Wonderful Matters

We saw a perfectly wretched motion picture last night, Everything Everywhere All at Once . It was about a woman bouncing through the multiverse being tossed from universe to universe, and while I believe it was trying to make a statement about how nice and non-dysfunctional a family could be, it was actually just a brainlessly meandering, sickeningly creepy, and painfully disturbing hot-mess. After I'd endured the 57th incident of pointless, tedious, and grotesquely bloody martial arts goofiness at just under an hour-&-a-half in, I was done. Turn this idiocy off. All of that wasn't even the most disturbing part. The most disturbing part was that there were so many who liked it, both reviewers and audience members. At Rotten Tomatoes alone: among over 300 reviewers it got a 95%, which seems pretty good (I know very little about the site). From the 2,500+ "verified ratings" among those posting with the popcorn icon it got an 89%. I could get deep into the film and ...

I haven't even had a chance to put in a modest blog post just to introduce my webzine's latest home page piece . Fall is a tremendously busy time for me professionally-- I don't even know how I put in anything in my web work at all. Definitely a God thing. But I always hope to remark about something notable so this is worth your time. How about this folly?... Today some large number of disled people went out of their way to screech loudly about climate change. At an intersection of a small college town near my home, a town filled with phenomenally disled people -- yeah, I should say here that I intend to say "dis-led," a more accurate form of misled, because these people are listening to, indeed led by the one who's endgame is their destruction -- anyway, at this intersection those people were all in on the folly. Holding up signs about how climate change is this and climate change is that. Pure folly. When someone says, "Protesting climate chang...

It is beautiful outside, sunny, warm, a bit breezy, and while there is likely some area on the globe where a weather event has caused some concern -- even a major one like recently in Mozambique where flooding devastated some places -- for the most part the earth's climate is in good shape. If you were to read the climate alarmist literature from 30 or 40 years ago, however, you'd see that all this should not be. Right now we should be covered in ice, or melting from the heat, or something nasty that man caused because of his profligate living behavior. Well now you've got the Jesuit-administered education system propagandist professors telling the new young socialist-minded Ivy Leaguers running shakedown syndicates like Justice Democrats  and Brand New Congress  telling people like peppy actress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to say things like "If we don't address climate change with radical solutions we'll all be dead within twelve years." The fact that...

I saw Avatar last night with my two sons, and after hearing everyone who's seen it offer up the quite elaborate response of "Wow," I can see why they say that. I could go into great detail of every item of note regarding this groundbreaking picture, but I just want to briefly touch on two things. One is about the production itself, and the other is about something in the story. First, the production. The 3-D effect has certainly come quite a long way. It has become so advanced that many more films, particularly those with the kinds of special effects that were in this one, will be adopting this format. The key thought I had regarded the boundary of our vision, that is, the 3-D effect was limited within that rectangular box. In some sense I felt I was watching a motion dynorama, you know, like those scenes you'd create in the second grade with the cut-out shoebox containing little plastic figures and cotton and pipe-cleaners. Avatar was just like that except every...