And the teacher says no energy drinks in the math test because you won’t always have one on hand in real life.

Flock continues to spread like a malignant tumor.

Or how zero could be a number instead of a null value

Also, birds are warm-blooded reptiles.

I took the kids to see this one. It was fantastic: good music and a compelling take on the Orpheus and Eurodice myth. Patrick Page has an amazing bass voice, and Amber Gray stole the show as Persephone.

Oh, and last week I watched Furiosa, Fury Road, and The Road Warrior back-to-back over three days. What a spectacular set of movies.

I watched The Hot Rock, a heist movie from the early 70s starring Robert Redford and Zero Mostel by the same screen writer as The Princess Bride.

A criminally (ha) underrated caper; only one plot point didn’t age well, but fortunately it was only immersion-breaking and not skeevy. Highly recommended.

Trailer link

Of all the soulless live-action remakes, this one seems to be the most pointless.

The trailers looked mediocre, but everyone says it’s great. I’ll have to give it a watch.

I really need to see this one. I’ve heard it’s great.

Smokin’ Aces was so bad that I can’t believe I sat through the whole thing. It looked like it would be a fun heist/fiasco movie, but it was incredibly dull without any likeable characters.

I rewatched The Great Escape, I haven’t seen it in forever.

Still one of the best heist movies of all time. The only shame is that they had to make so many of the main characters Americans to get the thing made.

I think Houston has a bit cooler temperature from Dallas due to the proximity to the ocean, but the humidity more than makes up for it.

It’s just impossible to cool down in that kind of climate.

Thanks, my estimate was a little bit off; I’m terminally America-brained.

It’s months of over 100°F to 110°F (38°C - 43°C) here, but it does spike up there, and the heat index does regularly get that high.

Pretty much everyone here has AC though.

Sorry to crash this as an American, but we have months of 45°C temperatures here in Texas with a really humid climate, so I might be able to offer some advice.

One summer my AC was out entirely for about a month. I survived by positively soaking a sleeveless tank in ice water and sitting around in that until it wasn’t cooling me anymore and then soaking it again.

I recently found some ice packs that go around the neck, and they really work miracles for lowering one’s body temperature. I always keep one in the freezer now for when I get back from a walk.

I watched James and the Giant Peach with the kiddos. They love stop-motion animation, so we figured we’d give it a try.

It was probably my least favorite Skelington Productions movie, but definitely still worth a watch. I particularly liked the surreal mix of animation and live-action in some scenes and how awful the aunts were.

The scene where he slaps a woman to get her respect didn’t age well, but the rest is great.

One Week with Buster Keaton is still hilarious and relatable, even though it was released in 1920.

From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristen Kobes du Mez

Antecedents can be found in nineteenth-century southern evangelicalism and in early-twentieth-century “muscular Christianity,” but it was in the 1940s and 1950s that a potent mix of patriarchal “gender traditionalism,” militarism, and Christian nationalism coalesced to form the basis of a revitalized evangelical identity. With Billy Graham at the vanguard, evangelicals believed that they had a special role to play in keeping America Christian, American families strong, and the nation secure. The assertion of masculine power would accomplish all these goals.

By the 1960s, the civil rights movement, feminism, and the Vietnam War led many Americans to question “traditional” values of all kinds. Gender and sexual norms were in flux, America no longer appeared to be a source of unalloyed good, and God did not in fact appear to be on her side. Evangelicals, however, clung fiercely to the belief that America was a Christian nation, that the military was a force for good, and that the strength of the nation depended on a properly ordered, patriarchal home. The evangelical political resurgence of the 1970s coalesced around a potent mix of “family values” politics, but family values were always intertwined with ideas about sex, power, race, and nation. Feminism posed a threat to traditional womanhood, and also to national security by removing from men their duty to provide and protect and opening the door to women in military combat. In similar fashion, Vietnam was not just a national security issue, but also a crisis of masculinity. Civil rights, too, dismantled time-honored traditions and destabilized the social order. Representing federal government overreach or even an insidious communist agenda, desegregation also heightened the long-standing imagined threat to white womanhood, and to the power of white men to police social and sexual boundaries. The reassertion of white patriarchy was central to the new “family values” politics, and by the end of the 1970s, the defense of patriarchal power had emerged as an evangelical distinctive.

Looking at the station makes it even crazier: