Author: photog

Tom’s World – 24JUL2024 – Gulf of Mexico Oil Field Work Boats- 2

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Here are a few more boats that work the Gulf of Mexico oil fields.

The ubiquitous tug boat. These aren’t the largest, sexiest, awe inspiring or most anything when it comes to work boats. But they have one thing going for them, it doesn’t work without them. They’re everywhere because they are needed everywhere.

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This one wasn’t a work boat. It’s an ex-roro (roll on- roll off) ship that carried cars for delivery all over the world until bought by Jeff Bezos and brought to Pensacola to have all of its superstructure cut off except the forecastle. This in preparation to operate as a landing ship for space launch vehicles. It would have operated similarly to the Space X barges. Bezos’ Blue Origin wheels ran off or something happened and his plans crashed. At the moment of this phots, the ships name was Jacklyn, for his mother.

Global 2000, another heavy lift work vessel used for building and dismantling drill platforms.

Deep Blue, makes pipelines for carrying crude from where it is drilled many miles out in the Gulf to onshore refineries. I’ve never thought it through but I wonder if the pipelines need intermediate platforms with booster pumps? I can’t imagine the needed initial pressure to push a viscous oil through 50-100 miles of pipe.

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I don’t know how I missed getting photos of it but the USS Oriskiny was brought into port here to be prepared to be the largest man-made fishing reef about 200’ deep in the Gulf. It sits about 22 nautical miles (25 regular) on roughly a 150 degree heading from the mouth of Pensacola Bay. I’ve fished it a number of times but you have to be there when it isn’t covered up with dive boats. I’ve never caught anything anywhere there were a bunch of divers in the area. Can’t get too upset, I used to be a fanatic diver.

What Comes After the Kamala-fication of 2024?

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As the political system of the United States descends ever faster into farce, I find myself wondering if there any depths to which the people running this carnival ride won’t descend in order to prevent the citizens of this country from regaining control?

Think about it.  They let a dementia patient pretend to be in charge of the US nuclear arsenal while they performed brinksmanship with Vladimir Putin.  They apparently were willing to let Biden try to stay on the job until he was eighty-six years old, only his inability to remember the word “healthcare” torpedoed the only public speaking appearance they’ve allowed him in years.  They’ve now anointed an emotionally unstable nitwit to be their candidate.  And four years ago, they were willing to shut down the world economy by releasing a tepid bio-weapon against us in order to prevent Donald Trump’s reelection.

So, let’s suppose somehow Donald Trump “wins” the election.  What makes anyone think they’d be unwilling to do whatever it takes to destroy his administration?  Maybe this time they release a deadly bioweapon and all the people who refused the vaccine last time, die this time.  Or now that we’ve seen how the secret Service can be weaponized what will prevent them from finishing the job after the inauguration?

I don’t want to come across as a doom and gloom-er (well, maybe somewhat) but I think there’s a pretty strong case to be made that the people who run the Deep State are pretty damn vicious and unafraid to throw a wrench into the works that keep this country running if it will damage their adversaries.

Let’s look at the best-case scenario.  Donald Trump gets back in the White House and has a House and Senate that aren’t dead set against him and he begins implementing his plan; deporting illegal aliens and restoring fossil fuels as our energy source.  Will the powers that be allow him to defang the Deep State?  Will he be allowed to fire the people in the Justice Department, FBI and CIA who have been working against him for almost ten years?  It seems highly unlikely.

After all, we’ve reached the go-for-broke stage of this battle.  At this point there are probably a lot of people who know terrible secrets of illegal activities by people in high and middle levels of the bureaucracy.  They must be pretty frightened that at some point someone will rat them out.  That somewhere in the FBI or CIA there might be someone who wants to put an end to the endless string of unconstitutional covert actions against Donald Trump and the normal people in this country.  In such an environment I have to think that the people running things must have a policy to avoid losing power by any means necessary.

If you follow how this has been going, the actions needed to keep the lid on all this seems to be escalating.  And the rate of escalation seems to be accelerating.  By my way of looking at this, that’s a recipe for disaster.  Eventually the lies and excuses will become completely transparent.  Even the stupidest or laziest observer will realize that the whole system is a sham.

That will be the point where our situation corresponds to last stages of the Soviet Union.  “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.”  At that point reality no longer controls the actions of the state and collapse will ensue without warning.  Well, at least I’ll be able to say I told you so!

2024 Summer Movie Talk – Part 9

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, OCF, OCF Classic Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , ,

Classic Horror Movies

Okay, the category is one of those inconsistent constructs.  Why not call them classic monster movies?  How do you define classic?  What is the allowable chronological range?  Are silent movies included?  Well, I’m fudging all of these and just selecting what I want to, no matter that logical consistency probably goes out the window.

Let’s look at my list.  Basically, it’s the Universal monster movies in their heyday along with “Nosferatu,” “Island of Lost Souls” and “House on Haunted Hill” thrown in for dubious reasons (basically because I like them).  I’ve left out a dozen Universal films that could just as easily have been included and I’ve included “The Invisible Man” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” which really belong in a list of early science fiction stories.  But that probably applies to the Frankenstein movies too.  So, the whole thing is incredibly subjective and personal in nature.

So, I won’t belabor the point any longer and will instead chalk this up to a labor of love.  As a little kid I thoroughly enjoyed these movies and hundreds more that provided a similar thrill.  List your favorites in the comments.  If you want my detailed reviews of most of these movies do a search on the site by title.

  1. NOSFERATU (1922)
  2. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925)
  3. DRACULA (1931)
  4. FRANKENSTEIN (1931)
  5. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931)
  6. THE MUMMY (1932)
  7. ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932)
  8. THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933)
  9. BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)
  10. THE WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1935)
  11. THE WOLF MAN (1941)
  12. HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959)

 

UPDATE

War Pig’s picks:

Black Sabbath 1963

Black Sunday 1960

Night o/t Living Dead

Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 1931

Psycho

The Birds

Phantom o/t Opera 1925

Last Man On Earth 1964

Incredible Shrinking Man

Curse o/t Demon

Island of Dr Moreau 1932

Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Tingler

M (also under film noir, crime, etc.)

 

 

 

Unburdened By Yellow School Buses

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Well, they finally did it.  They either bribed or frightened or just plain exhausted Joe Biden into withdrawing from the race.  My guess is cash.

Now we have Kamala Harris as Democrat candidate.  Okay.  This is the same Kamala whose job it was to control the border.  Well, wait a minute.  That didn’t go very well, did it? Wasn’t there some kind of problem with all of her staff quitting because she is a toxic witch that can’t get along with anybody and can’t get anything done?  Okay, that could be a problem, maybe.  What else have we got?

Well, there is the thing where she likes to talk about yellow school buses.  And she likes to make up what she thinks are deep, impressive statements but other people find to be vapid and laughable.  Like when she adopted the tag line, “I can imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been.”  There Is a YouTube montage video where someone collected dozens and dozens of times, she has said this or very close versions of this.  Watching them one after the other is a daunting task.  Eventually this mantra begins sounding like a slogan to sell sneakers or a sports drink and the one saying it begins to sound unhinged.  And there are any number of videos out there documenting her propensity to belabor the obvious and try to pass it off as “deep thinking.”

It seems then that Kamala babbling incoherently will just be substituted for Joe Biden babbling incoherently in the Republican commercials targeting her in the fall.  But who knows?  Maybe Kamala has come on the scene just as the American IQ has crashed into double digits.  Maybe the voting population has gone down the same road as Kamala and they can imagine what Kamala can be unburdened by the fact that she’s an idiot.  In fact, maybe an idiot is exactly what they want.  If they can couch her pitch in terms of pseudoscientific psychobabble and feminine emotionalism and top it off with woke appeals to racialist and feminist grievance arguments then maybe she can get enough crackpots to make her election seem almost plausible.

But honestly, she suffers from the same problem that did in Joe Biden.  After all, he was always in the hole, even before he broke out into tongues at the debate.  He was behind in the polls because his economy stinks and the country is flooded with illegal aliens, drug addicts and other homeless people who are causing a crime epidemic.  So even if Kamala’s version of Tourette’s Syndrome is slightly less off-putting than Joe’s she still has to convince voters that four years of Biden/Harris isn’t Harris’s fault.  And that’s a pretty hard sell.

An additional challenge will be for her to explain how she kept telling anyone who asked her that that Joe Biden was as sharp as a tack and running rings around his staff making America run like a Swiss watch.  That one isn’t going to fly.  Just like all of the rest of the liars in his inner circle they saw the Vegetable in Chief regularly and she knew that he was essentially a dementia patient with his finger on the button of the nuclear football.  That is going to be a very difficult question to answer.  I’d love to see her unburden on that little beauty.

22JUL2024 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

Courtesy is a science of the highest importance. It is, like grace and beauty in the body, which charm at first sight, and lead on to further intimacy and friendship, opening a door that we may derive instruction from the example of others, and at the same time enabling us to benefit them by our example, if there be anything in our character worthy of imitation.

Michel de Montaigne