RIP: Chadwick Boseman

Very sad to see that actor Chadwick Boseman has died.

He was most well known, of course, for his role as T'Challa in Marvel's Black Panther, first introduced in Captain America: Civil War. ...



But he was in quite a few films before that, including one of my favorite B movies, Gods of Egypt, in which he played Thoth.

A more serious film in which he appeared was Marshall. He portrayed a young Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice on the Supreme Court ...



And I especially liked when he appeared on SNL as the Black Panther :) ...



He will be missed.

Jacob Blake

Take a moment to think of Jacob Blake.

On August 23rd, Jacob Blake was shot by a police officer at least seven times at point blank range in his back as he was getting into his car, a car in which his three children were sitting. He is now paralyzed. Paralyzed.

You can talk about more training for police, but nothing will change as long as there is a group of people who hold life and death power over others, but who are unaccountable to the laws to which the rest of us must answer.

Defund the police.

Party of life?

Poll: 57% Of Republicans Find Coronavirus Death Toll, Now Over 176,000, ‘Acceptable’

A majority of Republican voters think that the U.S. coronavirus death toll, which is over 176,000 and rising, is “acceptable,” a CBS News/YouGov poll found Sunday, with an even larger number saying that the national response to coronavirus is “going well." ...

How many decades have Republicans styled the Democratic party as "the party of death" and their own party as "the party of life"? Just another Republican lie.

Convention day 3

Tonight at the Democraatic convention, President Obama spoke ...



Miss him!

And from last night, something I forgot to post from the second day of the convention: the roll call. Because everything in the convention is virtual, the typical roll call couldn't happen, but they replaced it with something way better. I couldn't stop watching! :) ...

Fires

Welcome to my crispy state. Vacaville is only about 30 miles from here. So scary!

Convention day 1

Here is Michelle Obama's really good talk from tonight's Democratic convention ...



And here is Bernie Sanders' also good speech ...



It is good to be a Democrat :)

Hendrix

Here's Jimi Hendrix doing his song, The Wind Cries Mary, 1967 in Stockholm ...



I'm sure I've mentioned it here before, but I did get a chance to see him perform live before he died. It was when I was in high school - went with my then boyfriend Dan to see him at the local state college in 1968.

WWZ again

Tonight I am re-watching an old favorite movie - World War Z, starring Brad Pitt ...

Former UN field agent Gerry Lane, his wife Karin and their two daughters are in heavy Philadelphia traffic when the city is overrun by zombies. As chaos spreads, the Lanes escape to Newark, New Jersey and take refuge in an apartment. UN Deputy Secretary-General Thierry Umutoni, an old friend of Gerry, sends a helicopter that extracts the Lanes and Tommy to a U.S. Navy vessel in the Atlantic Ocean where scientists and military personnel are analyzing the worldwide outbreaks. Andrew Fassbach, a young virologist, posits that the plague is a virus and that development of a vaccine depends on finding the origin. Gerry is forced to either help Fassbach find the outbreak source or the family will be evictrd ...

I never realizrd before how scary this movie actually is, but now that the coronavirus has appeared, it's just too plausible. In the film, a virus spreads from Asia to all parts of the world. Governments and police are overrun. What's left of the military and some scientists try to discover the origins of the virus so that they can create a vaccine before it's too late. Oh, and infected people turn into crazed mindless killing machines, infecring others almost instantaneously. Eeeeeeeee!

Heaven

Tonight on the PBS NewsHour there was a segment about the Talking Heads that reminded me of this song, Heaven ...

Sad song

Remembering 1984 today because of a song I heard at the grocery store. Normally I don't specifically remember what year most songs come out, but that was a strange year because I was getting divorced. The divorce actually happened in 1985, but 1984 was the year I was still trying to save the marriage, an unbelievably daunting uphill and futile slog.

The song was from the soundtrack of a movie, Against All Odds. I can't remember now if the movie was any good or not, but I remember going to see it with the ex, and that it was an icredibly depressing experience.

Time to exorcise some demons! ;) Here's the song, by Phil Collins, with bits from the movie ...

Kamala Harris

Joe Biden has chosen my state senator, Kamala Harris, as his running mate. I had wondered if Susan Rice might be best, but as I think it over, Harris is probably better politically. Here's more ....

Cool Yoda

It's 99 F today. When we got the window air conditioner, I worried the noise would scare Yoda, but she actually likes to nap right next to it ...

 

Ed Yong

A couple of days ago I saw science writer for The Atlantic, Ed Yong, on MSNBC - he has written a piece on the pandemic: How the Pandemic Defeated America.

Ed has a different perspective as he is British, and so clearly sees how weird and immoral it is to have a country where access to health care is tied to money, even duting a pandemic.

I have been reading Ed's work for years. When I first came upon him, he was a blogger at National Geographic at Not exactly Rocket Science. I liked that blog because he wrote a lot about animals. It was there that I learned that almost all female creatures are fertile and have babies their whole lives: only in a few species, like humans and killer whales, do females have menopause (Why Killer Whales Go Through Menopause But Elephants Don't).

San Francisco

Thinking of one of my favorite places today - San Francisco. Though it's about 90 miles away from here, we spent a lot of time there over the years, all good.