Re: Mad Unicorn

On Wed, 9 Jul 2025 23:12:51 -0400, Rhino
<no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

On 2025-07-09 10:16 PM, shawn wrote:

On Wed, 9 Jul 2025 22:08:28 -0400, Rhino
<no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
 

On 2025-07-06 8:02 PM, anim8rfsk wrote:

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

On 2025-07-06 1:34 p.m., Rhino wrote:

I decided to take a look at Mad Unicorn, new from Netflix, mostly on the
strength of a trailer with lots of action in it. It turns out that these
scenes were rather deceptive. I've just finished the third of the seven
episodes and it's actually about a poor guy from the mountains of
Thailand who has a dream to get rich with a package delivery service.
He's got a lot of initiative but only a sketchy idea of how to go about
achieving his dream. An inspirational talk by a wealthy businessman
lights a fire under him and he starts his journey, with the businessman
soon becoming a mentor to him.
>
Things don't quite go according to plan though and our hero and the
businessman soon have a major falling out, which adds revenge to our
hero's motivations. There's also a pretty girl in the mix, although she
is already engaged to someone else. In a nutshell, this is a drama -
with comedic elements - about a business startup. I should mention that
it is quite fast-paced, much like an action-adventure.
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The story is set in Thailand and China. I'm watching the subtitled
version because virtually every word of the dialog is in Thai or
Mandarin so you may prefer the dubbed version.
>
IMDB rates it 8.5 and it has lots of glowing reviews. One of the
featured reviews indicates that this is based on a true story. None of
the actors so far have been familiar to me so don't expect to see your
favourite actors in this.
>
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We're having a scorcher here today with temperatures in excess of 90F

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That’s what our temperature gets DOWN to in the middle of the night.

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I still don't understand how ANYBODY lived in your area before the
advent of A/C. If I was a pioneer, I would have just moved on to
somewhere cooler....

 
There's a whole science to building homes that will stay cool without
A/C. They are often harder to build but it works and has been done for
thousands of years. It's starts with building very thick walls that
can absorb the heat in the day keeping the inside cool and slowly
releasing the heat in the night keeping the inside warmer than the
outside.
 
Same idea was done in the South but with big airy rooms that let the
air circulate and lots of windows to let in the air and try to capture
the cross breezes. I got to experience that myself growing up as many
of the homes we lived in were built just like that.
 

Lots of good points in those two paragraphs. But you're omitting the
fact that people with money could build like that while people without
money couldn't and just had to endure the heat as best they could. And I
mean that for every part of the world, not just the US South.

Actually that's not at all the case.  At least for the South even the
poorest homes were built with big empty spaces and lots of windows.
Now they weren't built like the plantation mansions, just wood frames,
but they still used the same ideas. Hell, even the shotgun homes used
those idea. So named because you could stand at the front door and
fire a shotgun through the house without hitting a wall if the doors
were open. I saw many of them when riding on the school bus and yes,
you could see complete thru the house when the doors were open.

Now I'm not sure about the adobe homes out west. Though to be fair
people often built their own homes just using mud and hay. Not a good
mix in a rainy area but fine in a dry climate.

Then again, you're not even in the hottest part of the world. Millions
of people live places where the temperatures are substantially higher,
like India, where the pavement literally melts on the hottest days.

 
 
Melted pavement is so strange. I experienced that once in South
Carolina as a boy. I think the asphalt at that Goodyear station was a
cheaper kind, but even though I was 10 or 11 years old, and thus
fairly small, I sunk into the asphalt as I walked across one hot
summer day. It was so strange to look back and see where you had
walked.
 

I can remember the odd hot day where the asphalt became sticky. I assume
those were the days when the pavement was starting to get hot enough to
melt....
>
I saw a picture of a zebra crossing in Delhi, India where the straight
lines had all gotten wavy in the heat. Here is a picture I found of that
in Google Images:
>
https://images.app.goo.gl/Rm1d5tRgo8qd3RGW9
>

so

I decided to watch the rest of Mad Unicorn this afternoon rather than
risk heat stroke. I was very satisfied with this series and strongly
recommend it to anyone that likes something a little different from the
run-of-the-mill. They manage to avoid a lot of cliches while telling an
uplifting story. It reminds me of Karate Kid in that respect.
>

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