Month: April 2023

Anheuser-Busch CEO Makes Statement Without an Apology

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Brendan Whitworth is the Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO.  On Friday he made a statement about the Dylan Mulvaney sponsorship which basically said:

NOTHING.

He said. “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” and “We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”

So if they never intended to divide people why would they pick someone who by his very self-identification would antagonize the great majority of Bud Light customers?  Well, because their corporate culture is antithetical to the beliefs of the people who they sell their product to.  And they’d rather virtue-signal to their peers about how enlightened they are, even if it infuriates their customers.

My favorite comment on this apology was: “NOPE. Not good enough. Boycott continues until full apology, fire VP Mrkt, and Mulvaney dropped. Either that or Anheuser-Busch becomes the next Schlitz.”

Well, this is the perfect test case.  Bud Light is Joe Six-Pack’s go to beverage.  If there is one product that could be boycotted to good effect it’s this one.  And it’s the perfect time of year.  We’re on the cusp of barbecue weather and baseball and every other sports event but football.  So let’s just see where this goes.  If you never hear another thing about this then it’s hopeless.  Anheuser-Busch needs Bud Light profitable to stay in business.  If they never give a real apology and fire the wicked witch of the west then basically we have no clout at all.  So stay tuned.  I’ll follow up on this one.

16APR2023 – OCF Update – This’N’That

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So I enjoyed writing that review last night of the “groundbreaking” 1960s movie Blow-up.  Mocking something so utterly dumb was life-affirming.  It’s like watching that video of Musk brow-beating that dopey BBC reporter, just wonderfully satisfying.

Today we have a party to go to in the mid-afternoon so it’ll be a limited writing day because I also was handed a honey-do list by Camera Girl and there was a seriousness in her demeanor that leads me to believe that stalling will be seriously frowned upon.  Well, uninstalled new windshield wiper blades and blocked driveway drains are the stuff of wifely discontent so I guess I best bestir myself.

On the plus side I knocked off another 2,000 words on the story.  That’s another 2%.  Pretty good, pretty good.  And on the topicality front I did add an AI character to the story.  And that was before the current mania.  It was probably more an homage to “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”  Interestingly I’ve made mine a girl and she’s possibly the most enjoyable character in the book.  I’m trying to decide whether to kill her off or her creator.  One of them will have to go.

We had a ninety degree day on Friday.  That’s pretty damn hot for mid-April.  But we’re back in the fifties today.  But the heat really activated the dreaded mayflies.  Yesterday a cloud of them enveloped me while I was pumping gas.  Four of them followed me into the car and I was swatting at them like a lunatic while trying to drive on a busy road.  And the pollen is so thick you can taste it on your tongue.  People are walking around coughing up a lung.  Ah the joys of spring.

But life is good.  We turned the heat off a few days ago and there was still a balance in the heating oil account.  So Dementia Joe hasn’t quite bankrupted me yet.  Camera Girl will put aside her soup recipes and all sorts of warm weather provender will appear on the menu.

I was reading through the daily news and opinion rags with distaste.  The left is made up of dishonest people and idiots.  But the Right is hardly a paragon of virtue and intelligence.  Even when they get something right often it’s like the whining of the village idiot.  It’s just too painful to listen to.

I was watching a vlogger post about how camera photography was dying and how phone photography would kill it off any day now.  Maybe he’s right but that just tells me people are just too lazy to use the best tool for the job.  But he has a certain point.  The convenience of the smart phone has taken a heavy toll on the use of conventional cameras.  But despair seems a little melodramatic.

Well I better get on with my chores or I won’t get fed today.  Camera Girl is a Harsh Mistress. So enjoy the day and I’ll see what I can think of to comment on later.

Blow-up (1966) – A Movie Review

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I usually include a spoiler warning with my reviews.  But this movie is so awful that if I can stop you from seeing it by giving away the plot, I would consider that an act of mercy.

The only claim to fame I will grant this movie is as a source for the homage that Mike Meyers did of it whenever he did his photographer bit in the Austin Powers movies.  The absurd behavior that he displayed as he photographed the groovy models in those movies is almost an accurate portrayal of the Thomas character in this movie.  And that is the only good thing I can say for Blow-up.

The movie represents about a day in the life of London photographer “Thomas.”  He’s played by someone named David Hemmings whom I don’t recognize.  There are two actresses in the movie that I have heard of Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles but the only notable part of their performances is they take off their shirts.  In fact, most of the main female characters end up topless at some point.  But I’ll tell you right up front it didn’t help much.  Now I’m not one to disparage the female form in cinema but these attempts at partial nudity were painful.  This was during a time (the 1960s) when fashion models were expected to have the physique of famine victims.  You can literally count their vertebrae when they turn away from the camera.  This is not erotic.  It’s mostly silly and at times annoying because of how clumsy these scenes are.  I never thought I’d fast forward through a female nude scene but so help me, I did.

Anyway, the plot.  Thomas moves around photographing in a working-class area of London then to his home studio then to an antique store where he is attempting to buy an old wooden propeller then to a park where he photographs a man and woman kissing.  This last scene is the center of the plot.  The woman sees him taking her picture and demands that he give her the film.  He refuses and heads back home.  Eventually she finds him and demands the film again.  When he refuses, she, of course, takes off her shirt.  Now for the next twenty minutes we mostly see Vanesa Redgrave’s back.  Eventually he takes his shirt off and then he gives her what she thinks is the film of her in the park and she leaves.

Now we find out that he kept the roll of film from the park.  He prints it and after a very, very long sequence of him blowing up portions of the photos we can tell that there was a man hiding in the trees with a gun and eventually we see that the man who was kissing the girl was shot by the gunman.  Now why Thomas didn’t hear a shot isn’t explained but then again who cares.

Then Thomas goes to visit a friend whose wife is in love with him.  Then he goes to see the body that’s still in the field.  Then he comes home and finds that his house has been ransacked and his film and prints of the park have been stolen.  Then he goes to a party where the Yardbirds are playing and then he goes to another party where his agent is smoking pot.  When he wakes up the next morning in the party house he heads over to the park and the body is gone.

After that he watches some mimes pretending to play tennis on an actual tennis court.  Thomas even throws their pretend tennis ball back to them when it goes over the fence.

The End.

This movie is purported to be an iconic cinematic masterpiece.

It ain’t.

If I can convince you to never watch this movie, I will feel that I have struck a blow for humanity.  You will have saved two hours of your life.  If in the course of this website’s existence a hundred people decide not to watch Blow-up two hundred precious hours of human life will have been saved.  I will count that as my great gift to mankind.  Instead watch the first Austin Powers movie and enjoy his parody of Thomas.

Fun on a Friday Night

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Make a start.  Make a start.  Well, I’ve caught up with my chores.  All the distractions and alarums and excursions have kept me from writing.  Well, what can you do?  Life is like that.

But what to write about?  I’m looking for something upbeat.  I don’t want to talk about the crime epidemic or the 2024 race or even transgender pushback.  I’ve expended enough venom on those to last me awhile.  I’d rather think about something fun.

So, how about asteroid mining?

Until recently talk of this was restricted to science fiction fans.  Heinlein had asteroid miners in his juvenile novel “The Rolling Stones” and it was a staple of many writers in the last century.  But now it’s going from fiction to fact as NASA is talking about sending a mission to an asteroid that is believed to be composed almost entirely of metal.  There’s a mission to send an unmanned mission to reach Psyche 16 in 2026.

Psyche 16 is a small world with a diameter of 140 miles.  Its mass has been estimated at 2.29 ×1019 kg.  That’s about 0.0004% of the Earth’s mass.  But that’s an enormous mass.

Now visiting Psyche 16 is a far cry from actually mining gold and platinum from this worldlet and getting it to Earth where it has value.  But it’s a start.  The actual mechanism for recovering the metals that make up Psyche 16 is an interesting problem.  Depending on how fast it is going relative to Earth, changing its orbit has the potential to be a human existence-ending event for planet Earth.  Remember, the dinosaurs allegedly bit the dust because a fair-sized asteroid crashed into Earth sixty some odd million years ago.  So, diverting large asteroids should be something done with the utmost of careful planning and the least amount of change to our space environment.

The two choices I come up with are moving it into a stable orbit close to Earth or crashing it into the Moon.  Overall, I favor the Moon idea.  Maybe I’ve been influenced by Heinlein’s story, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”  In that tale the Moon colonists uses a rail gun to boost payloads to escape the Moon’s gravity and splash down in the oceans of Earth.  I’m sure that much more careful thought would need to be done to ensure that this kind of logistical method is possible but I’m guessing from a risk perspective where an extinction event is one of the risks it would probably be preferred to leaving that big rock moving close to Earth.

In the article someone did a back of the envelope calculation and came up with $10,000 quadrillion as the value of the metals in Psyche 16.  Of course, why it would be expressed that way instead of as $10 quintillion is unclear to me.  But they bring up the point that this would wreck the Earth’s economy by destabilizing the value of gold and other metals.  Well, this seems like a silly statement.  Extracting even something as valuable as platinum from the Moon and bringing it back to Earth will not be economical unless the price of that metal increases by orders of magnitude.

Digging gold and platinum out of the Earth is the economical choice and will be for the foreseeable future.  But if someday there is a need for metals that can no longer be found on Earth, then maybe asteroid mining might become a thing,

So, wasn’t that more fun than talking about trannies again?  Feel free to comment on my moon crash option.  I assure you I haven’t thought through this option much at all so we can dissect it as an occasion for fun.  Have at it.