Hey ya’ll, I want to tell you about a great actress I discovered on a marginal television show. The show is The Gifted, and it does have some ok scenes and set pieces but is mostly unexceptional. Also, the two main characters are boring sops so that certainly does not help.

But then you have Emma Dumont. She’s got more screen presence and acting skills than nearly everyone else in the whole show put together. She plays Polaris and is not the main character but very much should be. I’d be far more content if the show were called Polaris and Some Other People, Who Cares, Emma Dumont Rules Show.

She’s one of the few that I’ve gone back and watched scenes a few times because she just rocks so much.

Bad audio and video I assume to get around YouTube’s copyright filters.

To their credit, I think the writers and showrunners realized midway through the show that the main characters were irritating schmucks because as the series went on it became much more about Polaris and much less about those two little snivelers.

In her personal life, Dumont is an engineering student and was team captain in a major robotics competition when she was in high school. I care far more about what I see on the screen, but nice to know that she doesn’t torture kittens in her spare time, etc.

She is just great in the show and the reason to watch it. I like her so much I am going to watch a show I am pretty sure I won’t like called Aquarius just because she’s in it.

Regarding my post about gains vs. the market earlier, that should not be the only benchmark. Every situation is different. My risk vs. return profile has already shifted from beating the market to capital protection, by the way. To paraphrase something Barry Ritholtz said a while ago, that you can make a lot of money when the market is doing well doesn’t mean a damn thing if you lose it all when the market goes south.

I have shifted to a lot of cash, in other words, both in and out of my investment portfolio. I am willing to wait years for the deals to appear, and in some respects I already have. There is no rush. I am not emotionally involved and I know the present insanity cannot continue. Something that can’t continue, won’t. Investing based on your own emotion is the quickest way to lose all your money, by the way, and that is how the vast majority of people do it (even algorithms programmed by people do this).

That you cannot time the market is only true in the sense that you can’t completely gauge when the market is at its highest high or lowest low. This is correct. However, it’s a limited point intended to frighten the peons into not pulling their money out at the worst possible time. (I was literally begging a woman at work in late 2008 to leave her 401K and other money in the stock market at the time, and to invest more, as much as she could afford. She sold everything at a 65% haircut and likely will never be able to retire. She’s eternally much poorer because of it.)

This time is not different. The market will crash. The bulls will stampede off the cliff. Everyone will think it’s the end of the world and I will be at the bottom of the cliff harvesting the fresh meat.

The first 10 on today’s playlist:

Given the title, I bet you thought I was going to be all highfalutin’ and stuff. You know, nearly no one reads those posts where I really bust out with some abstruse galaxy brain stuff. I can see you not reading them.

But this pretty lowfalutin’. I was thinking how in several Phillip K. Dick stories there are time loops that trap the protagonist in some situation where the very actions(s) they do to attempt to break the time loop are the ones that cause the loop to eternally repeat.

And in the absolutely bonkers American Horror Story: Coven my manic pixie dream witch, Misty Day, ends up in her version of hell, and her hell is an eternally-recurring experience of bullying and shame after she accidentally resurrects a frog she was supposed to be dissecting.

Hell as an eternally-recurring time loop has been used in other media, too. The “eternal recurrence” idea itself has a long history, of course, with variants going all the way back to the ancient Egyptians.

In more modern terms, the hellish time loop and variants has been used effectively in movies like Triangle and Before I Fall to more mainstream fare like Edge of Tomorrow.

See, very little falutin’ of any type in this post. I just wanted to mention some things I liked. In particular, Triangle is worth a watch because Melissa George is great in it, and there is one particularly effective scene where she comes upon a pile of…well, just watch it and see.