Blackmoor Vituperative

Today’s Saturday matinee is “Battletruck” (1982), also known as “Warlords Of The 21st Century”. This is not a great movie, but it is interesting for a number of reasons.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were the golden age of vehicle-based adventure movies. “Death Race 2000” (1975) was the vanguard of the genre, leading to “Blue Thunder” (1983), “Megaforce” (1982), “Deathsport” (1978), and so on.

The 1980s were also the golden age of post-apocalypse movies. “Mad Max” (1979) was the vanguard of the genre, leading to “Road Warrior” (1981), “Warrior And The Sorceress” (1984), “Cherry 2000” (1987), and so on.

“Battletruck” (1982) combines these elements. Unlike most films of both genres, it is not filmed in Argentina, nor does it feature David Carradine. It was filmed in New Zealand, and the cast includes Michael Beck (best known for “Warriors” (1979) and “Xanadu” (1980), and who also appeared in “Megaforce”), Annie McEnroe (who appeared in “Snowbeast” (1977), a weird intersection of the 1970s crazes for ski resort movies and Bigfoot movies), and James Wainwright (who has been in a number of fairly good films, but I know him as Dutch from 1974’s “Killdozer”). John Ratzenberger, who would make his appearance as Cliff Clavin on the show “Cheers” later the same year, has a small but memorable part as Rusty, the mechanic and weaponsmith. (Fun fact! Ratzenberger is one of the most successful actors of all time in terms of box-office receipts.)

As a vehicle-based post-apocalypse film, “Battletruck” doesn’t quite measure up to classics like “Damnation Alley” (1977), but it’s a sincere film with sympathetic characters, and it tells its story without the outlandish nonsense of “Warriors Of The Wasteland”, aka “New Barbarians” (1983) and without the sexual assaults of movies like “Road Warrior” (1981) and “Postman” (which came out in 1997, but which is very much a throwback to the post-apocalypse films of the 1980s).

You may find this useful: How to get back ‘exact size’ and ‘larger than’ search filters on Google Images

tl;dr version, bookmark this url:
https://www.google.com/advanced_image_search

You’ll wake up tomorrow, you’ll be glad that I came
Because you’ll be singing one of the songs that I sang
So keep a happy outlook and be good to your friend
And maybe I’ll pass this way agaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain
Maybe!

Bye.

I am thinking about making a series of these.

Amazon may remove “The Dukes Of Hazzard” from its streaming service, due to the Confederate imagery on the roof of the “General Lee”, the Dukes’ gravity-defying orange Dodge Charger.

That makes me a little bit sad. They really were just good old boys, never meaning no harm. I don’t think they (or the people who designed the car) had any racist intent. I normally say “intent matters”. Because it normally does. But I am conflicted about this.

“The Dukes Of Hazzard” was my first exposure to decent people fighting against corrupt police. I was not aware of the history of bootleggers tricking out cars to outrace cops (which eventually led to NASCAR).

I have to think, that if the Dukes were ever told that the rebel flag was a symbol of racism and hatred, that they’d be horrified, and they’d waste no time in finding something better to paint on the roof of their car. Because they were decent, honorable fictional characters, and they would never cause pain to innocent people if they could help it.

I use a Python application called MyMedia to stream videos from my Ubuntu media server to my Roku boxes.

I installed Ubuntu 20 yesterday. The painfully slow navigation problem (caused by the slow but inevitable deprecation of python 2) re-appeared, and I tried to re-create the fix. Initially, I just succeeded in preventing MyMedia from running at all.

Here is what actually worked.

1. First, I copied all of my backed up MyMedia files to /usr/local/bin/mymedia
2. Then I installed python 2.7…
3. sudo apt-get install python2
4. Then I installed pip, but first I had to install curl…
5. sudo apt-get install curl
6. curl "https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py" -o "get-pip.py"
7. sudo python2 get-pip.py
8. Then I installed Pillow
9. sudo python2 -m pip install --upgrade Pillow
10. It might not have been necessary, but I installed several image libraries…
11. sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev
12. sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so /usr/lib
13. sudo apt-get install zlib1g-de
14. sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so /usr/lib
15. In common.py, I made sure that this…
16. import Image
17. … had been replaced with this…
18. #import Image
from PIL import Image

Huge success!

Note that during this process, I got several warnings about Python 2.7 being deprecated, like this one:

DEPRECATION: Python 2.7 reached the end of its life on January 1st, 2020. Please upgrade your Python as Python 2.7 is no longer maintained. pip 21.0 will drop support for Python 2.7 in January 2021. More details about Python 2 support in pip, can be found at https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/development/release-process/#python-2-support

It’s only a matter of time before MyMedia becomes unusable. I would love to get access to the git repository and try to update it for Python 3, if that’s possible. I’ve asked, but the original developer is no longer associated with the project. It may be that I’ll have to find a new solution to this problem in a year or so.

Also, I have updated my init script (/etc/init.d/memedia), which runs mymedia in a screen …

#!/bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: minidlna
# Required-Start: $local_fs $network $remote_fs
# Required-Stop: $local_fs $network $remote_fs
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: mymedia server
# Description: mymedia media server.
### END INIT INFO

# Do NOT "set -e"

# PATH should only include /usr/* if it runs after the mountnfs.sh script
DESC="MyMedia media server"
MEDIAPATH=/var/media
DAEMONPATH=/usr/local/bin/mymedia/server
DAEMON=$DAEMONPATH/mymedia.py
SCRIPTNAME=/etc/init.d/mymedia
SCREENNAME=mymedia
USER=bblackmoor
GROUP=media
EXECUSER=root
EXECGROUP=media

case "$1" in
start)
chown -R $EXECUSER:$EXECGROUP $DAEMONPATH
chown -R $USER:$GROUP $MEDIAPATH
su - $USER -c "cd $DAEMONPATH; screen -dm -S $SCREENNAME python2 $DAEMON"
;;
stop)
su - $USER -c "screen -S $SCREENNAME -X quit"
su - $USER -c "screen -wipe"
;;
status)
su - $USER -c "screen -list | grep $SCREENNAME"
;;
*)
echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status}" >&2
exit 3
;;
esac
:

Okay, so, we watched part of “Get Him To The Greek” (2010) last night. And we both noticed that Russell Brand is using the same accent as Ricky Gervais used for “the Office”. And I got to wondering if that was a deliberate choice? Like, does that accent belong to a particular region of the UK, yeah? Maybe it represents a certain socio-political group, or a stereotyped mindset? Maybe a bit stupid? Maybe a bit arrogant, even?

And then, for some reason, I thought of “What We Do In The Shadows”, which is a TV show (based on the eponymous film) about vampires in Staten Island, NY. And I got to wondering what it would be like if one of them had this accent.

“So I was at this bar, right? And this young thing, this lady, not that I mind a young bloke, I’m not sexist. Blood is blood, innit? Right? If you want a bloke, good for you. I support that. But in this case, a young lady, right? She’s all forward, which frankly I’m not fond of. Leave a bit for the chase, please. It’s a little word in relationships I like to call mystery. Leave a bit of it, right? Don’t just put everything on the table at once. Let us have a bit of fun. A bit of foreplay, right?

“But she’s persistent, and it’s getting late, and if I must admit, I was a bit peckish. I do get peckish sometimes. Not that I’m always on the hunt. Just because I’m a vampire, that doesn’t mean I’m just about that. I’m my own boss. Sometimes I’ll wake up in me coffin, and I’m like, ‘David, are you hungry?’ And I’m like, ‘No thank you. Think I’ll compose a sonnet. Think I’ll be a poet today, yeah? Can I just stay in my coffin and compose a sonnet?’ ‘Ooh, don’t know, better ask the boss.’ ‘David can I stay in my coffin all day?’ ‘Yes, you can David.’ Both me, that’s not me in my coffin with another bloke called David.

“But in this case, yeah, I drank her blood and left her body in the alley. Think she was alive. Might not have been. Didn’t check. Might be breathing. Probably not. Don’t care. That’s how I roll. I’m a free spirit.

“No, but… yeah, she was breathing. Again guilty, unorthodox, sue me.”

P.S. No one else thinks this is as funny as I do.

I had a dentist appointment this morning. I had planned to pick up some milk from the store afterward. Unfortunately, my car’s battery was dead. After some protests, Susan consented to allow me to drive her car.

When I arrived at the dentist’s office, I realized that I didn’t have a face mask: it was in my car. So no shopping afterward.

I called the dentist office to let them know I was outside, so they could bring out the pandemic-release forms and take my temperature. My temperature was 96.3 F, and they left the forms with me.

The first page described all of the reasons that I could catch COVID-19 at the dentist’s office despite their precautions, and ended with a statement I was supposed to sign confirming that my visit met the requirements of urgency and medical necessity described above.

I apologized and returned the form to the next nurse who came outside, and said it wasn’t urgent: just a checkup.

“Oh, it’s okay. We are seeing patients for checkups now.”

I apologized again, and fled, my stomach in knots.

Here are some Hogwarts screen captures you can use as wallpaper or as backgrounds for your Zoom meetings. These are all from “Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001).