Springing Ahead
Once again, we’ve moved the clocks ahead an hour into Daylight Saving Time. And, in the fall, we will ‘fall back’ and crank those dials.
This supposedly started during World War 1 to save coal—less needed for evening lighting. And it’s still good for tourism and recreation. In the fall, that shift helps a bit with those dark and cold mornings. But fewer places are doing this dance. BC has done their last shift, and will stay on DST. Saskatchewan dropped the change years ago, as did the Yukon.
Not that we actually have to crank all the clocks in our house to or fro an hour. It’s all automatic, synced via the Interwebs. Back in the 50s (yes, I’m old) it was all manual, and that first morning meant trying to remember which clocks you’d changed before bed. People would still be late/early for church, and ditto for school or work Monda morning. We were that “un-connected.”
NAS and stuff
My hard drive was overflowing with years' worth of movies, shows, and tunes. My son had been using a NAS (Network Attached Storage) and had an older one I could borrow. Empty, so I had to buy a hard drive for it. And learn more stuff. Two drives, actually, because it’s set up as a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). 4 TB Seagate Ironwolf drives. The borrowed box had some issues, so I got a Synology DS224+. Set up a Plex server, and now have 100’s of shows and movies—I could cancel all my streaming services, I suppose, and just re-watch everything.
I like the following list, via The Atlantic. Don’t have any, but most are Free To Watch via the Plex network.
Six Bizarre Movies That Are Actually Fun to Watch
Iron Sky (streaming on Prime Video and the Roku Channel)
Iron Sky is the sort of movie that demands a long-form investigation into how many hallucinogens were consumed during its production. The premise: Facing defeat in 1945, a group of Nazis flees to the moon and establishes the Fourth Reich, waiting for the right time to retake Earth—that is, until they are inadvertently discovered by an American astronaut.
Jupiter Ascending (available to rent on YouTube and Prime Video)
Jupiter Ascending is like no other movie ever made. What if Mila Kunis were a house cleaner named Jupiter who secretly owned all of planet Earth? What if Channing Tatum were a dog-human hybrid who skated around the sky on levitating boots? What if Sean Bean were also there?
The Wicker Man (streaming on the Roku Channel)
Edward Malus (played by Nicolas Cage) is a cop whose ex-fiancée asks him to investigate the disappearance of a young girl on an isolated island off the coast of Washington State. As he digs into the mystery, he gets caught up in the local matriarchal commune’s ancient rituals. LaBute’s The Wicker Man is intent on being a detective procedural; to modernize the story, it eschews the moralistic dissonance (and the musical elements) of the original, producing instead a madcap, paranoid thriller that is as absurd as it is fun.
Frozen (streaming on Prime Video and Tubi)
This is not your granddaughter’s Frozen. There are no trolls, reindeer, or enchanted snowmen—just a young man, his best friend, and his girlfriend trapped on a ski lift on a Sunday night. The resort won’t open again until Friday, and a storm is rolling in. I recommend this film not necessarily as a gratifying viewing experience—though I love it in a so-bad-it’s-good sort of way—but as a conversation starter. Frozen is a horror movie in which so many implausible things happen, and the characters make so many unfathomable errors, that you can spend hours debating its events with your friends and family.
But I’m a Cheerleader (streaming on Tubi and the Roku Channel)
A comedy about a high-school cheerleader sent to conversion-therapy camp could already be a bit of a bizarre premise, but even that description doesn’t cover how wonderfully weird this movie is. Megan (Natasha Lyonne) is thrust into the blue-and-pink-washed world of True Directions, where the girls learn how to vacuum and the boys are taught how to fix cars, among other activities, in the name of counteracting their homosexual tendencies. (These undertakings all, somehow, get pretty horny.)
Strawberry Mansion (streaming on Tubi, Prime Video, and the Roku Channel)
Christopher Nolan’s Inception may be the most famous film about dreams, but it fails in one regard: It doesn’t capture their ephemeral beauty, and how strange they can be. The 2021 movie Strawberry Mansion offers a more familiar vision of them, if that vision involves sailing through various purgatories in a pirate ship manned by bipedal rats or reincarnating as a caterpillar destined to inch across the planet for centuries.
BTW - here’s a tiny film -
Multi-tasking Day
I sent the passenger train in my RailRoader game off on a run, did some chopping and stirring for spaghetti sauce, and listened to Heather Cox Richardson. All good, except none of those things were on my to-do list.
Country Joe - RIP
Woodstock performer Country Joe McDonald died from complications resulting from Parkinson’s disease yesterday in Berkeley, California, on March 7, 2026, at the age of 84.
When he performed at Woodstock at age 27, Country Joe McDonald was already an honorably discharged veteran of the U.S. Navy. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy at age 17 and served for three years (1959–1962), including time stationed in Japan, although he later became a prominent anti-war activist and singer of the protest anthem “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” at Woodstock.
Thx to Woodstock Council of Elders Local Tribe #1969 on the FaceBook