Got to be birds flying higher

A mysterious sound blights the lives of US spies in Cuba. Is it a covert attack?

You haven't heard the last of Havana syndrome, especially after listening to this podcast.

What is it?

What could it be?

Despite numerous investigations, there is no consensus on what caused it--but it's all too real for people affected by it. Great podcast from the BBC!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0lgrwds

I'm pretty excited for this! I'm hoping they get a little more granular with my Mediterranean roots :-) I'm going to screencap the old version so I can compare.

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tugrik passed sometime recently. Although I didn't know him, I knew of him, I have been thinking about a lot of older fandom folks.

It made me recall the passing of a local model horse collector and how some Canadian collectors are trying to collect hobby history--photos, older models, etc.

It's wild to think so much fandom is just sitting around in people's memories, if not a box of fanzines in the attic or tapes and hard drives gathering dust somewhere. What do we do with these memories? It seems like a miracle LJ and DW are still around. More than one site I frequented has gone away, if I can remember the name of them at all! It seems like a job for AI to sift and sort through.

Hubs just has the WORST post-vacation cold. I feel so badly for him because it was settling in the last couple days we were in Ontario.

My guess is that he picked up something on the plane and just couldn't fight it off. I tagged this post aging because our immune systems aren't as robust sometimes, plus hubs is asthmatic. It's been horrible to watch him gasp for air :-(

My free advice for today is to mask up on planes. I was the only person masking at the airport and on the plane. On the return trip, I was one of a few people masking at the airport and at least one of two people masking on the plane.

There were so many people with nasty ass coughs, and, not to channel my germophobe Dad, but being trapped in a metal and plastic tube for hours with 100 other people is not going to end well ;-D I always resist wiping things down, yet...Dad is not entirely wrong either. On the return flight, there was a family with two little girls who crushed crackers and put their bare feet everywhere o.O People just trash the area around their seats, and it's like, ugggggghhhhhh...

Anyway, our trip had a grim beginning as a sick passenger was actually taken off the plane. The flight crew asked for any medical personnel to identify themselves, and two men did. The passenger sat at the back and was carried out by the volunteers. He coughed up blood on himself. I hope he's all right--we checked local news, but there was no mention of him. One of the volunteers sat near us, and he received gold-star service from the crew--their profuse thanks, a whole can of pop, and a free meal.

We arrived back from a week in Perth, Ontario on Friday and my birdwatching this year was much more successful. You would think Merlin would detect and prompt you to download the bird pack for your location--which is kinda does--but not when you visit a completely new location.

Here are the birds I mostly heard, thanks to Merlin. I wanted to sight the last two on the list, but we were in a rural area and the deerflies were fierce! One got trapped in my hair, ugh! Just as well anyway--I didn't bring the binoculars or camera.

House sparrows
Rock doves
European starlings
American robins
Canada geese
Grackles (Uncle Mike is feeding them)
Ravens
Blue jay
Song sparrows
Chipping sparrows
Chimney swifts
House finches
American goldfinches
Yellow warblers
Red-winged blackbirds
Ring-billed gulls (Merlin ID for sure! They were flocking at the railway museum)
Black-capped chickadees
Cedar waxwing
Osprey (by the side of the highway--saw the giant nest first!)
Red-eyed vireos
Eastern phoebes

Tubi suggested Fire and Ice to me, and as a fantasy lover, I couldn't resist!

But, IMHO, while I was prepared for a lot of scantily clad people (Frank Frazetta just hates pants ;-D), I wasn't prepared for the straight up racism with the subhumans. It was just very, very bad. The rotoscoping was beautiful, and although simple stories were okay, the plot was just too simple for my liking. It was nice that Princess Teegra is a capable gal and not a damsel in distress, and the fantasy world is interesting, but it was all surprisingly ho-hum for the feature length. Honestly, watching Saturday morning cartoons would be more interesting :-D

I also couldn't get over the fact that when Prince Nekron is using his ice powers--well, he's pretty much having an O! It really hasn't aged well.

Bonus trivia: Thomas Kinkade and James Gurney did the backgrounds.

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Now that the roofing saga is complete and we've gone a few rains without anymore leaks, we're going with a different company to do the siding.

They provided a quote for new windows and Hardie board fibre cement siding for us in 2022. The cost of the upgrade was half of what we paid for our house, so the insurance claim definitely helped us out this year. In hindsight, I wish we had just done the garage back then and lived with mismatching colours, but the cost was just a total turn-off!

Last year's hailstorm provided a great opportunity for change though--we're going from light grey vinyl to Mountain Sage, a very natury yellow-green. Neighbouring houses are going with dark navy, dark grey, and dark brown for siding--so green will be a sweet standout colour. You can get Hardie board in custom colours, but the paint isn't as weather-resistant as the factory colours.

I don't have an ungated link to this New Yorker article by Jia Tolentino, but I'm thinking about it a lot.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/my-brain-finally-broke

"I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does “illegible” still mean too messy to read? The day after Donald Trump’s second Inauguration, my verbal cognition kept glitching: I got an e-mail from the children’s-clothing company Hanna Andersson and read the name as “Hamas”; on the street, I thought “hot yoga” was “hot dogs”; on the subway, a theatre poster advertising “Jan. Ticketing” said “Jia Tolentino” to me. Even the words that I might use to more precisely describe the sensation of “losing it” elude me. There are sometimes only images: foggy white drizzle, melted rainbows in a gasoline puddle, pink foam insulation bursting between slats of splintered wood."

I always say if I go a week without posting, call the police, but in this case I was super busy with the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, our annual celebration of fandom, culture, and more! Whatever you're into, you'll find--and even if you're not into comics or movies or TV, you'll still love it. Honestly, you could take your grandparents and they'd have a fun time!

I missed 2024 and rebooked for 20026. I'll catch up later, as always! I hope all y'all had a good last week and a good week ahead!

And if you live in Canada, VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!!!!! Find you where you can vote at http://www.elections.ca

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A post shared by Christine 🦄 🐦🌈🍁 (calzephyr77)

Pulling from my watcher's notes...

I can't believe I'm writing that there's a movie Jason Momoa can't save, but it was definitely Conan.

I love Jason Momoa! He's a beautiful man inside and out, but I moved on after about half an hour.

Honestly, the movie lost me in the first few minutes when baby Conan is born during battle (get it???). His mother is a warrior and wants to see her son before she dies. Her husband takes her knife, does a 2-second C-section, and lifts baby Conan to her so she can name him, and then she dies. It is the most ridiculous thing! I can suspend my disbelief for a lot of things, but not that😄

The first part of the movie is brutally hard to watch (get it???), toned almost entirely blue and black where we see young Conan as the best of the best! He can finish his chores and have time to participate in a young warrior's marathon, where he single-handedly takes down a group of baddies that made his companions flee. Ugh.

After a battle where Conan is orphaned, it moves to the present day in full colour (get it???) where Conan and his companion free a group of slaves. Conan later spots someone who ransacked his village and gets arrested so he can get closer to the man. I gave up when Conan stuck his finger in the man's missing nose.

Although this movie is in no way related to the Arnold Schwarzenegger films and is a new interpretation of the books--and not having read the books, I don't know how faithful either adaptation is--the original Conan movie is so good because the characters have so much depth. The film is as disciplined as Arnold's workout routine and every time I watch it I enjoy the storytelling and cinematography so much. It's not easy to take pulp content and make it a action masterpiece.

This Conan movie is sadly kind of cheap and visually messy. A terrible movie can still be enjoyed if it has some redeeming qualities--but I knew after half an hour this movie was not one of them.

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