LiveJournal has announced the return of Basic Accounts. Unfortunately, what they are actually going to do is

1. Introduce a new sort of account, with advertising, though with less than Sponsored Accounts have.
2. Eliminate all existing Basic Accounts, moving every user who presently has a Basic Account to this new sort of account.
3. Give the new sort of account the name Basic Account.

For example, if one now has a Basic Account, then starting in August one's LJ will probably present ads to visitors who are not logged-in. (I'll let readers know whether ads are also present to those logged-in with registered external identities.)

Most of the comments that I saw to the announcement were the usual, clueless words of thanks, and I'll wager that most holders (even most active holders) of present Basic Accounts will either have missed the announcement altogether, or simply have taken it at face value where it says

Back by popular demand, Basic Accounts will be available to all users again by the end of the (northern hemisphere) summer.

There will be anger in August, when the changes are put into effect and thus discovered, but СУП will claim that users should have voiced their objections during the two-week feed-back period.

Famously, HDRC has a large campaign debt, which she and her husband are demanding Obama help retire. I'm not sure, then, how it is that she would be in a position to offer refunds. In any event, she is asking that money which would otherwise be refunded be contributed towards her 2012 Senate campaign, instead of being used to retire her debt.

It isn't really plausible that HDRC will pay-off her Presidential campaign debts in-full; instead, creditors will receive pennies-on-the-dollar, with the Clintons representing such settlements as-if they are payment in-full. If the Clintons channel monies that could have gone to the repayment of debt instead to her 2012 Senate campaign, then those creditors will in effect have been compelled to contribute towards that Senate campaign.

Yester-day morning, I watched King of the Rocket Men (1949), the Republic serial whence flowed Radar Men from the Moon (1952), Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952), and Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe (1953) (the last being written and filmed as a television series, but released first in theaters). King of the Rocket Men (or one of its sequels) was also the principal influence on the Rocketeer, though Bulletman (who appeared in 1940) is probably another direct influence on the Rocketeer, and was surely a direct influence on King of the Rocket Men. (Republic Pictures, who produced Rocket Men, had earlier produced the serial Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), based upon another Fawcett character, and with the same special effects team.)

It is, frankly, a bit of a surprise that King of the Rocket Men managed to inspire much beyond derision.

The male lead, Tristam Coffin, looks notably older than his 40 years, as if from hard living or merely from a hard life. (Coffin has one of those pencil mustaches which are more make-up than facial hair.) The female lead, Mae Clark, was 39, but looks even older than does Coffin, perhaps from harder living or from harder life. (Mae Clark is notable as Kitty, the girl who gets a grapefruit in her face, in The Public Enemy (1931), and as Elizabeth, the fiancée of Henry Frankenstein, in Frankenstein (1931).)

But the real problem with King of the the Rocket Men is that the protagonists, including Jeff King (Coffin's character, the Rocket Man), are worse than ineffectual.

A villain named Dr. Vulcan is trying to get control of the inventions of Science Associates, including King and a Professor Millard. King repeatedly fails to capture criminals, or captures them and then leaves them to escape, and he fails to prevent killings with almost perfect consistency. At one point, King takes a guard's gun, directing the guard to phone the police, and then fails to provide anything like adequate cover-fire for the guard, who is thus gut-shot.

King and Millard have been working on the Decimator for the benefit of mankind. The Decimator is named and consistently described as a weapon — indeed it is described as the most powerful weapon ever designed — which might lead one to ask how King and Millard conceptualize its benefits. King and his side-kick, Burt Winslow, leave the Decimator unguarded, so that they can pursue a suspicious motorcycle. Naturally, the Bad Guys take the Decimator. When King and the side-kick return, King doesn't notice that the Decimator is gone, but the side-kick does. With the aid of a photograph, King is able to tell the police the plate number of the truck being used by the villains. The police locate the truck in a mountain pass. King tells the police to stay back so that Rocket Man can deal with them. The villains try to blow Rocket Man up with a bomb, but he escapes uninjured, and then flies away, not even bothering to follow them as they drive off in a car with the Decimator. The police might have done a better job.

Eventually, King &alii have allowed Dr. Vulcan to fly to the east coast, where he plans to use the Decimator to black-mail New York City. Dr. Vulcan secretly sets-up the Decimator on Fisherman's Island, a little more than 300 miles south-east of New York, and gives the mayor a dead-line of a few hours to agree to paying a ransom of $1 billion. The mayor ignores the dead-line (G_d only knows how a mayor could come up with $1 billion in 1949, let alone in a few hours), and Dr. Vulcan uses the Decimator to trigger the Amsterdam Fault, which lies between New York City and Fisherman's Island. Earthquakes and waves begin to destroy the city. King figures-out where Dr Vulcan must be, and the Rocket Man flies to Fisherman's Island. The city is, for the most part, destroyed. King gets to the island, and blasts the Decimator with his ray-gun (something that he might have considered doing back in that mountain pass). Meanwhile, the mayor has had bombers sent to pulverize Fisherman's Island. King and Dr. Vulcan and Dr. Vulcan's henchman battle. The henchman is accidentally killed by Vulcan. The bombs begin to drop; the Rocket Man gets away just before the house from which Dr Vulcan has been operating is blown-up. Later, the mayor takes credit for saving the ruined city, and promises to rebuild (no Naginesque declarations about restoring the dominance of an ethnic group). Jeff King and his pals think the mayor ridiculous for not giving more credit to the Rocket Man. BTW, did you know that, if you jump out of a speeding car, all that happens to you is that you get a little dusty? Well, neither did I.

Sari draws her readers' attention to

(I guess that Bizarre has confused the Canadian dollar with a Canadian pound of some sort, and thinks that the Internet is the only internet. In any case, this story came to my attention by way of an entry at the Horrors of It All.)

Knife crime is such a problem in the UK because violent crime is a problem. In fact, per capita, there are more incidents of most sorts of violent crime in the UK than in the US, though this fact is generally hidden by the British using different data reporting protocols. Violent crime is at greater levels in the UK in spite of their having gun control, because guns aren't the cause. Nor are knives. The prohibition of guns has largely resulted in a substitution of knives. A prohibition of knives will largely result in some other substitution. And innocent people who aren't protected by the police will be ever more at the mercy of criminals.

Haha!

I attempted to log out of a web-site, and was logged-out of my local Linux session! This logging-out baffled me, because there shouldn't have been any way for a log-out command to have been passed to the local shell, and none of the associated strings from the site were valid log-out commands for that shell.

Well, the joint logging-out was basically chance coïncidental. An inspection of a log file suggested that, in the wake of the most recent up-dates to the Red Hat software, I needed to get a new driver for my graphics adapter. I should have reälized this sooner, as various processes had become far less responsive, and all of these involved display.

I am not, properly speaking, a fan of Metropolis; I have considered its message to be fascistic, and don't see it as plausible that its fascism was an artefact of the scenes in question having been dropped. But Metropolis is none-the-less a very important film, and I am actively pleased that this material has been found.

(I went looking for this story after reading an entry at the Horrors of It All.)

Last Tuesday evening marked the return of the Game Weasels to David's Coffee Place, but I must admit that this time they were reasonably well behaved, and certainly not so terribly noisy. Perhaps one reason for this was that only one male weasel was in attendance, at least while I observed them. (At some point, the Game Weasels moved outdoors to the front patio.)

I have been reading Collected Fictions, an anthology of the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges.

The translator, Andrew Hurley, has increasingly struck me as a pirouetting fool, and this after-noon I encountered what may be the definitive illustration of this foolishness.

The first paragraph of Night of the Gifts places an event of Borges's life near the intersection of Calle Florida and Piedad. Hurley presents us with the datum that Piedad's name was changed to Bartolomé Mitre in 1906, and Hurley proposes to date the story accordingly, taking a swipe at Borges for pretending that he might have participated meaningfully in a discussion of Platonic ideals at or before the age of seven.

Well, the second paragraph describes a character as elderly, and in the third paragraph that character says that in the summer of 1874 he was about to turn 13. At the time that Piedad's name was changed, that character would have been about 45. It's rather unlikely that Borges would call such man elderly (especially as Borges himself would probably have been in his seventies when he wrote the story).

In other works, Borges or his characters often use older names for places. Here, forgetful, defiant, or indifferent, he uses the older name for a street, in spite of the declarations of city officials. Woo hoo.