To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Because I’ve seen that movie before.
Actually, I read about the movie in one of the kiddie computer magazines in like 1984–I forget which magazine, but I had a subscription to it several years before I had a computer–and I eventually watched it at some point.
I don’t have it in the library here at Nogglestead, and it’s not likely that I’ll find a videocassette of it in the wild, but one never knows.
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This is a Rob Schneider film. So if you know what that means, you know what you’re getting: Rob Schneider acting whacky in absurd situations. Which did not prove to be a particular winning formula at the box office–well, winning enough to get a Deuce Bigelow sequel, but not winning enough that most people know what a Rob Schneider film is like. Unlike, say, an Adam Sandler film, which most people will know involves a man-boy of some sort thrust into a position of adult responsibility and having to grow up. Everyone has seen at least one, although that one is probably not Little Nicky.
At any rate, Schneider plays a civilian employee of the police force who keeps trying to get into the police academy via a physical competition/obstacle course race, and every year he fails (and wets his pants, this being a Rob Schneider movie and all). But after an automobile accident in the wilderness leaves him close to death, a strange doctor heals him with the help of animal parts. The animal parts give him strength and abilities, but also tend to give him animal impulses that he struggles with (this being a Rob Schneider film and all). So he gets to become a police officer after an incident, and he woos a nature lover/animal shelter operator played by Colleen Haskell, a participant in the original Survivor who had a brief pop culture moment which was mostly starring in this film. But The Animal starts having blackout incidents that coincide with animal mutilations in the area which leads him to worry that perhaps he should be return to the scientist and live there away from others he can hurt.
It was amusing in that Rob Schneider film way–I even liked Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo. But it’s not for all tastes, for sure.
The film also had John C. McGinley as a police sargeant antagonist. McGinley has had a long career playing similar types (as well as one of the Bobs in Office Space against type). I’ve seen him here and there enough to recognize him, but for some reason, I sometimes confuse him with Tony Goodwyn. Maybe it’s because they’re often in those second banana roles or antagonist roles. I dunno. But there it is.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to check the video library to see if I actually own Deuce Bigelow or if I have to remember to watch for it.
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This book has been languishing on the most ignored to-read bookshelf at Nogglestead, the small little bookshelf in the hall between our offices. The three full-sized bookshelves on the opposite wall command the attention when I’m looking for something to read, and so I rarely draw a book from there. Even when I’ve looked at that shelf for something to read, I’ve sometimes considered this volume, but it’s a bit of a chonker–it’s 400 pages, and with Playboy on the cover, it’s not like I was going to carry this book to the dojo or to church. I guess I was saving it up for just the right moment when I would want to read it. Which finally arrived.
The book contains over 30 humorous articles and essays that appeared in the magazine up to the middle 1960s. Some of the articles are about sex, but not all of them. Remember, younglings, back in the 1960s, Playboy was a premier literary magazine as well as a place to see bazingas.
So this book includes pieces by Woody Allen, Allan Sherman, Art Buchwald (who must have been young once, ainna?), Jean Shepherd, and others. And aside from Art Buchwald, I could hear the enumerated authors’ voices in my head as I read (after all, I did listen to Pomp and Circumstance, a collection of Shepherd’s radio programs, in 2019). In searching for the link to the musings on that radio program collection, I externally remembered that Shepherd Mead, also in this book, was the author of How To Succeed In Business Without Trying (which I have not seen or read) as well as How to Live Like a Lord Without Trying (which I have read). So, clearly, I am in the target demographic of this book although I was born five years after it was published.
Overall, an up and down collection. Some pieces are funnier than others. Some rely on being an insider on publishing or movie-making. I was going to say that a few of them are dated, but, c’mon, man, very few overtly political sneers and no mentions of modern technologies or mindsets, so they’re all dated, but some of them fall into the anachronisms of my lived experience. I am sure that if you handed this to a kid today, he wouldn’t be scandalized because he wouldn’t know what Playboy represented in the 20th century, and he probably would not understand much of the humor within the book anyway. Not that he would want to read it. Not if there was a good, or any, TikTok or YouTube video available.
Which is unfortunate.
At any rate, Playboy collections from the 1960s are probably worth picking up even if they don’t have pictures. So one can remember a time where men aspired to some sophistication or at least think wistfully about a time when men might have aspired to some sophistication but were probably mostly all about the bazingas.
Although the cover art, man. That gives me nightmares.
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MINOR LEAGUE TEAM SCORES 7 RUNS, WINS DESPITE BEING ON THE RECEIVING END OF A NO-HITTER
The Trash Pandas, unfortunately, were the team that threw the no-hitter.
(Remember, gentle reader, the Rocket City Trash Pandas have been my favorite minor league baseball team for five years, which means mostly I wear that sweatshirt in heavy rotation in the winter and I post about them when I see them in the news–not that I follow them closely.)
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This film comes from the 1990s, when the movie industry let Joe Pesci star in comedies (such as My Cousin Vinny). I mean, you could consider this an ensemble cast as it includes Dyan Cannon, George Hamilton, David Spade, and Todd Louiso (who was also in High Fidelity, so apparently I am on a Todd Louiso kick like my recent Wesley Snipes and Sandra Bullock kicks, but accidentally).
This film combines comedy with Pesci’s mob roles as he plays Tommy, a transporter who is commissioned to take the severed heads of 8 members of a gang from the east coast to the west coast as proof that a hit occurred. On the flight (in the 20th century, I suppose one could suspend disbelief that a man could carry on a duffel bag with heads in it), his duffel is mixed up with that of a college student on his way to go on vacation with his long-distance girlfriend’s parents. Hijinks ensue when he takes the duffel bag to a Mexican resort and discovers its contents. So the guy tries to keep anyone from discovering the grisly remains, to keep from getting arrested, and to dispose of them while Tommy tries to find where the kid has gone and to get them back.
So it had amusing moments, but underwhelmed me a bit.
But if you’re a Todd Louiso completeist, you must see it.
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I have a bit of a confession to make, gentle reader: when I was younger, middle school or high school perhaps, I was prone to confuse Saki with O. Henry. Mostly because I knew that both were short story writers who used pseudonyms. I am pretty sure that I only had O. Henry stories available in the giant reusable English textbooks of the day, but it certainly wouldn’t have helped that I only read “A Retrieved Reformation” and maybe “The Gift of the Magi” and no Saki whatsoever. Because the styles are quite different.
One wonders if young people today, or even college English majors, could tell the difference between the two or know just that much about them (short stories, pseudonyms) to confuse them. Probably not.
It doesn’t help that Saki short stories are rather short, with a bit of a twist to them kind of like O. Henry stories. However, they are very British. They reminded me of Chesterton’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, as it too deals mostly with upper crust members of society at their particular concerns and country manors. Several deal with Clovis, a young sophisticate and how he punctures some of the more fuddy-duddy members of his class.
The book also plays upon the trope of aunts, childless women in the family who insert themselves into the lives of their families (or who end up raising the children in the family for various reasons). Kind of like a relatively recent Progressive insurance commercial I’ll post below but which will be yanked from YouTube within a year as its rights expire or something, and we’ll all wonder what I was talking about when viewing this post in 2026:
One had to wonder if the shrinking size of the American family has put all of that aunt energy into the political arena to our detriment.
At any rate, an enjoyable read at 178 pages in a cheap college-reader paperback edition.
I did flag a couple of things:
The baddest word
The book does feature the baddest word, and even in Britain in the late 1800s or early 1900s, it’s used to show the speaker in a bad light. In this case, a man who would like to be known as an expert in religious architecture has moonlighted as the writer of poems that are set to popular music of the day, and he’s afraid that he’ll be known as the writer of music that, erm, black minstrels sing. So it’s not the main character (Clovis) using it, but a bit of a ridiculous fellow.
Although, to be honest, the word “minstrel” is probably already on its way to being a bad word, and I should probably be banned from polite society for using it. Not that 1) there’s any part of society that’s polite these days, and 2) I probably would not be part of that world anyway.
I’m right there with you
“It’s not the daily grind that I complain of,” said Blenkinthrope resentfully; “It’s the dull grey sameness of my life outside of office hours. Nothing of interest comes my way, nothing remarkable or out of the common. Even the little things that I do try to find some interest in don’t seem to interest other people.”
Ya know, I spend my off hours reading books I only post about on this blog, writing poems that I’m not sanguine about placing with magazines, and doing various crafts that end up in boxes in the garage because I’m not sure they’d be of interest to anyone but me, and I’m not eager to open an Etsy account to determine if that’s truly the case.
Hopefully, though, I won’t have the comeuppance or resolution that Blenkinthrope has which involves a fictional chicken.
Walmarts Dollar Generals in 1910 England
“The outlook is not encouraging for us smaller businesses,” said Mr. Scarrick to the artist and his sister, who had taken rooms over his suburban grocery store. “These big concerns are offering all sorts of attractions to the shopping public which we couldn’t afford to imitate, even on a small scale–reading-rooms and play-rooms and gramaphones and Heaven knows what.”
I guess it was not the Dollar Generals back then, but the same complaints are heard today, ainna?
The solution, devised by the artist, involves having some actors in to provide some intrigue which the housewives spread amongst themselves and that pretend intrigue draws them in to shop.
I’m not sure if it would work at the Pricecutter–it’s hard to keep the story lines straight when the employee turnover is accellerating (Dusty was in produce for a number of years, Ira and Debbie’s pharmacy is gone, Ron, the retiree who worked at Pricecutters as a bagger for fifteen years after retirement from his real job, and Linda, the sour checker, are gone; even Andrea and Ryan, the later replacements who checked and worked their ways up to the courtesy counter, have been gone for–years?)
But it’s a good example of how the stories have their twists, and how they might have been ahead of their time. Or how, perhaps, I did not give enough credit to stories and concerns that were nearly universal in industrial/modern societies that might have been shared by people or writers before my time (random thought: My brother and I offered this rejoinder to our sainted mother back in the day: “It’s the 80s, Mom.” which is an anachronism now).
I guess that’s why I read: to broaden my horizon and to realize that my experience is not so unique.
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I picked this film up not long after I watched The Art of War with Wesley Snipes a couple of weeks ago. Like that film, this DVD was a little deeper in the archives–meaning I did not buy it this year–but I figured that I would not be quite so primed to watch a Snipes film, especially an obscure Snipes film, as I would be right after another Snipes film. Well, this is the third in relatively short succession as I did watch Demolition Man recently even though I did not report on it–because when I ordered it, it came as part of a four-pack of Sylvester Stallone films, and I didn’t move it to the review staging area because the set has three more films in it. Sorry, I have let you down.
Also, I guess this means that I am on a Sylvester Stallone kick since I also recently watched The Expendables. But that’s neither here nor there.
So: Wesley Snipes plays Painter, a spotter who identifies targets for precision bombing. He proves how good he is in an exercise, but he has a dark past: He mistakenly “painted” the wrong target, leading to his support team getting killed. He’s drawn into a mission to identify a decommissioned nuclear plant in Chechnya before terrorists can re-start the nuclear reaction and blow it up, creating devastation and killing hundreds of thousands. However, it becomes clear that some sort of double-cross has occurred, and it’s the American missiles that will destroy the already reactivated power plant. So it’s a race against time to rescue what scientists he and his team can and to rectify the errors–and he’s not sure whom he can trust from above.
So a better film than The Art of War, although in 2005, the Russians, or certain hardline elements of the Russians, were the bad guys, some where good guys I guess? Then, as now, the internal politics and policy goals of a foreign people are difficult to ascertain. The movie itself plays a lot like a good direct to cable movie or a B movie would have been back in the day. Better than, say, Hell Comes To Frogtown or Warlords, with a bigger budget, but the Internet says they recycled some film from higher budget spectacles outside the generic military-in-the-industrial-facility scenes.
Still, not bad.
Also, it has an older (but younger than I am now) Emma Samms as a, um, psychologist/handler/love interest for the Wesley Snipes character.
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This film is based on a Philip K. Dick story, so you know that it deals with messed-up memories. Not to be too meta, I’d seen this film before–whether I’d rented it from the video store or recorded it on a DVR and watched it, I am not sure–I do know (or do I?) that it’s not in my current watched video library which I am getting familiar with as I am now actually dusting it semi-weekly instead of once every six months unless the DVD is behind others, as the video library at Nogglestead is also doublestacked (or because someone did not want me to see the film again). So I picked it up in February and watched it in late March.
And, gentle reader, in keeping with the spirit of it, I had forgotten the plot of the movie. Or had it been erased from my memory, by whom, and why?
At any rate, I will post it here so that I do not forget again as long as they let me keep this site active. Ben Affleck plays an engineer, Jennings, who does work for high tech firms under strict non-disclosure agreements which involve having his memory wiped for the period of the contract. He can only work eight weeks at a time, and as his friend Shorty (Paul Giamatti) wipes his mind after his latest job, Shorty notes that it’s getting harder to do and that it’s getting risky. But a long-time acquaintance and billionaire offers Jennings a job that will make him millions but will last two years. So he agrees, and only moments seem to pass for Jennings, but he’s done what they’ve asked, and he’s released from the secure facility. He checks the value of his stock options, which have grown to a value of $90 million dollars. When he goes to cash out, though, he finds that he himself had only a couple of weeks before surrendered his options and apparently replaced the personal belongings he brought with him to the facility with seemingly innocuous items.
So he has to figure out what’s going on. Clearly, a conspiracy of sorts, as he is hunted by Federal law enforcement for treason and by others who want him dead.
I won’t spoil it for you, gentle reader who is likely me in a decade or so when I have forgotten the details of the film. It’s a pretty good bit of paranoid fiction. Ben Affleck is not Harrison Ford or Arnold Schwarzenneggar, but he does a good job here. The film also features Uma Thurman as the love interest, so clearly I am on an Uma Thurman kick (having also recently watched My Super Ex-Girlfriend). But, as with that previous post, I am not posting pictures of Ms. Thurman, insisting instead that you refer to Kim du Toit’s post which is fading into the history of the Internet already.
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The blog turns 20 today. It started on Blogger and Blogspot in the days before blog posts over there had titles; in January 2010, I switched over to WordPress and my own domain (I think the first post is this one), and I have since imported all the Blogspot content here and cleaned it up to replace all the internal links to point to this blog and to replace my old Amazon affiliate links with my new Amazon affiliate links (which are now also old Amazon affiliate links, as Amazon kicked me out of the program again, this time because you cheap bastards gentle readers weren’t buying anything through them).
I started it after having read other blogs for a couple of years. I had just finished my novel John Donnelly’s Gold, and I thought a blog would be a good place for me to post essays–something to keep me writing daily, or at least semi-regularly.
But it didn’t work out that way; instead, I found myself posting short, snarky bits on news items. You know, like a blog. More of a linker than a thinker (which was not the original intent, note), but I guess I found I did not have the time to write a well-reasoned essay every day.
Ah, in those early years, I was quite up there in blogs. I was in the top, what, 5000 blogs on the planet (according to the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem). Of course, there were fewer blogs then, and they tended to be individual blogs. And then the consolidations came.
I didn’t really make a whole lot of blog friends, or blog contacts that led me into the wider blog industry. I mean, some people have made a go of it for fifteen years, whether supplementing income or deriving side income from blogging, but I never got called up to the bigs. I did some work for 24th State for a while, but that has been, what, a decade? And I never hit the big time.
These days, I’m mostly writing book reports and thoughts on movies I’ve seen interspersed with stories from my life, little humor bits, and the occasional snarky bit of commentary on the news. I’m not overly political these days because frankly, that’s wearying and boring. I can’t work up the same zeal for it as I did twenty years ago.
But I write it mostly for myself, gentle reader, for myself in a couple of years when I’m wandering back in the archives for some reason–looking to see what I thought about a particular book (and surprised how much time has elapsed since I read it) and then wandering a couple posts forward or back.
I hope you continue to find some amusement in some of the posts. Or, at very least, pleasing photos of actresses on select movie reports.
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I bought this film as part of my February buying spree, which means it was part of my March binge. Which is a couple of movies a week, so I am not sure that that counts as a binge in 2023.
I just read the book–in this case, “just” means almost two years ago. So I will steal the book’s plot summary as the film is pretty true to the book:
So. The story of the book is that the protagonist, a 35-year-old record store owner named Rob Fleming gets dumped by his long-time live-in girlfriend for the guy who formerly lived upstairs from them (and the two move in together elsewhere), which triggers Rob’s reflection on his relationships and his life which seems to have stalled. Prone to making a list, Rob lists his top five heartbreaks of all time and gets in touch with those women and moons over Laura, whom he met while he was DJing at a defunct club. She has gone onto become an attorney at a big law firm in London, which creates a gulf between them in Rob’s mind, and he’s starting to get a little bitter.
That’s the size of it, except the location is changed to Chicago.
In the film, Rob (John Cusack) breaks the fourth wall a bunch to talk directly to the audience, which actually works to capture some of the first person narration of the book. The film also wraps up and closes pretty quickly after the funeral, when Rob and his most recent girlfriend reconcile–the end part of the book where Rob dotes a little on the reporter for the local alt paper goes on a bit much, and his future with Laura, the girlfriend with whom he reconciles, is left more in doubt. In the film, as I said, this is minimized, and it looks like Rob has actually grown up and changed, whereas the book left that in doubt.
The film resonated with me, perhaps more than it did when I first watched it. Rob’s kind of at a loose end, getting older and not really accomplishing much these days aside from sticking in his rut and then bolting from relationships. It’s been a while since I have had a project that I spent time on–I’ve started to think that the things I start or try are pretty much doomed to failure as I tend to get to a certain point with them, encounter some difficulty, and then set them aside and the tide of life washes over them, and suddenly six months or six years have passed.
I’m fortunate, though, that I’m still married and I don’t have to deal with that particular angst of dating and finding someone. I just need to remember I have her more.
So a better film than a book, strangely. Perhaps a bit anachronistic to the younger people, although who knows? It certainly did not seem anachronistic to me because I lived it contemporaneously.It also has nice casting, including Jack Black as one of Rob’s employees and Tim Robbins as the pony-tailed martial artist and Zen master neighbor that Laura shacks up with.
And one of the parts of the film is Rob reaching out to women who broke his heart–although he relearns that he was often the dumper and not the dumped. The film casts many lovely actresses as Rob’s former girlfriends.
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An aside in Stephen Green’s column You Don’t Need a Study to Know That Pets Are Good for Your Kids’ Health:
“Besides,” I added, “my cat Dingo thinks he’s a dog. He drools and fetches. Seriously.”
Apparently that was a good enough answer, because we’ve been together ever since that night.
ASIDE: Dingo was short for Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián d’Anconia Green, named after the Atlas Shrugged character because they both had black hair and an attitude problem. I had to shorten his name to Dingo instead of Frisco because I didn’t want to correct countless assumptions that I’d given him the same horrible nickname as the city I used to live in.
I never did announce the names of the kittens we rustled in October. We did name one Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, shortened to Nico.
The other?
Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián d’Anconia. Although we have shortened it to Cisco instead of Frisco. And, yes, I have memorized the whole name, although I am pretty sure his official records and microchip all say Cisco (I joked that it would have taken a second chip to get the whole name between his shoulder blades).
Currently, Cisco is wearing the collar as he was neutered but last week. He had an undescended testicle, and the vet hoped waiting would let it descend on its own (it did not). So he has had his share of other nicknames, including Solo, Paint Can (if you shake him, you can hear a marble inside), and other things. Now that he’s in a cone, though, the only nickname we’ve given him is Starlink (unlike Roark back in the day.
And, yes, that does bring us to four cats named for Rand characters (the other two were Galt and Dominique). Far and away the best represented mythos among many and many opportunities to name cats over the years.
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I saw this listed in the church bulletin this morning, and I was eager to see how they would do:
I mean, the youth chorale members are small, but they are many. I guess how well they would do in a battle would depend upon who the 1 was and how well he or she kept the vocal horde in front of him or her, stacking the singers so only one or two could attack at once.
But, turns out, this meant that the youth chorale was singing the first verse of the hymn. Not fighting versus 1 person.
A little disappointing to be sure.
Next thing you’re telling me is that we’re not going to see Pennywise the Clown during Holy Week.
Sure, the slide might be talking about the cantata the previous slide refers to. Or it could refer to It.
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Police investigate counterfeit money in Republic, Mo.
The counterfeit money is not exactly the highest quality:
C’mon, man, that’s not putting any effort into counterfeit money. That’s buying stage money and passing it.
Even Old 880 put more effort into it than that.
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I bought this movie during a spree in February, and I wasted no time in watching it. It’s a bonus pack with the film on DVD and on Blu-Ray, which worked nicely for me, for although I have both, only the DVD is hooked into the sound system and the Blu-Ray only plays through our nearly 20-year-old television (which we will keep for as long as we can because it is not a smart device). So I played the DVD version of it.
Basically, it’s kind of like The Avengers in that you have a number of action stars, Stallone, Statham, Li, Lungren, Terry Crews (who I have seen mostly in commercials, honestly), and some other guys (cameo by Schwarzeneggar, Mickey Rourke in a supporting role) are mercenaries. In the initial action sequence, one is a little too violent and gets expelled from the group. They pick up another assignment, to take out a dictator on a Caribbean or South American island who is just a front for a rogue CIA operative’s drug operation. Some action sequences, some betrayal by the discarded merc, and finis.
Statham and Stallone have the meatiest parts. I think Jet Li was a little underused, but he’s a martial artist in a world of firearms, so I suppose that’s to be expected. Overall, about as good as you would expect, which is not bad if you’re into actioners with blockbuster budgets.
The one thing I would have stuck a sticky note on were this a book, though, was Tool’s speech, where Mickey Rourke as a tattoo artist who supports but does not go on missions, describes how he lost his soul:
Gentle reader, that is the plot of Albert Camus’ The Fall, in a nutshell. And either Stallone or the other writer on the film David Callaham knew it. Given that Wikipedia sez that Callaham’s screenplay was only a starting point for the film, one must infer that Stallone has read The Fall.
A quick Internet search indicates that nobody else has recognized this as the source of the side story meant to burnish the development of the main character (who goes back to the island to save the girl before the splash), one must also infer that the Venn Diagram of people who watch movies like The Expendables and people who like Camus books is a picture of me.
Thanks for stopping by, and know that although I am not a genius like Dolph Lundgren (well, I once scored Trailer Park Genius on an IQ test), I am well-read. And a fan of actioners, big budget or not.
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This is a Luke Wilson film, as opposed to an Owen Wilson film. So you’ll have an everyman protagonist thrust into a bit of a situation, and he’ll play it pretty straight throughout.
In this case, Wilson plays Matt, a project manager who has not been lucky in love until he meets and is encouraged to ask out a mousy librarian type by his womanizing friend. She rebuffs him, but when someone snatches her purse, he chases after the fellow and gets into more trouble than he bargained for. Then, the tables are turned on his attackers. The woman, art historian Jenny Johnson, is the secret identity of superhero G-Girl, and she’s touched that he tried to defend her. So she goes out with him, they start dating, and she reveals her secret. Then she meets his co-worker Hannah, with whom Matt is really comfortable, and Jenny becomes jealous. When Matt breaks up with her, she lashes out in a series of humorous situations that only a superhero can provide. So Matt teams up with G-Girl’s nemesis, Professor Bedlam, to strip her of her powers, but all’s well that ends well with a comedic ending.
The arc of the story is a little more balanced than the title would have you believe–she is only his ex-girlfriend for the final bit of the film, so the movie relies on other situations for the humor, which is just as well. The quick bits of her revenge would make for a long night if they comprised the whole thing.
At any rate, the movie runs about an hour and a half, which means that it’s fortunately not padded out. So an amusing thing to watch, and not something I’ll avoid rewatching in the future.
I know, I know, gentle reader: As I post these notices mostly so I have future reference as to films I’ve watched and what I thought about them when I did watch them.
You, on the other hand, are here for the pictures of the actresses in the movies. However, I am too lazy to work that up today, so you’ll just have to go to Kim du Toit’s blog as he just posted pictures of Uma Thurman last month.
Last month already? How long has this DVD sat on my desk awaiting a couple paragraphs of brain dump?
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They say it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert, and I still play the game at Settler or Chieftain, the two lowest game settings.
Just think what I could have learned in that time over the last 20 years. To actually play a musical instrument instead of just buying them. I could have written a couple more novels, although they would have probably only sold as well as John Donnelly’s Gold at best, which is not that well. Or something.
On one hand, these hours played actually represent the cumulative time that the game has been open, and most of those hours are time I’m not actually playing them–sometimes, when I start a game, it will run for 48 or 72 hours while I’m not at my computer. C’mon, 175 hours in the last two weeks? I haven’t even spent that much time at my desk.
But, on the other hand, this only represents the time since I bought this game on Steam. Civ V, if I recall, was the first that required a Steam login to play. So the Steam version only comes with, what, my current computer, which is only a couple of years old.
Still, I could better spend my time. Although, as you might know, gentle reader, I’ve gone through phases of my life where I play a lot of Civ and then patches where I don’t. I just happen to be in that patch of playing it for a bit every afternoon or night now.
And practicing guitar or harmonica or maybe getting to some of the I’m Gonna projects in the garage? Not so much.
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On Wednesday afternoon, my oldest son asked me to come outside. He was not asking me to a game of Horse or 1-on-1. Instead, he was showing me that he had sheared the passenger side mirror off of the truck that he uses to commute to school. As it is a power mirror, it was hanging by the cabling. Instead of pulling the whole door apart that afternoon, we duct-taped it with a little support beneath it in an effort that would prove mostly futile to stabilize it until we could get another mirror ordered and then only pull the whole door apart once (and hopefully put it back together again).
As I was putting the duct tape away, I noticed someone coming across the private drive that separates us from our nearest neighbor, D—. D— and her husbandlived there when we moved in, and I’ve talked to them on a couple of occasions, and I’ve even been in their house a time or two to help trouble shoot computer issues or help move a refrigerator. But because our 80s era homes have garages that face each other and because we have a football field between our homes, most of our interactions have been waves or shouting “Hi,” across the private drive if we’re going out to get the mail at the same time.
The husband passed away some years ago, and D— has been in declining health recently. One of her children basically moved in with her, and I saw him more than her over the last stretch of time. So when I saw someone coming, I thought it was bad news about D—.
But, no.
Let me back up a bit. When we first moved here, the house at the end of the private drive a quarter mile away was owned by the Whitakers who not only bought the property with the house, but also bought several acres from the previous owners of Nogglestead and built a twenty horse barn (in addition to the 8 horse barn on their property) as they wanted to run a boarding stable. When their dreams fell apart, the banks foreclosed on both parcels. The house has been bought and sold three times, once by the Jones family whom we got to know a little better because the wife was a dental tech at our dentist before they moved out of the area to a real ranch. The next people were only there for a year or so, and I never met them. And I’ve only spoken to the parents of the Russian family that now live there once, and they’ve been there about a year now.
The large barn, though, that was another matter. I went to the auction on the courthouse steps when the barn and its acreage were foreclosed upon–only to discover that the other bidder is likely to be the bank that holds the note, and they start the bidding at the amount of the mortgage. Which is why it was not my twenty horse barn for almost a decade now.
As that parcel and barn originally belonged to the owners of the house at the end of the private drive, its access was through the private drive, and it was landlocked as the easement on the private drive ended before the beginning of the property. And my neighbors across the lane were not eager to allow a business to buy that property, so they refused to offer easements to it for any number of businesses.
Until one man and, I presumed, his wife wanted to make it into a dog ninja warrior training facility. So they bought the property and sued for access to it. To bolster their case, they built a little “house” on it for their residence and said they weren’t going to use it for a business–just parties (or so I heard. Well, once they got access to it, they moved out of their little shed and bought a small house about a mile down the road. Then, when the house opposite our neighbor across the private drive went up for sale, they bought that house and moved into it to be closer to their barn.
I only talked with him once, I think, when he asked about Internet availability (we’re at the end of what was possible with cable, so he’d probably have to go with satellite) and once with his presumed wife when she came to the door to ask if we’d seen anything when someone stole a trailer from that property (we hadn’t). Other than that, it was waving across vast pastures when mowing the lawn or waving at cars when they were coming or going down the private drive to the barn.
Which is why I did not recognize the woman crossing the grass on Wednesday afternoon. I thought it was one of D—‘s daughters, as numerous cars have been parked on the grass over there for the last few days (not likely good news, as I mentioned). This woman said they were having an auction in a week and that there would be lots of cars, so that was what was going on. She handed me a poster for the auction, and when she got halfway across the grass, I asked, “Does this mean you’re leaving?” And only when she got to her car did the full realization hit me. “C—- died” I told my son.
I did a little research, and I found the online guestbook/obituary. He died in December, and I hadn’t noticed. I’d seen increased activity back there in the past few weeks, but that has been typical as they prepared for “dog parties” in the spring and summer. But I guess this year, she was getting ready for the auction.
I kind of feel a little bad that I didn’t notice, and that I didn’t get to know him better. David Burton, whose book A History of the Rural Schools in Greene County, Missouri I read in 2010, has been writing columns on how to be a good neighbor for years, recognizing in the modern world how easy it is to not get to know your neighbors. The modern world combines with my suspicious nature so that I keep neighbors at a distance. Since I’ve been an adult, I’ve really only gotten to know one of my neighbors in five different locations.
Which is not to say we have not tried. We brought Christmas cookies to neighboring houses the first couple of years we lived here, and that never really spurred a lot of communication. I did end up with the phone number of the family of the dental tech at one point, so we had a couple of interactions.
But I’m not a good neighbor. Not a bad neighbor. Just a guy you might wave to and will never miss when you don’t.
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Apparently, going to the gym is getting dangerous.
Here in southwest Missouri, my greatest danger at the gym is that I’ll do something foolish to impress my beautiful wife, like captain’s chair leg raises:
I know it’s a good ab workout when I think I’ve contracted the stomach flu two days after the ab workout.
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I remember seeing ads or trailers for this film, but I am not sure if it was contemporaneous advertisements for it in 1987 or if the trailer preceded one of my favorite comedies from that era, which meant I saw it over and over again. So I bought this DVD earlier this month, and because I have liked Cheech in some of his later work (Nash Bridges and Lost, so it’s not recent later work), and because I was in the mood for a comedy one night, I popped it in.
The film follows the story of Rudy, a Los Angeles resident, who is supposed to go pick up his “cousin” from Mexico at a factory. Due to plot contrivances (which are not unnecessarily unrealistic plot contrivances), he mistakenly leaves his wallet at home when he goes, and while he’s there, he’s swept up in an INS raid and gets deported. With no ID and no money, he has to figure out a way to get back home. Which relies not only on the grifts of an ex-pat American running a club (a pre-Home Alone Daniel Stern, but the affection of a Mexican woman (played by an American of Southwest Asian Indian-Venezuelian descent). Eventually, he is able to cross the border when he storms it with a vast crowd of Mexicans. My DVD must have skipped a scene or two, as he pops up in a parade, and he and other main characters in the movie try to blend in to escape the authorities.
Ya know, times have changed. Although sympathetic with the main character, a couple of pieces of the movie don’t ring quite so innocent in 2023. One is the storming of the border by the numerous Mexicans. Another is that one of the grifts that Rudy participates in is helping some non-Mexican immigrants from Asia to act Mexican-American so when they illegally cross the border, they can fit in. Ay, carumba! the blogger said, stealing from a culture–not so much the Latinx culture but the 1990s catchphrase of Bart Simpson.
The biggest difference is not so much the political questions of today–those sticking bits from the preceding paragraph–but the loss in the shared humanity that made these stories approachable and consumable in the 1980s and 1990s. I mean, when I rewatched Friday last October, I also hearkened back to a time when the art made me sympathize with the plight of the characters even though I was not of that particular race.
I mean, I liked The Triplets’ “Light a Candle” which is all about illegal immigration:
But, now, it’s a political hot button (and a far greater problem), and I’m having trouble seeing it as a human interest story or a bit of shared humanity.
Because the professionals, the grievance industry, the politicians, and the people making “art” today would prefer to divide us.
Man, the future of back then sucks. I hope the future of today is better, but I’m not betting on it.
At any rate, the film was amusing. And notable for being a whole film based on a novelty parody of “Born in the U.S.A.” Which is better than most films based on video games and board games.
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As I just read a translation of The Art of War, of course I jumped right on watching this film even though I didn’t pick it up on my latest DVD buying binge. Actually, it ended up atop the cabinets by the media center because last week, as my boys were out of town, I organized the media center by throwing all of the video game controllers, cords, and games into their cabinet and also tried to match discs with their cases for the most part before giving up when I was almost done. In condensing the unwatched films from the top of the cabinet to the interior, it moved them around a bit so some from the cabinet are now atop the cabinet and more visible when I’m in the mood for a film. Kind of like I did to my library 7 years ago(?!)–which means I should give that a go again this year and rediscover half my books.
At any rate, on to my thoughts on this film. Hominy crickets, but this film, released in 2000, might be the very 1990s movie ever.
I mean, Snipes plays a black bag covert ops guy for the United Nations whose first exploit is to jam up a North Korean general in Hong Kong who is dealing in sophisticated military equipment and underage prostitutes. When the Canadian Secretary-General of the UN, played by Donald Sutherland, learns that someone is trying to saboutage a US-China free trade agreement, he reluctantly brings Snipes’s character in to investigate and to protect the Chinese ambassador (James Hong). When the ambassador is assassinated, Snipes is framed for it and has to hunt down the real conspirators aided only by a translator who claims he’s innocent (played by Marie Matiko).
I mean, it’s got the UN as the ultimate power broker here, using its covert operations branch to manipulate China and the US into a better tomorrow. I mean, of course the bad guys are ultimately westerners who want to hold China down (and, presumably, to loot China’s cultural treasures as in every martial arts movie I’ve seen recently). But this is strictly Hollywood’s play: The actors are mostly American, and most are not Chinese, even the Asian characters. We’ve got Koreans playing Japanese, Americans of Japanese descent playing Chinese characters, and so on. I mean, even James Hong is an American of Chinese descent from Minneapolis. Weird.
And listen to the big speech by the ultimate bad guy:
Eleanor Hooks, the bad guy: The Art of War teaches win by destroying your enemy from within. Ironic, isn’t it, that a 2000-year-old strategy would be turned against the very people who created it? Better us doing it to them than them doing it to us.
Julia, the translator caught up in the middle of this: What are you talking about?
Hooks: I’m talking about 20 years of China fucking America from within, and nobody noticing. Well, now, they’re going to notice.
Julia: You. You’re behind all this.
Hooks: With just enough help from David Chan to keep everyone guessing. David Chan most of all.
Julia: I don’t understand.
Hooks: Of course, you don’t, my dear. Because you, like most people, never stop to look at the big picture. I’ve been looking at the big picture every day for 20 years, and I’ve tried to look forward, and you know what I see? I see China maintaining a stranglehold on freedom, influencing our political process with illegal campaign contributions, stealing our most secret military technology and selling it to our enemies, weakening us from the inside. Like a virus. This trade deal is an invitation to finish the job. I intend to cancel that invitation. I intend to return America to Americans.
Geez Louise, considering that the bad guy was looking at the situation in 2000, think of how it is now, a quarter century later. I’m more sympathetic to the bad guys than the good guys from the U.N.
But the ultimate bad guy is not a MAGA Republican:
Julia: Who do you think you’re representing?
Hooks: The people who have steered this nation for decades behind the scenes, the people who protect democracy from itself.
Julia: For a woman obsessed with Chinese conspiracies, you sound frighteningly like the government you’re trying to stop.
The ultimate bad guy wants to save the day for the deep state.
Twenty years later, things are the same. But different.
Enough of that, though. Marie Matiko plays Julia, the translator in over her head. Continue reading “On The Art of War (2000)”
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