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OK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.
And here’s my first attempt…
I just screen-shot them…
Go click on this link to try it yourself…
CrAIyonOK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.
This is pretty good. Style options are not present, though.
Go click on this link to try it yourself…
Stable-diffusionOK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.
Personally, I do not like the results…
Go click on this link to try it yourself…
RunwayMLOK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.
This one takes a little bit of time to figure out and work with, but it’s not that difficult.
You upload a “seeder” image. Blur it to represent the amount of change you want, pick a style. Write a description and the AI does the rest…
Here’s some examples when I typed in a sentence, and then clicked on the style icon…
I think that it is fun.
Now, let’s put a completely different image in the system. Everything else stays the same…
This is part of a much larger “package” of tools for image manipulation and what-not. All in all it holds promise.
Go HERE to see the full “toolbox”.
You need to purchase “credits’ to continue using this product.
It shows promise, but playing around for ten minutes isn’t enough time for me to judge it’s worth and utility.
I probably will get back to it and play around some more. Just not right now. I have others that I will evaluate before then.
Go click on this link to try it yourself…
DreamstudioAIOK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.
Here’s some examples when I typed in a sentence, and then clicked on the style icon…
I think that it is fun.
I just set up a brief sentence (I only have five tries), and then conducted variations…
Go click on this link to try it yourself…
Pixlr-XOK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.
The capabilities of artificial intelligence just keep expanding, and this includes different kinds of art. We’re going to introduce you to an app that lets you create digital images with the help of AI technology. Dream by Wombo is available for mobile and online, but the former has more to offer. Learn how to use this AI artwork mobile app and what you can expect from it in just a few steps.
Here’s some examples when I typed in a sentence, and then clicked on the style icon…
I think that it is fun.
Now, I did all of this on my computer. But you don’t need to. You can download the APP.
It’s good.
It’s free, though you can buy a premium subscription.
It produces basic, recognizable art. The art style is cute / childish / basic illustration. Suitable for graphics, presentations and children’s books.
It makes nice renderings of cats and kittens. And after all, if you cannot render a kitty, then what is your value?
This app is perfect for decorating books, websites, walls, or custom playlist art without hiring a professional illustrator or graphic designer. It’s fast and easy.
Whether you’re on your phone or computer, Dream by Wombo’s AI can quickly produce stunning images in an artistic style of your choice with a simple prompt.
The browser-based version is simple enough to use and has a Mint as NFT option, while it lets you download or buy a print of your AI artwork. The mobile app, however, puts more tools at your disposal.
We’re going to show you how to use Dream by Wombo on your smartphone or tablet, step by step. But first, make sure you have the app.
Download: Dream by Wombo for Android │ iOS (Free)
Go click on this link to try it yourself…
DreamOK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.
Rabbits instead of cats. Same style generator.
Changed the preset to Anime.
Go click on this link to try it yourself…
NightCafeOK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.
DeepAI offers an easy-to-use text-to-image generator that produces decent results with the right prompts. There are many image styles on offer, and almost half of those are free.
The free ones include basic text-to-image, cute creatures, fantasy worlds, cyberpunk, old, renaissance painting, and abstract, among a few others.
All of these styles produce images according to that theme, pretty much like the other tools on this list. However, among these styles, there is a logo generator as well that you can use to produce interesting logo ideas. It’s particularly useful for artists who are looking for inspiration to build on or to overcome a block.
Here’s some examples when I typed in a sentence, and then clicked on the style icon…
Pretty good.
You need to play with it, because if you use the wrong feed generation icon, your images won’t look “right”.
Here, I used the architectural icon for a house-based sentence…
I think that it is fun.
This one tuned out pretty good…
Go click on this link to try it yourself…
DeepAIWe are over the transitional period. Over the next year or two, the dawning of understanding will creep into the collective minds of those that “lead” the West. How this will manifest can be anything, but I remain hopeful…
However, I am often wrong, and I fail at least 50% of the time in my predictions. Though, I’m often quite correct on trend-lines. Outcomes. Not so well.
What outcomes?
Who know what will happen. I don’t.
Have a great day.
Self explanatory.
Those of us who consume western msm are not delusional when we state there is an anti-China editorial policy in western newsrooms.
I always find with these stop-motion animation films that the wonderful Harryhausen creations always far out-act the human talent! Sadly, here is no different – Todd Armstrong in the title role and Nancy Novak as ” Medea” are as wooden as the Argo in this retelling of the ancient Greek myth.
It is still, however, an exciting action adventure though, with plenty of episodes to keep it moving along as Jason fights monsters and treachery to seek out the legendary Golden Fleece from the distant land of Colchis.
It’s got a decent enough, largely British, supporting cast with Honor Blackman standing out as his patron “Hera” and Nigel Green making for a wonderfully over-the-top “Hercules”, but the spoils definitely go to Talos, the Harpies and the skeleton battle is fabulous.
https://youtu.be/1c8NvctkSzs
No
Not even half as much!
Chinese people thinks the U.S. system and policies are daft and don’t work. They don’t hate the country and certainly don’t hate the people. There is very few who are racist like some Americans.
The Chinese people sees Americans as good customer and America as huge market. The treat customers well. They will never be submissive and subservient to you as to them they are a far more mature and intelligent person. You can think what you want but that what they think about themselves.
They saw through the manipulation and cheating of the so call international rules based international order and so does most others. And they will certainly not allow it to perpetuate. Quite rightly so. They still hope you guys comes to your senses soon before you implode.
The Chinese are at least 3 full steps ahead of Americans in thinking and response. You can rant and rave if you want but frankly it is not beneficial to hate the Chinese or China or CCP. The U.S. will lose more. If China maybe they can it means 100% it can be done. China will be either your biggest customer or your biggest competitor that U.S. your choice.
Milk in America and Canada underwent a major deterioration in taste in the early 1970’s. In the UK and Europe it happened in about 1980.
Milk undergoes significant and irreversible biochemical changes once it is heated above 64.5˚C. And these changes are readily detected as a deterioration in the taste.
Prior to 1980 in the UK, and roughly the early 1970’s in North America, milk was commonly pasteurised by heating it to between 63˚C and 64˚C and holding it in that temperature bracket for 30 minutes. It was a protocol developed in 1906 by Public Health officials in Massachusetts, who were desperate to persuade people to drink pasteurised milk instead of raw milk. But bringing milk close to boiling meant the wonderful rich taste of the milk when raw was lost. So the public bought raw milk by choice.
With what must have been a considerable amount of research, they found that by heating milk above 63˚C but below 64˚C, and maintaining the temperature for 30 minutes, the pathogens were killed, but the rich taste of the milk was not damaged. After WWII it became the widespread approach to pasteurising milk.
But in the 1970’s a far faster method was developed, which was to heat the milk to 73˚C and run it through pipework for just 15 seconds. The pathogens they were concerned about were effectively killed off by this method. And though the wonderful rich taste of the milk was damaged, the industry was persuaded to switch over to the new approach by the great cost savings it brought.
And since that switch in the mid 1970’s the per capita consumption of milk in the USA has declined by over 40%.
In movies from the 1950’s and 1960’s you often see a glass of milk at the dinner table. Look at movies made since 1980 and a glass of milk is a very rare sight. If you have never tasted milk produced using the old protocol, then you do not know what you are missing.
My wife is a dairy farmer, and we pasteurise and bottle our milk for sale through shops across Scotland. (In Scotland milk sold to the public has to be pasteurised.) Ours is one of the very few dairy farms in Scotland using the old approach. We tried (once) heating the milk to 73˚C but hated the way the taste was dramatically altered, in our view, damaged. And so we stick to the slower, older method. But we have noticed that, should someone forget to turn off the heating elements at the wrong point, and the temperature of the milk in the big pasteurising vessel goes above 64.5˚C, it then develops a “sticky” quality. We studiously avoid this happening, as that stickiness means the vessel is suddenly a nightmare to clean.
As milk goes above 64.5˚C the proteins are increasingly denatured. And the denatured proteins then coagulate with the butterfat. And this seems to be what causes the stickiness. I presume it is also involved directly in the alteration of the flavour of the milk.
And so the vast majority of the population on both sides of the Atlantic have no experience these days of good old-fashioned drinking milk. And that’s a big pity.
Addendum: there’s an important topic that is related to all the above.
Crohn’s Disease has surged in the years since the HTST process was adopted, and it appears there is a direct link between the two topics. There is a very widespread disease amongst cows & cattle called Johnes Disease, and it is caused by the Mycobacterium avium subsp. tuberculosis, commonly referred to as MAP.
The bacteria, once introduced to a herd, is nearly impossible to get rid of, as it can survive in the cow pats in fields for years.
There is currently no treatment for Johnes Disease, which is a wasting illness of the digestive tract. The symptoms of Johnes Disease and Crohn’s Disease are identical. While it is a simple matter to demonstrate that Johnes Disease is caused by MAP, there are ethical barriers which make a similar determination of MAP and Crohn’s Disease impossible.
We can’t have two groups of healthy people, and expose the folk in one group to viable MAP, and see what happens. But there is an enormous body of circumstantial evidence pointing to Crohn’s Disease being caused by MAP. Some 10% of supermarket milk sold in the UK (for example) has been found to contain viable MAP, i.e., 10% of milk on those shelves just might cause Crohn’s Disease in people who consume it on a regular basis.
The older process of 63˚C for 30 minutes is actually 10 times more effective at killing off MAP than the typical HTST process. Longer exposure to high temperatures are needed it seems, and this is why the HTST approach is a poor process for milk pasteurisation.
China’s Fujian air wing is slowly taking shape, possibly making it the first carrier worldwide capable of launching 5th-generation stealth fighters from its decks.
Few days ago it was reported that China might be preparing to deploy a new stealth fighter or perhaps a stealth drone from its Fujian aircraft carrier, incrementally building the combat capabilities of its third carrier and flagship naval vessel.
It is noted that the J-31/ FC-31 will complement the J-15, China’s only carrier-based fighter. It also mentions that the J-31 will be used for air supremacy missions due to its stealth characteristics, while the J-15 will be limited to ground and sea attacks.
However, the report notes that both the J-31/FC-31 and the Fujian are still not combat-ready, with the J-31/FC-31 still undergoing ground tests and the Fujian expected to perform sea trials later this year.
China’s J-31/FC-31 has a 2,000-kilometer estimated range, maximum takeoff weight of 28 tons, an operational ceiling of 15 kilometers and a top speed of Mach 1.8 or 2,205 kilometers per hour.
FH-97A Loyal Wingman drone is an AI-powered unmanned stealth aircraft designed to complement the J-20 stealth fighter. Unlike other loyal wingman drones, the stealthy FH-97A has a 1,000-kilometer range with a six-hour maximum flight time.
The FH-97A is designed for air-to-air operations, noting that it has a front-mounted EOTS and internal weapons bay for six infrared air-to-air missiles. Apart from air-to-air roles, the report mentions that it can perform secondary missions such as surveillance, suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) and electronic warfare. Considerations are being made to develop a carrier-based FH-97A variant featuring in-flight refueling capability.
A classic color revolution to disrupt the southern border of Russia.
Archaeologists in Peru have uncovered a monumental temple site where they discovered unique human burials wrapped in fabrics printed with bizarre zoomorphic designs. These bundles contain the remains of deceased individuals, as well as various offerings and personal belongings wrapped in multiple layers of textiles, often with intricate designs and patterns. Found in tombs and caves, many burial bundles have been preserved for hundreds, or even thousands of years.
PAP reports that within one burial mounds, archaeologists identified the wrapped remains of a young boy whose skull was “ intentionally deformed .” Wrapped in a three meters (9.84 ft) long cloth which was decorated with “totally unique zoomorphic representations,” the researchers reported that the boy was born into a “high-status family.”
Cranial deformation was a common practice in Peru. The process involved binding the heads of infants to create a flattened or elongated skull , often with the intention of denoting social status or cultural affiliation.
Łukasz Majchrzak is a bioarchaeologist focused on pre-Columbian cultures in Peru, specializing in health, diet, and lifestyle. Majchrzak, said the boy’s wraps were covered with “unique” zoomorphic representations, and similar fabrics have never been found anywhere in the Andes mountains to date.
Dyed fabric found in a tomb at the top of the site, dated 772 -989 AD Photo: Łukasz Majchrzak
The team of archaeologists were excavating what they describe as “a monumental temple” on the Cerro Colorado hill located near the city of Barranca in Peru, when they found the series of “unique tombs.” These were not ordinary burials because the people within the graves were painted and wrapped in high-quality fabrics.
Located near the coastal city of Barranca in Peru, Cerro Colorado is a famously red hill which is caused by high levels of iron oxide in the soil. With expansive panoramic views of the surrounding landscape, including the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, this important archaeological site features a sunken plaza and an amphitheatre, which were utilized in the pre-Columbian era.
The recent excavations were conducted by a team of archaeologists from the Jagiellonian University and St Mark’s University, in the “Los valles de Barranca ” project. According to a report on Nauka W Polsce , four earthen mounds were excavated in 2022 and, amidst a monumental temple structure, four tombs were discovered containing painted human remains wrapped in high-quality fabrics that dated to 772 AD – 989 AD.
Cross-section of a Peruvian mummy bundle. Source: Juulijs / Adobe Stock
The above dating determined that the graves belonged to the Wari culture , whose legacy can be found at Castillo de Huarmey, located only 70 kilometres (43.5 miles) north of Barranca in the Huarmey district of Peru. Castillo de Huarmey is a 16th-century coastal fortress built by Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro’s brother-in-law, Jerónimo de Aliaga. The castle is known for its unique blend of Spanish, Inca, and Chimú architectural styles and contains numerous well-preserved murals depicting daily life in the region, and a Wari mausoleum.
On two of the newly excavated pyramidal mounds, the monumental temple was found to have been constructed using dried red clay bricks and stone blocks. This discovery inspired a large-scale excavation of the site which revealed the burial bundles, also known as “fardos funerarios”.
An example of a Wari burial bundle (Public Domain)
Research revealed that while the burials dated to between 772 AD and 989 AD, the temple complex itself was built between 2500 and 2200 BC. This dating is derived from two of the four structures, with the remaining two not yet excavated, so the site might prove to be even older.
Majchrzak explained that such settlements, with “imposing architecture,” were built in the Andes during the third millennium BC. As agriculture spread, as a result of increasing interactions with communities residing in the Amazon, later Andean cultures established burial necropolises in abandoned deeply-ancient places of worship, believing their ancestors were buried within the timeworn pyramids.
Top image: Peruvian mummy bundles, representational. Source: Bayamin / Adobe Stock.
By Ashley Cowie
It says in Chinese: emergency relief, 1 set.
The photo is from Türkiye, and relevant information has been censored on the US platform.
Look at how it was “reported”…
Then here comes the question: did the US military buy these materials or just “borrow” them from Syria? Shouldn’t there be a comprehensive public verification of the executors?
LOL.
The West is too dysfunctional and weak now to fight on all fronts. Yet there can be no retreat without some de-legitimising humiliation of the West.
Just occasionally, a window is opened onto the truth of how the ‘system’ works. Momentarily, it stands naked in its degeneracy. We avert our eyes, yet, it is a revelation (though it shouldn’t be). For, we see clearly how tawdry has been the attire which clothed it. ‘Liberalism’s’ seeming success – almost wholly an ephemeral PR production – serves only to make its underlying internal contradictions more obvious; more ‘in your face’ – much less credible.
This unravelling speaks to a failure to satisfactorily resolve liberal modernity’s inherent contradictions. Or, rather its unravelling derives from the choice to resolve a waning legitimacy, through an ever more totalistic and ideological reaching for hegemony.
One such window has been the sordid affair of the UK pandemic lockdowns – as revealed by a paper trail leak of 100,000 ministerial WhatsApp messages, managing the lockdown project.
What did they show (in the words here of pro-government leading political commentators)? An ugly picture of how a western Establishment interacts in adolescent sniping at each other, and in its utter disdain for the populace.
Janet Daley writing in The Telegraph:
“It [lockdown] wasn’t about science, it was about politics. That was obvious as soon as the government began talking about following The Science – as if it were a fixed body of revealed truth … they were engaged in a deliberately misleading campaign of public coercion. The programme was designed to frighten – not inform – and to make doubt or scepticism appear morally irresponsible – which is precisely the opposite of what science does”. “The model for the monumental government programme in which sitting on a park bench, or meeting with extended family, became a criminal offence – was the nation at war. Horrifying levels of social isolation were deliberately designed to present the country as mobilised in a collective effort against a malign enemy. Much of this went way beyond what we generally regard as authoritarianism: even the East German Stasi did not forbid children from hugging their grandparents, or outlaw sexual relations between people who lived in different households. Every other consideration had to be relegated in a heroic national struggle against an invading army whose objective was to kill as many of us as possible. And this enemy was particularly insidious because it was invisible”.
Sherelle Jacobs: “We have been granted a rare glimpse of Power’s true nature away from the media gaze: how, in private, it schemes, swears, sulks and derides. On full display are all its dismal paradoxes: its fierce megalomania and constant seeking of reassurance from political aides; its tendency to groupthink and relentless sniping. “One feels a new cold solidarity with 1970s [Watergate] America in its horror at the “low-grade quality of mind” that characterised their political class. But perhaps the strongest parallel with Watergate is that … the state’s operations seem suffused with humdrum nihilism. It is there in the amused crusades to “scare the pants” off people. It is in the deadpan mocking of holidaymakers locked up in quarantine [hotels] (“hilarious”). It is in the remorseless dedication to “the narrative”. “How zealously the state threw themselves into implementing draconian measures, once it had decided at HQ that lockdowns were the correct populist call. We have come to learn how Hancock (Health Minister) conspired to “sit on” scientists, who he denounced as “wacky” or “loudmouth” for defying the official lines. We must digest the knowledge that civil servants insisted the “fear/guilt factor” was “vital” in “ramping up the messaging” during the dubious third lockdown. Just as unedifying is the revelation that, in the run up to this lockdown, politicians seized on a new variant as a tool to “roll the pitch with”. Perhaps most galling is Patrick Vallance’s (Scientific Adviser) advice that the Government should “suck up the media’s miserable interpretation of scientific data” to then “overdeliver” in an atmosphere of cranked up fear”.
“We see the PM appallingly served and briefed. Almost suspiciously so. At one stage, he is so in the dark about Covid’s fatality rate that he misinterprets a figure by a factor of one hundred. [Yet] the most revealing moment came in June 2020, when the mild-mannered Business Secretary, argued for certain rules to be advisory rather than compulsory. At this stage, Covid circulation had plummeted – deaths had fallen by 93 per cent from the peak: “Why is she against controlling the virus”, the minister complains. She is motivated by pure Conservative ideology! The Cabinet Secretary retorts [i.e., she is libertarian]. “The Lockdown Files include thousands of attachments sent between ministers. When I first came across them, I hoped to find high-quality top-level secret briefings. Instead, ministers were sharing newspaper articles and graphs found on social media. The quality of this information was often poor, sometimes abysmal”.
The ‘Lockdown Files’ – as published in the UK by The Telegraph – expose a toxic culture where any minister or civil servant asking “awkward” questions knew they were liable to be briefed against, sidelined or ostracised. ‘Off the boil’ Members of Parliament thought to oppose lockdowns were placed on a secret Red List, and the then Health Secretary’s aide wrote, “these guys’ re-election hinges on us: We know what they want”.
But the Files reveal something even more chilling. What was the overall public response to the publication of the files? Plainly said: It is that a majority of the people are so numbed and passive – and so in lockstep – as the state inches them through a series of repeating emergencies towards a new kind of authoritarianism, that they don’t fuss greatly, or even notice much.
To be clear, the Lockdown episode is iconic of this new schema of control effected through hegemony, ideology and tech. Autonomy for the individual – and his or her search for a life, lived with meaning – now is displaced by its opposite: The instinct to subjugate and dominate, and to impose order on an inchoate and seemingly threatening world.
The surveillance-based liberal managerial state has, as Arta Moeini has written, ballooned into “a totalistic and aspiring globe-spanning Leviathan”, fraudulently disguised in the feel-good casing of liberal democracy – the key liberational elements of which, having been long replaced by their antonyms, in an Orwellian inversion.
To be clear: All the excesses of state power that occurred in the UK during the pandemic were permitted within the realms of the Western political system. The state may at any time suspend the rule of law for what it deems the greater good. The pandemic merely exposed the workings in extremis of liberal democracy – channelling Carl Schmitt’s notion of a “state of exception” being the source-code to state ‘sovereignty’ over the populace.
In this ethical vacuum, and with the capsize of societal meaning, western politicians can only snipe coarsely at one-another, Lord of the Rings-style, whilst hoping to surf whatever ‘the narrative’ and the media ‘play’ of the day can ‘up their level’ in the power matrix. To be blunt, in its lack of any deeper guiding principle, it is purely sociopathic.
However, in pushing the pendulum of the liberal schema so hard over towards the hegemony extremity, it has caused the other end to the spectrum of the overall liberal schema to catch fire: The demand to respect individual autonomy and freedom of expression. This antithesis is particularly apparent in the U.S.
Liberalism was conceived during the early French Revolution as a project of systemic liberation from oppressive social hierarchies, religion and cultural norms of the past, so that a new order of liberated individualism could come into being. Rousseau saw it as a radical clean break from the past – a disembedding of the individual from family, church and cultural norms, so that he or she could better evolve as a unitary component to a redeemed universal governance.
This was the meaning to liberalism in its early phase. However, the subsequent Reign of Terror and mass executions under the Jacobins signaled the schizophrenic connection between ‘liberation’ and the desire to force compliance on society. The persistent appeal of violent revolution versus imposed (Utopian) ‘redemption of humanity marks the two oppositional poles to the western psyche which today is being ‘resolved’ through the tilt to ‘hegemony’.
This inherent tension between the radical liberation of the individual and a conformist ‘world order’ was to be resolved via ‘new universal values’: Diversity, gender and equity – plus restitution awarded to the victims for earlier discrimination suffered. This ‘liquid modernity’ was thought to be ‘globally neutral’ (in a way that Enlightenment values were not), and therefore could underpin the western-led World Order.
The contradiction inherent to this was too evident: The Rest of World sees the ‘liberal’ order as an-all-too obvious device to prolong western power. They refuse its ‘missionary’ underside (this aspect was never present outside the Judeo-Christian Sphere), and the claim that the West should determine what values (whether Enlightenment or Woke) by which we all must live.
The non-West observes rather, a weakened West and no longer feels the need to offer fealty to a global ‘overlord’. The meta cycle of enforced westification (from Petrine Russia, Turkey, Egypt – and Iran) is over.
Its mystique, its thrall is gone, and though lockdown compliance in the UK (and Europe) was indeed achieved through ‘project fear’, the success came at the expense of public trust. To be plain: the authority of Authority in the West increasingly is distrusted – at home, as overseas.
The crisis of liberalism’ contradictions and waning authority deepens.
Carl Schmitt’s other two mantras were firstly, to keep power: ‘Use it’ (or lose it); and secondly, configure an ‘enemy’ as polarising and as ‘dark’ as possible in order to keep power – and to keep the masses fearful and compliant.
Hence, we have seen Biden – lacking an alternative – resorting to radical Manichaeism to bolster Authority against his domestic opponents in the U.S. (ironically casting them as enemies of ‘democracy’), whilst using the Ukraine war as the tool by which to cast the West’s war on Russia too, as an epic struggle between the Light and Dark. These Manichean ideological source-codes for now, dominate western liberalism.
But the West has put itself into a trap: ‘Going Manichean’ puts the West into an ideological straight-jacket. It is a crisis of the West’s own making. Put bluntly, Manichaeism is the antithesis to any negotiated solution, or off-ramp. Carl Schmitt was clear on this point: the intent of conjuring up the blackest of enmities, precisely was to preclude (liberal) negotiation: How could ‘virtue’ strike a bargain with ‘evil’?
The West is too dysfunctional and weak now to fight on all fronts. Yet there can be no retreat (without some de-legitimising humiliation of the West).
The West has gambled all on its fear-led, ‘emergency-crisis’ managed ‘control’ system to save itself. It’s hopes now are pinned on its ‘Beware! The big boss has gone angry-mad’ act; he might do anything’, which it hopes will cause the world to back-off.
But the Rest of World is not backing off – it is becoming more assertive.
Fewer believe what the western Élites say; fewer still trust their competence. The West has recklessly ‘placed its bet’; it may lose all.
Or, more dangerously, in a fit of anger, it may kick over others’ gaming tables.
https://youtu.be/tcyVLMfsZ_4
According to an artist: “It started as a Christmas gift to my wife, who loves the “Woman Yelling at Cat” meme, and has unfolded into an art project called “Memes of the Floating World.” In this strange dream world, classic Japanese woodblock print art and legends mash up with memes, dead and living, and internet lore from the past and present.
I don’t know where this project will take us next, but it’s sure to be at least a little bit dank. Official art prints are available only at Society6, so make sure you can bring the weirdness into your home. Thank you for taking a look!”
More: Memes of the Floating World, Instagram, Society6 h/t: boredpanda
China thrown out into the cold? I think the risk is more serious that the Western countries will be thrown out into the cold by the rest of the world, if things continue developing in the way as they do today. China is bigger than the whole west put together. And the forming camp that includes pretty much everyone else outside North America, Western and Central Europe, ANZ, Japan and S. Korea who aren’t interested at all in taking part in US-led sanctions, ideological, moral and cultural crusades is actually 80% of the world. The world is a very different place than a couple of decades ago…
The below graphic shows the most important trading partners by country in 2000 and in 2020…
The US and the Western Allies would do much better if they wouldn’t push the rest of the world together into an anti-western coalition
EDIT: Following up on the comments about China being only a wobbly economy that is merely based on low cost manufacturing of poor quality “stuff”, and that is supposedly still very far behind the US and the west. I thought I would share a couple of interesting articles from the London-based The Guardian newspaper that will help to bust a few of these myths. I think it’s important that we don’t put our heads in the sand and have a clear picture about the reality
I’m from the US. I live in a part of the country that does not have public transit. We don’t even have Uber yet if that tells you anything. To live in my town you need a car. Plain and simple. You can’t even get a job here unless you have a car or someone with a car who will bring you to work. It’s literally a question on applications: do you have reliable transportation? If your answer is no, forget working there. We don’t have grocery delivery unless you use Amazon. (Well, my grocery store will deliver to me, but it’s not something they advertise to the general public.) And the way that the town is laid out, you can not just walk to the store, the doctors office, your job, or anywhere really.
That being said, some parts of the US like New York City, do have public transit. It’s in need of updating and some pictures of it make me seriously question the cleanliness of it, but it exists. And I’ve never assumed that only poor or low class people use it!
I went to Singapore last year. In Singapore it is painfully expensive to put a car on the road. It’s not like paying US $20 here for a drivers license. No, you won’t put a car on the road in Singapore without a significant expense. But fret not, because Singapore has an extensive, modern, clean, and efficient public transit system. Bus lines and MRT will take you most anywhere you want to go, and you can easily find a taxi or a Grab driver.
I certainly don’t think people in Singapore using public transit are poor or low class! Far from it, even actor Chow Yun Fat who married a Singaporean woman, uses it. It’s convenient and affordable.
China is another country with efficient public transit in many locations. They have high speed trains and were one of the first in the world to use them. I don’t think people in China are poor or low class for using public transport.
What we should remember is that many countries have the infrastructure to support public transit, making car ownership an option rather than a necessity. Perhaps one day the U.S. will realize that they should invest in better infrastructure, making car ownership unnecessary for us as well.
One of the often comments that I have seen is how absolutely terrible China is because all you need to do is go ahead and take a look at it’s bathrooms. And yes, this has been a very difficult impression to discount, because as recently as 2010, most public bathrooms in China has been absolutely horrific.
And when I mean horrific, I mean exactly that. They were totally and absolutely foul, disgusting, dirty, disease ridden death-traps filled with insects, vermin and open sewers. Horrible is putting it nicely.
Used to be.
Has been.
Not any longer.
But of course, with anything good, no one ever reports anything good about China. It’s all bad, and evil, and filthy stuff.
No one ever reports on the good.
Certainly not the United States.
Here’s a nice little video that works to dispel that illusion. Now, you all must keep in mind that pitiful toilets do still exist inside of China. You have a population that is four to five times larger than that of the United States. So it takes time to implement change. Yet, all in all, the changes inside of China are enormous and rapid. Especially when you compare it to the glacial changes inside of America.
Here’s the video.
And NO, it’s not me. This is a video blogger that travels the world and speaks better Chinese than I do. He has a vblog called JaYoeNation. He’s pretty good. LOL.
Take a spell and let it download. If it is taking too much time, you can click on THIS LINK and down load a zipped-file and watch the video directly. It’s pretty good. Please enjoy.
You have got to see the pictures and this video…
I have more posts along these lines in my China Index here…
USA vs China.
China.
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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
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Happy Easter everyone. I hope that you are spending time together with loved one, relaxing and chilling out. For the Metallic-family, we went out and visited a couple of new malls, and ate some fine delicious Thai food, and some mild Hunan food. With wine and beer. Of course.
Later on, it’s a nice long relaxing afternoon with some silly and easy to watch movies to chill to. Please let’s dust off this crazy movie and pop it in the VCR. Listen to the tape a whirl, and watch the movie with a bowl of chips and a chill out attitude.
The Evil Dead series, both in the cinematic and television forms, has a marvelously delirious history. An original film financed on a shoestring budget that plays its horror-centric tone mostly straight but with a few chuckle inducing moments, a sequel that is in essence a remake of the original and was originally supposed to follow the plot of the third film, said third film that goes off in a completely different direction, and now a TV series, 22 years later, that makes no reference to the third installment for legal reasons, therefore technically continuing the story of the first film but unquestionably borrowing the slapstick, overly comedic identity of the third movie. Few popular franchises can claim to having a developmental history has complicated and hard fought as Evil Dead, although one would struggle to consider that a virtue. All that being said, Army of Darkness, which premiered in 1992 but was only released wide in February of 1993, is arguably the most interesting, unique and important entry.
-popoptiq
The beginning of “Army of Darkness” makes a slight adjustment to the end of Evil Dead 2. Originally, Ash is sucked through the wormhole, gets dumped out somewhere in time south of the Renaissance, blasts a flying Deadite, and is immediately worshipped as a delivering saint by a group of medieval warriors. Here we have Ash mistaken as part of Duke Henry’s army, the force that Lord Arthur has just routed from the field of battle. Poor Ash finds himself a prisoner of Lord Arthur, locked in a stock and told to schlep it along.
Back in those days there were not any federally-funded maximum security prisons. Heck, there were not even any small continents or large islands so that a country of Queen-loving citizens could banish their criminals (and the criminals’ children, and their children, and so on) to lifelong incarceration upon the too-big-for-an-island / sort-of-small-to-be-a-continent. Lord Arthur’s solution to this conundrum is that the last of Duke Henry’s men are to be tossed into the Pit. Inside the Pit are Deadites. Obviously, Ash does not want to go into the Pit, but that is exactly where he gets pushed. Things look really bad for our hero, but the Wiseman tosses Ash his chainsaw as a Deadite closes in for the kill. Armed with his trusty chainsaw, Ash is more than a match for any demon. The Deadite quickly becomes just plain old dead.
After he climbs out of the pit, Ash recovers his sawed-off double-barreled shotgun, and then berates the unwashed masses of medieval citizenry (nobles, serfs, and vassals). The good Lord Arthur finds it difficult to say no to a man who carries a boomstick and who eats soul-eating Deadites for lunch. The nobleman can only glare as Ash takes up residence in the central keep, and sets about enjoying the service of the serving wenches. Even a surprise visit by a Deadite hag just further cements Ash in place as a royal thorn in Arthur’s royal side.
For his part, Ash effectively tells Arthur and the Wiseman that they can have the Middle Ages. All that Ash wants to do is go home. He does take a break from yearning for 1992 long enough to construct a mechanical iron hand to replace the one he lost in “Evil Dead 2.” He also puts aside his animosity towards Sheila (they had a rough start) and starts making it with the “Doth do maketh my heart warm with thy presence” sort of stuff.
I am not sure why Ash insists on returning to the present. Maybe he wants to avoid cholera, syphilis, and the Black Plague, but he will be doing that at the expense of a lot of quality time that could be spent eating grapes and wenching. Ah, wenching. Out of everything the Middle Ages stood for, I miss wenching the most. If you ever make it to 784 AD, make sure that you sample the wenches.
The Wiseman finally convinces Ash that the only way he can ever get back home is by undertaking a quest to recover the Necromonicon from a haunted graveyard. Now, Ash is an extremely groovy kind of guy, but he has a hard enough time staying out of Deadite-spawned trouble in his own living room. Mucking around in the land of the dead is going to have serious consequences. The first of those is that Ash gets chased around the haunted forest that is near the haunted graveyard by invisible motorcycles. The second issue created by Ash’s foray into the world of spirits, spells, and specters takes place inside an old windmill. A shattered mirror turns into a mob of tiny troublemaking Ash clones! They poke him with forks, drop things on his head, and generally make Ash wish that he had never had children of any sort. Once he gets the little hellions under control, Ash then has to deal with his alternate Deadite ego, Bad Ash.
One boomstick later, there is only one Ash standing. He is a bad-a**, but not Bad Ash.
Ash does finally reach the graveyard and recover the book (after dealing with two cursed imitation tomes). However, he does not correctly take possession of the Book of the Dead. Yep, Ash flubs “klaatu barada nikto.” As a result, the dead are woken from their endless sleep. Hundreds of skeletons assemble themselves into a massive army, with Bad Ash assuming command as the undead horde’s general. Now Lord Arthur has something worse than the proto-Scots and Deadite intrusions to deal with. Social Security was not created until the 20th Century; figuring out what to do about hundreds of the walking dead who refuse to stay in their graves is a big problem for a medieval noble.
Actually, Arthur and Ash decide to solve the problem the way that most problems were solved during the Middle Ages: they will have a battle!
To prepare for the battle, Ash and the other defenders of Arthur’s castle turn to the textbooks that were in the trunk of Ash’s car (the vehicle was also sucked back in time). I must say, Ash pursued some unusual subjects in college. How often does someone get to say, “That semester of ‘Steam Power 101’ really paid off!” in their life? Unfortunately, the hero has to make his preparations for Ragnarok without indulging in the time-honored tradition of pre-battle nookie, because Sheila is whisked away by a Deadite gargoyle. The next time that Ash sees his gentle lady, she is a Deadite witch and a real ball-breaker.
The Army of Darkness that attacks the castle finds itself on the receiving end of exploding arrows, catapult-lobbed bombs, and even a car that looks like the result of an Oldsmobile having sex with a windmill. Bones are crushed by the human defenders, but the walls are eventually breached, and Ash has a final skin-shedding reckoning with Bad Ash. The evil army is routed, and the only thing left for Ash to do is to go home to his own time. There are two different endings to this movie. In one, we see Ash back at S-Mart, defending the customers and employees from a surprise Deadite incursion. In the other, Ash hits the Rip Van Winkle bottle a little too much and sleeps well past doomsday.
I like “Evil Dead 2” more than “Army of Darkness.” Yet, this is an entertaining cult film. You could even call it a gruesomely groovy comedy. The movie is filled with Three Stooges-style slapstick, and the head-bangs and eye-pokes are so well done that I get nostalgic to watch some old Stooges’ shorts. Still, the reason that everybody loves Ash is that he has some great lines, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Stallone and Schwarzenegger action films of the 1980s, and he delivers them with style.
It is, in a nutshell, a melding of two films: an Evil Dead film and a medieval fantasy action comedy. No one in their right mind would seriously consider the movie to be an outright horror film. Granted, it features some ingredients that would be right at home in a horror movie, but so much of what Raimi and company want to provide is far more along the lines of an action adventure story soaked in the sort of slapstick humour Raimi is known for being a humungous fan of.
-popoptiq
Ai! I have more in my Movie Index here…
MOVIES.
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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
This is a really cool and interesting story. It’s not just that it’s old, but that the cutting, shaping and fitting of the wood was wonderful and precise. Indeed, the workers who made this structure would be just as comfortable making complex and detailed traditional wood homes in Japan as they would furniture and furnishings. Ok, in other words, this was no “log house”. The construction details show absolute precision. And it was all made with stone or bronze tools. All in all, it’s pretty darn amazing.
So…
Instead of thinking that Bronze Age man lived inside of crude stockades and rudimentary shelters, we need to revise our understanding of these people. We need to recognize that they had a degree of skill and appreciation of tools that we were absolutely unaware of.
Here’s a recreation of a wood stockade fort around one hundred years ago in America. It was used to defend against the American Indians who greatly resented settlers coming on to their land, taking their crops, burning their homes and raping and killing their people. Note how the logs are laid and the mere functionality of the arrangement…
And thus…
That is how we all think that the more primitive and ancient humans lived. We have associated them with the crude constructions that we see in our American History books. We associate them with “savages” and crude behaviors.
But, of course, that is not really true.
We know that wonder artistic furniture, homes and structures were the norm throughout history. What we were unaware of was just how long ago they came into being. For according to this structure, around 10,000 years ago our ancestors were building wooden structures like this…
All in all, I think that it is all darn cool, and super interesting.
The following is a reprint of an article titled” Oldest Known Wooden Structure ” By JDZ found at the Neveryetmelted site HERE. It is reprinted as found with very little editing. All credit to the author.
The old well doesn’t look like much – a wooden crate-like object, dilapidated, crumbling a little. But according to new research, it’s really special. A tree-ring dating technique has revealed that the oak wood used to make it was cut around 7,275 years ago.
This makes it the oldest known wooden structure in the world that’s been confirmed using this method, scientists say.
“According to our findings, based particularly on dendrochronological data, we can say that the tree trunks for the wood used were felled in the years 5255 and 5256 BCE,”
…explained archaeologist Jaroslav Peška of the Archaeological Centre Olomouc in the Czech Republic in a press statement last year.
“The rings on the trunks enable us to give a precise estimate, give [or] take one year, as to when the trees were felled.”
The well was unearthed and discovered near the town of Ostrov in 2018 during construction on the D35 motorway in the Czech Republic. Ceramic fragments found inside the well dated the site to the early Neolithic, but no evidence of any settlement structures were found nearby, suggesting the well serviced several settlements at a bit of a distance away.
It was filled with dirt, so an archaeological team carefully excavated and extracted it. It consisted of four oak poles, one at each corner, with flat planks between them. The well was roughly square, measuring 80 by 80 centimetres (2.62 feet). It stood 140 centimetres tall (4.6 feet), with a shaft that extended below ground level and into the groundwater.
Even in waterlogged conditions, the state of preservation of the wood was exceptional, showing marks from the polished stone tools used to shape each piece.
“The construction of this well is unique,”
Peška said.
“It bears marks of construction techniques used in the Bronze and Iron ages and even the Roman Age. We had no idea that the first farmers, who only had tools made of stone, bones, horns, or wood, were able to process the surface of felled trunks with such precision.”
And that amazing state of preservation also allowed for dendrochronological (based on tree rings) and radiocarbon dating, based on radioactive isotopes of carbon.
According to these techniques, the trees that supplied wood to the flat planks on the sides of the well were felled around 7,275 years ago. That’s probably when the well was constructed. But two of the poles told a different story.
Both were felled earlier – one around 7,278 or 7,279 years ago; and the other around nine years before that. This, the researchers concluded, meant that the two posts must have been used previously, and repurposed into posts for the well.
One of the side planks also had a different age. It was quite a bit younger, felled between 7,261 and 7,244 years ago. This is likely because of a repair to the well at some point.
I suppose this wouldn’t matter to most folk. If you want a couch or a chair, you go to a store and you buy it. Little thought goes into the effort and talent in making the furniture. And with today’s mass produced products, and electric power tools, it seems and appears so very easy.
Uh. um.
Well, it’s not. You need to really understand and have a real feel for the wood that you are working with. Or else it will all come out wrong.
And that is one of the things that we seem to take for granted.
That everything seems so easy…
You are hungry, so you go hop in your truck and go through a drive through and in five minutes you have a piping hot burger with fries and a Coke.
You need a new mailbox, you hop in the truck and go to Big Lots and pick one out of a multitude of others.
You want a dormer installed on your roof, you buy a kit, and it is all pre-cut and packaged and you just bolt the entire thing together and boom! It’s all done. Fast, quick and easy.
Jimmie Crickets!
I shudder to think that would happen to civilization if we cannot build or construct things with manual labor, simple hand tools, and a complete dearth of time-saving conveniences. And maybe…
…you should too.
Or this…
I have more posts along this line in my Happiness Index here…
Life & HappinessYou’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
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“The year is 2024…”
A post-apocalyptic tale based on a novella by Harlan Ellison. A boy communicates telepathically with his dog as they scavenge for food and sex, and they stumble into an underground society where the old society is preserved. The daughter of one of the leaders of the community seduces and lures him below, where the citizens have become unable to reproduce because of being underground so long. They use him for impregnation purposes, and then plan to be rid of him. -Ed Sutton
Here we have a movie where the chicks lay up with really thick foundation. Heh he. But, you know they really need to. It’s tough living in 2024.
Despite its ironically cutesy title (“A Boy and His Dog”) and a plot premise that might’ve come out of the Walt Disney archives (dog and boy share telepathic communication), this movie is about as darkly comic and acidic as anything Stanley Kubrick ever did (“Clockwork Orange”).
In the tradition of the great 70s dystopian/postapocalyptic scifis like “Clockwork Orange” (1971), “Rollerball” (1975), “THX-1138” (1971), “Soylent Green” (1973), “The Omega Man” (1971) and I’ll even throw in “The Stepford Wives” (1975), this movie has its appeal in a sort of minimalist presentation that presents a chillingly emotionless and sterile future.
The first half is something like Mr. Ed meets Mad Max, with its equal portions of chatty humor and dusty violence. But right in the first scene we realize that, despite the cute banter between boy & dog, there aren’t going to be many warm fuzzies. In the opening scene we learn that the boy (Don Johnson) is looking for female survivors so he can rape them.
If you can swallow that highly disturbing premise, which the director makes no bones in presenting at the outset, then the rest should be an unsettlingly fun joyride all the way to the film’s very memorable punchline.
Things get really trippy in the 2nd half, and even though there’s minimal nudity, certain things happen which would make D.H. Lawrence blush (particularly involving a certain mechanical device attached to the male anatomy).
Definitely NOT a date movie, nor any sort of movie you’d watch with your parents or kids, “A Boy and His Dog” is really like a lost cousin of “A Clockwork Orange” or “Dr. Strangelove”.
Vic and his telepathically talking sheep dog, Blood, travel post-apocalyptic Arizona. Besides scavenging for food and sex, this movie features old, terrible porn clips, evil Amish looking people with clown makeup and possibly the greatest pun in movie history. Blood provides hilarious commentary to all Vic's endeavors, his comments while Vic and a girl he finds have sex are particularly entertaining. At parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction. - emma505013 May 2004
A Boy and His Dog is as surprising an effort that has ever come into the genre. It is a movie where imagination is pushed to its most cynical, rotten roots. It is a movie where a wealth of pitch black comedy awaits those who have no problem..
… with the repore between a slightly dim dude and a dog…
… a dog who seems to be part comic relief, part ‘get-your-head-out-of-your-ass’ voice of reason.
It should be way too ridiculous to be taken seriously as a piece of legitimate cinema, perhaps as some gonzo experiment that’s dug up by cultists for tongue-in-cheek purposes.
Yet, Jones’s film is, in its way, a weird landmark.
It’s a snapshot of a moment where the basic fronts of a 70s ‘exploitation’ flick (action, comedy, randomness of the 70s, nudity) are put through the perspective of a filmmaker with brains and talent to make it stick in your mind.
This disorderly pre-Mad Max spree is one of the most entertaining post-apocalyptic future movies ever made. You know why? Because it has no taste and in that, it has no inhibitions about the questions it asked about what will happen after the world is spent by nuclear war. It asks about how procreation will happen, how basic sexual feelings will be satisfied, and other things. It has a genuinely original plot involving telepathic dogs that are more literate than their human masters,gunfights wherein the dogs direct their human masters, an entire society underground that discerns who is apart of them or not by wearing clownface at all times, and other crazy things. It's a wild, crazy, tasteless, sex-obsessed adventure that affords the viewer one of the greatest luxuries of the movies, one that is rarely completely fulfilled, which is unpredictability. It's so inventive in every way that you don't know what happens next. Even the comical theme song is so out of place for the genre of the film, but the theme of a boy and his dog makes it suitable. A Boy and His Dog is not a great film, but it's worth watching repeatedly and showing our friends. Another buried treasure. - jzappa
This is extremely low budget but not bad. The conversations between Vic and Blood are hilarious (and Blood’s face and movements totally match the dialogue).
I love the bit when Blood asks Vic to name the presidents (remember, this came out in 1975). He responds “Nixon, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy…” When they meet Quilla (about an hour in) the film falls apart. The sequences down under are, at first, scary but get quickly repetitious. But it leads up to a twist ending which is great.
This was issued in 1975 with a horribly exploitive ad campaign. It showed a woman lying down on the ground. You don’t see her face–just her body and all she’s wearing is a shirt and covering her breasts and other parts. Blood has a paw on her and a proud look on his face and Vic is standing beside him holding a gun! The implication is obvious and the rape aspect of this bothered a lot of people.
Armageddon is a difficult thing to rationalize, lending itself to outlandish scenes of violence and debauchery. The idea of a pubescent Don Johnson wandering the lonely wastelands guided by an intelligent and telepathic dog is a new one on me, but for some reason it all fits. Particularly so when the pooch in question has a bottomless stomach and spouts an endless stream of acidic criticism at Don Johnson. (Often complaining about Vic’s libido. A dog complaining about a teenage boy’s libido, I love it!)
The two lead an idyllic life, scavenging for food and water in the desolate landscape, but sometimes Blood is able to sniff out a female companion for Vic. For some odd reason all the women are in hiding, other than a ravenous and horny Don Johnson hunting them I can’t imagine why.
Well he ends up following Quilla into an underground fallout shelter, there the last “civilized” remnants of society are carrying on tradition. Country fairs, ice cream, and prizes for the best canned goods in addition to trapping fertile males from the surface to impregnate the young women.
Before you start thinking this is not a bad deal let me explain. Vic is immobilized and his genitals attached to the equivalent of an electronic milking machine. (Aiiiieee!) In short succession the lucky brides are wed to him, presented with a bottle of special sauce, and sent on their way. Nearly incapacitated by blue balls the ferocious young man stages a retreat from the complex after being freed, taking Quilla with him. The first (And last might I add.) marital problem results when Vic discovers his faithful pooch waited outside the shelter’s entrance this entire time and is on the brink of starvation.
Zany and fun to watch on a rainy day, plus the girlfriend will never look at your faithful hound the same.
Surely those who were looking for nothing more than what Hollywood usually delivers when they invoke the words "science fiction" were disappointed, because this movie resembles the usual horror or action film masquerading as sci-fi very little.
Its source material is a novella by Harlan Ellison, a writer who's recognized by many in the sci-fi community as a master on the same playing field of "psychological sci-fi" as Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick.
From Ellison we get a very dark tale about a strangely human dog and his boy. They live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where Phoenix Arizona used to be, and hunt women and food with the same predatory zeal. But when Vic (or as the dog calls him, Albert) is lured into a surreal society living in a large bomb shelter, their friendship is threatened and Vic is almost forced to become a sort of sexual machine for the good of the State.
Just to run through some of the aspects of the film that I enjoyed, I really liked Tim McIntire's voice work as the dog, perfectly crisp like a cranky old man. How exactly the dog knows so much or is able to speak to Vic is never really explained, but I think there's a clue in that Lou (Jason Robards, Jr.) believes that Vic has spoken to a dog he encounters in the shelter.
That, along with the "Committee's" seeming obsession with recounting facts and figures almanac-style, makes me believe that the dog actually came from the shelter. Perhaps he was sent there to "observe" Vic, as Lou tells him they have been doing for some time, and he rebelled against their control. Like all good sci-fi the idea is vaguely proposed but never explained.
Don Johnson did pretty good work here, I mean it doesn't strike you as all that impressive at first but when you think about the fact that he had to do so many scenes with just this dog as his co-star it's a pretty tough act to pull off as well as he did.
Susanne Benton was decent in her role as well. I loved when she tried to sweet-talk the dog, basically the same way that she treated Vic. Vic seems confused about her intentions all the way up to the end, which is excellent -- if he had figured her out completely then the ending would just feel mean-spirited instead of humorous.
As it is, it's as if Vic believes he's making a sacrifice but the dog knows better and turns it into a joke. By the way my girlfriend thought the last line was too tacky but I thought it was perfect, it gave narrative closure to the film as well as filling in those who might not have understood the scene with the campfire.
Honestly the only performance I wasn't crazy about was Jason Robards'. There's these great scenes he gets to play with Alvy Moore ("Green Acres") and Helene Winston (great laugh she's got... she didn't make a lot of movies but strangely enough just this week I saw her in Curtis Harrington's "The Killing Kind").
He just has no energy, I guess that's the way he wanted to do it but it's annoying how he kind of mumbles through the dialog and I just didn't feel that the dialog was supposed to be quite that casual.
Basically I just did not like the way he decided to play the character, I didn't think it was scary at all. His android assistant, like a twisted American Gothic, is pretty strange though.
Plus I never understood why everyone down there was wearing clown makeup. Was it the idea of the forced smile?
Anyway, I salute the film because I think it was a brave decision to make it as it is and not to try to turn it into a more conventional thing with romance or too much action. I think I can see some influence from this movie on George Miller's "Road Warrior" (though I was told that he claims he hadn't seen it), and definitely on "Slip Stream" with Mark Hamill from the 80s.
But this isn't really the kind of movie that was made to fall into place inside the pantheon of "sci-fi" anyway. It's a closer relative to "Electra-Glide in Blue" and other films of the early 70s that explored the bitter end of "hippie" idealism, the same trend that Hampton Fancher was trying to catch onto when he wrote his first drafts of the film that eventually became "Blade Runner."
Frankly I can't remember seeing another sci-fi film that is so close to the feel and ethos of the most transgressive and anti-establishment sci-fi of the 1960s.
- funkyfry
Watch the movie. It’s a great romp into 1970’s science fiction. And, as such, perfect for a nice lazy afternoon, or a boring evening at home.
If you enjoyed this article, please check out similar articles in my Movie Index…
MOVIESYou’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Ray Harryhausen was a mainstay of my childhood. His movies were regular features on the Saturday matinees — on television, not in theaters; I’m not THAT old! — and they sucked me in every time. How could they not? No sane young boy would be anything but engrossed by giant creatures slugging it out with heroes in sandals, and Harryhausen’s creatures were AWESOME. -Revisiting Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
It’s no secret that Hollywood has gone over the deep end and into the abyss of the bland and uninteresting.
It’s a combination of things. Firstly [1] , an over reliance on CGI and computer animation has somehow replaced decent story-telling and the passions inherent in the traditional movie genre. Secondly [2], the invasion of Political Correctness and rewrites for the LGBT crowd, and the war on white males, and traditional male roles has pretty much isolated Hollywood to the Land of the Loons. Thirdly [3], an over reliance on classical superheroes… you know, suddenly by magic, a person gets super-powers… get’s dull really quick. Finally, fourthly [4], just how many sequels do you need to make before the customers stop coming to the theaters?
Here’s some examples of contemporaneous Hollywood fare…
Yup Hollywood is going the way of the Dodo Bird, and like their political leadership, haven’t a clue as to how absolutely ridiculous they look to us “normal’s” in the audience.
But, at one time, Hollywood was truly the stuff of dreams. There, the studios produced some amazing movie flicks. These were the stuff of dreams, and tales of adventure. And, for I, a young boy… Hollywood movies took me to places where my imagination could soar and explore.
Let’s talk about one such movie. The Ray Harryhausen classic “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”.
The visuals in the movie were amazing. Anyone who has seen this movie when it first came out (late 50’s) was forever a different person for the better. This dynamic even continues to this day too.
Millions saw this when they were in their teens or younger and it brought out an array of emotions the body had not experienced before. There is wonder, adventure, thrills, suspense, love, good, bad, and monsters that make you wonder how can you fight them and live? Sinbad shows you all this and more and he became a role model and hero for the multitudes.
No doubt, it is an amazing movie.
Come on! Seriously. Giant birds, crabby cyclops, dragons, skeleton warriors, and a snake woman? Just another day at the office for Sinbad the Sailor.
Throw in an evil sorcerer, a mutinous crew, and having to not only rescue his fiancee, but also find some way to un-shrink her. Talk about having too much on “your plate”. You can well understand why this particular Sinbad set about his seventh voyage with a stern and brave face, very little humor and negligible cheer.
This movie is genius.
Other films of his have very challenging special effects too. If you have not watched any of his films, YouTube them and watch the brilliant sequences. That'll convince you. Try the sequence where the cowboys try to "rope" Gwangi, in which Harryhausen had to painstakingly match the ropes on the live action footage to the ropes on his stop-motion model. Or the tug of war in "Mighty Joe Young," using a similar technique. Or the sequence with the giant bird from "Mysterious Island," which works well with Bernard Herrmann's goofy score. Or the Washington destruction scenes in "Earth vs. Flying Saucers." Or It from "It Came From Beneath the Seas." Or Pegasus in "Clash of the Titans," or Medusa, from the same film. Or anything from "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," my personal favorite film of his. - Great Movies of my Childhood
This was a movie that I couldn’t tear my eyes from. I was totally and complete immersed in the story line, though as a young boy, it was kind of difficult to follow. Never the less, the visuals were amazing and absolutely drew me in.
Now the story is a classic. It’s an adventure, so of course, you pull the story out from classic adventure stories that have stood the passage of time.
Apparently this is a pretty old classic story from the 1001 Arabian Nights, of course no longer taught in schools as not progressive enough. It is the story of adventure when a ships crew makes an unexpected stop at an island.
The best thing about this movie is that there Hasn’t been any remakes of it.
It’s true. Can you imagine what the remakes would be like? OMG! I just get sick trying to imagine it all…
Sinbad is a man of the world. A seaman who travels the known world. As this is his seventh voyage, we knew that he was well experienced in the ways of monsters, magic and pretty attractive lasses. He has a crew of trusty seamen, and ship that is pretty state-of-the-art for the time-period.
So off he goes. His ship and crew sail off towards adventure…
He sails and sails.
When Sinbad finally spots land, he doesn’t yet know what island it is. (He didn’t have GPS, and Google was of absolutely no use to him.) He just doesn’t know that the island’s name is Colossa. Hum. Colossa could that have something to do with the word “colossal”? You’d think he’d take a hint.
Nor does he know that it’s the ancient world’s equivalent of Monster Island. Now, for some reason or the other, Sinbad has his old lady on board with him. She’s a real cutie, and can you blame him. After all, he’s the famous Sinbad.
Her name is Princess Parisa. She has cute dimples, a nice rack and a very curvaceous backside. You see, she and Sinbad are going to be married and help seal a peace pact between their two lands. It kind of sucks for her, but she gets a hero in the bargain, and all in all, by the standards of society at that time and place, it’s a pretty sweet deal for her.
Grant (who would go on to marry Bing Crosby) is an absolute delight as the princess, the kid playing the genie in the lamp should have been annoying but was actually quite a charming little tyke, and Torin Thatcher is wonderfully bombastic as the evil wizard Sokurah. They help carry the human element of the movie in a way Mathews’ Sinbad never does. -Revisiting Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
Once he makes landfall on the island, he demonstrates just how preoccupied he must be with the impending wedding. You can tell, because he makes some really boneheaded decisions. You know, decisions that would charitably be called “insane.”
So, let’s say you’re on a mysterious island in a world where terrible monsters still run amok occasionally.
Let’s also say that you notice strange footprints in the sand. These strange footprints are not only odd because of their shape (cloven hooves – eek!), but also because they are so far apart. As someone notes, this is indicative of a rather large stride and by extension, a rather large creature.
Now what could that possibly mean? I mean, what would you do, if you saw hoof prints that large?
Okay, let’s say you know all that and still you venture forth into the unknown.
Now, you have landed on this mysterious island. You and your crew starts to walk upon the sandy beach. And now when you walk further up the beach you notice carved in the side of a mountain, a strange face with the mouth being the entrance of a cave.
Not an everyday occurrence.
What do you do? Well, in spite of it being painfully obvious that this is the front door of a cyclops house, you decide to do some pretty messed up things. I mean, haven’t you ever learned that some things say “keep out” and run for the hills. But NOOOOO!
What does Sinbad do? Well, he decides to run right the hell in there just to see if anyone is home!
What do you think happens? Yup. It’s a lot of screaming, yelling, terror and blood and guts. Not to mention a chomp and gulp. Yes, it’s a story of lots of guys getting chased by a really pissed off cyclops.
Enter a sorcerer named Sokurah.
He’s a bald guy with a magic lamp that saves Sinbad and his crew by using the genie’s powers to erect a transparent barrier to keep the cyclops back. I’ll bet that you didn’t know that Genie’s had the power to erect repulse fields, did you?
Now, I have some bad news.
Unfortunately this doesn’t stop the cyclops from chucking big rocks at the departing boat. This causes everyone on the boat to fall overboard and in all the confusion Sokurah loses his magic lamp.
Now, this magic lamp is really special. Think of it like the latest iphone, or the keys to the Lamborghini. It contains a Genie. But this Genie is not just like any other Genie. Those “lower” Genies have wish-limitations. Most can only grant three wishes. Not this Genie. No. He instead grants unlimited wishes.
Obviously the loss of such a power, such a lamp, is a big disappointment.
Again, there is a lot of treading water, splashes and panic.
Once back on board his main boat, Sokurah demands that they return back to the island. You know, after all, it’s pretty cool having a Genie with unlimited wishes. Heck, if it was me, I’d go back.
No. Sinbad is a different person.
Sinbad refuses Sokurah’s entreaties to go back to the island and retrieve his lamp which by this time has fallen into the hands of the cyclops. Sinbad says “No time, baldy. I’m gonna get married to my most excellent girlfriend. And, you know what? I still have to hire a band and D.J. for my wedding, but you’re welcome to come to my bachelor party once we’re back in Bagdad.”
Sokurah offers to provide some entertainment at some of the pre-wedding festivities in hopes of currying favor with the Caliph.
The Caliph of Baghdad (Alec Mango) feels the same way, even after Sokurah amazes the court by conjuring up a snake-woman. Yes, this SOB ended up turning Parisa’s maid into a snake woman. Talk about violation of a work contract!
Meanwhile, he continues to try to convince Sinbad to go back to the island.
He starts to look into the future. He starts by looking into the future of Sinbad and Parisa’s lands. Not surprisingly perhaps, he sees only bad things for everyone. This (unfortunately) doesn’t earn him a ship and a crew of men, but does earn him an ass kicking out of Bagdad.
It is only when the princess is shrunk by an evil spell, the breaking of which requires the shell from the egg of the giant Roc – which (what-da-ya-know) resides on Colossa – that Sokurah can get his expedition mounted, with Sinbad in command.
But it’s not that everything is perfect. With a crew made up of a handful of his bravest men and some of the most desperate convicts in the Caliph’s prison, he has to contend with potential mutiny at every turn. It’s a constant bickering, fighting and arguments. Ugh! In fact, the men are driven almost to madness before they even reach Colossa.
Once there, at the island, they continue to find problems and strife. Obviously, they find terrors as great as the Cyclops and the treachery of the magician, but something else happens. Future Mrs. Sinbad; Parisa – in her tiny state – also discovers the beautiful world inside the lamp, and the lonely boy Genie (Richard Eyer) who inhabits it.
They strike the bargain that, when Sinbad’s bravery is added to the equation, will bring their quest to an end. If, that is, they can all survive the dangers that Sokurah puts in their path.
At this point for the record, I would note that when he was told this, no one specifically said that he wasn’t supposed to stop by the princess’s bedroom and use a magic potion to shrink her down to the size of a corndog. It’s a strange world we live in, and when you start mixing magical spells, potions and evil sorcerers together, you will find many surprises awaiting you in the bedroom.
Clearly, the only way to fix this is with the help of a very powerful sorcerer.
Sinbad finds Sokurah just as he’s about to leave town and pleads for his help. It turns out to be no problem for Sokurah to reverse the spell. In fact, he knows the counter-spell and only needs to procure one ingredient. It’s the shell of giant Roc’s egg.
Ah, the shell of the egg.
But that’s only available on the island of Colossa and we already know you don’t want to go there, right Sinbad? Well, right?
Still politics are politics, and if you don’t play your cards right, the result could be war! Thus, with the princess’s father immediately threatening war on Bagdad (despite Bagdad obviously having nothing to do with the incredible shrinking Parisa – but that’s an argument for another time), a shift in policy occurs and the next thing you know, a ship is being outfitted. As such, a big crossbow is being built and Sinbad is attempting to recruit a crew.
But where would you get a crew from for what is surely a suicide mission right into the heart of monster country?
Where do most guys for suicide missions come from?
Indeed, you find them at the toughest prison in whatever location the recruiting is being done in! I was thinking that we might be in for a Dirty Dozen-style affair with off-beat characters each with a specialized skill (forger, demolitions expert, scrounger, drunk) that would come in handy for this trek.
However, the intention of them being so vicious and crazy that they turn out to be the best dang fighting machine ever assembled doesn’t happen. Instead, these cons are so vicious and crazy that they mutiny as soon as they set sail. Not only that, but they attempt to take over the ship!
Unsurprisingly, the movie is filled with fantastic creatures and some very impressive visuals. The cyclops is a fearsome beast with great animation (based on the critter from 20 Million Miles to Earth) and fantastic integration into most scenes. This guy ranks right up there with the best of Harryhausen. A climactic skeleton battle is also highly impressive, with stunning choreography providing some damned impressive integration with real actors. It’s a stunningly well-realized scene. -Revisiting Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
Things don’t go any more smoothly once they hit Cyclops Island. If you can imagine. Treasure, a genie, and guy getting roasted alive are among the highlights.
This is by far the best of the three fantasy adventure movies that Kerwin Matthews (Sinbad) made during this era. If you have the time and the inclination, I would strongly recommend a rewatch of this movie. Preferably on a hazy hot dog-day afternoon in August, or a cold snowy blistery Saturday afternoon in January. I promise that it will reawaken the boyhood in you (if you are a man), the nurturing and strong lady in you (if you are a lass), or complete revulsion (if you are gender-confused).
Here’s some decent links that you all might want to take a look at.
You can watch it for free if you don’t mind waiting a half an hour to half a day to download the torrent.
For those of you who are unaware. Torrents are parts of files that are spread out in tiny packets all over the internet. You use a "Bit Torrent" client to vacuum up all those little bits and pieces of the file. It then assembles the file into a movie that you can watch. The time that this takes can vary from a few minutes to weeks depending on how popular or obscure your searched file is.
You will need an application to manage the download. I recommend the free application VUZE. To download the video is thus easy. Install VUZE, and then click on one of the following torrent links.
Depending on where you live, you might not have the freedom to access these sites and the ISP might block them from access, or the search engines might black out their search results. Americans, in particular, might have some real problems. Therefore, I listed the most accessible torrent sites available to Americans. Pirate Bay and 1337X. I think that Kick Ass Torrents is still blocked for all Americans.
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
We continue with our exploration of Asia though videos.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
If you live in any of the mountainous regions inside China, this is pretty much what lunchtime might look like. You would sit at a table on the side of a cliff face, and look down on the clouds that surround you.
You have to keep in mind that MOST of China is mountainous. All you need do is look at a relief map of China.
If you lived in and around these mountains, your lunch might look a little something like this…
Yeah. This is all pretty much what it looks like. This is the hallway in some generic KTV somewhere in China.
Of course, I have a large series of posts about KTV’s and in particular Business KTV’s that you might want to take a stroll looking into after this post is finished. In any event, all KTV’s are pretty awesome and are decorated “to the hilt”. They all look a little like this…
Subway travel is very common in Asia, and currently you can travel to all of the first, second and third tier cities in China using it. Here is the view inside of one of the cars. Here, as is quite common, the rail leaves the tunnels and travels above ground like a monorail would.
All Chinese flight attendants, stewards and stewardesses, are also trained to fight (you do know that Muslim extremist behaviors is not taken lightly by China), and provide medical service when necessary.
One of the things that they are also trained to do is to fly a plane. In the event that the cabin crew becomes incapacitated, the stewardess can fill in and fly the plane if need be.
Let’s continue forward, shall we…
If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.
Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.
This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.
The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.
And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Let’s continue on exploring China from the point of view of odd, strange and different from that of the “West”.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Chinese malls are everywhere, and they tend to be enormous. A mall is generally a sign of a healthy and functioning middle class. Before China kicked out the progressive liberal communists, there just weren’t any malls in China at all. Then, when Mr. Deng started to introduce Reaganomics (though under a Chinese-friendly name), the economy flourished, and malls started to pop up everywhere.
Here’s a typical mall. I think this one is in Hong Kong, if I am not mistaken.
I personally love this video. It shows some young drummers performing in front of an audience. It’s pretty cool.
In China, every spare moment that a child has seems to be packed into learning. This can be exhausting, and many children want to play some computer games to escape from “the grind”. You cannot blame them, can you?
Well, a number of Chinese parents figure that if you want to play a computer game, how about one where you can actually learn something. Thus, there is a market for business simulation games. This is a small, but growing niche, where you can become a farmer and eventually become a real estate tycoon. Or maybe try your luck moving a factory making widgets into a global enterprise. These simulations help that.
Here, a young elementary student can relax by running a farm and trying to make a profit…
In China you can buy, or rent recreational vehicles. You can do so just like it is done in the USA. Here’s what it looks like…
As I have alluded to previously, the Chinese don’t waste their time going up and down hills. They just build over them, and if there is a mountain in the way, they just plow straight through it. They do not mess around.
Never forget that, eh? There was a reason why China instituted limits on the number of children that you can have. While they have removed this limitation, many Chinese has opted not to have too many children as they are unwilling to take on the increased tax burden.
And that is it. I hope that you enjoyed this posting of the strange and unusual life of China as compared to America.
Thank you for visiting. I hope that you enjoyed this post and maybe learned something new in the process. Have a wonderful rest of the day!
And, may your days and nights be filled with happiness.
If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.
This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.
This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
