Tag: movies

Wenzdaz Wandering Political Thoughts

Wenzda finds me in a cheerful mood after reading some news.

Slop is the word of the year. The slop and state of the U.S. reminds me of the early Nazi efforts, back in the early 1930s. The German Nationalist party was still calling themselves socialists while attacking unions and communists, trying to get a grip on the population’s support. That grip finally came when the economic situation became dire. With employment hemorrhaging, unemployment rising, industry and trade faltering, prices rising, affordability decreasing, and shortages increasingly common, the NAZIs finally gained control. Patient and duplicitous, they were in it for the long haul.

This does remind me of now. Trump is a front. A distraction. His antics, nonsensical babble, tirades, and failing health give cover. His regime’s Project 2025 players feverishly work on making things worse behind the scenes. They push tariffs on Trump in the name of returning industry and economic power to the U.S. They’re bright enough to know that it’s really raising prices, reducing trade, decreasing tax revenues, while increasing the deficit.

This is all about manipulating the economy, which lets them manipulate consumers, which permits manipulation of voters. This is about making voters angry, desperate, and distrustful of the government, the media, and everyone else. This is about setting the stage for the next phase of their takeover.

They easily lie to Trump about what’s going on. They keep him in a bubble and feed him fake numbers. Trump, being the restless, self-centered, low-information guy who he is, easily swallows their lies. He wants and needs to believe it’s working because to combat his insecurity and the secret despair of how inferior he is. Information about his falling poll numbers is fed to him. He’s reminded that this is former President Biden‘s fault. That it’s fake news. That increases Trump’s frenzy and increases his distraction.

It’s well-established that when Trump gets more distracted and frenzied, he doesn’t calm down. He doesn’t step back to think. He spins up the crazy. Lying and cheating made him a ‘successful’ businessman. Spinning up the crazy got him a ‘reality’ show. Becoming crazier, and more openly hateful and sexist — telling it like it is — won him elections. Tacitly encouraged by his handlers, he’ll spin up to dangerously unstable levels.

Meanwhile, the Project 2025 folks will smile or look away. Let Trump go off and destroy himself. Go ahead, take down the GOP. Most Republican elected officials lack principles. They just want to remain in office. That keeps them relevant only in the minds of voters who don’t pay attention. Voters with short memories, little understanding of history, and less interest in thinking about it. They don’t want to think of themselves as dupes.

Trump’s handlers aren’t too concerned about the midterm elections or even 2028 POTUS elections. They give less than a fuck about the GOP and any ‘vision’ they might put forward. No, let them talk and strut. Just as we know who they are, so do the creators of Project 2025.

This is the long game. The serious right wingers, once called Neocons until that became tarnished and flailed, started their destabilization efforts in the United States long ago. Remember PNAC? PNAC wasn’t a failure. It did the job needed and was put to bed. Project 2025 is another step after PNAC and the Foreign Policy Initiative.

This is just the middle segment of the long game. They don’t have the right leader for the next phase. Not yet. They know it’s not JD Vance. Like Trump, Vance is easily manipulated, bent, and controlled. Like Trump, Vance is greedy and vain. But Vance lacks Trump’s charisma and oversized personality. He doesn’t lie and bloviate with Trump’s charm. Vance looks, smells, acts, and sounds like a snake oil hawker.

No, they need someone else. It wasn’t going to be Charlie Kirk. He was just riding on Trump’s coattails. Somewhere out there is Project 2025’s next leader to destroy the U.S.’s democratic republic and replace it with a white Christian fascist state run by oligarchs and true believers.

That leader could be a woman, a woman with charisma and charm, who can smile while lying and get everyone to laugh along with them, a woman who hates other women, who desires power because she’s morally bankrupt and needs attention to fill the many holes in her spirit. Basically, a female Trump.

Such a woman could speak to other woman and convince them that she should be the first female POTUS. She would deny Project 2025 — just as Trump did — and vow to restore the United States. She’ll fix the economy and restore dignity to the office and return rights to Americans. Then, in office, she’ll fill her cabinet with a new version of MAGA sycophants and play from a new edition of the latest update to Project 2025. Because remember, Project 2025 was written for now, the middle segment of their long con, to take advantage of POTUS 47’s availability and his staunch base.

The next phase is out there, waiting to be written and put in place. Unless we can do something about that AI slop and the disastrous Trump Effect on the United States being fostered by the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.

And that must begin now.

No kings? Hell, no crazies. No NAZIs.

No slop.

4

Mundaz Wandering Thoughts

We were once again facing the eternal question: where should we sit?

My wife and I agree upon many things. We also disagree on many things. She’s much more probable to violently curse when something goes wrong than I am. She’s better at remembering birthdays, faces, names, and gifts. I am really good at untying knots and finding things. None of that is really related to today’s topic. In essence, she’s an indo and I’m an endo.

I generally give her to her when the challenge arises. That means that we’ll sit in the middle. “Let’s move to the middle. We’ll have a better view.” That’s typical indo logic.

As an endo, though, I prefer the row’s endcap. Let’s face it, being on the end has multiple obvious advantages. If you’re leaving, you can stand up, turn, and walk away fast, without the bother of waiting others to stand, stretch, grunt, wake up, and realize where they are. As an endo, bathroom breaks are more easily possible. In an emergency, of course, being on the end is the place to be, preferably by the emergency exit. That’s how endos think.

I started as an end in school, though. I just preferred a little separation from the other young animals who’d been brought together to be taught. Being on the end offers more perspective to me. Easier to turn around and stare at someone. In the middle, you’re part of the end. On the edge, you’re, well…the edge.

It’s amusing when a group comes together and they’ll all one group or another. This come up at the beer group last week. Most of the initial joiners were endo. We ended to corner seats, leaving the middle free. But latter people were like, “Guess I’ll sit in the middle here.” Then they tried making it positive. “Hey, I can hear and see more from here.”

That’s an endo, trying to be an indo.

Not that it’s really important, but where do you fall on the seating spectrum? Are you an endo, or do you enjoy the middle?

1

Satyrdaz Theme Music

It’s Satyrda, Oct 18, 2025, also known as No Kings II. This is a day when We the People come together to remind Trump, Project 2025, the GOP, and the rest of the world that the United States rejected kings ruling them twice before, in 1776, and then again when the idea was floated before G. Washington. We didn’t want kings then; we don’t want them in 2025.

My spouse and I spent time last night constructing our signs and finalizing our plans. This morning, my wife came to me. “I screwed up,” she said. “My doctor appointment isn’t 1:30, it’s 11:30.”

Oh. That changed things. Originally, we would hit the rally from 11 to 1, leave at 1 and go to her appointment. Now we’ll go to her appointment and then head to the rally when it’s over.

It’s a brisk fall morning out there. Plentyo sunshine, clear, blue sky, but just 39 F at our place. 75 F will be ours before the night pulls in.

For the record, the Epstein Shutdown continues along on cruise control. Republicans are mostly content to let things slide and refuse to fix healthcare issues for millions of Americans. That’s just how they roll.

Today’s song comes from a convo with my wife last night. I was doing a load of delicates. Did she want to put anything in? Sure. She zipped around doing her collection, then came to me and said, “I can’t find my sports bra.” I found it in the laundry basket. She’d just overlooked it. But meanwhile, The Neurons projected a song variation in my head. They had me singing, “Looking for my bra in all the wrong places,” to the tune of “Lookin’ for Love”. “Lookin’ for Love” by Johnny Lee was a 1980 hit associated with the movie, Urban Cowboy. We were livin’ in San Antonio, Texas, at the time, and you could not escape the song. Anyway, The Neurons kept it going in the morning mental music stream. That’s how it came to be here.

Coffee is flirting with The Neurons. Time to get up and at them. Hope grace and peace find us all today and maybe stick around long enough for us to get to know them. Hope to see you at the protests. Cheers

0

A Friend’s Tale

One of my co-vacationers is a retired schoolteacher. While his specialty and favorite were teaching six-graders, he taught a kindergarten class one year. One of the young students brought in his pet rat for show and tell. As the littles gathered around to ogle the rat, the teacher did a James Cagney impression, saying, “You dirty rat.” A child instantly leaned in and continued the Cagney impression, “You shot my mother.”

The teacher was flabbergasted. He asked the child, “Where did you learn that?”

The child replied, “That was in a Jim Carney movie.”

Of course, the Cagney quote never happened, except in the Jim Carney movie.

2

Health Update

Spent Satyrda & Sun recovering from the gall bladder episode. I’m not a doctor. Don’t even play one anywhere. Not even in my mind. But I was too familiar with the upset gall bladders symptoms for the one previously experienced in July to mistake it for anything else.

So, watched telly on Saytyrda. Pulp Fiction and No Country for Old Men. Unfortunately, it was on Miramax, who are apparently squeamish about any variation of fuck and also disliked some scenes and left them out. Slept off and on Satyrda through that, but itched a lot. After going through a day when even drinking water nauseated me, I ate a bowl of oatmeal about midnight, which was the day’s sustenance.

Much better on Sunda. No abdominal pain at last but wary of eating, I searched the net for safe foods for gall bladder problems and gall stones. I resumed exercising. Had lean grilled chicken for dinner. Now aware that if I start feeling unusually full, as I’d noticed previous to both of the attacks, I reduced my intake and monitored myself.

Now the itching. There’s casual effects between being enormously itchy and gall bladder matters. They’re not sure what causes it, according to my net reading, but they think it might be something called ‘bile salt’. Whatever it is, man, places just suddenly exploded with itchiness. Breasts and chest. Scrotum, ankles, belly, underarms, wrists, palms, soles. It does afflict just one place at a time, like wrists, but it’s both wrists simultaneously, both palms, both soles, etc.

On the bright side, my other medical issues have taken a back seat to the gall bladder thingy. I’d say that’s mighty kind of them.

3

Thirstda’s Wandering Thoughts

TL/DR: AI is fucking up. And that’s fucking us up.

One of my childhood passions were cars. From that grew an intense interest in auto racing. It wasn’t something that I shed as an adult. Passions aren’t easily surrendered. Yeah, as an adult, auto racing, with its environmental impacts, ridiculously increasing costs, and inherent dangers, lacked substantial commonalities with the human condition and the challenges Earth and humanity face. I excused myself for decades with the subterfuge that we don’t want a vanilla existence. Year after year I followed sports car and Formula 1 racing. For a while, I also hunted NASCAR, IMSA, and IndyCar news. But sports car and Formula 1 was it for me. As I aged, the passion became muted and dulled. Part of that was that the sport just wasn’t as competitive. Aspects of its relevance to real existence also troubled me, though, and that grew.

One of the Internet’s commercial strengths is that it notices what you look at, and then baits you with more of the same. The net noticed I checked out LeMans this year. It came up with reminders about Ford’s victories at LeMans in the 1960s via the Ford GT. That effort was highlighted not long ago in a movie called Ford v Ferrari.

A story about Ford’s 1967 LeMans victory grabbed my eye. Driving a red Ford GT Mark IV, American drivers Dan Gurney and A.J. Foyt took LeMans in record form. I built a model of the car within a year. It sat on my dresser among my other models until I moved out of Mom’s house four years later. Eagerly, I read the story. Then I wondered: how many drivers have won both the 24 Hours of LeMans and the Indy 500?

I put it to AI; how many drivers have won both the 24 Hours of LeMans and the Indy 500?

AI responded, slightly paraphrasing, Lewis Hamilton won it in 2011 and Max Verstappen has won it four times recently.

WTF?

I know that Lewis Hamilton has never raced at Indy or LeMans. Nor has Max V. Both are Formula 1 champions.

The entire AI answer was fantastically fucking wrong. Now, if I didn’t know the sport, I may have been fooled by the answer. Which pushes the wonderment in me, how many people consult the Internet for truthful and factual information and are being fed wrong answers? How many lack the resources or awareness to challenge the veracity of what they’re being fed?

For shits and grins, I asked AI again. This time, one source said, “…while only Foyt has won both the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Indianapolis 500.” Another told me, “Only one driver has won both the Indianapolis 500 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans: Graham Hill.”

So, both answers are wrong, because I knew before asking that Foyt and Hill were the only drivers who accomplished this.

Wrong info on the net is not new. We’ve joked for years, “It was on the Internet so it must be true, ha, ha.”

But the shit is getting deep. The way that wrong information is advancing and spreading with AI’s gentle assistance, the joke is now on us.

0

Munda’s Theme Music

Hot, I say, hot. Munda, June 9, 2025, will be anywhere from 99 to 103 F in Ashlandia. Where would we be as a civilized society without electricity and A/C?

It’s already a helluva week and it’s just Munda. Wildfires still burn in Canada. We have protestors in Los Angeles facing off against National Guard. Gov. Newsom of California is asking the guard to be removed. Trump, of course, will thumb his nose at that. There’s a more general feeling that Trump is eager for this situation and unmindful of law or violence. There’s also a question of legality. From what we’ve seen of TACO, doing illegal acts bothers him less than lying. So the whole question is probably destined for the Roberts Court. I won’t guess about how they’ll respond. Besides that, there have been several fatal aircraft accidents, part of a disturbing trend for 2025. On the weather side, Hurricane Barbara has emerged. Fortunately for the U.S., it’s not expected to nail our nation, but unfortunately for Mexico, the same can’t be said.

Still disturbing the political horizon is the ridiculously named “One Big Beautiful Bill”. The longer it storms, the worse the bill seems to be. Many are angry about its impact on Medicaid. Others, like former First Bro. Elon Reeve Musk, complains that it will add to the deficit and is loaded with pork. The Congressional Budget Office say it will add trillions to the national debt. More people are angry that there’s a stipulation in the bill that will keep Trump administration officials from being declared in contempt of court. Others, like Marjorie Taylor-Green, voted for the bill but is now upset that it strips states from the ability to regulate Artificial Intelligence. Bitcoin marketeers are excited about the bill because many of them believe it’ll led to hyperinflation and the potential to rebase the US economy from the dollar to crypto.

As they say, time will tell.

Moreover, against these events, June 14 is Saturday, a perfect storm of TACO celebrating himself with a military parade for his birthday. It’s all about his ego. TACO has never served in the military but he feels that he should be honored with a military parade. This, from a man who frequently insults military veterans. He’s planning this parade while complaining about fraud, waste, and abuse, using that as a reason to chop up government agencies, don’t you know. That parade is expected to cost anywhere from 25 million to over 100 million dollars. Depends on what’s included, and who’s doing the addition. Either way, a penny over a dollar is too much and runs wholly and rudely counter to Republican squeaking about ‘the deficit’. That’s the way they always are.

Countering the TACO parade, several organizations are coming together in mass protests against TACO and his positioning via strongarm tactics and lawlessness as either a king, dictator, or PINO for life. Besides that, it’s Father’s Day on Sunday.

Watching events in Los Angeles, I ended up with Led Zeppelin and “Immigrant Song” in the morning mental music stream. The song’s been used in several movies, like School of Rock, Thor: Ragnorak, and Shrek the Third, so people who wouldn’t regularly know it are familiar with its driving staccato beat and Robert Plant’s wailing. Immigration, of course, has always been about trying to find a better place, and so it is the case with this song. On the issue’s converse side, the inhabitants of existing places often had something to say about immigrants coming into ‘their’ land.

Coffee is at hand again. I’m getting out of reality and slipping into story-telling and writing mood, somewhere were greed and evil is successfully countered, unlike the shitshow that we call reality. Y’all have a good one. Cheers

5

Sunda’s Wandering Thoughts

I wonder if they’ll ‘reboot’ the James Bond movies by re-making them.

Will there be a female or trans 007? I know a Black 007 has been discussed.

Oh, sorry, I remember that Casino Royale was considered a reboot, and that several subsequent movies have been called ‘reboots’. I don’t get that. Guess what I was/am thinking about are ‘remakes’. Will they remake, for example, Goldfinger?

Wonder what other films could be remadeand how they would be changed? Would anyone dare touch The African Queen, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, or The Godfather?

I watched the first Murderbot on Apple. I was disappointed but I seem to be in a minority. I never heard/saw Murderbot as a male, and the character’s dry disparaging humor seems to be absent. Well, IMO.

2

Some Light

Some Light

Tell me all your secrets

I’ll share a few of mine

We can talk and have coffee

Or maybe a glass of wine

You can tell me about your first love

And what you do for fun

About your first kiss, about your last love

And how that came undone

We can walk together under stars

Mention all the past

Or remember funny movies

And laugh until we cry

We can shake hands before we go

Or maybe kiss good night

I’m not looking for that much

I’m just searching for some light

~ m.w.seidel

6

Frida’s Theme Music

Clouds have moved into Ashlandia. As neighbors go, they tend to being quiet but flighty. They’re also large but I don’t want to body shame anyone.

With the clouds, we get warmer nights but colder days. Last night only slipped down to 51 F. Today’s high will be 61 F. Will it rain? Let me consult with my digitized Magic 8 Ball. Magic 8 says “It is decidely so.”

Today, BTW, is marked as Friday, April 25, 2025. One third of 2025 is about to end. Despite all of PINO Trump’s promises, preening, and bullying, the Russia-Ukraine goes on. The government is in miserable shape and not saving any money. People are losing 401K money because the stock market and bond market are waaayyy worse than under the previous POTUS. Tourism is down. Talk and worries about empty shelves, increasing unemployment, recession and even economic depression is increasing. Pundits already call it the Trumpcession.

PINO Trump responds to it all with glee. “Look how much money my billionaire friends made.” He alternates that with, “What, me — worry?”

I have The Outsiders performing in the morning mental music stream. The song is “Time Won’t Let Me”. Released in 1965, it grew into a hit and radio staple. That led to its purchase as a 45 RPM offering. The record became part of the basement playlist in our neighborhood. We usually did that over at Tracy and Carolyn’s house, as they had a finished basement.

The Smithereens did a cover for the 1994 movie Timecop, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. I admit, I prefer the original song.

Coffee has come to my aid again, fortifying my psyche for reading the news. Hope you’re all well out there in streaming land, cuz here we go. Cheers

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑