movie notes : Iron Man 3 (spolier alert)

below the fold contains a spoiler concerning the movie Iron Man 3

Sports Utility Vehicle

Crosley Motors advertisement from a 1948 issue of Popular Science 

The vehicle at bottom left is labeled "Sports-Utility; Rear seat obtainable. Lowest priced Crosley – $130 less than station wagon."

My first thought at seeing a Crosley in person was "Wow, that's small!" As a comparison :

Model	1949 Crosley CD station wagon	1949 Ford Custom 2-door station wagon	1949 Chrysler Royal 4-door station wagon	1949 Chevrolet DeLuxe Styleline 4-door steel station wagon
Wheelbase	80 inches	114 inches	125.5 inches	115 inches
Length	145 inches	208 inches	206.5 inches	198 inches
Width	49 inches	71.7 inches	73.5 inches	74 inches
Height	57 inches	62.8 inches	65.5 inches	65.8 inches
Weight	1403 lbs	3523 lbs	4060 lbs	3465 lbs

Except for the height, the dimensions of a Crosley are about 70% of the others. And the weight difference is amazing. 

Politics as a religion

I predict they will add animatronic mechanisms to Hugo Chavez's mummified corpse within a few years. We have the technology! Some might think using a dead person as a puppet to say things with their authority is ridiculous. It may be, but ridiculousness doesn't stop people from doing it.

At the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, Nikita Khrushchev arranged for an old Bolshevik woman named Dora Lazurkina to stand up and announce:

"My heart is always full of Lenin. Comrades, I could survive the most difficult moments only because I carried Lenin in my heart, and always consulted him on what to do. Yesterday I consulted him. He was standing there before me as if he were alive, and he said: "It is unpleasant to be next to Stalin, who did so much harm to the party."

While Communists are officially atheist, it is apparently okay to take counsel from ghosts.

Propaganda from Venezuela

What Will the Future of Venezuela be without Hugo Chavez?

That giant baseball is flying straight towards Hugo's head.

"Gracias Presidente Venezuela Campeón!" translates to "Thanks President Venezuela Champion!" on a billboard put up by political brown nosers in the City of Caracas in 2006 (trusting my memory, I think it was the City of Caracas but I can't tell if the logo on the lower left actually says it was Caracas).

It references the fact that Venezuela won baseball's Caribbean Series (Serie del Caribe) in 2006. I can only assume that the city government of Caracas put up billboards in the years that a Venezuelan team didn't win blaming Chavez for not wearing his baseball uniform.

But now, with Hugo Chavez dead, how will any Venezuelan baseball team ever win again? Don't worry, they have a plan :

Hugo Chavez’s body will be preserved and forever displayed inside a glass tomb at a military museum not far from the presidential palace from which he ruled for 14 years, his successor announced Thursday in a Caribbean version of the treatment given Communist revolutionary leaders like Lenin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh.

Obviously, in order to win future baseball games they'll dress mummified Hugo up in a baseball uniform for all to see and thank. When the Olympics roll around they'll put him in a brightly colored unitard for weight lifting, speedos for swimming events, put him in riding boots & duct tape him atop a pony for equestrian sports, and dress him in sequined tights for ice skating.

I, for one, am thankful that other world leaders don't get into a sport uniform to associate themselves with other people's success. Imagine Angela Merkel or Gerhard Schröder squeezing into a short tennis skirt and putting photos of themselves on billboards because a German won a women's tennis championship.

It is amazing (but not surprising) that a government had thought that it had nothing better to spend money on than a suck-up billboard when sending him (if a toady felt compelled to be sycophantic) a thank you card would have been less expensive and Chavez would have been more likely to see it.

I think this image was found years ago at Devil's Excrement.

In previous pre-taxidermied Hugo Chavez news : Hugo Chavez thinks he is Obi Wan Kenobi.

a dishonest gun controller : Robyn Thomas

@10:50

Robyn Thomas of the Legal Community Against Violence (aka LCAV) a group funded by the Joyce Foundation (which has given millions to gun control groups over the years) complains about Oleg Volk's posters in this video.

Robyn Thomas of the Legal Community Against Violence : What I'm noticing more and more is this really scary marketing techniques which implies that women have some sort of moral obligation to own guns to protect their families. So, someone sent me this website which shows some of this marketing, some of this propaganda type ads about this and the actual ad says "Around midnight, she called 911 but by 12:06 the fighting was done. No time to wait for help to arrive, so she used her rifle to stay alive."

Robyn Thomas of the Legal Community Against Violence : Obviously what they are telling us here is as a woman you can't rely on law enforcement to help you if an "intruder" (makes air quotes) comes to your house you have to have a gun available and ready to defend yourself.

Narrator : Based in San Francisco, Robyn Thomas heads a group of lawyers called the Legal Community Against Violence. She's angry about advertising campaigns that urge parents to buy guns for their children 

Robyn Thomas of the Legal Community Against Violence : Here's one that says "Once mature enough to be home alone she's ready to have a gun of her own." To me this looks like a pretty young child (Oleg says the model was 16 at the time). The message is clear, parents should be buying a gun for their young child so they can defend themselves. How sort of ridiculous is it to think that a child is going to get this loaded weapon, is going to use it, be effective with it and what are you saying about the experience of that child in both instances.

Of course, Oleg isn't selling guns so it is dishonest to describe his work as marketing or ads. Few advertisements have no logos, no copyright notices, no mention of the product or no mention of the manufacturer. A gun controller lying to advance their position? I'm sure everyone is suitably flabbergasted. Oleg is a citizen using his First Amendment rights to promote his Second Amendment rights. They don't even show Oleg's web sites like a-human-right.com or olegvolk.net instead the show his images at a Canadian website in French that is critical of his work. 

If she had been honest and had said the posters were not some expensive advertising campaign but images produced by some guy on the internet would the TV producers have included it in the program?

Did you notice at 11:25 she used both hands to make air quotes/scare quotes when she says intruder? One wonders if the Legal Community Against Violence is opposed to shooting intruders while being less concerned about any violence an intruder might commit.

Czech Propaganda poster - Lenin Weeps

A Soviet tank makes Lenin cry on a Prague wall, Czechoslovakia (1968)

A poster taped on a Prague wall in Czechoslovakia during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia showing a tank with the Soviet star on the side driving over a marker labeled 4CCP/ЧССР (which is CSSR in Cyrillic aka the CzechoSlovak Socialist Republic) and a jug-eared, disembodied head of Vladimir Lenin weeping.

It sounds like someone drunk the Kool Aid if they thought that Lenin would cry over the Soviet Union invading another country. I doubt Lenin cried when he had the USSR invade Poland in 1919.

Lessons in propaganda techniques to be learned from this :

1. The tank is a caricature of a tank. In an attempt to include only the essential elements of a tank it appears to consist only of tracks and a turret. If the tank were drawn more realistically with the front cockpit (as a real T-54 or T-64 has) then it would appear more bulky and crushing and therefore be more menacing and more productive. 
2. Comparing someone you aren't fond of to a monkey is classic and the jug-eared Lenin looks vaguely like a chimpanzee. 
3. Understand your audience. Note that the abbreviation for Czechoslovakia is "ЧССР" in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet while the Czechs would write it "ČSR." The target audience for the poster was probably Soviet soldiers who grew up where Lenin had practically been sainted and his mummified corpse turned into relic for a tourist attraction. It doesn't matter if Lenin was for or against invading Eastern Europe; the point is to try to provoke an emotional response. Of course, I would bet most Soviet soldiers, simply as a matter of human nature, were more interested in their own lives and people they actually know than any aspect about Lenin. 

More propaganda can be found in the Propaganda category.