Kepler-186

I miss Trump. Say what you like he was box office crazy. Is it really 10 months since he got a crowd to invade the Capitol? Wonder what the last couple of months of 2021 have got in store for us?

Yeah I randomly remembered it yesterday, can’t remember where I first watched it might have been on Virgin on Demand years back. Enjoy the rewatch!

The Booth At The End 7.5/10 Great little show. Episodes available on YouTube.

Beeb article on The Wire. Decent read. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-why-the-wire-is-the-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century

Bet they didn’t tip the Deliveroo guy either.

Yeah, would much prefer our 80’s rivalry.

Some soul searching Geordies.

Bit of space news from our friends in Russia. Russia’s space movie. Yulia Peresild, a Russian actress who once depicted a Soviet sniper in the Red Army, floated onto set yesterday. She’ll spend 12 days in the International Space Station (ISS) filming The Challenge, the story of a doctor who goes to space to save the life of a cosmonaut. It will be the first feature film shot in outer space (the less said about amateur efforts, the better). Why? It isn’t rocket science. “Movies have long become a powerful instrument of propaganda,” Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russia’s state space agency Roscosmos, said in June. Last year, shortly after it emerged that Tom Cruise was going to fly to space for a film directed by Doug Liman of The Bourne Identity fame, Roscosmos announced its own plans to send an actress to the space station. Russia got the first man, woman and dog into orbit. With Russia falling behind the US in the space race and facing growing competition from China, it’d be damned if it didn’t film the first feature length movie too. There’s also a money element. For nearly a decade Nasa used Roscosmos to carry astronauts to the ISS, but that changed in November last year when four cosmonauts were sent into orbit by SpaceX – the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk. The breaking of Roscosmos’ monopoly is set to cost the space agency around $400 million a year. More recently the US stopped buying the Russian rocket engines that Nasa had used for its launches, purchases that had generated billions of dollars in revenue for Russia. A movie doesn’t seem like the most obvious way to plug these losses, but Roscosmos has struggled to secure state funding from a Kremlin that prefers to spend on the armed forces. Rogozin, who has an executive producer credit on the project, told state television he hoped to “obtain…a whole new development of the promotion of state technologies”, which sounds like a bid for more money – from the Kremlin but also from rich oligarchs, who appear to be the target audience of the movie’s website: “The project will become a clear evidence of the fact that space flights are gradually becoming available not only for professionals, but also for an ever wider range of interested persons.” In July Rogozin criticised Russia’s billionaires on Twitter for spending money on yachts rather than developing spacecraft. Not everyone sees method in the madness. Sergei Krikalev, a former astronaut who was left temporarily stranded in space when the Soviet Union collapsed, was fired from Roscosmos after objecting to the cost of the project. He’s back in his senior role after anger at his sacking. Now onto the movie. What is The Challenge about? Yulia Peresild plays a doctor who has to fly into space on short notice to save a dying cosmonaut aboard the ISS. Who is Peresild? She is a 37-year-old actress from Pskov, one of the oldest cities in Russia. The child of a kindergarten worker and a painter, Peresild has two daughters called Anna and Maria. The Challenge is her 48th acting credit, according to IMDB. Perhaps her most striking role to date was in the 2015 war film Battle for Sevastopol. She played Lyudmila Pavlichenko, known as Lady Death, a World War Two sniper who killed 309 Germans. How was Peresild chosen? There were 3,000 candidates for the role and the field was whittled down to 20 finalists in May. Peresild was reportedly chosen both for her acting skills and her performance in medical tests. She had just four months to get ready for the flight, which she said was “difficult psychologically, physically and emotionally”. The preparation included centrifuge tests and parachute training. She becomes only the fifth Russian woman to fly to space. Spare a thought for her understudy, a little known actress called Alena Mordovina – so close to history. Who’s making the movie? Roscosmos describes it as a “joint scientific and educational project of Channel One, the state corporation Roscosmos and the studio Yellow, Black and White”. Channel One is a state TV station that airs the Russian versions of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Sesame Street. It provided ample coverage of the launch, including a countdown clock. Yellow, Black and White is a film studio that purports to tell “global stories with a Russian flavour”. The studio made the 2019 comedy Son of a Rich, the highest grossing Russian film in history. It’s about a man who wakes up one day as a 19th century peasant. It was directed by Klim Shipenko, who has travelled to space with Peresild to film The Challenge. How are they filming it? Details are scarce, but the scenes shot yesterday relied on handheld cameras. “Film-making is shockingly tricky up there,” Richard Garriott, a video game developer who once paid the Russians to travel to the ISS, told the Times last year. “Things have to be Velcroed to the wall or they’re going to float away on a trajectory that’s hard to predict, to be found several days later.” Peresild will do her own makeup and there won’t be any lighting or sound crews on board. Most of the filming will take place in Russia’s part of the ISS. Cosmonauts will play cameo roles. What happened yesterday? Peresild, Shipenko, and a trained astronaut Anton Shkaplerov set off from Kazakhstan at 9.55am BST yesterday morning on a Russian Soyuz rocket. They reached the space station in around three hours, quicker than it takes to fly from London to Moscow. The spacecraft docked with the ISS later than expected after its automatic docking system failed and Shkaplerov had to manually take over the controls. Peresild and Shipenko started filming during the approach. “The hatch is open! Everything as planned,” Rogozin tweeted. Peresild isn’t the only actor who will be in space this month. William Shatner, who played James T. Kirk in Star Trek, will fly to an altitude of 100 km on one of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rockets next week. At 90, he will become the oldest person to go to space. There are no plans for any filming on his trip.

Fair play to Jones to sticking it to them a bit. Wish Labour and other parties would up their game. Work, and the politics of work is something you can win people over on, as some Labour bods stated last week.

As if by magic those pesky kids….

A story which is rapidly being forgot as the people it exposed shuffle the pack and start to blame the ‘scroungers’ which was my wider point about DWP v HMRC priorities.

Marc Zuckerberg over here

They’ve been hounding these people with more staff at the DWP than HMRC have chasing tax avoidance, and they literally turned off Facebook to stop people sharing another leak about tax havens, the Pandora Papers, much like the Panama Papers before them.

Sociopaths run this country, its press and many of its institutions. Shite.

To paraphrase The Simpson’s: UK population-report for much worse duties. D’oh!