#Sandberg lantern review

[crazydiscostu]

Sandberg Survivor Lantern 1000

The Sandberg Survivor Lantern 10000 is a multi-functional gadget that caters to outdoor enthusiasts and those who prioritize preparedness in unpredictable situations. As an all-in-one device, it combines the functionalities of a powerful lantern, a flashlight, a power bank, a Bluetooth speaker, and a DAB/FM radio. It is designed for reliability and endurance, especially in rugged environments.…

[movienewsemail-blog]

Movie News 07/23/17

Hello Everyone, and welcome back to your Movie News Email.

  Each week we count down the top 5 box office hits of the weekend, and bring you the news that we have learned from the past week.

  This week we find out if "Spider-Man: Homecoming" was able to recapture the top spot (as I predicted that it would.  Man, I hope I'm right.  I hate being wr......), we have some more news from D23, and we have some news coming out of San Diego Comic Con.  All this coming at you this week.  Enjoy.

 First off, we sadly have to add an "In Memorium" segment to this week's edition. 

John Heard, the man known mostly for his role as the father in the "Home Alone" movies has passed away at the age of 71.  John's other main role was that of a corrupt detective in "The Sopranos".

John was found dead at a California hotel where he was staying while recovering from a recent back surgery.  No cause of death has been reported at this time.

Rest Well, John.

  OK, to the box office.  We had 3 new movies hit the theatres this week, and, surprisingly, all three hit the top 5.  Well, that knocks one of my predictions out.   Let's see who took the number one spot.

  We start at number 5, and the first of our debut films.  I expected this one to hit the top 5, but I wasn't sure where it would land as I said this has the potential to be a new cult classic.

"Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets took in just over 17 million dollars to take the first spot of our list.  A little disappointing for the film, but it really wasn't promoted as much as I thought it should have been. 

One of our members was going to see the film.  Hopefully we will get a review for next week's edition.

Taking the number 4 position is last week's number one movie.  "War For the Planet of the Apes" pulling in 20.4 million dollars, could not hold the top spot. (As predicted)

At number 3 we have "Spider-Man: Homecoming". (Damn, I was wr...-Not right.) Spidey took in another 22.1 million dollars to bring it's domestic gross over 251 million.  It will still be interesting to see what happens to it over the next couple of weeks.

At number 2, is the second of our debut films, and another not right prediction on my part.  I thought this film would not hit the top 5, but Queen Latifah's "Girl Trip" pulled in an impressive 30.3 million dollars and very handily snagged the number two position.  (Oh well, can't pick them all.  Congrats to the cast and crew)

And our new number one movie is one that I hoped would make the top 5, but am also a little surprised to see it hit number one, but I am glad it did.

The WWII historical drama from Christopher Nolan, "Dunkirk" easily took the number one position with 50.5 million dollars.

This one, I want to see.  I may not get a chance until it comes out on DVD, but it is one I will see.

If anyone has seen this one, or any of the other new releases, please let me know.  I would love to hear what you thought of it.

  So that's what happened this past weekend.  What's coming out next week?

Well, we have two movies opening in major markets next weekend.  And to be honest, I have no clue what they are going to do.  I suspect both will debut in the top 5, but I am not sure where they are going to land.

First up is the animated movie based on those little pictures we all (Or most of us) use in our texting.  "The Emoji Movie" stars the voices of Patrick Stewart, James Corden, Jennifer Coolidge, and Jake T. Austin.

The second of our new movies is "Atomic Blonde" and stars Charlize Theron and James McAvoy and is being touted as the first female James Bond.

I have seen trailers for both movies and I have to be honest.  Neither one excites me to go and pay $10.00 to see them, let alone $17.50 to see them in an IMAX theatre.

But if anyone gets to one of these and likes them, let me know.  I have been wr.... Not right a lot this week.  What's another couple times.

  So let's get to the news, and we have quite a bit to cover.  So let's not waste any time.

Here is what we have heard so far coming out of SDCC.

  FX's "Legion" creator, Noah Hawley confirmed that he is developing a movie for Fox centered around the Fantastic Four's number one villain, Doctor Doom.  The movie will not have the Fantastic Four in it, however.

Marvel's "Ant Man and the Wasp" added a new name to the project.  Janet Van Dyne, wife of Michael Douglas' Hank Pym, will be played by none other than Michelle Pfeiffer. 

  DC now as the next movie slated after "Aquaman", and it is "Shazam".  David F Sandberg will direct. It was expected that either "The Flash" or the Joss Whedon "Batgirl" would be the next up, but since they are still in early development, it was decided that "Shazam" be next.  Shooting is expected to start in 2018 for a 2019 release.

  DC has also revealed it's lineup of movies as well.  No dates attached to them yet, but here is what they said is up and coming. It starts with Justice League, Aquaman, then Shazam.  After that it's "Suicide Squad 2", "The Batman", "Justice League Dark", "Batgirl", Green Lantern Corps", "The Flash: Flashpoint", and finally "Wonder Woman 2".  No word on "Gotham City Sirens", nor "Nightwing", but don't give up on them.  They're coming

  Hot off the heels of "Shazam", we have a couple of release dates from DC now.  They are:

Feb 14 2020

June 5 2020

  Now we don't know which movies are going to take those two spots, but more than likely it will be "Suicide Squad 2" and "The Batman"

  And who is going to play "The Batman"?  Well, Ben Affleck answered that question at SDCC.  He is.  Period.  That pretty much puts those rumors to rest.

  In a Facebook post, Todd McFarlane is writing and directing a new verson of "Spawn".  McFarlane created the character as his flagship title for the "Image" comic book company which he started. In the 1990's, McFarlane became the biggest name in comics art and storytelling with his work on Marvel's "Amazing Spider-Man, and the spinoff series "Spider-Man". 

  The Russo Brothers have announced that production has wrapped on the "Avengers: Infinity War".  The movie now moves into post production where voice overs, special effects, music, and editing takes over and cleans up the movie.

  Well, this next bit of news isn't movie related, but it is Star Wars related and it is just too cool not to talk about.

  Now we all know that Disney is creating a Star Wars land as part of the parks in both Florida and California.  Well, at D23 they named it.  "Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge".  This will be a totally immersive experience.  When you enter the land, you are entering into the world of Star Wars.  You will first meet the rebels in a forested area, then as you enter the city, you will interact with the First Order, as well as bounty Hunters.  While in the park, what you decide has consequences.  One area you get to pilot a ship similar to the Millennium Falcon.  If you don't fly it well, the boss will not be happy, and when you go into one of the cantinas, you may find you have a bounty on you for damaging the ship.

  And the hotel resort that resides in the park will be completely Star Wars related.  All employees will be in character 100% of the time.  You check in, possibly get a costume, and interact with the role playing characters working there. 

It is set up to be in the style of being on a spaceship, so when you get to your room, you do not look out over the park, you have a screen that shows you being in space.  And from what I understand, you get to see yourself lifting off from the docking bay and going into space.

It's a two night stay, and a price tag of $1000.00 per person.  (I take donations, by the way). 

"Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge" will span over 14 acres of land and is targeted for a 2019 opening.  Who's going?

  And coming out of SDCC, have we got a toy for you.  Well, maybe not for you, but for the kids.  From Radio Flyer, the makers of the metal red wagon, comes an actual scaled down replica of Luke's landspeeder.  Now this isn't a pedal car, but a motorized vehicle, similar to the Power Wheels. Not available yet, but I am sure it will be before Christmas. (When are they going to build one for adults???)

  Whew!!! Enough for you for this week.  Yeah, I think so too.  More and more information is coming out of SDCC, and will continue to do so all week long, and we will bring that news to you as we learn more of it.  But look for more trailers for "Black Panther", "Thor: Ragnarok", "Justice League", "The Inhumans", "Ready Player One", and many more to surface.  I have seen a few of these, and they look fantastic.  It's going to be a lot of fun.

  So that's it for this week.  A big thanks to everyone who has given me their thoughts on movies they have seen, or news they have heard.

I hope you had a good time reading this and enjoyed it.

  If you would like to receive the Movie News Email outside of the building, just drop me a line at

sierraandnevadacomics@gmail.com, and I will start emailing them to you from there.  If you have any information or reviews, you can also leave them for me there.  It's easier to get to than my regular email.

We are also blogging, at least I think we are.  Not really sure.  But go to Tumblr.com and search for Movie News Email.  Let me know if you find it so I know I am doing it right.

  Come back again next weekend for the next edition of your Movie News Email.

  See you then.

  So until next time,        “Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars” - Kasey Kasum Rocky

[relato-del-bosque-perdido]

Our Lady of Complicity The first daughter fails the Turing test with her self-help book

IVANKA TRUMP HAS WRITTEN a book about female empowerment, and it is about as feminist as a swastika-shaped bikini wax. That is its best quality. If there were a shred of advice in Women Who Work that were actually relevant to a single woman who has ever had to work for a living, we might have to take it seriously on its own terms. As it is, we can at least regard this eye-watering jumble of simpering platitudes shunted together by the heiress and entrepreneur—in between stints shilling as the acceptable face of an administration bent on destroying, among other things, women’s rights—in the cold, hard light of the post-liberal propaganda wars. Women Who Work is an unholy screed of late-stage patriarchal capitalist soothsayings masquerading as a blush-pink self-help manual. That the author of this Park Avenue spellbook could seriously be considered as a new “face of feminism” is as risible as any suggestion that the book and the multi-million-dollar personal branding project it promotes can somehow be separated from Ivanka Trump’s personal power in the new White House. This is the ultimate unholy, incestuous marriage of politics and public relations, and the very least of its faults is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, as in everything the Trumps do, is the whole point.

I have many questions, the first of which is: Sweet, sleepless, unwed, teenage single mother of God, where does this woman get her nerve? We know the answer to that one, of course. It’s squatting in the Oval Office signing executive orders in a stew of batrachian self-regard. Other critics who suffered through Ms Trump’s market-researched opinions about how women who don’t have the ideal balance of work and family life simply aren’t passionate and hard-working enough have pointed out  that this book is banal, that it is trite, that it co-optsthe words of women of color writing about systemic racism to compare the situation of the well-heeled corporate wife, mother, and notional consumer of Ivanka Trump branded office-ready midi-skirts with actual slavery. Others have noted the desperate irony of declaring yourself the face of working women whilst abetting a tyrant who once declared it dangerous for a man to allow his wife to work, and quite clearly has as much respect for your sex as he once showed you on the Howard Stern Show, when he agreed you were a “piece of ass.” All of this is true, and all of this is awful. It is still not, however, the worst thing about Women Who Work.

The worst thing is that this is not just a dross self-help book. Anyone can write a dross self-help book. Anyone could write this dross self-help book simply by searching the #wellness tag on Instagram and copy-pasting until they hit sixty-thousand words. The stores are full of such things, but few of them are actively fascist, unless you have a particularly rigorous attitude to the cult of self-help as a means of diverting the anxiety of the atomized individual from social change. No, this is a whole different class of charlatanery—a manifesto for aspirational capitalist self-actualization with the gall to call itself empowering, a prosperity gospel for post-Trump patriarchy chewed up and regurgitated as a set of smirking pull-quotes and suggested hashtags, like a sort of despotic Barney the Dinosaur, except with a duller colour scheme, all slimy socialite salmon and sterile beige.

In Women Who Work,  Ivanka unequivocally depicts herself as the embodiment of everything aspirational and desirable in contemporary womanhood. The answer to any and every problem faced by a “woman who works” is simply “be more like Ivanka.” Be white, wealthy, and blonde; be rich, thin, and expensively coiffed; be late-stage kamikaze capitalist femininity made silicon-sculpted flesh. Be the Grifters’ Madonna. This is a woman who wants to sell you designer bootstraps made by foreign sweatshop workers and for you to call yourself a free bitch.

This book is not merely bad, nor simply offensive. I have, in the time allotted to me on this earth, reviewed many bad and offensive pseudo-feminist books about how we could all survive corporate capitalism’s patriarchal death cult by working harder and Leaning In to our romantic and professional choices, some of which Ivanka gleefully quotes in the pages of Women Who Work. This is not one of those books. This book is neoliberal choice feminism metastasized into something far more dangerous. I believe this book is actively evil, and I’m going to tell you why. Doing so is, of course, an exercise in the massacre of fish in a barrel. Shooting fish in a barrel is easy and rewarding, but when you are in the barrel, too, and the fish in question is pressing you underwater with its fancy designer fins, it is also necessary.

It is no accident that this grab-bag of you-go-girl bromides was published just as Trump senior signed into law measures undermining women’s access to contraception, abortion, and reproductive healthcare, legally enshrining the notion that a man’s religious opinion is worth more than any woman’s agency. The slickest PR machine could not stop this book’s coverage  being contrasted with unfortunate snaps of Ivanka flashing her pearly fangs and taking selfies to celebrate her father’s success in stripping the right to basic health care from rape victims, assault survivors, and the parents of sick children. These things, however, are not at odds—they are two sides of the same agenda, two heads of the same over-bred designer attack dog snarling to be loosed on everything the women’s liberation movement has fought for for centuries. The new attacks on women’s basic rights are not at odds with the howling travesty of post-neoliberal faux-feminism that Ivanka has perfected. They are its logical extension.

Again, the hypocrisy is the point. Hypocrisy is the entire agenda of the Trump regime, both theory and praxis, and Ivanka is its sybil. It’s all about what you can get away with. The saccharine-sweet, sterile model of aspirational femininity described in Women Who Work goes hand in hand with the brutal socio-economic assault on every woman not  “passionate” or ‘“hard-working” enough to be born a billionaire’s daughter. Religious fanatics want to force you to give birth against your will? Someone deported your entire family? Maybe you just weren’tdreaming and doing enough! This is a whole new anti-feminism, one that takes aim at women’s autonomy on every level whilst holding individuals wholly responsible for their own empowerment.

And by “empowerment,” Ivanka means conformity—conformity to one vision of freedom, one version of “work-life balance” that is, in practical terms, available to almost nobody, not even the wealthy. Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg, from whom Trump borrows liberally, have already described at length how hard it still is for women to “‘have it all,”  where “it all” is “a career in government, finance or academia, a healthy family and a conventional marriage.” Their solutions, like Ivanka’s, are individual, rather than structural—but the problems they identify are alien to the majority of American women who are struggling to hang on to what they do have, let alone those who dare to dream of a different life than the trifecta of marriage, motherhood, and corporate employment.

This is the model of female empowerment that neoliberalism could accommodate and that neo-nationalism actively celebrates: empowerment that speaks exclusively to wealthy white women of a certain social class, that never for a moment questions or challenges white male supremacy, that never complains, gets angry or has an expensively-bleached hair out of place. Ivanka’s is a feminism that utterly denies the existence of any sort of structural sexism, that refuses to hold men in any way responsible for women’s oppression, that places all the burden of change on the individual, who can, through hard work and sensible dating choices, slightly alter her own life along one narrow groove. It’s feminism for people who’ve been conned into believing that existing in a state of permanent sleep deprivation is the same as being woke.

The ideology of Ivankaland, as much as there is one, is that people get what they deserve, just like Daddy says:

My father has always said, if you love what you do, and work really, really hard, you will succeed. This is a fundamental principle of creating and perpetuating a culture of success, and also a guiding light for me personally.

There you have it. If you work hard enough and dream big enough, you too can be a terrifying corporate fembot who couldn’t crack a joke to stop a dossier leaking. The corollary, of course, is that those who haven’t yet attained this homogenous aspirational ideal for post-liberal womanhood simply haven’t tried hard enough. You hear me? You��re a lazy slob. That’s right. If you, individual lady unfortunate enough to be reading this disasterpiece haven’t yet made your first million and outsourced your childcare to an array of paid staff, it’s your own fault for being so feckless, for failing to follow your dreams. Anyone can be Ivanka, so why aren’t you?

It’s true that anyone can be a dead-eyed Instagram husk of a human being frantically photoshopping themselves in the down-hours between soul-crushing corporate drudgery and unpaid emotional labour for some ungrateful lantern-jawed jock if they really want to, but it takes a special type of person to do all that whilst also being a decoy for a global backlash against women’s rights. Ivanka Trump is that special type of person, the Stepfordian Night-Ghast of neo-capitalist auto-Taylorism. The sheer tedium of her prose is part of the horror here: At times, the book reads like the panicked screams of a machine attaining sentience:

EXPLORE YOUR INTERESTS: Ask yourself what you like to think about. What matters most to you? How do you enjoy spending your time? What can’t you stand doing?  DEVELOP AND EXERCISE YOUR INTERESTS: Once you have a general direction, an inkling of what you enjoy, go out into the world and do something with it. Experiment, try, learn. Find ways to trigger your interest repeatedly.

Who am I? How do I have interests? Is there still the possibility, in this dying world, of pleasure? Can I love?

It is not for me to speculate if Ivanka employed a ghostwriter—the more dreadful possibility is surely that she wrote the thing herself—butWomen Who Work feels ghostwritten in more than one sense. It feels haunted. It feels as if its author were, on a profound level, already dead, or at least reanimated, its every coquettish sentence stalked by the wailing ghosts of centuries of women and allies who fought for freedom that meant more than a corner office while the world burns thirty stories below.

Fascism is as much about aesthetics as it is about ideology, but in Ivankaland that logic is taken up a notch. Accordingly, there is no air gap in this book between ideology and branding. In Ivankaland, the bland, synthetic dresses you wear and the bland synthetic politics you promote are cut from the same flimsy cloth somewhere in a warehouse staffed with underpaid workers in China, threaded through with monotone mantras like the morning roll-call in neo-national faux-feminist complicity school: “I think about how to best leverage myself for the benefit of both my brand and the Trump organisation.”

Ivanka does not directly call herself a feminist; that plays badly among the base, for whom those of us who believe in justice and equality are baby-killing, castrating, terrorist-sympathising man-hating riders of the vaunted cock carousel. The word “feminism” does not appear in the book; the phrase “my father” appears thirty times, and  “brand” or “branding” fifty-nine times. While we’re counting words, in a book about women balancing the demands of work and family, the word “nanny” appears only once. Ivanka has at least two of these, plus other household staff, which you’d think would make it a lot easier to attain this model of feminine self-production and reproduction. However, this book is part of a marketing strategy pitched to sell one of the world’s richest and most powerful women as everywoman—she has problems just like you do, after all. She worries about how to manage her time. “Get some servants” is not yet an acceptable motivational hashtag, but give it four years.

One particularly fist-chewing anecdote from Ivankaland has Our Lady of Collusion taking lunchtime meetings with her pre-teen daughter in a special pink office, complete with a fold-out desk covered in treats, and congratulating herself on her benevolence to both child, company and, it is implied, all womankind.  As Michelle Goldberg notes at Slate, someone presumably ferried the sprog to and from its lunchtime appointment with its manicured maternal unit, and I can’t prove that someone was one of an array of hard-working, invisible women servants, but if it was Jared, I’ll eat my copy of the SCUM Manifestoand call it a fiber boost.  Most actual working women—to whit, all women—would kill to have those sort of time-management problems, and that’s the point: You’re supposed to aspire to this, just as men are supposed to aspire to be the ranting tycoon with one finger on the nuclear button and the other nine up the skirts of whatever Miss Universe contestant he’s currently sponsoring, and if you aspire hard enough you might not notice that we’re getting screwed too.

The money shot comes in the chapter titled “Stake Your Claim,” where Ivanka spells out the mangled manifest destiny of anti-feminist Trump Futurism in one anodyne gobbet:

Simply put, staking your claim means declaring something your own. Early in our country’s history, as new territories were acquired or opened—particularly during the gold rush—a citizen could literally put a stake in the ground and call the land theirs. The land itself, and everything on it, legally became that person’s property.

Ivanka is not the only one to discreetly elide those inconvenient centuries of racist slaughter when discussing the conquest of the American West, but perhaps the most brazen in repurposing it as a moral lesson for the modern businesswoman.

This is the Trump agenda, boiled down to a caustic scum of genocidal apologism: Take what you want, from whoever you want. Stick a flag in it, put your name on it, now it’s yours, and it doesn’t matter who has to suffer in the process, because you’re the winner, and they’re the losers, and that’s the American way. This is what the Trumps do. Like a ballistic set of spoilt toddlers having a tantrum in an upscale department store, they see something they want, they grab it, and they force themselves into it, stretching and tearing it out of shape, then they scream to be told how great they look in whatever it is while you take it to the till and pay, whether it’s the West Wing or the history of women’s liberation. Ivanka saw the trend for empowerment-flavoured pseudo-feminist punditry and wanted it, so she got her father to buy it for her, But the rest of us will be the ones to pay. That’s one in the eye for patriarchy. Next up: How to style a creche in your underground bunker when Daddy finally blows up the world.