I should be at Costco or Planet Fitness right now, but since I usually wake up around 7 am, an early afternoon nap seemed like a good idea. Being a well-mannered pup, Sparky waits for an invitation to hop up on the couch. He is far too cute not to be invited up.
Congress dragged me back in the game, so now I want to win.
Social Security is a game. It’s not like roulette, where the risk corresponds to the reward. It’s not much like blackjack where there is a clear strategy to narrow the odds. Social Security is more like that Fun Fair “Mystery Fishing” game where every player gets a prize, but there are better prizes and worser prizes.
It’s a good thing I ordered early. Sparky would have lost all faith in my judgement. The pet bed warmer I got for Sparky is completely ineffective. I’d have better luck keeping Sparky warm by reciting bawdy limericks all night.
National Geographic: In Japan, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is a Christmas Carol.
In Die Hard it’s a nice touch that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, ‘Ode to Joy’ is a recurring musical theme in the movie. Since NatGeo says “Ode to Joy” is a Christmas carol, then you’d have to be anti-science to disagree.
Sparky and I watched another Christmas movie. Die Hard is so good, that we also watched the corresponding episode of The Movies That Made Us. It was a leap of faith to take Bruce Willis from Moonlighting and turn him into John McClane, but not such a big leap since everyone else turned down the role. Frank Sinatra had right of first refusal, but he was too old and rich to do it. Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, and a bunch of other actors wouldn’t go for it.
For the science deniers who can’t accept that Die Hard is a Christmas movie, here is definitive proof.
My current project is to digitize all of the photos I’ve ever taken. That sounds daunting, but for the first half of my life, film had to be purchased and developed. Figure 25 cents per photo, which would be 75 cents in today’s money.
IMDB has a useful advanced search page. The search was for movies rated over 8.0, in English and with more than 100,000 votes. IMDB started in 1990, so that may explain the lower rankings before 1990.
Falling Skies is okay. Not great science fiction, but good. The special effects are convincing, but there isn’t much of it. Most of the action takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth. I haven’t watch much of The Walking Dead, but it’s along that line. The good guys are fighting the monsters in addition to a few bad guys. The best thing about it is the series runs to completion, wrapping up the story.
Since I may be two-thirds of the way through a Christmas miracle, I decided to watch Miracle on 34th Street.
Shouldn’t that headline be in the present tense? Nancy Pelosi coerced Biden into dropping out of the 2024 presidential election after the debate with Trump showed that Biden was too mentally feeble to continue with the campaign. If Biden is too frail to run for president, he is too frail to be president. We haven’t had a function president since July.
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