Donald Sutherland, whose acting career spanned generations of filmgoers, has died at age 88. You can read about it in: As one might expect from working so many decades, many in the film industry are mourning and sharing their remembrances. One of the aspects that I find so interesting about the lanky actor with the piercing eyes is he did prodigious character actor work, yet didn’t submerge into the role as some character actors are…
Here’s a bit of alternate history I learned just last week: before the current site for what is now Dulles Airport, planners were looking to put a new Washington-area airport in Burke, Virginia. Granted, if the Burke residents hadn’t mounted a resistance, we likely would have gotten a new airport in the area before John Foster Dulles was deemed an appropriate man to lend his name to an international aerodrome… and certainly before Carol Burnett…
Being a naturalized citizen of the Washington area, I have followed the saga of the Silver Line for, well, decades. The fact that it exists and runs all the way to Dulles Airport is a fact that still doesn’t quite seem real. This video gives a relatively quick explanation of all the twists and turns it took to get there. Now if you’re a DC-area denizen like me, you might wonder about a local perspective,…
I really should have posted this back in January when New Year’s Resolutions were top of mind… or perhaps when, here in the States, we sprung forward for Daylight Saving Time. However, whether or not our collection of Mason jars in the cupboard can successfully store daylight, having routines is a good idea… and certainly we’ve all heard about the importance of morning routines. In fact, go-getters who manage their extroversion without caffeine can be…
Although I did make a post last week giving an excellent resource to all sorts of banned books to start reading for this week, aka Banned Books Week, I would be remiss if I didn’t make another post during the week itself. Last week’s post from Harper’s Bazaar drew from an exhaustive report done by PEN America, and you can learn all sorts of details about the who, what, why, and when of the various…
Banned Books Week 2023 is almost upon us, so it’s time for me to finalize what book or books I’ll be reading next week — and you might be in the same boat! Often I go looking for books that have been historically challenged, but the current vitriol against the free flow of ideas has led to a lot of books being challenged or outright banned in a lot of different localities across the country.…
Apart from contemplating whether to see any component of Barbenheimer in the theaters, I didn’t have anything I was planning to see until my kids announced they were unanimous in wanting to see the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film aka “Wait, there’s another TMNT movie?!?” This was a surprise because, to the best of my knowledge and theirs, they have not seen any previous TMNT movie. They also have not been around long enough…
So, it’s August and both the screenwriters and the screen actors are still striking. The WGA is meeting about returning to the negotiating table this Friday, but that doesn’t mean their strike is ending and, at the time of me writing this, there’s no news on AMPTP talking with SAG-AFTRA (though per that article, they’d be happy to). I’ve gone back and tagged all my relevant posts about the strike(s) for ease of reference, but…
I’ve been working on an update on the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, but I saw a meme of the photo above and felt we could all use some good news about humans helping humans. Basically, a small sailboat lost its rudder and called for distress. Naturally, the closest ship came to their aid. It just happened to be a 788-ton 1:1 replica of an 18th century sailing vessel: the Götheborg. Looking for more information than…
I am interested in technological progress (not just fun with machine learning bumbling into the creative sphere). And it’s usually about progress and how we might want to examine our societal decisions about how fast we’re going. So imagine my surprise when I read this article in Wired by Charles Platt about how analog computing is making a comeback. Oh, this is giving me story ideas…