Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| Uh, we're just getting ready to record here. Let's get everything going. Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah. Dog barking in the background, for those of you who can hear it. Okay. Let's just do this intro part. Here we go. Transcription by ESO. Translation by — Welcome to Curmudgeons Corner for Saturday, March 21st, 2026. It's just before 1930 UTC as I'm starting to record. I am Sam Minter, and we have no Yvonne with us again this week. And this time around, it's his son's spring break, and they're visiting Yvonne's brother in Texas. And I am happy to report, as I'm sure Yvonne would if he is here, his son Manu actually got on the plane to go. There'd been an issue a number of months ago, as some of our listeners may remember, where Yvonne was going to come out to Seattle and we were going to do a curmudgeons corner meetup. And then Manu wouldn't get on the plane. So it didn't happen.
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Sam:
[1:27]
| But yeah, he got on the plane. He traveled. All good. They're having their vacation. But that means I'm here and I put out the email saying, hey, anybody want to be a co-host? Blah, blah, blah. As usual, leaving out the last couple of people who've done it so we don't get repeats all the time. And I got no response. Well, after I mentioned something in person, my wife said maybe she could do something with me. So we'll see. Maybe. But I am doing the thing I usually do when I'm doing solo shows, which is it is Saturday. I am starting the recording to get this in the right Sunday through Saturday week that we have not missed a week forever. And this will not be it either. It's because I'm starting on Saturday, darn it, UTC. And then I'll go off and do other things for a while. We're going to the Apple store in just a few minutes. My son cracked the screen on his iPhone, and we're going to get it taken care of under Apple Care.
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Sam:
[2:32]
| And I'm picking up something else at the Apple store while I'm there. Not a big thing. I'm not buying a laptop or anything. I'm just, yes, something to pick up. Okay, fine. It's a second Apple TV. Because, you know, we now have a second device in the house that we can use. Like we, we, my projector that I have in the living room died finally. Like it had been having issues for a while, you know, like it wouldn't come on unless you hit it. So we'd like get up on a stool and hit it. It was on the ceiling and, you know, sometimes it would start up fine. Sometimes you'd have to hit it a little bit. and, like, jostle it. And then once you've jostled it, of course, it's not lined up properly on the screen, so you'd have to readjust it. And the bulb... We had replaced the bulb once because it had told us, you know, it was... Running, you know, the bulb had had however many hours on it and they recommend replacement. But the problem is the projector was old enough that there was no, you couldn't get the OEM bulbs anymore. They didn't make them anymore. Like the, the, the original company.
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Sam:
[3:46]
| That we got the projector from had moved on to newer and better projectors and you couldn't get replacement bulbs for this one anyway anymore you could get them online from other people no name brands and like but some of them when you went to look for them some of them were even like used you have to look carefully to get a new one but we did we had done that you know we generally in the past like we'd gotten a no-name brand a few bulbs ago and it didn't work very well and so we did switch to an oem one because we could still find them at that point they were just like twice the price or something so the the the no-name brand the bulb had problems immediately didn't work what whatever or maybe it worked but it it it like blew out like very quickly like in a few months or so. I forget. But then we ordered another no-name brand because it was at this point the only thing that was available. And I remember this last time, it caused problems immediately. So much so that we took out the new Bulb.
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Sam:
[5:00]
| And put the old one back in because the old one hadn't burnt out it was just at the point where the projector was telling us this bulb is old you need to replace it and we put it back in, and it lasted like another year and a half after that with the caveat that you sometimes had to hit the projector anyway we decided a long time ago that when it finally died it was time to replace the projector so we we did when it was finally dead we did order a new projector.
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Sam:
[5:29]
| And but it was going to take a couple days for the new projector to arrive and i you know the it was going to take even longer if i'd ordered it from my former employer amazon it was going to be a couple weeks but we found uh you know bnh photo back in new york you remember like i remember the days where I got their catalogs and I ordered stuff from them before. And, you know, they've got a big physical store in New York and a big mail order business. And, you know, free, you know, just buy everything online from Amazon. That's, That's, you know, it was one of the places you went to for electronics. But anyway, it was going to take a couple days. We did not want to go a couple days without television. We did not want to just watch it on our laptops or this was just me and Alex. Brandy was still in Olympia. We did not want to just, you know, watch on either a laptop or an iPad or my computer monitors in my office. I mean, you know, I've got 27-inch monitors, but 27 inches is still, you know, relatively small compared to, like, a big, like, 120-inch projector or however big this thing is. It's even bigger, 200? I don't know. It's an entire wall, okay? It's an entire wall.
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Sam:
[6:53]
| But anyway, so we went out to our local store. We have Fred Myers out here in Seattle and just picked up one of the really cheap TVs. We picked up a $200 TV, which was still like, you know, big compared to the old days. I remember, you know, having 20-inch TVs and thinking that was like a big thing when I was, you know, however old. Anyway, it's not like a big 70-inch screen or anything like that, but it's a decent size. It's bigger than the 27 inches. I forget exactly. 50 something? 50 something? Anyway, it was a cheap Samsung. It was the cheapest Samsung. And we got it and we set it up. And so we used that in our living room for a few days. But now... We got the new projector. It's all set up. It's like it was an upgrade. It's a it's a laser projector instead of having a bulb. So it's not going to burn out the same way. So no no bulb replacements every 3000 hours of watching or whatever it's supposed to be.
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Sam:
[7:57]
| And it's it's 4k instead of, you know, old fashioned HD, which which frankly, for most things, didn't make a big difference to us. But having the new one in place, I can definitely tell the difference on some things. Like on lots of streaming stuff, the compression artifacts are bigger than the resolution difference anyway. It depends what you're streaming, right? Because they vary the bitrate quite a bit depending on which service you're using and what the content is and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But anyway, it's definitely noticeably better. I won't deny it's noticeably better. It is absolutely noticeably better. It's just like how much better depends on what you're watching. I mean, like, you know, Alex and I, amongst other things, you know, we're watching, you know, old Doctor Who episodes from the 70s and we're watching an animated cartoon from like the, I think it was the late 90s, maybe, no, early 2000s. Anyway, these things were not HD to begin with, let alone 4K. So, you know, and obviously there's some up-resing that happens, but, you know, it is a limit to how much better you can make things if the source material wasn't great to begin with, right?
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Sam:
[9:19]
| But a lot of things, yeah, you can tell the difference. And it's brighter, has better colors, you know, all this kind of stuff. So a good upgrade. But anyway, the point is, get back to the beginning of this story.
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Sam:
[9:33]
| Now we've got an extra TV, so we're going to put it in one of our rooms upstairs. But now it needs an Apple TV hooked up to it. Because, of course, there's no way in hell I'm allowing this TV to get on the Internet to use its own built-in smart TV features. We had to figure out when setting it up, like, the right way to bypass all that crap. Like like smart tvs have a really bad reputation for a the software being really clunky and slow and bad but b also they've turned them into surveillance machines that's one of the reasons that for 200 bucks you can get a decently sized tv these days is because they are all about tracking everything you watch and reporting it back and all kinds of crap and there's some of them like are inserting advertising. Some of them are doing things. And you, and you think like you, you would initially think, okay, look, okay. I know if I'm watching a particular service, obviously that service knows what I'm watching. No, no, no.
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Sam:
[10:36]
| The, the, these smart TVs are smarter than that. They're like taking screenshots of what you're watching every few seconds and sending them back to the mothership. So even if you plug like a Blu-ray player into the thing, it knows what you're watching you know and the exact amount of this varies by company some do it more some do it less i figured samsung was a nice established brand i know they do it too though you know i don't know so anyway but the point is i'm gonna hook an apple tv up to the thing so it can be used and so i'm getting a second apple tv and there's probably actually a really old Apple TV laying around somewhere. And there was an unused one that I gave to my mom and she's hooked up, logged into all our accounts. So I don't know. Anyway, we're going to the Apple store for those two things. And, you know, that that's the plan for day. Apparently there's some social thing that, My wife and I may attend in the evening as well. I've been talking to my wife and Alex. There are a couple movies I want to actually see in the theaters. I won't do two in this weekend, but maybe one this week, one next week. I don't know. There's stuff going on. So anyway, I'm starting this out.
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Sam:
[11:52]
| And then, like I usually do when I do solo shows, I'll spread out the rest of the show throughout the rest of the weekend as I have a few minutes here, a few minutes there. We'll do it. I don't know. My wife may join me for some parts of it. She may not. Alex may join me for some parts of it. He may not. The dog may join us and bark for some parts of it. He may not. You never know. Anyway, though, we need to leave for the Apple store to be on time for our appointment. So I'm going to say goodbye. I owe you guys an Apple dream. I've been talking about it for several weeks. I still have not made it ready. however through the magic of me doing this over the course of the weekend i will make sure, that it is ready to go so does as soon as i say we're taking a break and i'll be right back after this you will hear the apple dream won't that be exciting well you'll know just a couple seconds because i'm taking that break here's the apple dream.
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Break:
[12:58]
| I think this was a continuation of the last dream and i had successfully done something but i don't remember what it was that i'd successfully done and people were congratulating me for successfully doing the thing and i was telling them something like yeah but no it doesn't really do that yet or something maybe i don't i'm not really sure bye well.
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Sam:
[13:26]
| That was one of the most exciting apple dreams ever wasn't it i don't even know what to say anyway i'm back as expected i took a long time did other stuff it's the next day it's sunday march 22nd a little bit after 22 utc and i don't much time because we're going to a movie next. Yeah, Yvonne had like raved about Hoppers. So we're going to go see Hoppers with my wife, my son, and my mother. And I won't talk about it until I get to it in order. Probably. Maybe I'll give just a thumbs up, thumbs down in the next segment. I don't know. I also want to see Project Hail Mary. We'll probably see that next week. Anyway, I got a couple things. And look, I didn't do movies yet in that little mini segment a few seconds ago. So I am going to do a couple movies now. And then maybe, I don't know. You know, I am not really feeling super news inspired this week. There are, of course, news things going on.
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Sam:
[14:35]
| Let's take a quick look. I'm looking at Google News real quick. We, of course, have more on Iran. You know, Trump is threatening this. Iran is threatening that. They sent a missile aimed at Diego Garcia, which showed that their missiles have a longer range than people thought they did. There's Trump saying he's going to send ICE agents to the airport. There's you know cuba's had power issues and trump's been threatening cuba too, you know we got stuff we yeah i'm scrolling down the list and there's more there's a meteorite near houston on top of the one near ohio that already happened and yeah there's this stuff. We had people, you know, there were famous people who died.
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Sam:
[15:28]
| Chapel Roan is defending herself and saying she doesn't hate children after some incident at some hotel somewhere where security did something. I don't know. We care about any of that. Anyway, a couple quick things. First, that are updates. First, in the last segment, I said the cheap TV we got was like, I don't know, 50 inches or something. And I looked at the box because we still have the box. It's laying in our entryway, waiting to be taken outside. It was 43 inches, which is by today's standards, a relatively small TV. By the standards of when I was growing up, 43 inches would have been a huge TV. But now it's like you can get smaller. Just to be clear, you can get smaller, but you have to look for them. You know, like if you go into the just the TV section of your store, Most are bigger than 43 inches. 43 is already like the small end of the spectrum at this point. But anyway, we're, you know, like I said, we just got basically...
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Sam:
[16:33]
| They did have options that were cheaper. Alex was at first looking at, like, really cheap projectors. Like, they make projectors that are, like, $100. But they're relatively dim, and they have some issues, and blah, blah. And we just ordered an expensive projector. So it was like, let's get a regular TV. We haven't had one in his entire lifetime. You know, my daughter had one in her room. But we have not had one as a family in his entire lifetime. So we got one. And we got the cheapest, decent one, I would say. You know, anyway, it still has to make its way upstairs in the next couple of days. You know, but anyway, that was the one correction. The other thing I wanted to give an update on is last week, Yvonne and I spent an inordinate amount of time probably. And without actually asking her if it was okay, talking about our friend's file, you know, she accidentally purged files she didn't mean to by setting up a synchronization thing that got confused between iCloud and Google, whatever, Google Drive. And we'd said, oh, but it looks like iCloud has a restore. We did test that later. ICloud restore only had three files. We did restore those three files. I don't even know if they were missing or not, but we restored them just to be sure.
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Sam:
[18:03]
| And the rest of the stuff wasn't there. So we have yet to do the thing going through the backups.
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Sam:
[18:09]
| We're going to go do that sometime this coming week, probably. She's going to call me and we'll screenshot her and go through all of that kind of stuff. And she also wants to look at the Google Drive backups, because apparently they also have something. But I'm less confident that there's going to be much there because she had just turned it on to sync anyway lesson is lesson number one synchronization is not backup, Those are two completely different things. And second, synchronization actually complicates backups, so be careful about that. Third, if you are trying to synchronize the same stuff to two different places, be super careful. I'm not saying it'll never work. It may sometimes work. She may have just gotten unlucky. There may have been other factors going on.
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Sam:
[19:06]
| But beware like yeah these synchronization things are built to just synchronize one thing really you know so anyway like i don't know how many people would like go through the i don't know like you'd think it's an edge case that people would figure you know what well what happens if people are trying to synchronize this to five different things at the same time but you know that's not the primary use case anybody's worrying about. At best, it's a secondary use case.
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Sam:
[19:41]
| Anyway, so that's the update on that. I thought I'd also give an update on Robin Letter because, you know, it's a thing. And I've been talking about it a bunch. Why is this stuff here? Because I clicked on the wrong thing. That's why. Okay, so my quick Robin Letter update. First of all, once again, my appeal, If anybody listening here is not already on Robin Letter and is willing to at least try it, please drop me a line. Feedback at RobinLetter.com will get you there specifically for Robin Letter, but any of the ways to contact me, I always mention at the end of the show, will be fine too. It is a sort of anti-social media, like, I keep saying that term, but that's, it's not right. It's not anti-social media.
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Sam:
[20:30]
| It's a reaction against what social media has become. It's an alternative to social media. Basically, it's keeping in touch with family and friends in a way that, is slower and more deliberate and is not intended to induce competition or is not optimized for gaining views, all of that kind of stuff. I've mentioned it before in the show, so I won't go over it much more. And I'm just going to give some numbers. As of, I don't know, hour and a half from now. Well, that's actually, I won't have stats yet, but it has, we just passed a couple hours ago, five weeks since I launched the public version of it. And I have the stats from the end of yesterday UTC. So these, and I know there's been some activity since then, including new users and stuff, but I just give the stats. In five weeks, we're up to nine active Robins, 75 active users.
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Sam:
[21:33]
| 118 invites were sent out And I'll admit most of them were by me Not all, not all, Of those 57 Oh, sorry, sorry I want to be clear When I said active users That is active users in the last four weeks I'm tracking The active robins is just as of The end of the day yesterday, UTC That's a static number, most recent number, nine The rest of these Because I want to, As we move forward, it doesn't make sense to say, here's the total number of users, here's the total number of invites, here's the total number of invites accepted, et cetera. You have to time-bound that.
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Sam:
[22:15]
| And I have been also looking at weekly numbers and daily numbers and all that kind of stuff. But a good number to use is four weeks. It's you know and people sometimes talk about monthly active users and things like that when they're talking about twitter or tiktok or facebook or any of the big social medias i go for four weeks because it's an even number of weeks and you definitely in most things like this you have patterns that are weekly so if you go with a month first of all months are different lengths you've got february at 28 or 29 days depending on the year you've got months that are 30 days you've got months to the 31 days a month is not a real unit and that like infuriates me all the time anyway so four weeks so in the last four weeks there have been 75 active users 118 invites sent 57 accepted there have been 60 updates posted in those last four weeks and 1697 read events that's when somebody clicks the button to read somebody's update if they try to read it like four different times, it'll count as four, right? So, because obviously there have been 60 updates.
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Sam:
[23:26]
| Reading 1,697 is like, crazy. It means a bunch of updates have been open more than one time. It also includes updates that weren't posted in the last four weeks. They might have been reading older updates beyond that. It still seems a little bit high for me. Maybe I'll check that number, but it seems to be accurate. It seems to be like, you know, when somebody clicks the read button, you know, you see the thing. Anyway, 118 comments left and 171 reactions. So that's pretty good. All of these are still growing, by the way. If you compare all of these to where we were four weeks ago, they are up quite a bit. If you look at weekly numbers, there are some that are sort of leveling off a little bit, or sometimes up, sometimes down, but still trending up.
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Sam:
[24:14]
| But anyway, I'm happy with the growth so far. There's actually been a little additional growth burst in the last week or so, which is great, including two new Robins created by people that weren't me, one of which by somebody who I had not talked to about it at all. You know, they were included in one of my Robins. They have not had a turn yet, but they, and I think in my first post, I did say something about, it would be great if people used this and created their own Robins, but I did not actually talk to this person. I have not actually spoken to this person in 20 years, I don't think. Anyway, they made a Robin. And so, and it's, it seems to be going well so far. And, you know, I try to be really good, by the way, just if anybody's worried about this kind of thing. I do not look at the content of Robins I am not in. Now, I could, I have not built end-to-end encryption on this thing or anything like that. And in fact, there are possible problems with that as it would gain, if it continues to grow and gets larger, as an admin, you know, I might have to potentially deal with.
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Sam:
[25:26]
| You know, moderation problems or people even posting illegal stuff, you know, I don't know. Like, so actually making it completely encrypted so even I can't read it is probably not the right thing to do for a thing like this. However, just as a policy, like I'm not, you know, I'm obviously reading all the Robins I'm in, which at the most at the current time is most of the ones that exist. But there are now a few that I am not a member of and I am not reading the content of those. I am, however, monitoring the general health of them. You know, like how many people were invited? How many people have accepted? Who has, not who has posted, but how many posts have there been? Like that kind of stuff. Just to understand, are these new ones that are being created working or not? Anyway, I'm happy with the progress But I have now, officially as of yesterday, reached the limit of what I think I am going to do in terms of inviting individual people I know to individual Robbins as a growth mechanism.
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Sam:
[26:40]
| So next up, I'm probably going to make a more general LinkedIn post or something about the site and inviting people. I'll still keep it as invites only, but basically say that anybody who wants an invite, contact me and I'll come up. And if they make sense in one of the groups that I already have, I'll add them. But if not, I'll just add them cold and empty so they can make their own Robbins. Cold and empty sounds bad. Like, I'm not a marketer. What, what, what can I say? But yeah, but before that, one thing I've determined is necessary. I, you know, I've got this big, long backlog of things to do, but one thing that I'll definitely do before I do any additional promotion that probably would have helped already with like, you know, cause I have, I switched from at first only inviting people who I had extensively explained the concept to, and had gone back and forth in email first. Then the second phase where I was contacting them either by LinkedIn or by Facebook and giving sort of a one-paragraph description and saying, hey, would you like to be invited and inviting the people who said yes to finally just saying, okay.
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Sam:
[27:57]
| I've got the email addresses of some additional people I knew in college or additional people I knew at one of my previous jobs or whatever. I'm just going to send them an invite. Straight from the site with the only explanation being the exclamation, the explanation that you get in the email that the site sends you and see how that goes. And obviously, as you go through those categories, the less upfront conversation and explanation you've had with somebody about it, the less likely they are to accept and the less likely they are to actually engage once you're in. And also even those that, that in, there's sometimes confusion on exactly what to do next. And like, I'd say 80 to 90% of the people who get in figure that out immediately on their own. But I have gotten a couple of comments about people who like, what do I do next? I don't understand what do I do? So I'm probably going to do one of those like little slideshow things where the first time you log in, you get a little tour with like explaining the UI and stuff like that and the concept and.
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Sam:
[29:10]
| You know that that kind of stuff just so that people who come in that way know what they're supposed to do anyway i've talked long enough about that i've got one more story that's not like a newsy story that i thought i was going to to talk about today well you know i i was i was.
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Sam:
[29:30]
| I was saving it for yvonne i was going to talk about it with yvonne because i figured his reactions would be funny. So, but he's not here. So do I tell the story anyway? Or do I save it?
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Sam:
[29:47]
| So here's what I'm going to do. I'm at the very least not going to tell it in this segment. I'm going to go ahead and take a break, because we've got about 10 minutes until we need to be in the car to go to that movie. We're picking up my mom, and then we're going to the movie, and blah, blah, blah. And so, like, I don't want to start it and then run long and then be late, and then I would get all stressed about that and blah, blah, blah. So I'm going to go ahead and take another break. And I know, look, we've gone through two segments relatively quick here. This may not be our standard two-hour show of course every time i say that it ends up being even longer it ends up being like a five-hour show or something but like nope nope i am just going to accept however long this thing is however light this thing is hell a few weeks ago i did a relatively short show that was only a few minutes long saying like i just got out of surgery and Oh, I should update folks on that, too.
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Sam:
[30:42]
| I did have my last procedure for my lovely kidney stone thing. And so, like, back in January, I got this infection. I went to the ER. They determined, like, his kidney slash bladder infection slash actually it had spread. I was, like, in sepsis. They pumped me full of antibiotics. They stuck, like, a drain in my side.
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Sam:
[31:13]
| And then I came back for, you know, and they did the drain in my side just with, like, you know, the stuff that makes you not care, not the stuff that. Knocks you out completely.
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Sam:
[31:25]
| And then they, I came back in for a procedure where they did knock me out completely and they, they stuck a stent inside me and they used a laser to break up the stone, but they couldn't get it all. So then like several weeks later, I went back in, they changed the stent to a new one, I guess, just to give me a nice, fresh, clean one. They lasered out the rest of the stone, and then nine days later I had to come in to get the stet taken out. A stet, for anybody who doesn't know, is basically just a tube that helps widen an opening, because they wanted the passageway from, I guess, I never asked the details of exactly where this was placed, but from my kidney to my bladder, from my bladder to out, make all of those spaces bigger so that more stuff could get out more easily, and in the second time around so that there wouldn't be swelling, so that those things would close up because that would also cause problems. Anyway, my description that I did on one of the robins that I happened to have a turn on the day after, I got the stent yanked out of my bladder a few hours ago. It was fun. Take your pants off, lie down, we'll shove lidocaine in you, followed by a camera, and then pull this plastic tube out of you while you scream.
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Sam:
[32:55]
| Fun. Fun, damn it. Anyway, I feel so much better. The last, like, week and a half between the last actual surgery that they knocked me out for and pulling this thing out of me actually felt worse than any of the other time in the month previously. Now, they say that I asked the doctor about this, and he's like, well, you know, it's actually probably not any more uncomfortable. It's just that you're no longer sick. You know, the infection is gone, the actual kidney stone is gone, and so all you have left is this tube in you, and it's really irritating. So it feels worse because you're not comparing it to those other things that were wrong. Meanwhile, I'm like, I don't entirely buy it. Like the entire rest of the time, like I'd taken like three or four of the heavy duty prescription painkillers they gave me like right after procedures. And then I switched to like over-the-counter stuff for the rest of the time. This last week and a half, I felt like I needed that stuff like constantly. Like if I moved even slightly, it would hurt quite a lot. I mean, not like I was just shot a lot, I guess. Well, I don't know. I haven't been shot, so I can't compare. But it wasn't like, you know...
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Sam:
[34:20]
| It wasn't immobilizing, but it was definitely like you couldn't think about anything else because, oh my God, it hurt. And whenever I moved, I would also immediately get extremely urgent to run to the bathroom as quickly as possible. So I was spending as much time as humanly possible not moving at all, you know, and certain positions were more comfortable than others, but fundamentally, it hurt when you moved. So it was just like, find a position and then just don't move. Anyway, now that they pulled the thing out of me, which apparently they say took like between 45 seconds and 60 seconds, so the actual removal did not take very long. It was very unpleasant having the thing yanked out of me, but I started feeling better very quickly afterwards. By a few hours later, it was noticeably better. By the next morning, I basically felt really good.
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Sam:
[35:17]
| I wouldn't necessarily say 100%. I still occasionally feel some twinges and some, you know, uncomfort, but I'm probably over 95% now. I'm feeling much better, and I'm confident within a few more days it really will be 100%. So I'm feeling much better with that kind of stuff. So thank you for anybody who cares, and for those of you who don't care, well, fuck you. You know, so anyway... I'm going to go ahead and take that break, because it really is time for us to go get in the car and go get my mom. And I'm hoping my son is actually awake now. He's probably not. So we will go get all that taken care of. We'll go see the movie. And later tonight, which will then be Monday, UTC, I'll finish recording. I don't know if I'll probably be solo. Maybe I'll have my wife with me, but probably not. We'll see. We'll see. She's offered a couple times, but I don't know. We'll see. And that is that. Here comes the break. And yeah, back in a while.
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Break:
[36:25]
| Okie dokie. Here it comes. It's just my internet being stupid. My internet being stupid is a new song we will make. Oh, I'm tired. What's wrong i'm i'm really tired you you you it's it's amazing to get the show on the road there's a road there's a road oh my god there's a road.
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Sam:
[37:30]
| And I am back. As predicted, it is much later. It is now Monday, March 23rd, just before 7 UTC, which is midnight here on the West Coast on the 22nd. Anyway, I saw the movie, saw Hoppers. Like I said, I'm not going to give detailed thing until I get to it in order, but thumbs up. Good movie. And I will avoid saying more about that. I will say that I realized just now that I hadn't actually done the two movies from before that I was supposed to do. And I will say, before I do the two movies, I'll say, look, it's looking very much like I'm not going to do any newsy stuff at all. None. It will be a newsless show. Because, you know, okay, the Iran stuff is continuing to get worse. There's all kinds of headlines about gas prices and the Straits of Hormuz and all this kind of stuff. I just don't really feel like it. I just don't. There's the stuff about the airports being all backed up and security and ICE agents going to do that and all the stuff about that, whether it's even legal or not. And if it is legal, then what are the effects going to be? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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Sam:
[38:51]
| Not going to do that. There was, oh, yeah, I did want to update with this, though. You know, I ended with my health update. And I'm like, I'm feeling much better. I'm feeling much better on that one thing. But just within the last 24 hours, I've started to feel like crap in other ways. Which is like really i just finished or i'm almost finished getting better with one thing and you're going to hit me with something else basically sunday like i i mean i slept till like i went to bed just around midnight a little bit after midnight which is around when i usually go to bed i did not wake up until like 2 p.m like i just did not every yeah i would wake up occasionally use the bathroom but i was like still like feeling utterly exhausted went right back to sleep i went to the movie thing and that was fine but then on the way back from the movie i was not feeling good like my my head's all kind of like.
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Sam:
[40:01]
| I guess it's like head congestion is going on. I had a little bit of a cough. I was just feeling generally exhausted and run down. I'm like, this is fun. This is fun. I got home from the movie and I basically was like, I've got a whole bunch of stuff to do. I've got to finish the podcast. I've got to, I've got to do some cleaning. We've got some people coming over to the house to do some maintenance work on Tuesday. And I basically have to get, like, the downstairs in shape so that, like, we won't be completely embarrassed by random worker people coming into the house, right? And so, and, you know, that's going to be mostly me. Brandy's been doing a bunch. I have to do a bunch of stuff. And, yeah, I got home from a movie, and I went upstairs, and I lay down and slept, like, three hours, basically. Again, after having already had a big sleep earlier in the day, and I forced myself to get up because I had to finish the podcast, and I, you know, want to do some of the other stuff. I want to watch some TV with my son too, you know? And it's one of these, like, you know, I mentioned my head. I've sort of got a headache, stuffy head. Had the chest stuff going on right after the movie, but less so now. There is smoke in the air.
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Sam:
[41:26]
| And I don't know I haven't looked if there are wildfires going on or it's just this is the weather that people are using like wood burning fireplaces and it's in the air but whatever it is, the outdoor air itself is bothersome right now to me, so maybe that has something to do with it, I don't know that sort of started Saturday night, so it would line up, but in any case, I am pissed that, you know, getting over the one thing. And like, I now feel like crap and I've got stuff to do. And I was like counting on the notion that, you know, I feel good now. I can do stuff. I can be productive. I can like, not just like stuff sitting at a desk working on a computer too, but I can do like the physical things that need to be done, like laundry and cleaning the house and all this kind of stuff that, you know, I actually don't mind. I actually enjoy some of those things when I sit down to do them and when I'm not exhausted and when I don't have, you know, the situation where I do it for five or ten minutes and then I have to sit down either because I'm in pain or exhausted again or anything like that, which I was looking forward to. And now I'm like, I spent most of the day in bed. This is not okay.
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Sam:
[42:45]
| Okay, so anyway, I'm going to do these two movies and then basically wrap up. I don't even know what the total length of the show is because, you know, I recorded in segments and I don't remember how long the first two are. But I have a sense that this will be a short show, which, again, I shouldn't say because whenever I say that, that causes a problem. But whatever. Okay, the two movies, as promised last week. First off, Murder by Death from 1976.
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Sam:
[43:15]
| This is a comedy mystery film. and you know i i mentioned to yvonne last time he asked who who's who does it star eileen brennan truman capote james coco peter falk alec guinness elsa lanchester david niven peter sellers maggie smith nancy walker and estelle winwood the quick summary, on Wikipedia. The plot is a broad parody or spoof of the traditional country house whodunit, familiar to mystery fiction fans of classics such as Agatha Christie's and Then There Were None. The cast is an ensemble of British and American actors playing send-ups of well-known fictional sleuths, including Hercule Perrault, Miss Marple, Charlie Chan, Nick and Nora Charles, and Sam Spade. It also features a rare acting performance by author Truman Capote. And here's the thing. I remember seeing this, like, as a kid. I can't remember if it was, like, late preteens or early teens, but somewhere around that. I think, you know, it was one of these things—.
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Sam:
[44:31]
| I don't remember. In my head, it was like, I went to a couple of these things for summer camp, where it was like a sleepover summer camp at like the YMCA, and they'd put on old movies overnight for the kids to watch. And I have a feeling that maybe it was one of those. If it was one of those, it puts it in late preteen years. Alternately maybe i saw it in college or something i don't know like all you know the years all, merged together when you're old like me but i remember liking it at the time and thinking it was funny and laughing at the jokes and all that kind of stuff and maybe my memory has been corrupted but I'll tell you this time around I didn't like it. Thumbs down thumbs down. I found it more annoying than anything else. Like I didn't find it particularly funny like when they were spoofing things I was like just this is dumb you know and I recognize it was a spoof and I recognize it was supposed to be that kind of comedy but it just was not working for me. I just you know.
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Sam:
[45:53]
| I don't know, Here's the first two paragraphs of the plot from Wikipedia. A group of five renowned detectives, each accompanied by a relative or associate, is invited to dinner and a murder by the mysterious Lionel Twain. Having lured his guests to his mansion, managed by a blind butler named Jassimir Bensamum, who is later joined by a deaf, mute, and illiterate cook named Yetta, Twain joins his guests at dinner. He presses a button which seals the house. Twain announces that he is the greatest criminologist in the world. To prove his claim, he challenges the guest to solve a murder that will occur at midnight. A reward of $1 million will be presented to the winner.
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Sam:
[46:40]
| Before midnight, the butler is found dead. Twain disappears, only to reappear immediately after midnight, stabbed 12 times in the back with a butcher knife. The cook is also discovered to have been an animated mannequin, now packed in a storage crate. The party spends the rest of the night investigating and bickering. They are manipulated by a mysterious behind-the-scenes force, confused by red herrings, and baffled by the mechanical marvel that is Twain's house. They ultimately find their own lives threatened. Each sleuth presents his or her theory on the case, pointing out the other's past connections to Twain and their possible motives for murdering him. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. And it continues. And, you know, there are various reveals at various points. There are various sort of pieces of comedy of various sorts. There's some slapstick in there. There's some just, like... All kinds of like twists that make sense or don't make sense or are in them in and of themselves just silly. And like I said, I remember liking this. I mean, you know, I don't remember my specific responses to it, but I remember thinking, oh, that was a cool movie.
|
Sam:
[48:03]
| I don't feel like that right now. I feel like it was dumb, you know? And yeah, it's just, no. I don't know. Maybe if you like these particular people or the characters they were sending up or just the style of stuff, I don't know. I was not impressed. And maybe this is one of those things that just didn't age well, or maybe it's one of those things that worked really well for Teenager or Below, but did not work so well for, you know, an adult. Or maybe it would work better if you were under the influence of something or other. I was not.
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Sam:
[48:51]
| But yeah, I was, you know, not impressed. Domestic reviews. New York Times wrote that the film had one of Simon's, This was written by Neil Simon, along with Robert Moore. Wrote that the film had one of Simon's nicest, breeziest screenplays, with James Coco very, very funny as that somewhat prissy takeoff on Hercule Perrault, and David Niven and Maggie Smith marvelous as Dick or Dora Charleston, though they hadn't enough to do. Variety called it a very good, silly, funny Neil Simon satirical comedy with a super all-star cast. Adding, it's the sort of film one could see more than once and pick up on comedy bits unnoticed at first. L.A. Times found the film amusing, but added, while it is only amusing and not hilarious, madcap riotous, rip-roaring, or richly romping, I don't entirely know. It's a short movie, 94 minutes, but a slow one, surprisingly, so when you'd have said knock about speed was called for. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave it three stars out of four. After getting off to a shaky start, the picture quickly hits a speedball comedy pace it doesn't lose until the unsatisfactory unraveling of the mystery. Anyway, it is what it is. Shall I move on? I think I shall move on. That's enough murder by death.
|
Sam:
[50:20]
| Next up, Star Wars Episode II, Attack of the Clones, from 2002. I joked with Yvonne, this was a small indie movie that no one's ever heard of. Obviously, that is not the case. It is the second of the prequel movies in the Star Wars saga.
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Sam:
[50:37]
| I gave a relatively negative review to episode one when we talked about it a while ago. Episode two, I think, was fine. You know, I'm giving it a between thumbs sideways and thumbs up.
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Sam:
[50:51]
| I guess the last one, I said I gave it a thumbs down. It's not the kind of thumbs down, murder by death that is, that is a straight down. So between thumbs sideways and thumbs down. I'm graduating this more. I'm saving the true thumbs down to the ones that are actually painful, and I'm mad for having wasted my time watching them. That was not true of Murder by Death. I just didn't like it. So anyway, for Attack of the Clones, Star Wars Episode II, Attack of the Clones, I'll give it between a thumb sideways and a thumbs up. Not a particularly great, amazing movie, but it was fine and certainly better than Episode I. The plot... Ten years after the Battle of Naboo, the Galactic Republic is threatened by a separatist movement organized by Count Dooku, a former Jedi Master who mentored Qui-Gon Jinn. There we go. Former Queen-turned-Senator Padme Amidala travels to Coruscant to vote against a motion to create an army to assist the Jedi against the growing menace. After narrowly avoiding an assassination attempt from bounty hunter Zam Wessel upon her arrival, she's placed under the protection of Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi and his Padawan apprentice, Anakin Skywalker. Zam attempts to...
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Sam:
[52:15]
| The mouth, the blubbering, is like bad today. Zam attempts to assassinate Padme again, but is thwarted and subdued by the Jedi pair. Zam's employer, a jetpack-wearing bounty hunter, kills her before she reveals his identity. The Jedi Council instructs Obi-Wan to find the bounty hunter, while Anakin is tasked to protect Padme and escort her to Naboo. Despite the Jedi Code forbidding attachments, the two fall in love.
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Sam:
[52:46]
| And the fact that he's so much younger than her, and she knew him as a child, which is kind of never awesome. But whatever! That was not in the Wikipedia summary, that was me. Obi-Wan's search leads to the ocean planet Kamino, where he discovers a clone army is being produced for the Republic allegedly in the name of Sifo-Dyas, a Jedi Master who died before allegedly ordering the drones, with the bounty hunter Jango Fett serving as the clone's genetic template. Obi-Wan deduces Jango as the bounty hunter he is seeking and places a homing beacon on Jango's ship, before following Jango and his clone son Boba to the planet Geonosis. Meanwhile, Anakin is troubled by visions of his mother Shimi in pain and returns to his homeworld of Tatooine with Padme to save her. His former owner, Watto, reveals that he sold Shimi to a moisture farmer named Klieg Lars, who then freed and married her. Klieg says Tusken raiders abducted Shimi one month earlier, and she is likely dead. Anakin finds her at the Tusken campsite, barely alive. After she dies in his arms, an enraged Anakin massacres the entire tribe. He later confesses his actions to Padme and vows to prevent the deaths of those he loves, dot, dot, dot. It continues...
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Sam:
[54:11]
| Like I said, it was fine. It was a decent first Star Wars movie. I don't think it's like one of the... If I was going to rank the top Star Wars movies, which I'm not going to right now, but I would not put it in the top tier.
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Sam:
[54:27]
| I would say that neither of these first two are better than the original trilogy, than any of the original trilogy. I would still put episodes four, five, and six, which, of course, were the first, second, and third released, I had of these two, and I think probably episode three from what I remember of it, but I haven't watched it recently, so I'll reserve judgment until I watch it again. Same for, I'll reserve judgment for the newer ones as well. That's that. If you like Star Wars, of course you're going to watch it. You know, duh. You know. And so, you know, here we go. continuing on with Star Wars. And Alex and I had to make a decision at one point on universes like Star Wars or the MCU that have both TV and movies.
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Sam:
[55:22]
| Because what I had been doing was... When we say watch a movie, and then the next thing to have started was a TV show, then I would put watching that next TV show on my TV show list, but I would not put a continuation for the next movie on my movie list until after the TV show got watched. But the pace and the way in which we get to the next tv show is much longer because while i'm watching 10 tv shows at a time one of them has to finish completely like we've watched every episode that exists before we pick a new show to replace it and so you know going through the associated tv shows may take a lot longer than going through the movies so we decided to split those up so like what happens is if we finish like episode 2 attack of the clones, where the next thing in order that came out is like the clone wars tv series or the is actually a series of shorts that came out first no alex is telling me i'm wrong.
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Sam:
[56:40]
| Oh i did it that way i i you know i thought the decision was in conjunction, to do it this way because I actually thought we should keep doing it the old way. It would just take forever. But anyway... We should go back to doing it the old way? I think we changed it because at one point we were doing the Marvel Universe. And the oldest thing was a... We were looking for the oldest... We had rolled Marvel movie on the movie list. But the oldest one we hadn't seen yet was some series of shorts from the 1940s that would have fallen on the TV show side. But we still wanted to watch something, so we picked the first movie anyway and put the shorts... Anyway, we'll decide. I decided. Okay. Maybe I decided. We will discuss again the next time it comes up the right way to do this.
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Sam:
[57:47]
| Yeah. You know, cause I don't know. There are pros and cons to both approaches. Like, but anyway, the point is after Attack of the Clones, the next thing is the 2003 to 2005 Clone Wars series. Three seasons, 25 episodes total. so there's also a Clone Wars thing in 2008 this is separate from that and then there's another Clone Wars thing from 2008 going and I think they even released a new season a couple years ago so it lasts a long period of time there's several things with Clone Wars in the title. Anyway so we broke them up so we'll see I don't think we've watched any Star Wars since Attack of the Clones though, So next up will either be the Clone Wars TV series, if we roll that on the TV side, or Episode 3, Revenge of the Sith, if we roll that on that side, or if we decide to re-separate those again, or no, re-combine, I don't know.
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Sam:
[58:57]
| Alex is advocating for that, in which case the only eligible next thing would be Clone Wars, the series. Anyway, I don't know. It is what it is. I've said it is what it is several times. I also notice in terms of, you know, what I was saying earlier, I'm losing my voice a little bit now. And my eyes are watering. I think both of those, and my throat is getting a little scratchy, I think both of those things, like, or all three of those things, whatever it is, lend themselves to maybe it is an air quality thing that's bugging me. But like I look at my, I just brought up an air quality app. It says it's fine right now. So... I don't know. Like, yeah, I'm looking at the air quality index at places all around me, and they're fine. They're all green, really low readings, nothing like— the closest yellow thing is quite a few miles away, and they're scattered in a couple specific locations. So I don't know what's up with me. I hope I'm not getting sick again. I don't want to be sick. Anyway, I'm going to wrap it up. Thank you for joining me for yet another curmudgeons corner.
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Sam:
[1:00:17]
| Go to our website curmudgeons-corner.com check out all the ways to you can see our archives, you can see all the ways to contact us you can go to our patreon and give us money of course at various levels we will we will mention you on the show we will ring a bell we will send you a postcard We'll send you a mug. At $2 a month or more, you'll get invited to our Curmudgeon's Corner Slack, where Yvonne and I and various listeners are chatting throughout the week, sharing links, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And let's see. Oh, oh, oh, I should mention, I have not shared on the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack that story that I mentioned I was saving for Yvonne. And obviously, I've not shared it here either. So I'm still saving it for Yvonne. I will give you the hint that it involves almost running out of charge on my EV vehicle, having problems charging at superchargers, and how all of that end up being resolved. There's my spoiler. But from the Curmudgeon Square Slack, a highlight that we have not talked about on the show today, Let me find something good, something good from the, I usually, well, Yvonne usually picks these, but he usually picks from the random channel, which is the less serious stuff or tech, tech stuff often goes into random channel as opposed to like serious news stuff.
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Sam:
[1:01:46]
| Oh, polymarket. You know, those folks who are doing sort of the online gambling, they call it a market. You invest in futures for an event, and the price effectively represents the percent chance people think that it will happen. And it'll either end up going to 100% if it happens or to zero if it does not. So, for instance, you know, if something's a 50-50 chance and you buy it at 50 cents, then if it does happen, you double your money. If it doesn't happen, you lose all your money. Basically, that's how I understand it to work. I could be wrong because I've never actually tried this. But anyway, Polymarket has apparently opened a bar in Washington, D.C. called the Situation Room. The quick one-line description is, imagine a sports bar, but just for situation monitoring. Live feeds from X, flight radar.
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Sam:
[1:02:45]
| Bloomberg terminals, and polymarket screens so that people can live in real time, watch all kinds of world situations and determine how they want to bet on them, I guess. I guess it's no different than sports bars or the places that you go to like bet on horses or whatever.
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Sam:
[1:03:10]
| I can't see myself being, you know, I'm kind of lying. I don't see myself getting into the betting part of this. That just seems kind of dumb to me. Although Bruce once, one of our listeners told me that he made some bets based on what I was saying over on election graphs. And he made some money a couple of elections ago. So I don't know if it was Polymarket or something else. But so I don't know. But honestly, the idea of a place that you can go to sit where the screens, instead of being random sports games, are, you know, news channels and tickers and charts and graphs. Okay let me not lie that would be kind of cool now I wouldn't necessarily want to sit there and drink or whatever but like if there was a restaurant like this you know yeah I could see that I could see one as it is if I go to restaurants if there's a screen that's on a news channel, instead of on sports am I going to position myself so I can see that screen yes yes I am I'll generally ignore the sports ones. Yeah, generally. There are occasional exceptions, but it's rare.
|
Sam:
[1:04:36]
| Yeah. Okay, I think that's a show. I'm going to wrap this sucker up.
|
Sam:
[1:04:42]
| Hopefully, we will be back to a normal show with Yvonne next week. In the meantime, and hopefully, I'm feeling really, actually, 100% better. And we'll talk about more news. Because, you know, the Iran stuff is important. And it will probably get worse over the next week. Just, there's my bet. There's my polymarket bet. Iran will get worse over the next week. Of course, they're probably much more specific, like, you know, bet on the price of oil at a certain date and whether or not thing X or Y will happen by a specific date, whatever. I'm just very amorphous blobby. The Iran situation will get worse, not better, in the next week. We'll see. Okay. Is it time for the outro music? I think it's time for the outro music. And then I'll figure out what I'm doing. Bye, folks.
|
Break:
[1:05:38]
| .
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