"Full Metal Jacket" as a Christmas Movie

In retrospect, "Full Metal Jacket" may not have been my best choice of Christmas movies.  I have some interesting science queued but why write of it when we will all die pointlessly anyway, right?

Ed:  if this is a prelude to the Jim Jones Christmas, we will hunt you down and burn your wretched corpse!

Nah, it's nothin' like that.  I really did watch the movie but it doesn't elicit the horror it once did whereas "Apocalypse Now" will do it every time.  No chance the latter will roll this Yuletide.

The movie gives plenty of reasons to be thankful and hardly any of them are politically correct.


Cadillac Man recommended "War Dogs" and that one is recent, maybe even from 2016.  I have not watched it as yet and prefer not to know much about it before I do.  I don't know if it's a match as a Christmas movie so it will keep until after.  "Saint Vincent" might be a match but I'm not sure and it will likely wait as well.

Ed:  all you do is sit about watching movies?

Don't you worry about me, li'l snowflake.  I've done things which would make all yer li'l piggies run home to Mummy at the same time and none of that was by watching YouTube videos.  Cadillac Man was never known for being a daredevil but he took a dive out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft.  Tinkerbell was never so inclined either but she did it too.

So carry on, li'l snowflake.  Continue doing, well, whatever boring as fuck thing you do.


I did start rolling Mister Toad's Wild Ride but that one didn't seem such a hit so I haven't been pursuing it that hard.  I've got no burning need to write it but I'm happy to do it if you get a bang out of it.

Ed:  basically, you're just screwing off?

Indubitably, dear Watson.

Ed:  'dear?'

It's Christmas.


I do miss the speed and the wind in the face.  My reaction time isn't at all suitable for high-speed motoring anymore but tooling around a few laps in a Ferrari would be the closest approach to divinity which is possible on Earth, even if it's only for the sound of twelve cylinders screaming to automotive perfection.

Ed:  the cars are so much drive-by-wire now any fool could drive one!

Sure.  Let's see any fool drive one at 200 mph.

Ed:  this nostalgic crap is tedious rubbish!

It's not nostalgia when I've never driven a Ferrari at all, much less at 200 mph.  This is flat-out fantasy.


There hasn't been much about the Rock City either but there's some additional impetus since Elon Musk has similar thinking:  there's not much which can be done with a city at ground level so go underground.  I didn't pursue it as yet but he's proposing some type of tunnel-munching hardware.

Fort Worth is the driver for the Rock City since there's so much wasted space and the only result of that is one hell of a lot more driving than is really necessary to get anywhere.  When everything has to be the biggest, the thing which gets largest of all is the colossal waste of time in commuting.

Cincinnati was another since it could take well over half an hour to get to work and it was particularly grating since I've worked on mainframes all my life and much of that was via telecomputing.  The Big Bosses never accepted telecomputing as real work and I kept bringing it back but only got myself into the dumper for doing it.  There's much more telecomputing now but there are likely still blockheaded bosses who are preventing the progressives from really getting anything done.

Therefore, build underground in three dimensions and slash distances between any two points.  That immense hassle of travel which is almost ubiquitous for human existence now suddenly evaporates and the intriguing aspect of the Rock City is in the sociological changes which it seems would inevitably come.

Say working people on average save an hour per day in commute time which is lost to any productive purpose.  Say we have one hundred million working people commuting every day.  If that commute were eliminated, there would be one hundred million hours of increased free time from the people who are, at least in a production context, the most impressive force around.

Those are wild numbers except for the general scope and the consequence is incalculable, almost unknowable, since we have really never had that freedom since the advent of cities.


It's easily conceivable that the potential changes to the quality of existence make the Rock City as much of a Sociological Imperative as it is for improved energy consumption, living green, less rapacious use of land, etc.


We have other important considerations queued as well.

Did Hazel invent the word "doozy" and what happened to such a great word?

Note:  if you now feel compelled to find out if she invented it, welcome to OCD.  (I don't know)

Did the Greeks invent oyster crackers?

When Australians tell their kids kangaroos pull Santa's sleigh, how do they explain why the toys don't fall out each time they jump?

It's science, mates.  It's science, I tell you.