Lion ponderings

The sky is no longer dark enough to see any stars, but a photo lions took 13 years ago had a few new nuggets when scanned by http://nova.astrometry.net. The lion kingdom knew it contained M101, NGC 5422 & NGC 5474, but didn't know about all the other NGC objects. The astrophotography days were during a time lions were online very little. There were no blogs or goo tube videos documenting those days. Lions only had a clumsy home made star tracker.

The lion kingdom's 1st sighting of an Arri was this photo, 30 years ago. It was color & higher resolution, back then. The lion kingdom thought it must have been a low budget movie to use such a small camera with only 1 spool & such a short name. In old age, lions realized there were actually 2 spools in the magazine, side by side. Smaller cameras are highly prized because they're easier to work with. Arri was actually used on Return of the Jedi. It might have been just as popular as Panavision, 30 years ago, but today is the most prized digital camera by focusing on dynamic range more than resolution. Nowdays, lions just need a Gopro & brushless gimbal. It gets video just as good as the 30 year old Arri 35BL.

Dog's way home is a slow slog through boring dialog, computer animated dog, & Canadia being portrayed as Colorado. 1 fact it got right was pit bulls being banned in Denver. Computer animated dog & cat were failures, but it was the only way to get the fight scenes. It was a warning of just how bad the live action lion king is going to be.   Its only redeeming factor was a somewhat poignant ending.

It occurred to the lion kingdom that what kept it fascinated by the Commodore 64 years after the much faster IBM's was the distinct appearance of its graphics.  The choice of color palette was the mane thing.  Its bright green color really popped.  Its default light blue on dark blue was well chosen.  Most of the lion kingdom's Commodore 64 experiences were with greyscale monitors, but its colors still looked better in greyscale than IBM. To this day, lions still use light blue text on a dark blue background.  Its worst color was brown, but the other 15 were bright & contrasty.  Its other choices in graphics hardware gave it a distinct look.  It forced programmers who weren't very artistic to make artistic graphics. The use of the raster interrupt tended to lock animations at a tight 60fps.  The 40x25 character screen was more visually appealing than the 80x24 DOS screen.  The unseriffed characters were easier to read & more efficient.  Sprites were a visually

A Dog's Purpose was a good but underappreciated movie.

The lion kingdom long wanted to replicate a famous photo of Notre Dame from 1989 & realized it would never happen, today. Helas, it was actually Amiens cathedral which is still standing. The lion kingdom only remembered how narrow the columns were, how large & detailed it was, pushing the limits of 35mm. Modern equipment could make a much sharper photo. It's no longer possible to scan & upload magazines like it was 30 years ago, but there was a crummy photo of that photo on ebay. It etched James Stanfield's name in lion memory. There was a photo of him elsewhere in that issue, with 3 professional 35mm cameras strapped around his neck. How the lion kingdom wanted to have 3 35mm cameras like that & be able to shoot hundreds of exposures without paying for it. The lion kingdom eventually got a much better camera than what he had, but it was so painful to lug around, it hardly ever got used. He must have put on those 3 cameras for the self portrait, but on

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-slams-fed-again-says-151047489.html It also comes days after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, a frequent target of Trump’s criticism, told lawmakers at a Democratic Party retreat that the central bank won’t bend to political pressure, according to two people in the room for the closed-door event. Powell's comedian job is secure. U.S. central bankers in March signaled no rate moves in 2019, based on their outlook for solid if unspectacular economic growth with inflation near goal. No rate hikes until 2021.  2020 is an election year. Prior to Trump’s tweeting, global policy makers had spent the weekend leaping to the defense of the Fed and other central banks facing pressure from politicians. At talks of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said on Saturday that he was “certainly worried about central bank independence” and especially “in the most important jurisdic

A.X.L. was a failure because it lacked an antagonist, but the lion kingdom long dreamed of having a robot dog as agile as the real thing. Energy storage was never up to the task. Direct drive motors once seemed ideal, but the weight of the copper turned lions towards lighter gearboxes & very small motors.  The lion kingdom has used servos with titanium sputtered gears with great success, but they're only titanium coated gears with heavy iron underneath. Fascination with the bronze age in the post Xena era drove the lion kingdom to watch Gladiator again. It was a horrible movie because the good guy died. Would consider it a good representation of life 2000 years ago. Normal people were very primitive. Royalty had the best the economy of the time could provide , which looked very opulent but was nowhere near as functional as today . The richest man in the world, 2000 years ago, couldn't have what the poorest people in the world have today. Wealth was s