For Love of Boss-A-Man

 On February 21st, we had to make one of the hardest decisions of our lives. Boss-A-Man had severely declined, suffering from kidney failure. Quality of life was gone, and there was no hope for improvement.  

Over the last few months, Boss-A-Man had become more and more selective over what he would eat. We switched to Farmer's Dog, which at first he loved. Then he dropped one meat after another until he was only eating pork. Then, even that became a struggle.

We were concerned that his heart murmur was coming back, so we took him for that and started a treatment to help like it had done before. But his lack of appetite increased. We came back to the vet to see what was going on, and that is when we received the blood test that showed his advanced kidney failure.

We rescued Boss-A-Man in August 2017. This sounds made up, but he lived in a van down by the river with two elderly ladies and maybe as many a dozen other dogs. We adopted him about the same time I was cutting back to part-time at my CPA job, so I called him my retirement dog. I was very, very close to him and loved him very much.

He had a lot of physical problems when we got him, including heartworms, but we nursed him back to health. The vet thought he was 10 when we adopted him. I don't know if that's true, but that would have made him about 17.

He was a playful, spirited, friendly dog. He liked to bounce and bound and followed his companion, Pixie, everywhere. He loved people and was the ultimate lap dog. He had a myriad of nicknames - Sir Barks-A-Lot, Bossy, Turd Burglar, and many more.

I wish this was fancier. I wish this was a better tribute. But even after a week, I'm still in shock.

I love Boss-A-Man, and I wish he was still with us.

Sorry, MAGA! Everything You Thought Was Wrong

 

You thought you were electing Donald Trump President of the United States.

Surprise!

Instead, you got a foreign-born billionaire, one whose very citizenship is questionable, controlling what gets funded and what doesn't, using a small squad of barely adult hackers to break into secure systems and pillage all our data. And you were worried about unelected bureaucrats? HA!

Nothing he is doing is to combat fraud and abuse. Like  Trump, all Musk is doing is petty grievances. FAA had fined Space X for safety violations! FIRE HIM! Fire all those in aviation safety!  Offer buyouts to stressed, overworked air traffic controllers. If planes collide and go down, who cares.

USAID dared to investigate some of his StarLink sales to Russia?  Destroy their agency!  If people in other countries starve because of it, or farmers lose some $2 billion in sales, so what?  LET THEM STARVE!

You thought Trump was going to root out corruption.

In addition to the actions of President Musk, Trump has eliminated all the inspector generals who monitor such things, leaving us more open to government corruption.  He's fired other government-efficiency people. He is determined to weed out people from the Federal government not to save money but to replace them with people loyal to him over the Constitution.

Private corruption will soar now. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, our only protection against bank and corporate overcharges, has been dismantled and kneecapped. Executive orders have eliminated many climate change regulations and others designed to protect us from corporate greed.  

Think that's a good thing?  You may be less enthused when you get tainted meat, when you find your workplace unsafe (they want to eliminate OSHA), when you find there is an outbreak you can't get information about because the CDC and NIH have been censored and we have left the WHO, when you no longer get weather notification because the National Weather Service and NOAA have been destroyed.

You thought he would mass deport all those undocumented aliens you rail against.

So far, even with all the noise and thunder, the rate of actual deportations is not much different from what it was under Biden.

But have no fear!  He still may pull ahead.  Of course, the economic consequences of this will be catastrophic.  But do not despair!  Those jobs may be replaced by PRISON LABOR.  Some may come from the undocumented held in concentration camps.

Isn't that a pretty picture for the United States?

You thought he was going to lower prices, specifically mentioning eggs and gas.

Psych!

Fooled you, didn't he?

You can't entirely blame the President.  Economic events are not always under their control.   I mean,  you sure cut Biden some slack for the Pandemic-caused global inflation that he got under control quicker than virtually every other country on Earth, didn't you?  No, things weren't perfect. However, the fact remains that Biden generated the best economy in decades.

Trump promised he would lower prices from day one.  When he was elected, he immediately switched course and said that would be hard for him to do.

Of course, he may still impose more tariffs, but only those who have never studied economic history would believe that this is a good thing.

You thought he was going to get rid of DEI and we would return to a merit-based system.

Yeah, he's succeeded in dismantling DEI (including a lot of cooperation from a pathetically weak business community), but he is galloping as far away from merit-based as you can get.  Think Not?  Look at the qualifications of his cabinet nominees compared to those in the past. 

This cartoon sums up best what DEI is really all about -

DEI means Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Anti-DEI means Discrimination, Exclusion, and Intolerance.

I know what side I'm on.  How about you?

You thought he would end our endless wars and bring our troops home. No more foreign adventures for us!

This may be the thing you were most wrong about.

One of the ways we knew Hitler was such a danger was when he wanted to invade and annex his neighbors. Whether it was an excuse or not, he tried to bring any nation with any German population back into the fold of the Germanic Empire.  Putin wants to do something similar to restore the Soviet Union.

What Trump wants to do is worse. He makes no pretense of wanting to reunite with countries that have roots in us. He doesn't want to improve the lives of those places' citizens, and he doesn't even really care about the benefits to the American people.

He wants to exploit and consume their resources, and he wants himself and his billionaire buddies to profit big time.

He wants the Panama Canal back so he can control the shipping lane and profit from the traffic that passes through it.

He wants Greenland and Canada because he knows GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL, and underneath the ice, tons of natural resources, fuels, and rare earth minerals await.

He wants Gaza because he wants to turn it into a real estate development, Trump Hotels, and a place for the ultra-rich to party.  The Palestinians?  He doesn't give one whit about them as long as they are GONE.

Even in Ukraine, he's dangling the carrot of getting the rights to the country's rare earth minerals to provide them any aid whatsoever.

I have no qualms about my next statement - everything he does is monstrous.  Everything he is doing is unrepentantly evil. Many will die. Many will suffer.

Yes, MAGA. You've been had. Everything you thought was wrong.

And we will suffer for many years because of it.  

The least you can do is admit your error and join us in resisting it.

T. M. Strait

AOC '28

Top 100 Sci-Fi Movies of the 20th Century!!! Part 3 No. 86 - 80

  I received this issue of Remind, or what Alison calls "my old people magazine," which ranks the top 100 Science Fiction movies of the 20th century.

Remind does have many pop culture stories, focusing primarily on the 1950s through the 1990s, although there are some references to earlier decades. Each issue focuses on different topics, such as country music, westerns, where are they now issues, and much more. I enjoy it, as I love pop history. They also have puzzles and a monthly guide to what's on TCM (Turner Classic Movies).

I thought it would be fun to review the movies on the list in reverse order and share my thoughts. The magazine's ranking of the movies is not mine.  

I won't go into detailed reviews, but I will share the IMDb ranking and my own on a 1 to 10 scale.

86)

Videodrome

Year: 1983  IMDb: 7.2 Tom: 4  Had I seen before?   Yes  Service found on: Peacock

I say yes that I have seen this, but I think I had blocked most of this from my mind.  As I will again. I am figuring out that body horro, which David Crionenberg specializes in is not my thing.  Additionally, the plot is deliberately confusing.  Fine, if you want to take the time to anaylyze it.  I did not.  Positive side?  It had Deborah Harry in a feature role, a singing favorite of mine from the group Blondie (easily in my top ten bands).  Negative side?  In addition to the goopy guts and bizarrre storyline, the lead was James Woods, who has turned super-repulsive MAGA MAX in his senior years.

85)

Repo Man

Year: 1984  IMDb: 6.8 Tom: 5  Had I seen before?   Yes  Service found on: Prime Rental

This fared a little bit better than Videodrome, but not much. At least I could follow the story even though I wasn't all that interested. Emilio Estevez plays a punk rocker who has had little job success, taking a job helping repo men. There are some aliens and a glowing item in a car trunk. Often, the science fiction elements are minimized and muted. It was an okay but not memorable trip.

84)

Year: 1997  IMDb: 7.3 Tom: 8 Had I seen before?   Yes  Service found on: Peacock

Don't think about this one too much. The idea of exchanging faces like they do is not much in the realm of possibility, even for a science fiction film. But Nicolas Cage and John Travolta do some first-rate acting in this, switching personalities and helping make the implausible at least slightly plausible. It's filled with action, and it's a fun ride.  

83)

Marooned

Year: 1969  IMDb: 5.1 Tom: 5 Had I seen before?   Yes  Service found on: Tubi

Oy. Unlike 2001:A Space Oddesy, this one has not aged well. Big budget and big star production, with a slow moving and dull story that made me have to snack and hydrate to stay awake through. It's a shame. It had my Dad's quasi-lookalike in it, Gregory Peck. And a very game, Gene Hackman. I get it. Astronauts stranded in space. Will we get them back or not? Oh, please! Just get on with it. 2 hr and 14 14-minute runtime felt like six hours. And since it was Tubi, I'd have to sit through innumerable commercials. This is emblematic of what science fiction was often like before Star Wars.

    82) 

Quatermass and the Pit

Boy, did this one take a while to find! Part of the problem is that the movie has a different name in American distribution - Five Million Years to Earth. But when I finally found it, it was pretty good! Set in London, an archeological excavation unveils an alien spacecraft, and the danger increases as the movie progresses. Well plotted, you think the movie is, like many movies of its time, cut short where it could go. But it does not! Loved the pacing and acceleration of this nifty little story. Unlike Marooned, it still holds up really well!

81)

The Adventures of Buckeroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

Year: 1984  IMDb: 6.2 Tom: 5 Had I seen before?   Yes  Service found on: MGM+

Sounds exciting, don't it? Sometimes campy is good. Sometimes, it misses the mark. This hits occasionally but mostly misses the mark. I think it's trying to play off Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, but that's a guess. Most of it is played too cool for school, and the intriguing multi-dimensional premise is not used well. John Lithgow plays the villain, and he leaves no scenery unchewed.

80)

Altered States

Year: 1980  IMDb: 6.9 Tom: 5 Had I seen before?   Yes  Service found on: Prime Rental

Another oy. More body horror and incoherent plot. Something to do with sensory deprivation and reverting to a more unevolved state. I think. I'm not sure. About ten or fifteen minutes of it near the two-thirds mark was interesting (like a Jekyll and Hyde thing), but most of it was not my cup of tea.

I know there was a big time gap between this one and the last one (October 24). I'm doing the best I can. They're not always easy to find, and the dystopian horror of our country's real-life descent has been very distracting.

The good news is that I have already seen four of the next seven films on the list, so it shouldn't be too much longer.

Unless, of course, in the meantime, I am sent to a reeducation camp.

Until next time,

T. M. Strait

AOC '28!