Oh boy, this is going to sound bad.
Rain Man is a movie that doesn’t often get mentioned, but it should because it’s relevant to what’s happening with children today. While watching it tonight, it struck how looking after an autistic person is like having a dog. Yeah, that doesn’t sound good at all, but hear me out.
It’s an obvious game. Nobody cares about dictionaries, so at the end of the year, dictionaries get some attention by coming up with a word of the year. Then, because journalists are lazy, they get a column out of it.
This is too mundane for anyone to address, but a couple of words come to mind that we use frequently, but just aren’t very descriptive.
I have a cold. That happens all the time to everyone. That’s too close to being cold. If I say a head cold, that is a little better. Doctors call it an upper respiratory infection, but that sounds too long, and could be a sinus infection, which is much worse. Just come up with a word that is definitive and isn’t dependent on the rest of the sentence.
Dream is another one. If someone says that they had a dream, you know a boring story is coming. If someone says that they have a dream, you know something important is coming.
In Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, he goes on to refute everything that the modern progressive holds dear. MLK wasn’t talking about something that came to him while he was sleeping. He could call it a fantasy, but that sounds disjointed from reality and conjures images of dragons and heaving bosoms. We need a word that means a future reality that we should work toward.
Does anyone have sleeping dreams of the type portrayed in media? Those dreams are always carefree fantasies that write themselves. Some people have vivid dreams and some have vague dreams. People remember them, or they don’t. Freud thought that dreams addressed an issue that came up the previous day. That sounds more likely.
I don’t know. The word “dream”, just sounds like a romantic notion that can be tossed into a sentence, and people can take it a bunch of different ways.
I’ve been scanning and organizing old photos.
A year after I started at Caterpillar, management sent me to a week-long SLAM training course in Chicago. Turns out that a random bunch of engineers can be a lot of fun.
Since I may be two-thirds of the way through a Christmas miracle, I decided to watch Miracle on 34th Street.
Compare and contrast with our current culture.
Mary and I visited the Notre Dame cathedral in 1991, back when you could still do fun stuff like hang from the clapper of a giant bell.
Our tour guide was impressive. He switched from English to German to French so smoothly, often in the same sentence, that everyone could follow what he was saying without having to repeat himself.
Jaguar ad implores the audience to “live vivid”.
More like livid. That’s what Jaguar owners, car guys and British people are. Livid, as in furious, angry or enraged.
Livid also means “darkish, purple color” or black and blue, like a livid bruise. Which is what Jaguar will be left with after nobody buys the new models. To make it worse, Jaguar is pausing their manufacturing to retool to build the new EV models. This is the new Jaguar concept car.
The EV market is rough. Tesla sells half of all EV cars, with customers generally preferring hybrid cars to avoid the problems that come with a battery-powered car.
Jaguar is owned by Tata Motors. Tata is a large, diversified Indian company. Tata bought Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) from Ford for $2.3 billion in 2008. JLR has performed well for Tata, but with this Jaguar re-branding, that may change. Land Rovers sell well, and if that brand isn’t ruined, Tata can survive the death of Jaguar.
Here is the Jaguar ad that will kill the brand.
Caitlin Jenner recently posted this YMCA video because he shows up in it.1
I’d never seen this music video before, and that’s surprising because I was a fan of The Village People. I even bought the Macho Man 8-track.
At the time, my oldest sister told me that one of the Village People was gay. She was being informative or mean-spirited, I don’t know, but I found that difficult to believe. Like, what are the chances that a construction worker, soldier, Indian chief, policeman, motorcycle punk2, or cowboy, would be gay?
Turns out, the chances are about a 100%.
Apparently only the cowboy and Indian were gay, but teh gays sure liked that song.
1 The subject and pronoun don’t match in that sentence, but that’s not my fault. This human was the man, Bruce Jenner, at the time. I didn’t make up this stupid linguistic fur ball.
Along the same line, I don’t apologize for using “queer” in the title. The politically correct, “LGBTQIA2S+”, is intentionally unwieldy and absurd. Anyone attempting to stay current with the label is bound to be wrong because any letter can be added and the new members of that group will be furious. The Q is in there, so they can’t be too offended that it applies to all of them.
2 What I thought was a motorcycle punk, is the “Leatherman” character. I thought the character was similar to the Eric Von Zipper character in the beach movies of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.
I may seem astoundingly unsophisticated, but that’s what it was like before the internet. There was no way to look anything up.
When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, there were many Twitter posts from celebrities and influencers describing poignant reactions from their young children. The posts were too on-the-nose, and people called bullshit. This time, it’s “Just So” stories purported to have been written by high school girls or teachers.
Newsweek: Political realignment
This article in Newsweek is evidence that the elite class are finally starting to figure out why they are wrong all the time. The authors did make a fundamental mistake. Trump caused this political realignment. John McCain, Mitt Romney and other establishment Republicans were comfortable managing the decline of America. My younger brother called them puppet-dickheads.
This last week, during an interview with Republican Vice-Presidential candidate JD Vance, ABC’s Martha Raddatz tried to dispel concerns about Venezuelan gangs infiltrating Aurora, Colorado by stating that only “a handful of apartment complexes” in the city were affected. Listen more closely, and that benign-sounding dismissal is actually more sinister than it seems.
Euronews: Fire station burns down.
Germans are known for being smart and industrious, and not questioning their leaders. This leads them to getting too swept up in ill-advised causes.
A fire alarm system wasn’t installed in the building because experts did not consider it necessary.
A new fire station in Germany that was destroyed in a fire, causing millions of euros in damage, did not have a fire alarm system.
Germany has building codes. Someone made the decision to exempt this new fire station from customary procedures. Nobody objected.
Buried in the news report:
The fire broke out on an emergency vehicle belonging to the fire department, which contained lithium-ion batteries and an external power connection.
Lithium batteries burn very hot and are difficult to put out. When an electric car burns, fire fighters don’t extinguish the burning battery, but keep the fire contained. Why did the fire department need an electric vehicle? Because Germans are suppressing the smart part of their brains, and embracing the EV cult.
Here is respected physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, explaining “Why I’m embarrassed to be German”.
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