Movies Watched -- Only the Brave (2017)

134 minute running time so at least 30 to 40 minutes too long. SPOILERS: I didn’t realize this movie was commemorating a real tragedy, memorializing a group of wildfire firefighters, a.k.a., “hotshots.” It did make me wonder if the disaster were avoidable … were bad decisions made? I guess that’s something you can’t dare ask.

What interested me about it most were the parallels to War Porn … Josh Brolin is a sergeant (“Superintendent”) leading his squad of brave and buff young white men into battle, except they’re not killing ragheads in the desert to protect the homeland, they are battling mother nature to protect homes in the western United States. The classic-rock soundtrack, the pretty blonde wives (and nurses!) who call their men heroes, the fetishizing of the gear and the rigors of the training — all the usual macho stuff, just a different context.

It wasn’t badly made, but it was way too long … the culture of wildfire firefighters is interesting, and they did about as good a job dramatizing it as they could … but, it gets a yellow rating from me.

Mark Zuckerberg, former junkie, current hotshot

Hard To Categorize

I skimmed this Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape (PDF) report. This is how they segmented the groups:

• Progressive Activists: younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry.

• Traditional Liberals: older, retired, open to compromise, rational, cautious.

• Passive Liberals: unhappy, insecure, distrustful, disillusioned.

• Politically Disengaged: young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic, conspiratorial.

• Moderates: engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant.

• Traditional Conservatives: religious, middle class, patriotic, moralistic.

• Devoted Conservatives: white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising, patriotic

Where do I fit in this? I’m secular, cosmopolitan, retired, open to compromise, rational, detached, patriotic, and civic-minded.

Movies Watched -- Girls Trip (2017)

122 minute running time so at least 20 to 30 minutes too long. I only made it 10 minutes in before going to 16x fast forward. This is so squarely aimed at black women of a certain age and class that it holds no appeal to anyone else. Who wants to watch foul-mouthed women with chemically-straightened hair spout vulgarities for two hours? Terrible. Red rating, avoid at all costs.

This made the Rotten Tomatoes Top 100 list, which shows you how broken that list is.

Donald Clarke’s review.

Gag me with a banana

Trading Psychology: Painful versus Hurtful

I learned the following idea from Jeff Davis, who is a wise man and a veteran trader.

When you’re trading, it’s important to distinguish between things that are hurtful and things that are painful. For example, if you don’t take a trade that goes in your favor, that’s hurtful but not painful. If you’re in a trade and get stopped out at breakeven, only to watch it go in your favor, that’s hurtful but not painful.

Painful is when you actually take a loss, there is real harm done (even when it’s a planned, controlled loss). Missed profits are not painful. You don’t want to equate missed profits with actual losses in your mind. You have to be very careful about this. Your mind will play all sorts of tricks on you, so you have to stay right on top of it.

So the next time you get tricked out of a position (or “juked” out as my buddy Smash likes to say), quickly ask yourself, was that truly painful or merely hurtful?

The Politically Correct Beatrix Potter

I’ve been reading all of Beatrix Potter’s many “tales” with my daughter, and was surprised to see in one of the books from our local library that the original text had been changed and an illustration had been excluded!

In The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, the original text, which I remember well, reads: “When old Mr. Bunny had driven the cat into the greenhouse, he locked the door. Then he came back to the basket and took out his son Benjamin by the ears, and whipped him with the little switch.”

In the 1991 Ottenheimer Publishers edition from our local library, the text reads [my emphasis]: “When old Mr. Bunny had driven the cat into the green-house, he locked the door. Then he came back to the basket and took out his son Benjamin by the ears, and spanked him with the little switch.”

The politically correct editors of 1991 had no trouble with Benjamin being pulled out by his ears, but they did change “whipped” to “spanked.” They also dropped the accompanying illustration of Mr. Bunny whipping Peter Rabbit, while in the background Benjamin Bunny is holding his backside and crying:

Then he took out his nephew Peter

Movies Watched -- Maudie (2017)

115 minute running time so at least 20 minutes too long. Stars Sally Hawkins, whom I first saw in The Shape of Water … she’s a pro actress, probably will win (or has won) an Oscar somewhere along the line … she plays a simpleton woman who paints folk art in the wilds of Nova Scotia, and eventually finds some fame (though not fortune) … but life was hard, and she had crippling arthritis … it’s sad and mostly unsentimental. She has an abusive, even more of a simpleton husband played by Ethan Hawke. It’s the story of this odd couple over the decades … I wasn’t super thrilled. Yellow rating.

(Mick LaSalle hated it.)

Ask the Boss

Multiple Time Frame Analysis

If you want to trade stocks successfully, you have to have a deep understanding of this image. Price patterns are identical regardless of time frame. Be clear about the time frame that you’re trading, and then zoom in and out in time to understand how those patterns relate.

Thanks, Ben-wa

Movies Watched -- Frantz (2017)

In German and French. 114 minute running time so at least 20 minutes too long. A romance-mystery of sorts … kind of interesting (set in post-WWI Germany and France) … exploring times when the truth brings more pain than lies … ultimately unsatisfying. Yellow rating.

Life goes on….

Rearranging Everything Under the Sun

The great Tal Wilkenfeld (who normally doesn’t sing) and a crew of percussive hipsters:

Movies Watched -- Louder than Bombs (2016)

103 minutes plus 6 minutes of credits, but felt interminable. Impossible to watch without ffwd. About a woman who’s a photojournalist; [spoiler] she commits suicide by head-on collision, leaving behind husband and two young sons.

Completely disjointed, with lots of flashbacks and dreams, etc. The main story is set three years after the crash. The marriage was troubled. The kids are troubled. Dad is a sort of typically weak Baby Boomer type. The high point happened when Rachel Brosnahan (who played Rachel Posner in House of Cards), a former girlfriend of the older boy, flashes her tits, which I believe she also did in HoC.

Heavy on heartstring piano music … these are issues of educated, upper-middle class white people awkwardly dealing with a tragedy, who really gives a shit? You just want to take all the characters in the movie and shake some sense into them.

Red rating, avoid.

No one cares about Truth, n'est-ce pas?