Will's Good Idea for the Week of 7/30/23

We're going to restart Spanish today. Wish us luck, amigos. 

Middle Daughter and friend loved Barbie and called it very meaningful. Again, what were we supposed to do? Say, 'Don't see that! Don't see that!' We're not the church council in Footloose. We're a good, no, a great dad and co-parent with Mrs. Stroock, and are confident that Barbie's woke, bitter, and barren feminist message won't ruin our girls. 

You know, we were allowed to see movies like Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds at a young age. Even so, we never peaked into a sorority house's window. We never got a girl drunk, molested her and dropped her off at her doorstep at 6 AM, and never pretended to be a girl's boyfriend to trick her into having sex with us. Sometimes, a movie is just a movie. 

Staying on the movie beat....With Oppenheimer (the other) big movie of the summer, we are reminded about the great man's cameo in the 80's TV movie event War and Remembrance. Remember that? There's a short scene showing the trinity blast. The scene lasts a couple minutes but conveys so much. Watch it here, starts at 1:08.

The setting of the scene and the musical score convey the sheer enormity of what's just happened in Los Alamos. The bomb is at once wonderous and horrifying, the last and greatest act of the greatest event in all human history. 

These weren't a bunch of eggheads tooling around the desert. Oppenheimer and company were part of a massive national effort; we shall beat the Nazis to the bomb, whatever the cost.  The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion during the war. Adjusted for inflation that'd be about $30 billion today, but given the realities of modern life, governance and economics, we suspect the Manhattan Project would have totaled hundreds of billions of dollars today. 

Will's Good Idea for the Week of 7/30/23...so we walked the magazine shelves at Barnes and Noble yesterday, looking for ideas, looking for places to advertise. Our old military history magazines would seem like the place to start, or restart. Heck, we still get emailed by some of these people. We also decided that we shouldn't mix and match books. We'll do an ad for all three nuke novels; if we do an ad. 

Hmmmm....small sales spike at the end of the month. No idea why. 

Hmmmm.....again. If we focused in August and did nothing else we could probably get World War 1990: Norway, ready for the editor by 1 September. Of course that would mean putting aside... [Don't say it!-Ed]