Mitch's Blog

Here’s something I saw while I was walking the dog: This fairy village, which we pass by every few days. They’ve arranged it nicely since the last time I stopped to take a close look.

Natasha Dangoor at The Wall Street Jourrnal:

When Carlos Gomez’s recent flight from Guadalajara was delayed, he asked a gate attendant why. It wasn’t weather or crew shortages. There were 25 wheelchair passengers holding up boarding.

There were no such delays when Gomez’s flight landed. Most of the same passengers stood up without assistance and bounded off toward the baggage claim.

Social media has credited a divine intervention for this sudden return to mobility. An enigmatic “Jetway Jesus” is curing these passengers by the time they land, and the remarkable recovery acts have been dubbed “miracle flights.”

This year I traveled with someone who legitimately used a cane to walk, and it occurred to me that if I simply carried a foldable cane with me in my travel kit, I could get VIP treatment. But I only gave it a second’s thought and decided that would be a terrible idea, because I am not a psycho.

For this multimedia report, The New York Times joined a Ukrainian drone team at the front to understand how cheap drones have changed combat as we know it. The equipment is hacked together — the explosive looks like it’s contained in a plastic soda bottle. By Mauricio Lima, Andrew E. Kramer and Josh Holder.

This drone team, part of the 34th marine brigade, works in two rooms. One is cluttered with wires, antennas, zip ties, duct tape and soldering irons to modify the drones. The other holds the explosives. A wood stove provides comfort in cold weather.

The ingenuity is wonderful and the butcher’s bill (to use an old-fashioned phrase) is horrible.

Gwilym Mumford at The Guardian::

Bohemian Rhapsody is a deeply weird mega hit, a song that explodes all the usual rules of success. Everywhere you look there are contradictions. It’s a multimillion seller that has no chorus, numerous tempo and key changes, ambiguous and difficult-to-parse lyrics and a long running time. Musically, with its Gilbert and Sullivan operetta leanings, it has more in common with the 19th century than the 20th, let alone the 21st, but it’s also the most streamed 20th-century song this century, a musical throwback that nevertheless dragged pop into the music-video age. It’s both celebrated as a queer anthem or an extended metaphor for coming out, and is the British armed forces’ favourite song. It’s an extremely silly, borderline novelty hit that is also sort of deeply serious: “If I’m not back again this time tomorrow/ Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters.”

The phrase “this ain’t my first rodeo” goes back at least as far as the 1981 movie “Mommie Dearest,” where Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford proclaims, “Don’t fuck with me fellas! This ain’t my first time at the rodeo” to a room of high-powered male executives trying to get the better of her in a business deal. A Way With Words: “Earlier forms of this expression involve such activities as a goat roping, a goat race, pumpkin picking, or a frog race.” “This Ain’t My First Rodeo” was also the title of a 1990 country song.

Fresh Air rebroadcasts its September interview with Rob Reiner, which includes a previously-unaired segment where Reiner talks about “Being Charlie, a 2015 film he collaborated on with his son Nick Reiner. The film was a semiautobiographical story of addiction and homelessness, based on Nick’s own experiences. Nick Reiner was arrested Sunday evening after Rob and Michele Reiner were found dead inside their California home.”

I clicked on this linkbait headline: “5 Forgotten ’90s Sci-Fi Movies That Still Hold Up Today” and was pleased to see the list includes “Robot Jox,” with a screenplay co-written by our friend Joe Haldeman.

The premise is that nations have replaced war with one-on-one combat between champions piloting five-story weaponized robot suits. “It’s a silly conceit, of course, but it’s no less absurd than the current war model. Why bomb out cities and murder thousands when you can build a giant robot with a chainsaw penis?”