Potpourri - and I get more pi #*ed off with Microsoft

Hi Carolyn,


It's Don .... remember me?


Well, I always figured that once the summer was over things invariably tended to slow down, or at least fall back into the  steady and less hectic work-a-day routines. 'Tis anything but around here. No big crises or earth-shaking events - just a collision of a bunch of things that make for fast times, shall we say. Our daughter is in the final stages of  buying her first house,  it's the Canadian Thanksgiving, I'm doing the 65th birthday thing and a long time good friend recently passed away.  All of a sudden I look to see that it's been  a fair while since last I was hereabouts.   I'd been squirrelling away little tidbits of this and that herein so that I could simply come back and stitch them into a publishable entry. So it's potpourri time.

Lotsa planetary news of late. The Mars having regular water movements thing is certainly cool but the stuff from and about Pluto, for me , is even moreso. Mars is close enough and scrutinized to the extent that unless NASA has pics of a contingent of Martians parading about with placards reading " Welcome, earthlings, please park in the designated areas" or " Thanks, but no thanks! " then it's not really all that amazing. Converesely, detailed and up close ( relatively speaking )

pics of the surface of Pluto, are. They're pictures of something we've simply never seen at anywhere near this level of detail before. It really does stir up that sense of wonderment and reminds us of just how miniscule we are in the big picture.

Alas, it also makes me wish that I could be here about three centuries hence when we may well be checking out such places first hand.  

Your adventures with the faceless telephone voice promising to save you from a digital disaster were something else. Perhaps I'm caving in to that introvert on the edge of being a hermit thing I was on about earlier, but I've gotten into the habit of checking the call display on my landline for calls. If it's a local call, but not a number I recognize, I generally take it - unless it's clearly a telemarketer. If it's a long distance or 1-800 exchange with no identifiable info on display I generally let it play through to message time. Particularly persistent scammers have made their way through on occasion, but I think it's been a reasonably effective first line of defense.

For some reason though, after hearing about your adventures in scamsville, I got to thinking about how con- artists, as portrayed in literature and on the screen,  are sort of a minor strain of heroic anti-heroes. It also sent me back to a movie from " back then " that I haven't run into since but when ever I hear about some kind of scam I automatically think of. It was called  The Flim-Flam Man  and starred George C. Scott. I actually enjoyed it more than The Sting no doubt because of Scott's presence.

Scoundrels successfully pulling off the big con  do have a certain heroic cachet, don't they.  Whether it's knocking off a Vegas casino, or a payroll train, or a big bank's safety deposit boxes, or a snooty art gallery or smuggling stuff across the galaxy for Jabba the Hutt, there is some impetus to cheer for the bad guys in this scenario.  The cops may have the law on their side but the robbers may actually  have the upper hand in terms of charisma.


I'm quite certain, however, that you had no such feelings about the real life  sleazy types in the  attempted ripoff routine you dealt with. In fact, my better half just reminded me that she answered the phone earlier this week and was greeted by someone in very halted English claiming to be from Microsoft. She simply said " Good-bye and stop trying to suck people in! "

Okay, some other tidbits to scrunch in here. Probably the most downright freaky weather related item I encountered was a sidebar item that came on the weather network along with the coverage of all of the severe flooding in South Carolina and along the lower eastern seaboard. I'll just stick a bit of the Weather Network text in here - it's sourced from National Geographic and appeared under the somewhat provocative title of "Invasive species" and how they are surviving this climatic upheaval. 

However, it seems fire ants are prevailing against what state officials are calling a 1,000-year storm.
Notorious for their painful bites, fire ants have the ability to link legs and create a raft out of their bodies.
Bands of these insects have been spotted braving floodwaters across South Carolina.
A colony of fire ants can build a raft in less than two minutes and can survive for weeks, provided they eventually reach land, according to National Geographic.
"The ants move their queen and larvae to the center of the raft, where they stay high and dry on top of the mass of bodies. The fine coat of hairs on the ants traps enough air that those on the bottom layer of the raft avoid being completely submerged," National Geographic reports.
The invasive species are indigenous to swamp lands in Brazil, which flood on a regular basis.
Source: National Geographic

 There was a picture along with this  fascinating article but it doesn't seem to want to make it through this cut and paste thing under the new Windows software. Also, the newer version of Windows doesn't seem to like the Blogger platform when it comes to previewing things - I tell ya... it's all pushing me to join the Apple/ Macintosh movement full-tilt !

My daughter, aided by the good folks at Amazon, sent me this tasty paperback item for my birthday and I've actually found myself up reading it when I should have been getting horizontal shuteye. I'm most of the way through and it's been one of the most engrossing, enjoyable, entertaining books about the movie business that I've read in a good while.

 There'll be a full tilt reviews type thing once I've digested it  but I do want to stick in a wee bit here. Caseen Gaines, the author, interviewed extensively over a period of many months before writing and publishing this account in April of 2015. At one point he included an insightful quote from director Robert Zemeckis about how his directorial approach has changed since he made  the Back to The Future trilogy. It really nails how making movies for millennials differs from the old school days:

" Back in those days I was much more of a taskmaster. I would make my actors hit those marks and always be in the light, and now I've kind of - I don't care as much anymore," Zemeckis says. " I wouldn't allow there to be a camera bobble in any of those films. If the camera jiggled one frame, I'd have to do the take again. But nowadays, audiences are so different. I don't think they appreciate the attention to detail. Maybe subconsciously they feel it, but maybe they don't. Having a perfectly composed shot doesn't matter if you are watching it on an iPhone, does it? You wouldn't see it."

I also can't help but think that I wouldn't have been as attuned to this kind of change in perception if I hadn't read your stuff about dealing with millennials awhile back, Carolyn.

Mind you, I'm still looking forward to trading in my  five and a half year old iPhone 4 for an updated model with lotsa new and funky features stuffed into its hardware and software.

Okay, there's more stuff I wanted to get to but I'll save that for the next go round, just so I can get this one in the can and out there.

See ya later, and it's good to be back.

Don

All images sourced from Google Images ( despite the clumsy interference of Windows 10 )

Fig. 1 - www. nasa.gov

Fig. 2 - www.lewiswaynegallery.com

Fig. 3 - theentertainmentnut.wordpress.com