Tailors Today https://tailorstoday.com A commonplace collection Wed, 27 Mar 2024 05:02:17 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://tailorstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/cropped-logo31-32x32.png Tailors Today https://tailorstoday.com 32 32 Gods https://tailorstoday.com/gods/ Wed, 27 Mar 2024 05:02:17 +0000 https://tailorstoday.com/?p=4430

Though diminished by jets and telephones, each day the world grows conceptually larger. As a focal point, this big world demands a big house, with big people to fill it. When politicians and movie stars prove inadequate, only gods remain…

We sell humanity a language of ideas to articulate its times: the faith to remain unafraid as society explodes into increasingly chimerical shapes about them. We describe the new thing that is coming, and they worship us.

Alan Moore (Miracleman) ]]>
Jason Bourne (2016) https://tailorstoday.com/jason-bourne-2016/ Sun, 24 Mar 2024 04:50:54 +0000 https://tailorstoday.com/?p=4033

Matt Damon returns as Jason Bourne, in (hopefully) the final Bourne franchise movie for a while. In every Bourne movie, JB is just minding his own business, and a CIA director decides he has to be put down: the plot of this is no different, though the fifth time around it starts to look like satire. If you haven’t seen an action hero in a few years, what’s he been doing? Usually entering underground streetfights. In the movie before this one, Edward Norton got to give some of the best tactical project management speeches since Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. In this movie, they actually got Tommy Lee Jones, then gave him nothing interesting to say or do even once. Great hacking line: “use SQL to corrupt their databases!” This is the second Bourne movie where a Volkswagen outruns a police vehicle. I have to say something nice, so: the whole riot sequence was really well done. I would watch another installment, but they need to come up with some new ideas first, and why not buy a gimbal while you’re at it. I give it 3 dumbbells out of a possible 5 dumbbells.

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Investments https://tailorstoday.com/investments/ Thu, 21 Mar 2024 04:51:19 +0000 https://tailorstoday.com/?p=3082

The moralists told us the vice of the age was avarice, but what I saw in my great teachers twenty years later was bitter that they had not been recognized for what they had done. By now, I feel how deeply to have and to have done are the same. The resume is another kind of bank account, and harder to let go of. Sell all you have, said a better teacher than any of us.

James Richardson

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Stages https://tailorstoday.com/stages/ Mon, 18 Mar 2024 04:50:58 +0000 https://tailorstoday.com/?p=4319

Now dead, now on his feet, now immortal, now a ghost,
he reported to the hell marked out for him by God
and under his command there marched, broken and bloodless,
the souls in purgatory of his soldiers and his horses.

Borges, from “General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage” (Alastair Reid, trans.) ]]>
Carpenters https://tailorstoday.com/carpenters/ Fri, 15 Mar 2024 04:50:56 +0000 https://tailorstoday.com/?p=4254

It has been remarked thousands of times that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was a “humble carpenter” that we feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, as much a carpenter as a torturer. Very few seem even to have noticed that although Christ was a “humble carpenter,” the only object we are specifically told he made was not a table or a chair, but a whip.

Gene Wolfe

An incomplete list of things that are compared to the profession of torture in The Shadow of the Torturer:

  • Soldiery
  • Being a man (or being a human)
  • Sex
  • Writing
  • Acting (sort of indirectly)
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Idle hands https://tailorstoday.com/idle-hands/ Tue, 12 Mar 2024 04:56:20 +0000 https://tailorstoday.com/?p=4502

Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they’d never imagined.

Cormac McCarthy ]]>
Books and theft https://tailorstoday.com/books-and-theft/ Sat, 09 Mar 2024 04:51:20 +0000 https://tailorstoday.com/?p=4530

There are friends in books that I’ve known all my life, with me wherever I go. Libraries are the granary of the spirit, without which we couldn’t survive the siege. Some of the books have my name written on the spine or embossed on the brass tube, and because of that I shall never entirely die. Books make you happy, angry, peaceful, discontented, reassured, justified. A book can make me forget who and what I am, for a little while. A book is somewhere I can go and not have to take myself with me. Books say: come to us, all who labour and are heavy laden, and we will give you rest. Books are the islands in the West where good people go when they die. Books are a world apart, yet firmly here and now, written in the moment but eternal; in the beginning was the word, and ever shall be, world without end. Also, some books are very valuable, and the security arrangements in libraries are often woefully lax.

K.J. Parker ]]>
Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018) https://tailorstoday.com/sicario-day-of-the-soldado-2018/ Wed, 06 Mar 2024 04:54:11 +0000 https://tailorstoday.com/?p=3880

The title translates to Hitman: Day of the Soldier, which is such a powerful cluster of SEO keywords that it will eventually work on me, guaranteed. If they had called it Army Guys: Day of the Loud Gun Noises or even just Look at these Helicopters, I still would have watched it on a long enough timeline.

I give it 2.5 cargo shorts out of a possible 5 cargo shorts.

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Consistency https://tailorstoday.com/consistency/ Sun, 03 Mar 2024 04:52:43 +0000 https://tailorstoday.com/?p=4291

Despite the wealth of their lived experiences, people emerge from a historic ordeal still just as stupid as they were when they went into it.

Milan Kundera ]]>
Extraction 2 (2023) https://tailorstoday.com/extraction-2-2023/ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 04:50:28 +0000 https://tailorstoday.com/?p=4351

When you tell people you like something that’s easy to give, they’ll give it to you.

One of the family stories is about my mom, who one time happened to comment that a porcelain pig in a store was cute. Just an off-hand remark. So my aunt, who was there, remembered that and bought her a small porcelain pig for her birthday that year. And then the next year, she gave her a pillow with a pig on it, and the year after that some other pig-related gift. Then the news got out, and it spread to other members of the family, and for years my mom got pig-related gifts, until she was sick of them.

All that’s to say, that long one shot sequence in Children of Men was great, but guys, it’s time to move on. You don’t need to keep giving it to me again and again every year.

When I see these oners now, the game is just to spot where the cuts are hidden. A lot of moves where the camera briefly lingers on a wall with no moving bodies, or like passes through something and everything is dark for a moment.

But it’s not necessary. I like that it forces the fight scenes to be shot slightly wider, and not get chopped up in editing (Paul Greengrass) but wouldn’t it just be better for everyone to do these long, luxurious fight scenes and then cut at the appropriate time? Like, just a regular cut. When the shot should be over. Then on to the next shot.

Extraction 2 is a tactical movement/loud gun noises action movie with Chris Hemsworth. The plot doesn’t matter: forget about it.

Other than that, this movie ruled. After a brief and unnecessary 15 minutes of setup, it just goes and goes for most of the rest of the run time. I want like a half dozen of these types of movies a year.

I give it 4 Valentino dog shirts out of a possible 5 Valentino dog shirts.

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