Archive for 2024
December 23, 2024
READER FAVORITE: Under Cabinet Lights,40 LED Rechargeable Battery Operated. #CommissionEarned
I GUESS HE’S NOW THE REVEREND DENZEL WASHINGTON: Denzel Washington joins the ministry. “He attended the church as a child and later testified about being filled with the Holy Spirit after visiting another congregation with fellow actor Robert Townsend in the 1980s. According to Bryant, the actor’s baptism and licensing were not only spiritual milestones but also a return to his roots.”
Certainly more worthy of the title than the “Reverend” Al Sharpton.
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S NEXT FILM IS AN ADAPTATION OF HOMER’S THE ODYSSEY:
The speculation can finally end. Universal took to social media Monday to give film fans everywhere a present: the first official description of Christopher Nolan’s next movie. It’s called The Odyssey which, yes, is an adaptation of Homer’s poem.
“Christopher Nolan’s next film ‘The Odyssey’ is a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX film technology. The film brings Homer’s foundational saga to IMAX film screens for the first time and opens in theaters everywhere on July 17, 2026,” the statement read.
Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson and Lupita Nyong’o star in the film that opens July 17, 2026
This is a developing story, we’ll have more soon.
It’s good to see the man finally going small and intimate after a career filled with enormous blockbusters.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Winter Driving Tips for Snow and Ice: How to Stay Safe on Slippery Roads.
Can’t believe we need to know this, I thought snowfalls were soon to become a thing of the past.
THE OSBORNE EFFECT: How Not To Make A Pistol. “Or you can produce a really good pistol, and then announce that you’ve got a better version coming out soon. ‘Hudson H9, another darling of Shot Show, highly anticipated. [It’s] a really nice pistol, it did everything it was supposed to, [but] was a little more expensive than a lot of people would have liked when it came out.’ Then they announced they were just about ready to come out with a lighter aluminum-framed model. ‘And all of a sudden everybody who had been considering spending $1,200 on a Hudson H9 decided ‘Ah, I’m just going to wait for the aluminum framed version.’ Their cash flow dried up and the company went bankrupt.'”
ACE OF SPADES FILES A CHRISTMASTIME DISPATCH FROM NAKATOMI PLAZA:
2. The lead role in Die Hard was initially offered to Frank Sinatra.
Sinatra was 70 years old in 1985, when Die Hard was being put together as a concept. The producers didn’t really want Sinatra to star in the action movie — but it was legally required that they do so, because Sinatra had some kind of legal option on the sequel.
They offered him the role, hoping he’d pass. He did. He decided he was too old to play the role again.
And thus, “John Leland” became “John McClane,” so as not to confuse people into thinking this was in fact a direct sequel to 1968’s The Detective.
3. The John McClane role was offered to just about every warm body in Hollywood.
After Sinatra passed, the producers offered the lead role to all the people you’d guess they’d offer an action movie lead in the mid-80s to: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, James Caan, Richard Gere, Don Johnson, and others.
Pretty much the role was offered to anyone not named “Bruce Willis.”
They were all either uninterested or unavailable. I think they tried to sell Schwarzenegger on the idea that the story would make a good sequel for his “John Matrix” character in Commando.
Getting desperate, they offered it to television actor Bruce Willis, who played a detective on Moonlighting, but as a glib comedic figure, not as a badass.
The studio was very skeptical that Bruce Willis, hot off the non-success of the romantic comedy Blind Date, could carry a movie at all, let alone an action movie.
I think the documentary that Ace is referring to at the beginning of his post is a 2019 episode of The Movies That Made Us that focuses on Die Hard, which is still available on Netflix. There’s also a book that’s currently on Kindle Unlimited, Die Hard: An Oral History by Brian Abrams, which covers much of the same territory, though if I’m honest, the Netflix doc is the better of the two.
THE FAT LADY ISN’T SINGING BUT SHE MIGHT BE WARMING UP: Don’t Look Now but Iran’s Islamist Theocrats are in Deep Doo-Doo.
READER FAVORITE: Etekcity Camping Lanterns for Power Outages 4 Pack. #CommissionEarned
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: The Six Triple Eight — The Most Netflix Movie Of All Time (Video).
More here: The Six Triple Eight Review: On Netflix, Women in a Mail War.
I ALREADY LIKE THEM, YOU DON’T HAVE TO SELL ME: Oh No. . . Texas Allegedly Has the Weakest Gun Control Laws in the Nation.
SMART:
Finland plans to open 300 gun ranges, promoting firearm safety & proficiency as part of national defense. Imagine if the U.S. embraced a similar approach. Could we ever shift to a model where the gov’t encourages responsible gun ownership? Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/6wlDwMACsL
— ABetterWay2A (@ABetterWay2A) December 22, 2024
Edward Luttwak adds: “In the US there is no need to disseminate gun skills in society but the Finnish example is totally relevant for Taiwan whose 23 M inhabitants could easily outnumber any invasion force in any part of the Island with a mere 10% home guard participation.”
WHY TRUMP’S ‘UNQUALIFIED’ NOMINEES ARE GREAT: They should be confirmed precisely because the Washington Establishment in both political parties, as well as the mainstream media, think President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees are ‘unqualified,’ according to former Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Donald Devine, writing in the The American Spectator.
“Knowing how government really works, the Washington Establishment types know that the secret to political success is to understand that any change from the bureaucracy’s status quo will be reported immediately to the media, with complaints that it will destroy the essential health, education, welfare and national security of the U.S. in some way or another,” writes Devine, who is among the nation’s top outsider experts on managing and reforming public bureaucracies.
“The story will begin in the Washington Post and be picked up nationally and beyond. And the targets seeking change will look foolish with no supporters beyond family. That is why the secret to political ascendancy in government is not to do anything but to follow the herd and be considered a success by all,” he continues.
The nation’s capital is entering a period of radical political reform flowing down from the ongoing radical cultural conflict. This confrontation will spark trench and guerrilla warfare, plus every other kind of resistance the Washington Establishment can summon, producing continuous uproar, controversy, mis-representation, and endless predictions of catastrophic national and world consequences.
But at some point, possibly at about the third year of Trump’s second term, it could become clear to the American people that the country is being reformed, reinvigorated and restored. That is when the Washington Establishment will finally have to concede they no longer are.
SHOTGUN WEDDING: How Will a Merger of Honda and Nissan Affect the Auto Industry?
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro 2 Wireless Earbuds. #CommissionEarned
NANNYSTATERS: Denver City Council approves ban on sales of flavored tobacco products.
The Denver City Council voted 11-1 to ban the sale of flavored tobacco products in the city on Monday night.
The ordinance includes bans on e-cigarettes, menthol cigarettes, vapes and other flavored nicotine and tobacco products.
Advocates for the ban said leading up to Monday’s meeting that it would keep nicotine products out of teenagers’ and young adults’ hands. Those against the ban said it would destroy small local businesses and, in some cases, businesses would even go under.
Zack Shadi-Kingsley owns three convenience stores in Denver where nicotine products currently make up for about 55% of his inside sales.
“This would hurt,” said Shadi-Kingsley before Monday’s vote. “We spoke about moving out of the city, if this passes, selling all three of our locations in Denver and moving out of the city.”
That’s a small price to pay for the city council (particularly Councilmember Darrell Watson, the measure’s sponsor) to signal its virtue.
HMM: Having Your Tonsils Out as a Child May Have a Drastic Impact on Your Life. “A study by an international team of researchers now suggests this relatively common procedure could increase a patient’s risk of developing an anxiety-related disorder later in life.”
PBS’S WASHINGTON WEEK WON’T OWN UP TO PREVIOUS PRAISE OF BIDEN’S MENTAL ACUITY:
Washington Week with The Atlantic’s year-in-review episode Friday contained a fleeting reference to a bombshell Wall Street Journal story about how the White House and Democrats actively hid President Joe Biden’s descent into decrepitude, including several public stumbles, shaking hands with the air, and taking the “short stairs” up Air Force One.
The supposedly vigilant media acceded to Democratic wishes and showed astonishingly little curiosity about Biden’s decline, even issuing defenses of Biden’s acuity in the face of Republican observations, defenses that look simply pathetic in retrospect, like the New York Times story lamenting so-called Republican “cheap fakes.”
Not surprisingly, given the Murdoch connection, “Fox Stars Slam White House’s Biden ‘Cover-Up’ Amid WSJ Report,” with the Daily Beast noting that “During a Saturday appearance on Fox & Friends Weekend, senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy lamented not having been in the White House press briefing room to ask about the report, which claimed staffers concealed signs of Biden’s mental decline.” But did any of the network Sunday talk shows bring up the article yesterday?
There’s a Must Read Alaska post that ran on Friday headlined, “They hid the decline: Wall Street Journal’s bombshell on Biden reveals White House conspiracy.” It’s a much bigger conspiracy than that:
Related: The True Scandal Of Biden’s Death Row Pardons Is That We Don’t Even Know Who Made the Decision.
REAGANESQUE: You Want Peace? This Is How You Get Peace.
HMM: Introducing perceptein, a protein-based artificial neural network in living cells. “Westlake University in China and the California Institute of Technology have designed a protein-based system inside living cells that can process multiple signals and make decisions based on them.”
The concept of dark energy emerged to reconcile observations of distant supernovae. These celestial explosions appeared farther away than expected if the Universe’s expansion were consistent with a purely gravitational model. Physicists theorized that a repulsive force, dubbed dark energy, was driving the acceleration. This idea became a cornerstone of the ΛCDM (Lambda Cold Dark Matter) model, the standard framework for cosmology.
However, recent observations have raised questions about the accuracy of this model. The “Hubble tension”, for instance, reveals discrepancies between the current expansion rate of the Universe and its inferred early expansion from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Additionally, data from advanced instruments like the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) suggest that the ΛCDM model struggles to account for evolving patterns in cosmic structures.
Researchers at the University of Canterbury, led by Professor David Wiltshire, offer an alternative explanation that removes the need for dark energy altogether. Their timescape model proposes that the appearance of an accelerating Universe is an illusion caused by the uneven effects of gravity on time.
The theory hinges on a key principle of Einstein’s general relativity: gravity can distort the flow of time. In regions of space with strong gravitational fields, such as galaxies, time runs more slowly compared to vast, empty voids in the cosmos. These differences in time dilation mean that clocks in galactic regions would measure billions of years less than clocks in cosmic voids.
Previously: Maybe ‘dark matter’ doesn’t exist after all, new research suggests.
I’m no astrophysicist but dark energy and matter always felt a bit like cheats.
FORMER MOSSAD AGENTS REVEAL SECRETS OF 10-YEAR EXPLODING PAGER OPERATION:
Mossad began conducting tests with their newly developed devices to figure out the exact amount of explosives needed to limit the damage to the person holding the pager, the pair claimed.
Because Hezbollah’s pager was small and slick, the team had to enlarge theirs to fit the explosives.
Gabriel said: “I remember the day that I came to our director and put it on the table. He was furious, he was telling us: ‘There is no chance that anyone will buy such a big device. It’s not comfortable in their pocket. It’s heavy’.”
Two weeks later Gabriel convinced the spy chief to go approve the mission, he claimed. Mossad then used fake advertisements on YouTube to launch the new pager which was robust, dustproof, waterproof and had a long battery life.
He said: “We make advertising movies and brochures, and we put it on the internet. And it became the best product in the beeper area in the world.”
It’s a shame that mid-level Amazon Studio execs hate James Bond so much – because this material would provide an awesome subplot for 007 and Q if and when the franchise returns to the big screen.
EXCORIATION IS GOOD, LEGISLATION IS BETTER: Automakers excoriated by Senators for fighting right-to-repair: OEMs also called out for selling data they collect on drivers.
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Never Give Up! Never Surrender!