Month: January 2022

Saturday Snow Cleanup and Reality Begins to Seep Through

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Well today’s outdoor work took a lot longer than I expected.  That’s what I get for trying to do a good job.  But it was a beautiful, cold, sunny winter day and I got plenty of fresh air.  When I checked the news, Dementia Joe’s approval numbers had hit another all-time low.  Another medical expert is calling out Fauci and the rest of the health establishment about COVID lies.  And there are indications that the Supreme Court is going to find the OSHA vaccine mandate unconstitutional.  So, it seems like reality is starting to sink in all over the place.

And I can confirm that even in a little town like mine people are starting to take notice that getting vaccinated can be a dangerous thing.  Someone I know well, someone who is a staunch believer in boosters and tests and masks, told me that a sixteen-year-old girl in town died of heart failure.  No one is going to think that’s a normal thing.  That’s going to scare a lot of parents.  People are starting to reconsider the information they’ve been fed.

You know things have been crazy now for so long I haven’t even considered that maybe a lot of people who have been part of the problem might change their minds about the madness they’ve backed.  Could enough of the suburban women come around to the idea that they’ve been on the wrong side?  I guess we’ll know soon enough.

On the home front, Princess Sack of Potatoes has been home sick for a week with COVID but luckily, it’s omicron so she’s already feeling better and getting mighty uppity.  Both her mom and dad have the bug too so now there’s a serious power imbalance in the house.  They’re getting weaker and she’s growing stronger.  Camera Girl misses her granddaughter so she’s also getting uppity.  That means there’s no peace for me.  But I’m relieved that the little girl has gotten over the bug.  Now there shouldn’t be any nonsense about this three-year old girl getting that stupid vaccine ever.  She’s got the best kind of immunity and she won’t have any of the side effects.

I read where the drug makers wanted the results of the drug testing for the vaccines kept secret for seventy-five years.  I heard that they were not accommodated on this and the results will be available soon.  Something tells me those results weren’t normal.  I’m guessing that without legal immunity the manufacturers would never have dared to put these drugs into people.  I get the feeling that a lot of stuff is going wrong for the people running this country and it wouldn’t surprise me if they start to change their tune real soon.  If the Supreme Court rules against the vaccine mandates, I’ll bet Joe Brandon is going to soften his tune and start reconsidering a lot of things like his COVID policies, his anti-fossil fuel policies and who knows, maybe even his open border stance.  He’s made a lot of people very angry and they’re not going to forget anytime soon.  After the midterms he’ll try to sell everyone the old “bipartisan” routine.  Hopefully the Stupid Party will be slightly less stupid than usual and resist the impulse to help the evil Party out of their mess.

Enjoy the weekend.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 18 – The Lights of Zetar

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With these incredibly bad episodes it’s hard to marshal the will to even write the summary of the plot.  After all they took almost no effort in writing the damn thing.  Why should I have to waste time repeating it?  Well, c’est la vie.

Scotty is in love with a Lt. Mira Romaine who is on a mission with the Enterprise to visit “Memory Alpha” which is the equivalent of Wikipedia.  But a giant cosmic plastic bag full of Christmas lights attacks the Enterprise and invades Romaine’s brain.  Then the bag of lights goes to Memory Alpha and erases the memory and kills the nerds working there.  Then it comes back to get Romaine on the Enterprise.  When it enters into Romaine’s body Kirk has her put into the hyperbaric chamber and apparently forty or fifty atmospheres of pressure destroys this enormously powerful bag of lights without killing Romaine.  Finally, there is a laugh filled moment when Spock, McCoy and Scotty all agree that Romaine is well enough to go back to work.  Kirk yucks it up over this unanimity and exclaims, “Can I stand the strain?”

Whoever wrote this thing must have spent fifteen minutes thinking it up.  This must have been after they knew the show was doomed and they were just killing time until they started looking for new jobs.  Scotty drooling and pawing at the girl is creepy and off-putting.  It somewhat reminds me of the behavior of Gollum when he gets his hands on the One Ring.  There was a scene when the bag of lights was taking over Romaine and she started making a gargling noise.  It reminded me of the sound one of my dogs makes when he is about to throw up.  It was the high point of the episode.

The dialogue is vapid.  The plot is non-existent.  I’ll be kind and give it a 2 // 2.

08JAN2022 – OCF Update – Oh, the Pain, the Pain

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I have a post queued up for tomorrow at 6 am but I just had to talk about the Star Trek series.  I just finished the Lights of Zetar episode and the review will come out at midnight tonight.  But I felt I needed to vent about this task I’m completing.

I had forgotten over the years just how awful the Season 3 episodes actually were.  I have only six episodes left and two of them I want to review.  Requiem for Methuselah I look forward to because I love the pomposity of the line, “I am Brahms and da Vinci.”  The other episode is the “space hippies” one which is so awful that I will luxuriate in its goofiness.  Spock playing his Vulcan harp shouldn’t be missed.  But that still leaves four putrid episodes I’ll have to watch and review.

I am a weak willed individual and my mind rebels at this thankless and painful task.  For that reason I felt it was fair to cry out with this whiny complaint.  Letting the world know of my anguish makes me feel better.  My pain is shared.

I try to psych myself up by thinking that I will be able to start my next review project.  I plan to do Jackie Gleason’s “The Honeymooners” series.  I’ve always enjoyed most of that series and it will be a pleasant contrast to Shatner and his crew of space losers.  Well, thank you for reading this howl of indignant pain.  For those of you who read the Star Trek reviews I hope the earlier episodes were more fun for you than these last ones.

Snow Removal Musings

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So today I paid my first installment of winter penance in New England.  Three hours of snow removal and only half of the job is done.  Because I waited for the snow to stop before starting to clear it and since the snow didn’t end until early afternoon, I ran out of daylight at about the same time as I ran out of sensation in my frozen toes.  Tomorrow I’ll finish off the job.  But coming into a warm house and taking a hot shower after snow work is conducive to thinking.  So, thank you annoying snowstorm.

While I was clearing the snow it occurred to me that places like California have legislated to eliminate internal combustion engines from lawn mowers.  Eventually they want all motors to be electric.  If these people have their way it will require multiple large and expensive batteries to be able to clear snow for six hours or cut a large lawn.  Now granted lawns are not essential things but in a place like New England or any of the other cold weather areas of the country snow removal can be critical.  In fact, sometimes it’s life or death.  What if the idiots who want to make all motors electric have their way?  What exactly happens to the fleet of snow plows and other snow removal vehicles?  Will there be a warehouse full of batteries ready to be swapped out every few hours?  And around here it’s in the winter time that power lines go down.  What if there is no current to recharge those batteries?

I’m sure these people can’t be so stupid as to eliminate all these essential-service gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles.  For instance, they’re not going to have armies of battery powered harvesters and combines harvesting all the grain in the Midwest.  But that just makes it more sinister.  They know that they won’t eliminate these uses of fossil fuels.  And in point of fact almost all of the electricity that will power all these batteries is produced by burning fossil fuels.  And that won’t change.  What they want to eliminate is our private access to fossil fuels.

As I’ve previously said, energy is wealth.  If the only energy we have access to is the low-capacity battery systems then we become essentially an underclass.  The rich will have all of the perks that include gasoline powered lawn mowers and snow blowers and cars and trucks and access to airline flight.  We’ll be the serfs with our short-range electric cars and our undependable electrical grid.  We’ll be travelling on buses and subways as we shuttle to and from our serf jobs.

The saddest part of this is they’ve brainwashed a lot of the millennials to believe this is all for the good.  These fools agree with the elimination of fossil fuels “for the good of the planet.”  For them global warming and green energy are realities that they believe in.  For some reason they don’t seem to understand that what they’re agreeing to is a retreat back to subsistence technologies.  Or even worse, the stratification of society where the elite class has access to modern technology but the have-nots, among whom they will be included, will subsist in third world squalor.  Or maybe it’s even worse.  Maybe they accept their status as an underclass.

I think this will be a time of sorting.  Those who voluntarily accept these losses to their freedoms and range of actions are the walking dead.  They will retreat to small rental spaces and play video games and work as unskilled labor as they wait for their lives to end.  They’ll leave behind no children and they will celebrate their own extinction as a victory for Gaia.  The rest of us will select for freedom and life.  And our children and grandchildren will inherit the earth.  Literally.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 17 – That Which Survives

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Here is one of the flimsiest episodes in the series.  Kirk, McCoy, Sulu and a red shirt transport down to a planet that seems to have been artificially constructed.  But as they are being transported a woman appears and kills the crewman operating the transporter.  Then she “transports” the Enterprise almost a thousand light years away from the planet.

Back on the planet the woman reappears and kills the red shirt just by placing her hand on him.  Then she goes back to the Enterprise and sabotages the engines so that they will explode through excessive speed.  Back on the planet she attacks Sulu but before she can kill him Kirk gets between her and Sulu.  Apparently, she can kill only one victim at a time.  To others her touch is harmless.

Scotty has to climb into an access shaft to get at the antimatter feed stream with a magnetic probe.  He complains about the magnetic force feeling like ants crawling over his body but Spock chides him to stop making subjective remarks and get the job done.  With no time left and after being told to “reverse the polarity” of his magnetic probe by Spock, Scotty “fixes” the antimatter stream and the Enterprise is good as new.

Back on the planet the woman whose name we learn is Losira returns looking for Kirk this time.  McCoy and Sulu act as blockers preventing Losira from touching Kirk.  When she is prevented from doing her job, she contracts to a line then collapses down to a point and disappears.  Next the landing party find a hidden cave where there is a computer shaped like a cube that is the source of Losira.  But now there are three Losiras and each one is selected for one of the three landing party members.  Just when it seems our heroes are doomed Spock and a red shirt beam down into the cave.  Kirk shouts for them to destroy the cube.  The cube being hit by a phaser, the Losiras disappear and a message starts playing explaining that Losira was the last of a group of guardians who were tasked with guarding this new world for her people.  But both these new people and the guardians succumbed to a virus that they accidentally produced when the created the planet.  The Losira they saw was just a computer construct to protect the planet from intruders.  McCoy says something about Losira being beautiful.  Spock says beauty doesn’t last.  Kirk says beauty survives.  Whatever.

This is one of the least meaningful plots ever used on this show.  To me it seems completely contrived and pointless.  The only amusing dimension is the bickering between Spock and Scotty.  With Scotty in a panic over the problems he encounters trying to repair the overloading engines Spock constantly chides him to dispense with emotion and keeps up a veritable countdown on the moment of destruction for the ship which Scotty finds maddening.  And this little scene is amusing.

Losira is played by Lee Meriwether who was an attractive young woman who played one of the Catwomen on the 1960s Batman show.  But her part in this drama is extremely limited by the simplistic plot.

So how do I rate this mostly pointless episode?  I’ll give it a 5 // 3.