at the movies, and an elegy to dear old DOS

It's a typo, should have been: I hope Old Dog puts his cyber problems behind me, so that we can begin discussing movies and other stuff. That sort of thing slips in on me all the time.  I always reread hoping to catch them, and am always surprised at how many of them there are.  I catch most of them, but some slip through, my apologies for Old Dog for the time he lost puzzling over it.

Those DLL files, my understanding is that they are kind of catchall files with several different functions in them that the main program every now and then dips into and if it doesn't find them it just rises from its desk, puts on its hat, and clocks out for the day, and doesn't bother to leave an explanation.  I always think of them as a curse brought in by Windows.  In the grand old days you could just look for the exe file and have a clue as to what is going on, once Windows took over there were like twenty files and no way to know which one did what.  As Ice T says in that awful, often repeated, Car Shield commercial the days are over when you could fix your car with a screwdriver and a smile.  Anymore with computer glitches occur you try this and you try that and if you are lucky it works, but you never know why the thing you did last worked while the others didn't.

I've heard about that original version of Sling Blade, but I never watched it.  I liked the Billy Bob Thornton version just fine, hmmm, hmmm.  Did the guy in the short do that thing?  Anyway i found the longer version sufficiently lean and mean, a simple solution to a simple problem (not unlike the days of DOS), a few more overly sweet scenes than I remembered, but altogether, satisfying.

I miss the old days of movies when a movie would come out and there would be reviews and I would read through them and keep in mind what I wanted to see and when it showed up in the video store or later on Netflix, I would get the CD and watch it and there were almost always extras with the CD like deleted scenes, or best of all the commentaries, which when they weren't nothing but directors puffing out their chests, could be most informative.  Particularly Robert Altman who always had something to say.  

Nowadays movies just dribble out and you catch a review where you can, and then you have to search out what streaming service it is on, and it is just a pain in the ass.  Towards the end I had a hard time with the selections for Netflix's CD service so I went to streaming, and the selection is even shittier.  You end up watching what they have available rather than what you really want to see.  And those series which people are all giddy about binging on for days are just like twenty or thirty slices of the same old shit.

I've seen most of those maps on fb, but separately.  Nice to see them all together.  I will peruse them at my leisure.


There is only a cosmetic similarity between our extermination of the Indians and Detroit having a black mayor which I am assuming it does.  To use the same phrase to describe both is ridiculous.

Witness New York and Florida, the lockdown surely worked.  If it hasn't worked as well as you would like it to it's because of maskless yahoos like yourself.