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June 20, 2023

TV Tuesday 6/20/23

Back in March I posted about the Japanese media franchise Lupin the Third. The main character is the grandson of the fictional thief Arsène Lupin from the stories by French author Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941). Last month, I posted about a Japanese live-action series that isn’t connected with the franchise and only implies the fictional French thief.

For TV Tuesday this month, I’m posting about the French standalone live-action series Lupin. Here the references are explicit. When he was young, the main character fell in love with the stories of Leblanc and based his own life (as a thief) on the fictional Arsène Lupin.

And, as usual lately, I’ll mention some movies I watched on television.

4 Comments | tags: Donnie Yen, French TV shows, Ip Man, Lupin (TV series), Lupin the Third, Sammo Hung, thieves | posted in Movies, TV Tuesday

June 19, 2023

Juneteenth 2023

By Wyrd Smythe

A badly slanted worldview.

There is a disease of the mind, an awful meme, usually passed from parent to child, that sees a person’s paint job as an all-defining aspect of their personality. This disease blinds the mind’s eye, disabling it from seeing past the color of someone’s skin.

Historically this disease has been one of the great sources of human evil. It’s bestial, a hearkening back to the primitive animal reactions of the perceived other. Tragically, the same minds that rise us so far up give us tremendous power to conceive hate, evil, and destruction.

At its worst, this disease — racism — leads to casual murder of human beings.

5 Comments | tags: Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Juneteenth, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin | posted in Opinion, Politics, Society

June 16, 2023

Under the Northern Lights

By Wyrd Smythe

I posted a while back about the summer fishing/camping trip to the “secret” middle-of-the-wilderness lake my buddy “Scott” (we’ll call him) and I took each year — along with anyone we could talk into joining us. It was our annual pilgrimage for almost two decades.

Three times during that era we vacationed somewhere else: a cabin on Lake Kabetogama (where I caught zero fish); a houseboat on Lake Vermilion (loved sleeping on the water); and that time on the Churchill River in northern Saskatchewan.

We were so far north we were under the Northern Lights.

16 Comments | tags: camping, Canada, fishing, Saskatchewan | posted in Life

June 11, 2023

Epiphanies

By Wyrd Smythe

There are four fledgling posts that have nested in my Drafts folder for many years. The first three are based on hand-written notes that go back even further. They’re very personal, so I’ve debated with myself whether to publish them at all.

But a key point of this blog is documenting my life — of leaving my scrawl on the internet wall. Kilroy was here! So was Wyrd Smythe! And it has not escaped my attention, based on page hits and comments, that readers generally enjoy the more personal posts.

These are all “light bulb moments” — epiphanies that gave me key insights to myself (part of the eternal search for who I really am).

18 Comments | tags: anger, self, self-awareness, sympathy | posted in Life

June 6, 2023

TV Tuesday 6/6/23

By Wyrd Smythe

The other day I began watching the Canadian TV series, Letterkenny (2016-present). A couple of my friends had recommended it, so I added it to my Hulu watchlist some time ago but only got around to checking it out last week. And was pretty much instantly hooked.

Thanks to Amazon Prime, I’ve been slowly working my way through a couple of British golden oldies: The Avengers (1961-1969) and The Saint (1962-1969). I was a big fan of both shows when they aired back in the Jurassic era of black-and-white television.

And as seems a new habit with TV Tuesday posts, I’ll mention a worthwhile film I watched (on TV) last week, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

16 Comments | tags: Letterkenny (TV series), The Avengers, The Saint (TV series), westerns | posted in TV Tuesday

June 1, 2023

Sideband #77: Speaking of Op Amps…

By Wyrd Smythe

The last Sideband post (over eight months ago) was about Op Amps, mostly because I think they’re very cool but also easy to understand in the context of the Three Rules of Op Amps. [See this post and maybe the one before it.]

I posted about them in part because I also wanted to post about an electronics project I designed (but never built) back in the late 1980s. I thought it was a cool solution that leveraged existing infrastructure and used off-the-shelf parts.

Be advised this post is seriously on the electronics geek side and is mainly a memory with meaning only to me. I used to love designing stuff!

9 Comments | tags: electronics, field service technician, op amp, the past | posted in Sideband

May 28, 2023

Revisiting the Well

By Wyrd Smythe

This post’s title is a bit vague. Someone familiar with my interests might suppose it has something to do with the Well World series by Jack L. Chalker — I’ve posted about it before. I won’t draw out whatever suspense you might have — the well in question is humanity’s wellspring of stories.

The revisiting is our love of nostalgia in all the sequels, serials, remakes, reboots, adaptations, borrowings, homages, parodies, and pastiches. To name but some. And make no mistake, all stories have elements of other stories. Boil stories down enough and the reductions begin to look similar (the infamous seven plots).

But I find myself bemused by how obsessed we get about drinking from the same well over and over when there are so many other interesting wells.

22 Comments | tags: adaptations, reboots, remakes, sequels, storytelling | posted in Books, Movies, TV

May 24, 2023

The Bodyguard(s)

By Wyrd Smythe

In the last post I mentioned watching a fun double feature this past Friday night. As described in that post, the party ended up having some interesting, albeit minor, consequences, but no harm done to tarnish the memory of these two comedy movies from Thailand, The Bodyguard (2004) and The Bodyguard 2 (2007).

No connection whatsoever to the same-named high-cheese American film with Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner. That film has its moments but also earned seven nominations in the 13th Golden Raspberry Awards.

Last Saturday I watched a different unrelated The Bodyguard (2016), this one a poignant drama from China starring and directed by the great Sammo Hung.

4 Comments | tags: comedy, Martial Arts Movies, Mum Jokmok, Sammo Hung | posted in Movies

May 23, 2023

Walking the Dog

By Wyrd Smythe

Moar Treats? Moar Walks??

I had the unmitigated pleasure of spending last Thursday through last Sunday with my opinionated little canine “niece” Bentley. Fortunately, her opinions all involve walks and treats rather than politics (which she thinks is what happens when your parrot swallows a watch).

On the other hand, her opinions on walks and treats tend to be rather definite (and rather on the greedy side). She knows what she wants (all) and when she wants it (now). My giving in to her opinions on walks led to some unexpected yet interesting results Saturday morning.

Sadly, I didn’t have my camera with me to document those results but did take it along on two other walks to document the beauty of some local parks.

8 Comments | tags: Bentley, parks, trees, walking | posted in Life

May 19, 2023