In the making of movies based on books, a lot of details almost always get left out. There’s simply not enough time in two or three hours to tell a story that often takes 15 or more hours to read. Such is the case with Stephen King’s book “IT”. You know the one–the group of kids that are haunted by a curse plaguing their little New England town of Derry, Maine by a demonic “circus clown” they refer to as “IT”? Well, “IT” also refers to “The act”, as in “Did ya do IT?” or “We did IT in the bedroom.”. Seems like Stephen King kinda went off on a tangent with that one in the book, and in Chapter 22, all the kids have a bit of an orgy.

I couldn’t believe it when I read about this on the Internet, how it was omitted from the movies and the miniseries for obvious reasons. Well shit, I must have missed or completely forgotten about it when I read this, so I went back and read chapter 22 again. Sure as shit, there it was. How the heck can this group of kids, while hunting down a demonic circus clown that terrifies them by making them confront their worst fears, just stop in the middle and say “Hey, we need to bond here so we’re more powerful to beat this thing–get naked and stick it in me!”?

One by one Beverly called them over and talked them into taking off their clothes and having sex with her. Turns out Ben is actually in love with her, and also has a large “unit”. Yup, it’s very clear, Ben is hung. . And Bev didn’t think she was going to be able to take it all, especially since she had just lost her virginity right then, but she did.

That’s really basically what happened in the book. I can’t believe I somehow missed this when I read the book! I’ve had the audiobook for quite some time as well, so I played chapter 22 again and listened as Steven Weber acted out his reading of IT. Again, just Wow. They “bonded” alright. This scene was replaced by the blood-bonding scene in the movie, and I can’t remember exactly what they did in the miniseries to bond, but it sure wasn’t the sex party from the book.

Not really a party though–it was Beverly’s first time, she was a virgin, and I’m pretty sure most of the boys were as well, if not all of them, so it was quite the awakening and an eye-opener all around that supposedly made them stronger as a group.

King even referred to it as “IT” as I mentioned at the start of this post, emphasizing it several times so the reader definitely gets the reference and connection. It sure seemed out of place in this horror novel though.

I was about to post this question on here: “Why do selfies always appear backwards on smartphones?” This issue drives me nuts, especially when there’s text in the photo anywhere–like Wayne’s selfie of his colorful “Admit One” mask printed in the Kenosha News (and republished here, but with the photo corrected, because like I said, it drives me nuts). But then, as pretty much always, these days, I realized I can ask Google and get my question answered within 0.76 seconds and in 2,240,000 different ways.

Google says (via Michael Airhart from Quora):

“The front-facing selfie camera on many phones does in fact create reversed images: It is not an illusion. This horizontal flipping is evident in the backward lettering on shirts and signs in images that are uploaded from a front-facing camera to social media. Why does the camera initially flip the image? People are accustomed to seeing themselves backward when they look in a mirror. If they see themselves unmirrored while looking at a camera, they become distracted and disoriented, especially if they move the camera, since what they see on the phone is the opposite of what they would see in a mirror. So selfie cameras flip what they see, horizontally, in order to create a reassuring mirror effect. What happens when the picture is taken? When the picture is taken, some camera apps unflip the photo by default, and some don’t. If your chosen camera app does not automatically unmirror the image, then you may be able to change the app’s default settings for saved images, or you may need to use a third-party image app to horizontally unflip the image.”

So there you have it. I find it amusing that one gets easily distracted and disoriented by looking at their reflection the right way instead of mirrored. I gotta try that to myself sometime just to see how it affects me. Maybe just before I upgrade to my new phone… I don’t want to blow chunks on my active phone…

UPDATE: I already tried it. I played with “Webcam Toy” in Google Chrome on my PC and there are plenty of variations on mirroring your live image there. The mirroring that made words look right wasn’t disorienting. It was a little confusing, especially if you’re moving in one direction and your image “seems” to be moving in the opposite direction, but this makes sense to me. It would make it difficult to do anything practical, probably, but I think that’s just because we’re not used to seeing it that way–we’ve always seen our reflection a certain way, so that’s what our brain expects.

Webcam Toy does have some really neat effects though, if you haven’t tried it out before. I particularly like the live split-screen effects. I can move to certain spots to turn myself into an alien, a pinhead, etc., and just crack myself up. Of course TikTok now offers hundreds more live effects than Webcam Toy will even be able to, so I’m probably still way out of touch by today’s tech, but I’m aware, and always trying to catch up to the kids.

My switch to Standard Notes has been a success. There’s been a few bumps, but I’ve changed my habits and I can see the benefits of doing things using the Standard method (pun intended). First of all, it’s nice having a choice of editors to use “per note”. With Keep there was no editor–no way to even bold or underline anything–everything was just flat text. With Standard Notes “Extended” you have your choice of several different editor types per-note, so I can still have simple basic notes if I don’t want anything fancy in them–no formatting, no images, or I can opt for an editor specific to a note’s content. For example if I want full HTML formatting and included images I can switch a note to use the “Bold” editor, which includes full editing capabilities and encrypted image embedding. Or, if I have a to-do list I can switch to the “task editor” for that note and I get checkboxes and lists and I can check off and track what’s completely and not, very easily. There’s even a “Secure Spreashsheets” editor for a nice compact spreadsheet format, complete with cell calculation features.

I think the only other issue I’ve had switching over to Standard Notes is getting all of my 1000+ old notes out of Keep and into Standard Notes easily. I just finished up the last of those. I found that it was easiest to take each tag, select all of the notes in that tag in keep, then Export them to a Google Docs document and copy and paste that into one large Standard Notes note, then cut and paste them out of there individually as time permitted. This way, everything was still searchable in Standard Notes as I worked through splitting the notes one-by-one. I had to be able to easily find things in my notes, especially when I was working, so this made it very easy to find everything in the same application and I broke them out into separate notes to match what I had in Keep. That’s all done now, and I’m very happy with Standard Notes’ performance and options. I think this is going to be a great long-term solution. At least long enough to cover the 5 years of “Extended” I just paid for, which was extremely cheap if you consider it as a monthly plan. It’s $149 for 5 years, which is $2.48/month. Definitely cheaper than all of the other paid-plan note applications, including Evernote. If you just need basic notes though–identical to those offered with Keep, the plain Standard Notes is completely free. This gives you only the Basic editor, which offers no formatting options, just like Keep.

STORM – We had a really nasty storm blow through here yesterday afternoon. Very high winds and tornado conditions. Just around the time I usually leave work to go home they called a “Code Black Level 2” at work, which apparently means Shelter in place, so I decided to stay at work. Our department is in the basement, so it’s pretty safe from storms. I watched the weather map on my phone until the conditions improved quite a bit, when we were only getting torrential rain and a little lightning, then I left work.

My card was blowing around on the road a bit, but nothing too bad. The rain was pretty constant and pounding for the entire drive home though, and we now have a few small 3’x3′ “swimming pools” in front of out house… The street or sewer crews have been working in front of our house for the past week tearing up parts of the street and several crosswalk squares right out front, so there are huge open holes that completely filled and oversflowed with rain water yesterday. It looked a little amusing.

When I got home I backed Kevin’s car and my car into our driveway just so neither of us forgets the huge hole right in our driveway where there’s a missing 3’x3′ sidewalk square. There is a large red traffic cone in front of it, but we might have missed that on our backup cameras if we didn’t remember, so I backed our cars in to make it obvious. We have to drive on the grass and up and down our curb right now just to get in and out of our driveway.

RIOT – There was apparently a riot on the Magnificent Mile in downtown Chicago the other day–apparently fueled by the shooting of a black man in Chicago on Sunday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/10/chicago-looters-riot-magnificent-mile

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-chicago-downtown-looting-20200810-3zwa3b7zzrc5vdyb4qjqywrjvu-story.html

It’s really sad that our society appears to be collapsing. Everything’s going to shit. Everyone’s taking everything to the extreme, everything is very sensitive, partisan politics is causing everyone to take a side for everything, including ridiculous things like “the right to not wear a mask” in public. They can’t just set a country-wide law requiring absolutely everyone to where a mask in public? Because we have the right to spread COVID-19 all we want and kill hundreds of thousands of people? That’s our right because we’re free? Come on, it’s temporary. Only until there’s a vaccine, THEN we can start to return society to normal. But no, people can’t handle the isolation, businesses will die. So now we keep the businesses alive but hundreds of thousands of PEOPLE die instead. Seriously. This shit is seriously depressing. Here’s the dashboard in case you haven’t looked lately: https://ncov2019.live/. I added it to my links list on this site too–under Health & Fitness. Our totals just keep rising and rising while every other country’s numbers go up by very little or nothing.

But have a great day anyway! Sorry if I brought you down.

We watched a few good movies recently.

Made in Italy (2020) – A decent drama about a man and his son and their personal and family problems. The mother of the family died in a car accident when their son was very young, and the father took everything and anything that would remind his son of his mother and locked it away to try to protect his son from the pain of losing his mother. He even sent his son away to boarding school and abandoned their beautiful family home in Italy and moved away. As a result, the son grew up almost completely forgetting his entire childhood before his mother died.

Eventually, when the son is 22 and trying to make a living, he ends up having his own personal issues and is in need of a large sum of money to buy the gallery he runs or lose his job altogether. He tries to convince his father that they should sell the big abandoned house in Italy (they both own half of it) so he can buy the gallery. So they go back to the abandoned house where it is now just a run-down mess of an estate, so they try to fix it up. I’ll stop there.

Sandy and I both enjoyed the movie. It had its moments, both good and bad for the characters and in for the story itself, and we had a good time watching how everything turned out. It stars Liam Neeson as the father. The other actors in the movie I didn’t know.

An American Pickle (2020) – This was a pretty amusing movie starring Seth Rogen and Seth Rogen. Yep, he plays two characters in this movie– Herschel Greenbaum and Ben Greenbaum, Herschel’s great-grandson. Herschel gets a job in a pickle plant and a freak accident involving a swarm of rats ends in him accidentally falling into a pickle vat right at the instant the pickle plant is shut down and closed permanently, and the vat he fell into is immediately sealed shut. He is discovered 100 years later, in present-day, perfectly preserved and “pickled”. He finds all of his family long gone except one living relative–his great grandson Ben, who just happens to be exactly the same age as he is/was.

Seth Rogen pulls off a really good accent with Herschel and does an impressive job acting with himself through this story. It was pretty fun to watch and the story, albeit pretty far-fetched and very obviously just a silly comedy, turned out pretty good. Overall I enjoyed it a lot. Sandy, on the other hand, didn’t seem to get a lot of it and did a a lot of eye-rolling.

The Boys in Company C (1978) – I heard about this movie recently while watching a behind-the-scenes documentary on YouTube about Full Metal Jacket, my favorite war movie. They talked a lot about R. Lee Ermey, the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, and how he was an actual drill sergeant in the Marines when he was younger, and played a very similar drill sergeant in The Boys in Company C, another movie about Vietnam, that came out almost 10 years before Full Metal Jacket. That piqued my curiosity, so I had to find this movie and give it a watch. I’ve watched only half of it so far (this evening), so I can only say that I can tell it’s no Stanley Kubrick classic, but it’s pretty good and was probably highly rated back in 1978 when it came out. Things just aren’t as “polished” as Full Metal Jacket was, and even the drill instructors (R. Lee Ermey) didn’t have things as perfected as much, but it’s interesting to see the fates of each of it’s stars as the movie progresses and the story unfolds. Very good so far. I’ll finish it up tomorrow evening, probably.

We also found the awesome drawing below while cleaning the garage yesterday. This was drawn by Jeff Hoffmann, and is a drawing of Roger Behnke. He passed away and he drew this after he died. Roger’s nickname was “Lobo”.

I must have scanned this drawing years ago, printed a copy, and then stored it away, or I printed it for my dad and it wound up in his his things after he passed away and I ended up getting it back. I had printed it with an ink jet printer back then, so I’m pretty surprised it was completed faded away. Some inkjet inks will do that. It was pretty faded, but I was able to bump the saturation back up and I think I got it fairly close to what it was originally except for the pinkish shading down the left side. Great sketch though, I like it a lot.

Found a few old photo sheets from Matt‘s Cub Scout days when we cleaned out some of the garage today… I don’t think I have these as digital photos, they’re pretty old, so I scanned in each page.

Wow, just under the wire, but I made it! Day 21 in the bank! We’re cleaning out the garage in the morning, so time to hit the sack… I’ll probably find a few interesting relics I can scan and post here. Maybe tomorrow.

Well, I pre-ordered my new phone today. It’s a killer. Should be pretty sweet. Now I just have to wait two weeks for it. Verizon always seems to have issues with taking orders. You would think by now they’d have the entire process down and working really great, but it’s quite the opposite. Nothing but problems using their website, blank pages when it should be displaying critical information I need, and just a lot of frustration with most functions not working right in ANY browser.

That’s not all though. I always end up using the chat function on their website to have a real person prepare my order as I type everything out that I want, word by word. The chat function works great–it’s about the only thing on their site that does work properly. But in the end I STILL have problems with the process AFTER I place my order. My order always somehow gets flagged, put on hold and sent to fraud prevention. Then I have to call a special number with 24 hours to avoid having my order completely cancelled. And doing THAT is a challenge all its own. I think I had to call Fraud Prevention 7 times today because I would answer all of the challenges (Name, PIN #, Phone #, and all the proper buttons to get me to the “Order placed on hold, need to release it” people, I’d get hold music for a bit, then it would ring once or twice, then disconnect completely. So I’d have to try all over from the beginning again. And again.

Finally I was able to actually get to a human, explain my issue, and she asked me more questions, then sent me a text and a a phone call to make sure I have the actual phone with that phone number, then she finally released my order for processing. Wow. I just wonder if everyone else has to go through all of this. And it’s every single time I upgrade with Verizon. I really like their service and plans, they just need to work out their website and fraud prevention processes. Sheesh.

Here’s the specs. Mine’s the one on the right (the 512GB version):

Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra specs

GALAXY NOTE 20 VS. NOTE 20 ULTRA

Whew! It’s only day 19 and I almost missed posting something! We had a great cookout tonight with Matt, Anna, Connor, Kevin, Sandy and myself. Stuffed burgers, brats, hot dogs, corn on the cob and Matt & Anna brought a nice side salad. Then a nice ice cream cake Sandy made for dessert! Everything was awesome and everyone was stuffed when we were done.

Today was the big announcement of the new Samsung Note 20 phones. Tomorrow they’re available for pre-order, so I’ll be getting my order in for a new Note 20 Ultra and I should have it around August 21st. Not quite sure if I want that snazzy new bronze color or not. The color won’t matter much though–mine will be put in protective black case as soon as I get it anyway.

Wayne finished his Lego kit yesterday. Check it out!

My cousin Wayne picked up the new Lego Nintendo Mario set. It includes a reproduction of an old console TV, NES game controller, NES Console, and even a removable cartridge of the Super Mario game, all built with Legos! You can even turn a crank on the side of the TV and it “plays” through a Super Mario level by scrolling a Lego-built level inside the television. This thing is awesome. Check it out.

As he assembles it, he’s been sending me photos . I’ll post them all in a photo album as soon as he’s done.

I’ve been noticing lately that I make & miss more typos. I’m a little bit concerned that this might mean something. I do try to type pretty fast, and these days I’m trying to type 100% of everything, including the things I used to write down on paper. I think it’s improving my speed, but I am making more mistakes and I think I’m actually missing them when I proofread my documents.

The way I see it, making a typo is normal, but missing it completely on a re-read is not. I should be able to catch and correct it immediately, I think, and end up with something well-written. I think I’ve been pretty good with this up until recently, when I’ll re-read a document I’ve published and even proofread once or twice, and I still find errors. Typos drive me nuts. Did I mention that? And most of mine lately are entire words, so they’re not usually picked up by my spellchecker with the red underlines. I wish WordPress and Standard Notes included a grammar checking as well, like Microsoft Word does. I think that would help me a lot. But why now, all of a sudden, do I need more grammar and spell-checking? Is something changing as I get older?

I joke all the time about having “CRS” (Can’t Remember Shit Stuff), but I think it’s beginning to evolve into something more real, like Alzheimer’s, which then leads to dementia. It could be a totally irrational fear right now, and nothing I should be worrying about, but I do. I know I have several risk factors against me, including morbid obesity and diabetes, and I’m trying to work through improving those conditions.

The wayback machine contains oodles and oodles of tidbits I posted long ago. It still tickles me when I find little gems that I somehow never re-posted here. Here’s one from almost exactly 20 years ago – 08/07/2000. Just a few short bulletpoints, but it brings back a lot of memories. Surprisingly, some of the links actually come up if you wait long enough for the wayback machine to dig them up:

• Current Events -Sandy has Bronchitis, and is not feeling well. Today (8/7/2020) she has a temperature of 101.8. She went to the doctor and got a scrip, so she should be better in a few daze.
• New DVD’s: Independence Day – Lots of extras, two versions of the movie, and two discs, all for about the same price as a regular DVD! Drowning Mona – Very funny dark comedy with an obsession for Yugos.
• Matthew and I are playing the heck out of Speed Punks and N-Gen Racing, two great new Playstation games!
• Still watching Survivor, waiting for the last 3 episodes.  Watching Gervase get voted off was a real shocker.  When the news broke about the website revealing the winner I immediately went there and tried it myself; Sure enough, they were right, everyone’s picture was there with an X on it except Gervase’s! So naturally I bought the story. Turned out the creator of the show was the one that “leaked” the “secret” as a way to throw off the geeks. It worked very well, I must admit.
• More photos are up, which use a Webshots Community page to allow us much more space for our photos, and you can even send a digital “postcard” with any photo in our albums or any other photo on the Webshots site!

Here’s a few things I’ve watched recently:

The Room (2019) – I liked this movie. It’s about a couple who move into a huge house and find a hidden room that is sort of magical… In it you can ask for anything and it’s yours. Yeah, kinda like a magic genie, but there’s a catch. Watch it and see.

The Rental (2020) – I enjoyed this movie. It wasn’t the usual horror movie hack & slash fare. The characters were very developed and the acting was really good. It stars “Lip” from Shameless. Some things were predictable, but it turned out different enough to be very interesting. And just when I thought it ended and left me hanging, the quick scenes during the closing credits explained a few of the questions I had. Good movie.

Archive (2020) – Another movie I enjoyed. It takes place in 2038, where a guy gets a job developing robots with near-human AI. In 2038 they also have “Archive” technology used for when someone dies–they are able to store your “consciousness” or “mind” in an archive that you can access for up to, I think two years, so that your loved ones can say goodbye and get your final affairs in order. It’s a bit of a stretch, but it was a fun ride and had a surprise ending!

Greyhound (2020) – Great war movie, based on a true story. Takes place on a naval ship and Tom Hanks plays the ship’s Captain. Exciting and very loud… I shook the house with this one, not wanting to miss any dialog hidden in the noise. I was especially amused at all of the good meals delivered to the Captain throughout the movie–none of which he ever got a chance to eat.

I also watched a few older movies, just because I enjoyed them: Hollow Man (2000 – Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth Shue), Body Heat (1981 – William Hurt, Kathleen Turner), Lucy (2014 – Sharlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman), Men of Honor (2000 – Cuba Gooding Jr., Robert DeNiro), Jerry MaGuire (1996 – Tom Cruise, Renee Zellweger, Cuba Gooding, Jr.)

I was recently digging around looking for a playable version of the classic game Lode Runner. This game came out in the 80’s and was a great 2D platform game I really enjoyed. It came out for all of the old systems like the Apple II (never had one), Atari 8-bit PCs (had several), Commodore 64 (had one), IBM PC (had several), Atari ST (had one), and so on and so on… I didn’t have to search very long and I hit this page: http://loderunnerwebgame.com/game/.

It’s the real deal, running just like it always did and providing the exact same gameplay…in any PC browser (using HTML5). Just in a browser. But it’s not just the original Lode Runner. It’s all the variations, too! Check it out. Five different versions of the game. It’s also completely open-source and might be an awesome lesson on how to code HTML–I have dug into it that far yet, I’m just enjoying playing it. It even works with controllers, and even includes the editor, so you can even make your own levels! Today’s kids might find it boring or too simple, but I enjoy the crap out of this stuff.

Lastly, it’s completely free, no ads, no catches. How does THAT happen these days?! Wow.

We still have our August 11, 2020 election ballots and I have no clue what to do with them. I can’t vote. I’m stuck. Can someone explain this to me? I’ll google what I can after this post, but maybe someone here can just give me a clear answer real quick. Politically, I’m not with a specific party. I vote for PEOPLE, not PARTIES. I don’t understand how anyone can just pick a party and blindly stand behind everything that party supports and endorses. I try to find out what each politician stands for, and if I feel the same then I vote for that person.

So on the ballot (see the scanned ballot image I’ve included here) in the box “Special Instructions for Voting in a Partisan Primary” it says: “You may choose only ONE party’s primary. If you choose a party, votes cast in that party will be counted. Votes cast in any other party will NOT be counted. If you do NOT choose a party, and you vote in more than one party, NO votes will be counted. You must vote for individual candidates.”

I would LIKE to vote for individual candidates, but since at least one of the people I want to vote for is not in the same party as my other preferences, I can’t, as none of my votes will be counted. Is that correct? If so, this is all just a waste of time.

I don’t how they expect regular people to even understand enough of the complexities of these ballots, let alone how each politician stands on each of the key issues! Why does it have to be so divided like this? To me, it makes no sense. I can only hope the November election ballot isn’t the same way. Is this just the way a “Partison Primary” works? If so, what’s the point? Does this ballot even result in people winning an position?

This just in from the Kenosha News… published yesterday, Monday, July 27th, 2020, as the country starts to require face masks everywhere… My cousin Wayne. Now I’m off to watch Jim Carrey’s “The Mask”. Just kidding… actually we’re going to watch “The Rental” tonight.

I recently watched an old movie titled “TAPS” (1981). It stars Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn and Tom Cruise – all of them were very young back then, so this was a nice look back at a little of their early work. Somewhere in the middle of the movie I had to step away for a few minutes to do something, so I paused it. This is the frame I paused on.

It’s a normal frame from the movie, but for me it struck a chord. See the black CB Radio console on the desk? I know that radio! We had several different models of the “President” line of CB Radios! That there is the Dwight D. Eisenhower model. I knew it very well. We actually had several different President models, each had a different president’s name as it’s model name. That model, the Dwight D. Eisenhower, was the top of the line – the best one they made. That speaker on the right was actually a completely separate component and was just an empty metal box with a speaker mounted to the front. My dad managed to find another speaker, or took it from another Eisenhower he might have picked up at a rummange sale or flea market, and I was able to splice the wires to connect them both so we could have a speaker on both sides of the base station. It made it look more “balanced” and it sounded nice that way, even though CB Radio was mono anyway. I remember him being pretty surprised I wire that up and make it work.

My dad’s CH handle was “Redbeard” and mine was Redbeard Junior.  Blue Goose was Ted Meimar, a good friend of ours who sold us a lot of electronics, video games, and computers back in the day, and Utility Man was a very loud neighbor who lived across the street from us.  I remember Utility Man would install huge powerful “kickers” on his CBs that would overpower several CB channels at once for miles and miles when he talked–often for very long periods of time–on any CB channel.  Some users became so annoyed with his disruption that he sometimes got his coax cut–they’d sneak up to his house and actually cut his coax (the wire connected from his CB to his roof antenna or tower antenna) so he wouldn’t be able to broadcast.  Kickers were illegal actually, so I can understand their frustration.

CBs were a big thing back then.  We didn’t have cell phones, and most wireless portable telephones (wireless home phones) were unencrypted, so people could also use a scanner radio that had the same band of frequencies as those phones and scan the band, find conversations in the neighborhood and eavesdrop on neighbors’ phone calls.  Both sides of the conversation too, nothing left to the imagination.  Again, totally illegal, and I wouldn’t necessarily admit that my dad or I listened to any, I’ll just say that I verified the “Proof of concept” when I learned about it.  Ah, the good ole days.

Can you imagine if President radios were built these days?  We’d have a “Donald J. Trump” model… there’s a really funny joke right there, but I’m not gonna touch it.