The Baddest Word Strikes Again!

Actually, no, it’s people have made the word magic who have struck again.

The headline is Glendale High School teacher placed on leave after student records him using racial slur

However, the teacher did not use the baddest word as a racial slur. He discussed it as a word:

After a student notes slave owners’ use of the term, the teacher says he recognizes that, but then says, “Is the word (N-word) not allowed to be said?”

Amid several audible gasps from students in the class, a student begins to tell the teacher not to say it, noting, “As a teacher, if you want to keep your job — this isn’t a threat …”

The teacher responds: “But I’m not calling anyone a (N-word). I can say the word.”

Spoiler alert: It was a threat.

Weird times we live in, when “educators” can “safely” discuss sexuality with children and tell the children not to tell their parents, but discussing a word as a unit of language–not using the slur, but discussing it–is grounds for termination.

Also, I am probably a homophobe and a racist for bringing this up. But twenty years of this blog have already proven I’m irredeemable.

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I Knew The Hotel From The Headline

MOOKIE BETTS SO SCARED OF DODGERS’ MILWAUKEE HOTEL HE GOT AN AIRBNB:

Mookie Betts apparently has no interest in messing with potentially haunted hotels.

Betts has become a team leader for the Los Angeles Dodgers, but during the team’s series against the Milwaukee Brewers, he’s not with his teammates.

C’mon, man, that’s the Pfizer, one of the premier hotels in the city. I’ve stayed there a time or two when returning home in the years immediately after college. When I could not really afford it.

Which is weird: I went from staying with friends to staying at hotels starting with the Budgetel on the northwest side and the motel by Timmerman Field to staying downtown pretty exclusively. Hearkening back, I wonder if the change took place after I got my job in IT. It must have. But I stayed downtown numerous times, including at the hotel where Teddy Roosevelt got shot (the Hyatt at the time, although it’s probably changed names since then).

Never saw a ghost in the Pfizer, though.

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Movie Report: The Other Guys (2010)

Book coverThis is a buddy cop film comedy with Will Ferrell as a forensic accountant and Markie Mark as a hothead. They never get the good cases because two hotshot cops, played briefly by Dewayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson, get all the good cases, the headlines, and the nookie. When the two hotshot cops die in a foolish jump during a chase that did not have their normal Hollywood ending, Gamble and Holtz think that they have a shot to make the big time. But even though they’re on the thread of something big–a permitting violation has focused them on a British celebrity businessman who is involved in a massive bit of fraud to cover the losses incurred on behalf of a client.

So the film has rather predictable shenanigans and a recurring gag that the geeky Gamble (Ferrell) has the attention of beautiful women, including his wife (played by Eva Mendes) and an ex-girlfriend (Natalie Zea), which Holtz cannot fathom.

Eventually, of course, they get their man and save the day.

Overall, I might have confused this film with The Nice Guys, the Gosling and Crowe period piece. Well, not that closely. But I suspect that The Nice Guys is better. When picking films to watch one evening, my oldest mentioned that he’d started to watch this on Netflix but abandoned it. Given that he’s a Will Ferrell fan, this commentary probably explains why this film really never entered the zeitgeist for me to remember it outside of a profligate movie buying incident.

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Wherein Brian J. Is Synced Up With The Ace Of Spades HQ Sunday Morning Book Thread (And Will Be Aligned With Today’s Post For Some Time)

From the Ace of Spades HQ Sunday Morning Book Thread today:

My family had a set of Durant’s Story of Civilization series, and that was my secret weapon through high school history. I read the whole series a couple of times, and some volumes again and again. Great stuff.
It does show its age, though. Not just in the sense of being at odds with current intellectual fashions — that’s a feature, not a flaw — but (especially regarding the earlier periods) new discoveries have changed our understanding of what actually happened.

It’s still worth reading, and I don’t know of a better introduction to the history of Western Civilization.

Posted by: Trimegistus at April 30, 2023 09:43 AM (QZxDR)

I might have mentioned, gentle reader, that I have begun to read this set, and it is likely to take me through the year and beyond. So I guess you won’t have 100 book reports to suffer through this year. But I’m making up for the content with the movie reports.

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Movie Report: Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991)

Book coverWell, I guess I am on a Virginia Madsen kick. I mean, I posted the trailer of Electric Dreams for a twee post on AI, and then I watched Sideways. While researching her C.V., I discovered that she was the love interest in this film from back in the 1980s, and since I just watched Highlander in January, watching this film just seemed the thing to do. Also, note that since I picked up a second set of videos in the Highlander series, watching them again will mean that I’ve watched the series through within a span of five or seven years–more than the Conan series even. Make of that what you will.

So: Highlander purists deny this film from the canon, and it’s a strange thing that there are Highlander purists and Highlander has a canon. The film strays a bunch from the thin story set forth in the first movie and retcons some things in that make little sense in a continuing franchise, but this was the 80s, man (the film’s release date was 1991, but the zeitgeist was 80s). They weren’t thinking in terms of story arcs and trilogies and whatnot then–they were thinking “Hey, can we milk this almond one more time?” So when the third movie came along somehow, it ignored the events and stories set forth in this film. Rightly so.

At any rate: The film takes place in the far off future of 2024 (that is, next year). In 1999, Connor MacLeod, grieving the death of his wife Barbara (apparently, he married the woman from the first movie) due to–radiation sickness? Severe sunburn?–helps a scientific team to build an artificial “Shield” to replace the ozone layer which a decade after the first movie has broken down enough to threaten all life on Earth (remember that? No–we remember the artificially created panic around the possibility, but by the actual 1999 we’d moved onto the artificially induced panic of Y2K). The film takes place in 2024, 25 years later, when Connor has aged.

Here’s the retcon: MacLeod and Ramirez, Sean Connery’s character from the first film, were actually revolutionaries on a planet called Zeist where they rebelled against the rule of General Katana, played by Michael Ironside. When they’re captured, they’re exiled to Earth, where they’re immortal until they slay the other Zeistians(?), which I would guess includes all the other people who were killed in the first film and the Kurgan(?). Wouldn’t they have been fellow revolutionaries on Zeist? Ah, forget it, they’re just making stuff up and not planning beyond the end of this movie. Once Connor (I keep typing Duncan because that’s the Highlander from the television series) got the prize at the end of the first film, he could have chosen to go to Zeist (but he didn’t remember that part?) to be immortal there but chose to age on Earth (the alternative) with his wife. Who then died twenty-five years before the film takes place.

At any rate, for some reason, General Katana can no longer just wait for MacLeod to die of old age and sends two goofy assassins to kill him. Earth, meanwhile, under the shield is a miserable place, hot, humid, and without the chance of rain or the site of the sun and the stars. When the elderly MacLeod defeats the Zeistian assassins, the quickening from their deaths restores his youth and Zeistian immortality. He encounters the head of a resistance group, played by Virgina Madsen, who has learned that the Shield might not be necessary any more as the ozone layer appears to heal itself, and then General Katana comes to Earth himself to tackle MacLeod and so Michael Ironside can chew some scenery. Katana makes himself partner in the parent corporation (with a smarmy corporate leader Blake played by John C. McGinley, last seen hereabouts in The Animal. Sean Connery’s Ramirez is resurrected for some quick comic relief and to sacrifice himself to save MacLeod, and MacLeod defeats Katana and turns off the Shield to save mankind (I’d say “spoiler alert,” but, c’mon, man, we knew it would happen).

That is a lot of backstory and whatnot to make essentially a low budget B-movie about swordfights. It does not add the depth that the flashbacks do in the first movie, and they really don’t add anything at all. But it’s not bad for all that, although I don’t have an emotional stake in the Highlander canon to worry about the real serious issues you guys about this film in the whole mythos. Because it really wasn’t planned to be a mythos, and it doesn’t seem to have been planned much beyond getting the film done cheaply at all.

I have additional copies of the other two films in the to-watch library, so don’t be surprised to see a movie report about Sonny Spoons chewing the scenery in the near future.

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Book Report: From Gold to Grey by Mary D. Brine (1886)

Book coverWell, finishing this book has been a long time coming. I mentioned that it was a gift from a friend at a garage sale at my sainted mother’s in Fall 2008. We would have known, ainna, by then? My sainted mother would have been in the early parts of diagnosing and examining the cancer that would kill her early the next year. Her surgery, which the surgeon later said he would not have performed if he’d known how pervasive the cancer was, would be in late November or early December. So she would have been full capacity, and the event would not have been terribly somber, although we undoubtedly missed my aunt who passed away a couple of years earlier and always made these events a hoot.

More on the history of this book: As you know, gentle reader, I had this book beside the sofa for browsing during football games, wrapped in a paper bag until I properly wrapped it in mylar. I mentioned in September of 2021 that I’d started reading it in earnest, which means “off and on. Mostly off.”

I have certainly read other poetry books completely in the interim, but I had to be in the right frame of mind to read this book. After all, it is almost 150 years old, and I had to treat it gently. I did not open the book completely, only parting the binding the minimum I needed to read the book. And I had to read slowly, as the font sizes varied on each poem down to pretty tiny print to make it so the poems fit into the artwork.

So, the poems: I enjoyed them. They’re romantic, rhyming, and well-rhythmed. They deal with enjoying nature, looking forward to meeting one’s beloved, being with one’s beloved, and a couple about having lost one’s beloved. The sort of thing that heavily influenced me in my younger poet years, and I loved them.

I did flag a couple of things:

The first line of “In the Park” is:

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever!” so they say;

You might know, gentle reader, that I have a volume of the complete works of Keats and Shelley that was on the chairside table in 2019 but has migrated to the dresser upstairs as I’ve read the book outside on the deck in the evenings from time to time. But I know that “they” in this case is John Keats, as this is the first line of “Endymion”. Of course, I already flexed that I recognized it in a book review in 2021–however, to be honest, what cemented the first line for me is that when I mentioned I was reading the, my mother-in-law (epithet needed) quoted the first line to me, and I did not recognize it. But I do now.

A poem entitled “The Golden Gate” begins:

Beyond the clouds, the Golden Gate is waiting,
Which only angel hands can open wide,
And only they whose toil has ended
Pass in, and find their rest at eventide.

Gentle reader, when you and I think of “The Golden Gate,” we think of the bridge. Which was completed fifty-one years after this book was published in the first Grover Cleveland administration.

The book itself is beautiful. Heavy paper and lush illustrations surround every poem.

Every page is like that. Beautiful, but hard to read in spots because the fonts (although they probably called it merely “type” back then) is often small so the poems can fit into the illustrations. I might or might not have used a pair of my beautiful wife’s cheaters a time or to, but no one will ever know because I would only have done so after everyone else was in bed.

Now, a bit more about the provenance of this book.

The book was originally given to a Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Perry, on Christmas of 1886.

The book was then given by Mrs. Perry to her grandson, a young man named Ray Wood, in March 1929. Right before the bad times were coming.

I received this book in 2006 from a relation of Ray, I suspect, as they shared the surname. Given her age in 2006, I would guess Ray was her older brother or cousin and not her father. But what a great gift. I miss “Roberta.”

I’m glad I gave this book its due and read it outside football games. I am glad I’ve protected it with mylar and have hopefully kept Dorito dust out of it. But I cannot help feel some sadness that I suspect that I will be the last person to read the book.

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Movie Report: The Raw Feed (2003)

Book coverThis twenty-year-old Dennis Miller live comedy video from 2003 is mostly interesting as an artifact. I mean, I like Dennis Miller and all (I can’t believe that I’ve only reviewed Ranting Again during the lifetime of this blog, but I read The Rants in 1996 and I listened to other things as audiobooks before I started writing them up as well). But I think part of Dennis Miller’s appeal, at least to me, is a bit of snob appeal–he makes a lot of clever allusions to classical works, and I chuckle to hear them.

But his humor is very topical and based on contemporary events. This show was filmed in Chicago, and the biggest responses it got were about getting ready to invade Iraq and a joke about the child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church. Twenty years on, though, they’re not as fresh.

I have to wonder if I would appreciate this standup routine better as a book, but I’m not sure a single standup routine is enough for a whole book.

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Book Report: From Ghetto to Glory: The Story of Bob Gibson by Bob Gibson with Phil Pepe (1968)

Book coverI hopped into this book right after reading Open Net because I was in the mood for another sports book, and this one was right across the hall.

So. This book really has three themes, and they don’t mesh together very well at all.

  • It’s partly a biography of Bob Gibson, who came out of a poor neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska, played with the Harlem Globetrotters for a season, and then settled into playing for the Cardinals organization and then the major league team, winning a couple of World Series with them and becoming a star, although he’s pretty humble about that.
  • Because it’s 1968 and because Gibson is Black, the book also tackles the Race Question, which served to distance this particular reader who is white but grew up pretty poor. It distances the reader from the experience of the man whenever the book goes into the Experience of the Race.
  • A bit of a baseball book which goes into the philosophy of pitching and that particular, 1967, when the Cardinals won the World Series.

It would have been a far better book if they’d only focused on the first and the third of those themes. It would have focused on what draws us together, not what separates us. Fifty years later, the professionals have gotten better and more scientific at separating us.

At any rate, some good stories in here, like the time where he broke his leg and came out to pitch on it anyway before coming out of the game and being shut down for most of the season thereafter. A lot of love for his wife, whom he divorces a couple years after the book comes out. A lot of familiar names from Cardinals history–Mike Shannon, Tim McCarver, Roger Maris, and so on. So like Open Net, it helps someone who came to fandom later connect those names to stories, but perhaps useless to current fans.

The book is written in very plain language–I wondered if it was targeted to kids, or if it’s just the way the sports journalist Phil Pepe wrote.

I did flag a couple of things.

How do you measure poverty? I wore the same coat for three or four years. It was a hand-me-down from one of my brothers and I wore it until it had too many holes in it. I had one pair of shoes. No Sunday shoes, just one pair for every day in the week, and I wore them until they practically fell off my feet. When they got holes in the bottom, I put a piece of cardboard in them so the water would not seep through when it rained.

See, I can understand that. I got hand-me-downs from the neighbors, which meant I was pretty fly for a white guy in 1980. And my shoes were rubber-soled sneakers, so they’d break down by having the top separate from the sole, not wearing holes in the bottoms, but I remember making the shoes talk like a mouth with my exposed sock as the tongue. It was definitely not a Race thing.

Now that’s the way I see the Negro riots we’re having in this country, as a brushback pitch. Their intention, like the brushback pitch, is to get people to think and not to get complacent and take things for granted. Negroes have been mistreated for years. They are getting tired of being mistreated, misused, and misunderstood, and the only way they can rebel is to stage riots.

The chapter was called “Brushback”, and it started in pitching philosophy including when to brush someone back. Then, it turned into justifying riots as part of the Race Question. Gentle reader, I remind you that over 80 people died in 1967 in riots. The only person who died from a pitch was Ray Chapman. So they’re not the same. And it illustrates how the book veered between its themes poorly. One wonders what Gibson thought about the riots fifty years later in 2020 (which occurred right before his death). Oh, one wonders.

And, yes, lest you wonder, the book does contain the baddest word. Gibson talks about how he feels about it and how he and a couple of teammates cleaned the locker room up of language (and how the team came together as a team instead of groups of different colors).

All I wanted was a baseball book, where I could learn from Bob Gibson, the pitcher. Instead, I got a whole lot of Bob Gibson, The Other.

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Movie Report: Sideways (2004)

Book coverI got this film in February, and I watched it when it was amongst the latest and greatest haul. However, the February haul has been supplanted by the box load from the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale over the weekend, so I will likely start in on those before I finish the ones I bought in February.

At any rate, Sideways is a Paul Giamatti film. His name is above the title. I’ve always been a fan of Paul Giamatti–I remember him from The Truman Show and probably The Negotiator, but suddenly it seemed like he was in everything. But this is the only film I recall him in the starring role.

Giamatti plays Miles, a divorced man who is a writer and a wine and food enthusiast who takes his college roommate Jack on a week-long trip to wine country before Jack’s wedding. Jack is a philanderer and a scallawag, a bit shallow, but Miles is not an unblemished character either–his marriage collapsed due to his affair, and he starts the trip by visiting his mother to wish her happy birthday and to “borrow” (he probably thinks) some cash from her reserves. When they reach wine country, Jack sees that a waitress, played by Virginia Madsen, is into Miles, and he (Jack) arranges a double date when he picks up a winery pourer (played by Sandra Oh).

The relationships progress, but Miles learns that Jack has invited his ex-wife and her new man to the wedding, so he goes into a bit of a tailspin. Meanwhile, Jack’s relationship with Stephanie progresses as well even though Jack is supposed to be getting married in a couple of days–but he declares his love for Stephanie and their planned life together. One gets the sense that he means it, too, just like he means everything in the moment. When Miles lets slip they have to go to a rehearsal dinner, Maya tell Stephanie, and everything is off, but Jack has time for one last fling with another waitress before they return with a cover story explain his broken nose (having it broken by a jilted woman swinging a motorcycle helmet would not do).

The film is most notable for having damaged the merlot industry for a few years (and boosting the pinot noir varietal), but could be secondly noted for having two fully naked sex scenes in it. Miles walks in on both, and I’m sure this is a commentary on his lack of a relationship since his marriage and perhaps a comment on modern relationships as neither is a particularly Biblically sanctioned coupling. But give how few boobs one sees in action and comedy films these days, it was a little strange. Perhaps that’s because it’s a serious movie, where such things are allowed.

At any rate, a good film, a thoughtful film, and I am sure it would have hit me in a different chord if I’d watched it when I was 30 years old and fancied myself a struggling writer (about the time the film came out, I, too, was trying to place a book). But I’m twenty years older than that, and I’m a little calmer these days. So I did not identify with Miles as much as I might have.

Virginia Madsen appeared in this film. I mentioned Electric Dreams, a film that was an early role for her, last month. So perhaps I am on a Virginia Madsen kick.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Sideways (2004)”

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Book Report: Open Net by George Plimpton (1985)

Book coverI bought this book at the J. in St. Louis in August 2007, and I guess I was waiting for the right time to pick it up. It rested on the half bookshelf in the hall, close to The Playboy Book of Humor and Satire. So I picked it up. I suppose it helps that the St. Louis Blues did not make the playoffs this year, and I have no live television provider to watch hockey anyway, and Facebook for some reason is showing me lots of hockey-themed suggested posts. At any rate, I picked it up and read it.

The book takes place almost twenty years after Paper Lion (which I read in 2016), so the author cannot really embed as an older rookie with the Boston Bruins, the team that he embeds with for some training. The book takes place in the early 1980s, before the NHL grew to what it is today. The players remember the brutal days of the 1970s and the older facilities in which the teams played then. Don Cherry is the coach of the Bruins at the time, and I remember him from my hockey watching days fifteen years later as the CBC commentator with the crazy suits. And free agency wasn’t the thing it is now–players tended to stay with teams for a long time. From what I know of hockey today, that still seems truer than it is for other sports, but not like the old days.

The book contains stories from the players, descriptions of the drills, and then Plimpton gets some game time in a preseason game against the Philadelphia Flyers. But that’s two thirds of the way through the book. Then he goes into meeting with the WAGs (wives and girlfriends–don’t you read British tabloids?) and watching the game with them, experience watching the Bruins, whom he has come to think of as his team, at Madison Square Garden, and other stuff, and I wondered–where is he going with this? In Paper Lion, the climactic scene is the football game at the end, but it didn’t seem this was the case with Open Net. But then I discovered that after his experience, he went on a tour promoting the book or hockey or something and ended up in Canada, with a chance to play goal against Gretzky in warmups. So I guess that is the climax, although we’re never informed that we’re building toward that.

So it’s a good book that tells some stories about names I’d heard of, and it includes as young guys some players I’d recognized from the height of my hockey fandom around the turn of the century. No telling how good it would be to, say, my son, whose hockey knowledge is twenty years later than mine, and he might not even know who Bobby Orr was or Eddie Shore, whom I only knew that the Hanson brothers wanted to play old-time hockey like him.

If you’re going to read about a toff pretending to be something he or she is not, Plimpton is far superior to Barbara Ehrenreich.

And, full disclosure, I might have some Plimpton signatures around here on rejection slips from his magazine back in the day. Or they might just be stamps.

I have, I might have mentioned, his golf book as well (which was right next to Open Net, which probably means that the only organization in the stacks at Nogglestead is now gone). But as I am not a golfer, it might take longer than seven years before I pick it up.

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Movie Report: Frantic (1988)

Book coverThis is a 1988 film directed by Roman Polanski, filmed in France obvs because if he filmed in the United States he’d be arrested if he did. Harrison Ford stars as a doctor whose wife is murdered (sorry, wrong movie) disappears from their hotel room in Paris. She’d had trouble opening her suitcase, and when a call came in, she walked out while he was taking a shower. Did she leave willingly or was she taken? The search leads him to believe that it’s the latter. Then the doctor comes across a woman whose bag the wife mistakenly took from the airport. So it’s like 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag but in Paris, and ponderous because it’s directed by an auteur.

They discover that the woman whose bag the wife had taken was not smuggling drugs as she had thought but instead had a MacGuffin, and rival governments were after it. Once they get a hold of it, they exchange it for the wife, the government agents vying for the MacGuffin engage in a shootout, and all ends mostly well.

I don’t feel bad about giving a bit of a spoiler alert there because if you’re going to watch this film, you’re watching it because you’re a big fan of Harrison Ford even though some of his film choices are questionable and didn’t age well. Or you’re a fan of Roman Polanski. Or maybe just a fan of the Barenaked Ladies, who did their bit to keep this film’s cultural relevance in 1998.

But not high on my list of recommendations.

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Movie Report: The Hangover Part II (2011)

Book coverI watched the original film last month, and when I spotted this film in February at the antique mall, I picked it up. And popped watched it relatively quickly by Nogglestead standards.

Well, if you liked the first one (which I really didn’t as it’s more of a modern R-rated comedy and not to my taste) then you’ll like this one as it’s pretty much the same story. This time, the “wolf pack” travels to Thailand for Stu’s wedding (which is not to Heather Graham’s prostitute from the first film–ah, how fleeting is drunken love!). And this time, they don’t lose the groom: They lose the brother of the Lauren, the bride, played by Jamie Chung. And they again have to recreate the events of their blackout night. Which somehow again includes Mr. Chow, played by Ken Jeong, and an appearance by Mike Tyson.

Well, it wasn’t a terribly long movie, and it ended. I didn’t get much out of it. And it is unlikely that I will watch the third part of the film. Unless I can find a copy for fifty cents. After all, Heather Graham appears in it, and Jamie Chung reprises her role, presumably as the wife this time.

Continue reading “Movie Report: The Hangover Part II (2011)”

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Someone Wants Me To Come Home

I keep getting ads like this on my LinkedIn feed:

I’d like to come home, but the political climate of the state does not suit me.

But I will use Springfield, Wisconsin (in Jackson County) for test data today. Wistfully.

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