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Thursday, December 29, 2005
Posted
8:46 AM
by Angie Schultz
Or Review. This is an annual feature in which I brag about my Christmas presents. As always, the four main present groups -- books, movies, music, and software -- were well-represented, but this year's haul has something different: a theme! And our theme is: cruel mockery of the past. We begin with this year's popular favorite, James Lileks's Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the Golden Age of Parenting. I was a bit disappointed in his last book, Interior Desecrations, mostly because it was too short (maybe the all-color illustrations shot the cost way up). Also, some of the interiors were not really hideous enough. Here, though, is a rich vein of horror in glorious gray and darker gray. Dismal childbirth rooms in which all surfaces are covered by newspapers, which was apparently the cleanest substance available in some poorer homes. Frightening contraptions for airing, sunning, bathing, and entertaining baby, and pinning back his annoying, obtrusive ears. Gag-inducing meat by-products and meat by-product stretchers. Car baby seats, guaranteed to fling Junior into oncoming traffic, if the unpadded metal tubing doesn't impale him first. Part of the fun of Regrettable Food and Interior Desecrations was seeing bits of my own childhood mocked: the jello salads, the faux-country decor. But I'm too young for most of this stuff. I considered getting this book for my mother, but decided against it. There are too many naughty bits for Grandma, although I wonder what she'd make of it. Mom was born at home, and I'm curious to know whether she was born in an iron bedstead with boxes around the legs (Lileks facetiously suggests they keep the bed from floating away when the water breaks, but I wonder if they're meant to keep out the ants), or in the kitchen, with a big enamel tub set aside for "emergency", whatever that might mean. Emergency fetus disposal, I'm guessing. Brrr. In all, a very enlightening yet terrifying read. Next we turn to Happy Kitty Pony Bunny, which I keep calling Happy Kitty Boney Punny, so beware of brain glitches. This is a Lileks rip-off, in that it presents a bunch of seemingly-innocuous images from bygone days and shows us the fetid dark side that slithers just below the surface. In this case, the images are of cute kitties, ponies, bunnies, and other friendly childhood icons. The (too sparse) commentary in this case is by Michael J. Nelson of MST3K fame. The book as a whole is "the result of over two decades of work by the Charles S. Anderson Design Company", which -- I'm sorry -- is just really sad. The CSADC is headquartered in Minneapolis, which explains where they got Mike Nelson. Poor guy must be hard up for work. I empathize. Anyhow, Mike's commentary suggests that behind the enormous kitten eyes lurks the mind of a Bond villain, and reminds us that pretty ponies have gigantic teeth that can easily rend human flesh. Occasionally the pictures show us mounted Bambi heads, chainsaw-wielding squirrels, and cute l'il baby animals contemplating a tasteful pile of poo. 'Cause, you know, these things are ironic. I was with Niles when he bought this book. I did try to dissuade him. And, finally, there's Reefer Madness. This is a colorized (boo! hiss!) version of the cult classic from Off-Color Films. The original B&W version is on the disk, too, but it doesn't give you the audio track by Mike Nelson (yes! him again!). I'd never seen this old chestnut all the way through. It's a short 1936 film on the dangers of "marihuana". It starts with a crawl even more boring, and yet far clearer, than that which opens Revenge of the Sith. The actual movie begins with a pinched-faced old coot (Dr. Carroll) gassing away to an audience of PTA types who act as if they'd all toked up before the meeting. At random intervals the director apparently urges them to show some life signs, and they all turn to each other and start nodding like drinking birds. The story really begins when Carroll says he's going to tell us about a kid he knows... Mary is a high school student, and high school student Bill is sweet on her. She has a high school brother, Jimmy. Also hankering after Mary is Ralph, a pot fiend who helps Blanche and her assistant/squeeze/boss, hatchet-faced serial snacker Jack, lure high school students to Blanche's apartment to introduce them to Mr. Weed. Another hanger-on at Blanche's is Mae, who might be Ralph's girlfriend, but it's hard to tell. Jimmy frequents the corner malt shop, which doubles as a haunt for the drug dealers. A malt shop is Satan's Foyer, kids. Never forget that. The pot pushers have no trouble luring Jimmy into their web. At one point, having borrowed Mary's car, he takes Jack out to get more "product". Stoned out of his gourd, he runs down an old man and speeds off. His sister Mary, on the other hand, will have nothing to do with the "older" crowd, and cheerfully brushes them off. Bill, too, is virtuous, until one day the gang catches him unawares at the malt shop, preying upon his natural politeness to get him to come along. They go over to Blanche's apartment, which as usual is filled with grass guzzlers, undergoing spasms which they believe to be dance moves. Bill is disgusted at first, but Mae offers him a joint, which he politely takes, and soon he's giggling and twitching with the veterans. And he's instantly hooked. His schoolwork suffers, and we get another appearance by Dr. Carroll, from the beginning, who's principal of Bill's school, or something. Carroll is concered about Bill, and tries to draw him out, to no avail. I figure he would've tried harder, but realized that he'd be missing out on an opportunity for some sour-pussed moralizing, so lets it drop. One day Bill is over at Blanche's when the dancing and the toking are in high gear. Bill pulls the classic smooooth mooove of dancing Mae into the bedroom where, we are led to surmise, weed-fueled coitus occurs, after which Bill and Mae climb back into their unwrinkled clothing and stand around awkwardly. Meanwhile, the cops are investigating the hit and run. They have a partial plate, which matches Mary's car. She denies lending the car to anyone, and they totally buy her story. She then legs it over to the malt shop, where the soda jerk, aka Satan's Bartender, gives her Blanche's address. Jimmy's not there when she arrives, but the lugubrious Ralph says he'll be back soon, so sit down, relax, have a smoke. Mary takes a few tokes and gets all giggly. This is Ralph's cue to begin pawing at her. She screams and writhes and scratches, but she can't manage to get away from the dopey, fumble-fingered clod. About this time Bill staggers back into the living room, and in his reefer madness, believes that Mary is willingly undressing herself for Ralph, right there on the couch. Somehow, this is supposed to make him more enraged than out-and-out rape, and he launches himself at Ralph. Jack takes out his piece and advances, meaning to pistol-whip Bill, but Bill's too fast for him, and they wrestle for the gun. Now, here we know someone is going to catch some hot lead. Will it be Bill? Will it be Jack? Will it be Mae, standing dully in the bedroom doorway? Or perhaps Blanche, dithering behind Jack? Or, at an outside chance, will the two men turn, and hit Ralph? But NO! The bullet travels at a right angle to the axis the two men are making, gets about ten feet, and makes another right angle downward, and it's Mary, swooning face-down on the couch, who is awarded the booby prize. And she's dead, Jimmy. (Who isn't there to witness it.) Jack, showing admirable sang-froid, quickly frames Bill for the deed, then moseys over to the malt shop to tell Jimmy that his hit-and-run victim has died (which we know to be a lie), but that Jack will be big enough to keep it under his hat, if Jimmy won't ever say anything about being in the apartment. Jimmy readily agrees, and at Bill's trial is either too stupid or too venal to make the connection that, hey, they must've talked immediately after Mary was killed! Jack and Blanche are keeping Mae and Ralph cooped up somewhere during the trial, so the increasingly-unstable Ralph won't spill his guts. Jack hints darkly about taking care of Ralph, permanently, once the trial is over. While they're waiting for the verdict, Ralph smokes more and more pot while Mae plays piano. If you've seen a clip from the movie with a man smoking and shrieking "Faster! FASTER!", that's the scene. Well, the jury votes to convict (after brow-beating the lone nebbishy holdout), and Bill's going down for the crime. Jack goes over to tell his associates about the verdict and Ralph, even in his grassy haze, is alert enough to see that his days are numbered. Pulling a riding crop out of nowhere (I think it's supposed to be a fireplace poker, but it's white), he beats Jack to death. Cops spring up out of a trap and take them all in. Mae is anxious to clear Bill, but the judge tells her she'll have to testify against Ralph in Jack's murder. She agrees, but on the way to her cell -- escorted by a tiny, ancient prison matron who looks as if she's determined to have nothing to do with the movie -- she launches herself out a convenient window and dies. On the strength of her testimony the judge frees Bill, after compelling him to watch Ralph being sentenced to the nut house. Bill's parents are overjoyed, and even Jimmy and his mother are cool with it. Carroll brings his interminable lecture to a close, and we are free to contemplate his tale of weed and woe. It's a nice, comfy feeling to watch this old turkey with Mike Nelson's voice droning in your ear. The commentary isn't as dense or funny as it was on MST, but it's better than nothing in these dark, Crow-less days. As on MST, the best part is when Nelson points out something that you were already wondering about, such as the drug pushers' business model, in which they seem to have neglected the need to sell their product. Instead, they give it away. First one's free, kid! And so are the next thousand. In addition to Nelson's audio the disk contains the original B&W version (without commentary, dammit), a trailer for the colorized version, and another audio track by the color designers. We thought this would be very interesting, but we were mistaken. It was like watching listening to Dr. Carroll pontificate, and we stopped it before the opening crawl had finished. Too bad, because it might have been nice to know what made them give everyone the same orange-peachy complexion. As I've said before, it looks as if they gave a kid a "flesh"-colored crayon and set him to drawing on the film. (And yet the scenes with the judge, near the end of the film, are really quite good.) And what about the eye-poking pastel clothes on Carroll's PTA audience? And why yellow, for Mary's car? If it were really screaming canary yellow, as portrayed, the witnesses would surely have mentioned it, and the cops would demand to get a look at it. One nice touch is the pot smoke. "Look, man. You can see the colors!" Each smoker's emissions are a different color. Ordinary tobacco smoke is white, and there's plenty of that in the movie, too. Finally, the disk contains an over-long reefermercial titled "Grandpa's Marijuana Handbook", in which an old coot explains how you, as an old coot, can grow and enjoy your own pot, grass, weed, tea, maryjane, roach, or reefer. Which, of course, reminds me of a poem:
Anyhow, "Grandpa" gives helpful hints about growing your own pot, e.g., the Feds can take your house if they catch you, so throw the seeds over the fence into your neighbor's yard. About five minutes of this would have been mildly amusing. This stretches out into about five hours. The guy flogs his book -- available at amazon.com! -- too. I think he must've provided funding or something. There's also a bunch of unfunny outtakes, in case the rest hasn't put you into a coma. Don't say you weren't warned. Monday, December 26, 2005
Posted
9:43 AM
by Angie Schultz
A while back, Lileks posted a blurry (why?) photo of the 1966 Goodyear Christmas album, calling it the "ur-album". Our family had that album, too, and now I have it in my collection of aging vinyl. I wish I had some sort of software to burn the thing to CD; I worry that the record will finally warp or melt or break and the songs will be lost forever. This is the comforting sound of the Sixties -- that is, that part of the Sixties which was the last remnant of the Forties and Fifties, the same sound that appears on the soundtrack for the Rankin-Bass "Rudolph" special. I can't hear that music without wanting to curl up on the couch and go to sleep. This image from a Petula Clark site shows the 1969 edition of the album. I know it's not very large, but you can see from the ugly avocado green and the font that the rot that would be the Seventies had already set in. Sad, really. Here's an article from the December, 2003 issue of Modern Tire Dealer, noting these releases, and the similar ones by Firestone. Just because I can, because this is information I actually have, and because Lileks didn't do it, here's the track listing: O Holy Night -- Andy Wiliams It Came Upon a Midnight Clear -- Andre Kostelanetz* Caroling, Caroling -- Anna Maria Alberghetti* Jolly Old St. Nicholas -- Maurice Chevalier* Little Drummer Boy -- Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra Star Carol -- Anna Maria Alberghetti* We Three Kings of Orient Are -- Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra Hark! the Herald Angels Sing/Angels We Have Heard on High -- Andre Kostelanetz* Silent Night -- Maurice Chevalier* The Lord's Prayer -- Richard Tucker* Sleigh Ride -- Steve Lawrence/Eydie Gorme The Twelve Days of Christmas -- Dinah Shore* O Little Town of Bethlehem -- Richard Tucker Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming -- Diahann Caroll* Some Children See Him -- Diahann Caroll O Come, All Ye Faithful/The First Noel -- Danny Kaye* Silver Bells -- Doris Day Jingle Bells -- Sammy Davis, Jr. It's Christmas Time All Over the World -- Sammy Davis, Jr.* Tracks marked with * were recorded especially for the album according to the album cover. Richard Tucker, whom I've never heard of, was apparently a star of the Metropolitan Opera. "O Holy Night" is beautifully done here. When Williams gets to "fall on your knees", it's all I can do to stay off mine. "We Three Kings" is another favorite, even though there are no lyrics. Danny Kaye is usually remembered nowadays (when he's remembered) as a comic actor. I caught him the other night in the last part of The Court Jester. I keep forgetting he was a singer, too. The back of the album gives details about the songs' provenance -- what was written by so-and-so in 18-whatever, and what was written down by monks in the Middle Ages. "It's Christmas Time All Over the World" was especially written for the album. It's been at least six years since I actually listened to this. My turntable is packed away somewhere because we don't have room to set it up. Lileks played part of Maurice Chevalier's "Jolly Old St. Nicholas" in his Bleat podcast on the sixteenth, and he says he remembered all the places where Chevalier throws in a gratiutous "Yes!" even after a couple of decades. I never liked Chevalier's songs on this album, and when I grew up, I came to regard his "Jolly Old St. Nicholas" as positively creepy. You see, he iss so Franch on zis song, eet's as eef he iss saying, "You stupid Americans, you want ze outrageous Franch accent, I give you ze outrageous Franch accent. What do you know about it anyway, peeg-dogs? And anyone who sinks zis song, narrated by a leetle boy, should not be sung by a septuagenarian, will show zemselves to be an unsophisticated Yankee barbarian. How do you like zose apples, eh?" And he doesn't do "Silent Night" any good, either. Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Posted
9:35 AM
by Angie Schultz
From today's Bleat:
Mmmm-mmm! Them's good eatin'! Now, the best way to cook Aussie, obviously, is on the barbie, but that might not be practicable in Minnesota in late November. I assume the Aussie in question is Tim Blair, who looks a goodish size, so I hope you have a large oven. Otherwise you're going to have to cut him up and freeze him (or, in Minnesota, just store him out in the back yard). This is the perfect time to post my recipe for Stuffed Aussie[*]. The very first ingredient you will need (er, besides the Aussie) is beer. Lots and lots of beer. Don't be getting that Foster's crap. Australian for beer is not Foster's, but Victoria Bitter. I don't say it's good beer, but it's way more popular than Foster's. But you probably don't have a supply of that on hand at such short notice, so any beer will do, although he may kick if you try to feed him Bud (or Busch, Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, or Miller). Besides beer you will need: About 100 cups of bread cubes (see below) 1 bunch celery 2 medium-to-large onions 4 or 5 mangoes 4 cups white raisins 2 cups chicken broth 4 lightly beaten eggs 8 tsp ground sage 12 tsp salt 4 tsp fresh ground black pepper Butter, softened More beer. Quite a lot of beer. Now, once you've poured enough beer into your Aussie, he'll pass out (note: for an Aussie, this requires an awesome amount of beer). The trick is not to pass out yourself, and there you're on your own. After he's good and unconscious, you can dispatch him by any convenient method. Then you must clean and gut him, and there again you're on your own. I don't even cut up chickens anymore. You might want to truss his legs up so he fits in the oven better. Now, if you want to roast him whole it's going to take a good while, so you might want to start the proceedings as soon as he arrives. Preheat your oven to 325 degrees Farenheit. For the stuffing, you're going to want to use damper; this is a very popular bread in Australia, sort of a pioneer bread I guess. Brumby's Breads makes a nice spinach and feta cheese damper, but again you probably don't have that on hand. So while you're waiting for Tim to arrive, bake up a bunch of drop biscuits. Damper is essentially a giant drop biscuit, so you should be all right with those. My cookbook doesn't have a recipe for roast Aussie, but it says that you'll need 12 cups of bread cubes for a 12 pound turkey. I make Tim about 180 pounds (hard to tell, since I don't know how tall he is), but the body cavity on a human is smaller, in proportion, than a turkey's, so let's say 100 cups of bread cubes. It might be a good idea to make more biscuits, just in case you find you need them. So, once your biscuits are baked, break them up into cubes (Gnat can help with this, if they're not too hot), and stick them back in the oven to dry on a low temperature. Meanwhile, slice up a bunch of celery and two medium onions, and sautee them in butter until the onion's clear. Peel and pit the mangoes and cut them into small cubes. They just love mangoes in Australia, for some unknown reason, so this will go well with your Aussie. Combine bread cubes, celery, onion, mangoes, raisins, chicken broth, and seasonings. The broth won't be sufficient to moisten this much stuffing, so add more beer until the bread is thoroughly damp, and just a little soupy. Add eggs and mix thoroughly. Rub inside with salt. No, the Aussie's inside; I suppose after this much beer, I need to make that plain. Add stuffing. Dot Aussie with butter, place in shallow baking tray, and cover lightly with foil. Roast at 325 for 24 to 36 hours. Yes, in the oven. Baste frequently with beer. Remove foil for last 20 minutes. When you can wiggle his leg freely, remove Aussie from oven and let rest for ten minutes. Discard stuffing. Discard Aussie. Drink the rest of the beer. Prepare chicken nuggets for child and tell her they're roast Aussie. Remove child to safe place, such as the basement. Load guns. Practice screaming, "You'll never take me alive, coppers!" [*] Obligatory disclaimer: Not a real recipe. Do not kill people and eat them. Do not expose human tissue to temperatures of 325 degrees Farenheit. Do not shoot at police. Keep away from small children. Have a bit of flippin' sense, for God's sake. Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Posted
11:20 AM
by Angie Schultz
Two weeks ago I found that my humble, unassuming blog had been mentioned in the Guardian, in connection with some drivel I wrote on the subject of Charles and Camilla's visit to the U.S. Well! Cool beans, eh? But what did they say? Niles refused to call and get his parents out of bed to drive to Milton Keynes and find an open newsagent, so I was stuck with the Guardian's digital edition. I could pay a pound and a half for twenty-four hours access, or I could wait until that issue was precisely two weeks old and get it for free. I am dead broke and dirt cheap, and so I chose the latter option, and yesterday I made my spring, and downloaded the PDF. The mention appears in a little sidebar on p. 2, entitled "Today on the web: Charles and Camilla", and my portion reads:
THAT'S IT? That's my quote?? I'm not complaining about the brevity, but the levity. This is the least funny bit in the whole post! I mean, the next two sentences are: "Surely you've read about it. It was in all the papers." Now that's funny. Unoriginal, but funny. I was going to cease taunting them out of gratitude[*], but now that's all off. I shall continue to mock them like nobody's business. Leftist toads. Thanks again to master Guardian baiter Scott Burgess for the heads-up. [*]This is a lie. Sunday, November 13, 2005
Posted
10:14 PM
by Angie Schultz
One of Instapundit's readers notes that today's "Doonesbury" (which I didn't see; I haven't read it in years) comes from an alternate universe in which Harriet Miers is still being considered for the Supreme Court. This was also true of last week's "Opus", which was at least amusing and non-partisan. Perhaps Breathed has decided that being cutting-edge topical is too difficult and risky, because this week's "Opus" is recycled from an old "Bloom County" strip, in which Steve Dallas comes home to find his mother in his house. She's been cleaning and opens up his anxiety closet to discover that she's in it. He even uses the same damn punchline! At least "Opus" is charming and occasionally amusing. I used to love "Sylvia". I went so far as to attend a performance of Sylvia's Real Good Advice in Chicago, many years ago. (Featuring the cat national anthem "Everything Here Is Mine".) Alas, Nicole Hollander has come down with a bad case of Bush Derangement Syndrome and has sacrificed her wit in favor of non-stop Bush bashing. Here are a few completely fictional examples that I think will give the flavor of her recent work. --- (Sylvia is watching TV.) TV Announcer: Here's a tiny news item. It involves something the government did about two weeks ago. We really can't do it justice in the three panels of this cartoon. But if we say it fast, it'll sound funny. Sylvia: Rita, can I... Rita: No, Mom. --- --- The Woman Who Lies in Her Diary Goes to Washington DC... Woman writing: "Today I went to DC and who should I run into but Donald Rumsfeld! 'Rummy!' I cried. 'I just love you! Can I have your autograph?' And then I whipped out my favorite purple fountain pen and thrust it into his eye, stabbing repeatedly until the blood gushed and his brains spurted. 'This is for the poor innocents at Abu Ghraib!' I shouted, as thousands cheered." Woman (to viewer): "Oh, like you never thought of it." --- --- The Rhino series. A. I would really like for President Bush to meet with me personally and show me all the intelligence he got which implied that Saddam Hussein was working on WMDs and carefully explain that he honest and truly did not lie to get us into a war so that his old oil buddies would become 0.0001% richer. B. I'd rather be buggered by a rhino with Saddam's mustache. --- If you didn't think any of that was funny, then I have accurately captured the tenor of "Sylvia" these days. Sad, really.
Posted
12:47 PM
by Angie Schultz
Since Niles and I returned home from our Rita-induced exile, we've had a whole new explanation for life's mundane little vexations and oddities. For example, we woke up yesterday morning to find that our beloved jungle-print sheets were cut to ribbons, and there was a further patch that was worn thin and full of holes. We never noticed the thin patch before, and have no idea how holes could have been made so quickly. We don't have a cat, nor a poltergeist, nor, to our knowledge, a small time warp which caused the sheets to age overnight. So we must rely on our new all-purpose fall-back explanation: "Hurricane did that." Industry has apparently embraced this handy excuse as well, as evidenced by this incident (third one down, under "BEVERAGES"):
Hurricane put a turtle in that woman's coffee! Fear the power of the hurricane! In other Folgers news, their plant in New Orleans has returned to full capacity:
Everyone knows that turtles spontaneously generate in metal coffee cans. That's why they stopped making them. By the way, Mrs. Morris says she does not plan to sue Folgers, which makes her rarer than a turtle entombed in coffee. Saturday, November 12, 2005
Posted
5:40 PM
by Angie Schultz
Come back with me now...back...back to the last century, when the Web was new and dewy. In those sepia-tinted days, a comet did appear, and it was called Hale-Bopp. And an amateur astronomer did take an image of it with his CCD rig, and he did find something unexpected: a Saturn-like object. That's in that top photo. The very bright blob is Hale-Bopp, and the bright thing to the right, with the line through it, is a star. Except the "astronomer", Chuck Shramek, didn't see it on his star chart. This was due to the odd behavior of his astronomical software. That sort of thing might happen to anybody (I "discovered" Mars once in a similar fashion), but Shramek immediately leaped to the conclusion that it was a spaceship following the comet. Who wouldn't? See here if you want all the fun details. Nearly ten years and the page is still going strong. Well, radio host Art Bell got hold of that, and there was a great disturbance in the Force, and the astronomical Usenet groups burned with the news for months. More responsible heads tried to explain the origin of the line through the object (diffraction spikes), and the fact that proper use of the star chart showed there was an ordinary star at that position, but some were determined to be unconvinced. In particular, one fellow, whose name I did not note, claimed that just because the star was a star and not, in fact, a spaceship did not mean that there was no spacecraft accompanying the comet. After all, the aliens could be hiding behind the comet! There, what do you have to say about that, Mr. Smarty-Pants scientist? I was agog. Leaving aside the incredible improbability of the whole thing for a moment, the only "evidence" for a spacecraft was the strange object. Once that was explained, there's no reason to believe in comet-tailgating spacecraft. I thought I'd discovered the world's stupidest human being. Apparently, I was wrong. I owe that man an apology. (The thing that really steams me about the whole Mapescapade is that this is a woman, several years older than I, who had a position of tremendous responsibility in a media giant, yet she seems not to have the brains God gave gravel. OK, OK, I can sort of accept that after months -- I think it was -- of careful research, she was unable to discern that there was something fishy about the print on the memo in question. But even now, after it's been explained to her and everyone else in gory detail -- multiple times, so the slower kids can catch up -- she still believes there's an AWOL following Comet Bush, and we'd all see it if those reactionary, close-minded blogologists weren't suppressing the Truth.) (Also, for the sake of my title, I hope "Mapes" is pronounced "Mapes" and not, e.g., "May Pees", because I managed to get through the whole Miers contretemps without hearing about it on TV, and so for the longest time I thought her name was pronounced "Meers", and it was only when various wags started coming up with titles such as "Miers Deniers" that I twigged.) Saturday, November 05, 2005
Posted
9:34 PM
by Angie Schultz
Niles and I are big MST3K fans, but, alas, it is no more. The MST principals have picked up a few other gigs here and there, though. Mike Nelson, for example, provides audio commentary for a version of the horror "classic" Carnival of Souls. So tonight Niles and I snuggled in with this movie, little realizing the sheer horror that would await us. Carnival of Souls begins in some nameless burg (which is actually Lawrence, Kansas) with a couple of juvenile delinquents challenging three girls, who look like Sunday school teachers, to a drag race. After some initial hesitation ("Do you think we should, Doris?" "Oh, I don't know, Emma."), they accept. When the race takes them over a narrow bridge, the delinquents repeatedly ram the girls' car, then act all surprised when it goes into the river. Three hours later the cops are dragging the river, but have just about given up, 'cause of the strong current and the silt and the fact that the river's five, maybe six feet deep just there. But wait! One of the girls (who probably had a name, but I wasn't paying attention) is crawling out of the water! How she got out after three hours, or where the others are, or what Teddy Kennedy joke should go here, she can't explain. A couple days later she goes on merrily to her pre-arranged job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. But she does not escape so easily, for all the way to Salt Lake, and at her church job, and in her dismal rented room, she is stalked by a man in too much make-up (Herk Harvey, director and Head Zombie). She's repeatedly drawn to an abandoned amusement park, where in the end Herk and the Zombies grab her and drag her into the lake. The cops find her last traces there, but her footprints in the sand lead nowhere. She turns up who-knows-how-long later, back at the bottom of the river with the two other girls in Lawrence. Gasp! So, of course the filmmakers really wanted the horror to lie in the overuse of make-up and the partying zombies and the times when the woman seems to vanish from the world of the living. But the real horror lies in her scenes with her fellow lodger, the groping, leering, oleaginous John. Ewwww! John shows up at her door shortly after she gets there. She's just out of the bath, and opens the door thinking he's the landlady. Seeing her clad only in a towel, he naturally tries to ooze in, acting as if he couldn't imagine how a lubricious stranger might threaten a woman by trying to push his way into her room while she's half-nekkid. (I've known guys like that.) Now, back in '62, especially in places like Lawrence, women didn't know how to administer groin kicks or instep stomps or Vulcan death grips, so she has to get rid of him politely. He is not deterred, however, and shows up the next morning with "unsanitary coffee" the moment her alarm has stopped ringing. He pursues her like this for a couple days, at one point molesting a stair banister while he asks her on a date (no, really). We are led to believe that this woman feels no need for human contact ('cause she's dead, see), and yet she prefers the company of the loathesome John to being alone with her lurking zombie nemesis. Frankly, I don't see it. John's performance was so oily, so sticky, and so grimy as to comprise the true terror of this film, making the climax -- where she's chased down by the cheerful zombies -- seem a happy ending in comparison to what might have awaited her in the rooming house. I'm pretty sure this was unintentional. But that wasn't the really scary thing. The really scary thing happened when we looked at the "special features" included with the movie, and learned that the man who played "John", Sidney Berger, is now Doctor Sidney Berger, Director of the School of Theater at the University of Houston. AAAAAIIIIIGGHHHHH!!!! I'll never sleep in this town again. By the way, this version of Carnival of Souls is colorized. I do not understand this burning desire to colorize black-and-white movies. Depending on the movie, it could even be sacrilegious. But this is a darned good colorization, except, as always, for the skin tones, which look like they were hand-tinted by third-graders wielding Crayola crayons ("flesh"). Oh, yeah: Dr. Sidney "John" Berger is co-founder and producer of the "Children's Theatre Festival". THE HORROR. THE HORROR. Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Posted
1:48 PM
by Angie Schultz
Holy cow. According to Scott Burgess, this humble blog was mentioned in no less than the Guardian -- today's print edition only, apparently, so no link -- in connection with Charles and Camilla's visit to the US, and Charles's ill-advised (purported) scolding of Bush. I got an email today from a fellow on the subject. I wondered why I had a reader. Oh, goodness, and I didn't even dust, or look up the proper spelling of "feng shuied" (turns out there isn't one, so that's all right then). So, welcome, Guardian consumers! Make yourselves comfortable, take a look around. Try some of this pate: made from force-fed, battery-kept baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, ritually humiliated and mechanically separated in Chimpy McHitlerburton's AmeriKKKa. Enjoy! Sunday, October 30, 2005
Posted
8:42 AM
by Angie Schultz
UPDATE: See bottom of post. Niles and I laughed the other day when we read this article:
Are there Americans who really give a damn about whether there's a Queen Camilla? I mean, there may be a few rabid Anglophiles who take this a lot more seriously than the British do; and then there are the avid readers of the National Enquirer, who are also deeply concerned about whether their pets' quarters are properly feng shuied; and finally there are those who are informed enough to know to shake their heads when reading about the royals in the Fluffy News snippets in the newspaper (right next to the current starlet marriage league tables). The latter group don't really care, and the former two groups are surely very small. In any case, Americans are kind of out of the loop as far as approval of British royalty goes. As some of us keep pointing out, we fought a war to make sure we'd never have to care again. Surely you've read about it. It was in all the papers. But, let's assume for the moment that the opinions of the 5% of Americans who give a damn are really really important to C&C, that somehow their approval will persuade Britons that they ought to accept Camilla as queen. Given that, we see that Charles has exhibited the keen sense of PR that the current crop of British royals is known for, and is planning to lecture Bush about being a mean old bazootyhead to those poor Muslims:
Right, like all those concentration camps and Koran burnings and lynchings and whatnot. Or maybe it's just that we still openly allow piggy banks to be displayed, in front of Allah and everybody. The future head of the Anglican Church (where he'll fit right in) goes on:
Unlike those nice mullahs in Iran, with their Great Satans and their martyrs and their rivers of blood and so forth. Good job, Charles. It's a just as well no one here really cares or matters, or you couldn't sneak Charwoman Camilla into Buckingham Palace. That Telegraph article states that Charles is actually trying to woo the American media to the Camilla camp, in which case the Islam PR campaign makes much more sense. Anybody who scolds George Bush will be a hero to them. UPDATE: According to the Australian program Media Watch, as reported by Tim Blair, the piggy bank ban story was "hogwash". Also, Sky News reports that when asked about the upcoming tour of Charles and Camilla, 81% of Americans breathlessly asked, "Who?" Just as I suspected. (I didn't suspect that Sky could have such a sucky website. Their news crawl is making some of their ads flash off and on in my browser. Animals. Couldn't find a print-friendly version.) Saturday, October 29, 2005
Posted
11:37 AM
by Angie Schultz
Iowahawk has wrestled several classic sci-fi movies into a blender and whipped them into a pastiche for your enjoyment: THE BLOG. Not one of his better efforts, in my opinion, although it does contain the line:
The best part was the terrific photoshop job he did on the Criterion Extra-Sooper Dooper Iridium LaserDisc artwork. His version replaces Steve McQueen with Arch Hall, Jr. AIIEEE! RUN! Via Rand Simberg. Thursday, October 27, 2005
Posted
1:06 PM
by Angie Schultz
The front page of today's Houston Chronicle carries a story about the new TV series Commander in Chief with the headline: "Madame President on TV Stirs Political Intrigue". The picture of Geena Davis accompanying the article is captioned "Some conservatives taking Geena Davis' presidential role seriously". Also, the subheading on the continuation page inside the paper reads, "Some conservatives are outraged." The picture, caption, and subhead are not available on-line. The fourth paragraph of the story says:
The story has twenty-nine paragraphs (all quite short, of course), and it isn't until the 25th paragraph that any actual outrage is reported. That would be the outrage of Rush Limbaugh, who was "exercised" when Geena Davis reported that she was "honored" when she first set foot on the show's Oval Office set. Limbaugh says, "It's a TV show!" Presumably he meant that she should get a grip, remembering it's fiction and not reality. I can see how she'd feel it was an honor to be chosen to play a woman president, but only if you thought a woman president was something new and astonishing. See below. The next paragraph does feature actual, spittle-emitting, red-faced, bellowing outrage:
Can you feel the OUTRAGE?? No? Sorry, that's all there is. Yes, this and the Limbaugh paragraph are all the "outrage" reported. Ah, but maybe there's some actual foaming and writhing on Boortz's site, eh? Um, no. In that post, Boortz says he's concluded that the show is designed to promote Hillary Clinton's presidential run, based on the fact that her former communications director is one of the writers, and her (former?) social secretary is a special advisor to the program. I think that's jumping to conclusions, myself, but the point is that Boortz's OUTRAGE! is somehow missing. The article also quotes a couple of local female Republican bigwigs who agree that it's a Clinton promo, but are not noticeably outraged about it. There's a quote from a Democrat who's outraged at Bush, though. There's also this:
Whatever. Sounds like a joke to me. I wonder what happens if Condi gets the nomination. Will they take credit then, too? Frankly, if someone's got to be outraged, it should be the public, for the way that the producers have been patting themselves on the back for their progressive courage in presenting us with a woman! President! Boy, howdy! We're really in the 21st century now! Sure, Gramps. You do realize this isn't 1975, right? Apparently not, because they're trying to get away with drivel like this:
Urp! Oops, sorry.
Why isn't this a national joke? The shelf life on that sort of thing expired at about the same time the Mary Tyler Moore Show went off the air. The show does have one big futuristic, paradigm-breaking aspect: the President's an independent. Now that, I don't believe. Sunday, October 23, 2005
Posted
1:20 PM
by Angie Schultz
In the mornings Niles and I read the newspaper. When he's gone I usually don't bother, preferring to get my news from the Web. Niles is a dedicated newspaper reader though (which is why he's not better-informed), and reads the backlog of papers after he returns from his trip. Which is the reason why I didn't read the special K section -- a hurricane retrospective -- in the October 7th Houston Chronicle until yesterday, and so missed this priceless example of journalistic prose by Mike Tolson:
WRITING! Judging by this snippet reported by Tim Blair, I believe James "I root for hurricanes" Wolcott would approve:
OK, for that, I need a bigger font: WRITING! So journalism, then, is redefined as overwrought emotionalism, rather than the disinterested pursuit of facts. Obviously Mike Tolson is bound for journalistic glory. Bon voyage! (By the way, the inclusion of Aaron Broussard's fifteen seconds of fame is particularly apt, since it was all emotion with only trace amounts of pent-up truth.) Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Posted
10:07 PM
by Angie Schultz
It started with this Tim Blair column in the Bulletin. Near the end, he proposes a new TV show, Bring the Bakhtiaris back from Afghanistan!. (The Bakhtiari family, allegedly fleeing political repression in Afhanistan, sought asylum in Australia. There were a number of difficulties with their case -- for one thing, they were evidently Pakistanis, not Afghans, and I believe some of the kids did some dumb things. They became a cause celebre among Australia's extensive Caring Community. They were eventually sent back to Pakistan.) So I was thinking that's too long a name, they should just call it Bakhtiari, and could have a catchy repetitive theme song like the old Daktari show. In a fit of nostalgia, I googled up Daktari, and found (er, but not at that site) that it was produced by Ivan Tors, who produced the other beloved nature/adventure series Sea Hunt, Flipper, and Gentle Ben. But he also did a series I'd never heard of, Men into Space, which starred William Lundigan as Col. Ed McCauley. Here's the IMDB listing. Wow! I'd been looking everywhere for Col. Ed McCauley, just not lately. Sometime in the 1980s I bought a lunchbox featuring Colonel Ed McCauley: SPACE EXPLORER! I think I bought it for twenty-five or maybe fifty cents -- that's cents. It's listed here for $378. That's dollars. More if you have the vacuum bottle (which mine does not). Of course, that's for one in mint condition, and mine is not. Wish I'd been able to see that show. It was the subject of an AIAA dinner with speaker David Levinson last year, at the Ramada Inn in dear old Sunnyvale. He was to show two episodes. Man, I'm sorry I missed that. The Lunchbox Pad has photos of some interesting lunchboxes, and the history of the beast. Part II shows both Hogan's Heroes and Star Trek lunchboxes. Wow! I know I had several lunchboxes when I was a kid, I just don't remember what they were. The only one I remember for sure was an Archies lunchbox. I wasn't particularly fond of the Archies, it was probably just the best of the available lunchboxes at the store that day. I had a vinyl lunchbox at one time. I don't remember the picture, but no one could forget the aroma of a garlic baloney sandwich, marinated for four unrefrigerated hours in vinyl fumes. I took garlic baloney because the garlic helped stave off the bacteria for a few minutes more. Occasionally I took peanut butter, which also soaked up the vinyl perfume nicely, and which would be a capital offense these days. Probably garlic baloney is too, as it is offensive to the sensitive undead-American community. Ahhh, childhood. Smells like...lunch. Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Posted
10:23 AM
by Angie Schultz
Scott of the Daily Ablution regularly throws himself onto live grenades, reading the Guardian and the Independent so we don't have to. He has noticed an annoying trend in the Arts and Entertainment sections of the British media: no article is complete without a gratuitous swipe at America, Americans, American culture, or (this is the jackpot) George Bush. As examples, he offers this sighting of a story by Rupert Smith, about a giant hog:
In the comments to Scott's post, arlye rightly notes that should be "nucular", not "nooclear", for pity's sake. Today Scott has another example, from a Mark Lawson article on Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize, which touches on English -- yes, English -- national pride as divined from the new Wallace and Gromit movie, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit:
Would that it were! Then we might see some ass kicked (see below). With all modesty, I must point out that I've noticed this trend before, writing about it (in passing) here. In that post I report on "Oscar-winning animator" Bob "Who?" Godfrey's pronouncement about Aardman Animation (makers of Wallace and Gromit):
(That's a quote from a Guardian article.) Well, looky here! The movie whose defiant parochialism gives Mark Lawson such a warm spurt of English pride is part of that Faustian pact with DreamWorks, imperialist churners-out of mass-produced dreck for the lumpenproletariat. Huh. This sort of thing was very common in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald. The cheeky "What's on TV Today?" section typically would have an entry something like this fake-but-accurate offering: "The Agony of Africa (It's All Your Fault)" (SBS, 7 pm) tells the story of a fish dying on a Gambian beach, almost within reach of a starving child. The film cuts rapidly between the fish and the child as they eye each other in their last moments, filling the spaces in between with newsreel footage of the Vietnam War, the Watts Riots, Hiroshima, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, etc. In the end, seagulls swoop down to pluck out their eyes. While the production is grim and uncompromising, difficult to watch, it is infinitely more rewarding than the kind of mass-produced American rubbish available on the commercial channels." After years of this nonsense, I've decided that I can't beat 'em, so I'm joining 'em. I shall take a single episode of a British television show and extract a world of unflattering meaning from it, while smugly congratulating my culture for its superiority, preening at my perspicacity, and balancing a red rubber ball on my nose. You'll have to take my word for the last, of course. The other day I saw an episode of the BBC/WGBH series Foyle's War, about an English police detective during WWII. The series is several years old now, but this was the first episode ("The French Drop", by the way) I'd seen. Foyle must investigate a dodgy-seeming suicide which leads him to a school for "dirty tricks" and a turf war between competing intelligence agencies. In the end, Foyle delivers an impassioned (well, for an Englishman), inappropriate tirade against the saboteur-school. They teach people hand-to-hand combat! And psychology! And blowing stuff up! Now, his wrath might've been understandable if they'd assassinated a recalcitrant Cabinet minister (even a German one) during the show. Then he could wax eloquent on the subject of whether resorting to dirty tricks, even in desperation, knocks your cause from its moral high ground, and puts you on the same plane as your enemy. But the episode (obliquely) makes this argument even though the greatest crimes committed by the organization were 1) defiling a corpse, and 2) lying to police. And the latter wouldn't have occurred if someone in authority had quashed the investigation in the beginning, as should have been done. In short, the British can no longer abide the thought of even the most minor crimes in the pursuit of victory, even in the "Good War", even against the Nazis. Emptying a single grave puts you on the level of those who fill mass graves. I turned to Niles. "The British have become pussies," I said, resorting to unusually crude language in my indignation. "They're doomed. You're not going back." Maybe the feisty parochialism of the Were-Rabbit will save them. Thursday, October 13, 2005
Posted
11:29 AM
by Angie Schultz
From Damian Penny comes the news that this year's Nobel Laureate in literature is none other than: Harold Pinter. Damian reproduces a Pinter poem, and links to another. Pinter's poetry inspires comments like "awesomely bad", which I think is being over-kind. 'Course, Pinter's prize is for his plays, not his poetry. Actually, it was probably more for his politics than his plays; the BBC article talks as much about his political posturing as it does about his work. (That last clause saved me from a dangerous alliterative meltdown. Hmmm: Political Poseur Pinter Procures Prize for Plays, Not Poems. There, got that out of my system.) And Ginny, in the comments to her post at Chicagoboyz, notes that Pinter's heyday as a playwright was from 1957 to 1965, suggesting that his politics was the deciding factor in today's award. Perhaps I'm wrong, though. The Nobel committee's timing could be a desperate attempt to hand Pinter the trinket before he disgraces himself completely. According to this Guardian article, Pinter has given up writing plays, but "I haven't stopped writing poems," he said ominously, as in the streets the children screamed, the lovers cried, and the poets dreamed of fresh starts in new, nobler careers, like telemarketing. People have been given multiple scientific Nobels when they've been in on more than one important discovery, and two organizations have multiple Peace prizes, but I don't know if they would award multiple Literature prizes. I gather those are given out for a lifetime's work. Well, perhaps if Pinter manages to hang on another decade or so, he can win a Peace prize. Surely his poetry will advance the cause of peace! Here's a popular portion of Pinter's peace-provoking poetry:
Monday, October 10, 2005
Posted
8:35 PM
by Angie Schultz
Back in August, just after Katrina, Michele Catalano asked the non-musical question:
Well, I had to make that decision, except that I didn't limit myself to five things. I had to limit myself to what I could carry on the plane. Besides my clothes and so forth, what we took was:
I had another couple boxes of rare CDs to take, but they had to be left behind. Along with my postcard collection, Niles's stamp collection (he has every US stamp, he says), and a gazillion dollars in books. Everything like that got dragged out of its place, was waterproofed as much as possible, and put in a safe place. My clothes were thrown out of their cheap plastic drawers to make room for the diaries and postcard collection. The heavy drugstore rack of paperback books was moved from its place by the living room window into the interior of the apartment. Less fortunate books were just covered over with plastic garbage bags in situ. And then, of course, the hurricane was a big non-event and I had to spend days putting everything back. Stupid hurricanes. Sunday, October 09, 2005
Posted
9:10 PM
by Angie Schultz
I'm still digging out the things that we put away "safely" for Hurricane Rita. As predicted, there are things that I now cannot find. If anyone finds two 8"x12" views of the Twelve Apostles, in black frames, wandering around lost, kindly direct them to me. In digging through the non-rubble I found the postcards I bought at a stamp show on Sep. 17th. I didn't put them away because I meant to blog about them, and then the hurricane attacked and I never got a chance. So I'll bore you with them now. Still working on that poem post, by the way. Anyhow, these postcards. Postcard dealers buy up collections from estates (I guess), and so when you dig through their stock you find multiple postcards to the same people. One dealer I see all the time from Iola, Texas, is selling off his grandmother's postcard collection (he's old enough to be a grandfather himself). She got some nice old linen postcards back in the day, and I like the idea of having bought them from her grandson. So "family postcards" turned out to be the theme of the other day's haul. First up are four postcards sent in the late-'70s to mid-'80s to the Baggins family, Bag End, The Shire. No, wait, it wasn't Baggins, but something similar; and it wasn't Bag End, but something different; and it wasn't the Shire, but Adelaide, Australia. One of them was addressed to "Master Frodo Baggins". OK, not really Frodo, but you get the idea. Three of the cards are in the same (rather curly, European-y) hand, signed "Grandma", and have a return address label stuck to them. Grandma, it seems, lived in Berkshire, England. She sends cards from Piccadilly Circus, Blackpool (a lovely, gaudily-lit night view there), and Tunisia. Doesn't everyone's grandma go to Tunisia? Ah, but she had a special purpose:
The postcard is from Hammamet, Tunisia, and a little googling turns up the Medjez-El-Bab cemetery near there. Here are some pictures by a Canadian who "does" military cemeteries, whatever that means. I couldn't find a list of names for Medjez-El-Bab, nor could I find a Baggins associated with the cemetery. Grandma's name is not Baggins, so it's possible that this is Mrs. Baggins's mother. Grandma's surname is much more ordinary, and I couldn't find it associated with the cemetery either. Of course, Grandma may have remarried, so if this is Mrs. Baggins's father we're talking about, I have no way of knowing his name. I didn't read this card until I set out to write this post. Funny. The final of the Baggins' postcards isn't from Grandma, but it is from Berkshire, and mentions young Master Frodo being there. Next up are some postcards I'd wished I'd bought more of. They're from "Jack" to his mother in River Edge, New Jersey. Obviously Jack was a sailor, since one card (which I didn't buy) showed an English dockyard; on the back he wrote, "We are docked second from right [or something like that]. Not a thing to do in this town." One of the cards I bought is of the waterfront in Long Beach, CA. Jack writes that he's going to some sort of show, and that it is "bank night". He adds "Boy I hope I'm lucky." Not the sort of thing you expect a sailor to write to his mother. ("Bank night" was apparently kind of like a lottery, or bingo, where you got tickets/cards with your movie ticket.) The second of Jack's postcards is from the Panama Canal. "Wrote this just as we passed through the Gatun locks. Very hot now." Jack, it must be said, is not the most scintillating correspondent. But he did send a lot of postcards. These two, by the way, were from 1938. The last of the family-themed postcards comes from 1919. This fellow, from Hillsboro, Texas, worked at the Hillsboro Cotton Exchange, which we know because he sent them a postcard of the Pennsylvania Hotel in NYC. He writes:
Sounds as if he was trying to get the New Yorkers to believe cotton was going to be scarce. Ha, them rubes'll believe anything. He sent the same postcard to his family, which doesn't say much interesting, and at some other time (there's no postmark) sent a generic hotel postcard from the Windsor Hotel in Montreal. This poor fellow apparently never got out of the hotel! At least the Pennsylvania's card had a picture of the hotel on it; the Windsor's just has a cartoon of men in 18th-century livery fiddling with some carriages (or possibly automobiles). There's not even a month on this card, but he writes (to his father), "Pretty cool here. Slept under a sheet blanket and counterpane." The fact that this was a source of wonder to a Texas man indicates that the card was sent sometime during the (Texas) summer, which narrows it down to about ten months out of the year. (Hillsboro is north of Waco, so make that eight months out of the year.) He adds, "They sure do write funny here and have funny money". The last of his postcards has no stamp or date. It's an old-fashioned flowered, gilded, embossed affair which just says "To my pet". Based on the names on the other postcards, I think this is to his mother. In non-family cards, I got one of those multiple-view, foldy postcards ("Twenty views of beautiful Moose Jaw!"). This one's of the farmer's market in Los Angeles, though, and I bought it largely because of the relentlessly sixties outfits on the women, and especially for one picture in which they're examining "Delicious Fruits from Islands of the Pacific" from beneath giant bell-shaped hats covered in shredded coconut, or possibly sheepdog hair. No, these are not novelty hats; I believe they're meant to be fashionable. There's also a picture of a hairy-armed fellow decorating a cake. Yum! Now finally we have the rare class of informational postcards. The first has an olde-fashionede drawing of some sort of institution populated by women, and reads: Stone Walls do not a Prison make, Nor iron Bars a Jail; But 'til the E.R.A. is Won, We're only Out On Bail. Har! Wonder if they've served their time yet. This was one of several ERA (link provided for you young 'uns -- they're still going strong!) postcards there. This one was copyrighted 1977. I thought it was dead before that, but apparently it didn't die until 1982, the previous link notwithstanding. I bought this particular postcard because it -- alone -- helpfully showed the text of the amendment:
The final postcard is also meant to be informational. It (also one of a set, and I wish I'd been able to buy the others) shows a cartoon of an African village. There are three women, carrying water, wearing short shirts which have cut-outs for their (rather large) breasts. Two naked men, one wearing what seems to be a crown, are watching nearby, and the crowned one is saying, "The missionary says it ain't decent to go without clothes---" On the back you are informed that this is a GENUINE (don't be fooled!) NUDIST COMIC CARD:
...an address in warm and sunny Spokane, Washington. Approved by American Sunbather Magazine! There were maybe a half dozen of these cards there. I picked this one because it was politically incorrect, and because I actually got the joke. One of them showed a cartoon (all very pretty, the cartoons, in pastels) of hotsy-totsies cavorting around a pool. It was captioned "Wish You Were Here". Well, OK, that one's comprehensible. But another card had two cuties. One is fiddling with a camera, and says to the other something like, "Nice scenery here." Which would be understandable if Kevin Sorbo were prancing about nekkid, but the only man in sight is a balding, beer-bellied fellow in a chaise lounge. I guess the subtext is supposed to be, "Middle-aged men! The nudist life means hot chicks panting to take polaroids of your tender vittles!" Sure, I believe it. Will Kevin be there too? Thursday, October 06, 2005
Posted
8:07 PM
by Angie Schultz
Or rather, Glenn Reynolds imitates Mike Nelson imitating Andy Rooney. Reynolds: ...I've always viewed slow-cookers with some suspicion... Nelson (as Rooney): I don't trust soups on the whole, no more than I trust stew. Careful, Glenn, or you'll wind up on Sixty Minutes, wondering aloud why there ten hot dogs to a package, but only eight buns.
Posted
7:39 PM
by Angie Schultz
Er, no, not this blog. Not even its author is fifty. Thanks to Emily, I now know that Allen Ginsburg's poem Howl turns fifty today. Read about its history here, at the site of the anti-censorship (unless it's someone we don't like) City Lights bookstore. Howl, of course, gave me the name of this blog:
I don't really much like Howl, to tell you the truth. It's incoherent, and where it's not, it's nasty, celebrating drug use and the joys of getting sodomized by bikers or candles or whatever. There's also eye-rolling bits like "the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar" and "the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism". Whatever, dude. However, as I said here, Ginsburg can turn a powerful phrase, which is more than some of your modern poets (example provided at the link) -- who seem to think you can just through in a few surreal phrases and a couple of pop culture references and you're done -- can do. For personal reasons the phrase "...burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night..." resonates with me, hence the blog name. Emily also informs us that Norm Geras has declared this "Poetry Day" on his blog, for it is National Poetry Day in Britain. Tomorrow, time permitting, I'll examine my favorite poem by my favorite poet. Its subject matter is waaaay more controversial than Howl sex-n-drugs. Betcha can't wait. Saturday, October 01, 2005
Posted
9:26 PM
by Angie Schultz
Got home just after midnight Wednesday morning. On the drive down from the airport we looked for (literal) signs of hurricane damage, but didn't see much. Lighted signs -- plastic (I assume) panels lit from within by fluorescent bulbs -- are ubiquitous, which you don't really notice unless you're looking for them. Last November, when we were in Florida, I noticed that a lot of these signs were smashed, including the one at our hotel. To me, this is a sign of a bad neighborhood, and for a few seconds I was a little wary of staring at a hotel in such a crummy environment. But then I realized that the damage was the result of the hurricanes they'd had a couple months before. Once I figured that out, I noticed broken signs everywhere, even well inland. So that's what we looked for on the way down from the airport, but we saw only one that had been damaged, and that might've happened at any time. We did see an intact sign which caused us to say, in unison, "Well, Halliburton's still standing." In fact, we couldn't find any hurricane damage. We had to make stuff up. "Look! Hurricane crunched that traffic barrell, leaving the other twenty intact!" "Leaves in the road! Hurricane must've done that." On the 22nd Niles went to the grocery store for provisions, in case we were forced to remain at home. By then the shelves were pretty much stripped bare. There was no water, so he bought juice. He was supposed to buy canned stew, or something else that we could eat cold if necessary, but much of that was gone, too. He brought home Campbell's cheddar cheese soup. (I tried this on broccoli once, hot; it was dire. I shudder to think of eating it cold. I'd have made Niles eat it.) There was no bread, so he brought back the nearest thing to it: taco shells, corn tortillas, chocolate chip muffins. So on Wednesday night we went back to the store, to find it little better. There was no wheat bread, and the tomato selection was just terrible. I thought it was the End of Days. But today we went to Wal-Mart and everything was back to normal. Saturday, September 24, 2005
Posted
11:50 PM
by Angie Schultz
UPDATE: Now with an image link to the dreaded purple swirly. By the way, we're fairly confident that the hurricane was a non-event in our part of town. Laurence Simon, who lives well east of us, has been blogging up a storm (har), and reports that it was all a big nothin' where he was. (Stirring portapotty post linked there, by the way.) Niles noticed that, in the satellite image the cable news networks have been showing, the purple swirly part of the hurricane never got west of Galveston Bay. If I could, I'd post the storm total precipitation map, which shows that the precipitation drops sharply just east of I-45 (the end of which runs along the west side of Galveston Bay). East of 45, they got something like 2-4 inches of rain; about ten miles to the west, there was less than an inch. In other words, the purple swirly bit of the hurricane packs the most punch. Fear it! Niles called our answering machine today and it picked up, meaning that we still have phone and power. So, given the testimonies of those sources, we figure we got off pretty light at home. I look forward to unwrapping everything we wrapped in plastic (the TV, the computers, the windows), and putting everything back in its place. I imagine, though, that will be little items that were tucked away in "safe" places that we'll never find again.
Posted
11:27 PM
by Angie Schultz
Fleeing the cyclone tyranny...hee hee, can't get enough of that...hapless refugees Angie and Niles drive a ragtag, fugitive rental car on a lonely quest: to see as much of the area as possible before returning home. Our original plan, such as it was, was to drive the 450 miles to Tulsa, which was carefully chosen on the basis of being the location of the nearest hotel room Niles could find. I almost wish we'd gone there instead. Then there'd be no temptation to run around and see the exciting countryside, and we could spend the time in the hotel room, sleeping and watching the DVDs we brought and blogging and driving each other insane. Instead we feel compelled to get out and look around. It's very beautiful here. I'm getting homesick for Silicon Valley, which is kind of like Issaquah, where we're staying. I'd move here. It's nice and cool and pretty and there are never any natural disasters, ever. In other news, we went to Mt. St. Helens today... What? Speaking of things disappearing without a trace, my blog seems to be missing. All I get when I load the URL is some restful white space, which many would count as an improvement, I'm sure. Perhaps it's blown itself to bits and is even now covering Wonkette, say, with three feet of fine, powdery, ash. I'd like to think that, anyway. UPDATE: Well, that fixed it. Wonkette is safe. For now. Friday, September 23, 2005
Posted
7:03 PM
by Angie Schultz
Which in my case means sitting in a cool, comfy hotel room with a cold beverage by my side, blogging away and listening to Niles growl "Die, Geraldo! Die!" at the TV. Greetings from beautiful, sunny Seattle. I don't know what the weather is usually like here, but today it was glorious, and the landscape is gorgeous -- lush with a thousand shades of green and the occasional gold and scarlet. And it's cold. God, it feels good. We had planned to drive the 450 miles to Tulsa (which was the nearest place with hotel rooms, according to the web). But then we saw that people were taking 11 hours to get to Austin (150 miles away), and some were running out of gas on the highway, and some were giving up and coming home. So Niles got the bright idea to see if we could get a flight out on his frequent flyer miles. To my great surprise, this was possible (at about ten hours notice), and we chose Seattle, based on the facts that a) we had not been here before, and b) there were seats available. We stayed up all night preparing the apartment and left at 4:30 am for our 7:50 am flight. I thought we'd left it too long. But there was hardly a soul on the highways. I-45, jammed earlier in the day, was empty. We did see a lot of cars abandoned on the shoulder of the road -- maybe a couple dozen. These presumably ran out of gas. The airport was packed. I heard a man behind me tell someone that he was on his third flight -- he'd been given two others which had then been cancelled. He said another woman in line had been trying since 2am (this was at about six). They were cancelling connecting flights (I assume that meant connecting through Houston). We were fortunate that we were actually able to leave. We got up to our gate, and there was only one business open in the food court -- the Starbucks -- and there was an enormous line. It was like the last cappucino out of Saigon. We weren't particularly hungry, so we passed. After all, our flight had a snack -- probably a pastry or something. (Cue the ominous music.) Well, when we were nearly ready to leave, we heard the flight attendants saying that the plane hadn't been catered, and probably was not going to be: no snack, no soft drinks, no water -- not even cups for the water in the bathroom sinks. The flight attendants said they thought there was one catering truck and three employees working that day. We saw the truck servicing an aircraft by the side of ours, and Niles and I talked about organizing a posse to rustle us up some water. Apparently the flight attendants took care of that, because one of them came aft with a case of water and some ice, and we at least had a little water for the flight. Very little. I'm still parched, twelve hours later. It was just like the hardships of the pioneers! Except I'm pretty sure the pioneers didn't get free headsets in compensation. Once I woke from my doze to find a man, not dressed as a flight attendant, coming through the aisle handing out something. He turned out to be a passenger who had a bag of Dove chocolate candies -- kinda like Kisses -- that he was sharing with the plane. He came by again toward the end. Speaking of dozing: I had about three hours of sleep Wednesday night, and no hours of sleep Thursday night, and couldn't sleep on the plane. I'm in hell. We're keeping our eye on the weather radar, and so far it looks OK in our part of Houston, though Hurricane Rita has yet to make landfall. Hurricane Greta, however, has landed and is mercilessly punishing Houston, but I am too tired to make further use of this joke. Oh! Oh! Speaking of jokes, I'll just point out that we are fleeing the cyclone tyranny. Har! Thought that one up myself, could you tell? Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Posted
8:19 PM
by Angie Schultz
It looks as if we will be bugging out ahead of Rita. We live 60 or 70 miles inland, and I don't expect flooding, but I worry that winds will knock the power out and we'll be stuck for a while with no power and no A/C and maybe no sewers, which would be dire. I have had trouble getting Niles -- who has the only car -- to take this emergency seriously. He seems to think we're the only ones in the Houston area who might be thinking of leaving, so we can wait until the last minute. We have new neighbors downstairs. They're from Mississippi. Guess why they came here. Monday, September 19, 2005
Posted
11:51 AM
by Angie Schultz
Arr! It be September 19, and you lubbers know what that means. Aye, maties: it's Talk Like A Pirate Day, one 'o me favorite holidays. Ye'll see that the Pirate Crew have a book out, their second, apparently. It be named Pirattitude!: So you Wannna Be a Pirate? : Here's How! Arr, I don't need no bleedin' instruction manuals, but if ye do, there's one. Contains an introduction by their close personal mate, Dave "Arr!" Barry. Who, by the way, has his own blog, and will be observin' the day, like the black-hearted salty dog he is. Start here, blast ye, and page forward through the 19th. Or, er (errrr!), or else! Now, ye may be thinkin' that there are no pirates these dull days, but ye'd be wrong. Take a squint at the Worldwide Threat to Shipping and the Weekly Piracy Report. Arrr, Weakly Piracy Report, they oughts to call it. Feast your eyes on this nonsense:
Did ye ever see such lubberliness in all yer puff? O'course, they don't always get away empty-handed. They usually manages to take "ship's stores", whatever those may be. D'ye suppose the ships are storin' gold 'n silver? Arrr, no, beans 'n bacon more like. Most darin' pirate feat I heared of recently was in Chiny, or there'bouts, where they stole a whole ship full of tin, I b'lieve it was. spit Tin, I asks ye. What be the world come to these days? This pirate argot be fun, but it's not the Caribbean cruise ye might imagine. It be hard to talk in a true pirate voice, especially for a squeakin' wench, and it be hard to write, and I reckon it's even harder to read. Arr. In the next week, I hopes, I'll be blatherin' about the days when writers rejoiced in dialect, and the readers could like it or be damned. In plainer speech, I got a heap o' Kipling to tell ye about. Afore that, though, we got a bad movie to gut and leave fer dead. I'd ha' done it today, but ye don't want to be readin' about coronal mass ejections in pirate talk. Arrr, sounds a bit dirty, don't it? Until then, be ye recollectin' the wise words of Dr. Clayton Forrester: Look, you bombastic biscuit boy, any more of this faux Dead End Kids patois, and I'll teach you the real meaning of lexiphanicism! Arr. Friday, September 16, 2005
Posted
7:37 PM
by Angie Schultz
In one episode of the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati ("Dear Liar", March, 1982), Bailey Quarters is doing a news report on a children's clinic. Overwhelmed by what she sees there, and uncertain how to proceed, she makes up a story about a little boy named Bobby, who is a "composite" of the patients. She types it up and leaves it on her desk, where newsman Les Nessman finds it. He thinks it's so good that he reads it on the air, pretending to have written it himself. Hilarity ensues. In the aftermath, Bailey offers to quit, citing a similar case at the Washington Post. Andy Travis, the program director, tells her to forget it, saying, "There's Washington Post ethics, and then there's WKRP ethics," clearly implying that the latter are not quite as stringent as the former. Well, that was the case twenty-three years ago, anyway. I thought of Andy and Bailey when I read this story over at LGF. Jill Bandes, a columnist for the Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was fired over a column she wrote supporting racial profiling. She used some rather strong language and imagery...
...and went on to say: And Arab students at UNC don't seem to think that's such a bad idea. She quoted two students and a professor as supporting racial profiling. Naturally this provoked an outcry, and Bandes was promptly fired. Her editor, Chris Coletta, explains her dismissal like this:
There's some confusion here. Did the people quoted really say they weren't bothered by racial profiling? Bandes's article clearly states this. If they were just expressing a willingness to put up with random, intrusive searches, then she has certainly quoted them out of context and deserves to be disciplined, at the very least. But Professor Iseem is quoted as saying, "There were Muslims in those buildings [i.e. the WTC], too." Which seems to indicate he knew Bandes was asking about racial profiling. If that's the case, then Bandes's crime is in making her case using stronger language than the people she quoted. Her language is very strong; sounds like she's of the write-to-shock school of journalism. Coletta had a chance to tone down the language before publication, and he didn't. Now he's in the middle of a shitstorm, so he cobbles up this "out of context" excuse to fire Bandes. It's always amusing to see a university newspaper piously adhere to standards of journalistic ethics that are completely unknown at larger organizations. Imagine sources expecting to approve of the way a big-time reporter uses their quotes. Imagine them being miffed that a conversation they thought was going to be about one thing was actually about another (say, a conversation about welfare reform that actually was about Valerie Plame). I hope editor Coletta is not set on a journalism career, because his tender regard for journalistic ethics is not shared by the major media. Take for example the case of Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi, covering the Cindy Sheehan circus in Crawford:
See there? That's big-journalism ethics for you. I hope it's not too late for Coletta to switch to the philosophy department.
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