shuffling off

With Netflix you can choose a program that involves discs, or a slightly more expensive one that involves streaming and an even more expensive one that involves both.  I subscribe to the first program.  I kind of like the whole mail thing and being able to hold my media in my hand.  I was a regular watcher of Glow when it was on tv, all the goofiness of professional wrestling and scantily clad babes to boot, what not to like?  I have read some reviews of the new series and it sounds good.  And of course Bong-Joon-Ho is one of my favorite directors.  That Okja movie I am not so sure about, but I'll have to see it of course.  I don't understand how it is a Netflix production.  Did they bankroll it?  Are they marketing it?


This whole Russia/Trump thing is such a sprawling story with the steady drip of information punctuated by tweets and obfuscations that I am having a hard time trying to recall a specific incident that started it.  I think there have always been suspicions about Trump's dealing with the Russkies, reinforced by his refusal to reveal his income taxes, but I think the trip wire was his people denying that they met with the Russkies and then it turned out that they had, and if they were just innocent little tea parties why did they lie about it?  I think Flynn might have been the first domino to fall but i am not sure.  I am eagerly awaiting the book.

You know I read a little bio about Don Jr.  Apparently he was pissed when Trump dumped his mother and took to drink and shenanigans, but at some point he straightened up and flew right.  I am reminded of the James Dean character in East of Eden who did some kind of war profiteering to impress his father.  Could Junior's motivation for meeting with the Russkies be his way of trying to buy his father's affection?  Well I doubt it.  In the movie James Dean's dad refuses the blood money, hard to imagine Trump refusing the goods on the big girl.

When you delete something on a computer, what the computer does is lose the address where the data is on the hard drive, but the information is still there.  Eventually the computer will overwrite that part of the drive, but in a sort of skipping pattern where some of it will still remain and some programs can read the drive byte by byte and reconstruct what is still on the drive.  Also when you send the email and it goes through the tubes I think bits and pieces of it are left in server farms and can be recovered.  I am not so sure of the last part, but I expect Old Dog knows more about that,

The story on Tricky Dick's tapes is that he put them in because he didn't trust anybody and wanted to have a record of what was said.  He thought they would prove he was a great man.  At some point, late in Watergate he must have known they would sink his ship, and he had a window where he could have burned them on the White House lawn, and it's always been a bit of a mystery why he didn't.  He was notoriously clumsy in dealing with the tapes and I suspect he just didn't know how to destroy them.

We have had several incidents in Chicago where people have done horrendous things and been caught because they put them on facebook.  As to why they did that I can only shrug my shoulders.  As for those guys from Onaway (what a cool name for a town) the answer is the usual one whenever somebody does something unbelievably stupid: alcohol.

Ruby Dew is coming to town Monday and Tuesday we are shuffling off to Buffalo and not getting back until Thursday, and I probably won't be posting until Monday July 24th.  I will have my super phone with me so I will be able to follow the blog, you guys carry on without me.

And you may be wondering why Buffalo.  Well there is a Louis Sullivan skyscraper there, and all kinds of architecture and history.  And there is Niagara Falls just up the river.  Not that I am big on the falls, but I am kind of interested in going to Canada and tasting authentic poutine and not the Americanized pap they serve in local restaurants.