Friday, May 20, 2016

Jetta Plays The Ghost of Dorothea Puente

Congratulations, Jetta, for representing the ghost of Sacramento's most well-known personage for a TV show (likely to be aired on the Travel Channel):
Hi Friends, I just got done taping for the travel station and I played the lead as Dorothea Puente "yes you heard right" the old woman who killed 8 or 9 boarders at her house, at the house 1426 F street, which of course is now owned by someone else (this probably doesn't help in getting a date, to say this). I don't know yet when it will be shown, will let everyone know. They told me what happened to the friendly Jetta that came in, she became scary (I guess that meant I did a good job). I was kidding around on the set by telling a man playing a corpse that this is what happens to you when you complain there is too much salt in your soup!

Alex, I'll Go With 'Crazy New Shit' For $100

Gone Fission

Hunter S. Thompson Knew

Philosophers

I Am The Danger

Dancehall Was Fun Last Night!



Kristen Stewart Is At The Cannes Film Festival This Year With "Personal Shopper"

Beyond pleased that Kristen Stewart has two movies at the Cannes Film Festival this year, including "Personal Shopper" with director Olivier Assayas. Their teamwork was fantastic with "Clouds of Sils Maria": this project is bound to be fantastic too. (The actor in the first scene of this trailer was also in 'Clouds', so Assayas must enjoy working with the same people on different projects, and Stewart played a personal assistant as well in 'Clouds'.):




Kristen Stewart's on a roll now. She's right where she needs to be. In twenty years, these Assayas movies will be classics, but right now they are as fresh as the morning dew.

The reason I like 'Clouds' is that it's pitched at such a sophisticated level that almost no one gets it. It's like being the only one who understands a secret code.


Woody Allen's "Cafe Society" looks good too!:




Kristen Stewart has yet another movie coming out this year. She must be the busiest person on the planet.




I need to go Cannes sometime. It looks like a lifestyle one could become attached to. A friend, Bill O'Brien, once made a movie that got shown there, and he'd go there every year just for the fun of it:

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Deathbed Conversion

On his deathbed, former Utah Senator, Republican Bob Bennett, denounces Donald Trump's anti-Muslim xenophobia:
Instead, with a slight slurring in his words, Bennett drew them close to express a dying wish: “Are there any Muslims in the hospital?” he asked.

“I’d love to go up to every single one of them to thank them for being in this country, and apologize to them on behalf of the Republican Party for Donald Trump,” Bennett told his wife and son, both of whom relayed this story to The Daily Beast.

Ahab and the Whale

Patience and Wisdom

Nothing Is Written In Stone

Peacock Experiencing an Out-of-Body Experience!

If Trump Were A Priest

Nevada Democratic Convention Chaos

Transparency is important in conveying the impression of Fairness. The absence of Transparency in Nevada doomed the proceedings there. The convention started before everyone was credentialed or even seated and was acting under Temporary Rules, with Roberts Rules of Order no longer in effect. No better recipe for creating chaos. I'm wondering if Hillary's supporters deliberately engineered this mess. In any event, the events there aren't very important either, and it's important to stay focused on the bigger picture.

Someone at Reddit put together a timeline of events.

The Clinton camp's take.

A Very Old Mastodon Kill

This discovery could push the North American timeline back more than a millennium:
Stone tools and mastodon bones found at the bottom of a Florida river point to humans living in the region 14,550 years ago. That's more than 1,500 years earlier than previously believed, scientists say.

"This is a big deal," said Jessi Halligan, one of the study's authors and an assistant professor of anthropology at Florida State University.

"It's pretty exciting. We thought we knew the answers to how and when we got here, but now the story is changing."

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

May 16th Walk With Bella

A quiet walk with Bella last night.

Four cop cars with five cops converged at the Money Mart on Broadway, the same one that someone shot out the plate glass window several weeks ago. There, the cops stood in a circle with their hands in their pockets. They looked baffled as to why they had been called, since nothing was going on. I wonder if someone is playing with them?

A raccoon loped across Broadway at 19th Street. Bella pursued, but it wasn't a hot pursuit, since she had to drag a slow human along too.

At one point, Bella rolled on the grass, having found a particularly good-smelling patch.

Kafka Lives

We Partied Like It Was 1999

Brain Goes To Pieces

Had a very energetic Zumba class tonight, went home, promptly fell asleep, and started dreaming about Game of Thrones. I don't even watch Game of Thrones; my brain was just making up Machiavellian power crap featuring reality TV and spiders. Get some good exercise, the brain just goes to pieces. Looking for a win-win here.

Why Do We Graar?

Outtakes From an Orson Welles Wine Commercial

Words don't suffice.

One Robust Dog!

May 15th's walk with Bella started inauspiciously. I arrived home and climbed the steps of the back porch, at the top of which Bella sat, eagerly waiting to forcefully lunge at my mouth for a kiss. My arms were burdened by a jumbo package of 12 rolls of paper towels, a can of soup, and sweatpants. I stepped on the sweatpants, fell on Bella, and flung her off the porch. She fell 1.7 meters (5 feet, 7 inches) onto concrete. To my vast surprise, she was completely unhurt, just apologetic that she had misbehaved in some way so that her master saw fit to hurl her off the porch. What a robust dog!

Just outside the yard, Bella detected something on the ground between the tree and the fence. It was a terrified squirrel, incapacitated by sickness or injury. I tossed the squirrel a peanut in the hope that helped, and pulled Bella away.

The walk itself was uneventful. Bella is fond of passing through the Neutral Zone, the area under the W-X Freeway where those homeless people who have cars choose to park and sleep for the night.

"Brigadoon" Closes

Paying Off My Primary Mortgage

On May 1, I started sliding into a period of quasi-retirement. There were a few matters to take care of first, however. Today, I mailed in the last payment on my primary mortgage. There is a home equity loan outstanding, so I'm not debt free by any means, but at least the debt is consolidated.

The history of my mortgage hints at some of the turmoil in the mortgage business in the last two decades. I assumed the Norwest mortgage (ARM, 6 to 8%) on Jan. 1, 1998. It was passed on like a hot potato to Wells Fargo in December, 2000, and passed on again for a hot minute to Fleet Mortgage in April, 2001. Was it refinanced in 2001? I can't tell anymore, but from July, 2001 to December, 2002, it was managed by Washington Mutual. The mortgage was refinanced by ABN AMRO mortgage (conventional, 5.375%) in December, 2002, and passed on again to the bargain barn of the American economy, CitiMortgage, in September, 2007, where it's been ever since.

I think my mortgage broke the back of the economy. I apologize. My bad.

A To-Do List

On May 13th, Bella and I went back to see if we could find again the homeless woman’s journal we stumbled across on Wednesday night. The journal was gone, but the few written pages in the journal had been ripped out and scattered, so I picked them up to read them in more detail, out of curiosity about life on the street.

It’s mostly relationship stuff, though. Discussing her boyfriend, she writes “im thinking he went to his MOMS but i dnt knoe so wat im doing is bout to look to see if he’s in the system I really hope he didnt go to jail I would be hurt”.

She also writes a “To Do” list. There was also another “To Do” list written by someone else and left lying in the street, that includes:

Go to meetup.com
Start journalling again, and coloring
Drop gov’t class
Need comfy pants
Look into things you want to do
Get organize
Start going to Chico more
Hike (by yourself)
Look up books you need
Clean the s..t out of your apt

A Journal

On May 11th's walk with Bella, I discovered a journal written by a homeless person laying on the sidewalk. There wasn't much in the journal, and what was there was pretty depressing. I liked the little reminder: "Don't forget to go to the ER!"

I wonder if the journal will still be there over the weekend?

Bernie Sanders Leaving the Woodie Guthrie Museum

Comancheria turned “Hell or High Water”

This new New Mexico movie will be great!

Picking Up Poo With Aplomb

An idea whose time is here.

Ka-Pow!

Wind Chimes

Bees!

Everyone's been looking!:
SACRAMENTO, CA—Putting to rest a mystery that has confounded scientists for a decade, a team of biologists from the University of California, Berkeley announced Wednesday that billions of bees believed to have died in recent years were discovered living anonymously in a quiet neighborhood in Sacramento. “Over the years, the scientific community has come up with a number of theories to explain the unusual disappearance of bee populations throughout the world, but it turns out they’ve been in Sacramento the whole time,” said Berkeley Department of Entomology director Lucinda Ronan, who admitted that she and her colleagues had “never thought to look” for the millions of colonies’ worth of flying insects in the sleepy, tree-lined Northern California city and eventually came upon them in an out-of-the-way subdivision entirely by accident.

President Barbie

Hillary Clinton Doesn't Bother Me Too Much

Even though I much prefer Sanders, Hillary doesn't bother me too much, because she responds to concerted pressure. She can be nearly as progressive as Sanders, if progressives continually lean on her (and lean, and lean, and lean). It's exhausting work, of course, which is why Sanders would be better:
“I’m also in favor of what’s called the public option, so that people can buy into Medicare at a certain age,” Mrs. Clinton said on Monday at a campaign event in Virginia.

Mr. Sanders calls his single-payer health care plan “Medicare for all.” What Mrs. Clinton proposed was a sort of Medicare for more.

The Medicare program covers Americans once they reach 65. Beneficiaries pay premiums to help cover the cost of their coverage, but the government pays the bulk of the bill. Mrs. Clinton’s suggestion was that perhaps younger Americans, “people 55 or 50 and up,” could voluntarily pay to join the program.

She made the remarks as she continues to face a determined challenge on the left from Mr. Sanders, forcing her to essentially fight a two-front war as she seeks to turn her attention to Donald J. Trump and the general election. While Mr. Sanders trails by a substantial number of delegates, his effect continues to be felt in the race as he pressures Mrs. Clinton to adopt more progressive positions.