"The Remains of the Day" (1993)

This classic movie was released in 1993, fifteen years before I started this blog, so I've never reviewed it here.  But after re-watching it last evening, I feel the trailer should be saved in TYWKIWDBI as a heads-up for any readers who may not have been paying attention to movies 30 years ago.

The movie is a Merchant-Ivory production, presenting an extended and often sympathetic character study of one man's obsessive devotion to his life's work - serving the grand house where he is employed, and serving his master (however defective), at a cost of his family life and his personal life.

The movie was nominated for eight Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, Screenplay, Costume, Music, and Art Direction), and Hopkins won the BAFTA that year.  But be aware that this is not a "fun" movie, with a happy Hollywood ending.  Its power lies in the absolutely superb acting of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.  

Puffer jacket stuffed with pickles

The product is offered by the United Kingdom division of Kentucky Fried Chicken to promote their marketing of pickle-enhanced foods (Pepsi, french fries).  Personally, I'd prefer stuffing my half of my jacket with olives, but everyone has different tastes.  

Image cropped for size from the original at the Neatorama via.

It may cost you more to return a rental car early

From the travel section of the New York Times:

"Last summer, I flew to Geneva, Switzerland, and picked up a rental car from Budget for a two-week vacation in neighboring France. More precisely, I reserved the car for 13 days and four hours, for an estimated 866 Swiss francs, worth about $1,060 at the time. I ended up returning the vehicle not just on time but a little earlier than planned — after 13 days and 30 minutes — so imagine my surprise when the final bill came to 1,545 francs. The lion’s share of the difference was in the base rental rate, so I assume I lost my discount for returning the car early. I’ve heard of car rental companies recalculating rates for returning a weeklong rental a day early, but hours? That is ridiculous."

The explanation:

The car rental industry is notorious for charging customers for services they do not need or sometimes never agreed to, but collecting what amounts to a $595 fee for bringing back a car a few hours early seems beyond the pale.

Even more astonishingly, perhaps, is that after examining the documentation you sent me and combing through Budget’s policies, I now believe it was not even a question of hours. You could have saved $595 by returning the car just 10 minutes later than you did...

“Because the vehicle was returned earlier than the 14-day period, the rental no longer qualified for the weekly promotional pricing,” Lauren Bristow, the director of marketing communications for Avis Budget Group, wrote in response to my emailed questions. “As a result, the system recalculated the rental at the applicable shorter-term rate.”

And I’ll admit that Budget’s “General Conditions of Rental” (Part 12, if you’re following along) does back her up. “Because special offers and discounts often relate to specific time slots,” it reads, “you may even end up having to pay more if you bring back the vehicle early.”

Offered without comment.

Word for the day: kerning

In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the space between two specific characters, or letterforms, in a font... The term "keming" is sometimes used informally to refer to poor kerning (the letters r and n placed too closely together being easily mistaken for the letter m).

More information at Kerning, spacing, leading: the invisible art of typography.

Reconsidering Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is a UNESCO World Heritage site because of its monumental statues (moai).  For several hundred years it has captured the public's imagination because of its mind-staggering physical remoteness and the seemingly incredible feat of humans locating and colonizing the island, located 2,000 miles from the nearest island in East Polynesia:

Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island is a new book recently acquired by our library system, which I borrowed after reading that the author offered a new vision of the history of the island.  It is indeed an awesome book, which I have no doubt will become a standard reference citation, but it is probably TMI for the average reader because it examines every single detail about the history of the island, giving new emphasis to original ethnographic research conducted a century ago and debunking many modern interpretations.

"Conventional wisdom" (repeated in pop science articles and television shows) suggests as follows:

"That theory argues that Islanders let their population outgrow their home's capacity to support them.   In the quest for food they overfished the sea and destroyed soils, and in desperate religious tumoil they cut down all the trees to move statues.  Society collapsed in a fit of war and cannibalism.  When Europeans first saw Rapa Nui, it is said, they witnessed the result: a devastated land with few people, who could not have created the island's spectacular archaeological legacy." (xix)  

Thor Heyerdahl speculated and tried to prove that Rapa Nui had been colonized by white people who had crossed the Atlantic, built the South American civilizations and then continued west across the Pacific. 

The book convincingly debunks previous speculations.  The author notes for example that the population was not starving when the first Europeans arrived.  In fact, they offered food to the sailors.  They had an elaborate system for harvesting intermittent rainfall and had developed farming techniques suitable to the terrain.  The state of their society in modern times is in part a reflection of their more recent history:

"Lost in the haunting seduction of this eco-collapse theory was the true history of what the Islanders had endured at the hands of colonial imperialists.  Within a century and a half of having been found by Dutch sailors, Rapa Nui's people had been kidnapped, sold into slavery, killed off by new diseases, and removed to other islands.  They were all but extinguished.  Survivors were housed in a walled settlement, forbidden to return to their traditional homes and gardens and their sacred places, which were overrun by sheep and cattle making money for businesses half a world away.  Their history was written by outsiders who could not credit them with the abilities their monuments revealed... Those abandoned monuments were plundered and restored to make a museum for tourists... Their ancestors were an example to the world of the worst imaginable negligence, of behavior so lacking in respect for life, for the very soils that nurtured their existence, that they brought down their own future in a violent orgy of self-destruction..." (143)

An interesting book to browse.

Government debt vs. GDP

The embedded image is harvested from Facebook, but I will vouch for the economic credentials of Mohamed El-Erian, whose opinions on world economics I have valued for years.

Posted because the economic consequences of the U.S./Israel war on Iran are going to be extreme.  There is almost no foreseeable outcome that will not adversely affect most of the major economies of the world.

And while I'm on Facebook, I'll add these other items -

Introducing a "from Facebook" category in TYWKIWDBI

I have deeply conflicting feelings about Facebook, which I joined last year.  One the one hand it allows me simple and frequent communication with friends, classmates, neighbors, relatives.  On the other hand it is loaded with utter crap, including extraordinarily realistic AI creations and misleading clickbait. Of course on the third hand it reassures me by feeding me more and more material I agree with because its algorithm is designed to do just that.

Intermixed with all that is a potential abundance of "ordinary" (nonpolitical, nonpersonal) postings from history groups, science and technology groups, scholarly institutions, and reputable news sources.  It's sometimes hard to tell which is which.

Take for example the screencap embedded above.  Interesting, certainly.  And makes sense.  If you are already fucking up the ecosystem of the abyssal plane of the world's oceans by harvesting manganese nodules, it makes sense to add the capability to do a little snip-snip on a rival's undersea cables.

I don't have time to chase down primary sources all the time.  I made a screencap of that item, but did not go to the South China Morning Post to confirm that the article exists.  

Going forward, anything I post in the "from Facebook" category should be viewed with suspicion.  And I'm not providing links because I don't want to support clickbait.  You can search for relevant info elsewhere.  

Assessing geopolitical turmoil

The embed is a screencap from Facebook, which I haven't tracked to the primary source, but I quite agree with the expressed sentiment.

I am disappointed (but not surprised) that major news outlets tend to report on what Trump is saying without adding any nuance or interpretation.  Perhaps that is their perceived role, or perhaps they are under pressure not to openly criticize this authoritarian president.

Personally, I have been monitoring Al Jazeera every night.  They have a You Tube channel that broadcasts live in English 24/7.  Whether you hear live news or recordings depends on your global time lag (mine is 9 hours).  The broadcasts originate from Qatar and include interviews with Middle Eastern and European leaders or their representatives.

What I hear just from brief visits to that site is quite different from what I hear on American sites.  This morning the equity, bond, and oil markets are reacting positively to reports that U.S. and Iranian representatives "are talking" and that "there are hopes for a settlement."

The underlying truth (I think) is that the Trump administration has issued a set of 15 guidelines (no nuclear weapons capability etc).  Trump is expecting "unconditional surrender" including control of Iranian oil production.  Iranian leaders have issued their "talking points" which include "sovereignty over their nation and the Gulf of Hormuz" and "reparations for damages done by the U.S. and Israel."

Does anyone actually think there is serious talking going on.  Nonsense.  Everyone knows that this apparent cease-fire is nothing more than an opportunity for both sides to reload.  The U.S. has elite ground forces en route to the conflict area:

For their part, the Iranians are at least talking locally about unceasing resistance:

Trump and Hegseth seem to feel they can bomb Iran into submission - a sentiment that scarily echoes what I remember from coming of age during the Vietnam war, when the goal was to "bomb them into the Stone Age."  Iran is not Vietnam.  Consider just the size:

Now consider Iran's leverage in the Gulf region.  The obvious first leverage was control of the Strait of Hormuz.  Trump has said "we don't care, we don't need oil from there, we have our own", which is true and quite irrelevant.  Here is the outflow from the Gulf:

Very little oil goes to the U.S.  But India is already hurting from gasoline shortages.  China less so because they have the world's largest strategic reserves of oil stored underground.  But the rest of Asia is suffering, and Europe is worried.  

The other things that come out of the Stait of Hormuz include the fertilizers that much of the world depends on for agriculture.  Trump's cavalier assessment that he doesn't care about Hormuz closing ignores U.S. farmers, who may be pushed to insolvency because of fertilizer costs.

Liquid helium comes out of the Gulf.  I think some MRI centers in the Americas and Europe have already indicated that they will decrease the availability of MRIs.  And I think liquid helium is also critical for some computer chip manufacturing.

Note that Iran has been attacking neighboring Gulf states, in part because those states have supported the U.S. with air bases, but also because they can do immense damage to the regional economies.  The next potential targets:  desalination plants.

Image cropped for size from the original in The Guardian.

Most Gulf countries only have water reserves to last about a week. Analysts have said that if any of these plants are struck and capacity taken out, the impact would be quick and severe and it could wipe out water to major cities in a matter of days.

Power plants need desalinated water for cooling, so electricity supply would be affected. It would particularly affect healthcare and the running of hospitals, and would likely have to cause industries and businesses to shut down for as long as there was a water shortage.

Water rationing would likely have to be introduced. There are concerns that this could lead to mass panic and civil unrest.

You want to talk about "bombing someone into the Stone Age"?  

Trump undoubtedly feels "the pressure of the midterms" because Republicans have been losing local elections all around the country, including Texas and yesterday in the district that includes his precious Mar-a-Lago. He will certainly be getting panicy calls from Gulf emirates who worry that their entire economies may be destroyed by a few well-placed ballistic missiles.  

Enough gloom and doom for right now.  More later on the potential for a world-wide recession, because despite Trump's assertion that things will quickly revert back to normal, it's more likely that "things" are going to continue to get worse...

Addendum Wednesday evening:

(Excerpted from Facebook, so no guarantee that it is true.)

Anomalous behavior in financial markets

I did not blog it at the time, but when Trump overthrew the government of Venezuela with his military action, an article in The Atlantic noted that some people profited very handsomely by correctly betting on that outcome via the prediction markets:

When U.S. Delta Force commandos slipped into Venezuelan airspace over the weekend, they did so in secrecy. And yet, in the hours before President Donald Trump gave the final order for the strike, someone bet more than $20,000 that Nicolás Maduro would be ousted as the country’s leader by the end of January.

On Polymarket, the online platform that lets people wager on almost anything, an anonymous trader somewhere in the world placed a series of suspiciously well-timed bets. Using a fresh account created last month, the individual made just a few bets in the days leading up to the raid, according to The Wall Street Journal—all on the possibility of imminent regime change in Venezuela—and appeared to come away with more than $400,000.

The Guardian made the same observation and interpretation:

The online wager platform Polymarket has angered some gamblers by declaring it will not settle millions of dollars’ worth of bets on a US invasion of Venezuela, arguing that the capture of the then president, Nicolás Maduro, does not qualify.

Before Donald Trump’s forces seized Maduro on Saturday morning, some traders appeared to have anticipated the shock move by placing bets on “prediction markets”.

These were not random "man on the street" bets.  Someone had inside knowledge and bet accordingly.  The publicly available data do not allow one to judge whether the people doing this are friends of Trump, or military commanders, or low-level communications staff.

Now it has happened again.  The embed at the top of this post is a cropped photo of my television, which was tuned in to Bloomberg at about the start of the trading day.  Donald Trump had announced (via Truth Social for crying out loud...) that he was going to scale back military action, which might lead to a easing of tensions and the reopening of the Gulf of Hormuz and (theoretically) lowering the price of oil.

The circled data point in the charts show that someone (??who??) traded options on the S&P 500 (proxy for the general market) and oil futures to the extent of more than a billion dollars IIRC.   The purple line in the bottom graph is either Brent or West Texas Intermediate, which immediately traded down when the market opened (and the equity indexes immediately traded up).

Someone knew this would happen.  Again, available data (at least public data) don't show whether it was a Trump friend.  But somebody is making big bucks from Trump's decisions.

Addendum:  Here are more details, from a BBC report -

...However, at 07:04 Eastern Time (11:04 GMT) on Monday, before US markets opened for the week, the president posted on his Truth Social platform that Washington had held "VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS" with Tehran over a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities.

Immediately, stocks bounced and the price of oil dipped to as low as $84 (£63) per barrel for the benchmark US price.

Observers have since scrutinised what happened in financial markets in the minutes leading up to the president's post.

At 06:49 ET, traders placed 734 bets on WTI crude oil contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex). 

One minute later, that number had jumped to 2,168. That's equivalent to about $170m.

The same pattern can be seen in traders buying contracts for Brent crude, the other major oil benchmark. Between 06:48 and 06:50 ET, the volume of trades rose from 20 to more than 1,650. That's about $150m in contracts.

Data for previous Mondays shows that far fewer trades are normally made at that time of day. 

Similar trades also happened on Monday with futures contracts for the S&P 500, Euro Stoxx 50, and other markets.

This means traders placed bets on the value of the largest firms listed in the US and Europe rising minutes before Trump's announcement.

Light pillars and sun pillars - updated x4

An Astronomy Picture of the Day from Finland, explained at the link and in my previous post on the subject.

Reposted from 2013 to add this awesome Astronomy Picture of the Day taken over Whitefish Bay:

"...vertical lines of light over a ground source that reflect from falling ice crystals. As the ground temperature was above freezing, the flat crystals likely melted as they approached the ground, creating a lower end to the vertical light pillars."

Reposted from 2018 to add this photo, via. 

And reposted yet again to add this remarkable image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day, which depicts a sun pillar.

"This was not a typical sun pillar. Just after sunrise two weeks ago in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, a photographer, looking out his window, was suddenly awestruck. The astonishment was caused by a sun pillar that fanned out at the top. Sun pillars, singular columns of light going up from the Sun, are themselves rare to see, and are known to be caused by sunlight reflecting from wobbling, hexagon-shaped ice-disks falling through Earth's atmosphere. Separately, upper tangent arcs are known to be caused by sunlight refracting through falling hexagon-shaped ice-tubes. Finding a sun pillar connected to an upper tangent arc is extraordinary, and, initially, took some analysis to figure out what was going on. A leading theory is that this sun pillar was also created, in a complex and unusual way, by falling ice tubes."

Might as well link to my previous posts on sun and light pillars in 2009 and 2010.

This schematic from Wikipedia -

- illustrates how the phenomenon is created.

Reposted from 2021 to add yet one more spectacular photo -

"Stool inspection shelf" illustrated

The discussion thread at the WeirdToilets subreddit includes extensive discussion as to whether a "stool inspection shelf" is a common feature of toilets in various European and worldwide locations.

Additional discussion at this archived article and in the "washout toilet" section of the Wikipedia page on flush toilets.

"Washout, or Flachspüler ("shallow flush"), toilets have a flat platform with a shallow pool of water. They are flushed by a jet of water from the back that drives waste into the trap below. From there, the water flow removes it into the sewage system. An advantage of the design is that users will not get splashed from below. Taking of stool samples is also simplified. Washout toilets have a shallow pool of water into which waste is deposited, with a trapped drain just behind this pool... Washout pans were among the first types of ceramic toilets invented and since the early 1970s are now only found in a decreasing number of localities in Europe.[citation needed] A washout toilet is a kind of flush toilet which was once predominantly used in Germany, Austria and France. It was patented in Britain by George Jennings in 1852 and remained the standard toilet type in Britain throughout the 19th century..."

Disappearing snowpack in the American west

Those of us who live in the Upper Midwest have been focusing on record amounts of snowfall.  Meanwhile, the opposite is happening in some western states, where they are currently experiencing record high temperatures.

Copypasting from Facebook is a lazy substitute for doing original research at sources, but I'm so pressed for time right now that this will have to do.  I believe these data are reliable.

A reminder of an old friendship

I've been busy this past week trying to trim down my ThingsToDo list, so I've not been blogging.  But there's always time to doomscroll, and while doing so yesterday I saw what looked like a clickbait link to People, which I don't normally visit or monitor.

The link turned out to be a brief but fairly decent summary of Beck Weathers' near-death experience on Mount Everest thirty years ago.  Beck was a classmate, neighbor, and friend during my years of postgraduate study in Dallas in the 1970s.  Two decades later his adventure -

"... Weathers at one point became temporarily blind from the ice splinters in the air, and opted to wait 400 feet below the summit until his vision cleared... Weathers collapsed and over the next 24 hours, eight other climbers died on the summit. When a Canadian climber found Weathers half-buried in fresh snow the next day, he assumed he was too late. "I thought Weathers was dead," Hutchinson said in an earlier interview, per PEOPLE. "I unburied him and broke the ice off his face.... Weathers ultimately lost his hands and nose to frostbite and underwent 10 reconstructive surgeries in the years that followed..."

- made headlines and was eventually incorporated into the novel and movie Into Thin Air.  Beck and I have fallen out of touch over the decades, but it's nice to see that the People article indicates that he is alive and doing well.

Interesting photograph

The underside of a brick bridge illluminated by light reflected off water, with perhaps something else casting a shadow - I haven't figured that part out.  No info re location at the Facebook source.

Reflections from a relatively tiny box

The middle of a continent is subject to weather extremes.   Here in Wisconsin we had robins, crocuses, and first butterflies last week, then a snowstorm dumping 10" snow overnight, now expecting 70-degree temps next weekend.  I'm looking forward to getting out of my own "tiny box" when all this gets sorted out.