To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
80s kids have fewer opportunities to quip, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” or “I want my two dollars!”
Geez, you damn kids. The first is from RoboCop (1987). The second is from Better Off Dead (1985).
Nowadays, we’d have to say “I’d buy that for six dollars!” or “I want my twelve dollars!”
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Deadpool, as a character, came at the end of my new comic buying period (that is, I went to college and stopped buying them whenever I came up with a buck and they had new titles at the drugstores as they did in those days). I know, I know; I’ve been known to go to the comic book shop in the last decade and pick up a run or two of Dynamite titles, mostly revamped old properties like Conan or Red Sonja or whatever. Also, he came out in the mutant books, the X-Men and all their spinoffs, and those were not my first choice amongst the new titles–I preferred Spider-Man, Captain America, Wonder-Man, Quasar, and the Avengers over the X-everythings which I found to be too soap-opery.
According to whatever Wikipedia is quoting, the character’s creator says this about Deadpool:
Liefeld spoke on how the character was influenced by Spider-Man: “The simplicity of the mask was my absolute jealousy over Spider-Man and the fact that both of my buddies, [fellow Marvel artists] Erik Larsen and Todd McFarlane, would tell me, ‘I love drawing Spider-Man. You just do an oval and two big eyes. You’re in, you’re out.’ … The Spider-Man I grew up with would make fun of you or punch you in the face and make small cracks. That was the entire intent with Deadpool. … I specifically told Marvel, ‘He’s Spider-Man, except with guns and swords.’ The idea was, he’s a jackass.” Other inspirations were Wolverine and Snake Eyes. Liefeld states: “Wolverine and Spider-Man were the two properties I was competing with at all times. I didn’t have those, I didn’t have access to those. I had to make my own Spider-Man and Wolverine. That’s what Cable and Deadpool were meant to be, my own Spider-Man and my own Wolverine.”
You know, I described him to my beautiful wife the same way: He’s got the wisecracks of Spider-Man, but crass. Also, he’s an anti-hero. He’s definitely of the age that was dawning in the 1990s and in this 21st century.
So the film is his origin story: A thug-for-hire falls in love with a beautiful woman as crazy as he is (played by Morena Baccarin), but learns he has advanced cancer. So he goes to a black market mutant factory where they promise to cure him, but the torturous process, which is actual torture, is designed to stress people to trigger mutagenic change, but the ultimate goal is to create mutants and sell them as slaves or soldiers. Deadpool gets away and then goes hunting for the people who did this to him–made him practically immortal but with scarred to the point that people shun him on the street. They find out who he was and kidnap Marena Baccarin, and a great fight ensues, and Deadpool gets help from Colossus and Negasonic who are familiar with Deadpool whom they want to join the X-forces. Bam, zang, crass, and finis!
I mean, it was all right. I’m growing a little more tolerance for the crass these days, and it did have the comic book movie thing going for it. Apparently the comics also had Deadpool breaking the fourth wall, kind of like She-Hulk in her late 1980s series. Which means it wasn’t as groundbreaking as they might have thought–other comics were doing the Deadpool schticks, but I guess something about this particular character caught on enough that they were making movies about him thirty-some years later. So Marvel has that going for them, which is nice.
My youngest, who watched it with me, was eager to watch the next one if we had it. Oh, but no, gentle reader; when my beautiful wife bought the film for me indirectly for Valentine’s Day, she did not get the second. And one suspects that the latest, Deadpool and Wolverine, might not make an appearance on physical media at all.
And although the film does feature Morena Baccarin who is, what, fifteen years older than she was in Firefly when this film came out? You would have to probably draw a variety of charts and tables with lots of science in them to prove it to me–even though it has Morena Baccarin in it, it is also the first film I’ve seen with Gina Carano in it. So Gina Carano it is. Continue reading “Movie Report: Deadpool (2016)”
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Ah, gentle reader. Yesterday, I cleaned the main level of the house and then hit the gym with my beautiful wife for some cardio training since I will probably do one or two more triathlons at the end of the summer and don’t want to suck or don’t want any of my family to beat me in them. After a snooze, I was not sure what to do with the afternoon, so I thought I’d spend an hour or so at Relics, ostensibly looking for presents for birthdays, the wedding anniversary, and/or Christmas. Nothing in that regard leaped out to me, but I did find a couple of records to bring home.
I got:
I paid for it with the cash in my wallet, so it really wasn’t like spending money at all. And I got change to use in the offering plate for a doughnut and cup of coffee since I’m not tossing twenties in there these days because I’m even now the kind of fellow who will go for some retail therapy now and then, even if it’s only eleven dollars’ worth.
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You know, I suppose I could have read this book last year, when I was on a bit of a Hiaasen-clearing mood (when I read The Downhill Lie, Bad Monkey, and Razor Girl in October and November), but I did not. This book has been on my shelves since 2018, but I’ve not been inclined to pick it up until now. Probably because of the list of authors all working on one novel.
And it was a good judgment call on my part, actually. You know, when I was a sophomore in high school, one of the exercises, the class wrote a story in the round. We were divided into groups based on our columns of desks, and we each started a story and then passed it off to the next column to add to it. We made up a character and inserted him into every story (I know, I know: I just mentioned this story 21 years ago, but that’s back when the blog was on Blogspot, so I can understand if you don’t remember it–and I did mention it more recently in the book report for Samurai Cat Goes To The Movies in 2023).
This book is similar–and apparently it originally appeared as a serial in Miami Herald Tropic. So each of them, it looks like, picked up the thread or from the cliffhanger of the previous writer left off. And we whipsaw a bit between stylistic changes and even some plotish and characterization elements. One of the authors kills off a sympathetic character in the middle. Another makes the title manatee, nicknamed Booger, almost sentient in sentiment only to have Hiaasen de-retcon that when he wrapped it up.
So, the plot, as it starts: The manatee, naked, gets tangled in some cargo being smuggled in a special metal container after a boat collision sends it into the bay. An elderly defender of nature whom the manatee knows helps untangle him from the netting into which the contraband was caught discovers It’s Castro’s frozen head! (remember, The Day After Tomorrow was a best seller the year before). Except another cannister turns up with another Castro head in it. And Castro wants to come to the United States to visit an old paramour from the days of the revolution. Or he’s already here receiving advanced cancer treatment. Given that they’re just riffing off of previous chapters and putting their own spins on it, the authors kind of do what they want, and Hiaasen writes the final chapter to try to make sense of it all, but….
What I read was more of a concept than a novel, and it doesn’t hold together very well. I’m not even sure who most of the characters are–they have names, and relationships established in various chapters, but they differ just enough chapter-to-chapter that I didn’t really remember who was who or what they wanted to do. And I’m not really sure I could tell you the actual resolution except that the manatee, human-intelligent in one chapter but not at the end, never does get clothing and remains naked at the end.
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I can’t actually tell you when I bought this book from ABC Books, as it does not show up in a Good Book Hunting post via a quick search, but it would have been shelved right above the martial arts section when they had one (the last time I was in, they did not have a martial arts section, which was empty most of the time anyway). They must have thought a lot about this book, as it is wrapped in a mylar cover, but one of the things I noticed about it very early was the poor paper quality. It’s yellowed and its luminosity has dimmed–I would have thought I was reading a 1960s paperback instead of a hardback that’s under 20 years old.
At any rate, it tells the story of a man who attended and played football for a remote Texas state university in the late 1960s who left college after his junior year. Well, left is a euphemism. He was thrown out because he was a brawler, raised by a brawler to fight from a young age. The book starts out describing how he got back together for a reunion with some of his team mates from the old team when they were all older, and he wondered if he could still play. He had a year of eligibility left, so he went out to Aspen, Texas, to find out if they were open to letting him try out for the team, and they were. So he comes down, enrolls in grad school, and….
The book shifts to a bit of an autobiography, talking about how he was raised by a hard father, how he got into a lot of fights in his youth, including the one with a team mate that got him thrown out of school, and then about how he got started as a weight and strength training coach for different universities culminating in a position at Texas A&M and how he fought and bested an NFL player who was ignoring him when he was trying to close the weight room down for the night. He talks about finding Jesus, he talks a little about getting involved with a friend’s pyramid scheme in collecting money to invest in selling American clothes overseas but eventually after they’re both indicted, his charges are dismissed. Then…. there’s a gap of about 20 years, and then we’re back in the present.
He tries out and makes the team as a special teams player, and he spends much of the season hurt with a groin pull (not fun; I had one almost a decade ago, and it took me eight or ten weeks to return to semi-normal activity and maybe a couple of years before it stopped hurting sometimes), herniated disks, and other things. He gets hurt in practice, and cannot actually play, although the media comes to town to do stories on him and the crowds chant for him to go in, and eventually, at the end, the he gets to play in the last game of the season and makes a couple of blocks.
And then, in the last chapter (“Afterword: Is There A Fountain of Youth?”), he talks about the missing 20 years: He apparently came up with a simple apparatus for exercising which he sold via infomercials and then to the government in wholesale lots and made big bank on it. The last chapter is almost a pitch for the device. And, to be honest, it brings the whole thing into question. Was the whole thing a publicity stunt to sell the devices (and a book and, eventually, a movie in 2023)? Did he really earn a roster spot or was he merely a wealthy alum humored by the university? The coach seems ambivalent to say the least, and the authors claim his distraction was because his family had moved to Wisconsin and he was stuck in Texas, but is that really it?
So I was looking for inspiration in being athletic even when one is getting up there–I mean, I’m still lumbering through triathlons and doing martial arts even as various aches and pains arise with no seeming reason nor triggering event, so I could use that sort of thing. But this was not it. Also, my experience of the book is probably colored by the fact that I attended a manufacturer’s conference a week ago where “Rudy” Ruettiger whose story was the basis of the movie Rudy about an undersized player who attends the university later than other students (only a couple years in Rudy’s story), walks on to the football team, and gets to play at the end (and was later indicted for financial shenanigans). But at least Rudy got a sack.
So not to slag on the guy, who is 77 now and can probably still kick my can, but not inspirational to me.
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Well, not a quiz per se, but yesterday Lileks posted a screen grab from the original Taking of Pelham 123:
Ooops, sorry, that’s something else, and Travolta was in the remake, not the original.
Here is what Lileks posted:
And I thought: “Hey, I’ve been in a physical book store in my life!” Wait, no, I thought: “I have that book.”
Later book club editions that I bought in 2008 and will read…. someday. Undoubtedly, they’re way out of date for modern things but are still appropriate for things that still actually work.
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Neo posted this video, 10 Old House Styles No Longer Built Today, on her open thread today:
As you might remember, gentle reader, when we lived in Old Trees, we took our baby-at-the-time out walking for sometimes four hours a day, so we covered a large portion of the area. And of the ten styles included in the video, there are only three that I cannot remember seeing: Atomic Ranch, Brutalist, and Shotgun Shack.
Which is not to say that you cannot find them; it just means that I cannot remember seeing them, although the area had several smaller houses which might have been Atomic Ranch or Shotgun Shacks, they might have been torn down for bigger houses by now.
You might think that all-steel Lustron houses would be hard to come by, but we had one across the street and two around the corner from our house just off the highway. Not as many as Brentwood, another suburb of St. Louis, but enough that I recognize them.
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Well, he is breakfasting on a hunk of French bread and cheese (not French), so….
All signs indicate yes.
(See also: a crust of brown bread as a snack.)
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This is one of John D. MacDonald’s science fantasy books–The Ballroom of the Skies being the other, which I just read almost 20 years ago. I just picked this book up ten years ago, and I’ve been kind of pacing myself on new (to me) MacDonald books because one day I will run out. Although there are so many, and I’ve paced them out so, that I can probably re-read them.
So: On Earth, a brilliant scientist is working on a discredited project for interstellar travel that the military wants to kill. A technician, in a moment of “madness,” damages the project, but Bard, the project leader, wants him back. The team is monitored by a psychologist for signs of this madness, this loss of control. Meanwhile, a dissipated and dying race on another planet has forgotten its history and only lives to play and to “dream” in special machines that show them worlds that they think don’t exist where they can play violent and destructive games. An outcast of this race who has gone to forbidden levels of the world, a large building on a desolate planet, to learn, and he wonders if the worlds and the people are real–and he hopes to establish contact with the scientist and to help him to reach their planet–or to take one of the remaining rockets on his planet to visit Earth.
So it’s very close thematically to Ballroom of the Skies in that psi-aliens are responsible for the burgeoning violence on the planet. In both cases, Fawcett reprinted some of MacDonald’s earliest works given his later success, particularly with the Travis McGee series. It’s early in his career–and with a bit more imagination, perhaps he would have become a successful science fiction writer rather than crime fiction. But this book is a little uneven–it tackles bureaucracy well, but it flags in the middle and limps to a happy ending. Maybe that’s characteristic of MacDonald’s early work, the interesting setup, a tailed-off middle, and an abrupt end–I seem to remember thinking that about some of his other early paperback originals–the checklist in the book report for John D. MacDonald: A Checklist of Collectible Editions & Translations links to my book reports on some of his work from the 1950s, and it does seem to be the case that he’s still finding his footing and his formula that will be successful in the 1960s and beyond.
So definitely a book for a MacDonald fan. But for a general science fiction fan: you could probably do better. And worse, as the book reports on this blog indicate: paperback original science fiction from the mid-century period was a mixed bag.
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It’s funny: I have several Steve Martin movies atop my fresh media cabinet, including The Pink Panther, Bringing Down The House, The Shop Girl, and probably a couple of others (although not The Out-of-Towners which I watched late last year), but I passed over them for this film early in his ouevre which I just bought with my Valentine’s Day gift card.
In it, Steve Martin plays a neurosurgeon, the best in the world, who has recently lost his wife. As he is driving, he hits a cruel golddigger, played by Kathleen Turner, who has just given her current husband a heart attack, but he has written her out of his will. Martin’s neurosurgeon, Dr. Hfuhruhurr, performs emergency surgery on her and saves her life and falls for her–and she gets her hooks into him, denying him his marital due, and is on the verge of leaving him during a European trip until she learns he stands to inherit fifty million dollars. Dr. Hfuhruhurr learns her true nature and becomes sympatico with the brain of a young victim of The Elevator Killer, a serial killer stalking the streets or elevators of Vienna. So it becomes a wacky love triangle, and Dr. Hfuhruhurr tries to figure out how he can be with the brain of the woman he loves.
So, yeah, it’s a bit odd, but it’s full of Steve Martin’s type of humor which is dry and absurd, but not especially slapstick. I think his best work comes in his original films, like this and Dead Men Wear Plaid and Bowfinger rather than the other things where he does remakes or reboots. Of course, I haven’t seen The Pink Panther yet, so maybe it will wow me.
I’m thinking about actually going back to Vintage Stock to look for Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and The Jerk–they would have come out about the beginning of the home video revolution, so they should be available in DVD or VHS (Vintage Stock is not vintage enough to stock VHS–but maybe I could find them at antique malls for a buck or so). So let that be your endorsement: I’m tempted to pay more than a buck on other works by the same actor based on the viewing of this movie.
Although the other films won’t have Kathleen Turner in them. Continue reading “Movie Report: The Man With Two Brains (1983)”
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I mentioned that a poet whom I knew decades ago is now atop my Facebook feed every day, not because she posts photos of she and her husband in the cockpit of a plane where they’re flying rescue animals hither and yon nor photos of her most recent trip to Europe–I have gotten those intermittently since we reconnected right after Mike died–wow, five years ago already? I guess that tracks as I was just telling my brother that my aunt in St. Charles died five years ago Thanksgiving. At any rate, the poet now appears at the top of my Facebook feed about every time I log in because she’s posting about politics every damned day with the attitude “I am a reasonable person, and I’m trying to make sense of this madness that is opposing viewpoints….”
Like this:
Mmm-hmm. David French.So she has found a “conservative” who has been slagging on Donald Trump and the people who would vote for him for, what, ten years running? Maybe try some Kevin Williamson, too, if you can find him nowadays.
You know, I was off Facebook for, what, a year or so a couple of years back. I get the sense that logging in to see my memories is not going to be enough to keep me interested in it here shortly. Not when posts I put up remain unacknowledged (probably unseen) by friends, and when the posts I see are AI- or foreign-generated sludge and political posts from tangental acquaintances designed to sway me because all my friends, apparently, think one way.
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So I got this book in a roundabout fashion: As part of the stocking stuffers for Christmas 2023, I bought the family Barnes and Noble gift cards, which I failed to stuff in their stockings in 2023 (they were full enough anyway), so I put them in the stockings for Christmas 2024 (where the stockings were less stuffed, so the deferred giving worked out better than it might have). My beautiful wife knew that this book was coming out this year (although the copyright date is 2024, it was not in book stores until February 2025). She read it right away–ah, gentle reader, I remember a time when I would buy a book by an author the day it came out and read it that night, but we are too far in the 21st century for me to do that much any more. After she read it, she put it into my office, and I put it in my unread stacks until after the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. And, amazingly, I found it again shortly thereafter, so I picked it up.
This is an Elvis Cole / Joe Pike novel–it seems that Crais has abandoned writing other non-series books–and it’s definitely a throwback to late 20th century suspense writing. The style balances paragraphs of decription with dialog, which means good pacing with actual description in it and not just a script in a hardback. It’s almost 400 pages, but it doesn’t feel like it.
So, the plot: A young woman famous and rich from her online baking videos and growing media and baking empire contacts Elvis Cole to look for her father who disappeared ten years ago. He was declared dead after five years missing and a search by an investigation firm that Cole knows and respects. So he starts his investigation and discovers that someone in Rancha, the last place the father was seen, doesn’t want him investigating. Which leads to a brutal beatdown of Cole by multiple attackers (when he doesn’t give up) which allows multiple characters to say, “It looks like you got your ass kicked,” which was probably funnier to the author when he was writing the book than to me reading it.
The plot is a little convoluted–well, no more so than a Raymond Chandler book–and I don’t know that it hangs together seamlessly or without wrinkles–I thought a particular twist was coming which did not, and it ended up a little disappointing, but the execution and writing was refreshing enough that I’ll probably get the next Crais book for my wife right when it comes out, should another be forthcoming (it’s taking him several years to crank them out these days, so one of these will be the last, but hopefully not soon).
Which leads me to think maybe I should read all the Cole and then Cole/Pike books again. I’ve read Robert B. Parker’s early works several times, including some binge reads where I tore through all the works to a certain point in rapid succession, but that’s been twenty or twenty-five years–and I’m not especially inclined to do it again with the Spenser novels as they got longer and more hardback scripts having gained length but losing depth somewhere around that time. But Crais? I suspect I’d find they are pretty much quality throughout. But I have so many other books to read that I’m not eager to run through them again unless they accidentally end up on my to-read shelves again.
So: Recommended.
And I would be remiss if I did not mention that I own two copies of what might be Crais’s first published work–which is not The Monkey’s Raincoat. Which was expensive in paperback when we tried to find it twenty years ago.
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I am pretty sure that this film and Raw Deal were both in fairly heavy rotation on Showtime during the period when we were in the trailer and had Showtime, which meant that we would have watched it over and over. I watched it so many times that I thought, surely, I have it in the library, but, no, not until recently when I was spending a gift card and it was facing out. I didn’t think to look for Raw Deal at the time. I mean, it was only last year that I picked up Predator, which is still part of the contemporary culture–not only is it in a fairly common meme, but you still see it mentioned on blogs (and Substacks) as relevant. But Commando? Where is the love?
At any rate, Arnold Schwarzenneggar plays Matrix, a retired special Army unit, well, Commando whose old unit is getting killed off by unknown forces. A general comes to ask Matrix, Schwarzenneggar, for help, but Matrix has promised not to leave his daughter (a very young Alyssa Milano). However, the outside forces get the drop on Matrix and kidnap the girl, and it turns out one of Matrix’s old unit, a sadistic man named Bennett, faked his death and is the, what, leader of a group protecting an exiled South American dictator, and they want Matrix to go to the South American country to kill the leader he (Matrix) helped to install to replace the dictator. They put Matrix on a plane and expect to hear from his escort in 12 hours, but Matrix kills the escort, gets off the plane, and then has 12 hours to find his daughter before they know he is not in South America. 1980s explosive mayhem occurs along with some especially lame one-liners when bad guys are one-offed.
Still, it was an enjoyable re-watch, and I might even watch it again sometime.
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Ah, again. Facebook is starting to show me contacts with whom I’ve not had much truck in a long while (because Facebook generally prefers to show me suggested posts and whatnot) but whose expressed opinions are disproval of the current administration (which is a little over a month old and has already apparently ruined everything).
I mean, we’ve got the professional poet whom I knew 25 years ago who disapproves. We don’t comment or like each other’s posts–why is she back with her disapproval?
I dunno. I guess Facebook has an interesting idea of whom I want to see anyway. I get posts from an ex-pat with, erm, modernly special child or children, with whom I worked twenty years ago. I get my cousin the yoga teacher who just married a woman.
I also get this Twitter friend whose webinar I attended this month, but who probably could do without my Internet acquaintance:
Jeez, man. Tell me your job depends upon government funding without saying those words.
Facebook is not nudging me to more modernly approved opinions. I’m getting nudged to not bother any more.
I’m pretty sure I’ve grabbed my best one-liners from Facebook and put them onto the recycler tour posts here anyway.
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This book is undated and looks to be self-published, probably something for the gift shop in Smirnoff’s theater in Branson. I could date it pretty closely by its topic matter: Several Enron jokes, but no mention of the September 11 attacks. I went to the Amazon listing for the book, and it says 2000, which is what I would have guessed. Closer to when I met him in 2012 than that meeting is to today, gentle reader, and meaning it’s been fifteen and a half years since I read America on Six Rubles a Day, and only eight months since I bought this signed copy in Clever last year. I just sort of presumed I had a lot of Yakov Smirnoff books on my shelves, but I guess there are not that many titles available. I just see a lot of them because they’re pretty common in these parts.
At any rate, it’s a collection of short topical bits about, well, life and living in this country and whatnot. Fairly basic humor stuff. A little biography worked in here and there, some of his story of coming to America and coming to Branson. A little about the philosophy that would lead him to becoming Doctor Smirnoff later and his philosophy of happiness and love.
So I guess I could have picked this book up for the Feels Good category of the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, but I did not. But it was close to Hope Always Wins, so I picked it up shortly thereafter.
And I guess my shelves are not rife with Smirnoff, which is a shame. I’m old enough to remember his 80s schtick which gives him a head start in appreciation. I should really get down to one of his shows again before he does retire for good this time.
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