To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Phone thief has balaclava whipped off face as group screaming ‘w***er’ surround him
I immediately thought wigger, but since it’s Britain, it’s probably wanker.
But it’s getting hard to read news these days with so many words blotted out.
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Petition aims to close a portion of a Christian County road to through traffic:
Holder Road has become the center of controversy in the small community near Clever. Those calling for the Christian County road to be closed are speaking out.
I saw this story covered a couple of weeks ago, and I’d not heard of Holder Road. But once a month, I drive from Republic to Nixa and like to take a couple of different routes just to keep things fresh. One is to take Highway ZZ to Highway 14, and the earlier story actually alerted me to this shortcut.
I tried to take it last Friday, but the article did not mention it is impassable in high water–it has a low water bridge–so I had to turn around part of the way along.
It’s a narrow and curvy road, so I don’t expect travelers can get up to a great head of steam on it, but country boys, you know.
But it does get my dander up when residents want the government to take a public good and make it private to them.
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Well, after picking these up at an estate sale a couple weeks ago, I thought maybe I would wait until I got a copy of First Blood to watch the series from the beginning, but I did not. I watched them not quite on consecutive nights, but enough to have them very fresh in mind as I moved to the next. I read the novels in 2008 (see First Blood and Rambo: First Blood Part II).
So: In Rambo: First Blood Part II, Colonel Trautman gets Rambo out of prison (for his actions in the first movie) on a covert mission into Vietnam to scout a prison camp that might hold American POWs. He is not to engage the enemy, though–only to confirm the presence of POWs, and a Delta Team will get them out. But while the government official running the op, Murdoch, expected the camp to be empty, the Vietnamese have rotated in prisoners, and Rambo liberates one and brings him to the extraction/exfil point. When Murdoch hears that, he aborts the mission before pickup, leaving Rambo to his fate. Rambo then breaks out with the help of his Vietnamese contact played by Julia Nickson and delivers the POWs of the camp to Murdoch.
The film would have been a scant decade after the end of the war, so it was still pretty fresh in the American zeitgeist (it was the topic of many films and television programs for quite some time). It had a couple of different acts to it and even a bit of depth to it. It’s not just jingoism; parts of the government (maybe all of it) are suspect and have their own agendas contrasting with that of the common man or soldier.
Rambo III, on the other hand–well, it lacks depth. It is a bit more….. jingoistic? It spends too much of its runtime explaining the gallant people of Afghanistan, those plucky guerrillas fighting against the Soviet menace. Trautman finds Rambo living in an ashram after the events of the second movie and stick-fighting for a little extra cash for the monks, and he invites Rambo to join him on an expedition into Afghanistan to find why one sector is particularly good at blocking arms shipments. Rambo demurs, but When Trautman is captured, he reconsiders and basically single-handedly invades a fortress. Well, he does have an Afghan guide and a child warrior for company, and the mujahideen do ride the rescue, but it’s overly simple and more comic-book/action movie than the others.
This film must have come on Showtime fresh right before we moved out of the trailer park, as I’ve seen it several times. But the only things that stuck with me were the opening scene and the cauterizing a wound with gundpowder scene. And my boys have not seen it, they have seen two films which parodied it: Hot Shots! Part Deux and UHF (which includes a parody of it in one of George’s daydreams).
Jeez, though, when you think that in a shorter span of time than the gap between Vietnam and the first (and second) films that the United States would be the target of those “gallant” freedom fighters. Life comes at you pretty fast especially in retrospect.
Rambo (don’t think too hard about the series numbering and naming convention) takes place 20 years later. Rambo is still living in southeast Asia. The Burmese civil war is raging–we get some expository footage to start the film–and a group of Christians is hoping to go up river to deliver medicine and hope to a persecuted Christian village, and they want to hire Rambo and his boat to take them. He demurs, but the woman of the group convinces him to help. So he takes them up river and protects them from pirates on the way. After they disembark, they’re captured by the local warlord who razes the village in the manner of Ghengis Khan. Rambo learns this when another member of their ministry arrives and commissions Rambo to ferry a team of mercenaries up river to find them. And he ends up taking a more active role in the rescue despite the mercenary leader dismissing him as just “the boat guy.”
This film, too, has some depth to it. Rambo is older, a bit more jaded and tired, but he has some attraction to the woman in the group which cannot be returned because she is, apparently, the fiancee of the group leader. And at the end, when they’re safe, she runs to him while Rambo watches from a distance. And Rambo returns to his hometown at the end of the film to reconcile with his father and/or family.
The shots are more dramatic as well–the 80s oranges have been washed out by the darkness of 21st century filmmaking, but Stallone, also the director, put some thought into them. Its effects are more gory than the 80s spot of blood and belly clutching–one online source said it was to maximize the effects budget because fake blood is cheap–but comparing other similar films from across those decades (see also On All The Conan Movies–so far) shows that it’s just how movies are made these days.
One thing to note about the films: They have mostly or all male casts. Rambo: First Blood Part II has the contact in Vietnam; Rambo III has a couple of extras amongst the Afghan tribespeople. Rambo has the woman who is on the missionary team and some extras. Very male dominated films, and I only note it because I know you want to see photos of the pretty actresses in them, and all you get is Julia Nickson. Continue reading “Movie Report: Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985); Rambo III (1988), Rambo (2008)”
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To break up the monotony of the paperback science fiction novels I’ve been reading (most recently Halo: The Fall of Reach), I picked up a paperback Western instead. Although this book is actually a paperback that’s been upgraded to the library binding (as it was in the library of Nixa High School in the early 1980s, with intermittent checkout stamps until 1988 which means while I was reading adult crime fiction from the volunteer library and Agatha Christie books from my school library, someone my age was already reading Westerns in high school). Someone else acquired this book and later donated it to the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale, where I bought it and other Westerns last June.
So: This is not one of L’Amour’s best.
In it, an Irish immigrant from the County Cork is heading west to work on the railroad; he has a disagreement with the conductor, he falls asleep on a layover and awakens to find the stationmaster missing (and later finds him wounded) as former Confederate soldiers hope to kidnap General Sherman from the train–but they end up with a colonel instead. The lovely daughter of the colonel wants to go looking for him, so the immigrant goes with her and has to learn the ways of the west as he goes.
So the book has many different foci: The kidnapping, the search, it turns into a boxing book in the middle as the immigrant gets a chance to box the conductor for money, then it’s back to a search and rescue and a big battle in the end and a brief one-on-one, and finis!
So a serviceable throwaway book, but not one heavy on the philosophy to quote in A Trail of Memories, although it had a few one-liners about proper manliness and self-reliance. So something to read if you’re looking for a Western, but not something to really pull you into appreciating the genre at its best if you’re not already a fan.
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I have already enumerated the LPs I bought this weekend on half price day at the semi-annual book sale at the Ozark Empire Fairgrounds. Now, gentle reader, you get to see what I bought in books and videos.
I didn’t get a whole lot of videos; they’d been picked over, and I’m already trying to clear recent overflow from the top of the video cabinet. Still, I got a couple:
I kept mostly to the poetry table in the dollar books section, but did cruise into the better books section to look over old books. I did get several of the chapbook bundles, though, which is like a box of chocolates. Or three in this case.
I got:
The bundles also included another copy of Journey through Heartsongs by Mattie J.T. Stepanek, but as I read it in 2021 (and did not like it!), I’ve put it in a donation box already. Not even worthy of the free book cart at church.
I’ve definitely restocked my chapbook and quick read stack and have a couple of other magazines to put on my stack upstairs for when I’m winding down and want to read a couple of poems before bed.
AND: I want to point out that I spent a total of $32.50 for all of the things I bought, including the records, DVDs, books, and audiobook. And, I’m pleased to say that I did not overburden my storage for these things, although my previously viewed video library needs some attention. Sometime this summer.
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Yesterday morning, I drove my beautiful wife to the airport so she could jet away to speak at a conference. And the airport is practically at the Ozark Empire Fairgrounds (where the scale of Springfield means everything is “practically at” or nearby to everything else compared to actual large cities), and the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library was having their semi-annual book sale and it was bag day. Since it was on the way home (“on the way” meaning “not actually on the airport property”), my youngest son and I stopped.
I found some records.
More than four, actually:
That’s like 37 records or two-record sets, and it cost $18.50. You can’t beat that with a stick.
As we–well, I was flipping through the records, a college-aged young lady was joined by a friend, and she, the young lady flipping through the records, told her friend she was looking for jazz records.
Jumping Illinois Jones, she passed the Elgarts, the Cugat, the Shearing, the Jackie Gleason…. Was she hoping to find Miles Davis records for fifty cents? Dealers coming in on the preview night would have snapped that up. Half price day is about taking fliers on bands you’re not familiar with. Or about setting your taste to match what you can buy for a dollar or less (as I do).
I greeted my wife on her arrival in the conference city with the innocent question, “You know how we set the stereo on a set of record shelves? What if we did that with the sofa, too? Wouldn’t that be cool?”
It’s a wonder I’m still married. Which I presumably am, but this time might have gone too far.
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Ex-Yankee Joey Gallo shows off video of first bullpen as he attempts to make comeback as pitcher
As a reminder, St. Louis Cardinal Rick Ankiel was a promising young pitcher who got wild but then went to the minor leagues and emerged an outfielder with some success in the majors. The linked Wikipedia entry compares him to Babe Ruth who was also a pitcher turned hitter, although the “records” they share are pretty precise in what they measured.
I don’t really know who this Joey Gallo is because he’s never played for the Cardinals, Packers, or Blues.
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I mentioned last October that the kittens had learned how to open the sliding screen doors to our deck and to our patio.
Presumably, they learned this by practicing on the pocket doors in the master bathroom which they learned how to open early on.
So I got some locks that fold up to lock the screen doors and down to open the door, and we’ve (well, I’ve) been very careful to engage the lock when opening the sliding doors to let air flow in.
As the sliding door in the master bedroom is the only window, we’ve (well, I’ve) been in the habit of leaving the door open overnight for nice cool sleeping weather.
This morning at roughly 3:00, I heard a commotion at the back door. My beautiful wife had mentioned that an outdoor cat had peeked in the other night. We’d been remarkably free of visits from neighborhood cats over the winter–I’d said as much to her recently (hence, literally remarkable), undoubtedly drawing the wrath of the gods in the process. So at 3:00, when I heard that ruckus at the door, I got up and checked. There was, indeed, a cat outside the screen. A young black cat. Probably another spawn of Peirce, the long black cat who spent a few weeks lounging in our back yard when we had Athena in the back yard. One of our cats–Muad’Dib or Nico–was inside looking at him relatively quietly. I closed the sliding glass door so that nobody would try to get at him through the screen. I didn’t go out to meet the new cat–Cisco, Nico’s brother, is an absolute berserker when he sees cats outside and is prone to attack the indoor cats or the people in the house when his tail is fat. So I didn’t want to draw his attention to the interloper. And it was 3am, and I wanted to go back to bed.
In the mornings, I generally find Muad’Dib in the living room, and he will trill for a scratch before I’ve had coffee. But not today. I couldn’t find him, and in a dedicated search, I determined he’d pushed the bottom of the screen out of its splined track and crawled out:
He had several hours of head start, and he’s probably under cover as it’s been raining all morning, so I could not find him when I walked the edge of the wind break and by the woodpile and shed looking for him. I presume he will return later today, hopefully with no wounds or insects upon him.
But now I’m beside myself thinking I should have gone out the back door this morning to corral him while he was still on the deck.
And now that he knows how to push that spline out, I’ll have to wonder how I can account for that–a second screen on the inside of the doors? And will the kittens (now three years old, but still kittens to me) apply this knowledge to the screens in the windows as well? Or only the ones with ledges, such as in the office here?
Too much excitement for me.
UPDATE: A little before three this afternoon, Paul of the House Atreides came back to the door on the deck and meowed to be let in, no doubt disappointed that he could not simply let himself in with the gap under the screen door.
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As I mentioned in February, I wanted to pick up a copy of this film when Bob Uecker died because I’d never seen it. Apparently, also, the St. Louis Blues hockey club have picked up a “mascot” named Jobu for their late season push and playoff run which was a voodoo idol from this movie as well. So I had two reasons to watch it, and I was happy to find a videocassette copy of it last weekend.
So: It’s a comedy that tracks kind of with the plot of Bull Durham, almost. The characters anyway. The wife of the man who owned the Cleveland Indians inherits the team when he dies, and she wants the team to move to Miami, so she sets the GM to build a roster from nobodies and has-beens. The veteran catcher, played by Tom Berenger, is a few years past his prime and has bad knees. Charlie Sheen plays a convict who joins the team as a fireball pitcher with control issues caused by poor eyesight. A Cuban power hitter, played by Dennis Haysbert (whom I knew was in the film but did not recognize), offers sacrifices to Jobu. A veteran pitcher relies on foreign substances to continue playing. Corbin Bernsen plays the shortstop whose thoughts are on his investments more than baseball. Wesley Snipes plays an outfielder who is fast but rough. Etc. Rene Russo is Berenger’s former flame in Cleveland, planning to marry a Yuppie (as they were known in those days). The team muddles along, improving, until the GM relates the scheme to the manager who tells the players, which inspires them to make a run for the pennant.
An amusing more than laugh-out-loud comedy. A bit of a product of its time, but not too dated. Worth watching, but I’m not rushing out for the sequels. And note that this is a Tom Berenger movie: his name comes first above the title. Man, he was something in the 1980s and maybe early 1990s, and although he’s been acting continually since, you mostly think this was a Charlie Sheen vehicle, ainna? Corbin Bernsen, the L.A. Law star, is the third on the poster. Not Wesley Snipes, who was not hitting his peak yet.
And, you know, I could have been in the movie. I was in town in the summer of 1988 when they filmed the stadium scenes at Milwaukee County Stadium (I thought it was true, and the scoreboard shots all show television station WTMJ 4 to confirm it). I know that people I knew then went to the stadium and stood in line to sit in the stands while scenes were filmed, but I did not. But I did keep looking in the crowd for people I might have known.
And just saying Milwaukee County Stadium reminds me that I have never been to a baseball stadium that exists today. I’ve been to ball games at Milwaukee County Stadium, but not Miller Park, and I’ve been to games at Busch Stadium (II) but not Busch Stadium (III). It has been a while, and they do change them every couple of decades these days.
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A couple of years ago, when I was still driving my youngest to youth group (before he could drive himself), I would get to the church to pick him up a little early (as is my wont for all things). This particular summer evening, I had the windows down, and I was listening to the birds and the wind in the trees and just soaking in the ambience of the quiet Sunday evening in the neighborhood. When the youth group came out, one of the young ladies in the cohort said, “What is he doing?” referring to me, just sitting there with my automobile off and no device in my hand.
The New York Post reprints a Fortune piece based on a podcast at the 31 Flavors last night, so I guess it’s pretty serious: The new rawdogging? Workers are ‘barebacking’ on their way to the office — and fellow commuters are furious:
Curiously dubbed “barebacking,” the NSFW-sounding practice involves forgoing all tech and either gazing into space or — even worse — making repeated, awkward eye contact with other passengers like some kind of subterranean serial killer, Fortune reported.
Podcaster Curtis Morton, who coined the term, recently slammed straphangers who engage in the questionable practice in a TikTok video with 100,000 views.
“You’ve commuted enough times,” the Brit, who cohosts the “Behind The Screens” podcast, ranted in the clip. “Why are you sitting there without a phone, without a book, just looking at me, looking at what’s going on? Just do something!”
As I’m able to sit and enjoy my rich interior monologue without reading a book or scrolling through meaningless Internet drivel (like this blog post!) for long periods of time, I’m a bit of an outlier even amongst these Gen-Z-Discoverers. And since that night, I’ve wondered if it indeed makes people uncomfortable.
I guess so, for Gen-Z people who need something to rant about on obscure TikToks anyway.
But when I commuted on mass transit for hours a day, in my college years, I didn’t have devices, and I did not focus on books, especially college textbooks. The neighborhoods I went through required that you keep your attention on your surroundings.
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After watching Tropic Thunder, I popped this film in on the next night. I kind of have a bit of a goal now, to watch the films I recently bought at an estate sale, because the unwatched films are now overflowing from the top of the video game cabinet and onto the top of the (full) unwatched video cabinet. AND THIS CANNOT STAND.
Also, if you’re keeping track, this is the third time I’ve watched this film: The first, in the theater, maybe, with my beautiful wife (or on videocassette with my beautiful wife). The second, probably rented from the video store not long after I mentioned the film to my wife and she repressed the memory of it. And now, again, since I’ve bought it at an estate sale and want to clear that particular deck.
In it, Steve Oedekirk (more known as a writer) has digitally inserted himself in a 1970s martial arts flick by imposing his head upon the lead actor, and he’s rewritten/redubbed the dialog and has inserted a number of gags, including a brawl with a computer-animated cow. In the plot, he’s a wanderer whose parents were killed by a gang led by Master Pain, and he grows to learn to fight and to seek revenge from Master Pain and to liberate the countryside from the sinister machinations of The Council who is giving Pain the orders behind the scenes. The plot is not important, though, as it only serves to tie the gags together.
Like Tropic Thunder, it’s a bit self-indulgent and only has a couple of really funny moments. But maybe I’m just old and grumpy. Maybe 13-year-old Brian J. would have liked it better.
At any rate, a couple of days later, a couple of things have stuck with me. The main bad guy, Master Pain, and the love interest are dubbed in silly voices. Master Pain sounds like a cartoon character and the love interest sounds like the high parts of Miss Piggy’s voice (without the brass), and she is prone to saying “Wi-oh-wi-oh-wi.” I’ve found myself making those voices when I’m alone. Jeez, Louise, guys, the things I say, the voices I make, and to be honest, sometimes the animal noises I make when I’m alone. I would be frightened for the sanity of anyone else whom I knew did this. But I’m pretty sure I’m sane, ainna?
And now I own this film on DVD, and if history proves a guide to the future, I will likely watch it more than I watch most things I own. I don’t know why I am drawn to these dumb comedies, but I am.
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I got a new computer over the weekend.
My old PC was only five years old, and it is probably adequate, but it’s had a whine somewhere within, and I was reluctant to tear it apart to find it. I actually did at the beginning of 2024; my employer provided an annual $200 stipend for office supplies, so I opened it up and gave it a listen and thought it was the power supply fan, so I replaced the power supply. But that was not it. Audio playback was starting to fade in and out as well, and it was laden with cruft–basically, in the five years I’d had it, I had installed all sorts of frameworks, servers, and databases that left behind detritus when uninstalled–so it was taking 30 minutes to come to the desktop after a reboot. So I decided it was time.
I am about to disappoint you, gentle reader, but I did not build my own rig. Continue reading “A Big Iron On My Desk”
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After picking up a number of DVDs at an estate sale recently, I popped this film in first because it’s been in the news recently (last November I posted because some media outlets call retard/retarded “the R-word”).
You know, I think my beautiful wife and I saw this film in the theater, but that would have had to have been on a date night since we had two very young children when this film came out, so maybe we saw it on cable? More likely the theater. There was a time when we would go to a new Ben Stiller film as a matter of course, but this might have been the turning point in that. Not only because we stopped going to movies as frequently once we had kids, but also because Stiller and his crew lost a little something. Or we aged out.
This film is about a group of five actors making a Vietnam War movie: Stiller plays an action movie star who is losing his box-office appeal; Robert Downey, Jr., plays an Australian method actor who undergoes John Howard Griffith treatment so he can play a black man; Jack Black plays an drug addict known for low-brow comedies; some geeky-looking guy plays the actor playing the geeky-looking guy; and some guy plays a rap/hip hop artist trying to break into movies whilst promoting his energy drink and snacks. The shoot, on location, is in trouble, so the author of the book upon which the film is based suggests some cinéma vérité by dropping the actors in the jungle with a vague plan of the goals in the script and to really get into character. After a speech about the goals, the director steps on a landmine and is vaporized. So the actors try to get to point A and then rendezvous with the chopper on their own. Unbeknownst to them, they’re in the area of a drug processing camp with real bad guys afoot.
So the main gags are Ben Stiller is earnest but not too bright; Downey is too enmeshed in his role, leading to conflict with the hip-hop artist; Jack Black is Jack Black; the efforts of Stiller’s shallow agent to get him a Tivo on location as specified in his contract; and Tom Cruise not looking like Tom Cruise as the profane studio head.
So too much of the humor is a bit of inside baseball in the movie making business to really make the film funny. It’s amusing in spots, but not Stiller and his group in their primes. Still, er, I have the film on DVD now and can watch it again in 20 years if the mood again strikes me (and the DVDs don’t decay–so far, so good).
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For some reason, the 1970s show The $1.98 Beauty Show came to mind recently. It was a briefly running variety program that looked like a beauty pageant but really was not.
Apparently, as with Sha Na Na, you can find full episodes digitized from videocassette recorder early adopters’ home collections:
Well, maybe it’s not that much different from what you see today as entertainment, but adjusted for the changing times.
And for the life of me, I cannot remember why this program came to mind. Sometimes, I think I’ve just got my brain on Shuffle.
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From an article about Deion Sanders: The Next Generation dropping in the draft, we get:
And now for the reason America turns to National Review: sports commentary. Yes, I’ll admit I’m a rank amateur when it comes to the world of college football or the NFL Draft and only casually familiar with the professional product itself — I’m a baseball guy at heart.
* * * * For those unaware: Shedeur Sanders is the son of ex-football star Deion Sanders, former NFL Hall of Fame great. “Neon Deion” looms largest in my childhood Washington, D.C.-area memory as the guy who signed a seven-year deal with the Redskins back in 2000 and retired completely after year one rather than play a day more for the Redskins.
A baseball guy who one would presume is under thirty (he’s not) for not remembering that Deion Sanders also played major league baseball for a number of teams and is the only player to appear both in the World Series and Superbowl.
Not really germane to the article, but I wanted you to remember, gentle reader, that I read Deion Sanders * Brett Favre thirteen years ago.
(Link via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
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I bought this book on my only trip to the Friends of the Rogersville Library book sale in 2016, and something funny about it: Although I read the Spiderman novel Spiderman: The Octopus Agenda in 2017, the only two other books I bought at that book sale were this book and an omnibus edition of Thoreau’s works which I’ve been reading science fiction paperbacks because, yeeks–although I read Walden and counted it for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, I’m bogged down in The Maine Woods and hope I’ll finish it and Cape Cod to count that thick volume as one book. This particular paperback weighs in at almost 400 pages, and I read it faster than I’ve read the last couple of days of Thoreau’s final trip into Maine.
At any rate, I pregress. This book is the prequel to the video game Halo: Combat Evolved, the first game in the franchise, and it talks a bit about how John/Master Chief/Spartan-117 became the chief, some early encounters with the Covenant including a couple of space battles that culminate in the fall of the human’s major base at Reach and then the humans finding and decoding, with Cortana’s help, the location of the Halo–so they go there, and the book ends.
I mean, I’ve oversimplified the plot quite a bit. Early, we get a lot of training insight into what the Spartans did, a couple of missions including one to a planet with artifacts that identify the location of Halo, and whatnot. The Spartans take some losses, and John, the Master Chief, has to do little soul-searching about it.
As you might know, gentle reader, military science fiction is not my genre of choice generally (what is? whatcha got?). But this book moved along really well. I did not feel like I was left in the dark because I did not play the games or because I did not serve in the military (unlike some hard science fiction which I don’t like because I’m not an academic scientist–Greg Bear, I’m looking at you). Plus, as I mentioned in the previous review (didn’t I?), I was a technical writer circa 2000, and I cannot imagine how awesome it would have been to have my employer ask me, and pay me to write a science fiction novel. Well, mine kinda did, as I wrote about how technology might work someday. Oh, but no, and so I still toil at my trades today instead of cashing in on stock option wealth.
At any rate, I repeat myself, this book is alright (in the northern sense of alright, meaning good). It made me want to try to play the video game again (on brief attempt to play a later Halo game with my son ended in humiliation). The controller has a lot of triggers, buttons, and mini-joysticks, though, so most likely I will just continue with my twenty-something-year-old Civilization game. Or not: I am putting together my next computer, and I’m not sure I’ll put Steam on it. Sometimes, I’ve done that to some good effect. But there are always blogs and job boards to waste my time on, so it will remain to be seen how long that might last.
Oh, and two more things:
One: I mentioned to my son that this franchise, or at least the early bits of it, are heavily influenced by Ringworld by Larry Niven. He didn’t know or care who that was or why.
Two: The franchise features Spartans wearing MJOLNIR armor. So let the people who post this meme say no more:
As a reminder, this is one of those memes that hits close to home: Sparta is over in Christian County. I’ve been to archery competitions in one of the schools there, and I’ve been to and will likely again attend a book sale at the Sparta branch of the Christian County Library this year.
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in my post this weekend about the potential for buying CDs, DVDs, and VHSes for a buck and selling them at a profit: VHS, cassettes find new life at NYC event as hundreds of analogue enthusiasts are ‘fed up with streaming services’
Cassette sales have surged 440% in the last decade, per NPR, and VHS stores are on the rise — from Blockbuster’s return in the UK to the opening of VHS stores from Maryland to California.
“I think it’s a lot more appealing to the people to do that now than ever before,” said Aaron Hamel, co-owner of Night Owl Video, a VHS and DVD store that opened in Williamsburg this year. “I saw the record resurgence, and I feel like physical media for movies is sort of the same environment [vinyl] was 20 years ago.”
At the NYC Tape Fair, Night Owl Video’s VHS sales included a copy of David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” and “Love Camp 7,” which Hamel describes as a “Nazi exploitation movie from the 70s.”
Stores selling physical media will last at least as long as self-serve frozen yogurt shops.
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New (to me) music: The band The Defect. Atmospheric metal. Lyrics are not that deep/evocative, but they fit a mood. Plus, it looks like they play in Madison, Wisconsin, a bunch, so they might be countrymen.
The band’s Web sites are down, which is unfortunate. If I could snag a signed CD, I would.
The CD is available through Amazon, though, so I might end up with an unsigned copy.
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Since I’m apparently reading a lot of paperback science fiction this year, I picked this book out of the paperback cluster of the paperbacks stacked on the yet unrepaired bookshelves which broke in 2014. Looking back in the annals of this blog, I bought it at Pumpkin Daze later that year, which was the same time I bought John D. MacDonald’s The Wine of the Dreamers which was one of the other paperback science fiction books by authors that are known for a different genre. Pendleton, of course, was best known for starting The Exectutioner series of books, although the Ashton Ford series (one of his lesser known lines) had elements of fantasy to them.
At any rate, a couple of years into the future, the human race has enhanced itself through directed evolution. One such fellow graduates from his military training and is about to take charge of Terra 10, an interplanetary battle device that the corporations in charge of Earth want to use to keep rebellious systems in line (this is pre-Star Wars, so it’s not based on the Death Star). The guy has been enhanced to interact with the computers quickly and think like a machine partly, and he’s large (actually, larger than most of the type). But things go sideways and he ends up on Earth, which is an agricultural powerhouse, with a group of “Reavers”–reverts who failed evolutionary enhancement and are passionate people who want to be free from the tech overlords. He falls for one of the women there, and so he becomes involved in a plot to seize Terra 10 for the Reavers to negotiate a peace with the techno overlords, but then an alien invasion force comes into the solar system, and he has to use the weapons platform to defend humanity en toto.
It definitely has mid-century paperback original vibe. It tries to grapple with some bigger issues, like how much can a man be enhanced and still be a man and whether computers serve man or does man serve computers (timely, as I sit here writing a book report knowing its main audience will be LLM scrapers of some sort and me in the future, which is more of a machine audience than man). But although it raises the questions, it does not answer them, not well. But at least it does not read like Mack Bolan In Space. No numbers falling, no statement of philosophy followed by the one-word sentence “Yeah.” So good on ‘im for trying something different.
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The church at the end of our farm road was having its annual(?) sale, and since I scored a couple records up there two years ago, I wanted to go. So I shanghaied my youngest, who became excited at the thought of maybe finding some collectible coins or trading cards cheap, and thought we would hit that sale and an estate sale whose sign I’d seen on Friday.
As it turns out, he was eager to stop at other sales, and a subdivision close to the estate sale was having its annual(?) subdivision sale which promised a number of sales in close proximity, and so we hit a number.
I mostly got videos.
I picked up two books at the church sale and one at the estate sale:
I also picked up three CDs. Well, four, as one is a two disc set:
And, oh, the videos. The estate sale, which was really a downsizing sale (so I heard), had enough of a set spread across three different rooms that I wondered if the homeowner had not owned a video store. I got a number of titles that I’ve been looking for elsewhere, such as Vintage Stock in February.
At the rate I’m going, that’s movie watching for a decade to come.
But the whole stack set me back about twenty-five dollars.
Which makes me wonder if I could make a go of hoovering up old DVDs, videos, and CDs for a dollar or less per and getting a booth at an antique mall and listing them for a couple of dollars each. I might have mentioned that some of the booths devoted to DVDs are charging five dollars and up for DVDs. So if I got them for a dollar each + cleaned the libraries out on bag day….
Well, I will perhaps leave that to my son. Who was eager to go to garage sales, but did not find anything for himself. We stopped at a Walmart Neightborhood Market, and he bought a $40 Pokemon box, and he was ready to be done for the day. But he has not ruled out doing them in the future, so maybe I am back to being a peddler like I was 25 years ago.
UPDATE: Originally, I said I’d bought the first three Rambo movies because I thought maybe they’d retitled First Blood into Rambo to retcon the numbering (First Blood is the first, First Blood II: Rambo is the second, and Rambo III being the third). However, I’d forgotten that the much later fourth was simply Rambo which is the one I picked up here. So I’ll have to think about picking up First Blood if I want to binge them in order.
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