Black Scorpions and Idiot Kids

Kind of a lost weekend – went to the Brooklyn Brewery with some friends (no that’s not why it was a lost weekend) which was pretty cool – at least until what looked like the entire population of Brooklyn showed up – then it got a bit much. Still the beer was very good – and you were expecting it to be bad? Anyway what knocked me out was not the beer but the take out I had when I got home. That evening and night I spent too much time on biological activities and not enough on sleep…with the upshot that Sunday morning I was a wreck and feeling just useless.

So I just spent the day watching movies and noodling about the web.

And got hit in the face twice in one day by the ‘stupid kid’ cliché. Which I hate with the heat of the 1,000 suns.
Let me explain:

The first movie was Black Scorpion one of William O’Brien’s last pictures (he was the man behind the 1933 King Kong). Here there are these giant scorpions that have been released from their underground lair by a volcano. It was the 50’s everybody was doing it. The film is set in Mexico and stars Charles Durning (from Creature of the Black Lagoon – it’s sad I don’t have to look these guys up) and Mara Corday (of the Giant Claw) as the female lead (she’s the owner of a cattle ranch) Anyway people and cattle are vanishing as Charles (a geologist) and another Geologist show up. With the title of The Black Scorpion we figure they are being et but it takes a while – too long really – for the movie to find this out. Meantime Charles meets Mara and promptly forgets about geology in favor of trying to get into Mara’s pants – which I can understand Mara was a playmate of the month in 58 and this film was made in 57, and who the hell wants to look at rocks?

Just as about some serious busy time was coming – a scorpion comes out of the ground answering all the questions about where the missing people when to by eating to line men (“ I am the line for the county ahhhhhhhh!!!!!!!) And then rampages through the village. After that they decide they have to do something about it.

Anyway at Mara’s ranch is a small boy named Juanito – hereinafter the idiot kid or IK. He attaches himself to Charles like a leach and as Charles and the rest get themselves ready to look for the lair of these big bugs IK is pleading with Charles to take him with him. Charles showing damn good sense does not. That done they drive out near the volcano where a fissure in the earth has opened up – found by one of Mara’s ranch hands by falling into it.

And it turns out IK has stowed away in the trailer the jeep was towing. After they tut-tut a bit Charles and his fellow geologist – (who are also somehow experts on giant arachnids) are lowered into the cave via basket – as they get out we see that IK has smuggled himself aboard – of course a) you’d have to completely stupid not to notice him going down and b) once you’d found him in the trailer I’d have tied him to the bumper of the jeep. There is much toing and foring in this bit as the men and the IK are menaced by the various giant insects – IK manages to get himself nearly et by what looks like a mutant ant lion or trap door spider – which forces Charles and his friend to come to rescue allowing the scorpions to destroy the basket. (They all get out but no thanks to the kid).

Thankfully at the finale of the film the IK is nowhere to be seen - one assumes Charles tied big rocks to his ankles and then dropped him down the well – well we can hope can we.

One last quibble – Scorpions do not have teeth the way reptiles and mammals have teeth. And they don’t droll much.

Next up was volcano – a 1997 film staring Tommy Lee Jones as the same person he played in The Fugitive not the same name but the same type of hard ass with a heart of gold kind of thing. He is the head LA office of emergency management when a volcano blows up in the middle of LA. Anne Heche (?) plays the female lead – an expert on geology who’s assistant gets killed by the lava. Safety note – never stand astride a crack in a deep tunnel when investigating possible lava flow – it ends badly.

Anyway Tommy and his wife are separated and it’s Tommy’s turn to look after his daughter who is 13 and is self-absorbed – however she is not the IK of the film. That is reserved for some blonde little moppet who’s mom is hurt. And Tommy’s daughter ends up watching along with a bunch of other kids as the volcano erupts and lava flows.

So at the climatic moment – who the hell wanders away from everybody so the Tommy’s daughter has to chase after him and save his ass from getting crushed by collapsing building or burned by lava (don’t ask the details they are dumb as hell) – yep the little blonde moppet. Now I’m as fond of little kids as most people but there comes a point were you have to say “Darwin has spoken” and let nature remove said idiot kid from the gene pool.

Later.

Peace, Love, Darwin

Let them eat cake, Vampire facts and beasts

Let them eat cake!

It doesn’t really take much to get the GOP hatred of the paroles going. In this case, just GM suggesting that maybe they could get some government cash like all the Wall Street firms did aroused the talking heads into a hate frenzy.

The reason they don’t want a bailout is fidelity to free market principles –which they of course abandoned in the wall street bailout – but it’s actually because GM has union workers and nothing makes the hate come like well paid Union workers – they are taking money that would normally go to bonuses for excutives. (these same stalwarts of market capitalism have said ‘boo’ about executives at firms like say AIG who have used bailout money to pay themselves their bonuses – no it’s not hypocrisy it’s class warfare)

Anyway - on to other things – my early morning riding on the train to work because the damn lottery sell still won’t sell me the winning ticket was unpleasantly disturbed by the cover of one of the free papers (AM and Metro) that folks distribute to people as they go into or out of the subways, buses and street corners (you can’t get away from them even if you run) – there aren’t much as newspapers go – the news stories are all pretty much wire service stuff and the columns are mass syndicates – but this morning I was greeted with the unlovely visage of Rudy Giuliani looking like he’s ready for the remake of Nosferatu the revenge – with some sort of Rudy’s on the comeback headline.

This is just another proof that it is never enough simply to drive a wooden stake through the heart of a vampire – you also have chop the head off and fill the mouth of garlic as well ( a detail noted in Bram Stoker’s Dracula but for pretty obvious reasons dropped from all the following adaptations.) how Rudy after running one of the worst planned most expensive and least successful primary campaigns in history (he ended up with one delegate, just one. Which in only one more than I got and I didn’t even run) has the nerve to stand up and say I’m thinking of running for governor on New York or maybe even president.

Consider my mind boggled.

Watched The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms last night again – it’s an early black and white ray harryhausen picture and one of the inspirations for Godzilla – and not without charms of it’s own – Ray’s animation is always a treat – there’s a charming retro quality to stop motion at least when Ray does it. (See Star crash for an example of bad stop motion animation). A couple of things caught my attention – one – what starts the whole business going is a team of scientists blow up an atomic bomb north of the artic circle. Nobody even bothers to say why this is important or an even good idea. But hell it’s the 50’s they were tossing about the idea of building a new Panama canal using atomic bombs to do the digging – not that it would have completely bad – you could always find it the dark and there wouldn’t have been that much of a fuss about giving it back to Panama.

The other odd detail was the size of the rooms – the male lead has an unfortunate accident in the artic after seeing the beast and ends up in the hospital for weeks on end – and his room is huge – it’s bigger than some apartments I was looking at – and the female lead who is – as is the norm – a very good looking young woman - is working as an assistant to the chief paleontologist of the America museum of natural history and where as in real life she’d be living in at best a tiny studio and eating ramen noodles when she wasn’t hunting squirrels for food – has a huge 1 bedroom and an endless series of outfits – which beggars the questions what do you wear when a prehistoric sea beast is attacking New York?

The last thing is the beast is really a built up lizard rather than a dinosaur – which have very different hips and don’t have the sprawl of the Beast. But Ray found this easier to work with in this case and time was money.

Peace Love Beasts from 20,000 Fathoms.

Poppies, toads and movies

In Flanders fields where poppies grow.

So goes the poem –

Between the crosses row by row.

Today is Veteran’s day – it used to be called Armistice day – the day world war I ended – on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, on the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour the guns stopped.

It was the end of the war to end all wars and the sudden silence was breathtaking.

Of course the guns started up again in about 20 years but at the moment it was a big deal.

It’s a bigger event in England and Canada than here – folks go about with poppies pinned on their clothes (or whatever and all the games this week have had a moment of silence before they started)

Side note on moments of silence – I remember that soon after Jerry Garcia died Blues Traveler had a show and Tom Poppel asked the crowd for a moment of silence – and sure enough someone after ten seconds yelled out “Yeah JERRY!!!!!” proving once again most Grateful Dead Fans are stoned idiots.

Anyway the thing that I feel is important about world war I is that it forces us to confront the beast without illusions – war done well can seem exciting or like a video game to go by most of the Armed Force’s ads these days. World War 1 was a bloody futile nightmare whose only real accomplishment was that it swept away the ruling class of the 19th century and set the boundaries of the playing field for the next war and the cold war that followed. And introduced the idea of bombing cities from the air.

Not the best track record.

Meantime I see that Lieberman is trying to worm his way back to the winning side. And proving that the senate needs an enema some big time dems are talking about taking him back. I mean come one. You can’t trust him further than you can spit him and to leave him as the head of a committee with subpoena powers is to hand him a knife that is going straight between Obama’s shoulder blades the instant holy joe sees his chance. You can’t trust a turn coat – especially one who tries to put his old coat back on – Benedict Arnold at least stayed on the British side once he’d sold the US up the river – I’ll give that for him – even he didn’t have the nerve to come back to the states after the war and say “hell what’s a little betrayal? Why are you so mad?”

The political thing has kind of overwhelmed my pop culture crawl but now I hope that I can get back and see what’s going on in edge city music and movies and what not. Managed to see a pretty awful film over the weekend The Concubines but to be honest I have to watch it again because there are about 7 flashbacks folded into each other to the point where I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Which is pretty hard to do to me – only Glen and Glenda and Butterfly and Sword (which I must write about soon) have got me puzzled to the point of saying what the hell? Does anybody know what is gong on at all? Did anybody? Hell I can follow Mexican wrestling films for Pete’s sake.

Anyway – it’s nice to be able to get back to things like that and not be overly worried that the mush wit in the white house is going to do something really stupid or not do something with horrific consequences. Obama will make mistakes (like Lieberman) but they won’t be because he’s stupid.

Peace, love. Poppies

The Day After the day.

Strange morning here in New York – you have the calls of Mizzen from the newly built towers summoning the faithful to prayer – a cry which stills for a moment the hurried conversion of St. Patrick’s cathedral into a mosque – there is a brisk business in veils sold by the sidewalk vendors and all the broadcast Advertising signs are displaying the words of the Internationale.

Well not really but if you’d paid any attention to the right wing as the days dwindled down you’d have thought this was what was coming. I’m not sure what they are thinking today but I suspect at least a number have retreated into their basements or their pillow forts and won’t come out for a while.

We can only hope.

For the rest of us, well I can only really say for me, so for me, this was a transcendent night showing again what Hunter Thompson called “the fantastic possibilities of life in this land” or as I understand Lincoln said “the last best hope for humanity”. The game has shifted, the lights are being put out and the long dark night is ending and we can see a dawn.

I note Obama is under no illusions that this is going to be easy – the GOP especially in the Senate will do everything in their power to toss sand in the gears – and you know to be honest – that’s their fricking job – they are the opposition party and if you can’t stand opposition well then really the democratic process isn’t for you. Yes it can be maddening and slow but most of the damn time we’ve gotten in trouble by being too damn quick to decide things.

Anyway personally, I hope that this brings to an end the faux guided age we’ve been living in since the 80’s – I’ve always regarded America’s embrace of Ronald Reagan was the country going into denial – we don’t have a problem with the poor the poor are lazy – the Homeless are there because it’s their fault, we don’t need to worry about our dependence on oil, the environment, health care, the Jobs leaving this country, the stagnation of the the middle class, the growing gap between the haves and the have nots, we didn’t have to worry about anything USA! USA! USA!

It seems odd to me that the problems we faced back in 1980 are pretty the same ones we face right now – just worse. Oil is still a major issue, taking care of the environment has morphed into dealing with Global Climate change – a nasty irony here is that if the country had tried to reduce their use of imported oil in the 80’s and worked to develop wind, solar, huge hamsters, and whatever other alternate sources of power they could come up with, we’d have made a major impact on climate change pretty much by accident. The great magnet is not without a sense of humor it seems. And the economy is in bad shape – in a way we are not used to.

There will be a lot of reasons or excuses given for this win – I’m beginning to think that everybody’s analysis will eventually leave something important out - although I can say that McCain’s campaign was the most tin eared wrong footed mess I have see. And add the money grubbing hillbilly from Alaska to the mix – well that’s just a mess.
But Obama had to be able to take advantage of McCain’s mistakes and the world events proving luck is the residue of design.

Just a few other notes – I can remember when the election of a president caused dancing in the streets can you?

Or a spontaneous demonstration outside the White House? I think if someone had come along with a bunch of torches and pitchforks W would have been in real trouble.

Palin is going to go away – and probably try guesting on the View or something.

And I can go back to worrying about Band shit.

Yes.

Peace Love and Joy.