The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Kate was at Heathrow with plans to fly to Norway.  The man in front of her at the ticket counter proved to be a massively built though apparently dull-witted fellow and not owning a credit card to book his flight.  Growing increasingly frustrated, Kate offered to buy his ticket.  Then it turned out he didn't have a passport.  No sooner had she abandoned her trip to Norway than Heathrow exploded!

Dirk Gently slept through the urgent ringing of his phone.  Eventually, the repeated phone calls ended and he was able to slip back into a pleasant sleep.  When he finally awoke, he realized that he was late for an appointment with a paying client!  That explained the phone ringing!  How to explain his lateness and still get paid?  He made his way to the client's home and was troubled to see so many police cars parked out front.  His client was inexplicably dead in a basement locked from the inside.  Suicide?  Unlikely.  His decapitated head was sitting on the record player.  The situation was clearly impossible, which was just the sort of mystery Dirk liked.  If only he had a paying client.

Odin, the All Father of the Norse Gods, has retired to a mental hospital where his linen sheets are changed frequently and he lives in comfort.  Annoyingly, Thor had demanded a challenge in Valhalla, which was going to interrupt Odin's joyous retirement.  Yes, it turns out that the gods still exist though they have not adapted to the modern world.  Most of them are tramps wandering the streets.  In fact, until very recently, Odin had been one such tramp, but he sold off the power of the gods for a clean bed and fresh linens.

Dirk proves to be a hapless oaf, a man who puts immense effort into avoiding small tasks until they became insurmountable.  The most obvious example of this was his fear of opening his refrigerator for discovering what might have become of the contents.  It hadn't been opened in months and his cleaning lady had likewise avoided opening the refrigerator.  Funny?  Not really.  He was so determined not to open it that he bought a new refrigerator and had the old one hauled away, unopened.  In the course of the day, he managed to get his nose broken, his hand clawed by an eagle, twist an ankle jumping out of a window, rip his coat, crash his car twice, and get run over by a motorbike.  Is this an effort at slapstick?  Dirk was quirky and mysterious in the last book, here he is mostly an idiot who literally crashes into the solution to his questions.

Thor is a lot of fun.  He is full of godly fury and has an epic temper-tantrum to clear his mind.  He's usually gruff and laconic, but his interactions with Kate are fun.  His punishment of having to count all the stones on the beaches of Wales was rather funny, especially when he refused to say how many.  "Count them yourself!"

As for the mystery, it really isn't explained.  Like in the last book, Dirk's great solution - if there was such - takes place off screen.  What happened to get Odin back to his linens and Thor on his way to Norway?  The end is very abrupt and unsatisfying.

Skip.

Gerrymander

Based on the 2024 election results, there are 21 blue states and 29 red states.  The blue states account for 206 seats in the House of Representatives.  The red states account for 229.  Of course, there are Republican Congressmen from blue states and Democratic Congressmen from red states.  How does that break down?

Now let's talk gerrymandering.  The idea is rather than let the voters pick their representative, the representative picks the voters.  This allows for safe seats or splitting strongholds of the other party into bite-size chunks that can be overwhelmed and digested by the ruling party.  Depending on how the districts are drawn, the dominant party can greatly weaken the opposition.  Let's look at some examples.

Illinois (blue) has 17 congressional districts.  In 2024, the state votes 43% for Trump and 54% for Harris.  How many Republican congressmen are there from Illinois?  Three.  That is 17% representation.

Texas (red) has 38 districts.  In 2024, the state went to Trump by 56% to 42% vote.  How many Democrat congressmen from Texas?  Thirteen.  That is 34%.

California (blue) has 52 districts and broke heavily for Harris: 58% to 38%.  Republicans hold 9 of the 52 seats, or 17%.

Many states are difficult to gerrymander.  Several only have 1 congressman (Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming).  The smaller states - 4 congressional districts or less - are mostly unremarkable.  That eliminates 21 states from the list, leaving 14 blue states and 15 red states.  Here is the new breakdown:

First thing to note is that there were no Republicans in the smaller blue states, but there were 5 Democrats in the smaller red states.  Interesting.  In a red state, representation is 71% Republican vs. 29% Democrat.  In a blue state, it is 73% Democrat to 27% Republican.  Not a big difference.

Harris carried blue states by an average of 55% to 43%.  Trump carried red states by an average of 58% to 41%.  Trump performed better in blue states than Harris in red states and yet, the House was on a razor's edge.  

The blue states have done a far better job of gerrymandering than the red states.  If the Republicans adopt the same strategy, they will gain seats.  Having already gerrymandered the blue states, there is little the Democrats can do to counter it, other than complain.  That 34% representation in Texas might soon drop to the level of an Illinois or California.

In the near future, perhaps an unbiased AI can draw districts that don't create ludicrous zigzag patterns that weave through various counties and cities to generate a safe seat for the dominant party.  For the time being, a party would be foolish not to gerrymander.

Jim Lovell

Jim Lovell had been one of the New Nine astronauts in 1962, which included John Young, Ed White, Pete Conrad, Frank Borman, and Neil Armstrong.  Lovell's first flight in space had been with Frank Borman on Gemini 7 in December 1965.  In 1966, he went back to space on Gemini 12 with Buzz Aldrin; this was Aldrin's first trip to space.  In 1968, he joined Frank Borman and William Anders on Apollo 8 for the first flight to the moon.  The famous picture of Earthrise was taken on this mission.

Though slated to command Apollo 14, his crew was bumped forward to Apollo 13 on account of Alan Shepard's perceived unreadiness for the mission; Shepard's last mission was 9 years earlier.  Lovell was one of only 5 astronauts who had been on 3 missions at the time; he had spent 3 weeks in space so far and would be the first to make a 4th trip.  A walk on the moon would be a perfect capstone to a stellar career.  Instead, it proved to be the successful failure that saw NASA overcome an array of challenges to bring the astronauts home safely.

Lovell was portrayed by Tom Hanks in Apollo 13 (1995) and Tim Daly in HBO's From the Earth to the Moon (1998).  Both the movie and the series are highly recommended.

RIP

Twixt (2011)

Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a horror author noted for witch stories, arrived in a small town for a book signing.  The decline of his career was demonstrated by the venue: a hardware store that happened to double as a bookstore.  He only signed one book.  Sherrif Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern) is a fan, as well as an aspiring writer.  He had an idea for a book titled The Vampire Executions.  Hall politely declined to be a co-author.  However, when the sheriff offered a chance to visit the morgue and the victim of a murder, Hall consented.  The corpse of a young woman with a stake through her heart laid on a gurney.  Maybe she was a vampire, the sheriff suggested.  Hall also learned that Edgar Allen Poe once stayed in the town.  He eagerly visited the ruins of the old hotel and saw the plaque.

Edgar Allen Poe slept here

Duly impressed, he checked in for the night at the local motel and fell into a restless sleep.  The ruined hotel, the murdered girl, and talk of vampires intermingled in a dark dream.  Here, he met Virginia (Elle Fanning) - the murdered girl? - and visited the hotel - which was open for business - and had dark history of a dozen murdered children.  In the morning, he investigated the dream only to find many truths in it.  As such, he agreed to co-author a book with the sheriff and made multiple trips into dreamland to further investigate the various crimes with the help of Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin).

For an 80-minute film, it has far too many characters, too many plot threads, and too scattershot a storyline.  Coppola was trying some experimental filmmaking and it clearly doesn't work.  Virginia proves to be a stand-in for Hall's tragically killed daughter, for Poe's dead wife, and for the child who escaped the previously mentioned murder of a dozen children only to be buried alive like in a Cask of Amontillado. The ending is entirely unsatisfying.  Is Flamingo (Alden Ehrenreich) actually a vampire or just some Goth poser?  Does the devil live in the 7-faced clocktower?  Is the sheriff the serial killer that he is supposedly pursuing?  Let the audience decide.  The important thing is that Hall has a mental breakdown about the death of his daughter, thus 'dealing' with the tragedy.

Joanne Whaley - who was Kilmer's ex-wife IRL - plays his shrewish wife here.  Yikes!  How much of these interactions are acting vs. re-enactments?

Skip this one.

One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing (1975)

Sometime in the 1920s, Lord Edward Southmere (Derek Nimmo) had gone to great efforts to smuggle a microfilm containing Lotus X out of China, wearing ludicrous disguises and resorting to dangerous routes.  When back in England, he allowed his guard to drop only to find himself hotly pursued by members of the Chinese embassy.  He avoided capture long enough to hide Lotus X at the Natural History Museum.  While at the museum, he had a chance encounter with his one-time nanny, Hettie (Helen Hayes).  So it was that Hettie took up the task of recovering the Lotus X before Hnup Wan (Peter Ustinov) could.  While Hettie and her band of nannies sought to find the microfilm in the dinosaur skeleton, the Chinese opted to steal the entire skeleton.  Would the Chinese recover Lotus X or was that secret to be revealed to the English?

The movie is a goofball Disney comedy that pits hapless Chinese agents against a platoon of British nannies.  Of course, craziness ensues.  The highlight of the film is the dinosaur skeleton on a lorry being driven through the foggy streets of London as the Chinese give chase.  A British big game hunter (Jon Pertwee) sees the dinosaur and instantly joins the chase to bag the biggest game of his life.

The movie has not aged well.  The Chinese are played by British actors with cringeworthy makeup.  Bernard Bresslaw, who was six feet seven inches tall, is embarrassing as a Fan Choy.  Clive Revill also has a terrible makeup job as Quon.  Peter Ustinov may have parlayed this role into Charlie Chan some years later.

I saw this in the theater as a kid and remember being disappointed how the hero - Lord Edward - kept getting sidelined.  Heck, he was hardly in the movie after the first 5 or 10 minutes.  Nonetheless, I had warm feelings about it until recently rewatching it.  It does have a surprising number of unexpected stars.  Joss Ackland plays a Texan visiting England.  Roy Kinnear is the baffled police superintendent who must respond to reports of a dinosaur traipsing through London.

Skip.