June 2021 – Page 3 – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

(Not Pictured: Kathy Ireland)

June 5, 2021June 4, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

The New York Post has runs a story called Over 50 and fab: Nine of the finest OG supermodels are hotter than ever which includes luminaries like Christie Brinkley, Brooke Shields (the first victim in Alice, Sweet Alice which I might own on videocassette as it was one of the first ones my mother purchased when we got our first VCR in our trailer in Murphy, Missouri, in 1985), and, sorry, where was I? Oh, yes, Naomi Campbell, Elle McPherson, and a Helena C-something who was not in Fight Club.

No depicted: Kathy Ireland.

I suspect that she’s not depicted because she’s not actively posting sexy pix on social media sites these days unlike the others in the set who are posting clickbait pictures or posing topless for magazines even now.

Hey, I’m not saying that it’s wrong to either flaunt what you have or to be more reserved. But the list itself contains attractive women over 50 who are actively flaunting it for profit, whereas some take their profits in other things over 50.

Buy My Books!

Film Watching: National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I (1993)

June 4, 2021June 23, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover After watching the National Lampoon double feature (Adam and Eve and Dirty Movie) last week, I thought about watching this movie with my boys. It’s rated PG-13 instead of R, and I didn’t think it had any boobs in it (it doesn’t), so I queued it up.

It’s a send-up of buddy cop action movies, particularly the Lethal Weapon series although it has bits making mock of other contemporaneous films films as well. Emilio Estevez plays the rogue, gun-happy cop; Samuel L. Jackson, playing against type, is the straight-arrow partner Lugar who is getting too old for this stuff. Estevez’s Colt is mourning the disappearance of his K9 partner Claire when he gets assigned to a case where Lugar’s partner is murdered while trying to get microfilm to Lugar. The microfilm contains the recipe for turning cocaine into Wilderness Girls cookies for transit and distribution.

So that’s the story. The film includes appearances by Jon Lovitz as the stool pigeon; William Shatner as General Mortars, the bad guy; Tim Curry as his henchman; and Denis Leary, Phil Hartman, Corey Feldman, Frank McRae, Dr. Joyce Brothers, and Lance Kinsey in small roles. Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox from CHiPs make cameos, as does Paul Gleason as an FBI agent. Charlie Sheen makes an appearance as a valet, and Jon Lovitz’s character has a meta gag where he says something like “Isn’t it funny that your brother is in Hot Shots! and you’re doing this?”

So a lot of the humor comes from then-contemporaneous (the then- is extraneous with contemporaneous, ainna?) understanding of movies and commercials, but some of the humor is not–enough that my oldest son liked it more than, say, Airplane! or the aforementioned Hot Shots!.

And, as for the judgment of the youngest: Well, when Colt and Kathy Ireland’s Destiny Demeanor (Allyce Beasley plays the same character, the head of the Wilderness Girls organization, before she lets her hair down) do the sharing of scars before lovemaking scene (riffing off a similar scene from Lethal Weapon 3), he declared he didn’t like ugly people because he is still scandalized by kissing in a movie.

What? Kathy Ireland ugly? Let’s review, shall we?

Continue reading “Film Watching: National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I (1993)” →

Buy My Books!

Brian J. Snorts At The Library Cinemaphile Schedule

June 4, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

So while sitting in the vet’s parking lot yesterday, I had a chance to browse through the Springfield-Greene County Library’s current quarterly newsletter which generally includes a schedule of activities at the various branches. This quarter is pretty thin because semi-governmental and medical and psuedo-medical facilities are the last to give up on the late unpleasantness. Which explains why I was sitting in the parking lot of the vet’s office, killing time.

I guffawed (I am old enough, gentle reader, to be described as gruff instead of just an ass, and I can now guffaw) when I saw the virtual shared film discussions for this quarter.

July’s film is Hell Comes to Frogtown.

Pseudo Rowdy Roddy Piperaste will argue that They Live! is Piper’s masterpiece mainly because that’s the only film they’ve seen him in, but those of us raised on USA Network’s Up All Night in the 1980s know that Hell Comes to Frogtown is truly his pièce de résistance.

In it, Piper plays Sam Hell, who is a wanderer in a post-apocalyptic wasteland whom, the military medical corps discovers is virile–the apocalypse has left much of humanity incapable of bearing children, so the race is on to repopulate and have another go at the war. He gets drafted to impregnate some fertile females, but they’re kidnapped by a mutant warlord in Frogtown, so Sam Hell and two Army women have to go to rescue them.

I watched it once or twice on Up All Night and then I recorded it–so I watched it over and over during my college years. I eventually got it on videocassette, so I got to see that woman who played the psycho in the three part Hunter television series’s boobs–that scene with Rowdy Roddy Piper was cut from the USA Network version.

“Are you going?” my beautiful wife, also in the car in the veterinarian’s parking lot, asked.

Oh, but no.

I mean, what is there to talk about? That it’s a sterling example of the post-apocalyptic genre that we got fed a steady diet of in the 1980s (but not recently, though, even though a major national rival is currently threatening nuclear war with the United States if we don’t let it do whatever it wants). That the videocassette market and the new cable markets made for quite a collection of B, C, and D movies. Kind of like the streaming providers now are churning out, except they’re doing “series” instead which is more of a commitment of time.

Hey, I’ve just gotten used to having time to watch movies in my normal week, so I’m not about to start extending that to entire six- to thirty-hour blocks of time to watch series. Also, I’m skeptical of modern movies and television, and I have many, many fine films to go through in my newly rapidly growing again physical media library.

But Hell Comes To Frogtown? Perhaps I’ll revisit it sometime soon. And the virtual cineaste’s discussion is a month away. If I have nothing else going on that afternoon, maybe I will join the Zoom call.

Buy My Books!

Do I Look Like An Amateur?

June 3, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

C’mon, man, I have more than 80 classic Atari games in my Atari drawer now.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I own over 350 Atari cartridges (but not Private Eye), but most of them are duplicates. The collection has not expanded much since I haven’t seen any Atari cartridges in the wild recently except for a couple of very common cartridges at an antique mall marked something like $8 each.

So now you know, gentle reader, why I have accelerated my purchase of physical videocassettes and DVDs at garage sales–because I know that sometime relatively soon, perhaps as little as ten years, you won’t find them in thrift stores or garage sales, and if you’re like me, it will only in retrospect that you notice they’re gone.

Kind of like it was with old computers and game systems–in the 1990s, you could find them with some frequency at garage sales for low prices. Then, when all the attics were empty, they were gone. Mostly into my storage cabinets, probably, but you can find them on eBay at a premium, but where’s the fun in that?

Buy My Books!

Sparkly Vampire Fan Fiction Apparently Allowed

June 2, 2021June 2, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

In 2004, I mentioned that Bravenet singled out the works of John Norman in its terms of service:

Funny, Frank Herbert, J.R.R. Tolkien, and R.A. Salvatore don’t suffer from the literary persecution John Norman does. Here’s section 8d of BraveNet’s terms of service:

(d) Associate Bravenet and any Products and Services with any adult material of any sort. This includes, but is not limited to, such things as nudity, any site, page, image or service requiring any adult verification service, anything that users to be 18 or older to view or join or access, and any text, image or likeness suggesting sexual and/or inappropriate and/or illegal acts of any sort. Without limiting the foregoing, you may not use the Products and Services to store, use, contain or display pornography, adult novelties, adult toys, XXX material, escort services, Gorean, bondage, BDSM, bigotry, racism, hatred, profanity, or any material which may be insulting to another person(s) or entity;

No Counter-Earth fan pages for you, children.

Well, I see today that Lileks added Bravenet forums to The Bleat, so I went a-looking to see if Gor is still prohibited.

Yes.

Although it’s now in section 9, so someone has updated the terms in the last seventeen years, although nobody removed the Gorean prohibition. Probably they didn’t know what Gorean meant. Which, to be honest, is probably why few people post Gorean content using Bravenet widgets or services. Not because anyone but me reads these terms and conditions closely.

You can probably find all kinds of Fifty Shades of Grey knock-offs across sites using Bravenet components, though. Because that’s modern stuff and not really dirty like your grandpa might have liked.

Buy My Books!

Brian J.’s Recycler Tour’s Biggest Hits

June 2, 2021June 2, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Well, maybe not my biggest hits, but June 2 has historically proven to be particularly good on my Facebook feed. Here are a couple of items from years (decades) past:

2014:

I’m starting a band called Meowy Vanilli, and we’re going to do nothing but meow covers of Milli Vanilli songs.
We’re going to be HUGE in Japan.

2011:

Brian J. Noggle doesn’t think he can actually explain what he meant when he told his three-year-old, “You’re such a cutie, you deserve a death cab.”

Brian J. Noggle complains, “Life has given me lemonade. What am I supposed to do with that?”

Well, maybe only two years in the past.

Buy My Books!

Rebooting History So Everything Is New

June 2, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Taylor Swift shatters vinyl sales record with ‘Evermore’:

The pop superstar charted a new peak in modern-era vinyl sales — as more music fans turned to vintage records during the pandemic.

The vinyl edition of Swift’s album “Evermore” shattered the US record for largest vinyl album sales in a single week, according to Billboard.

It sold more than 40,000 copies just three days after its May 28 release — already surpassing the biggest single-week sales record since MRC Data began tracking in 1991.

The title had previously been held by Jack White’s “Lazaretto,” which sold 40,000 copies in the week after it launched in June 2014.

Everything is a new record.

Because history got rebooted around the end of the 20th century, and everything is now unprecedented and record-breaking.

Buy My Books!

A Special Thank You To A Singapore Reader

June 2, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Or bot as the case may be for answering a question I had in my report on watching Alien.

I noted that I had the first, third, and fourth movies in the series, but not the second, and I mused it was probably not at the place where I bought the films.

Well, a reader or some scrapping algorithm in Singapore led me to the answer.

I bought the movies at the Hope Church Relay for Life Garage Sale in 2013.

The three Alien movies I have yet to see. The Hope Lutheran Church sale did not have Aliens.

I have started haunting antique and thrift stores for films and have yet to see Aliens.

Buy My Books!

Apparently, I Am Not Mad This Is Not Evidence Of My Madness

June 1, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

So over the course of the last year, as I have watched DVDs, I have from time to time picked up the DVD remote after the film ends to eject the disc. A couple of times, I was taken aback when I looked for the eject button on the remote, and it was not there. I mean, I haven’t generally watched enough films nor gotten so in depth with the functions of the DVD player that I’m intimate with all of its functionality, but I do generally know where the play, pause, stop, select, power, and eject buttons are. But, as I said, a couple of times over the last year, I’ve picked up the remote and have struggled to find the eject button. I mean, I am pretty sure I have pressed the eject button after the movie. Heck, I might have even pressed the button on the remote to put this particular DVD in. But it’s not there now.

I chalked it up in the user error column. After all, a flaky receiver and some ad hoc reconnecting inputs in the back have led to some strange results when trying to watch a movie in the past (see also Movie Night at Nogglestead: THWARTED). I have started to think I’m reaching the age where I get flummoxed by technology. That’s not really the case, though, as connections to new devices are getting simpler (just stream it on your device!). But the Case of the Disappearing Button intermittently bothered me. And then other times, I would push the button to eject the DVD.

We also have a Sony Blu-Ray player which we use very infrequently. Its remote looks almost exactly like the DVD remote, but it has a BD at the bottom instead of DVD.

You see, it has an open/close button on it. Maybe I’d gotten confused between the two, although I really don’t watch many Blu-Ray discs as you don’t find them for a buck at garage sales yet.

I try to keep the remotes organized on the side table by the entertainment center. But when the boys use them to put on their video game systems, watch television, or occasionally put in a movie, they tend to roam to various seats, under blankets, or under pillows/cushions. I am not immune–sometimes I will pick up a remote and lay it on the entertainment center somewhere when I’m putting in or taking out a movie only to “lose” it for a moment where I cannot remember where I laid it.

So this weekend, while preparing for my bi-weekly movie watching (it has been twice a week the last two weeks and more when I include watching a movie with the boys), I discovered the truth.

For some reason, I have two Sony DVD player remotes.

Which is odd because we only currently have one Sony DVD player; the one I stored last November was not a Sony. It might have been a previous model that I replaced at some point; I know I used to save old remotes in a bin (I have since donated them). This one would have been spared, though, since it looks like it works with the current DVD player.

And it does. All the buttons work as expected, so I was able to conduct the movie. So I would pick up whichever one I found first, and when that was the one without the open/close button, I would briefly question my sanity. Which, I am pleased to say, ~~is intact~~ is not disproven. And the world might not actually be a Philip K. Dick illusion that a small inconsistency can dispel.

Buy My Books!