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Open thread 10/30/2024

{ 13 comments… add one }
  • ghostsniper October 31, 2024, 3:42 AM

    cathedral?
    greenhouse?
    acoustic design space?

    • Casey Klahn October 31, 2024, 7:17 AM

      Reminds me of where the forced air dissipates in Colorado Springs (USAFA).

      BTW my son & I are binge watching Masters of the Air, with a free week to get it done. I’m mostly liking it. Worth your watch – the air combat scenes are some amazing spectacles from the visual perspective. I’ve long chided the air force because that’s what you do when you’re a grunt. Then, one Memorial Day, I was at the Florence, IT US military cemetery and honoring the fallen under those rows and rows of grave markers. My attention went then to the mausoleum with it’s beautiful memorial pieces, and then: the names. Names like a host of angels: hundreds of names and overwhelming in their number. Those are the aviators whose remains don’t fit in a grave plot.

      That got my attention. WWII air combat proves that, while war is hell, air combat is a mother %4#@er.

      • ghostsniper October 31, 2024, 5:22 PM

        Looked it up. Apple TV. We don’t do that. Dam.
        Guess I’ll keep watch to see if it shows up elsewhere.

        • Casey Klahn November 1, 2024, 6:56 AM

          Same here about Apple TV, but I risked it just once to take the 7 day free trial. Now to un-subscribe today; we ripped through the 9 episodes.

          I enjoyed the stuff relating to the characters, the drama or narrative, and the aerial combat. I also enjoyed how they presented the uniforms correctly, instead of the typical Hollywood intentional skew of ribbons and sundry characteristics of the uniform. The Flying Fortresses look incredible.

          I have critiques, too. I may never watch Spielberg and Hanks again. But, I’ll save that for after the readers here have had their chance to enjoy it.

      • azlibertarian November 1, 2024, 1:00 PM

        I admit to having a passing interest in Masters of the Air, but not enough to actually seek it out. This is a battle in our house, but IMO, we already have faaaar too much streaming available to us. The entire cable spectrum, with the HBO and Starz channels, Netflix, Prime, Disney Plus and Hulu. I just can’t stomach adding Apple even if only for a free week in order to watch Masters.

        Hanks’ public political views are far different than mine, but his acting skills are good enough and he’s been able to avoid DeNiro-level obnoxiousness that I’ll still watch him. I have no argument to brook with Spielberg.

        In the past month, my YouTube feed has brought me several of these “reaction reviews” of 20-somethings watching, and then reacting to their first viewings of Saving Private Ryan. It has been great to see them grow to appreciate what their great-grandfathers did for us.

        • Casey Klahn November 1, 2024, 1:34 PM

          I hear ya on being over-cabled. But, I successfully dodged paying anything for the Apple TV week; successfully managed to unsubscribe before the payment clicked in. Having said that, you can wait for the disc set or for the eventual release of the series for free somewhere like Amazon.

          In my viewpoint, art must be unified or else it fails. Film is art, and MOTA had more little political points available for the liberal watcher than ever in the Spielberg/Hanks universe. Everything not serving the main story was a drag on the whole. I was being preached to and didn’t care for it. I mean, I liked the patriotic parts, the courage and leadership of the characters on their trajectories. But, the stuff liberals like was out-of-place and shoved down your throat. SPR and BOB and Pacific were cohesive and tight, in spite of their great lengths. No sidetracks that I could tell in having watched them all several times over.

          Spielberg is supposed to be a great director or, in this case, producer, but it felt like a film maybe produced by the Soviets or the Chicoms, only with American socialist content. I can’t believe he’d sully his artistic body of work this way, but these guys breath communism like it was their oxygen.

        • ghostsniper November 2, 2024, 4:06 AM

          I can honestly say that I have never subscribed for any TV channels since arriving here in the north almost 19 years ago. My wife originally had one of the dish companies install their stuff but it was disconnected about 15 years ago and since then she’s subscribed to a couple streamers. I don’t know much about that stuff so if we watch anything it is her choosing.

          I’ve sat there and watched her try to find something to watch and it seems to be another one of them technological fiasco’s centered on “too much stuff” and most of it junk. Same with my Samsung phone. Does a LOT of stuff (so they say), but takes forever to figure it all out. So it mainly sits on the desk and I rarely use it.

          I spent 20 years waist deep in everything technology and couldn’t get enough of it and then almost overnight in the early 00’s I just got fed up with all of it. Now, I can take it or leave it. It could all go black tomorrow and I wouldn’t cry for very long. When this site shuts down in a couple months I’ll miss all you folks, though some of you I’ll still “see” now and then here and there, but it won’t be the same as when we were members of “Gerard’s Club”. These are the good times we’ll remember in the future.

  • Anne October 31, 2024, 12:25 PM

    Thank you Casey.

  • DT October 31, 2024, 4:13 PM

    Halloween night. Just can’t get into it this year. The scary stuff comes Tuesday anyway.

    • ghostsniper October 31, 2024, 5:30 PM

      This is the 18th year in a row I have purchased a bag of Hershey’s miniatures for the trick-or-treaters and it always ends the same way. No one showed and I’m eating a few of them miniatures right now. The distance is too great for todays soy kids to muster. Besides, their parents keep them primed with plenty of sugar and strange man-made chemicals anyway.

      When I was a kid, 1955-1973, sweets of any sort were very rare and therefore trick or treating was a big todo. At the end of the evening my mother would collect all of it from us 5 kids and put it in a big container and divvy it out to us a piece or two at a time over the next couple of weeks. Binging wasn’t possible and all of us remained skinny our whole lives.

  • John A. Fleming October 31, 2024, 9:20 PM

    We had a smaller than average collection of trickertreaters this year. There weren’t as many middle-schoolers, as in none, and just the little kids came by. Every year I put out a carved pumpkin, in our family style as when I was a boy, with a candle inside. I also put out right next to the door an arrangement of pumpkins, squashes, gourds, colored corn cobs: a harvest still life. This year I included some tangerines as additional decorative elements. One kid, it must have been his first year, he wasn’t sure yet on the whole concept of getting candy from strangers, but he walked right up to the still life and grabbed one of the tangerines. And wouldn’t let it go or put it in his basket. To him, it was a pumpkin just his size.

    My daughter on her first Halloween picked up on the concept immediately and with enthusiasm. “Go to people’s houses and get candy? Oh I am so down with that!” She wanted to run between the houses.

    I’m not sure where all the kids are. Our street is kind of dark, it doesn’t have any street lights and there are lots of shade trees, so maybe the kids are intimidated. I put out my pumpkin where the kids can see it from down the street. And a lot of my neighbors are sticks in the mud, they don’t really make their houses welcoming for the tricker treaters. It’s weird, because they doll up their front yards with all sorts of Halloween grotesqueries and decorations, there seem to be more than ever this year, bigger and more elaborate. Not for me, I’ll stick to the basics.

  • Snakepit Kansas November 1, 2024, 6:08 AM

    I had a big bowl of candy last year. Not one person showed up. None last night either.

    • ghostsniper November 1, 2024, 6:51 AM

      There’s little incentive for kids to Trick or Treat any more since all household now are filled to the rafters with sweet and salty snacks, the evidence is the gross amount of obesity everywhere.

      Inexpensive corn syrup and it’s ugly cousins are in everything these days and what it’s not in is instead laced with GMO’s and every kind of filler material you can imagine and more.

      Lot’s of evidence out there proving a civilization in decline if one has the intestinal fortitude to recognize it.

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