Ironhold

A friend of mine is Filipino *and* a restaurant-trained chef. I'll see if I can catch him at some point and ask him, but he's got a new job now and it's keeping him pretty busy.

Shut-In. Yet another 0 / 10.

That's her name. She appears to be of Indian descent.

https://www.gofundme.com/hugh-mungus Rudy Pantoja Jr., better known as internet figure "Hugh Mungus", is out of work due to a hip replacement. This has left him unable to afford repairs to his truck, and he may also be facing eviction. To this end, H3H3 Productions has set up a GoFundMe page in order to help the man pay his bills until he's able to work again. H3H3 also did this as a response to the fact that Zarna Joshi, the woman who publicly and falsely accused him of sexual harassment for what was essentially a "dad joke", is begging money online "for [her] personal safety" despite the fact that her own personal actions were to blame for her fall from grace and the responses she's received.

There have been efforts to, indeed, clean the rolls up, but those are usually met with hysterics about how this is actually an effort to disenfranchise people; if even one person is accidentally disenfranchised, they're immediately made a bloody shirt and regarded as "proof" of how evil the effort was all along.

Doctor Strange. A few younger children were literally crying in the theater because of how intense some of the fight scenes were, but on the whole the film is good.

Clancy himself claims the inspiration for the work was the report of a mutiny aboard a Russian warship in the 1970s, the Storozhevoy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_frigate_Storozhevoy The political officer on board the ship was frustrated with the level of corruption in the Soviet system during the period, and so convinced the enlisted men and several of the junior officers to join him in a mutiny. The plan was to sail the ship as planned during an upcoming fleet maneuver, then divert to park the ship in a symbolic location and broadcast a message for reform. Unfortunately, one of the officers who claimed to support him only did so as a means of avoiding confinement during the mutiny. Once no one was paying attention, he slipped ashore and alerted the authorities.

Seriously - if what happened here in Houston gets brought up as precedent, then the state is hosed. The City of Houston, Texas tried something like this a few years ago, and it blew up in their faces.

Forgot to post it earlier, but... Inferno. It was the only new movie opening at the local theater. As far as seeing it goes, don't. Not because it's got Tom Hanks (which doesn't help its case any), but because it's slow-paced and incredibly boring.

Your average cup of home-brew instant coffee has 10 - 11 times the amount of caffeine as your average cup of chocolate milk or hot chocolate. Your average cup of fast-food coffee has several times the amount of the average cup of home-brew instant. Your average cup of donut-shop or coffee shop coffee has several times the amount of the average cup of fast-food coffee. Your average energy drink has several times the amount of the average coffee shop coffee. And so on.

Thing is, there are people who down large quantities of "energy" drinks and the like. A four-pack of Red Bull is nothing for some people if they intend to do an "all-nighter" or otherwise want something to keep them awake, while 20-somethings commonly consume "party drinks" consisting of energy drinks mixed with vodka. And of course, we've got people who need five or six cups of *coffee shop* coffee to get them going. Really, caffeine addiction is far more common than people realize, such that most people who are addicted probably don't even realize it.

To begin with, let's consider the coffee. http://www.caffeineinformer.com/ I'd suggest looking up the coffee you drink and checking the caffeine content. What's in there *might* just surprise you.

Same goes for me to. Remember - I'm a movie reviewer.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/oregon-case-jury-delivers-blow-to-government-in-lands-fight/ar-AAjuxZf?li=BBnbfcL&ocid The jury in the Bundy case from Oregon acquitted them, but their lawyer was assaulted and arrested when he demanded their immediate freedom. So yet another bloody shirt to wave around...

People have fits because [1] it shows him as a military leader and [2] it shows him wearing a rather gaudy uniform. Thing is, [1] The town's charter did, indeed, allow for a militia of its own in response to the violence of Missouri; Illinois allowed it so that the horrors could never happen again. [2] In the days before modern command & control systems were implemented, the two main means for officers to control their soldiers was "sight" and "sound". As part of the "sight" method, officers did, indeed, frequently wear gaudy outfits so that their men could recognize them under battlefield conditions; unfortunately, it also allowed enemy snipers to recognize them, which is part of why that method faded away. Whenever someone harps on this issue, then, it merely tells me that their knowledge of history is sorely lacking.

I'm posting this separately since I don't know how long this post will be up. http://www.fmh-child.org/Lisa.html "Lisa" was a Chick Tract first published in 1984, and thrown down the memory hole not long afterwords. In the tract, a doctor discovers that a minor has an STD. The minor's father confesses to sexually assaulting their own child when the doctor confronts him, at which point the doctor... witnesses to the father. At no point does the doctor act on his legal obligation to notify the authorities. No, the dad said the right words in front of him and so all is forgiven. The fact that the minor will spend the rest of their life with a persistent STD is swept under the rug because hey - if someone says that they're saved, they're saved, right? Chick Publications denies ever producing this tract, but enough copies survived to the present that people began scanning them and posting them online.

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-ln-jack-chick-obituary-20161024-snap-story.html LA Times article announcing his death. So yeah - contrary to the rumors, he's dead.

It's not so much a prank as it is a confession. It's Halloween. It's five minutes until the time the city officials designated for Trick-or-Treating to begin. I don't have a costume, but my parents need me to be the one to hand out candy anyway (IIRC, dad was still at work, and mom needed to be indoors with the animals). Well, I had a sinus infection that year. Long and short of it, I wound up spraying myself with blood when I sneezed. All over my shirt. No time to change, either. Nobody could tell that it was real. Apparently, everyone just thought I was done up as a slasher.

On Friday, the right-hand turn indicator on my car failed. Adding insult to injury, the four-way emergency flashers also failed. Either failure would be enough to sideline the vehicle, as State of Texas law requires both to be functional. I had *just* passed the annual inspection check, and so these failures were especially galling. I had reason to believe that the cause of the failures was somewhere in the steering column. So my dad, a mechanic, took it apart. One of the springs governing the turn signal was busted, while the rest of the mechanism was worn and corroded; although the mechanism itself could continue to function, we decided to go ahead and replace it. And the flashers? The fuse blew. Well, as usual, I'm running close to the wire. Church starts at 1, it's 12:50, and I'm 10 minutes away. I go to back the car out, and... no right turn signal. Flashers? There goes the fuse again. This makes the second time I've missed church this year, both times due to a mechanical failure. Both parents are doing prison ministry (we've got a branch specifically to cover the local prisons), and so the best I can do is leave a message on my mom's voice mail. I come back in, sit down on the couch, and fall asleep watching BYU-TV. When I wake up a few hours later, it's a BYU-Idaho devotional about not mistaking blessings for curses. My mom has finished for the day, and so calls me back on my phone. She lets my dad know, and he's just as flummoxed as I am. We both get changed and go back out to check the car. In all the confusion that was going on yesterday (the issues with the car, the home wireless router failing, et cetra), we had failed to do the most basic thing you're supposed to do when indicators don't work: check the bulbs. Sure enough, one of my bulbs had failed, and the socket itself was badly caked with corrosion. Due to the way my car is wired, losing one of the turn indicator bulbs off-lines all of the indicators on that side. Oh, and apparently I bought the cheap fuses the last time I was at the parts store. They kept failing because they were just poorly made to begin with. My dad picked up some higher-grade fuses while he was at the store getting replacement bulbs, so hopefully that won't happen again.

Jack Reacher: Never Look Back It's pretty much your everyday post-Mission: Impossible Tom Cruise Movie. It's got humor and heart if you can sit through the violence and underwear scenes to get to it.

I'm not surprised about "Max Steel". Down in Latin America, the franchise is a massive hit; it's been consistently popular since it first came out 20 years ago, and there's no sign of it slowing down. He-Man might get all the spotlight, but Max Steel has the sales numbers to back him up. Outside of Latin America, however, the franchise has been lukewarm at best. The franchise did well when it first came out, especially given the astoundingly intelligent and well-written cartoon series it had supporting it. But things fizzled out once the cartoon ended, and so it lay dormant until the revival a few years ago... which changed things so completely that the only things shared between the two were a handful of character names. The revival was pretty well dead on arrival, but Mattel and Disney kept beating that horse anyway. The movie was first pitched back during the revival, but ended up on the back burner in favor of other projects. By all appearances, Mattel only revived it so that they could beat the "Power Rangers" theatrical revival to theaters. Given the franchise's strong success in Latin America, I would imagine that so long as the film kept costs to a minimum (I'm thinking $15 - $20 million) international receipts will at least break it even. It very much felt like a quick turn-and-burn venture, especially given the minimal promotion, so we'll see.

I have to see so much garbage in my job as a movie reviewer, and Parker & Stone have never really been all that funny to me, so this is pretty low on my priority list.

Just saw "Max Steel" this afternoon. One censored swear word as Max hurts himself in a training exercise, but otherwise it's in keeping with most teenage action films these days. The movie appears to follow more after the reboot from a few years ago than the original circa 2000 cartoon series, but it does borrow elements from the latter.

Try YouTube. You'd be surprised what they have on there these days.

http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/enthuellungen/gerhard-wisnewski/anetta-kahane-wie-eine-ex-stasi-frau-die-oeffentlichkeit-und-das-internet-terrorisiert.html -> original article https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Finfo.kopp-verlag.de%2Fhintergruende%2Fenthuellungen%2Fgerhard-wisnewski%2Fanetta-kahane-wie-eine-ex-stasi-frau-die-oeffentlichkeit-und-das-internet-terrorisiert.html -> machine translation via Google The German government has partnered with a series of NGOs in order to police "hate speech" on the internet, with some of these NGOs using definitions so loose that anything which is contradictory to the "progressive" movement is subject to being flagged. An investigation has determined that the leader of one of these NGOs is a former member of the Stasi. She is known to have reported at least two people to the Communist authorities (a writer who was later deported, and an actor who later killed himself), and she is also known to have enjoyed perks exclusive to high-level members of the Party. Despite this, she continues to claim that she never did much and never rose to much. German YouTube host Kraut and Tea has been all over this, using language so strong I can't post his videos here. The latest twist in the matter (the source is one of these videos) is that the German branch of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream has become a corporate sponsor and partner for this effort... despite, by their own admission, knowing full well that she used to be Stasi. I... don't see this ending well.