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Saw (finally) The Last Jedi last night. Spoiler-laden review coming next, but in the meantime… 🙂

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a true American hero – RIP.

From the Seattle Times – NASA: Legendary astronaut, moonwalker John Young has died

“….NASA called Young one of its pioneers – the only agency astronaut to go into space as part of the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs, and the first to fly into space six times. He was the ninth man to walk on the moon.”

“…His NASA career lasted 42 years, longer than any other astronaut’s, and he was revered among his peers for his dogged dedication to keeping crews safe — and his outspokenness in challenging the space agency’s status quo.

Chastened by the 1967 Apollo launch pad fire that killed three astronauts, Young spoke up after the 1986 shuttle Challenger launch accident. His hard scrutiny continued well past shuttle Columbia’s disintegration during re-entry in 2003.

“Whenever and wherever I found a potential safety issue, I always did my utmost to make some noise about it, by memo or whatever means might best bring attention to it,” Young wrote in his 2012 memoir, “Forever Young.”

He said he wrote a “mountain of memos” between the two shuttle accidents to “hit people over the head.” Such practice bordered on heresy at NASA.”

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Saw this documentary yesterday – pretty interesting, actually. It’s a look back at the life of Evel Knievel, hosted in part by Johnny Knoxville, several of Evel’s contemporaries, and sports broadcasters like Frank Gifford (RIP), Jim McKay and other ABC Wide World of Sports luminaries. Weirdly, Geraldo is in there too.

As a kid in the 70’s, we all knew about Evel – hard to not know about him. And i’m halfway sure I had one of those Ideal Stunt Cycle toys they show (or had friends who had one – I definitely remember the commercials). I also remembered that EK had spent a bit of time in jail, but didn’t know the details until seeing this movie (pretty scary, actually).

I was also very vague on the whole Snake River rocket jump attempt in ’74, but they sure go into a lot of detail here – sounds like a scary event for a lot of reasons, most of them not positive (for attendees as well as EK). As the story progresses from around that point and beyond, his decline and excesses get hard to watch, and in a couple of key areas, hard to forgive.

While I’m not ready to lionize him quite the way that Johnny Knoxville, Tony Hawk and others seen here do – you can’t argue with his influence on their (and similar) careers, and the industries they spawned (extreme sports, X-Games, etc.).

And I definitely *will* say, that he’s a true American Icon, for better or worse (to the filmmakers’ credit, they cover both) – and yet another example of being true to your dreams.

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finally got around to watching Logan tonight – definitely one of the better X-Men movies, but a few comments (which could be taken by some as spoilers, be forewarned):

1) pretty over the top violent, even with the lead guy having blades fly out of his hands as per usual. We’ve actually been watching Daredevil a bit lately too, and while that show lacks (for the most part) super powers (Daredevil is not a mutant), it’s violent like this one was….

2) there are a lot of influences going on here, from Terminator 2 to The White Mountains, to Escape to Witch Mountain being the most obvious in my mind. Unlike T2, there’s very little to no ‘end of the world monologuing’ a la Linda Hamilton here, however. And unlike the other two, there’s definitely a much darker tone, especially compared to E2WM. Nor was there a ‘rescue’ by other hideout mutants at the end the way I was expecting (following from the White Mountains or E2WM plots).

3) I was a bit unclear on how Charles Xavier is alive in this movie, when he was killed by Jean Grey in the 3rd movie – the 4th movie doesn’t count because that was time travel, and I haven’t seen the Apocalypse one yet.

4) I’m also a little skeptical that they could kill off nearly the entire world’s mutants in the space of only about 25 years(?) – in the early movies, we were led to believe that there were only going to be more and more mutants, and, what about all those that already existed – only Logan, Charles, Caliban and these ‘manufactured’ kid mutants exist over the whole world? Hmm.

Otherwise, it’s pretty good, although also pretty long (clocks in at almost 2.5 hrs).

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happy holidays!

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The Nightmare before Christmas

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