Saturday Sounds - Philip Glass - Violin Concerto No. 2

For this week's musical treat, I'm going back to some classical music with Philip Glass's Violin Concerto No. 2 "The American Four Seasons". Title aside, there isn't much of a similarity with this and Vivaldi's well-known work. In any case, it's a lovely piece of music and I hope it gets performed locally again.  (It had it's world premiere in Toronto in 2009; I don't know how I missed hearing about that, and I absolutely would have gone had I known about it). As you might guess, I like it quite a bit more than the reviewer quoted in the Wikipedia article linked above.

This performance is by the Delirium Musicum under the baton of Étienne Gara from a 2024 recording. 

Movie and TV Reviews - August 2025

Movies and TV shows that Nancy and I watched in August. I do these posts mainly so I can keep track of what we've been watching, so the reviews are cursory. Now that it's baseball season, there will probably be fewer items here.

Movies

• Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. Somewhere in this bloated hulk of a movie, there's a really good 45-minute-long episode of the original TV show screaming to get out. (Paramount+)
• Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. Again, an almost 3-hour-long movie that could have, and should have, been no more than 90 minutes. Even then, it would have been a total waste of time. 
• Jurassic World: Rebirth. The parts with big dinosaurs doing nasty things were good,. The rest of it was pretty meh. Out of the four movies we watched this month, this was the best, which is also a comment on the sad state of big Hollywood blockbusters these days. 
• Superman: Another wasted 2 hours. There was nothing in this movie that was better than the Christopher Reeve Superman. 

TV Shows

• Antiques Road Trip (season 10): Our journey though the gewgaw cluttered antique shops of Great Britain continues.
• Ridley (season 1): A police procedural set in the gloomy lake district in England. I found it rather slow. Main reason for watching is that it stars Adrian Dunbar (Line of Duty). (PBS)
• The Good Ship Murder (seaons 1-2): A murder mystery about a lounge singer on a cruise ship who doubles as a private detective. Light entertainment set in various ports around the Mediterranean. (BritBox)
• Ludwig; A puzzle creator becomes a detective by impersonating his missing twin brother. It's an implausible idea, as all such impersonation plots are, but we enjoyed it. Funny and more than a little twisted. (BritBox)
• The Liverpool Murders: Ashleigh and Olivia. A documentary-style show about two murders in Liverpool. Not the best example of this type of show. (Amazon Prime)

Featured Links - September 2, 2025

Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Swans on the bay

• AI is unmasking ICE officers. Can Washington do anything about it?  "A new twist in the debate over surveillance tech raises tough questions for policymakers." As William Gibson said: "The street finds its own uses for things." 
• Reflections on Katrina: 20 Years Later. "People often ask me: What’s the worst hurricane you’ve ever personally seen? With over two decades in the hurricane and disaster space that’s taken me to the ground (or in the air) for nearly every major U.S. hurricane in that span, including Katrina, the answer to that question shouldn’t come so quickly. But it does."
• Alberta Separatists Say Trump Regime Offered Them $500,000,000 “Loan” To Break Up Canada. "Alberta’s separatist circuit is bragging about a half-billion-dollar “transition loan” they say was discussed with Trumpworld in Washington. Seditious if true..." Even if money has not been offered, there is no doubt that the MAGA movement is coordinating with Alberta separatists. 
• Decline and Fall of the American Empire. "Alliances were what made us great." And Trump has shat on almost all of them.
• Our Preoccupation With Protein Intake. "The data on high protein diets, bars, supplements, and powders will surprise you." Some reliable information on protein intake. 
• What happens to New Orleans’ levees when a Category 4 hurricane hits? "The city’s $23 billion levee system is only rated to withstand a Cat 3." The city is still at risk. 
• How to rescue yourself from choking when you're all alone (video). This technique save your life.
• No, the White House Is Not Getting a 90,000-Foot Extension. "But Trump’s doomed proposal does give us a revealing glimpse into his state of mind."
• Earth's Seasons Are Out of Sync, Scientists Discover From Space. "We present an unprecedented and intimate portrait of the seasonal cycles of Earth's land-based ecosystems. This reveals "hotspots" of seasonal asynchrony around the world – regions where the timing of seasonal cycles can be out of sync between nearby locations." 
• Heat events and domestic violence linked, a new study out of New Orleans finds. This does not surprise me but it's good to have the data to back up the hypothesis.
• Harassment at Antarctic research bases could spell problems for moon, Mars outposts. "Antarctica is an isolated, confined environment similar to those that might be on future moon or Mars bases."  

Taking the Weekend Off

We're coming up to another long weekend here in the Great White North. Our heatwave has disappeared to be replaced by autumn-like temperatures, though given the overall climate, I'm sure more warm weather is on the way. I'm taking the weekend off from blogging and will be back here on Tuesday. 

In the meantime, here's a picture of two of Toronto's best known landmarks, the Rogers Centre (which will always be the Skydome to me) and the CN Tower. I took this with my Pixel 8 Pro from our seats at Wednesday night's Blue Jays game. 

The Rogers Centre and CN Tower in Toronto

Why Are the Markets So Complacent?

I have been expecting a major market correction, and possibly even a crash, for some time now; that is, ever since November 5th, 2024. It should be blindingly obvious to anyone with half a functioning brain that Trump and his MAGA cronies are going to steer the US into a major crisis or be faced with a polycrisis that overwhelms the US capability to respond, and the markets are finally going to notice. 

I'm not the only one who thinks this. See, for example, Paul Krugman's newsletter today, titled Why Aren't the Markets Freaking Out? Here are a couple of relevant quotes. 

My read of economic and financial history is that market pricing almost never takes into account the possibility of huge, disruptive events, even when the strong possibility of such events should be obvious. The usual pattern, instead, is one of market complacency until the last possible moment. That is, markets act as if everything is normal until it’s blindingly obvious that it isn’t.

Later: 

So if the conventional wisdom is that economic conditions will remain more or less normal despite highly abnormal policy, markets will remain calm until the illusion of normality becomes unsustainable. At that point market prices may “change violently.” The current technical term for this phenomenon is a “Wile E. Coyote moment” — the moment when the cartoon character, having run several steps off the edge of a cliff, looks down and realizes that there’s nothing supporting him. Only then, according to the laws of cartoon physics, does he fall.

You might ask why smart investors with long time horizons don’t foresee Wile E. Coyote moments and get very rich in the process. Some do. But for reasons that would take another long post to explain — maybe a primer one of these days — there never seem to be enough such investors to shake market complacency, no matter how unwarranted. It’s one thing to short a stock, but to short the entire market is a completely different beast.

And yes, he does provide receipts to back up his assertions. 

I think I will forward this column to my financial advisor.  

 

Word Docs Now Saved to the Cloud by Defau;lt

If you use Microsoft Word as part of Microsoft 365, you need to look at this article from Office Watch. Microsoft has changed the default save location for Word docs to the cloud, either OneDrive or SharePoint. You can change it to a local directory on your computer, but it takes a bit of effort. 

This is an arrogant but inevitable step by Microsoft to ram OneDrive down the throats of their paying customers. A change made to benefit the company with little consideration of the customers’ legitimate needs.

Here’s what we know about this change (announced today) based on Microsoft’s carefully crafted description. Office Watch will report more once we can test the new Word build ourselves to see how it really works.

I'm not impressed. I don't use OneDrive any more than absolutely necessary. Windows wants to use it for screen shots, for example. I can live with that, but I want files I create in a specific location for which I have backup routines in place. 

Featured Links - August 26, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Front yard hyacinths. 

The Super-Weird Origins of the Right’s Hatred of the Smithsonian. "The Trump administration has stepped up its antagonism of America’s treasured museums. But conservative antipathy toward the institution began long ago—with the bones of Bible giants."

Scientists Propose a Smarter Way to Hunt for Alien Radio Signals. "We might find intelligent aliens by looking for them the same way they’d find us."

Covid and Our Arteries. "A new study on acceleration of vascular aging adds to the body of evidence." Yet more reasons to do whatever you can to avoid catching COVID.

4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC. "A lawyer representing the online message board 4chan says it won't pay a proposed fine by the UK's media regulator as it enforces the Online Safety Act."

The 9 Worst RFK Jr. Decisions to Date. "By every measure, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been — and continues to be — a disaster. His actions undermine scientific progress, public trust, and the health of millions. In a mere matter of months, his agenda has left lasting scars on America’s public health infrastructure, while reverberating globally by undoing decades of progress in vaccination and disease prevention."

Sadopopulism and the Fascist MAGA Ethos. "Trump’s policy is to inflict pain, even upon his own voters. But why does this work, and what will stop it?"

Five Ways to Fight Trump's Fascism. "People are constantly asking me — what can I do? Between now and the 2026 midterm elections, here are five practical steps you can take to make a difference." YouTube video from Robert Reich. 

We Are All Lisa Cook. "Nobody is safe from weaponized government."

The “Peace in Our Time” Moment. "Why Trump’s Deal With Putin Echos Munich 1938." The similarities between now and 1938 are clear. 

Dude, you broke the Future! A talk by SF author, Charlie Stross, from the 34C3 conference in 2017. It's eight years old now and still relevant. (YouTube video)