A rare misrating by Netflix's algorithm; it thought I'd love it. I
thought it was boring, predictable, and stupid. Or maybe I was just in a
bad mood. I don't claim that these reports are anywhere near objective
measures of movie quality.
For the record: I liked the old Jumanji movie just fine. I like
Dwayne Johnson. I even like Jack Black. Rhys Darby was hilarious in
"Flight of the Conchords".
Kevin Hart is OK, I guess.
I even like
Karen Gillan, who played Nebula in recent Marvel movies, although I
didn't recognize her with hair and non-blue skin.
Anyway. It's the inverse of the original movie; instead of game
characters showing up to menace the real world, kids are sucked into the
game-world. They show up as adults, although still have their kid
personalities. So they bicker childishly, and doubt that their new bodies
can accomplish what they need to do to win the game.
Yes, the kids are misunderstood losers and outcasts in the real world, and are tossed
together by getting detention.
I fell asleep at a number of points, so maybe good stuff happened then.
Spoiler alert: 313. As opposed to a hefty
1492
in the KJV. I guess the KJV translators were an excitable bunch.
J.D. Tuccille notes, for the rest of us, how Proverbs 11:31 has been
overridden in Arizona, where
Laws
Are for the Little People. ("You mean the leprechauns?" "No.")
For aww-shucks acknowledgment of abuse of power, it's hard to beat
Arizona-style honesty. When informed by a sheriff's deputy that
doing 97 miles per hour in a 55 zone was a tad excessive, state Rep.
Paul Mosley (R-District 5) answered,
"Well, I was doing 120 earlier...This goes 140. That's what I like
about it."
Under fire from the public and the press, Rep. Mosley apologized
both for speeding and for his "jokes about frequently driving over
100 miles per hour." But he drove away from that incident free as a
bird, and likely faces no consequences more perilous than what the
voters can muster up at the ballot box. As he explained to the
deputy, he enjoys "legislative immunity."
Arizona, it turns out, has a pretty broad legislative immunity
written into its constitution.
For those of us wondering "what about the Live Free or Die state?",
the NH Constitution
Part 2, Article
21:
No member of the House of Representatives, or Senate shall be arrested, or held to bail, on mesne process, during his going to, returning from, or attendance upon, the Court.
That's from 1784. Interestingly, I can't find any such protection in
place for NH Senators. In any case, I'd like to see a rep trying to
do 120 on NH Route 4 to Concord.
Arguments over tariffs invariably cast the protagonists as large, impersonal units: the U.S., China, the EU, corporations such as Toyota and Harley-Davidson. We are asked to take a side between actors too big to comprehend, perhaps in the hope that we will slip into a team mentality and assume that any costs incurred are simply coming out of the pockets of the rich or abstract, with little real effect on the rest of us. This is a grave mistake. Tariffs, both those enacted by the U.S. and those they provoke in retaliation, impose limitations on the behavior and livelihood of individuals. This has been made vividly clear recently by the plight of Maine’s fishermen, who are caught right in the middle of the White House’s trade war.
China is one of the largest markets for Maine shellfish, but because the Chinese have reacted to the U.S. tariffs by imposing some of their own, that is beginning to change. With tariffs now set at 40 percent for live lobster and 35 percent for processed lobster, Maine’s seafood producers are taking a hit. Rather than pay a considerably higher amount in taxes by importing from Maine, Chinese businesses are shifting to Canadian suppliers, whose lobster exports have not been subject to the new tariffs. Canadian waters are home to the same species of lobster, so the trade war makes their product a direct, cheaper substitute.
The only bit of good news: this should make lobster cheaper
for the rest of us, right? Sucks if you're a lobsterman, though.
The upstart New York congressional candidate has been hailed by
pundits, newspapers and pols as "sharp," "smart" and
"extraordinary." BU's Associate Provost and Dean of Students Kenneth
Elmore gushed that Ocasio-Cortez is "brilliant -- she is boldly
curious and always present. She makes me think and could always see
multiple sides of any issue. ... I can't wait to see what happens
when her time truly comes."
But when the time came to put her BU economics education to work, Ocasio-Cortez flunked. On PBS last week, she asserted that "unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs." Moreover, the erudite B.A. holder in economics posited, "unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their kids."
No, as Michelle points out, that's not how unemployment statistics
work. And the fraction of people with multiple jobs is
"less than 5 percent and has been declining for nearly 30 years."
Maybe Alexandria could get some tuition money back from BU?
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