As you could tell from Airplane Movies 2023, I spent a lot of time on planes last year. A. Lot. Of. Time. All I’ve got to say about that is that having Black Titanium Card status [1] on United ain’t worth much. Sam Elliott did not come out of the cockpit to give me The Card with my name embossed on it. In my head canon, I’d imagined a combination of Up In The Air with the business card scene in American Psycho. Instead, I got an email. And a couple of titanium luggage tags [2], which are unusable in practice because they would cut your luggage [3] to shreds as they are thrown about.
Even with all the travel [4], and not being a big fan of airplane rawdogging, I honestly haven’t spent so much time spent watching airplane movies [5]. Frankly the airlines have been letting me down here. It’s not for lack of time sitting in a seat, there just hasn’t been that much that I wanted to watch, even with the proviso that airplanes are where you watch movies you wouldn’t pay for, whether that be art-house or grindhouse.
But it still has to be something you kinda wouldn’t mind watching.
Or maybe it’s Hollywood just making a bunch of crappy movies? I can’t watch super-hero movies anymore.
There also haven’t been any series-only-available-on-services-I-don’t-pay-for that I wanted to binge, which was always a fallback in the past. That’s how I got through Westworld [6].
I did watch The Fall Guy (it wasn’t available on a plane at the time, so not included here, but frankly should have waited to watch it on a plane for free [7]), and did not realize until just now that Aaron Taylor-Johnson was one of the kids in KickAss. Smarmy there, and smarmy in every movie I’ve seen him in since. So if that’s what he’s going for… I hope he’s not 007. It’s on the plane now, so I guess I could review it, but I bought it on AppleTV as a brainless jet-lag watch, so not sure it meets the stringent AMR criteria.
The good news is that I have about four long-haul trips planned between now and 2025, and four planned for the first 5 months of 2025, so if UA and the global movie industry work with me, I can have get a lot more airplane movie reviews in and also get super-duper status for next year.
Potential candidates for the next trip, if they’re still playing in a month:
Zero Between one and three long-haul trips remaining this year (assuming no emergencies), so here’s hoping for more interesting AMR failures… next year.
[1] if they still gave out physical cards, which they don’t
[2] blank, not personalized
[3] and others
[4] I reached the published top tier by May
[5] Theirs anyway. My touchpad-unlock iPad is full. I still wear masks, so can’t use the new one I bought figuring that the risk of Covid would go away
[6] Except the season finale which was starting when the annoying landing we-pause-this-for-an-important-announcement-about-signing-up-for-our-credit-card messages start, which is always the sign to give up. And I was so done with WW at that point that I didn’t care what happened to Rachel Wood (who I saw in a pizza joint the night before the pandemic shut everything down) and The Man in Black
[7] The Fall Guy: not good
[8] How do you think I got all those miles? Flying to Oz for a one-day review, twice, will do it. I had to take a day in Sydney as my butt would have seceded otherwise
[9] Thus the allure of watching Heat and every other Hollywood movie, and all the meta-vid (Los Angeles Plays Itself, Shotgun Freeway, Haim videos, 1-Adam-12, etc.) just to see all the places you’ve been, or haven’t quite, or 10 20 30 40 years ago. Sheesh. I’ve been here a minute…
[10] Could be biased by that being one of the first movies I saw on my new 1080p HD TV set at the time, and the quality which I had never see outside a theatre (and mostly not in them) absolutely blew me away.
[11] The accompanying Man Ray/Lee Miller exhibition suited me better…
“To go fast on two wheels was the point
“To go fast on two wheels is the point of life, isn’t it?”
— Frederick Seidel
When I made this the tag-line for this widely unread blog, after trying out a few things from Buckaroo Banzai [0] and other cultural references going back to Moby-Dick at least, and arriving at this commentary on unexamined assumptions and selection bias, I had no evidence there might be any truth to it. But since the orcas started the war with yachts [1], their cousins the dolphins are also fighting a rear-guard action.
So I guess I will keep this around for a while longer while we see how this plays out in the rising oceans.
[0] Laugh while you can, monkey boy
[1] You’re welcome [2]
[2] Is that dark sarcasm?
I got Covid, and it was nice this summer, so I was able to go see some shows in that short period of immunity without fear of long-term illness or sweating my ass off.
For some reason I’m getting spam emails from some new vulture-capital-funded bullshit company that I have no business relationship with, and who should therefore not be spamming me with their bullshit. Their spiel is that they’ve helped themselves to the Mountain Project database, generated by work contributed gratis from users, for other users, and are going to sell it for a monthly subscription fee.
I’m sure this will work out exactly as well as did Gracenote/CDDB, Discogs, DejaNews, Reddit, Slashdot, StackExchange, etc. for all the folks who contributed their time to building up a user-generated database which will now become privately-owned and controlled, siloed, marketed, corporatized, ad-driven, AI-ified, and merged with skiing, surfing, mountain-biking, BASE-jumping, and e-biking, then eventually sold after the IPO cash-out enriches the VCs and employee numbers 1-9 for pennies on the dollar to the suckers^W stockholders, and all the PII, password, and credit card information of the original contributors ends up on unencrypted disks sold to the lowest bidder for data-scraping before ending up unrecycled in landfills leaching toxic metals into the local water table after using enough energy on LLM to drive the chatGPT-driven UI (so they don’t have to hire an actual human) to power Nigeria for a year.
Not to mention that it will bring even more people with even fewer outdoor skills or ethics into already trampled-out areas to get them closed to climbing forever. They even brag in the email about giving you the beta on climbing on private lands.
I’m sure that will work out well. Especially in modern-day Texas.
Supertopo and MP did no favors to the climbing community in the long run. If you think I’m wrong, see the inevitable wilderness bolting ban that’s about to come down. Pads are going to be not far behind. Back to the days of bruised heels, when we tried Midnight Lightning like it was meant to be done [1].
I’m not going to link to these vultures. I am pretty sad to see the AAC and AF involved in this bullshit. Though not surprised, especially by the latter, given the inside scoop I’ve heard from disgruntled former AF workers (all of them, it seems, never met one who had anything good to say about working there, and plenty of tales of the bullshit unethical work practices), and my own experience dealing with the highly ineffectual AF (local climbing area is still closed, going on 20 years now, with little-to-no-work by the AF, especially at the beginning when they wouldn’t even return our calls).
[0] Get with the program Firefox, stop telling me that the literal word of the year is misspelled. Oh wait, Firefox is on that enshittification list too…
[1] I got up to the match and mantle a couple of times with A Well-Known-Climbers’ running beta stream before I chickened out because there was nothing below me but a hard hard deck and Good Intentions spotting, and I had already broken both heels once… definitely the high point (literally) of my bouldering career.
To my great disappointment, the only acknowledgement was the email. The linked video in the email was not… this:
Perhaps in 5-6 years after they’ve all wrapped themselves around a light post (with hopefully no other fatalities), the streets will be a bit quieter as these jerks aren’t street racing at 5 AM to get to their minimum wage job at the 7-11 in order to keep making the payments on their 84 month leases.
Now do the Mustang. And Camaro. And Raptor. Harley seems to be handling their own demise as the boomers age-out or die-out of shitty loud motorcycles with crappy Nazi-themed helmets.
Here are the bandages Kaiser Permanente is using on patients today:
Amazon “Fresh” is just a way for Whole Foods to get rid of things that have either already expired, or will expire tomorrow.
Spring fever
When I first moved to Los Angeles lo these many years ago, I had spring fever every day. Not too hot, not too cold, not too humid [1]. Anywhere that I had lived previously, if there was a day like any average day in LA, you’d take the day off, because there would only be five days like that a year. You couldn’t afford to waste them doing something stupid like school or work.
Eventually, I overcame the impulse to blow off work every day [2], because the weekends were also nice, so it was okay [3]. I’d get my nice days in every weekend [4].
But spring fever is coming back. The summers are no longer mostly pleasant. Humidity, anopheles mosquitos year round, high dew point — the evenings don’t cool off so much. Winter isn’t as cool. No adiabatic frost on the grass. I haven’t even thought about backcountry skiing in the San Gabes in a decade, nor heading up to Baldy for a morning.
You can still avoid it by living over the hill. I still needed a sweatshirt at the Hollywood Bowl in August. Maybe it’ll be worth adding the 90 minute commute back into the day, twice a day, soon. House prices will reflect that, but maybe it’s time to get while the getting is good.
[1] Yeah, it could get hot for a week in the summer a couple of times, but it was a dry heat, and below freezing in the winter in Pasadena, but the evenings cooled off, and the days warmed up. Though I installed central air when the c. 1913 floor heater died around 2005, it didn’t really get turned on very much until 2015
[2] I didn’t
[3] You didn’t used to need to check the weather in the summer between May and the end of September, because tomorrow is going to be just like today, statistically.
[4] and also I would schedule my time so that I could play hooky Wednesday mornings and go to the Hole from 6-11 in the morning in the summer, and ski Mt Baldy from 7-11 in the winter, and still get a full day in. Those days are also gone…
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