To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Videos show Jason Momoa unscathed after head-on motorcycle crash
Mimosa was in a 1970 Oldsmobile. One would guess he would be okay unless the rider came through the windshield and landed on his lap.
The motorcyclist was taken to the hospital with minor injuries, which indicates that it was a relatively low-speed collision.
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On the Ace of Spades HQ Overnight Thread last night, I saw a link to this listicle: 50 Bad Movies That Are Absurdly Fun to Watch, so I thought, well, how many of them have I seen?
The films I have seen in bold:
Well, 30%, although I would argue that some of the films on this list are not bad at all.
I will leave it to your imagination, gentle reader, to wonder how many of these films I have seen in the theater during their runs. Know you that the number is greater than 1.
Also, I cannot help but note that the oldest film on this list is from 1985, and most of the films listed are from the 21st century, which leads one to believe that the person who wrote it is young and threw in a couple of big budget movies from before the writer’s birth to acknowledge that not everything has taken place in the last fifteen years.
But if you don’t have a bad black-and-white William Shatner movie like Incubus or even a color one like Kingdom of the Spiders on the list, is it really the best bad movies? No Hell Comes to Frog Town? No Revenge of the Wasp Woman?
Child, please.
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On Saturday, after spending an hour in a parking lot helping my oldest master the basics of parallel parking, I had him drive me a half hour to ABC Books and a half hour back to help fill his log book before his driver’s license testing. Also, Mrs. E. had posted about a book signing.
The author signing her books, Shirley Gilmore, is a local to Springfield but who taught in southeast Missouri for 25 years. Her books are set in a fictional town there called Turn Back and feature a ten-year-old girl, Bucky, who moves there with her father from New York City and things happen as they so often do. She has five books in the series and a related one-off, and of course I bought them all. Her books include:
The main characters are Bucky and a group of Sunday school teachers she befriends. Boy, howdy, the first book is 680 pages. I would have some work cut out for me were I to try to get to A Turn Back Christmas as my Christmas novel this year.
I also noted that Mrs. E. topped up her martial arts section for me. I also got:
Just down the aisle from the martial arts books, I pawed through the music milk crates as I recently discovered I have no books on bass guitar (and I have a bass guitar again). So I picked up two books, Rock Jams and Iron Maiden: Play 8 Songs with Tab and Sound-Alike Audio; a closer look now that I’ve gotten home shows that Rock Jams was misfiled with the guitar books. Ah, well, I guess I will put that upstairs for the trumpet players of Nogglestead.
I did not empty out the martial arts section; I only took about a third. Because there’s another book signing next weekend, and I am being kind enough to give the other ABC Books martial arts book buyers a thin chance at picking them up. Mrs. E. said the others have not been in in a while. I grant them this one chance.
At any rate, the number on the photograph is 195. Hard to imagine that I’ve posted about bulk book buying 195 times, but the sagging and overstuffed bookshelves of Nogglestead indicate this is so.
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FCC orders phone companies to block auto warranty robocalls
Clearly, the spam auto warranty calls were blocking the spam political calls, and the politicians demanded action.
I kid you not, we have been getting calls from one robopolling company several times every hour for several days.
You know who election year phone calls is killing? The phone company. We’re one of the last holdouts with a land line, and we’re about to dump it just so we can get our scam and spam calls on the go on our mobile devices.
(Link via Wirecutter.)
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Beloved monarch butterflies now listed as endangered by conservation group
It’s basically a press release from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, but apparently the news story has quotes from ecologists not affiliated with the nonprofit saying the numbers of monarch butterflies have declined recently.
How recent counts match with history is impossible, because the prehistory–the time before written records were kept–of counting monarchs ended probably only decades ago–that is, all counts of monarchs, probably based on computer models rather than an actual census, began recently.
So science is probably only tangentially involved.
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Oh, I have come to a place where I think of movies that are almost twenty years old as “recent.” I mean, this film came out when this blog was but a year old, when I was only a bit past thirty and probably didn’t even think about having children. So, yeah, this film came out two lifetimes ago, but it seems like not that long ago.
Okay, so this is Nicolas Cage as a modern Indiana Jones. He has been searching for the treasure of the Knights Templar since he was a boy and his grandfather told him the story. Thirty years later, Benjamin Franklin Gates (that is, Nick Cage) is a treasure hunter, and he is leading an expedition to the Arctic to look for a ship that holds a clue to the location of the treasure. They find a pipe whose inscription says that a map is on the Declaration of Independence–which is about as much of the movie as I could have told you before watching it (the Declaration of Independence is a treasure map). So the crime boss funding the expedition, played by Sean Bean, wants to steal it, but Gates balks, leading to a dissolution of their partnership. When Gates and his computer hacker/comic relief sidekick are rebuffed by authorities, they decide to steal it before Sean Bean can. And when they do, they follow the clues and hope to find the treasure, with the crime boss incredibly just a step behind them–and sometimes ahead of them.
So, yeah, well, it’s an actioner, so one should not expect too much from it, but it seems like lighter fare than the action movies when I was young. But, you know what? I’ve been watching some of those older movies, and they don’t have a whole lot of depth to them. If I’m looking for depth, perhaps I should re-weight my evening leisure to reading books, and not just men’s adventure paperbacks. Which this kind of resembles, actually.
But it was one of the few films lately that I watched with my boys, so I have that going for me. Although at least one of them had already seen it. As my beautiful wife has gotten a family NetFlix account so that my oldest could binge-watch Breaking Bad after her mother shared the first episode with the lad (and she a former English teacher, too), I am at risk of falling far behind on movie watching and pop cultural awareness so I must keep watching films. Besides, my to-watch cabinet is full, and I’ve taken to placing my recent video acquisitions atop the entertainment cabinets, which looks kinda junky. So my recent movie watching is actually housekeeping. Which is why I shall end this brief musing here and go watch a movie.
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So on Saturday, after a rare martial arts class for me, I dragged my youngest to Rublecon at Relics Antique Center. As you might remember, gentle reader, I visited this small comic book and collectible convention in 2019, when I bought Potbelly Mammoth Volume 1. Of course, with the Ever Recent Unpleasantness, I have not been to a similar convention since then.
But we went in, not long before the only cosplayer present, someone dressed as Cobra Commander in battle mask, arrived. This person was putting on the helmet as we crossed the parking lot.
So it was a little smaller than Gaming Arts Media Expo and LibraryCon (RIP, apparently). I’d taken out some cash from the automated teller machine machine using my personal identification number number before hand, and the first two tables counter-clockwise were Anthony Hunter and Matt Decker, the comic book artists behind Lame Brains, Silent Sillies, and Zombie Dave. Which kind of explained a bit of my confusion: Both have zombie-themed comics, and I see them every (couple of now) year(s) at cons. So I was not sure about which issues I’d had of their work. So I overbought to be safe.
So, basically, the comics were it. I got:
So it was about sixty bucks, but I saved a lot of money.
One table had old video game systems and had an Atari 2600 in its box ($150) along with some cherry cartridges in their original boxes including several Star Raiders complete with keypad controller. But I already have, what, five or six Ataris in both black and wood trim and an Atari, Jr., floating around here? So I told my youngest, “Ah, but if they had an Intellivision or ColecoVision…”, and I looked to the other end of the table (to which the helpful proprietor was gesturing, and lo, an Intellivision with all the accoutrements. $200 could have bought me the lot, but I demurred. I am thinking of downsizing my collection as it is.
Another booth, the one where I bought the Bill Murray book, had some off-brand first generation table tennis game that also accepted cartridges along with several cartridges for $300. I don’t think I’ve seen one like it ever before. But, again, fiscal responsibility and thinking about unhoarding while people my age have some spending power.
It doesn’t look like there’ll be a LibraryCon this year, and apparently the GAME con here in town will be the last one. Which, too, will help my fiscal restraint. But not Saturday.
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The Best of the Dean Martin Show was a collection of videocassettes and later DVDs with songs and skits from the decade-long television program along with occasional commentary from guest stars and the producer/director who released this set. It comprises 29 volumes in all, but the Lutherans for Life garage sale only had 7 videocassettes, and not contiguous, which makes me wonder where the other 22 went.
At any rate, as it is a “Best of” series, it does not play the episodes in total. Instead, it features a couple of musical numbers, a couple of skits, and a bit of commentary in each hour-long videocassette. It starts often with Dean Martin sliding down the pole into the living room set and singing “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime”, the show’s theme, but later with the Golddiggers, the all-female song and dance group that opened the show or the pre-show warning users not to touch the dial.
And the guest stars. Jimmy Stewart and Orson Welles team up with Dean Martin at one point to do a comedy and song number about men at a beauty salon. Dom DeLouise is a frequent guest, and Peter Sellers stops by. Lorne Greene from Bonanza sings a song with Dean while they’re astride horses and Dean’s won’t stand still.
The producer/director Garrison, who is behind the collection, said that they often did not tell Dean the punchline when he was being the straight man, or at least as much of a straight man that Dean Martin could be, so that his laughter and reaction would be genuine. And there’s a recurring bit where someone knocks from inside a closet, and when Martin opens it, he’s confronted by a secret guest star who makes a gag or something and then leaves, and Martin doesn’t know who it is in advance.
Much of the humor relies on Martin’s reputation as a sophisticated partier, but in real life, he wasn’t that way, so the Dean Martin character you see is only a character infused with Martin’s warmth and humor.
So it was a fun bit to watch–I am pretty sure I watched my seven cassettes in as many nights–but it would have been better if it was more of a complete first season kind of thing, with the actual episodes collected, but this collection precedes the confidence that people would buy that sort of thing by a couple of years–this collection was packaged in the middle 1990s and sold via infomercials. One assumes that the audience then would have been old people, perhaps my grandparents, who remembered the show and Martin’s movies fondly.
One can only speculate about the kind of audience finds these cassettes secondhand two decades in the twenty-first century, but old man is probably not far off the mark.
And as I mentioned yesterday, Sandahl Bergman, who played in Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja, was one of the Golddiggers, the singers and dancers that opened the show in later years and appeared in skits. So given that I have watched those two films and four or five of this set in which she appeared, I have seen more Sandahl Bergman on screen in the last two weeks than anyone in the world unless 1) Sandahl herself is watching her old films, Norma Desmond style, in a dark room in her mansion or 2) there’s some academic writing a dissertation on her for a film doctorate who has done nothing this summer but watch her movies over and over to gather evidence for some assertions or others. If I yield to the temptation to watch Hell Comes to Frogtown in the coming days, I might surpass either of those cases.
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Yeah, verily, some might think we worship cats at Nogglestead. We have several (three indoors these days, one outdoors, and another that comes around but has a day home or day job). We have statues of cats. We have paintings with cats in them. When one is at Nogglestead, one sees cats everywhere. Sometimes when there isn’t actually a cat.
Such as this tableau that appeared on the table for a couple of weeks. The table downstairs, now a larger table after my mother-in-law’s downsizing, is not only the staging area for numerous Good Book Hunting photographs, but it’s also an accumulation point for the downstairs detritus. Books and toys (even now) that should go back to the boys’ bedrooms; Christmas cards and thank-you cards gotten out for periodic card-writing and then not put away for a while; articles of clothing (not socks) that need to go up to the laundry; puzzles and games gotten from the game cabinet but not returned; and a throw blanket or two.
From time to time, a cat will hop up there to have a rest amongst the soft nesting materials. So when I saw this, I thought the black cat had done so:
But the black cat was passing through on my lap.
Apparently, my pattern-matching algorithm favors cat in the house, as this was other things.
Instead of a cat, we have a crumpled cleaning cloth (made from an old Telerik Tools t-shirt, if I am not mistaken) and a Phillips 66 cap.
Even knowing now what I didn’t then, I would still want to pet it. As I do with an old stuffed cat that has found its way onto the back of the sofa in the living room (not Tristan II, who is still hanging above the bed) and the other scattered stuffed cats–c’mon, man, of course, Nogglestead has stuffed cats, too–or throw blankets that are arranged with corners sticking up on the sofa in the dim light.
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So over the week that my boys were at camp and at the National Youth Gathering for non-perch-handling Lutherans, I took a moment to review the major Conan movies, including:
All right, Red Sonja is not a Conan movie, but it could have been. It is a De Laurentis sword and sorcery flick with Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s name above the titles and above Brigitte Nielsen’s name.
To be honest, I have seen Red Sonja most of the films, as it was on Showtime in that era where I was young, bored, and not supposed to leave the trailer during the day when my mother was at work. So if it was on Showtime in those mid-1980s summers, I saw it a bunch, and Red Sonja qualifies. Secondarily, I have seen the first Conan the Barbarian several times, and Conan the Destroyer. It was the first time I’d seen the Jason Mimosa Conan the Barbarian–I remember when it came out that it was presented as being pretty brutal and not being too interested in seeing it.
So:
In Conan the Barbarian, young Conan sees his father and mother killed before him when a raiding party strikes their undefended village, and he is taken as a slave. He grows up, becomes strong from his labor, and then ends up as a gladiator traveling with Mongol-types, still a slave, until he is released. He flees to a dead area where he finds Mako playing a sorcerer of questionable ability and seeks his revenge on the leader of the band who killed his family and razed his village, Thulsa Doom played by James Earl Jones. Of course, the man is now the leader of a spreading cult of snake-handlers. Oh, and Sandahl Bergman plays Valeria, a fighter-thief that Conan loves.
So it’s a pretty good bit of sword-and-sorcery low fantasy, with magic and whatnot, and it’s the most memorable of the films because, c’mon, man, James Earl Jones turns into a giant snake, and the film has the “What is best in life?” line. It opens and closes with Mako saying it’s but one of Conan’s many adventures.
In Conan the Destroyer, Conan is given a quest to escort the virgin niece, played by Olivia d’Abo, of a queen who is destined to restore the horn of a sleeping god. So Conan and a thief start off with the girl and her bodyguard, played by Wilt Chamberlain. They rescue Mako and a female warrior, played by Grace Jones, from a hostile tribe and they go do some sidequests and then the main quest and discover they’ve been played, and the queen is going to sacrifice the virgin to resurrect the god. So Conan has to slay the tall bodyguard and then the resurrected god.
You know, I might have only seen this twice: Once when I recorded the films onto a DVR and this time. It certainly did not stick with me.
In Red Sonja, a young woman watches her family killed before her for rejecting an evil queen (played by Sandahl Bergman). Left for dead, she prays for vengeance and a magickal figure offers her assistance. And Sonja goes to a monastery to learn to fight with sorta-Buddhists. The same evil queen and her henchmen attack another cult who are about to destroy a talisman called the Talisman that is too powerful for humans. They succeed, leaving only Sonja’s sister to escape and tell Sonja she must plunge it into darkness. So Sonja does some sidequests, dodges and declines Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s offers of help (but he shows up time and again to save the day). Then they storm the castle and save the day.
You know, for having watched the film over and over again thirty-five years ago, I remembered very little about the plot and the action in it. Maybe it will stay with me, but maybe not. Although I own the DVD now and can watch it again before three decades pass.
In Conan the Barbarian, the leader of a raiding band is looking for the parts of a magic mask that grant the wearer great powers. The Cimmerian tribes broke the mask when resisting the last guy to wear it, and they’ve hidden the pieces across Hyboria. Conan’s father is a blacksmith and war leader for their tribe, and this particular film develops the relationship between the father (played by Ron Perlman) and the young Conan. So he lives longer than a parent in the other films or your typical Disney film. But when the bad guy comes to town with his creepy (probably supposed to be Goth hot) daughter, they slaughter his family and take the last piece. But they need a woman of pure blood to sacrifice, which leads them to a monastery. The pureblood woman, played by Rachel Nichols escapes, and Conan captures her/defends her from an ambush and uses her as bait to draw the warlord to him for revenge.
You know, the other three movies are brightly colored and maybe just a touch orange in hue, but the latter film is very darkly colored, with the modern deep blue palette and with a lot of scenes taking place in the darkness or dimly lit areas. It was a little less pleasant to look at.
And as far as the brutishness goes, I guess the Jason Mimosa was supposed to play the character a little more coldly than the Schwarzeneggar version, but to be honest, it’s not that much different. And as for the blood and gore, it’s probably about as shocking as Conan the Barbarian would have been in the early 1980s. The earlier film had decapitations and whatnot, and this film has gouts of blood. I have previously discussed the 80s R and how different R-rated movies from that halcyon era were from R-rated movies today. I think that the brutality and special effects on display in the latter Conan the Barbarian reflect more what our era expects–after all, my kids play video games with gouts of blood erupting now, and that’s something we didn’t have because an Atari 2600 could not capture it.
Oh, yes, and I know, it’s not Jason Mimosa, but I’m going to call him that until he beats me at solo unarmed combat. Of course, I have been practicing saying, “I’m sorry, Mr. Mamoa,” without moving my teeth so I can do it with my jaws wired shut. But then I will probably call him Jason Meowmeow because I never learn.
So, to sum up: It was an interesting review of the material, and it made me wish they made 80s sword and sorcery films today. But they made them then, and I have DVD and videocassette players and spares of each, so I should be able to accumulate and watch the old movies.
It reminded me that it had been eight years(!) since I read the Conan stories (The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, The Bloody Crown of Conan, and The Conquering Sword of Conan). I used to read a lot of this kind of pulp sword-and-sorcery stuff, but I have not in a while. I don’t know if they make much of it any more, or if it’s just not sold widely enough to end up at used book sales–or if it’s that I have not haunted the paperback fiction sections of said used book sales.
But I did get to thinking, how would the Conan saga played out if Robert E. Howard had not killed himself at 30. He could have feasibly lived until the 1970s or 1980s, writing the whole time and maintaining a tight degree of control on his work and characters. Would that have altered the arc of the availability of the characters’ rights for comic books and films? One cannot know.
Oh, and did someone say “Sandahl Bergman?”
Continue reading “On All The Conan Movies”
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One wonders what kind of fiction a writer such as myself would create with a with a writer’s retreat like this:
In what looks like a scene out of Martin Scorcese’s “Shutter Island,” a decommissioned World War II fort in the middle of the ocean is being auctioned off for first time, starting at just $60,000.
Located in the Humber Estuary of Northern England, the concrete vessel was initially constructed between 1915 and 1919 for naval defense during World War I, though it wouldn’t go into use until WWII.
Considered a historic listing, the property is defined by the United Kingdom as a “grade II” building or structure that is “of special interest, warranting every effort to preserve it.”
It’s about sixty thousand dollars, but probably more to have it fixed up. It has water from its own artesian well, which means you don’t have to have it brought in. N
So it’s like Sealand except a little more sheltered from the open sea, it would seem, and a tad less than the billion dollar asking price.
But my beautiful wife says no, so I guess we’ll stay landlocked.
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The New York Post, (July 15, 2022): ‘Jaws’ made people irrationally afraid of sharks, scientists declare.
The New York Post the week before letting the “scientists” blame the fifty-year-old movie:
Kazuki Takahashi’s body showed signs of being attacked by a marine creature, possibly sharks, but the cause of death was still under investigation, the official said.
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At the end of his Florida Man Friday post this week, Vodkapundit includes this GIF:
And I asked Stephen, my Facebook friend of long standing, whether that was from the film Hell Comes to Frogtown, which I had just been thinking of otherwise as I watched Conan the Barbarian recently, and both films star Sandahl Bergman.
Well, Stephen hasn’t answered yet because, c’mon, man, we’re Facebook friends, but when I went to compose this post, I went to snag the image from the post, and it’s Hell-Comes-to-Frogtown.gif. So, yeah.
You know, I saw the film on cable’s USA Up All Night back in high school when the film was fresh, and I recorded it on my own videocassette at some point. I watched it numerous times and even came up with an official VHS tape which includes the brief boobage you didn’t see on basic cable.
It’s been a while. Soon, I will have watched all the Conan movies available. Maybe I should revisit that classic which is Rowdy Roddy Piper’s best film. Not They Live!
Come at me, bro.
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So in addition to the loss of one of our cats, we also made the difficult decision to put one of our other cats who had a problem with inappropriate urination out back.
We’ve done this before; ten years ago, we had a pair of tabbies whose occasional IU became more consistent, including peeing things on my desk, that we put out in the back yard. We provided them food and water and bought fairly expensive small dog houses to ignore whilst they sought shelter under the deck.
The food drew some of the other neighborhood cats and other fauna along, and so it was with Athena. A black male cat has been showing up, even before Athena was out there and food was available, but he comes around in the evenings for a little nibble. He makes a strange sound, and he will not get close to us, but he is comfortable enough to flop on the patio or the lawn nearby. And Athena, who did not get along with the other cats in the house–she would spit and hiss at them and then lose any escalated encounter that occurred. But she’s cool with Peirce, as we have nicknamed the cat (not a typo: He is named for Charles Sanders Peirce). She’ll not yowl at him and will sometimes trot off to see where he’s going when he leaves the yard–but Athena does not venture far, which is probably for the best.
It’s kind of nice having a backyard cat, Athena. I’ve taken to bringing a book out in the evenings to read, and Athena will jump onto my lap. Sometimes, she’ll jump down and lounge on the patio pavement or on the table between the chairs, and I’ll actually get to read that book.
Like last night. She hopped down and settled against the wall of the house behind my chair, and I read a bit.
But then Athena spit a hiss and moved from under the chair, and I turned to see if it was Peirce, and it was a different cat….
No, wait, it was not a cat. It was a raccoon that had basically sneaked toward the food dish by creeping under the chair I was sitting on.
He went to the food dish with one eye on me and consumed the remainder of the food in the dish.
So I have named him Samwise Gamgee, although I am not sure I will be able to recognize him again.
But I’ve been closer to him than I have to Peirce.
We try to keep the amount of food in the bowl to a minimum to prevent too many wild creatures in the back yard. When we had the boys out there, we kept the bowl for them full, so every night we had possums, raccoons, other cats, and skunks stopping by–sometimes more than one of each at a time.
Given that we sit out on that patio more these days now that we have a patio set, I don’t think I want to encourage it.
But I think I’ll take my phone out to get a picture from now on.
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This film is labeled “National Lampoon’s,” but it was a British film and not an American film. So any connection to the National Lampoon franchises or brand is negligible, which is kind of unfortunate, as I was going to speculate on whether National Lampoon films were kind of lampooning films of certain genres with their entries in the field, but unfortunately, it would appear that they just rented out the name for the money. And not enough, as a (full disclosure) investor in National Lampoon Media Partners (NLMP) would tell you (because the investment has not panned out, but at least it was not a big of a loss in my portfolio as Salon).
Ah, where were we before I started thinking of my 25 years of investing, which has pretty much broken even?
Oh, yes, this film.
All right, if you wanted to see a Happy Gilmore style movie, but instead dealing with bocce, I’m sorry, bowls (which is apparently the British spelling of bocce) instead of golf, this is the movie for you. Actually, it doesn’t have the Happy Gilmore story arc–this film follows more of the rock star arc where a humble man becomes famous, the fame goes to his head, but he redeems himself after alienating those most important to him.
A guy from the British projects plays bowls, a lawn game where you try to roll a ball close to a target ball, and you can knock the other team’s balls off away and into a gutter. So it’s remarkably like the bar game with the disks or even cornhole in that regard. He wants to play for the English team to take on the international stars, a pair of Australian brothers. So he gets to play in a local tournament/match/Ascot or whatever they call them in Britannia against the local reigning champion (played by James Cromwell, most recently notorious for a silly Starbucks hand-gluing) who has never aimed higher (to play for the national team, for example). He wins, but he writes a British bad word on his opponent’s scorecard, so he gets banned from the sport on a technicality. A splashy American agent (played by Vince Vaughn, not just phoning it in) convinces him to sign with him, and they make a splashy show out of bowls with the new Bad Boy of Bowls. Throw in an obligatory forbidden romance with the daughter of the local champion, a reconciliation of sorts, and a teaming of the two bowlers to face the Australian brothers (and a sudden death final point that looks an awful like Dodgeball), and finis!
Not a whole lot of laughs in it–to be honest, I liked it better when I was watching it and thinking it was an American film lampooning films like this and not the straight comedy it actually was.
But I am thinking about stopping by Academy Sports to pick up a set of bocce balls. Which would be interesting here at Nogglestead, as the ground slopes from north to south and has furrows from where water has run and where old fences stood. So it’s not likely to be the manicured greens of actual bocce courts.
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Teen turned away from water slide because of weight, family says:
A family in Illinois said their 13-year-old daughter was turned away from a ride at Raging Rivers Waterpark after being told to step on a scale in front of strangers.
* * * *
The scale read 205, but Batton said they were told there was a 200-pound weight limit.
A spokesperson for Raging Rivers said the decision was made to prioritize the safety of guests.
Jeez, Louise, this story is out there to ding The Man, in this case the operators of an amusement park with safety rules that single people out based on physicism, which takes into account things like mass and gravity to stigmatize individuals of a certain size and to prevent them from plunging to their deaths or turning their little rafts over in dangerous conditions.
I mean, it’s been months since we were seeing the opposite story in the news (Adjusted sensors on ride contributed to Fla. teen’s death in fall) wherein the large teen in question died instead of ran crying to the news about being embarrassed.
Full disclosure: This summer I was in a water park whose new rotating water slide wheel had a weight limit. I don’t remember whether it was posted on every landing climbing to the ride or whether it was just at the top, but my family was too heavy cumulatively to ride in one raft. And, yes, the staging area for getting into the raft was a scale, with the numbers where everyone could see them.
I’m not here to pick on large people.
I am here, however, to decry sensationalist media who will run both stories in succession: The story of dangerous theme park rides killing kids who are too large for them, and then running stories about mean theme parks not allowing kids on rides which would pose an extra danger for them.
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In six or ten years, when we have another hot summer like this one, most people will not remember how hot it was in the summer of 2022.
Because most people are going to spend this hot summer indoors where it’s cool, and they won’t remember acutely that the days here in Missouri rang the 100° bell a lot this year.
I can say this with some confidence because I’m getting Facebook memories where I’m commenting on the weather, and I found a site called Climate Spy that acknowledged temperatures reaching 100° in June (highest: 100.9°), in July (highest: 106°), and in August (highest: 106°). It got to 96° in September, for cryin’ out loud. In December, Mizzou published a brief Jeremiad about Hot 2012: MU climatologist: last year was warmest since 1895.
You know, ten years is a long time when you’re young. It’s not too long ago when you’re a bit more, erm, seasoned. And when you’ve lived in the same place for over a decade, where you can watch the seasons pass in their rhythm and variety. Where you can see the warm and cold winters, the warm and cool springs, the temperate and the hot summers, and the warm and cold autumns. We’ve been at Nogglestead for a dozen years (soon to be fourteen because we’re superstitious). So we have seen. And we remember.
Unlike the rest of the modern world.
I guess I got a little of what I came for.
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I spent a little of the time that the boys were away at camp and at their church youth group gathering watching R-rated movies such as this one, which features Jason Statham as a former racecar driver framed for the murder of his wife and incarcerated on Terminal Island, a privately owned prison where convicts are given a chance to participate in a pay-per-view livestreamed Death Race, where they race on a course in cars modified with armor and weapons and try to kill one another on the track.
So, basically, it’s The Running Man combined with Car Wars.
The film opens with a race wherein a driver named Frankenstein is pursued by another driver called Machine Gun Joe. Frankenstein is in the lead, but his defensive weapons malfunction, but he still thinks he can win the race. His navigator/weapons officer, a female con named Case and played by Natalie Martinez, ejects just as the car blows up.
Statham, I mean, Jensen Ames, his character who is totally unlike The Transporter, is given the Frankenstein mask to wear and is told that if he wins the single race, he will be freed, but he figures out the con–Frankenstein will always not win that last race, and if the current Frankenstein dies, the warden will just get a new one. He also suspects that Case might be a part of it. So he makes a plan to escape with the help of Machine Gun Joe–Frankenstein’s hated enemy.
Okay, so it was the kind of midling action flick that you’d find on cable back in the day, but with a special effects budget that allowed just a touch of gore. Not bad, not disturbing, but there for its own sake. Not a lot of character development, but a lot of action.
So worth it for Jason Statham fans or if you’ve got a couple hours to spend whilst your kids are out of the house and you can watch R-rated movies. But perhaps the most telling rating for the film is that I watched a Jason Statham movie, and I shaved the next day. I’ve mentioned that Statham movies like Safe have led me to try the stubble look for a while, but although I wore it a while last year (even after I said it ended–I wore stubble and a short beard into the autumn and early winter this year, actually). But this one did not.
Oh, and did someone say “Natalie Martinez”?
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Whilst researching my book report for My Ántonia, I cam across a 2004 post about the 99 best books or series of all time that I treated as a quiz as was my wont. In 2004, I’d read 16 of the 99.
So how do I do now? I have put in bold the books/series I’ve read (providing links to book reports on this blog where available) and have underlined things I know are on the shelves but are yet unread.
It looks like I’m up to about 28 of 99.
I don’t know how much progress I’ll make between now and 2040, but I have a greater chance of reading the classical literature than the 20th century stuff, especially the children’s books or Colombian magic realism.
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Well, I wish I could say that my confusion between Willa Cather and Eudora Welty is easing with my reading, apparently, a couple of Cather novels in the recent years. Oh, but no. I had this book before me with the author’s name right on it, but I got to thinking Eudora Welty wrote O Pioneers! which I read in 2018. Wow, four years ago? I feel a little better about forgetting who wrote it then, even though I said at the end of the book report:
I do have a copy of My Antonia around here somewhere; this book was a pleasant enough read that I won’t hide from the other novel if I find it.
Apparently, it took me four years (!) to find it even though it was in the front rank of my office bookshelves. You know, where I go most often when looking for a new book to read. In my defense, I probably passed over it a couple of times looking for something quicker or something that appealed to me more in that moment. But I finally picked the book up.
The book is very similar to O Pioneers! Both are set in Nebraska during the sodbusting years; however, this book follows a young man, Jim Burden, sent to live with his grandparents and his friendship with a young Bohemian (from Bohemia, not just wearing hemp) whose family arrives on the same train. She is the Ántonia of the title; the name is pronounced the Bohemian way, not the way to pronounce the small town down the county highway from where I lived my last years in high school. The Shimerda dwelling is basically a cave, and they really do not know how to farm or bust sod, coming from a city in Europe, so they need help, and Jim and Ántonia bond as he helps the children learn English. They have some youthful adventures; then Jim and his grandparents move to town when they rent their farm, and Ántonia, who is a couple years older than Jim, gets a job in one of the houses in town, and although they are not quite peas-and-carrots, when a traveling dance instructor troupe comes to town and hosts dances in a big tent, Jim hangs with Tony (as he sometimes calls her and I’m going to for the rest of the review because the accent on the A is a bother) and some of the other hired girls. Then Jim goes to Lincoln for college; another of the hired girls moves to Lincoln and starts a dress shop which does well, and she spends some time with Jim, but he becomes distracted from his studies, so his mentor, who is moving to Massachusetts to teach at Harvard, encourages Jim to come along, and Jim does. And then, twenty-some years later, Jim returns to Nebraska and sees Tony and her family, which includes her illegitimate daughter, the result of her dalliance with the son of a local railroad baron; the boy had promised to marry her, but he was not a good man, and after they lived together in Denver for a while, he abandoned her, pregnant, to return to Nebraska in shame. In the years since, she married another immigrant and they’ve had a large family. Tony has grown old, lost some teeth, put on some weight, whilst Jim, presumably, has aged better with his law degree and urban lifestyle. Jim feels the same connection with Tony as he had when they were kids–a kinship, more brother and sister though the middle part of the book indicated some romantic leanings–and he promises to visit the family and her boys in the future. And, finis.
One of the dings I, well, dinged O Pioneers! for was that it was a series of short stories or, more truthfully, sketches that Cather stitched together to make a book. You know, this book is also broken into sections. The first two, “The Shimerdas” and “The Hired Girls”, deal with the introduction of the characters and their lives on their respective farms and then their subsequent moves to town (Jim when his grandparents rent their farm, Tony when she hires on at another household). These two sections comprise the first 200 pages roughly of the 277 page book, and they hang together pretty well, hinting that there might be a cohesive plot. The next section, “Lena Lingard”, is about the hired girl who becomes the dress maker and meets up with Jim Burden in Lincoln; we still might have some plot advancement if she really does rival Tony for the author’s affections. Oh, but no. She mentions Tony is going with the ne’er-do-well son of the railroad businessman and seems to like him a lot. In “A Pioneer Woman’s Story”, the next section, takes place a couple years later, when Jim comes back to the Nebraska town after graduating law school and hears the story of Tony’s betrayal and her raising her new daughter at the old Shimerda place. Then the last section, “Cuzak’s Boys”, takes place decades later. The narrator has updated us on the other hired girls and how they’ve gone on in the world. Lena continues to be a successful dress maker, but she has gone to San Francisco and joined another hired girl, who had gone to Seattle, opened a business of ill repute, but sold it to join the Yukon gold rush where she made out big. When Jim, the narrator, returns to Nebraska, he visits Tony, now Mrs. Cuzak, and meets her family. And, that’s it. Ultimately, the book offered indications there might be a plot, which kept me reading along a little better than O Pioneers! (I presume), but ultimately it is just a series of sketches, and the whole My Ántonia title and repeating of Optima dies… prima fugit make one suspect that the author might have wanted to convey more a mood of nostalgia and the loss of youth, but that alone is a little disappointing after 277 pages.
Still, an easy enough read. I note that, like The Red Badge of Courage in the heavy use of colors as adjectives–one cannot go pages without blue sky or orange this or red grass. I think modern writers have been trained to not use colors as adjectives, but they’re easier to see in one’s mind’s eye than other obscure shades used as adjectives. The pamphlet that Reader’s Digest provided with the book says the author became friends with Stephen Crane, and one wonders if this tic was part of his influence on her.
I did flag a couple passages in the book for comment.
Regarding the back story of two Russians who have moved to Nebraska, someone relates that they had been drivers of dogsleds taking a wedding party home, but when the party was beset by wolves, the two men sacrificed the entire party to save themselves.
We did not tell Pavel’s secret to any one, but guarded it jealously–as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure.
C’mon, man. In the 21st century, the Right Thinkers Who Talk On Television have assured me that it’s Ukraine and not the Ukraine. A hundred years of common usage must be publickly discarded so that the current Right Thinkers Who Talk on Television can teach us rubes something and prove their own shibbolestication.
Regarding town living in the late 1800s:
Most Black Hawk [residents of the town, not the tribe] fathers had no personal habits outside their domestic ones; they paid the bills, pushed the baby carriage after office hours, moved the sprinkler about over the lawn, and took the family driving on Sunday.
You know, when the Monkees were singing in 1967:
They were echoing criticisms of the literati of fifty years earlier.
Although I think I just marked the passage because I did not realize sprinklers were a product of the 1800s.
Eh, I flagged a couple of other things and was not really sure what I wanted to say about them when I flagged them.
At any rate, still, a worthwhile read just to remember what life was like a hundred and forty or fifty years ago–and might be again!
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