids are ground-breaking transgender surgeons. This very public divide was first aired by Abigail Shrier a few months ago on Bari’s Substack, of course, where a trans pioneer in sex-change surgery opined: “It is my considered opinion that due to some of the … I’ll call it just ‘sloppy,’ sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process.” Oof.

Sullivan has been one of many charged with being a ‘bigot’ by those who, consciously or not, chose to bypass having any debate over the entire issue, an abrogation of our moral, if not legal, obligation under the tenets of liberal democracy, to which we aspire if not attain; other names include Richard Dawkins, PhD, and J. K. Rowling, author; I believe Margaret Atwood has been similarly branded.

I’ve noted before this abrogation and its possible political consequences for the left & the Democrats, proved out in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and I once again call upon them to repair the abrogation, as mentioned above, in whatever way seems practical; without such efforts, the left’s chances of success in the future remain dicey, at best.

I’ll be ignored again, as I have no profile in this area.

But it’s worth briefly meditating on the practical consequences of debate. Debate is often seen as a rhetorical war between two sides, but it’s actually quite a bit more. A debate, conducted informally yet rigorously, can lead to new insights. As information, generally accepted as fact, is clarified, validated or rejected, and emerges from the gauntlet of the thoughtful, new intellects consider these facts, and where the old intellects may have settled comfortably into their trenches, to fight their perceived enemies, the new intellects almost inevitably will perceive new connections, false and self-serving narratives, and other significant configurations of knowledge and misperception, and come to clarified conclusions that are more convincing than those of the previous generation of intellects.

And, by so doing, improve the situation of those directly involved in the subject under debate.

When the “advocates” of the transgendered scream “bigot” at Dawkins, et al, they are not supporting the transgender, past and future. They’ve quashed debate, they’ve stoppered better knowledge and conclusions, they’ve, through their frantic need to do the simplest and wrongest, subjected the honest questioner to hatred and loathing. I shan’t take it further, as it’s unwarranted, and I suspect many of these haters are themselves victims of a concerted campaign to induce self-loathing, a campaign of which I don’t know the details, but have only seen hints. But it’s worth understanding that these supposed supporters are those that are endangering the transgenders, past, present, and future, and need to reconsider their brutal, primitive tactics that are not part of being a member of a liberal democracy.

Why, yes, my forehead is three times the size of my jaw. Does this … bother you?

Broil (2020) tries to dance the tightrope of story information: not enough? Too much?

Not enough, too often.

The Sinclair family is physically superior to the ordinary run of humanity, and immensely wealthy, controlling an entire industry, and its thirst for more, both in the world and in the family, is unslaked: power, control … blood. Patriarch August Sinclair is the king on his throne, hated for his ways, loved for his power, and his lust for the game of power is unreserved. His and his family’s aura is an ancient power that reaches far, far back in time. The Sinclairs are unstoppable.

And it’s time to celebrate, for it’s harvest time, and a special celebration is to be served up, because Chance and Luck, the young daughters of dissatisfied June and December, may be welcomed into the secrets of the family. August has heard of someone, called the Chef, who seems to be a power unto himself. A mere pizza cook who knows all combinations of flavors, he’s a little shocked at being recruited into the Sinclair kitchen.

And a lot more when handed poison and asked to use it on August.

Is he willing to take the risks involved in taking out his employer, when the employer is nearly invincible? What is this refuge Chance finds, and who’s already there? Why is Chef, at the end of his days, counting down from ten?

And just who granted Chef an extension?

That last question links to the lack of information mentioned earlier. This isn’t a twisted murder mystery, because there’s absolutely no way to guess the occult powers behind the maneuvering, much less their motivations. For the audience, this is less a mystery and more throwing audio and visual bombs at the audience for them to absorb, between puzzling interludes that make little sense, except in the aftermath.

Combine this flaw with the mistake of pulling metaphorical rabbits out of hats each time a plot hole needs plugging, and the story becomes a little less enchanting, and it’s too bad. The early puzzlement and anticipation was quite delicious, as was the impatience of Chance with August’s ancient sensibilities, but when it turns out there’s no perfectly reasonable explanation, within the parameters established early in the story, for later developments, then it becomes a bit disappointing: the audience doesn’t get to feel either clever at their insight, or overwhelmed with the storytellers’ moxie, but rather simply overrun with unstructured magic.

Close your eyes and don’t see the hole in the keel.

All that said, it is a fun ride, and if you can ignore the storytelling mistakes, or even if you can’t, you may enjoy this one. It can be an enjoyable challenge.

But don’t mess with August, unless you have some truly impressive backing.

Between cryptocurrencies and something called web3, the unexpected consequences may be enormously expensive. Noah Smith first explains web3 on noahopinion:

In recent months, there has been a lot of excitement around the idea of a new World Wide Web based on blockchains. It’s commonly referred to as “web3”, to be contrasted with “web1” (websites) and “web2” (social media platforms). The creators of Ethereum have been pushing this idea for a while, but the recent success of NFTs as an asset market has gotten lots of people excited that web3 is really happening.

There’s still the question of what web3 will actually do. This isn’t actually as important a question as you might think; when people started building websites in the 90s, no one really knew what the Web might ultimately be useful for. Sometimes humanity gets a cool new toy, and playing around and seeing what it’s useful for is more important than sitting around and theorizing about it.

And then he opines on where it might lead:

Imagine if everything you do online required you to decide whether to make a tiny payment. Send an email? Pay a few cents. Read one more paragraph of an article? Pay a few cents. And so on.

It would be an utter nightmare. The psychic cost of having to decide whether to pay a tiny amount for a tiny piece of product, dozens or hundreds of times a day, would be enormous. Some people would just choose not to deal with the hassle, and instead to simply use a ton of paid services and see their bill at the end of the month, like they do when using electricity in their house; but this carefree attitude would naturally lead them to buy far more than they really wanted, and when they saw a few of those monthly bills, they would reconsider.

In the end, most of these users would likely migrate back to either free ad-supported services or to subscription services that only make you think about payments once in a while.

Followed by

This is why the people trying to build web3 should probably steer away from making it just “micropayments, but in crypto”. I know this might sound crazy, but having to pay for stuff is not a feature. I am going to go ahead and predict that the added allure of being able to pay for things in a form of money that (nominally) isn’t controlled by the Federal Reserve will not be enough to make micropayments succeed where before they have failed.

My initial response is that It depends on whether you’re a producer or a consumer, now doesn’t it? But soon enough, the introduction of payment for every last little thing may even rebound negatively on the producers.

Let’s take the topic of opinion writing. While folks involved in the practice of opinion writing must, oddly enough, eat just like everyone else, and maybe have some expensive dreams in mind, this is not a transactional occupation. Opinion writers don’t just write pieces without regard to their past nor their future; rather, a producer of opinion writing who is an honest part of American society is trying to influence society to what they perceive to be its betterment. This is served by conveying an extended story to the audience, and neither is particularly well served by charging for it, because if the audience can’t afford it, or doesn’t want to pay for it, the author has failed.

And if the entire future is centered around micropayments?

There will be certain cases in which micropayments via crypto may make sense – but it’ll be interesting to see if they outweigh the disadvantages that come with crypto.

And the saga continues. Read Smith’s piece, I had not heard of web3 before and it may point to the future. A future that we may not want.

Curse Of The Black Widow (1977) is a typical example of the 1977 TV movie genre: bad cinematography, dubious story, unfocused characters, and dated, dated, dated. Despite the unexpected twist at the end, which was probably not necessary, this dull example of the 1970s movie making is just not worth your time.

Or my time.

But our cat Peeper did seem fascinated.

After the disappointment of certain dead people not showing up in Dallas for the gratification of the QAnon cult, here comes a new announcement:

Some of [QAnon leader in Dallas Michael] Protzman’s supporters have also spotted that Trump’s official announcement mentions “live entertainment” as part of the [Arizona] rally, and suggested that this will involve a band made up entirely of dead musicians and singers, including Michael Jackson, Prince, Whitney Houston, Janis Joplin, Tupac, and John Lennon. [VICE]

I suspect the former President knows how important it is to keep the troops entertained, especially when they can so easily walk away unharvested, so the solution is obvious:

Provide a band made up of impersonators. That way, you can have Elvis lead the singing.

Today’s blast near Tonga:

WATCH: Satellite imagery shows shockwave as Tonga's Hunga volcano erupts, causing tsunami pic.twitter.com/4r2gBFmAqE

— BNO News (@BNONews) January 15, 2022

“Who dies next? I’ve got a fiver on myself.” Priests never did learn how to bet.

Mutant Chronicles (2008), it turns out, is based on a video game, and that explains the dystopian scenario: the world is controlled by four warring corporations (remember the old board game RISK?), which accidentally break a seal during a corporate war that had been restraining an ancient evil. It specializes in converting the sick, injured, and the dead into multi-use zombies.

Sort of a recycling program.

So everyone who can find a ticket onto the spaceships is evacuating Earth, while the leftovers will have to fend for themselves, or join up for that last, suicidal mission to Hell.

Yeah, sounds like a video game.

What sort of saves this movie is the acting and the script, who and which manages to wrench some credible emotion out of a scenario that doesn’t really lend itself to emotion. The script digs around and finds some sad situations that actually feel authentic, mostly involving children, and the characters make it work.

Which is not to say you need to rush right to your favorite movie source to see this. It’s gritty, quite violent, a little silly, and there’s too many throw away characters. But the visuals are generally spectacular, even if Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t agree – maybe it looked worse on the big screen – there’s an actual plot, and if the ending is somewhat ambiguous, what the hey – it’s all in a good corporate cause.

Right?

While the transmission of fake electoral materials by fantasizing half-wits in Arizona and other States is a serious business, this addendum made me laugh:

It’s worth noting that while Arizona’s forged materials originally looked a little different, we learned yesterday that there were actually two different sets of Republicans that created fake documents in the Grand Canyon State — both of which were sent to the National Archives as if they were real — and while one was unique, the other matched the materials in Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Georgia. [Maddowblog]

Competing criminals? Trying to reinforce their point?

Tripping over their own feet?

It’s just emblematic, even if it’s a false perception on my part, of the basic incompetency of the right. The left has its own problems, but right now what passes for conservatives seem to have a problem with their best foot.

It’s a fairly awful foot.

The question continues to ring true, at least in my ears.

But for all the hype, there’s scant evidence that digital currencies stand on the threshold of some kind of mainstream breakthrough. While a recent Pew Research Center survey found that 16 percent of Americans have used cryptocurrency in some way, most buy it as a speculative investment, not for its originally intended purpose — as a way to pay for goods and services.

“It’s not happening,” Dan Dolev, a financial technology analyst for Mizuho Securities, said of the notion that crypto is replacing cold hard cash. “I wouldn’t even try to quantify it because it’s so insignificant. People are buying crypto because they think it can only go up. Or because they’ve heard it’s the future. Or because they don’t know why they’re buying it.” [WaPo]

For all the hype, yes, I think it’s true: hype. This continues to exhibit the signs of, well, to be quite frank after 30 years of investing or more, a pump and dump scheme. One red flag is the appearance of a lack of utility, as in either no real product or a very questionable product, and as I’ve noted before, I fail to see the unique and indispensable utility cryptocurrency brings to the financial landscape. The other big red flag? The big talkers talking it up:

Billionaire tech executive Michael Saylor has called bitcoin “the seminal invention of the human race.” His website describes it as “a bank in cyberspace” offering a “simple, & secure savings account to billions of people.” He recently claimed ownership of 17,732 bitcoin worth about $740 million.

Simple & secure, yet it depends on the continued existence and availability of the Internet. The latter is a big question mark, isn’t it, and there are times when I wonder if the Internet is really worth its trouble. He glosses more than one crack in the cement. And it appears he doesn’t do it well:

But one thing Saylor cannot do with bitcoin is pay for the $18 shrimp cocktail at Tony and Joe’s Seafood Place several floors below his penthouse apartment on Washington’s Georgetown waterfront. Though Tony and Joe’s has an ATM that can convert cash into bitcoin, the restaurant won’t accept it.

“I would take Monopoly money before I took cryptocurrency,” said a manager, who declined to give his name.

Whoever this manager is, he may not have Saylor’s billions, but he’s the one who has to make his business run. I find it telling that he, along with millions of other people, aren’t interested in cryptocurrency as a basic currency, but only, if even that, as a wildly speculative investment.

Crapulence:

1. adjective
   sick from gross excess in drinking or eating. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in Max Miller’s YouTube video “Rome’s Wonder Medicine: Cabbage“:

While I was aware of the fake electors who showed up at Michigan’s Capitol back in November, or was it December, of 2020, I was not aware of this:

As Trump’s team pushed its discredited voter fraud narrative, the National Archives received forged certificates of ascertainment declaring him and then-Vice President Mike Pence the winners of both Michigan and Arizona and their electors after the 2020 election. Public records requests show the secretaries of state for those states sent those certificates to the Jan. 6 panel, along with correspondence between the National Archives and state officials about the documents. [Politico]

The web of lies? The web of the law? Either way, it’ll be putting the squeeze on something.

That seems like interference in official matters, as well as fraud and forgery. For the good of the nation, these jokers should have their butts chucked in prison for a couple of years to emphasize that we’re not playing games and that a bunch of fourth-raters like them don’t get to make arbitrary official actions.

We do things as we have in the past in order to avoid riots and even civil wars. These guys, operating without a shred of evidence that there’s any systemic fraud going on, just don’t have a clue. And if you tell that, they’ll yell and scream about it.

Because they’ve been trained to believe that they can do things just as well as the people with years of training.

Oddly compelling, yet unintelligible. From the Deep Baltic link.

A couple of days ago, Erick Erickson tried to look angry at Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA):

Also, shame on the current Vice President.

Unless Kamala Harris can show us videos of people jumping to their deaths from the Capitol Dome to escape the mob, she needs to shut the hell up instead of comparing January 6th to September 11th. What a ridiculous and shameful thing to say. But I’m sure she doesn’t care, which makes it even worse.

The first red flag was the context of his anger, which is a post reprimanding Republicans and right wing extremists who might be angry at former Vice President Dick Cheney (R-WY), who served in the Bush II Administration, and happens to be the father of Rep Liz Cheney (R-WY). This slam of the Vice President was tacked on to the end.

Why is this important? Because Erickson is trying to stay relevant to the conservative base, and by criticizing a base angry at the former vice president, he’s running a risk. This is risk-mitigation, where he invokes conservative base anger and derision and throws it at Vice President Harris.

And don’t forget the ridicule. That’s the second red flag for me. Ridicule of someone for stupidity, who just happens to have a reputation for being really smart, is a good, but not infallible, red flag.

Erickson didn’t provide a link, but, if she did say anything applicable, I think there’s not much question of what it would be, given Erickson’s description. So does it make sense to compare the 9/11 Tragedy and the January 6th insurrection?

There’s potentially more to an incident than just counting bodies or dollars; that is, metrics, as always, matter. So what’s the proper metric here?

Incidents in the past function as indications of what may happen in the future. To pick out an astronomical example, the telescopic and radar watch for Near Earth Orbit (NEO) objects is motivated, in large part, by the Tunguska event of 1908. This immense air blast over a fortunately sparsely populated area of Siberia has been a topic of speculation for decades, and one of the better theories is that a huge meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere and blew up in mid-air over Siberia. If we want to prevent having this event replicated over, say, New York City, the first step is to detect an incoming object, and then do something about it, two projects that remain under development.

What you are motivates metric selection. Insurance companies count the dollars in sometimes-stomach turning detail^[1], first responders count bodies. What do leaders such as VP Harris and Cheney do?

They worry about tomorrow. What’s the risk of this happening again? is what they should be asking. Measuring existential risk, and mitigating it, is their job.

And here’s the thing: for all of the nightmarish horror of 9/11, future risk is not that big a deal for 9/11. Only a few extremists were involved, who took advantage of a very lax security system. We have since tightened security, closed loop holes, and hunted down the criminals responsible. There have been no more incidents.

The insurrection: How do we assess the risk? We can compare personnel: a collection of foreign nationals for 9/11, compared to several hundred Americans, people who should know better than to believe the “Big Lie” of widespread electoral fraud, who invaded the Capitol building, chanted intimidating slogans, set up an executioner’s stand, and vandalized parts of the Capitol building.

Motivation is important, too, as most foreign nationals with access to the America have no interest in inflicting violence on us. Meanwhile, members of one of the two major American political parties continue to believe, to an unsettling extent, that electoral fraud occurred in the 2020 election, despite a complete and utter lack of evidence.

Leaders? The 9/11 leader is dead. The insurrection leaders are not, and some are still free, although the Department of Justice is working on that problem.

And was 9/11 an existential threat? Not in the least. It was clever, but not backed by sufficient resources to endanger the entire country, and there hasn’t been another attack like it in 20 years, and those who are thought to be in sympathy with it find themselves dead or pinned down, thanks to the combined efforts of Republican and Democratic Administrations, otherwise known as American Administrations.

Meanwhile, simply getting Republican leaders to admit that Biden won in 2020, fair and square, is like pulling teeth out of a five year old: kicking, screaming, denying, head-shaking, and NO NO NO NO! is all de rigeur. Each one of these “leaders” is a potential leader, although the former President doesn’t tolerate dissent, nor wannabes jockeying for position. And 20%, maybe, of the conservative base thinks it’s been cheated.

Perhaps most frighteningly, without evidence. This lack of rationality is perhaps the most frightening: they have no idea how to assess reality or predict the future.

In essence, once the metric changes from counting dollars or nightmares to existential risk, all of a sudden VP Harris suddenly appears a lot more credible than Erickson is willing to give credit.

Does Erickson realize all this? Is he a hypocrite simply simply trying to keep his audience happy, to reassure them that disbelieving the 2020 results is really acceptable, by slamming a Vice President who has to sit the hot-seat, moreso than many others have because of the age of the President? Or does Erickson really believe that measuring a tragedy stops with the body count?

Beats me. But I don’t think it does. This is all about “Fool me one, shame on you. Fool me twice … we’re all dead.”

¹ I once worked for a word-processing company, and in order to report bugs our customers would submit documents to show how our print subsystem didn’t work. Some of these documents came from personal injury attorney firms, and reading those documents could be a hair-raising experience.

The Devil To Pay! (1930) is a light-hearted romp that explores the contretemps that can happen when the newly engaged make impossible demands on one another, even when the demanded is quite the miracle worker. It’s not worth recapping the plot, except to say even the crabby old rich British father has a certain cachet to him, so watch out!

Or you’ll be mildly charmed.

A caption in WaPo:

The crater fire named “Gates of hell” is seen near Darvaza, Turkmenistan, on July 11, 2020. The president of Turkmenistan is calling for an end to one of the country’s most notable but infernal sights.

What, does this crater move around like a coyote?

Carceration:

noun Incarceration; imprisonment. [Wordnik]

Noted in “Why Isn’t BLM Celebrating?,” Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish (paywall):

It seems to me there’s an explanation. The goal of BLM was not to reduce the number of cop killings so much as it was to abolish and defund the police, and stop punishing crime with carceration. Proof that the police can be reformed, or that a lot of progress has actually been made, might defuse those efforts. In fact, it might suggest we need to adjust a little to keep murder from spiraling out of control in our cities, as progressive DAs do all they can to keep violent criminals on the streets. And that’s the kind of data none of these groups or anyone in the MSM wants to cover.

My guess is that organizations that achieve their goal often go out of existence themselves, so they resort to not advertising their successes in order to keep the money coming in.

I don’t know that’s happening here, but it is a known, and logical, phenomenon.

Remember this speech that I highlighted back in 2016, as reported by Steve Benen?

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) delivered a speech last week at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s anniversary gala, and the Wisconsin Republican highlighted an interesting excerpt from the remarks on social media over the weekend:

“That is the key difference between ourselves and the progressives: We do not believe we should be governed by elites. We do not believe that there are experts or elites who should steer us in their preferred direction. We see that sense of organization as condescending, paternalistic, and downright arrogant. We know it’s wrong. […]

“Because we believe that all of us are equal, we believe there is no problem that all of us – working together – cannot solve. We believe every person has a piece of this puzzle, and only when we work together do we get the whole picture.”

I have come to the conclusion that the proper plain English translation is …

I hate and loathe the opinions of some experts, so I’m anointing all of you experts so you can tell me what I want to hear.

I just thought my readers should know.

Look, there is certainly a tension between experts and non-experts when it comes to topics that impact everyone, such as public health. Finding a way to live with and conform to those opinions, with the alternative being potential disaster, is important.

But former Speaker Ryan’s approach is rank and callow extremism, and I’m afraid that’s what has invaded the Republican Party organism. It screams dreadfully at the thought of being told what to do, and its members die and die and die.

Have you heard that 5G, or the fifth-generation of cellular networks – how your phone talks to the data network – will cause vaccinated people’s heads to explode? Yes, yes, quite silly – and Mashable’s Matt Binder is on the case:

The videos are real and quite disturbing. However, no one is spontaneously combusting. These videos are from 2019 and depict protesters in Iraq being shot at close range with “non-lethal” tear gas rounds. Unsurprisingly, when police shoot these at close range, they do become quite lethal and can actually become embedded into someone’s head, creating that disturbing image caught on camera.

But there’s a more subtle point here. If you had heard about this, and took it seriously enough to do your own research on this, then there’s a key point to consider:

Did you discover the same resolution, that some depraved monster – I exaggerate only slightly, I think – has appropriated videos of a tragic and terrible incident, and relabeled them for, at the very least, their own disgusting amusement, and more likely so they can materially benefit from their lie?

If you did not, if your research left you thinking that you’ll be covered by blood and gore on January 5th – or January 19th, the revised rollout date – then you should be questioning your research methods. Are you trusting sites that, just maybe, have been setup to mislead you? Did they ask for money?

Did you even ask yourself how such a terrible scenario benefits companies such as Verizon? Have any of these supposed conspiracies to inflict blatant disaster and suffering on mankind, in the guise of a new product, come true, especially in the face of experts denying the possibility?

No, you cannot cite the notorious Jimmy Bakker. Yes, his promotion of colloidal silver is a disaster for anyone who takes him seriously, but his ‘expert’ was a naturopath, which is basically just a fake doctor.

My point is: if your ‘research’ didn’t find Binder’s end point, if you’re not covered in the blood and gore of your vaccinated friends and family now or on January 19th, perhaps you’d be better served by not doing your own research, and instead do surveys of real experts. Always remember, there can be fakes even in the ranks of the trained experts, so that’s why you do surveys and keep an eye on politics.

Pope Francis, leader of the Catholic Church for those living under rocks, in caves, or in schismatic Catholic cults, recently expressed, in our over-populated world, his horror at the idea of not having children, of care for, instead, house pets:

That’s one hell of a ‘tell’ when you’ve been dealt a royal flush.

Man with the Screaming Brain (2005) is an attempted send up of the B-class monster movies of old, but having seen a few of those – finally! – over the last several years, I must say I’ve been impressed by the quality of the acting and scripts in many of them – and that’s where Man with the Screaming Brain falls down. It has a lack of timing for much of the humor; gags are executed for the sake of the gag, rather than advancing the story, and this is the fault of the script. Two or three more drafts of the script were really necessary before filming should have begun.

That said, if you’re a Bruce Campbell fan, it won’t hurt you much to see this. However, his memorable Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) was a far, far better effort, and is actually worth your time. This one, despite the efforts of the actors, just doesn’t come off as much more than an amateur effort in the story.

A fun little map of the lands of the Baltic Sea:

Stories about supernatural beings seem to be something that is common to all cultures, handed down from generation to generation, perhaps most often as a way of explaining mysterious natural phenomena. Even in an age when belief in these kinds of traditional stories have declined, they are regular features of the fairy tales told to children, and are still rich sources of inspiration for creators of literature and film. First published in 2012 by Vilnius University Press, the map “Mythical Creatures in Europe” includes 213 creatures from the length and breadth of the continent. Categorising the creatures into a number of general groups by their form, nature and attitude towards humans, the map reveals both enormous variety across Europe and broad areas of similarity even between very distant cultures. In addition to universally recognisable figures such as giants and vampires, there are others that will be unknown to most outside the region where they are found, such as the sleipnir, saratan and barbegazi.

More on the mythical creatures of the Baltic Sea area at Deep Baltic.

Near the end of last year, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) suggested that he all but had the 2024 Presidential wrapped up, assuming former President Trump did not run:

My Arts Editor thought this was too long, but enjoyed its sophistication.