Review of "Animal Farm" by Angel Studios

I have seen quite a number of productions by Angel Studios.  And I know the book "Animal Farm."  In fact, I have seen multiple movie or video adaptations of "Animal Farm."  So I was a bit surprised to see that Angel Studios would be doing a version of "Animal Farm." The productions by Angel Studios have happy endings.  "Animal Farm" does not have a happy ending.  George Orwell wasn't very big on happy endings.

But then the movie started, and I thought that this must be some different story, since the first animal we are introduced to is Lucky the pig.  I don't remember the part that Lucky the pig plays in George Orwell's "Animal Farm."  Oh, but wait.  Then we are introduced to Boxer, and Napoleon, and Snowball, and Farmer Jones, so maybe we *are* in Orwell's "Animal Farm."  Except that we also have some giant mega corporation buying a farm, and a drone, called Moses, which don't appear in "Animal Farm."

So it's confusing.

The story development of Orwell's "Animal Farm" proceeds pretty quickly, with Snowball being exiled, and Napoleon starting to take over.  (However, the allusions to the Russian revolution are a bit rushed, and therefore lost.)  Angel Studios is very heavily Christian oriented, so it isn't terribly surprising that the story relies less on political machination, and much more on temptation.

The plot of the original "Animal Farm" gets severely messed with, but the theme of new revolutionaries re-implementing the old dictatorship proceeds pretty much as it always did.  Electricity is good, then bad, then good ... and then maybe bad?  Then we get the ending of the "Animal Farm" book, but this movie doesn't finish.

Then we kind of go all "Animal *House*" for a while, and then we finally have a ... well a kind of an indeterminate ending, but I suppose that it could be *seen* as a happy ending.  At least there are a lot of warm and fuzzy sounding platitudes before we all sit and look at the stars, and consider that all the animals who went to the slaughterhouse could be coming back as stars.  Maybe.  Maybe you only come back as a star if you went to the glue factory instead of the laughterhouse.

The moral of the story is that farm markets are good, and wearing hazmat suits is evil.  (The reason why is too complicated for your little piggy brain.)

Or maybe that you can never go wrong as long as you remember that Snowb... Napo... Luck... Boxer is always right.  Except when he's wrong.

Or maybe that someone pretending to be your Dad is always evil.  But people who claim bast friend status are good.

Or maybe that astrology is based on your dead friends coming back as stars.

(Possibly Angel Studios should stick to making feel good films for adults, and avoid simplifying literature for kids.)

Branded Call Display

As it was turning off, my phone offered me branded call display.

That was all I could read before it shut off.  So, I was wondering why on earth I would want branded call display?  Was this something that would allow Norton to jump in whenever I got a spam telephone call, and announce that if I purchased Norton for my phone it would have diverted the call from Telemarketers-Backwards-R-Us?  Would Ford be allowed present the fact that if I purchased a new vehicle it would make the drive to Esther Singleton's house, at 3:25 Oak View Crescent, a distance of 2.7km, much more comfortable?

So I looked up branded call display, and found that, no, it wasn't my phone that would generate the display, but the idea that, if I was a company, I could purchase the fact that Call Display would no longer display the number that I was calling from (even if it was false), and would instead present the name of a company.  So I guess this is why so many recent spam and scam calls are coming to me from "British Columbia."

Review of "Deep Water," 2026, with Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley

"Deep Water" seems to be a very popular movie title, so I have to specify not only the year, but also the stars, since at least *two* movies of that name were released in 2026.

If you know anything about airplanes, aircraft design, water, aircraft flight paths, ocean waves, securing cargo on passenger aircraft, where Guam actually is, or water pressure, you will be annoyed by this film.  (I don't know much about sharks, but I presume that they got most of that wrong, too.)

Given the prevalence of screens and devices, and the fact that the whole thing is set off by a faulty device, it could be seen as an indictment of our modern screen-oriented society.  Or maybe just that smoking can kill you.  (In more ways than one.)

I don't know why Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley signed on to such an egregiously error-laden turkey, but I suppose anyone can make a mistake, and a lot of the goofs wouldn't be as obvious in script form.  (Kingsley gets to die relatively quickly.)

Here's looking at you ...

My computer has a camera.  As a security maven, I don't trust the software switch that turns the camera off (when I don't want it on), and have installed a shutter to physically block the camera.

Yesterday, when I went to start a virtual meeting, the shutter was still closed.  The computer, and the meeting software, warned me that something might be blocking the camera.

So, the computer can figure out that I've probably installed a shutter over the camera.

I'm not sure how I feel about that ...

Jonah 4:9

But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?”

“It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”

Country Squire station wagon

The Ford Country Squire station wagon is possibly one of the weirdest examples of corporate branding that I have ever encountered.

Our family had one.  We had a lot of cars over the years, and, at one point, latterly, with a fairly large family, we would often have more than one car at a time.  I remember that there was another station wagon that we had at one point, I can't remember what it was.  But we did have a Ford Country Squire station wagon, for a long time, and it was even the car that we had when we took a trip across Canada in Canada's Centennial year.

First of all, there is the issue of the term station wagon, itself.  Before the sport utility vehicle, and before the minivan, the station wagon was the standard American example of the large family car.  But why call it a station wagon?  It certainly has an implication of an agricultural utility vehicle, but really only in Australian parlance.  In the United states, a farm is called a farm or a ranch.  In England it might be called an estate.  But it's only in Australia that a large agricultural spread is referred to as a station.  So why do the Americans refer to a utility vehicle as a station wagon?

And then there is the model name of Country Squire.  There were, of course, other models of station wagon.  Even Ford had other models of station wagon.  But the Country Squire was certainly popular, and possibly the most popular model of station wagon during the station wagon's run as the American family car.  This possibly has to do with the faux wood trim that was added to the sides and rear of the country Squire.  It definitely made it very identifiable.  But why call it a Country Squire?  Yes, I can see the attraction of referring to the country.  A lot of the advertising for such a family vehicle would refer to the ability to travel out into the country for a family vacation, going camping and such.  But why call it a Country *Squire*?  Squire is of course a reference to gentry or minor nobility in Britain.  But it isn't used widely in the United States.  So why brand an American car as a Country Squire?

SF - 3.15.0 - Quality

SF - 3.15.0 - Quality

The whole quality movement probably has to be referred to Walter Deming.

Following the surrender of Japan at the end of the Second World War, the allies wanted to avoid the problems that had followed the surrender of Germany following the First World War.  The fact that Germany was left without assistance, and facing massive war reparations, was certainly a factor in Hitler's rise, the result being the Second World War.  So the allies provided reconstruction aid to Japan following the Second World War.

Walter Deming was a worker from the US Department of Agriculture.  He worked with the Japanese agriculture industry, and particularly in terms of quality control, both in terms of production, and in terms of packing, storing, and distributing of supplies of agricultural products.  His success in this regard caught the attention of other areas of Japanese industry.  He set up training on quality issues for other Japanese industries.  Over the course of a couple of decades, of course, the quality of Japanese goods quality and reliability of Japanese goods reach such heights that they actually threatened American production.  Thus, a couple of decades late, perhaps, American manufacturers and business owners started to realize that they, too, needed to pay attention to quality.

Deming's seminars for American CEOs, which were highly subscribed, didn't just cover quality, but also many issues of management.  One of the points that he made was that Americans, because of their manufacturing success, thought that they knew something about management.  He would point out, in the seminars, that Americans didn't know anything about management on that basis.  They had been on the winning side following a major world war, and therefore, it would have been extremely hard for their businesses not to succeed.

There are a number of different approaches to the quality movement, but they all seem to lead back, at some point, to Walter Deming's ideas.  There is, for example, Total Quality Management, or TQM.  This relies very heavily on the PDCA, or Plan/Do/Check/Act, cycle that Deming instituted.

Six Sigma is another quality movement.  Sigma is a reference to a standard deviation, on the Bell curve.  The point of the Six Sigma movement is to try and improve quality to the extent that there is almost no difference within six standard deviations, and therefore the normal bell curve starts to look more like a spike.

ISO 9000 is the international standard for quality, although, as previously noted, it isn't really the international standard for quality.  It is a standard and structure for discussing how important quality is to you, and what steps you are taking to ensure that your products meet standards of quality and reliability.

Security frameworks (SF) series:

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/06/sf-3120-octave.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/06/security-frameworks-sf-0000-intro-and.html

Next: TBA