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Tropical Storm Hilary has swept over San Diego on its way north towards Idaho and here’s the first impression report for my family and friends.

While throughout the country there have been serious effects from so much rain and wind, flooding, downed trees, and electrical outages here and there, overall, it looks as if the county has weathered the storm well and for myself and my sweetie-wife it was super easy, barely an inconvenience.

At our condo we suffered no interruption in the power and very little damage around the complex. at least one major branch has come down off one of the trees, landing on a van but aside from that we have not seen serious damage. During the early evening the internet services might have suffered a little lag but then again that could have been Netflix’s servers producing the glitching as we watched They Cloned Tyrone. Later in the night I watched Star Tek: Strange New Worlds and witnessed no issues with the stream.

It is now nearly eight o’clock in the morning on August 21st and I have finished my preparations to go into work. Aside from rain swept streets and road closures that are not on my commute I expect today to proceed in a fairly typical manner.

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Computer and email issues this morning so this post will be brief.

Wednesday night I had a dream that in itself was quite pleasant but upon awakening was very depressing.

I dreamt I visited a friend of mine who due to health issues is now in an assisted living facility. In the dream we talked, nothing of any terrible importance, just friends chatting.

Then I awoke.

It took the customary few seconds to sort out reality from the dream and as that process played out, I became depressed.

You see my friend is in an assisted living facility suffering from a degenerative neurological illness that gas robbed him of many motor functions including the ability to speak. This is not something one recovers from and that simple dream, sitting and chatting, is quite impossible.

It is not surprising that people flee from reality when reality is so often cold and cruel.

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While I certainly enjoy Christopher Nolan films and consider many to be truly great, I would not count myself as a Nolan Fanboy. Some of his films are simply too flawed for my tastes, with Interstellar far too cynical to the point that it confuses cynicism for wisdom and Following has a plot that in my opinion is less credible than Tenant.

That said the three-hour opus Oppenheimer dramatizing the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer from University through his later years is a magnificent piece of cinema and an outstanding
achievement. The runtime passed for me quickly as the film propulsive plot, and not entirely about the development of an implosion plutonium device, is always compelling and never without character driven human drama. I have watched movie less than half-as long that felt twice the runtime.

Robert Oppenheimer [Oppie] played by Cillian Murphy, a complex man driven equally by ego and curiosity, is most remember as the project head for the Los Alamos Laboratory that developed the first functional, practical atomic weapon. The film touches on the major elements and challenges of Oppie’s life, his association with Communists before the war and during the first ‘Red Scare,’ his elevation to a media figure for his work in the Atomic bomb project, his philandering and affairs including with the tragic Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), and his hounding from government programs for being a suspected communist.

In a film that is packed with star power, the story is principally carried by two performances, Murphy’s as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr Lewis Strauss as the story’s antagonist. Much of the film is told with the Strauss’s confirmation as Secretary of Commerce hearings acting as both as a framing device and tool to jump to specific points in the Strauss/Oppenheimer feud.

Photographed beautifully by Nolan’s long-time cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema Oppenheimer presents a lush, lavish, and sweeping frame well encompassing Hoytema’s talents and Nolan’s passion for large format cameras.

Oppenheimer, Nolan’s first feature for his new home at Universal Studios, is an achievement in scope, scale, and humanity that the filmmaker has been building towards for decades, and a movie well-deserving of as theatrical viewing.

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This blog has been quiescent for several days because this author has been battling the worst flu/cold he has suffered in something like 15 years.

Thursday July 6th symptoms began with a nasty cough that made it seem like tiny workmen with sandpaper were busily resurfacing by brachia. I managed to get to my day job on the 7th and after that I was down and out.

Last week was a terrible collage of coughing, hacking, and sweating. I managed to return to work on Friday and even this weekend had far more coughing than I would have cared for.

Now that the worst is behind me, I hope to return to work on my novel and perhaps even make it out to a film.

Yesterday, being a Sunday without a feature film for me and my sweetie-wife was a day to go to the zoo. I had expected it to be quite busy on account of Father’s Day, but when we arrived at 9:15 am the crowds were quite spare.

The Snow Leopard was posing for the guests, and I am very happy with this photo.

The Grizzly bears had been fed and the cool morning had them unusually active.

Like the Grizzlies, the Mountain Lions were also very active. As we watched them a small side door opened and one mountain lion exited immediately while the other in true cat fashion came to the door and then paused for a lengthy period torn between going through the door or staying put.

We ended our visit with a trip to the burrowing owls, one of my sweetie-wife’s favorite spots.

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It has been said that Trump can never lose he can only be cheated, and that is his operating method, he wins every election and contest and when it is declared he did not then that is fraud.

Since 2020 presidential contest where Trump was thankfully thrown out on a slim margin of some 40,000 in just the right places, the Trump cult has been focused on taking over local election boards and altering election laws to allow them to cheat the next contest. It is not only an existential threat of American democracy but to the Republican Party itself.

The GOP, standing aside, too cowardly to confront the monster that they have crafted, seem to believe that this terrible fraud will only be utilized against the Democratic Party, an idiotic short-sighted perspective.

There is talk is this or that GOP pol can beat Trump in the primaries and take the nomination. Trump can never lose be can only be cheated. Any and every primary ‘loss’ will be proof of the ‘Establishment’ and ‘RINOs’ conspiring against Trump. that could be nothing but bitching and complaining but for those local election boards and seats now firmly in the Cult’s control.

I do not know if they hold the power to unquestionably throw the nomination to Trump, but I do know that they will try. The fanatics willing to storm the capitol will have no reservations about the RNC. Even if they cannot by legal means manipulate the results, they will spark a floor fight at the national convention unseen in modern times. If the future of our democracy were not hanging in this balance it would be a time for popcorn. Everyone one of us must vote against every Republican political until the party is burned to the ground, the ground salted, and a new party, undoubtedly with the same name, is constructed.

Actor Robert DeNiro, 79, has fathered a child in an act that strikes me as narcissistically irresponsible. Undoubtedly DeNiro is thrilled and proud to be a father again with a 7th child. There is no question that he possesses the wealth and resources to provide for another kid. But at such an advanced age DeNiro is unlikely to see his offspring mature and it is the child’s emotional health and mental well-being that I find myself thinking on.

Now, it is entirely possible that the emotional scars of losing my own father when I was young has made it difficult or impossible to be dispassionate about such matters, but it is also possible that it has given me a viewpoint thankfully not shared by the majority.

I do not think that DeNiro is showing a great deal of concern for this child. Losing a parent, particularly when one is old enough to grasp the concept of death but still too young to deal with the crushing reality of death is a very hard road to travel. My father dying when I was 10 has impacted me in so many ways and so shaped my emotional relationship with death and dying. Everyone dies is a truth but to have it be an emotional truth at age 10 or so is impactful on ways that are difficult to comprehend. To inflict that on a child as a probable outcome is self-centered to a Trumpian degree.