Month: December 2023

Promises Made, Promises Kept – Yeah, Right!

On By Norbert HauptIn PoliticalLeave a comment

I frequently ride my bike past this gate.

One of the signs says “Don’t blame me, I voted for Trump.” And the other one is a 2020 campaign sign “Promises Made, Promises Kept.”

Trump promised he’d build a border wall and Mexico would pay for it. There is no wall.

Trump promised he’d repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. He never repealed it, and certainly he never even offered an alternative.

Remember the endless “Infrastructure Weeks” in the first year of his presidency? The weeks happened, but no infrastructure bill was ever proposed, let alone passed. Biden did that eventually.

Then there was the matter of bringing back coal. Beautiful, clean coal.

The fact is, generation of electricity by coal declined more under Trump than any other president since 2012, and it actually rebounded a bit when Biden took office.

He was going to “drain the swamp.” His administration has presented no anti-corruption legislation and Trump himself did not divest from his businesses. In fact, I would argue that it’s gotten worse. Trump put members of own family in key government positions and his properties profited from government business.

Coyote on Daley Ranch

On By Norbert HauptIn Nature1 Comment

I have been doing a lot of bike rides on Daley Ranch lately. I am really fortunate to have this beautiful wilderness literally in front of my door.

Today I saw a beautiful coyote, and I was able to catch a couple of great photos to share here:

And here is one more:

Book Review: Remarkably Bright Creatures – by Shelby Van Pelt

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three Stars1 Comment

Remarkably Bright Creatures was the book my wife’s book club read a couple of months ago, and she kept saying that she thought I’d like it. “It’s about an octopus,” she said.

Indeed, one of the narrators in this book is an octopus named Marcellus. He is in captivity in an aquarium in Sowell Bay, a town in northern Washington, and he tells the story from his point of view inside a tank.

Tova Sullivan is the cleaning lady at the aquarium, a woman in her seventies whose husband recently died of cancer, and whose only son disappeared somewhat mysteriously at age 18 – thirty years ago. Tova is making arrangements for a somewhat lonely retirement.

Cameron Cassmore is a thirty-year-old misfit in Modesto, California who never knew his father, and who was raised by his aunt when his mother abandoned him as a nine-year-old.

Tova and Cameron, along with a number of other colorful characters, will eventually meet at the Sowell Bay Aquarium and learn about themselves. Each has surprises coming, all courtesy of Marcellus, the octopus.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is Van Pelt’s first novel, and it is a remarkable debut. She is a great story teller who had me turning the pages. After getting over the concept of a sentient octopus and how it interacts with humans, the rest fits together nicely and makes for an entertaining read.

Octopuses are indeed remarkably bright creatures. I am reminded of the movie My Octopus Teacher.  I also read another book about octopuses: Other Minds. I was amazed how much there was to learn. Scientists have not yet figured out how octopuses have evolved to have such incredible intelligence with a lifespan of only four years, at the high side.

If you want to learn about octopuses first in a non-fiction science book like Other Minds, or if you just want to go for an entertaining ride with Remarkably Bright Creatures, either approach is well worth your time.

 

3 stars

Movie Review: Leave the World Behind (2023)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, One Star1 Comment

Amanda Sanford (Julia Roberts) is an advertising executive in New York City. Her husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) is a college professor. One morning, Amanda wakes up and decides she needs to get out of the city in a hurry just to get away for a few days. With their two teenage kids, they drive out to Long Island where they rented a luxury house for the weekend.

As soon as they get there, things start going wrong. No Internet, which drives the kids crazy. No television, no cell phone signal. Apparently some unprecedented blackout has befallen the city – but for some strange reason the lights are still on.

Just as they settle down for the night, somebody knocks on the door. The owner of the home (Mahersala Ali) and his daughter are asking to spend the night. They can’t make it back to the city with the outage going on, and it’s their house, after all.

Quickly, strange things start happening. An oil tanker beaches itself, planes crash, apparent sonic booms break windows, wild deer start hanging around the house, flamingos swim in the pool and Tesla cars without drivers crash themselves into each other.

Leave the World Behind is a wanna-be doomsday movie that does not convince. The plot holes are huge, the acting is terrible and amateurish, even though there are some big name actors, like Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Kevin Bacon.

At the end, when the movie was over, I had literally forgotten the title within minutes, and I had to look it up again just to put together this review.

You can definitely pass on this one. You’re not missing anything at all.

 

Movie Review: Napoleon (2023)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two and a Half Stars4 Comments

When I saw the advertisement for Napoleon by Ridley Scott, I knew I would want to see it. It’s an epic movie about an epic life. Since I am familiar with the life of Napoleon, the movie helped me associate visual images with my knowledge of this life. As it usually goes, the film glossed over many, many details. The steps in his rise in the movie were enormous. He went from captain to brigadier general in just a few minutes. He jumped from Egypt to Austerlitz in another few minutes, his return from Elba was one scene, and then we were at Waterloo.

That’s not how it went.

I read the biography Napoleon, a life by Andrew Roberts in 2015. There may be more books written about Napoleon than any other figure in history. Roberts’ book presents new material based on the 33,000 letters Napoleon wrote over the course of his life, sometimes as many as 30 a day. His letter-writing is also highlighted in this movie, particularly in letters to Josephine, but also to his brothers and mother. That’s how the man communicated.

Napoleon was idolized by his soldiers. That came through in the movie. But he was also a killing machine. During the 15 years he was in power, he conscripted millions of young French men away from their farms, shops, factories and schools into the military, just to lead them into endless battles to be brutally killed. Many battles “only” had 4,000 killed or wounded. Others 30,000 or more. Of the 600,000 men he took into Russia, eventually reaching Moscow, only about 40,000 came back home. Most of the men did not die in battle, they died of Typhus and other diseases, fatigue, starvation, and on the way home in the winter, the brutal, relentless cold of the Russian winter. During his reign, he led 61 battles and was basically responsible for the deaths of three million people!

Reading about the movie, I picked up a bit of trivia from IMDb: While never directly addressed, the black French general who appears in several scenes, played by actor Abubakar Salim, is credited as General Dumas. This was the real figure of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a Haitian-born general who commanded troops during the Napoleonic Wars, and was the father of writer Alexandre Dumas. A brilliant tactician in his own right, he was nicknamed “The Black Devil” by contemporary revolutionaries.

Joaquin Phoenix does a great job portraying Napoleon, in a movie of large-scale scenes, stunning visuals and backdrops and dynamic battle sequences. As with all war movies, I walked out stunned, wondering what sense it made for people to march into battles in the 18th century that were certain slaughters.

It takes a lot of me.