Thin Red Line, Dreadful WWII movie

It was made fairly recently.  It's allegedly about Guadalcanal.  A green Army (Army not Marine) unit is landed on Guadalcanal.  They move up to the line, get ordered to assault an enemy held hill, and most of 'em get killed.  All the officers come across as nut cases.  We have conversations between one star generals and bird colonels, bird colonels and captains that would provoke court martials for all hands in the real world.  Nobody wears insignia of rank, making it hard for us viewers to figure out who is giving orders and who is taking orders.  The hill is covered with fantastic shoulder high grass, thicker than any grass I ever saw in Viet Nam.  It's so thick and lush that they could have taken the enemy position by belly crawling thru the grass.  They would have been totally invisible.  Instead they all stand up, start running forward into enemy fire, and all get shot for their pains.  
   Another down check, we never learn the names of any of the characters.  They probably give names once or twice, but not often enough or clear enough for this couch potato to catch 'em.  The movie shows Guadalcanal as a tropical South Pacific paradise with brown skinned native girls, colorful parrots, dugout canoes and grass huts.  No one who fought on Guadalcanal had anything good to say for the place.  All the letters home and memoirs talk about is heat, mud, bugs, enemies, snakes, booby traps, and artillery barrages, a genuine hell hole, not Bali Hai from the musical South Pacific.
The purpose of a war movie is to show a protagonist thrown into a dreadful situation, have him master the situation somehow, and learn from it and grow a bit.  Nothing like that happens.  We don't even have the satisfaction of seeing the more obnoxious characters take a bullet.
Bad flick.  We turned it off three quarters of the way thru to watch the Great Debate. 

So I stayed up for the Great Debate

Well, it went off.  Nobody imploded on stage.  Romney looked and sounded good.  Jim Lehrer moderated and just asked the questions and then let the candidates speak to them, which is good.  No new ideas were presented.  But they did speak to the issue, the economy, and kept the discussion on an adult level, and didn't wander off into trivialities. 
Good show.
We will see if it influences the polls.

Air Strikes won't work says Aviation Week

Long illustrated article discusses the Iranian situation in depth.  The writers conclude that the Iranian nuclear facilities are too deeply buried to be damaged by bombing.  Even by USAF, let alone the Israeli Air Force. Unless nukes were used.  USAF won't use nukes and we are pretty sure the Israelis won't either.  The article did say that the Stuxnet computer virus slowed the Iranians down by five years, but that won't work again the article says.  The Iranians are constructing a secure network and taking their computers off the public Internet. 
  Of course, Stuxnet wasn't spread via the Internet.  Stuxnet was put on flash drives, and they scattered a few infected flash drives around the parking lots outside Iranian nuclear facilities.  Sharp eyed workers would spot the flashdrives lying on the asphalt, pick them up and take them in to their cubicles.  When they plugged them into their computers, Stuxnet would load itself into RAM and go to work.  No Internet access required for infection.

Frank and Robot, Depressing movie

Youngest son dragged me over to the Colonial to see this flick last night.  Frank, retired old codger, has grown children who worry about his health.  Frank has been letting things go, like the dishes, hair cuts, picking up, housework in general.  It's unattractive. 
  So the children buy Frank a household robot.  It cleans and cooks and sweeps and urges Frank to eat healthy and go on low sodium diets and yadda yadda.  Somehow Frank, wily old codger who used to be a cat burglar, talks the gullible robot into becoming his assistant on a few burglary jobs around the town.  "Just to keep his hand in". 
  It's cute, and there are some good lines, but speaking as a guy approaching old codgerhood, I found it depressing.  Frank is at end of life, alone, with nothing to do.  His children are unattractive, deeply into trendy unproductivenesses, and no grandchildren.  It's so bad that Frank develops a father-son relationship with the robot. 
   Depressing movie. 

What is it with Democrats and Tax Hikes?

Democrats want tax hikes.  It's their holy grail.  Obama keeps talking about the need for more taxes.  ("a balanced approach") So do Anne Kuster, Maggie Hassan, NHPR, and Carol Shea Porter.  David Gregory offered a 10 for one deal, "For each dollar of tax hike you Republicans give us, we will give you 9 dollars of spending cuts."  Real bipartisan that is.
   As far as Democrats are concerned, original sin is refusal to hike taxes.  They beat on Republicans about this all the time.
   And the electorate must have some kinda death wish, they keep on electing democrats. 

Refrigerator patents

According to the Wall St Journal, Whirlpool and LG settled their patent suits over household refrigerators yesterday.  Wow.  The household refrigerator was invented a hundred years ago.  You would think the patents had expired by now.  Ingenious lawyers, aided and abetted by the ever helpful US Patent Office, have managed to bill yet more hours over trivia. 
  The last go round was over "the concept of a refrigerator dispenser with an extendable tray and water spigot".  And that idea really really deserved a patent because it was not obvious to any housewife, let alone someone "skilled in the art".
   We could get the economy moving again except every time someone puts a product on the market they get sued by patent trolls.  There is nothing new about refrigerators.

Leaf Season

Leaves beginning to turn in Crawford Notch (just north of North Conway).  Took this pix on Thursday.