Rain Gryphon

It looks like Dreamwidth is back to loading normally now, regardless of whether I'm logged in or not. It was a lot of refresh/retry for a while there. I guess some nigh Totalitarian "free" economy was having an election somewhere.

The US/Israel war on Iran is doing one thing that no one would have had the guts to do otherwise: cut oil extraction and use. Not by much, only 20%, but still, it's giving the world a taste of the future. In Sri Lanka fuel is limited to 15L per week (I use half that much). In some regions of Australia public transit is free (that should be the case everywhere, regardless of oil supply). I can only hope that more investment in solar power grids and windpower is going to take place worldwide as a result and maybe make the 20% cut permanent. Except that people are just going to waste more power one way or another and fossil fuel extraction will just keep on going up. Burying dead trees in clay soils is just another distraction.

Should I stock up on toilet paper now? How about eggs? What's the panic like in Oz? Everything happens there first. It's the time zone/date line thing. Tru fax.

It seemed to me that it must be that the US and Israel have been using cell phone signal ID to locate and bomb specific people in Iran and Lebanon. So I searched "cell phone signal target iran" and yep, scattered news reports saying just that. It annoys me that the national news service keeps such things quiet. The cell phone omission in the assassination reports reeks of serving business interests over that of the general population. When data harvesting devices gone wild can allow trigger-happy governments to guide exploding drones to murder just about anyone anywhere, what more do you need to show that cell phones that broadcast your position and everything about you are a bad idea? I'm also ticked off about the same national news service no longer giving the daily value of the stock markets, of gold, a barrel of oil, the dollar and even on occasion, bitcoin. Instead, we get endless fluff pieces, like Ferrari-shaped Kitkats, a cat the crosses the border by jumping a ditch, the decline in the number of people going to the movies, McDonald's energy drinks, do you know your mail carrier, would you eat cricket powder...



Everypony see Hail Mary yet? That's the movie about wee black bacteria blotting out the sun. I saw it when it was still fresh. Now, some weeks later, while reading a blurb on the movie I realize that the movie was supposed to be about some guy who wakes up on a space ship 11 light years away from Earth with no recollection on how he got there or what he's supposed to do. Now that's a movie I would have liked better. Instead, the only way I can tell that there's a memory problem is because there's a few lines of dialog stating as much. Otherwise, the flashbacks just look like the standard filling in of details during what would otherwise be long boring breaks in the action. Instead, what I saw was a movie about an antisocial black sheep scientist who has abandoned a research career to become a middle-school science teacher. Despite having apparently totally pissed off the entire scientific community, he comes across as kind, thoughtful and just a little quirky. So, yeah, not buying the asshole hothead story. Moving on to the science.

Enter the space bacteria. The bacteria, capable of crossing interstellar distances, at apparently near light-speed to have infected all the stars in our neighbourhood simultaneously, and invulnerable to intense unfiltered solar radiation, can be punctured and popped with a pin. They also are able collect enough material out of the atmosphere of Venus to multiply in sufficiently high numbers to completely encompass the sun. It's like trying to paint an entire house using the film of water on a wet golf ball. Or maybe a wet pea. The sun is HUGE. Then there were the space amoebas. What's keeping the amoebas alive on the three year trip to Earth? Plus, I thought it was _hot_ in the alien ship, but in the whole rescue, all I saw was that O2 is corrosive (we knew that). As for the initial problem, sunshade cooling the Earth, where was the obvious solution: burn more fossil fuels, release methane, release HFC's! Also, after the wee bugs have finished cleaning up Venus, we could move there... or not. Scratch that, bad idea, see Mars. Then there was the alien recognizing a stopped clock as a mechanism for keeping track of time. That was a wee bit hard to swallow. I also did not catch how the leap occurred to linguistic translation without any apparent Rosetta Stone style object-to-word exchanges. So, the movie was a bit of a miss. Worth seeing once.



Next movie I saw was Mario Galaxy. Not good. There was no story. It was, metaphorically speaking, a wink and nudge fest. Sappy too. Seven-year-old kids will probably like it a lot. Well, it was (and still is!) the only thing playing in town and it wasn't horror or a romantic comedy (there's a new twist in the movie schedules now -- there's the one English movie playing once a day, like Mario Galaxy, and then there's a Thursday English movie at 7pm, like some rom com movie about Tuscany). It really did not go beyond what I imagine is the in-game "world", apparently revolving around a plumber who runs through an obstacle course. Plus there was air in space! Universal gravity toward the "ground" everywhere! How does the ground know which way is down in order to become the ground? It's a shame that instead of Hoppers or Zootopia 2, we get this.

So I ordered five movies via eBay. Zootopia 1 and 2, Alien: Covenant, Detective Pikachu, and Rick & Morty Season 8. OK, four movies and a season of a TV series. I looked at sales of Death of a Unicorn but whoa, pricey. I'll wait.



I think that when your TV series consists of scripts written by a parade of gig workers, it's all fan fiction, even if your writers only care about the paycheck. That goes double for spin-off books that aren't even canon to what transpires in the source audio-visual product.

I went to three different discount grocers belonging to the same chain in town and finally found cans of peppermint milk chocolate powder. It's the only one I've found that makes reasonably good hot cocoa, although I have to make the mix in three steps to minimize the dregs of chocolate left in the bottom of the cup. I should get a few more cans just in case this product has been discontinued. I'm going to go make a mug of hot cocoa now... In related news, I am amused to learn that a miscreant has been filling their cans of "pure" maple syrup with a 50/50 mix of maple syrup and cane sugar syrup! Somebody noticed that the flavour was off. That somebody is a somebody who works as a journalist for an news-style TV show. Talk about a scoop! So they collected 5 cans of this one "pure" maple syrup from five different grocery stores and all five were doctored. Oh la la! It is worse that le anti-freez in le vin! Oh wait, cane sugar isn't poisonous. Still, it's fraud. Pure Quebec maple syrup is sirious biznes, yo. Beware of deep discount deals on cooked tree sap.



One of the earliest signs of Spring is the awakening of the Asian ladybird beetles, Harmonia axyridis. Unfortunately, these spotted red insects have the gift of overwintering in my walls and come Spring, awake, finish the migration through my walls to swarm indoors, all over my windows and light fixtures, every time the temperature outside climbs above +7°C or so. They also bite. My bed is right below a window.



But there are other, more pleasant signs of Spring now. Redwing blackbirds, American tree sparrows, turkey vultures, a brown creeper, spring peepers, ruffed grouse drumming in the woods and the first flowers: coltsfoot. There were several European honey bees on the European coltsfoot flowers, collecting nectar and pollen, a good sign that coltsfoot is superior to dandelions, despite the no-mow May trend.



My trends tend to have staying power and as a result, my lawn is more of a wild area, carpeted with two years of weeds. I have a dethatching rake but it isn't easy going. I should go out and have another go at it soon. Eventually. When there are fewer cars driving by, judging me. Meanwhile, my lawn has become poplar with the trees, several of them. Poplars. As soon as the saplings bud out I'm pulling out the shears. They'll leave and the llama will get fresh greens.