Purring

The other day I was giving our cat, Lily, scritches behind the ears and she was purring, which I took as a sign that she liked the attention. 

When Lily first came to us (rescued from an animal shelter) almost nine years ago, she purred nearly constantly. I have videos of her purring such as this one:

I got to thinking... do cats intentionally purr? So, of course, I googled it. This was before Google AI but here's what Google AI says now:

Yes, cats purr both involuntarily and voluntarily. While often linked to contentment, purring is largely an involuntary reflex used for self-soothing when stressed, injured, or in pain. It can also be a voluntary behavior to communicate needs, such as demanding food or attention from humans.

That made me wonder if she was stressed, being in a new home, and that's why she purred a lot. 

Not long after we got her, I was watching TV and Lily came into the family room purring loudly. And I wondered why she was purring so much until I remembered I forgot to feed her her second meal. She was hungry and/or wanted my attention. 

She doesn't purr as much now, but she will when she's content. Like when I'm scratching behind her ears.

Here's a recent picture of Lily just because. She turns 9 next month:

Shifting Cars in Movies

Recently I watched Ford v Ferrari.  It's a pretty good movie about a true story. I don't know how historically accurate it is, but it's still enjoyable if you like cars and racing (and I do). 

However, there was one scene where accuracy took a tumble. During the race at Daytona, Carroll Shelby told driver Ken Miles to keep the engine on the Ford GT-40 below 6,000 RPM to protect the engine. They were in second place. Shelby had bet his whole car company on Miles winning so with just a few laps to go, he got a sign board, wrote "7,000" on it, and showed it to Miles as he drove by (this was before there were radios in the cars), giving Miles permission to go to 7,000 RPM.

What did Miles do in the movie? He upshifted (based on the RPMs dropping) twice. And then went to 7,000 RPM and won the race.

The GT-40 had a 5-speed transaxle so the film makers indicated he was running in third so he could upshift twice? No, he would have been in 5th gear all along and just mashed the throttle. But shifting is so much more dramatic in movies.

Movie makers use shifting dramatically all the time. In some movies (I'm looking at you "Fast and Furious" franchise) cars will seem to have endless gears as the drivers keep shifting and shifting.

The worst offense to me, however, is downshifting to pass in a race. Yes, when you're driving your car on a highway and it has a manual transmission, you likely cruise in the highest gear to get the best gas mileage. Then, if on a two-lane road when you want to pass, you downshift to put the engine into the power band (where the engine has the most power) because you need to accelerate quickly. Movie makers seem to think this translates to the racetrack. It doesn't.

On the racetrack, you downshift for corners because you have to slow down and then downshift to get the engine back in the power band. But for passing, you don't downshift. You press the throttle harder. If you're at maximum RPM, you might try passing on a corner. But you're not going to downshift on a straight to pass another car. You're already at maximum RPM. If you downshift you'll over-rev the engine (and maybe have pistons coming out of your hood) and possibly lock up the drive wheels (on a race car they are invariably the rear wheels) causing you to lose control. Downshifting to pass didn't seem to happen in Ford v Ferrari because I was watching for it. Maybe Rush was the movie where they downshifted to pass. I don't remember.

Have you noticed bad shifting in movies? Let me know in the comments below.

 

The Final Countdown Movie

I recently watched the 1980 movie The Final Countdown (no relation to the song by Europe).

This movie was a big production starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen and Katherine Ross. It was filmed mostly on the aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz and had aircraft such as the F-14 Tomcat flying on missions. For an airplane buff like me, it was enjoyable although there were some aircraft I didn't recognize which was frustrating. The script seemed to be written to showcase various carrier operations such as aerial refueling* and putting up an E-2 Hawkeye radar plane to see what's going on around them. I enjoyed that. 

And it was a science fiction movie. Really.

SPOILERS if you haven't seen the movie.

The Nimitz and its crew and aircraft and weapons and everything are sent back in time to December 6, 1941 due to a bizarre storm. There's no explanation of how or why the 1,000-foot long ship is suddenly taken back in time to a crucial spot in U.S. history other than the storm. It takes a while for the captain (Douglas) to figure it all out but then there's a dilemma. A single modern aircraft carrier could have stopped the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor easily. (Could have sank the whole Japanese fleet but they never discussed that possibility.) Should they stop the attack? Should they change history?

At the end, the captain decides to, yes, stop the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and launches F-14s and other planes to do that. I think the filmmakers wanted to show as many planes being launched as possible because some of the planes didn't look like combat aircraft.

But then, just before they are about to attack the Japanese planes, the bizarre storm comes back and they are all taken back to 1980, including the planes not on the carrier. Sort of a cop-out ending if you ask me.

They reused footage from the 1970 movie Tora Tora Tora for the attack on Pearl Harbor.

And, yes, the special effects were cheesy (lasers and smoke). 

For "let's make a movie on an aircraft carrier" it was great if you like airplanes and military stuff (and I do). For science fiction, it was dumb. They had this opportunity to film on a real aircraft carrier and they ruined it with a stupid science fiction plot. In 1980, it was the height of the Cold War (there was actually a Russian "trawler" spy boat in the movie). Couldn't they have come up with, oh, a plot about Soviet spies or the possibility of a shooting war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union? No, they did a dumb time travel story.

Have you seen The Final Countdown? What did you think of it. Let me know in the comments below. 

The above photo is being used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act: fair usage.

*The refueling in the movie was done by a variant of the A-6 Intruder. But since the Navy no longer flies the A-6 nor its variants, I wondered if there was a way to do aerial refueling now. According to Google, now the Navy uses "buddy refueling" where one F/A-18 Super Hornet with extra fuel tanks will refuel another F/A-18. And, according to Google, the Navy is developing the MQ-25 Stingray: This upcoming drone is designed to be the first dedicated carrier-based aerial refueling aircraft. It will allow F/A-18s to focus on combat missions rather than acting as tankers.

Reality Shows

When Who Wants to be a Millionaire first came out in 1999, my mother asked me how they could afford to give away a million dollars. The best answer I had was that they didn't do it very often.

Later, I heard that the five main voice actors for The Simpsons were making $400,000 per episode. So that's $2 million per episode without any production costs. 

So, I decided giving away a million dollars every now and then is probably pretty cheap on Hollywood's scale of economics. 

The other day I was scrolling through the guide on my Dish satellite system (I have yet to "cut the cord on TV) and I noted all the reality and game shows. And I'm thinking A) production costs are probably pretty low because they don't have to pay actors, maybe just a host or narrator, and B) people watch them. I don't watch them except Jeopardy (I think Wheel of Fortune gets higher ratings). I've never watched Survivor or The Greatest Race or any of those types of shows. Although the one about celebrities going through special forces training was tempting.

How do you feel about reality and game shows? Do you watch them? Do you enjoy them? Let me know in the comments below.