OK, here we have a guy is a Star Wars costume balancing on a ball droid while playing fire-spewing bagpipes. What the actual frack? as the kids say…
OK, this is apparently happening in Portland. That probably explains it.
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I’m told this is a take-off on the first two Twilight films, which I haven’t seen. As I have admitted more than once, one of my character flaws is a tolerance for dumb parodies, and this one has one or two talented people in the cast, so I thought it might be worth a try. Well, a Twilight fan with very low standards for comedy might enjoy some parts of this, but I’m not a Twilight fan and even my standards aren’t this low.
by Rob Reiner’s romantic comedy, about an aging and disagreeable real estate agent (Michael Douglas) and a depressed widow and nightclub singer (Diane Keaton), is watchable but formulaic. It begins when Douglas’s estranged son drops off his daughter (Douglas’s granddaughter, who he had never even known existed) on the way to serve a prison sentence, and Keaton pitches in to help because Douglas is obviously not up to the job. It’s OK but forgettable.
by This famous image of the Moon was shot on Christmas Eve 1968 from lunar orbit by Apollo 8 astronaut William A Anders in the Apollo 8 command module. He and his crewmates Frank Borman and James Lovell were the first humans to orbit the Moon or see the far side directly, though it had been photographed by a robot spacecraft a few years before.
For more on the photo, see this page and also this one from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day in September.
For those of us old enough to have been around at the time, it’s a bit disconcerting to realize that it happened 47 years ago. More than half the people in the United States had not yet been born. As of 2014, the median age in the U.S. was 37.6 years. That is, half the population was older and half younger, so most Americans alive today were born in the latter part of the 1970s or later.
The last time humans visited the Moon was in December of 1972. I was present at that launch.
by English writer Kyril Bonfiglioli wrote a trio of well-received comic thrillers in the 1970s that were compared favorably to the works of P.G. Wodehouse. Their hero, Lord Charlie Mortdecai, was an adventurous but not very competent aristocratic art dealer who relied on his preposterously loyal manservant Jock Strapp to keep him out of danger.
Johnny Depp isn’t bad as the film version of the character, Gwyneth Paltrow is lovely and appealing as his wife, Paul Bettany makes a good Jock, and the rest of the cast is fine as well.
So I can’t put my finger on why this movie doesn’t work. It isn’t awful, but it just isn’t very funny, and most reviewers seem to agree. The trailer, on the other hand, isn’t bad:
by During last night’s Democratic presidential candidates’ debate, moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC News prefaced a question with this:
“Secretary Clinton, the Department of Health and Human Services says more than 17 million Americans who are not insured now have health coverage because of Obamacare. But for Americans who already had health insurance the cost has gone up 27 percent in the last five years while deductibles are up 67 percent, health care costs are rising faster than many Americans can manage.”
The obvious question is how those increases compare with previous years. Raddatz didn’t name her source for her numbers, but a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation (link to PDF; see Exhibit 1.11 on page 31) shows a very similar 26 percent increase in average family health insurance premiums over the five year period 2009-2014. According to the same source, for the preceding five years the increase was 34 percent, and for the five years before that it was 53 percent. It’s hard to blame rising premiums on the Affordable Care Act when premiums rose faster before.
Furthermore, under the Affordable Care,
On top of that, about 80 percent of people who buy their own coverage qualify for a subsidy that enables them to pay less than 10 percent of their income on premiums, often a lot less. The very poor can get free coverage through Medicaid (except in states that for political reasons rejected Medicaid expansion).
I don’t mean to paint too rosy a picture here. The rise in deductibles Raddatz mentioned is a significant source of concern, though conservatives have long advocated higher deductibles as a way of inducing people to shop around and negotiate for cheaper care (not something many of us are inclined to do when we’re sick, especially when doctors and hospitals don’t like to reveal their costs up front).
And even though premiums are rising more slowly than they used to, the rate of increase still isn’t sustainable. Something needs to be done, and it’s fair to ask what.
What isn’t fair, though, is to imply that the Affordable Care Act is making healthcare less affordable when it pretty clearly is not.
For more on healthcare costs see this page on the Kaiser Family Foundation website. There’s more on the Affordable Care Act in these posts from my blog:
by This typically entertaining Discworld novel sends the elderly witches Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, together with their younger colleague Magrat to a place rather like New Orleans to help a young woman rather like Cinderella avoid marrying a prince.
Half the fun is getting there, with the witches encountering dwarves, a vampire, a werewolf, and foreign food and drink, while Granny Weatherwax complains and Nanny Ogg cheerfully tries to “talk foreign” to the bafflement of the foreigners. Not everybody likes Pratchett’s comic fantasy, but if you do, you’ll probably enjoy this.
by An experiment at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, suggests that dogs behave altruistically toward other dogs, especially toward dogs they know.
The experiment involved teaching dogs to pull a string that delivered either a treat or an empty tray to another dog in an adjacent cage. Dogs showed a preference for delivering the food tray, especially when the other dog was known to them. This involved multiple trials to attempt to rule out random accidents and other explanations.
More details at this link.
Such “prosocial behavior” has been seen in a number of species, sometimes instinctual (as in the case of vampire bats who feed starving colleagues) and sometimes involving situations not normally encountered (as in the experiment here) and hence likely reflecting some level of thought. In other research I’ve read about, primates have also shown prosocial behavior, and in addition primates and dogs have exhibited annoyance when seeing another animal receiving apparently better treatment. See this earlier post, which has an amusing clip of the experiment in action.
by For the easily amused, about a dozen references to Star Wars in 40 seconds:
Examples: “But if you Luke farther west, you will be seeing a glimmer of sunshine if you’re Wookiee. However, there will be a fairly light breeze. The force is strong, though, for northern Scotland. And then tonight the weather strikes back. … Now if you’re forced to awaken early tomorrow morning it will be on the dark side…”
by Some reasonably amusing stuff here, with the usual caution that there’s some (mainly) accidental indelicate language here and there. It runs 15 minutes and would have benefited from additional culling. Not every last clip is a winner. But I think there’s enough funny material to make it worth passing on.
(By the way, the clip starting at 1:38 is from a station I used to work for, many, many years ago.)
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