Iron Man 3 Super Bowl Ad: Extended Look

Robert Downey Jr truly is a master thespian.

Some fun for a cold and dreary Monday morning.

Hate: My Personal Origins

A continuation of my essays on hate, this time focusing on how I learned to hate with every iota of my being when I was young. As I’ve grown older, it has become apparent that nurture overwhelms nature to a great degree and looking back at how being bullied changed me I can see that now. Why? Because one can change back after being changed…

I was a cheerful, happy kid who got criticized for talking too much in my early years. The world was so fascinating and a source of constant wonder, so I wanted to share that with others. Born into a family where my siblings were half-brothers sixteen and twenty years older respectively, that meant I was dealing with adults full time and they don’t like to hear from kids. They were also more concerned with extending their adolescence or reliving it, so that had something to do with it.

To be clear, I was never beaten, abused, or mistreated. Instead I was pretty much left to do whatever I wanted -- which could have been disastrous. Fortunately for my parents, I was a relentlessly good kid enamored of heroes and acts of valor. Sadly, I never had the kind of health or physical strength to do much with those impulses.

Interesting Weirdness

As much as I despise writing about my terrible health, I have to say sometimes my experiences with it can be very interesting – if I can notice them past the misery. The infection I’m suffering from right now has given me two experiences involving perception that fascinate me.

The first was awakening and getting up after forgetting to take the contacts out. Everything was foggy inside the house, so I removed them and put my glasses on. There was still a mist throughout, so I took the glasses off. Still foggy. Then I noticed that all light sources had rainbow hues halos around them. Even more strange was that I could look at a naked light bulb without experiencing discomfort or pain, which is extraordinary given I’m very light sensitive.

It eventually faded out after an hour or two, but it was something I’d never experienced before. Today I’m back to light hurting the eyes, so at least that is normal again. What mechanism was responsible for this I do not know and am very curious to discover.

The second experience was time distortion last night. Normally if I suffer it from being ill, it tends to be lost time. By this I mean time goes by in large chunks and I don’t realize it until I see a clock. But last night I suffered time distortion that was the exact opposite. I was dead sure many hours had gone by, but only an hour or so had. Even more extreme was a couple of instances where I thought several hours had passed and it had only been fifteen minutes! It got to the point I didn’t trust the clocks.

Bizarre and disturbing are the two words I’d use to describe that particular side effect of the infection. I hope to never again experience it.

I suppose I should document where things stand with the infection. After two doses of Ampligen, my fever (or more accurately what passes for one with me) broke around 4:15 AM (which I was sure was 6 or 7 AM). Delirium ended after that, but breathing is still difficult.

My blood pressure at the clinic was sky high for me. Initial reading was 150/100 and the one taken after I'd had time to rest was 142/90. I’m usually in the ballpark of 120/80 and even when fighting an illness like bronchitis only hit 134/85 for a maximum. All I can surmise is that my entire system is under attack. Meditation techniques had little effect as can be evidenced by the change in readings.

A Strange Lump

Awakened yesterday with a silver dollar sized lump having formed inside of one of my thighs. It got very painful, but I decided to tough it out. Not so good an idea. It has become the size of a fist and I was very ill last night. Time for an emergency trip to the doctor.

Packing things in a backpack, just in case.

UPDATED:

That’s a relief. Instead of possibly being a blood clot of some kind like I suspected due to location, it is instead a very bad infection. Antibiotics have been procured and a procedure scheduled for when it becomes an abscess.

This one is a doozy, I feel worse than when I had the flu and bronchitis. Once again I am sidelined.

Changes to the Blog and One Thing Not Changing

While I really liked the minimalist theme in place since the beginning of the year, the free template was not very flexible and easily broken. So now I’m trying out this Blogger provided one since it is the closest in feel to it though even more minimalist in appearance. Also, I’ve enabled the Mobile option to see if it displays a little better on smartphones and tablets. Any feedback on that particular feature would be appreciated.

After doing some digging, I found I was not alone in seeing my traffic decline starting in December. Google has made some changes that have demoted a lot of sites in their search engine and it doesn’t look like they’ll be undoing them. That means I’ll never see the traffic I once had

One massive change by Google that is actually destroying livelihoods is a revamp of the image search that now shows the full size images on a website rather than preview images. So sites that would get traffic to sell images and photos now do not because they aren’t linked to as prominently. The theory going around is that this is a result of pressure from Pinterest and Facebook in the arena of searching for pictures.

Weird Movie Origin involving He-Man, Spider-Man, and Van Damme

Movie Legends Revealed: He-Man & Spider-Man Films Became Cyborg ?

Only in Hollywood could something like this happen: a combined shoot of Masters of the Universe 2 and a Spider-Man film in the 1980s instead gave us a science fiction movie B-movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.  This little piece of trivia completely boggled my mind for I knew Cannon Films had the rights to Spider-Man for a long time, but to find out it was linked to another He-Man movie is bizarre.

Would this have resulted in cameos in each other's movie for Spidey and He-Man? The world will never know. I do know somebody needs to write a parody script ASAP!

The Folland Gnat: A Lightweight Champion

While my infatuation with very lightweight fighters began with the failed F-20 Tigershark, another stole my affection once I found out about it. The Brits built a plane during the Cold War that couldn't get any smaller and actually succeed. That little bird was the Folland Gnat which served as the RAF's trainer and Red Arrows acrobatic team mount for many years. But it was the obscure Gnat F.1 fighter version that peaked my interest after finding out it saw combat with the Indian Air Force.

Tiny by jet fighter standards and even WWII prop fighter dimensions, the Gnat was a potent adversary in gun based air to air combat thanks to its high maneuverability and hard hitting 30mm cannons. It racked up a good number of kills against Pakistani F-86F Sabres which were not exactly large fighters themselves. This video shows both variants and you'll even see Gnats next to Sabres for an excellent size comparison.

Americans will probably remember the Gnat from the movie Hot Shots, a spoof of Top Gun starring Charlie Sheen. Since it is little known here in the States, I figured I'd link to the video. Folland's little fighter is a good looking plane deserving of some love, in my opinion.

One of these days I'll build the Aeroclub 1/48 vacuform kit of the fighter in my collection. If I only had a nickle for how many times I've said that about a kit...