Another Scoop Of Bullshit, With Sprinkles On Top

 h/t Granite Grok

Apparently, unable to help themselves, and tickling the confirmation bias of every "masks don't work" retard on the planet, some Norwegian numbnuts' have burped out another pointless non-study "study", full of more holes than an entire warehouse of Jarlsberg cheese. 

If you're going to consume something, we recommend
this choice unhesitatingly over what's in the header pic.

Notable is their forthrightness in telling you, right in black-and-white, what a load of crap they've excreted.

For bonus points, they waited until 2022 to do this, after COVID had transmogrified worldwide to, at worst, a bad flu, and normally, a 2-3 day cold. Wherein people who actually had it couldn't even tell it was anything to worry about. Genius, right there.

The parts of the self-reported survey no one reads down to that matter:

Additionally, there may be other factors that could confound the relationship between face  mask use and study outcomes, such as participants in high-risk professions or with risk factors for severe COVID-19. Both groups may be more or less prone to wear face masks, while also  observing different social distancing practices than the average population. We also cannot  rule reverse causality, in which those testing positive for COVID-19 were more prone to wear  masks afterwards in order to protect others. Finally, there could be an association between the  inclination to test and the propensity to wear a face mask.

So many of their "frequent" users could have been health care workers in close proximity to active COVID patients. Which screws the pooch decisively, all by itself. They performed no control for this. Then they mention the other two obvious reasons what they think they found is hogwash, so their imaginary "correlation" is so much worthless bullshit. Which they even told people from the outset in their intro summary:

We believe the observed increased incidence of infection associated with wearing a face mask is likely due to unobservable and hence nonadjustable differences between those wearing and not wearing a mask. Observational studies reporting on the relationship between face mask use and risk of respiratory infections should be interpreted cautiously, and more randomized trials are needed.

Thus, any similarity between what they claim to have found, and actual truth, is as likely due to witchcraft, or heavy use of psychedelic drugs while correlating their so-called "data". Monkeys throwing darts at a board would be more reliable. 

Well-played, weasel-word maestros.

And how many participants reported wearing a face mask all the time?

Of the participants, 852 (26.6%) reported using a face mask at least 75% of the time when near others outside their home, 861 (26.8%) reported using a face mask between 25% and 75% of the time, and 1,495 (46.6%) reported using a face mask less than 25% of the time.

So the answer to the question of who wore a face mask all the time is 0%.

They even told people this openly:

Owing to few responses for some of the categories, in our analysis we combined the response categories into: Always/Almost always; Often / Sometimes; and Almost never/Never. This was prespecified in the protocol.

Therefore, they combined that 0% with the 26.6% who wore a mask maybe 75% of the time when near others outside their home.

That's like combining steak and bullshit in equal proportions to make a meatloaf. Consume at your own risk.

Not studied: how many of them had close contact inside their home with friends and family who had COVID, and would likely have transmitted it to them, when nobody in the equation was wearing anything.

The greater point, as usual, is how many of those wearing masks were in proximity to those wearing none, when the whole point of any masking policy involving simple masks is that other people wear them to protect you, not the other way around.

They knew this too, yet continue to test seatbelts to see if they prevent car accidents, and test parachutes to see if they prevent plane crashes, in true anti-scientific jackhole bassackwards fashion.

With two university professors, a master's graduate, and a Ph.D. conducting this "research". Which is as reliable as a mall survey. And you wonder why college, worldwide, is simply shit?

They conclude by summarizing yet again all the ways their "research" is full of shit:

Our findings may be explained by several factors. A major limitation of our study is the non- randomized, cross-sectional study design. It may be that mask wearers were more prone to wear masks to protect others from their own infection. This reverse causality may explain the positive association between risk of infection and mask usage, and could be supported by the finding that participants reporting to wear masks also were more likely to test themselves for COVID-19. Furthermore, there may be other behavioral differences related to perception of  risk [26] or occupation that we did not observe, that are linked to the likelihood of wearing masks [27] or to the likelihood of being tested for COVID-19 when symptomatic. There is also the possibility that mask wearers feel somewhat protected and thus change their behaviors to not observe social distancing, so that any benefit of masking is offset by increased exposure. Lastly, our main outcome was based on self-report, which is also a possible source of bias.

Therefore, any similarity between what they published, and useful information is purely coincidental. Which makes you wonder WhyTF they even bothered to do it, other than to justify their rent checks, and to not be prosecuted for grant fraud, let alone skin-wasting and oxygen theft.

These witless wonders couldn't find their own asses with both hands, a map, and a rear-view mirror. But grant money was at stake, so more shit chowder for the Bubbas is once again on the menu.

And at the end, this pearl:

Recommendations to wear face masks in the community are largely informed by low certainty evidence from observational studies.

No shit, Sherlock.

IOW, TPTB, being even stupider than these educated idiots, made foolish decisions to implement jackassical policies which had no scientific basis, and no possibility of working, because 

a) they wanted to be seen "doing something", even if it was bag-of-hammers-stupid, with a 0% chance of success, like we told you from the outset, and

b) because the sort of people who become TPTB self-abuse themselves to fantasies of telling everyone else what to do, for their own good, no matter how stupid, pointless, and ill-informed those instructions are.

Short answer: in any crisis, ignore any so-called leaders who have no actual bona fides qualifications, any alleged "experts" they call on, and damned near anything they tell you to do that sounds even remotely suspect. And whenever possible, kill both categories before they can breed, for the good of the species.

Total number of "studies" that actually studied mask-wearing efficacy, since about EVER: still only one, AFAIK.

More grant money set on fire, and then flushed down the toilet.

Universities should pay professors to not inflict this sort of bullshit on the people, and dock them salary commensurate with any grant stipends they receive which plop this kind of pure bullshit in public. It's the only way they'll learn to stop doing it, short of kicking them in the dick 100 times a day for a week.

For the record, I'm in favor of that too.

But little steps, right?

Like A Crock

Irish and Kenny posted about Chevy's latest ad for the holidays.

You can find it there; I won't give it more views, but not because it's a tear-jerker.

Why not?

Sorry, would that be the subsidiary of Government Motors?

The ones who took bailouts from taxpayers to continue their failed business model?

The ones chipping nanny-cars, eavesdropping on all conversations in those cars, and turning God Alone Knows What Data over to the feds and God Alone Knows Who, willy-nilly?

The ones pimping Diversity Is Our Strength in every commercial, from mixed-race to Heather-Has-Two-Mommies as the norm, rather than an infinitesimal fractional fringe of society?

Now they want to pander a little, suck up to traditional America, pretend they care about us, and jerk some tears to pimp their cars?

(And while we're up, why isn't Granny black, hispanic, Asian, let alone LGBTEIEIO?? The only thing white people are good for in commercials is to be doddering old fools...? Got it.)

Whatever.

Somebody would have to have Alzheimer's to forget all that and still buy their crappy product.

No Alzheimer's here, nor Stockholm Syndrome either, thanks.

Somebody tell Chevy:

Fire your woketard advertising staff, apologize publicly for at least twenty years of shitting on your customers' heads, make better cars, and then we can talk.

Why Richard Dawkins Is An Underbright Lying Twat

For some unknown reason, YouTube burped this excerpt of a greater debate featuring famous atheist Richard Dawkins, and some polite creationist (I frankly couldn't care less about the latter's identity or bona fides; he's an irrelevant variable) onto my feed.

You can watch this entire segment if you like, or even the entire program (it's on YouTube) and nonetheless be stupider for the time wasted.

Dawkins, and by extension Darwin, and all the lazy idiots of similar ilk always default to a knee-jerk lie, rather than address the actual question in this segment.

His idea that there's a "ramp of improvement", like Darwin's half-assed and ignorant suppositions in the mid-19th century, rest on wholesale ignorance of the physiology of vision. Darwin had an excuse: the science hadn't been performed then. Dawkins, however, is simply intellectually lazy, and deliberately mendacious, because by now, the mechanisms enabling sight, particularly human sight, are far better known and such research widely propagated. 

The problem enters in when, rather than addressing the ponderous hole that physiologic truth has blown through his atheistic codswallop, he lazily chooses to simply lie his way around the Great Wall Of Reality into which he's just been run headfirst, at speed.

To wit:

One cannot have "only a quarter of an eye, only a hundredth of an eye, or half an eye, is better than nothing " (3:50ff).

Basic physiology disagrees:

It doesn't work like that.

In the trade, there's a technical term for what you are when you have a half, a quarter, or a hundredth of an eye (and by this we mean not just the eyeball itself, but the entire cascade of processes enabling vision): BLIND.

Darwin, and Dawkins, have a four-year-old's scientific apprehension of how vision happens, which he exhibits in this debate, and which he shares with fellow lunkhead Casper Milquetoast, scientific imbecile, and Defender Of The Faith. Milquetoast should have trounced Dawkins' retardedly facile explanation and mopped the floor with him at that point, but he wasn't bright enough to attempt that, lacking even the most rudimentary concept of vision physiology  himself. As this was programmed, he was either controlled opposition, or deliberately chosen for being this ignorant. The Washington Generals are everywhere, and about as obvious.

The so-called "debate", therefore, is simply a real-life exhibition match between Dumb and Dumber, to make the most annoying sound in the world.

The actual process of phototransduction, which is how reflected light and images are transmogrified into mentally usable images in the brain, is incredibly ridiculously complex. The idea that all the physical structures and biochemical processes that make those structures needful and useful all aligned precisely from beginning to end simultaneously out of random chance and selective evolution is akin to positing that a flight-worthy 747, whole, fueled, and ready for takeoff, would spontaneously generate from enough tornadoes hitting an airplane boneyard. Frankly, of the two cases, the spontaneously assembled 747 is the likelier of the two, by orders of magnitude.

Sh'yeah, that engine could just appear randomly too.

There are thousands of biochemical actions and reactions in the cascade of vision, which have to happen immediately in forward and reverse, acting on microscopic and specialized physical structures that accommodate those processes, every fraction of a second, to get the image from one single light photon to the retina. And as many again to get from the retina to the visual cortex. And then it has to instantly reverse to reset the rods and cones so that you can receive the next image, rather than have visual imagery locked on, or see life like a flickering silent-movie-era projection, flickering in and out forever. And it has to happen the next instant. And the next. And the next, endlessly and seamlessly. As it has since you were born.

If any of the bio-mechanical structures of vision are missing or flawed, you won't see, at least not well. If some certain of them are missing, or if any one of those hundreds of thousands of biochemical and bioelectrical processes fail, you don't see dimly; you're simply and completely blind.

So you can't have any "fraction" of an eye, and build any delusional "ramp of improvement" on that. You have to have the whole process, top to bottom, front to back. There is no reason to expect 99.9999% of them to "evolve" and hang around just waiting perpetually, when they'd serve no purpose without the missing piece(s). One does not see a hubcap, and imagine an entire automobile will eventually spontaneously assemble around it either, and for the same reason: the entire idea is delusionally recockulous.

We'll leave off the problem of the lack of the billions and billions of fossils of blind animals necessary, even over billions of years, before sight developed. The process, even for relatively "simple" eyes in the animal kingdom, is all or nothing. And it's no more likely to have spontaneously and randomly generated than is the computer screen, tablet, or smartphone you're reading this on to have just been burped up by the cosmos out of blind luck.

In Dawkins' delusional universe, these fall off of trees too.

Dawkins, and Evolution since Day One, skips that conundrum by saying, in effect, "but a Galaxy 1 is better than no Galaxy, and an iPhone 1 is better than nothing", which begs the question of how you got from Og and Thag beating on hollow logs to having any Galaxy or iPhone at all, plus the entire cellular telephone network worldwide, without someone to build them in the first place. Just like eyes, and a vision process.

Dawkins knows that (if he doesn't, he's a gibbering moron), and were he ever smacked in the face with that frozen mackerel of truth he's spent a lifetime ignoring, by someone scientifically brighter and rhetorically less handicapped than segment opponent Casper Milquetoast (which is an incredibly low bar), he'd dissemble, dig in and double down. Or else be forced to admit that his pet theory and favorite philosopher is so much codswallop, and had to be for the decades and decades of physiological discoveries of the complexity of vision, of a magnitude never imagined by 1800's dimwit Darwin. But I doubt, with Dawkins being so invested, intellectually and morally, in the lifelong lie, he'd ever be intellectually honest enough to admit that he, just like Darwin, had a grudge against the idea of the divine or supernatural, and both had therefore sunk their spurs into the idea that there is no god, because it makes the rest of their pathetic existence tolerable and comfortable, not to mention lucrative.

He's entitled to go to hell in whatever way he sees fit to do so; that's free will in action.

But to make it his life's work to try and bamboozle others by deliberately ignoring the utter lack of any scientific underpinning for his delusions, and furthermore ignoring the monumental evidence to the exact contrary, and outright lying about both in support of his line of twaddle, is quite inarguably and inexcusably monstrous and damnable.

But it obviously calms the simple-minded on their way to the abattoir.

Sunday Music: Crazy

 

Seal's first Top Ten hit from his 1990 debut album, which put him on the music map, until 1995's "Kiss From A Rose" launched him into the stratosphere of headliners.

Be A Man Among Men

Epic Moments

Happy Thanksgiving to one and all.

Word To Your Mother

If you live in the 513, best avoid the Pinedale Shopping Mall tomorrow.

Best Wishes; Wish He'd Eat The First Slice

FIFY

 

Can't Tell The Players Without A Program

 h/t Wilder

Crossword Clue: Flightless Turd

 h/t WRSA

One Big Old Fish Story

h/t (and apologies) to CW at Daily Timewaster

For the 100th time, CW runs a great photoblog over at Daily Timewaster. As anyone who's ever visited already knows. The pictures he finds God Alone Knows Where, and what he decides to post is a constant source of "Wow!", at least 99 times out of 100, if not more like 9999 times out of 10,000.

The above post, entitled One Big Old Cannon was no different. And the comments never fail to highlight the wide range of actual knowledge from most of the commentariat.

As this one did. Having some wee familiarity with the topic, courtesy of Uncle Sam, I also chimed in, as I've seen me do a time or three around the 'net.

SurlyNovember 14, 2023 at 6:44 AM

I think it is a M114 155 mm howitzer.

Replies

1. 
   AnonymousNovember 14, 2023 at 7:48 AM

   Definitely appears to be.
2. 
   AesopNovember 14, 2023 at 7:51 AM

   Quite so.
   "The Pig".
   Klunky, heavy, solid, reliable, ugly-as-sin p.o.s., but it got the job done.

 So far, so good. No harm, no foul.

AnonymousNovember 14, 2023 at 8:50 AM

Is that an oil slick under the left tire? Did it have an oil lube system?

Reply

Replies

1. 
   AesopNovember 16, 2023 at 3:29 PM

   It's likely water from swabbing out the breech with a big wet sponge after each round was fired, so the next powder charge didn't hit a flaming ember and detonate prematurely.
   
   When you spin the gun to lay on a new azimuth, as they're doing here, the breech rotates too, and the puddle is now on one side or the other, rather than its former location dead center behind the gun.

Still doing just fine.

Enter Anonymous Problem Child.

AnonymousNovember 14, 2023 at 9:25 AM

Dat's a 155, 100# shell came on pallet of 8 thats one of them on the ground could lob the round 25miles supposed to have crew of 7 , I never had more than 4 we were air mobile under the belly of a chinock until they decided too many came back down and we had to wait for the jolly green. Ah 20yrs old, all the ammo you could shoot warm beer free marlboros and $89 a month with another $25 thrown in for combat.

Natzsofast, Guido.

AesopNovember 15, 2023 at 8:10 AM

Um, not so much.
Max range on The Pig was 16K yards, or a shade over 9 miles.

The only way you could fire a shell from one and have it go 25 miles would be as the belly gun on the Space Shuttle.

The gun also weighs over 12,000 pounds, even stripped for combat, and the max payload on the Jolly Green was 6000 pounds, and the max takeoff weight was only 9000 pounds above the empty weight, and that's before we talk about air density 10° above the equator, worse at altitude, so no Jolly Green was picking up Pigs anywhere in 'Nam, ever.

The Sh*thook A and B models could only pull 10,000 pounds stripped, which is more than the Jolly Green, not less, and they could only lift 7,000-8,000 pounds in-country, so no one was lifting Pigs in 'Nam with those either.

They couldn't even try it until the D model was introduced, which didn't happen until '79. Which is 6 years after we pulled out of Vietnam, and 4 years before it went all-commie from the Delta to the Chinese border.

If you yanked a lanyard in 'Nam, you should know the difference between an 105mm M-101, and a 155mm M-144.

Starting with the fact that the little 105mm howitzers, unlike their big brothers, only weigh about 5,000 pounds, and are the only guns any helicopter could pick up from 1965-1973. Let alone carrying another 1000 pounds of cannon-cockers inside the bird.

Some of us have done this for real, and in places other than Call Of Duty.

I'm not saying you didn't, but if you did, it's time for a check-up.
Your memory is shot.
But then, you'd be in your 70s now, so that's par for the course, and something we all have to look forward to.

Butthurt Alert! Now it's on like Donkey Kong. I insulted Doofus, and apparently also his Daddy Doofus, and shat upon someone's cherished childhood memories.

AnonymousNovember 19, 2023 at 6:48 AM

Aesop. My WW II father was in artillery, 155s was all his battalion had, besides the 50's to protect them. Decorated by Patton twice, DeGaulle, Eisenhower, and Bradley. He said they could lay'em in at 25 miles all day and all night. Just like he did at Mannheim and many other places. He said they just added an small booster powder charge that provided the extra distance. Call him a liar if you want,,, be glad you don't know him if you do,,, Mr authority on all that is.

Have it your way, Mr. Butthurt. CW decided to wipe my last reply out today. I'm not surprised. His house, his rules.

My house, my rules. So here's the reply, and with pictures instead of just hot links:

Anonymous Fairytaler:

Your father might possibly have been referring to the M1 155mm "Long Tom" guns,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/155_mm_gun_M1

not the 155mm  howitzers, 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M114_155_mm_howitzer

which latter is the one in the picture heading this post, the details on which I was intimately trained, as we didn't retire that relic until after my military service ended.

And that bigger weapon (the WW2/Korea M1 gun) weighed 30,000 pounds, never was deployed in Vietnam, and had a maximum range of 14 miles (23km), giving 6 more miles of range from three times the howitzer's muzzle velocity, which is why the tubes only lasted about 1500 rounds.

He'd still come up 11 miles short.

We also had the M1 8-inch (203mm) gun in WW2, which could fire out to 35,635yds, which at 20.2 miles, while the longest range on any US artillery in WW2, is still well short of "25 miles" range.

For anything farther than that, you'd need the 16" guns of an Iowa-class battleship:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16-inch/50-caliber_Mark_7_gun

For the record, those guns were actually used in WW2 and Vietnam, but no one ever delivered a battleship by helicopter anywhere either.

So, in order:

1) The US never deployed any field artillery of 155mm size that could crank rounds out to 25 miles range, at least not any time prior to 2010;

2) none of the artillery of that size were ever able to be lifted by any helicopter in existence before 1979, long after Vietnam was a distant memory;

3) no such weapon with that range capability existed, in WWII, Vietnam, or frankly, probably ever, anywhere, in any army that ever existed, prior to the improvements in ammunition (which require literal rocket propulsion) of only the last 15 years or so.

I'm sorry if your recollections and/or your father's tales are factually and demonstrably impossible, but that's how reality works. If your recollections of your father's tales are accurate, then yes, he lied to you. You were there, and I wasn't, so I can't say for certain which it is. I suspect he was merely pulling your leg.

But no one ever got an 180% increase in howitzer range by dropping in any "small booster charge". The powder charge to get to 9 miles on the M114 is over 2' long. 

So you'd need another two charges to get that increase, which 

a) wouldn't fit inside the breech to begin with, and 

b) would blow the piece to hell on the first try, probably maiming or killing anyone on the gun. 

That's actually a bigger whopper than anyone lifting M114s with a helicopter before the 1980s.

Maybe these were Magic Booster Charges. Maybe the laws of physics didn't apply on your father's artillery piece.

And maybe your bluff and bluster in light of actual realities are simply pointless, sad, and unseemly in public, despite the fervency of your familial bonds.

If you have any actual link to the type and specifications of the imaginary artillery in question, kindly post it, and prove your contentions.

Failing that, kindly spare me your ire and gas after spouting fish stories that never happened, and inarguably never could have.

This is CW's blog. We're guests here. I simply corrected a factual error from an anonymous poster. Instead of taking this so personally, I ask you to kindly just let it drop, rather than getting me so invested in this I make you the topic on mine. (Too late!)

P.S.: I hope someone else already clued you in about the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. It's not my job to stomp on all the balloons from your childhood.

_______________________________

IOW, Butthurt Bullshitter, don't get so invested in your own line of b.s. that you end up naked, on the internet, in front of the whole planet, trying to explain exactly how your shit doesn't stink.

It won't work, and you look and sound ridiculous. No wonder you post Anonymously.

But the original offer stands, BB. Post a link to your Magical Unicorn 155mm artillery piece. Put up, or shut up.

And BTW, if anyone thinks I shouldn't be kicking retarded kids this hard, someone should stop dropping them in the road right in front of me. On a kicking tee.

Because I can drop 'em on target 25 miles out, all day long.

Just saying.

- Authority On All That Is

Sunday Music: Back In Black

 

If you can't rock out to this ultimate rock/metal anthem, there's something wrong with you. It worked in 1980, and it still crushes it now. They'll probably still be playing this on everything 40 years from now.

Credit Where It's Due

Though we understand the backstory rationale, Tam's blog quality has slipped somewhat since going comment-free some years back (which potential fate is the only reason we still tolerate the occasional jackhole poster here, at least until we spam-tag their IP), but proving that writing for a living hones the craft if you let it, she's still got it when it counts, which is why it's still a regular visit.

This genius-level turn of phrase in this sentence requires a standing slow clap:

Message Fic 

A critique flung at authors of fiction who get too polemical, first recorded in use against H.G. Wells, is that they'd sold their artistic birthright for a pot of message.

If you have the cultural literacy to see what she did there, you'll recognize that unlike a steak, that's both medium rare, and well done. And since we can't say it there, we offer it here: Kudos.

Fuck You! Strong Message Follows.

 h/t Divemedic

Perhaps, while she was up, Nikki Haley could also have our Social Security numbers tattooed on our inner arms - more free government! - to prove we'd been verified by Uncle's gentle minions, so the TSA could scan us on the way up the gangplank and into the boxcars too?

Unable, as she is, to lay her finger on the precise section of the US Constitution that would permit the full weight of the federal government to perpetrate such a monstrous rectal intrusion upon everyone who logs onto the internet, Haley ought to be be punched in the mouth by every bystander she meets until the day she recants this totalitarian horseshit, in tears. Ideally, after losing a few teeth. Even if that day only comes long after this election season ends.

Silence Dogood, Mark Twain, and Dr. Seuss all called in response to Haley's pining for more intrusive government. Separately and collectively, they said, in so many words,

"Eat a huge bag of dicks, you Nazi cunt."

A message with which we concur most heartily.

As an aside, WTF gives with South Commielina? First you fuckers inflict Lindsay Grahamnesty on America, and now it's this goose-stepping whore from hell? What The Actual Fuck? And the balls on some people to whinge about Califrutopia's retarded offerings after this?!? STFU until you have something better to offer than Nikki Hitler, She-Wolf Of The SS.

The GOP still doesn't want Trump? THIS is why you get Trump. Who never, BTW, sicced the FBI on me to run down my name and address.

The Secret Service is going to have to start escorting Haley to and from buildings with a shield wall of 5' slabs of AR500, just to get through the primaries until this twat is voted down. It's a huge pity that all the beatings she's going to get are only going to be electoral. This is one wannabe-gauleiter who desperately needs an appointment with 3' of pipe across the chops.

I do not envy the hurdles her protective detail will have to face in looking after such a gross waste of skin and oxygen. Sadder still that the boos and catcalls after she burped this crap out haven't forced her to immediately withdraw from further campaigning, and seek political asylum back in India, where she belongs. She could take Ramalamadingdong with her, and save another trip.

Before You Put Your Chips On That "Sure Thing"...

h/t daily timewaster

Winter Fun

Sunday Music: Sunset Grill

 

Don Henley's second solo album in 1984, after the Eagles went into extended hiatus, which turned into a Top 40 single in '85. It's almost 40 years old, and the melancholy rock beat is perfect for song about the slow decline of La-La Land that could just as easily have been written yesterday, and still ring as true.

Narrative Pimps

h/t WRSA

 

Pre-Occupied...

Sorry. Other than some fall cleaning, got busy binge-watching the first season of Tulsa King. Haven't watched network schlock since...pretty much this entire millenium, especially not when I worked in it. Looked at Yellowstain er, Yellowstone the first season, but as I noted at the time, it's a really crappy Wyoming tin-earred echo of The Godfather, except done far, far worse than Coppola on a mac-and-cheese budget, despite Kevin Costner trying to carry the entire series on his back. Which multiple seasons of continued production just proves that the average cable Nielsen viewer will give a thumbs-up to watching turds circle in a porcelain bowl, just for being slightly less turdly than everything else on TV, broadcast, cable, streaming, or whatever

Tulsa King, by contrast, is a completely fresh idea, and Taylor Sheridan (unlike that earlier effort) seems to have hit his stride with a new concept, rapidly becoming the Joss Wheedon of the 2020s. For a bonus, as extra features noted, and unlike Justified, they didn't keep trying to sell you northern L.A. county as Kentucky (which as Austin Powers noted, look as alike as Malibu and the South of France), they actually shoot this thing in Tulsa OK. Bad for employees in The Biz, but great for production value and OK locals. 

Without looking at the credits, spotting the always lovely Dana Delaney (whose voice is still music), and an aging Barry Corbin, in recurring roles was a special treat.

I don't do streaming, preferring to watch what I want on my terms, forever, and actually own it beyond their freshness date of expiration (Disn-idiots at ABC producing The Rookie who refuse to put that series out on DVD/BD, call your office). So (spoiler alert) the cliffhanger ending was a little bit of a piss-off. But so it goes. We can settle for seeing an entire season at a time when it's this fun to watch.

If you haven't given this one a look, it's highly recommended.

Fun fact: Stallone was passed over as 29th Italian extra behind the wedding cake in The Godfather, and every studio in town passed on his script for Rocky, twice. Proving the timeless truth of William Goldman's maxim about Hollywood: "Nobody in this town knows nothin'." 50 years later, someone occasionally catches a clue.

Haven't seen anything more interesting IRL lately to make any given day not a new version of SSDD.

You're Invited

Not as a guest. As the menu.

Sunday Music: California Dreamin'

 

Any one of these four had more raw talent in their little fingers than most acts bring to the table with their entire bodies. This song hit #4 on the Hot 100, and finished as the #1 song of the year for 1966, tied with Ballad of the Green Berets.

Stop. Teasing. Me.

 h/t Divemedic

Keep playing stupid games.
But don't say we didn't warn you.

Home and Dry

Rough plot of the Odyssey, not counting detours and side trips.

I should've done that years ago!

The odometer says something over 2600 miles in two weeks. Far enough that I could have driven to Kansas City and back, or to Boston one-way. For about $250 in gas. At 70 on cruise control, the buggy gets better than 40MPG. Suffice it to say I spent more on food.

Probably walked another couple of hundred miles, all tolled.

I've driven completely across the country twice, ocean to ocean both trips. I don't recommend it, but Uncle Sam was rather insistent about my arrivals at the time. Bite-sized day trips are a lot more fun.

Coronado, Julian, Tucson, Tombstone, Prescott, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Meteor Crater, Las Vegas, Fresno, Monterey, and Santa Barbara were the highlights. Multiple side trips.

Best part: Two weeks of no place to be but where I wanted, no alarm clock or time clock, just "What do I want to do today?"

The only news I saw was weather reports.

I popped online a couple of times, briefly, mainly just to see what other people were posting.

I usually have several days off in a row nearly every week.

Weekly trips are now on the menu.

Regular blogging will resume later today. After a healthy nap.