New Mattress in the House

The mattress we bought on Saturday was delivered Tuesday afternoon. I've waited a few days to write about it to see how satisfied we are after sleeping on it a few nights.

First, here's the old mattress after we stripped it for the movers to take it away.



Getting the new mattress delivered and installed, and the old one taken away, was awesome because our bedroom is on the 3rd floor (non-US: 2nd floor). The delivery guys struggled a lot getting the new one up the stairs. I'm glad that wasn't us trying to do it. And as a bonus, having delivery guys in the house prompted us to straighten the bedroom a bit. Mostly that meant dusting.

Here's the new mattress before we put the sheets on it:



It looks pretty much the same except for slight difference in color and pattern. It's a different brand, though, and new vs. over 8 years old.

The old mattress sure doesn't look bad, at least from a casual view, but it's sagging in a few spots that are obvious when you lie on it.

The new mattress is way better. For me it's only a small improvement, but for Hawk it's huge. She used to opt to sleep on the floor half the time. She wasn't sure any bed would work. But this really firm mattress has enabled her to get better sleep the past two nights than she's had in months.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

A few weeks ago I watched Blade Runner: The Final Cut. My impetus was reading an article about it. I saw the original Blade Runner (1982) back in about 1989 and enjoyed it a lot at the time. The article promised that this second director's cut, released in 2007 after years of wrangling over legal rights, was the truest to filmmaker Ridley Scott's vision. It was on one of our stream services, so I gave it a watch.

A 1980s Vision of the Future

The thing I enjoyed most about the original Blade Runner was its vision of the future. The movie imagines a world where technology is more advanced but society is still gritty. There are flying cars and interstellar space ships, yet the big city of Los Angeles on Earth is crowded, disorganized with people speaking multiple different languages, and still has poverty and homelessness.

The filmmakers' choice to imagine the future that way was a fresh break from the predominant trope in SF through the 1970s and into the early 1980s that technological progress would create a gleaming future of material abundance. Blade Runner clearly had dystopian elements... but without going full-on dystopia. Especially as I watched it in 1989, toward the end of a decade that had seen real-world cities become increasingly plagued with drugs and crime, it struck me as the most realistic extrapolation of what the future 20 years out might look like.

The Final Cut keeps all of the atmosphere of the original theatrical release. Possibly it even goes longer on it, telling the story at a slower pace than I seem to remember from 34 years ago. I didn't re-watch the original back-to-back with this version so I can't say for sure.

How that Vision Looks Today

Watching it today, of course, the movies' vision of the future is laughably quaint. "Los Angeles - November 2019" reads the subtitle over the opening scenes. That's now 3½ years ago, and we don't have flying cars, let alone interstellar space travel. Oh, and why is it constantly raining in Los Angeles? I've lived in LA. It gets, like, two rainfalls a year, and everyone loses their minds when it happens.

Here are several more things I chuckled about as terrible guesses from the 1980s of what 2019 would look like:

• Billboards for Pan Am airlines. Oops, they went bankrupt in 1991.


• At least the billboards for Coca-Cola aren't obsolete. Though the movie does predate the whole New Coke fiasco of 1985.


• The head of Tyrel Corp. is making a replicant that's "more human than human" but hasn't invented Lasik to get rid of his need for Coke bottle-bottom trifocal glasses? (Probs because Coke is an ad placement; see above. 🤣)


• Soundtrack by Vangelis.... Wow, there's a name— and a body of music— I haven't heard since about 1993!


• 37 years in the future and they imagine everyone still using crappy little picture-tube TVs?


• In the club scene everyone's smoking. Haha, we (California) fixed that futuristic problem in 1998!

Original Theatrical Release vs. The Final Cut

The main difference between the versions is that 2007's Final Cut tells a more cerebral story. In particular, it strongly implies that Deckard (Harrison Ford), the blade runner himself, is a replicant. A few key scenes that I think were not included in 1982's theatrical version show him doubting himself.

Of course, "Is he or isn't he?" is a hotly debated topic. I've read stories that Harrison Ford outright demanded to know, Is Deckard a replicant? to portray him accurately. The same stories indicate that Ridley Scott initially wanted the answer to be Yes but was pushed to No by the producers. The Final Cut changes the calculus.

In making the story more cerebral it seems to get more ponderous. I was surprised that there was basically no action until halfway through the movie's full run time. Again, I haven't re-watched the original so I can't say for sure, but I feel like the original had more action earlier on. Either way, The Final Cut is definitely a slow boiler. But at least it doesn't suffer the bloating problem of most director's cuts stretching toward 3 hours (or more). It clocks in at a trim 1 hour 57 minutes.