Isn't that like the plot of a movie with Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn?
I mean the one where one kid gets kidnapped and the other doesn't.
Is the cat-monkey story similar to how Tom Sawyer gets other kids to paint the fence for him?
Moral: don't put your nuts near fire.
3: the movie where the monkey kidnapped the cat?
The moral of the catspaw story is going to be something like "be cautious about whether a friend is taking advantage of you."
The moral is that Michael Cohen went to jail and Donald Trump didn't.
Monkeys suck and pigs shit on their own testicles.
Maybe the old version of the girls and the sports car guy is Lilith and Eve.
Presumably, people still tell kids not to get into a stranger's car unless the plate matches the plate the app says the car should have.
Ace and Pokey both responded, "No one got murdered! They were just kidnapped!" which reminded me how little context kids have for the folklore and panics of previous generations. They had no concept of ransom or death or anything beyond "Sometimes adults take children just to have them, for their collection."
Also worth noting, kid's stories can be intense. One of my formative childhood references -- when I was five or six, I had a collection of cassette tapes that my parents recorded various storytelling albums from the library, and a cassette player in my room, so I could listen to stories on my own. It was a broad collection, some were collections of short stories, some we longer, classics, newer, etc. My two favorites were probably The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Many Moons (by Thurber), but there were some that I liked that were just devastating. I still get a lump in my throat thinking about The Trumpeter of Krakow or The Wounded Wolf (which ends okay, but is not a light story).
My kids quiver in fear over the idea of bowler hats. I am not exaggerating. Biggest pansies I've ever seen.
Heh. Never realized that was the origin of "catspaw."
In the long war between cats and primates, that was the low point for cats until I Can Haz Cheezburger.
The first story kind of sounds like Little Red Riding Hood plus a goody-goody character foil.
||
Can someone tell me how Alec Baldwin had a real gun as a prop on a movie set and fatally wounded somebody? If we had fewer guns in the US, then they wouldn't be so prominent in films. But how can there not be more safety standards for this?
|>
I wonder if the "original" tales were in many cases intended for children at all.
He had a real gun for the same reason he had a real horse: a fake wouldn't have worked.
Pretty much any unaltered weapon will fire a blank round perfectly well. But most will not then fire another - because they rely on taking off a bit of the gas generated and pushing it down a wee pipe, the gas tube, to the side and back, to cycle the working parts and load another round. With no bullet, all the gas just rushes out the muzzle and none of it goes down the gas tube. So if you want to fire blank, you need to block up most of the muzzle, to create enough back pressure in the barrel and gas pipe to move the working parts. For training we do this with a Blank Firing Adaptor- a sort of plug that screws on the end. It is big and yellow for safety reasons.
For films you can't do that so they block up part of the inside of the barrel - the weapon is now more or less permanently blank firing only.
If you somehow load a live round into a weapon with a BFA the BFA will catch it with a hell of a noise and you'll get put on a charge. If you somehow do that with a movie prop weapon the barrel will very probably explode and in any case it will be a hell of a mess.
But, crucially, none of this is true for a lot of Western movie type weapons. They are not gas operated. The Winchester rifle is lever action - you swing s lever with your hand to load a new round. Revolvers rotate the cylinder with the force of your trigger pull.
What that means is that they are perfectly able to work as movie props with no adaptation - they'll load and fire blanks and it'll look just like you're firing live. Great! Less work!
But it also means that there is nothing blocking the barrel - no BFA. So if somehow you get a live round in there, or some other object is already up there like debris or dirt, it'll come out the barrel unobstructed.
If that's the case, the question is why there was a live round on set.
24: might just have been a bit of debris, like remains of a previous round (that's what killed Brandon Lee).
24 before seeing 23. But in this case two people got shot, which makes me wonder more what happened.
Depending how close she was, just the gas blast from an unobstructed blank round could have killed her. Safety distance for a 5.56mm blank with BFA is 6m. That's a long way!
We've no idea how the director got injured - maybe he had a coronary when he saw the shooting, or fell over and broke his ankle or something.
Anyone who could appear in Thomas and the Magic Railroad is capable of anything.
Or if he was standing close to or behind her he could have been injured by bits of the same debris blast that killed her, or indeed by secondary projectiles (bone or tooth fragments for example).
Peter Fonda wasn't involved in any deaths I'm aware of, but he went to University of Nebraska-Omaha and appeared on screen as Ayn Rand's husband.
We'll need the investigation to complete. But here's someone with a fuller rundown of different ways they mimic guns on set and relevant precautions that should be asked about.
I don't know anything about guns or movies but the guy who posted this thread seems to know what he's talking about
https://twitter.com/Neptunesalad/status/1451410920584855559
Maybe you will want to sign this petition too!
26: I think it was only fired once. The first person hit died; the second was treated in the hospital.
That sounds like a lot for one bullet to do.
Revolvers rotate the cylinder with the force of your trigger pull
Double action. Single action (like the Colt .45 Peacemaker) rotates the cylinder when you cock the hammer.
We don't have many details yet but this sounds like a major fuckup by the props/armored person.
Um https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1451634746061168646?s=21
From the story linked above
There were two misfires on the prop gun on Saturday and one the previous week, the person said, adding "there was a serious lack of safety meetings on this set."
Jesus
Alec Baldwin is listed as a "Producer" on Rust along with several others. I am not sure if that is just a figurehead title or whether he was an actual part of the management team that looks to have been running a fraught corner-cutting operation.
Shooting began on Oct. 6 and members of the production said they had been promised the production would pay for their hotel rooms in Santa Fe.
But after filming began, the crews were told they instead would be required to make the 50-mile drive from Albuquerque each day, rather than stay overnight in nearby Santa Fe.
This isn't exactly surprising; Santa Fe is much more expensive than Albuquerque and it's not uncommon for people to commute like this. It does point to poor management, though. They probably promised to cover the hotel rooms in Santa Fe before they checked to see how much that would cost.
I'm assuming. I don't think I've ever been to Albuquerque.
I copied it from your above comment.
49: It took me a long long time to figure out that teo was referring to your misspelling of Santa Fe.
Oh, right. I guess I just assumed Albuquerque was spelled wrong because it looks wrong.
43: Maybe just means that he put up some money? Or perhaps they gave him "producer" billing as a vanity title?
If merely a figurehead title, does this/should this exonerate him from blame/responsibility? I have no idea how these things work, but I'm assuming there will be lawsuits.
Shooting began on Oct. 6 and members of the production said they had been promised the production would pay for their hotel rooms in Santa Fe.
This really sounds like way more than one bullet.
I'll show myself Up if I ever get past the giant sad at the start.
I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
At least Peter Scolari didn't live to see this.
I'll show myself my self if I ever get to go to me.
I drove through Albuquerque once. This gives me a rich understanding of the place and its people.
I lived in Albuquerque for 6 weeks once (plus maybe another week of other times I've been there). I think that's tied for 10th in places I've been, just ahead of Cambridge England and Utrecht Netherlands, and just behind Portland OR.
No, probably 11th. Forgot about Aarhus Denmark!
63:. Is this chronological order or best to worst?
Aarhus, it is where we used to sleep.
Aarhus, then we moved on to Utrecht.
Aarhus, is a municipal seat.
Aarhus, near where Grendel used to eat.
Places I've lived longest. Right now it's interesting because the 3 places I've lived longest (what I think of as my home town even though we moved there when I was 10, my grad school location, and my current location) are all within a year of each other for first place.
I guess it depend on how you count the college years, but I'm coming up on Pittsburgh being the place I've lived longest.
I have only lived in 6 different cites.
Inside a cite it's too small to move around.
Speaking of fables and where I used to live, did everyone else has a local "haunted house" story? Our was "The House of Crying Babies." Supposedly a bunch of babies got killed in this abandoned farm house because (reasons) and to this day you can still hear them cry if you go in at night. I think I was at the house (opinions varied as a which house), but during the day. I walked inside, but not very far because the floor was clearly not strong. Then I shot a refrigerator that was on the ground outside.
The stupid birds were avoiding us just because we were shooting at them.
Aarhus midt på aargade.
Huset vårt midt i gaten vår.
Then I shot a refrigerator that was on the ground outside.
WORST COVER VERSION EVER.
Freeman Dyson might be a genius, but his vacuum cleaner seems designed to maximize how often I have to bend down when I clean the housel
Stop trying to vacuum the Eucharist, Moby! It's already clean.
I just learned a new word, thanks to the power of typos.
I've lived in Albuquerque for I think about 14 years. I've now been in Anchorage for 10(!).
Have you been there long enough to really know you're in the largest state of the union?
Wow, I wouldn't have thought you moved to Anchorage before I moved here.
I know, right? It really doesn't seem like that long.
It seems like just yesterday, you were fleeing New Jersey.
Albuquerque is my dad's hometown and pre-covid we'd get out there every year or two to see the ever more populous Catholic extended family. This especially skewed lurid on the city, since all we tended to see, apart from the airport, were the big dumb gated communities where my relatives have their big dumb semi-mansions with pools. On our last trip we finally broke away long enough to see a couple of grad school friends who are now UNM faculty and live in a cute casita down by campus, and took a downtown street with actual foot traffic to get tacos and micheladas. So that was nice. Our friend's shock and horror was something to see, giving us a ride back to the gated community: "WHAT IS THIS? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? I HAD NO IDEA THIS WAS HERE!"
So I guess there are many Albuquerques.
You can't step into the same Albuquerque twice.
Ha. The second Albuquerque in 88 is the one I grew up in, but with plenty of contact with the first.
When I was there we lived for 4 weeks in some UNM faculty members lovely house near the university, and I'd go play chess at Frontier Restaurant. For reasons I'm not quite clear on (maybe this was part of the plan, but there was also some mixup where the person we were renting from thought we were going to be paying for the cost of them watering their lawn and we didn't think that) the last two weeks we lived at a rather sketchy long-stay hotel with a pool and a guy who hung out by the pool with his pet iguana. So I saw two Albuquerques, but neither was the suburban one.
I also somehow had computer access at UNM and it was the first time I'd ever seen a graphical browser. I think I mostly used it to look at Magic: the Gathering cards, even though I wasn't allowed to play it on account of the satanism.
Hey Shell, you know it's kind of funny
Texas always seemed so big
But you know you're in the largest state in the union
When you're anchored down in Anchorage
Spent some time in Albuquerque, much more in Santa Fe and other places in northern New Mexico. Generally like the whole area and contemplated retiring there. But have not.
I do get depressed with the Rio Ranch sprawl along 550 going northwest out of town. But you soon get into some lovely and stark countryside. I found it interesting that Breaking Bad really emphasized the more desert-y environs of the city rather than the more mountainous ones.
Spent some time in Albuquerque, much more in Santa Fe and other places in northern New Mexico. Generally like the whole area and contemplated retiring there. But have not.
I do get depressed with the Rio Ranch sprawl along 550 going northwest out of town. But you soon get into some lovely and stark countryside. I found it interesting that Breaking Bad really emphasized the more desert-y environs of the city rather than the more mountainous ones.
And right on cue, I was just reminded that my grandfather in Albuquerque turns 94 today and I should send him an email. Which I did, signed with my old name because I don't need to be the thing that kills him, but at some point Albuquerque is really going to start asking why I don't visit any more.
I used to hang out at the Frontier all the time in high school. Back then it was open 24 hours but I don't think it is anymore.
Looks like the Chess club still meets there: https://www.nmchess.org/clubs
I have never even been close to Albuquerque (which I totally do not know how to spell). I feel so northern and provincial.
I haven't been to Albuquerque in ages, but I was in Santa Fe for a few days this summer. Truly amazing food.
Jammies is a New Mexico person, too. He went to college in Las Cruces.
So did my dad! They used to go down to Juárez for a good time; I gather it was very much not the Juárez of today.
Weirdly enough, a high school classmate has a son who just started at NMSU and I have no idea why he picked it. I've never met him, but there's family connection on either side.
My oldest was born in the kirky. I think of it very fondly.
Two internet friends drove me from Madison to L.A. as part of [an extremely long story involving a road trip] in 1998. I don't think it had been clear to them from the internet that I was still 100% a kid mentally if not legally. Once we crossed the border into New Mexico, the two of them, who had been trading off driving, started wondering about things like gas stations and food and hotel rooms and so on, while I began sobbing in the backseat because the desert was so beautiful I couldn't stand it.
Me: "Pleeee-e-e-ease pull over the ca-a-ar..."
Them: "Um, this is the freeway, lurid, we can't exactly just pull off the road wherever we feel like it."
Me: "I WANT TO SEE A YUCCA FOR A LONG TIME, sob sob sob sob"
Them: "..."
Them: "Okay, looks like 150 miles to Albuquerque, can you check the map?"
Me: "Don't you have souls????"
I got so much schadenfreude out of the scene in 88, though, as well as normal freude from the sopapillas.
Probably the highlight of that road trip for me was the church sign in Tulsa which, due to a single unfortunately malformed letter, enjoined visitors to "COME AND WORSHIP THE LIVING GOO". I think we actually did pull over the car that time because both drivers were incapacitated.
We had a yucca in our front yard. You can just go buy one at a garden center.
I'm pretty sure the fable for the car story is the Charles Perrault version of Little Red Riding Hood--a delightfully gruesome and dark fairy tale that differs a little from the Grimm version we are more familiar with https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault02.html
Something that got lost in the shuffle of the heated thread is the news that teo is joining Twitter. It's like reading someone you know has decided to join Scientology. Don't do it, teo!
Are you the only one here not an operating thetan?
On their fence's gate, one of my neighbors put up a stop sign with "Dead Inside" written on it in graffiti-style letters. It took me a while to realize this was a Halloween thing and not an emotional declaration.
|| And here I'd been told that cops having a shoot to incapacitate policy was a pipe dream. |>
The United States is going to pass Belgium this week in covid deaths per capita, putting us at the top of what used to be called the first world. Excepting San Marino.
113: Sorry! I held out as long as I could, but Twitter is where a lot of the online energy that used to be on blogs has gone, and they've been making it harder and harder to just read it without signing up. I still haven't tweeted anything myself and don't intend to anytime soon.
||
More details on the Baldwin/Rust shooting. Suggests both injuries came from one discharge.
There was in fact an armorer in the crew, contra Twitter. However, it suggests an AD took the gun from a cart on his own, calling it out as cold without checking.
And it says the cart had "left outside the structure because of COVID-19 restrictions" - a long way of saying the armorer was not in fact allowed on set? That particular set, at least.
|>
What it sure sounds like from what I've read, though I'm not sure how fully confirmed it is, is that people were using the actual guns used in the film to go shoot bullets out in the desert at night for fun, and that's how a real bullet ended up in the gun. (It was supposed to have neither bullets nor blanks, but given that it went fully through one person it really seems like it's a real bullet and not a blank. I don't know whether the possibility that it was a blank and there was a projectile stuck in the barrel has been ruled out though.)
122: One thing I thought was in the various Twitter explainers was that the material used in blanks can come apart, or other stuff can get lodged in a gun with a blank. That might better explain one discharge hitting two people, if that's what happened.
I held out for a long time too. I do enjoy it, primarily because I keep it really small and because I try to follow friends and small single-purpose feeds. I like the ones who tell me whether something is a recluse spider, or how many more minutes of daylight we get (from winter solstice to DST). I do follow some of the clever pundit types, but as soon as they drain me, I unfollow. Be really willing to unfollow; if someone says something clever, it'll get to you even if you don't follow them.
The thing that drives me crazy on Twitter is the amount of sponsored content and other promoted stuff in there that is not from the people I've followed. Somehow I can handle the amount on IG and FB without losing focus, but the frequency is too high for me on Twitter.
Sponsored comment: Wouldn't a glass of Ovaltine be great right about now?
I'm feeling both hungry and thirsty for something malted and weird, all of a sudden. Weird.
If 122 is true that's really fucked up
123: and also that 'live ammo' on set means 'loaded with a blank', not necessarily a bullet. The contrast is with an unloaded gun (cold) or rubber gun prop. One of the frustrating things about the hot takes on this is people acting like Baldwin should have been treating the gun as if he were a private arms owner. No, actually, you don't want the talent trying to clear the carefully loaded blank out of the gun before the shot.... and gun safety is taken seriously enough that there's already a lot of regulations and an armourer responsible for the safe use of firearms. Whatever failed here it wasn't Baldwin-the-actor's fault (although Baldwin-the-producer might be, but swirling rumors haven't settled.)
125 went away when I installed an adblocker. I only use the laptop browser for Twitter (no phone), and I'm about to turn the Impulse Blocker add-on back on to block it for the day. Teo, I think you can just do what you were doing and visit individual accounts while avoiding the "timeline" as much as possible
oh shit my office is completely infested with ants. Why??? Is there something dead in here? Pray for me. This is arguably worse than Twitter.
They say "treat every gun like it could go off at any time no matter what you're doing with it." I would get if that were for safety in the one-in-a-thousand freak event. But it seems that guns really do go off without their holder's intent with surprising frequency? Weird if so. Guns are such an old, analog technology, you'd think all the predictable kinks would be worked out by now.
They have been. The solution is "treat every gun like it could go off at any moment."
It's not like the guns are failing. It's that people are pulling the trigger when they didn't mean to.
Teo, I think you can just do what you were doing and visit individual accounts while avoiding the "timeline" as much as possible
I've been doing that to some extent, yeah, although the timeline is also pretty useful as long as it's set to "latest tweets" rather than letting the algorithm dish up whatever. (That's a definite advantage over FB, which doesn't have a comparable option.)
This is arguably worse than Twitter.
I aspire to treat ants at the office and Twitter the same way: Somebody else's problem.
132: In this case he's practicing doing a quick draw, which is exactly the sort of thing which is liable to end up with an accidental discharge. That's something you do for western movies but which wouldn't be a typical way of using a gun in non-movie settings.
Twenty years ago when I was a summer associate, I was peripherally involved with litigation around a particular brand of rifles that would sometimes go off when jarred even when no one had pulled the trigger. Which seems like a bad kind of rifle.
That does happen. The Sten was a truly terrifyingly unsafe weapon. Cheapness was its only redeeming feature.
But there's no weapon ever made that will go off, even if jarred, unless a human has deliberately loaded it and made it ready first.
Gosh it's weird that so many people keep loaded guns laying around at home, not locked up.
But if someone makes one, the NRA will stick up for them.
LA Times reported "The projectile whizzed by the camera operator but penetrated Hutchins near her shoulder, then continued through to Souza." It's possible that they've made a mistake, but they're clearly saying here that a single projectile passed the whole way through, rather than say several pieces of debris going in the same direction to hit multiple people.
At any rate 130 is right, this almost certainly wasn't Baldwin's fault. That said, part of the armorer's job is to give training to everyone, and it sounds like often that training is something like "Before handing you a gun I will demonstrate in your sight that it is empty" in which case the actors should refuse to use it if that hasn't happened (for example, because they don't actually have the armorer on the set, as seems to be the case from reporting). You can't expect actors to be experts in gun safety or gun usage, and it's not reasonable to expect them to be able to check the weapon themselves, but it is reasonable to expect them to follow any protocols that the experts have put in place. It seems likely though that in this case there were no such protocols in place, so I suspect it isn't Baldwin's fault. (The other caveat is that if it turns out people were playing around with the guns for funsies I wouldn't be surprised if they reason they got away with it was that Baldwin was the people doing it, but that's just speculation on speculation on speculation.)
After reading the NYT story about Great Falls yesterday and the WaPo story about Kalispell today, I'm not sure how far we really are from a more traditional explanation about what might cause an accidental discharge: https://www.legendsofamerica.com/lydia-gilbert-witch/
Basically either the quote in 143 is wrong, or it was a real bullet, or Baldwin was way way too close to people to be practicing with a real gun (cold or not).
137: I know two people who I'm pretty sure shot themselves in the foot doing that. Anyway, they shot themselves in the foot for certain and it wasn't too avoid the draft.
Was either one of them a basketball player with a really great name that I can't remember, in a nightclub?
There were two NFL players: Aqib Talib and Plaxico Burress. Both were at clubs. I will leave it as an exercise for the Unfoggetariat which of those names is more cool.
They're both great if you write the crosswords.
Aqib Talib is a million times more useful for crosswords, but Plaxico Burress is definitely what Heebie meant.
I guess so. Short, has a q without a u. You can't beat that.
131: "I told you I would come back, even if I am a bit streamlined."
BURRESS isn't totally useless because RRESS are fantastic ending letters. PLAXICO is very difficult to get in a grid. If PLAXICOBURRESS were 15 letters (the width of a grid) instead of 14 it'd be fantastic. But in general short words are just so so much more useful than long words unless they're 15 and you're writing Fr/Sa puzzles.
I get that there are a lot of people who think that they're going to be called upon to fire their weapon with no time to load, but at some point 'treat every gun as if it is loaded' has to be because 'because it probably is because everyone is bad at remembering to take the bullets out.' My cell phone has more user-friendly failsafes and it doesn't shoot anything.
The new thing is somehow forgetting you are carrying a gun through airport security.
Pokey did that, but it was a nerf gun.
A really good long thread from a film armorer about film gun safety protocols, and why proper protocols should have prevented this tragedy: https://twitter.com/sl_huang/status/1451797888158375937.
The fundamental problem is that we've developed a culture of complete fucking stupidity around pretty much everything to do with guns.
"new thing is somehow forgetting you are carrying a gun through airport security."
There was a senior Israeli policeman back in about 2002 or so who did this IIRC. (By accident.) Flew Ben Gurion to JFK to Chicago, got to his hotel, opened his carryon bag and there was his issue weapon. No one spotted it.
157 is entirely accurate. Another reason why revolvers are dangerous - as well as having no safety catch, a lot of them can't be loaded and yet unable to fire on a trigger pull, which is a very useful state for a gun to be in.
Come on at least the other spambots make generic but sincere sounding comments. Put some minimal effort into it. [NB: This comment references a series of spam comments that have since been removed. --The Mgt.]
169 was when the spambot's cat jumped up on the keyboard
An engineer we contract with (through a very large company) twice forgot to remove his personal use concealed weapon before traveling. He was arrested, and one time made the local news. Weirdly, this did not affect his employment, which relies on his ability to travel.
'"Have gun, will travel" reads the card of a man.'
157.last: You'll need to upgrade for that feature.
Here's a story about the guy who turned down the prop master position because they wouldn't let him have a full-time armorer. These producers need to get charged with felonies.
Nothing looks as rented as a rented armorer.
In the Copenhagen airport they found a small souvenir pocket knife out then-10yo had forgotten was in his carryon. They were real assholes about it, giving the whole family a lecture about how they could call the police and have everyone arrested for bringing a knife through security. They pretended they were being so generous by letting us go and just confiscating the knife and making a kid cry.
JFC, someone told the LATimes about the 1AD:
"That's when they brought in Dave because he had a reputation for being lax on safety," Therond said. "Apparently, when the first AD walks off a project, Dave is known as the guy you call."
That's good job advice. Be known for something no one else does. Have your niche.
But, yes. It really does look like the producers are criminal.
The 1AD also apparently was fired after an accidental discharge in a 2019 filming.
I really hope this doesn't become a scrum on the 24-year-old armorer, who may have been inexperienced but likely as a result wasn't allowed to properly do her job.
I dunno, I feel that if your inexperience and incompetence gets two people shot, you're probably due a wee bit of a scrum.
At the moment I'd be hoping for something like the 1AD does jail time, and the armorer and several producers get a felony conviction with probation and a ban on working in film. I don't see any indication that this is going to come down on the armorer first rather than the AD.
The last similar case I read that several people (I think 1AD, Director, and some producers? I should double check this was in Georgia 10ish years ago.) got convictions but with that probation arrangement and no jail time.
178 The director did 2 years of a ten year sentence and a couple of others ten year suspended sentences with probation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Rider_(film)
I'm expecting to find out that someone who wanted to murder the cinematographer deliberately put a live round in Baldwin's gun, but it's possible that as a young man I watched too much Columbo.
Another article going after the 1AD, no way he's not the person who it comes down on hardest:
" The assistant director who handed actor Alec Baldwin a prop firearm that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza on the set of "Rust" last week had been fired from a previous film in 2019 after an unexpected discharge on that set, according to a producer from that film."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/10/25/alec-baldwin-rust-search-warrant/
179: Having anything to do with the Allman Brothers makes for an aggravating circumstance.
Sorry 181 is the same link as 175.
Don't I know you from the cinematographer's funeral?
Too soon, Paul, too soon.