Excaliber 1981

Released in 1981 making it forty years old this year.  It’s long, two hours and twenty minutes.  It tells the King Arthur story beginning with Uther Pendragon’s visit to Igraine, where with Merlin’s magical help he begets Arthur.  We have a young Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, in front of a big crowd and being acclaimed king.  We have Lancelot’s affair with Guinevere.  We have Mordred’s treachery leading to Arthur’s death at the battle of Camlan.  In short all the significant stories from Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur are presented. 

   The movie has a few costume problems.  Everybody wears shining armor, plate armor, all the time.  Makes it hard to tell who is who since they all look alike, and wear helmets that obscure the actor’s faces. Arthur gets marred wearing shining plate armor.  In real life plate armor doesn't breath, making it sweaty as well as heavy.  I am sure armor would have been kept on hooks in the armory and only donned to go into combat, not worn around the house. The other trouble is, in Arthur’s time (late 400’s to early 500’s) armor would have been either old Roman armor or chain mail, or boiled leather.  Plate armor would not be developed for another thousand years. 

   Nigel Terry plays King Arthur, Helen Mirren plays Morgana, and Nicol Williamson plays Merlin.  Patrick Stewart and Liam Neeson have bit parts, so small that I never recognized them while watching the movie. 

Choosing the Right Strategy for WWII.

   Right after Pearl Harbor there was incredible political pressure to do something about Japan.  Natural enough.  But Roosevelt wanted to deal with Germany first.  He saw Germany was more dangerous.  She was bigger than Japan, bigger population, far more heavily industrialized, had her own supplies of coal and iron, had plenty of top flight scientists, and occupied a very strategic location, right in the center of Europe.  Europe was the center of the civilized world in those days, where as Japan was way off in the Far East.  The US Joint Chiefs of Staff and most of the American establishment agreed with Roosevelt and supported his views on the matter.  The British were all in favor.  And, Hitler declared war on the United States.  This was purely off the cuff on Hitler’s part, he had no alliance with Japan, no treaties offering support, and he didn’t own the Japanese anything.  Five million German soldiers were locked in deadly combat with the Russians, the British were bombing the snot out of his homeland, last thing Hitler needed was another enemy.  What Hitler did manage was to convince everyone in America that Germany and Japan were in league with each other (the Axis) and so nailing the Germans was as good as nailing the Japanese. 

   Had we followed our first impulse and thrown everything into smashing Japan we might have given the Germans time to develop nuclear weapons.  We certainly would have given them time to get their deadly Type 21 submarines into action.  We would have given Hitler time to beat down the Russians.  Time for Rommel to stiffen the defenses on the Atlantic Wall.  As it was, the Atlantic Wall was almost strong enough to defeat D-Day.  Another year or two of laying more minefields, building more pill boxes, and it might have been strong enough to hold.

Ho Ho Ho. Windows 11 coming for Christmas.

The Wall St Journal ran three pieces on Windows 11 today.  It will start coming preinstalled on desk tops and laptops by Christmas time.  Windows 10 owners will be offered a free update. They say they have not changed the user interface "much" from Windows 10.   Windows 7 and 8 users will NOT get a free update. " Users can choose from Android apps Amazon offers to install on their PC's." to  quote the WSJ piece. I think this means Windows 11 can download and run some, perhaps all, Android apps.  TikTok and Uber ride hailing service were mentioned by  name.  They claim better integration with "the cloud" which is not a feature I care about.  They claim deeper support for Microsoft "Teams".  First I ever heard of "Teams".  I must be loosing touch with the technology since I retired.  They claim 20 million users for "Teams"  a year ago and 145 million users today.  

   Did not talk about how much slower and fatter Windows 11 will be compared to Windows 10.  Every new version of Windows going all the way back to 3.1 has demanded more RAM and more disk space and more time.  Only improvements in PC hardware performance over the years has kept Windows sluggishness within limits. 

So what is critical race theory, really

 Far as I can tell, from web surfing, critical race theory says that skin color is your destiny.  If your skin is white you are a nasty oppressor, if your skin is brown or black then every thing that goes wrong for you is whitey's fault.  White kids should feel guilty.  Brown and black kids should not work hard, they should accept failures in life as white oppression.  

   Forget Jefferson "All men are created equal" and Martin Luther King "Judged by the content of their character".  And if you look deeper, critical race theory looks like Communism or Socialism with the capitalist vs worker conflict replaced with white vs black (or brown and black) conflict.  

Not something that does any kid good to be taught.

Uniforms for Richard Sharpe TV dramas

 I have been watching my collection of the Richard Sharpe videos.  Sharpe, played by Sean Bean, is a British Army officer in the Napoleonic wars.  They have some cool shots of the redcoats, in uniform, in line or column, in action.  The red coats are really red, so red that I wonder if they could dye cloth that bright a red back in 1810 or so.  The redcoats and most of the other troops wear white pants which are nice and white and clean in most of the shots.  I gotta wonder if in real life white uniforms could stay looking that presentable after a bit of scrabbling around in the dirt.  But they look cool for the video.  And the officers get to wear gigantic hats.  I am not a real expert on period costumes so I don't know just how real the ones in the videos are, but they look cool.  

How Long Can America Keep Borrowing?

 Title of a Wall St Journal Op=Ed.  The answer is simple.  The US can keep borrowing as long as people are willing to buy T-bills.  Right now T-bills are selling briskly.  They are considered the soundest investment on the planet.  The US has an enviable record, gong back a couple of hundred years,  of never welshing on its debts.  In actual fact, we promise to repay a T-bill, with interest, after a fixed period of time, 5 years, 10 years, whatever, depends upon the specific T-bill.  We repay the T-bill owners with dollar bills, of which we can print as many as we need.  So as long as the financial community thinks US T-bills are a good investment they will keep buying them.  So long as we don't do anything really stupid to shake world wide confidence in US T-bills and US dollars, we can keep on borrowing. 

Wall St Journal discovers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company

 TSMC we call them in the industry.  They have been around, and important for 20 years that I know of.  Biggest semiconductor fab in the world.  TSMC doesn't design chips, they accept designs from anybody with money and fabricate them.  They specialize in digital parts, 5 volt or 3.3 volt.  Should TSMC go out of production for some reason (Main land china invades Taiwan for example) there would be a semiconductor shortage world wide much worse than the shortages we are having now.  

Anyhow the Wall St Journal ran a story this week indicating vaguely how important TSMC is to the world economy.  First time the Journal has bothered to notice TSMC.