Author: TomsWrite

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The Hidden Fortress – Star Wars

Misa Uehara

In 1958, Akira Kurosawa made a decision that would ripple through cinema for decades in ways nobody in that era could have predicted.
He owed Toho Studios.
They had backed his riskier, more personal work. Films like Rashomon, which had confused studio executives and astonished the rest of the world. So when Toho asked for something more commercial, more accessible, something audiences would actually come out to see in large numbers, Kurosawa delivered.
He gave them The Hidden Fortress.
It became the fourth highest-grossing film in Japan that year and the most successful of his career up to that point. A rousing, energetic adventure built around two bickering peasants escorting a disguised princess and a disgraced general through enemy territory. Crowd-pleasing in the best sense of the word, without sacrificing an ounce of craft.
The making of it was its own kind of adventure.
Key sequences were shot in Hōrai Valley in Hyōgo and on the slopes of Mount Fuji, where a record-breaking typhoon rolled in and stopped production in its tracks. Bad weather. Delays. A director who was already known for shooting slowly and precisely and refusing to rush.
Toho’s frustration reached a point where the following year Kurosawa formed his own production company, though he continued distributing through the studio. The partnership survived. The tension never fully disappeared.
There is a detail from the production that stays with you.
Misa Uehara, who played the princess, described her first makeup session. Kurosawa walked into the dressing room carrying a photograph of Elizabeth Taylor. He held it up and explained, using that image, exactly what he was looking for in his princess. The precision of the vision. The specificity. A director who knew down to the finest detail what he wanted every frame to look like, including the face at the center of it.
That was Kurosawa.
And then, nearly twenty years later, a young filmmaker in America sat down and watched The Hidden Fortress and something clicked.
His name was George Lucas.
What caught Lucas was a specific technique. Kurosawa had chosen to tell his story through the perspective of the two lowliest characters in it. Not the general. Not the princess. The two peasants, Tahei and Matashichi, bumbling and squabbling their way through a story much larger than either of them understood.
Lucas took that structure and carried it into space.
Tahei and Matashichi became C-3PO and R2-D2. Princess Yuki became Princess Leia. The hidden fortress became the Death Star plans. Lucas has acknowledged the influence openly and without hesitation.
What is less widely known is that his original plot outline for Star Wars bore an even closer resemblance to The Hidden Fortress than the final film did. That earlier draft was eventually reworked and became the basis for The Phantom Menace in 1999.
A film made in 1958 as a commercial favour to a frustrated studio, shot in typhoon weather on the slopes of Mount Fuji, quietly seeded two of the most successful science fiction films ever made.
Akira Kurosawa was trying to repay a debt.
He ended up changing the shape of storytelling itself.
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Stop planting flowers around your garden and start planting them inside it.

Most companion planting advice puts the helpful flower in a border or a separate bed. The problem is distance. The scent cloud, the trap effect, and the predator recruitment all weaken sharply past a foot or two. A flower planted twenty feet away from the vegetable it’s supposed to protect isn’t doing much.

The flower belongs in the row. Right next to the stem it’s defending.

Basil between tomato stems is the clearest example. The aromatic oils that confuse pests looking for tomato foliage work as a scent screen — but only at close range. Basil in a border across the garden is too far. Basil planted within a foot of the tomato stem masks the signal where it matters.

The same principle applies to every pairing that works.

Pairings that work when planted close:

– Nasturtiums at the base of each squash hill — soft foliage that pests prefer over squash leaves. When the nasturtium is loaded with aphids, the vine beside it is clean. Replace heavily infested plants mid-season to reset the trap

– Flowering dill or cilantro in the brassica row — the blooms attract tiny beneficial insects that target cabbage caterpillars. Let one or two plants bolt on purpose. The bolted herb is doing its most important work

– Flowering chives in the carrot row — the scent masks carrot foliage from flies that locate carrots by smell. The chives need to be in the same row, not in a pot nearby

– Sunflowers at the end of a bean row — aphids climb the sunflower stem and cluster at the top, drawing them away from bean foliage below. The bean fixes nitrogen that feeds the sunflower. Both benefit

The distance between the flower and the vegetable is the variable that changes whether companion planting works or doesn’t.

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Watering Potted Plants

Watering Potted Plants

The pot has a drainage hole. You added gravel at the bottom for extra drainage. Water runs out when you pour it in.

The plant is still struggling. And the gravel is part of the reason.

A layer of coarse gravel under fine potting mix doesn’t help water move through faster. Water resists crossing from one texture into a very different one — it pauses at the boundary and the soil above holds more moisture than it would without the gravel there at all.

Fill the same pot entirely with potting mix, no gravel, and water actually moves through more evenly and exits the drainage hole sooner. The root zone ends up drier without the layer that was supposed to make it drier.

The fix is simpler than the problem.

Three things that actually improve container drainage:

– Skip the gravel — fill the pot with potting mix all the way to the bottom. A uniform column of the same material drains more consistently than layered materials with different textures.

– Lift the pot — a drainage hole sitting flat on a solid surface can seal under the weight of wet soil. Pot feet, small stones, or any spacer that lifts the base half an inch lets air enter from below, which is what pulls water downward and out.

– Bottom water when soil resists wetting — dry peat-based mixes sometimes repel water, sending it down the inside wall of the pot and out the drain while the root ball stays dry. Setting the pot in a tray of water for twenty minutes lets moisture pull upward through the soil evenly, rewetting the whole root zone from below.

The pot that looks like it’s draining well and the pot that’s actually draining well aren’t always the same pot.

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FDA Covered Up Safety Signals

Sen Ron Johnson FDA Uncovered

This is earth-shattering. Senator Ron Johnson just revealed that Secretary Kennedy provided him with 11 MILLION pages of HHS documents on the COVID vaccine. What the documents exposed about the FDA is truly disturbing.

JOHNSON: “We have now uncovered the fact that FDA officials knew in March of 2021 that their analytical system for the VAERS system, was completely inadequate, that it would MASK significant safety signals.”

“They had a different system that would, you know, produce this information unmasked.”

“They presented that to top FDA officials, and they covered up.”

“They were 49 cases of extreme masking, resulting in 25 safety signals, including sudden cardiac death, bell’s palsy, pulmonary infarction, very serious side effects.”

“And again, I said, I don’t I didn’t need a sophisticated system.”

“I saw deaths per year go from a couple hundred to over 20,000 the year the vaccine came out in 2021.”

“And yet the FDA officials hid behind their analytics that they knew would hide these safety signals to continue to claim to this day, we didn’t see any safety signals with the Covid injection.”

Click to view the video: https://x.com/overton_news/status/2047370947150192792?s=20

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Ignatius J. Reilly by John Kennedy Toole

John Kennedy Toole

His mother believed in him fiercely.

John Kennedy Toole grew up in New Orleans under a mother who treated his genius as her personal mission. Thelma didn’t just love her son — she managed him. His clothes. His friendships. His future. John’s father, quietly fading from the world, offered no counterweight. So John learned to be two things at once: extraordinary and obedient.

He was brilliant by any measure. He skipped two grades, entered Tulane on scholarship at sixteen, earned a master’s at Columbia, and eventually landed in Puerto Rico with the Army — where, for the first time in his life, he breathed air that didn’t belong to anyone else. It was there, in a borrowed office, that he began to write.

He invented Ignatius J. Reilly: an enormous, pompous, brilliant man who lived with his overbearing mother and waged absurd war against the modern world. The character was hilarious. He was also, in ways Toole understood completely, a mirror.

John called the novel A Confederacy of Dunces. He knew it was something rare.

He sent it to Simon & Schuster, where editor Robert Gottlieb corresponded with him for two years — revisions, suggestions, glimmers of hope — before delivering the final verdict: unpublishable. Something inside John cracked open after that. The rejection confirmed a fear that had been whispering louder every year. He began to unravel. Paranoia. Drinking. A deepening silence his students and friends couldn’t reach.

In March 1969, at thirty-one years old, John Kennedy Toole drove to Biloxi, Mississippi. He rented a cabin. He did not come back.

But his mother was not done.

For eleven years, Thelma carried that manuscript like a torch. She showed it to anyone who would hold still long enough to look. She eventually found her way to Walker Percy, the celebrated Louisiana novelist, and put the pages in his hands. Percy began reading with polite reluctance. Then something shifted. A prickle of interest. A growing excitement. Then disbelief — how had no one published this?

A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980 by Louisiana State University Press. The first print run was just 2,500 copies. Within a year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Twelve years after John died believing he had failed, his novel received the highest honor in American literature. It has since sold over two million copies. It never goes out of print. There is a bronze statue of Ignatius J. Reilly on Canal Street in New Orleans, where tourists stop and laugh every single day.

John never held a single published copy in his hands.

His story doesn’t come with a clean moral. It doesn’t promise that persistence always pays off in time, or that the world always recognizes what it should. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it does — but too late.

What it does offer is this: the thing you’ve made, the thing you believe in, the thing the world hasn’t understood yet — it may be carrying more weight than you know.

John thought he had failed.

He had written a masterpiece.