Category Archives: General

General, Movies

Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood…

This is, frankly, shocking.

Ellie Shechet on Jezebel.com has the following article:

Robert Wagner has been named a “Person of Interest” in death of Natalie Wood

Back in 1981 there came the shocking news that actress Natalie Wood, known for roles in Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story (among others) and then wife of Robert Wagner, disappeared from the family’s yacht and was later found drowned.

Aboard the yacht at the time was Robert Wagner, Christopher Walken, and Captain Dennis Davern.

Of course, there were plenty of rumors spread at that time regarding her death.  Christopher Walken, who as mentioned was on board the yacht, was starring with Mrs. Wood in the movie Brainstorm.  Were they involved in some other way?  Did this lead to some kind of confrontation between Wagner and Wood?  Were they simply partying too hard and she accidentally fell of the yacht?  More darkly: Was she pushed?

There were many questions but the case was essentially concluded as an accidental drowning and not much was made of it.

Yet the questions lingered.  It was reported that Wagner and Wood had an argument shortly before she disappeared.  People in a boat nearby stated they heard someone saying she was drowning.  True?  False?

Regardless, the case is being given another look and, as mentioned, Robert Wagner is now being listed as a “person of interest”.

Mr. Wagner will be 88 this month so even if something were to come of this new scrutiny it is doubtful he will face many/any consequences -if indeed any are merited!

If nothing else, the curious case of Mrs. Wood’s death seems like it’ll be back in the news again, a reminder of the sad ending of an extraordinary actress’ life.

General

Voynich manuscript… cracked?

Ever heard of the Voynich manuscript?  No?

It’s a document named after Wilfred Voynich, a Polish book dealer who in 1912 purchased the manuscript.  In the years since, the manuscript has been carbon dated to being made in the early 15th Century, some 600 years ago.  The manuscript is filled with wild images and even wilder notations.  Notations that no one has been able to decipher, at least not until now.

In the years since the manuscript’s discovery many, many people have scrutinized the work and tried to decipher whatever is written on it.  To date, no one has figured out what the notations mean, leading some to consider the possibility that the manuscript’s writings are nothing more than gibberish and mean nothing.

Here are some images of the famous (infamous!?) document (wanna see more?  Google Voynich manuscript then check out the vast amount of images available on the web!):

Image result for voynich manuscript

Image result for voynich manuscript

Image result for voynich manuscript

Now, however, and according to George Dvorsky at gizmodo.com…

Artificial intelligence may have cracked 600 year old manuscript

I won’t give away everything presented within the article but here is the key paragraph presented in the article:

For Greg Kondrak, an expert in natural language processing at the University of Alberta, (decoding the Voynich manuscript) seemed a perfect task for artificial intelligence. With the help of his grad student Bradley Hauer, the computer scientists have taken a big step in cracking the code, discovering that the text is written in what appears to be the Hebrew language, and with letters arranged in a fixed pattern. To be fair, the researchers still don’t know the meaning of the Voynich manuscript, but the stage is now set for other experts to join the investigation.

From a little later in the article:

For the final step, the researchers deciperhered the opening phrase of the manuscript, and presented it to colleague Moshe Koppel, a computer scientist and native Hebrew speaker. Koppel said it didn’t form a coherent sentence in Hebrew.

“However, after making a couple of spelling corrections, Google Translate [was] able to convert it into passable English: ‘She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people,’” wrote the researchers in the study, which now appears in Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics.

Fascinating, no?

Assuming these people are on the right path and the mysterious manuscript is indeed on the verge of being decoded, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if nothing terribly earth shattering comes from the actual writings, perhaps musings that while illuminating to the times, don’t mean all that much to us today.

Then again, I could be wrong and, I must say, it would be incredibly fascinating if I were so proven! 😉

General

Whoops…

In this era where just about everyone has a smartphone and many have smart or exercise/tracking watches and one’s location can be followed so long as the user sets the phone/watch to do so, that there just might come a point where that proves… troublesome.

Liz Sly from The Washington Post writes about how…

U. S. Soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging

The article’s headline effectively tells you most of what you need to know: That some top secret bases light up thanks to soldiers wearing their smart watches while jogging or, for that matter, simply walking around their classified digs.

The article is well worth checking out and proves how scary modern times are, especially when we willingly have given away so much of our privacy to all those smart devices.

One of the comments made to the story says it all:

Why not post your position on Facebook?

Because the enemy knowing where you are at all times is a such a positive to the troops!

This, by the way, reminded me of a story a while back where thieves looked around Facebook for idio– …er… Facebook users who posted pictures contemporaneously when they were on vacation and far away from their homes and, when they returned home, found –surprise surprise!– their homes had been broken into.

Yup, that happened.

General

What’s good for the goose…

In the many years (and miles) of travel I’ve engaged in in this life, I’ve read, studied, and analyzed.  I’ve tried to put myself in others’ shoes and sought to follow the “do unto others” philosophy to the best of my ability.

I’m no saint, mind you, and I would never claim to be.

I also found, quite early in my life, that religion wasn’t for me and that I was, at heart, an atheist.  Having said that, I don’t begrudge anyone having strong feelings for their religion.  If it makes your day that much brighter to follow your particular faith, then more power to you.  I can respect your faith, can you respect my lack of it?

You see, this goes to one of the things that irks me -to the point of making my blood boil- most about religions: The seeming need to thrust your idea of religion on others.

See, though I have no religion, I don’t go around demanding others follow my ideas.

Yet there are those who do this, often with gusto, in the public arena.  One prominent example is the issue of abortion.  A thorny issue, I grant you, but one where the religious have tried to foist their ideals on others.

Enter the Satanic Temple.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Satanic Temple?!  They’re evil, right?

Actually, not really.  This Wikipedia article on them offers a great summation of their philosophy and goals, all of which I’m all in favor of.

From the article, their stated mission is “to encourage benevolence and empathy among all people” …The Satanic Temple has utilized satire, theatrical ploys, humor and direct legal action in their public campaigns to generate attention and prompt people to reevaluate fears and perceptions, and to highlight religious hypocrisy and encroachment on religious freedom.)

In the case of Missouri’s restrictive anti-abortion laws, which are very skewed toward pushing religious ideals, they appear to be about to win in court using the very same tools the religious have used to argue their point.

From jezebel.com and written by Aimee Lutkin…

Satanic Temple suit may crush restrictive anti-abortion laws in Missouri

From the article (sorry for spoiling things):

The case states that in 2015, Mary Doe was forced to wait 72 hours, listen to a fetal heartbeat, and accept a brochure that states life begins at conception before she was allowed to have an abortion. These are all acts, the suit argues, that go against Doe’s religious beliefs as a member of the Satanic Temple. Those beliefs include a conviction that a “nonviable fetus is not a separate human being but is part of her body and that abortion of a nonviable fetus does not terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being,” according to NBC News, which she told her doctors in St. Louis.

Furthermore, the plaintiff says that the rules imposed on abortion seekers by the state of Missouri “does not advance a compelling governmental interest or is unduly restrictive of Doe’s exercise of religion.”

Using religious “rights”, in the plaintiff’s case with the Satanic Temple, is, IMHO, ingenious and, as I wrote in the headline, the very definition of the old cliche of “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”.

And you know what?  Wonderful.

According to the article, the state has already pulled back on some of their ideas and, it would appear (again based on the article), the Satanic Temple is on the verge of scoring a win here.

I strongly believe that those who are very religious should be able to follow their paths.

But we cannot allow those paths to block others from theirs.

General

Tourism slump…?

Ben Popken over at nbcnews.com offers the following article which, I suppose, is political in nature yet has real world consequences:

Tourism to the U.S. under Trump is down, costing $4.6 Billion and 40,000 jobs

I know I’m probably preaching to the proverbial choir, but this here is a very solid example of the real world harm which happens when someone in as prominent a position as Mr. Trump shoots off his mouth as he does.

Considering I live in a region which benefits from tourism, this is indeed very scary.

General

Thanks for saying that, Michael Steele…

As usual, a warning: Politics be here!

So beware!

I’m old enough, and have perhaps wasted far too much time on following the ebbs and flows of politics, to recall when Michael Steele was chair of the Republican Party.  When he was in that capacity, he would come on TV and often make what to me were incredibly asinine comments in defense of the Republican Party.

To put it bluntly: He made my blood boil.

Now, I should have taken those comments that so inflamed me back then with the proverbial grain of salt.  While chair of the RNC, it was his job to defend the Republican Party and therefore some of those crazy (again, IMHO) statements were probably made for the cameras but which he may well not have believed in.

Now that he’s no longer the chair of the RNC, he’s become one of my favorite pundits on TV.  His comments/opinions have been, it would seem now, to come from a far more honest place.  He’s willing to criticize both sides equally and, at least whenever I catch him, talks with a combination of wit, humor, and refreshing bluntness.

His latest comments given toward the end of this segment of MSNBC’s Hardball, regarding evangelical leaders, is particularly right on target (sorry for the stupid add for a CNN clip that hides his face):

Preach, brother.

Preach.

General

Politics… politics… and more

Beware…!

Hard to avoid the topic today as the Government is just hours away from a shutdown. There have been shutdowns before, all of which hurt Republicans who, for the most part, initiated them against Democratic Presidents.

Interestingly, this time around we have a Republican House, Senate, and Presidency and yet here we go again.  The last time such a thing happened with a party in control of all parts of the Government?  Jimmy Carter back in the 1970’s.

He wound up being a one term president.

Unlike other government shutdowns, the scariest thing about this one is that President (Gods how hard it is to address this… individual… with that title!) Trump either doesn’t care or doesn’t think a shutdown is a big thing.  Worse still, he is so fickle regarding what he wants to get done -changing his opinion on what he wants done sometimes within seconds- that many in Congress and the Senate have little idea what to do to solve the problem at hand.

What’s most amusing is the politics of the whole thing, and the fact that Trump and the Republicans are trying to blame their regular boogey-man, the Democrats, for any potential shutdown.

Yeah, blame the party that is in the minority on everything and can’t get anything they want done for your own failures.

Makes about as much sense as everything else we’ve seen going on in Washington this year.

****

The other still fairly big news out there involves sexual harassment.  It’s truly harrowing to read about Larry Nassar, for example, the one time USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University doctor who, its been revealed, abused for years the girls in the Gymnastics programs he was involved in and, incredibly, had the huevos to complain that facing the people he abused in court is hard for him to do and, I suppose, it was somehow becoming abuse to him.

The judge in the case shot that one down nicely, calling him “delusional” for thinking that way considering the lives he ruined.

But what intrigues me is the fact that all this seems to be catching up with actor/director Woody Allen.

I will admit here and now that there are some works/movies he’s done that I’ve loved.  Some of his early comedies were hilarious and some of the more “serious” films he did after that first wave of comedies are quite good.

But when Mr. Allen had his breakup with Mia Farrow and the stories involved in that (and his subsequent marriage), things certainly turned… icky.

Later still he was accused of sexual abuse by Dylan Farrow, Mia’s daughter, and while for years it appeared people were unsure whether to believe her or Woody Allen, the tide appears to have finally turned.

Yesterday, Dylan Farrow gave a tearful and, quite frankly, chilling interview regarding her one time step father…

Today, word today came that Colin Firth has announced he will no longer work with Woody Allen.  He follows in the footsteps of several other actors who once worked with Mr. Allen and have announced they will no longer do so.

Good.

Being a clever, even brilliant artist doesn’t make you immune to being a creep (or worse) and if the accusations are to be believed, and I do, then Mr. Allen’s day of reckoning appears to have finally come.

General

Resurrected Roman Temple…

Fascinating story written by Katy Scott and found on CNN.com concerning…

Temple To Ancient Roman Cult Resurrected Beneath London

The temple, originally re-discovered soon after the end of WWII, was dedicated to the cult of Mithras, a religious cult in ancient Roman times of which little is known.

I don’t want to give everything in the story away, but it is a fascinating one and proves, as if there was ever any doubt, that researchers, archeologists, and historians have a long way to go to understand the various religions and organizations lost to time.

Fascinating, fascinating stuff!

General

So I got my flu shot and figured all would be well…

Nope.

Sitting here with what I suspect is a chest cold and dealing with plenty of phlegm and weakness.  I suppose it could be worse but man do I hate being sick.

Yeah, sure now.  Show me someone who likes being sick!

Off to bed I go…

General

Oh boy…

An article by Selena Larson and Jethro Mullen and presented on CNN offers the following chilling reveal:

Apple: All iPhones, iPads, and Macs affected by chip flaws

For years, even before Apple became the juggernaut it now is, one of the things the company’s proponents pointed out to as being a positive of their products versus the Windows based platforms was that they were safe.

While the Windows based desktop/laptop systems had to use some kind of software protection(s) from viruses and malware, Apple products weren’t affected by these silly problems.  Thing is, I always felt this bit of bragging was misdirected.  At the time the Apple defenders were saying this the most vocally, Apple was a much smaller company and their computers were not being used as much as the ones that had Windows in them.

To me, it was about numbers.  The Windows systems were incredibly popular and almost everyone had them.  Why wouldn’t hackers go after richer targets?

A few years later and here we are: Apple is a juggernaut.  Apple is incredibly popular and used by a large number of people.

And guess what?

Flaws are being found.

Granted the flaw isn’t necessarily Apple’s fault and it affects just about every computer out there, including those who use Windows or Android systems.

This points out another problem with computers in general: We’re all for them and leap from system to (hopefully better) system and when one hears information like this one can’t help but wonder how much care the companies behind these systems have done to make sure there is safety in their products from malicious eyes.

Lately, these same companies are trying to create some kind of credit card pay system, wherein you just flash your phone or watch or whathaveyou and don’t worry about paying for anything with those pesky credit cards or even peskier cash.

Hmmm.

Given this bit of news, I might wait a little before taking that particular leap.