Nostalgia...

Last night's Svengoolie double feature had the classic Jim Henson flick The Dark Crystal, and I'd forgotten what a fun romp that was.

Combined that with last week's Labyrinth and you have a bangin' GenX Nostalgia Machine...

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When R2D2 goes rogue...

An internet connected appliance is a hackable appliance.

Robot vacuums manufactured by Ecovacs have gone rogue, with some customers reporting the tiny tech tools chased them around their homes and barraged them with profanities after being hacked.

Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson is one of those people. He told Australia Broadcast Network about an experience in May with his Deebot X2. the uniquely problematic model from the Chinese manufacturer.

Instead of Skynet infiltrating our fortified bunkers with T-800 Terminator killbots, it's 4chan infiltrating our living rooms with robot vacuum cleaners that bang into our ankles and call us names.

This future is somehow both duller and dumber and yet also more dystopian than the one I was promised.

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Unholy Terror

Watching The Terror I’m reminded that period nautical dramas shoot a large percentage of scenes on deck or in the captain’s cabin, which gives 19th century seafaring an unrealistically light and airy vibe.

That, and they haven’t figured out how to broadcast smell.

Something like seventy dudes crammed into a 100’ long ship… It must have smelled unholy belowdecks, especially with those retrofitted steam engines. Like the locker room in a burning slaughterhouse.

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Okay, this is cool...

The original cast of The Avengers assembled again... to dub their lines in the Lakota language.

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Star War

So, I watched original gangsta Star Wars and Empire on Tuesday night. Then I watched Return of the Jedi yesterday afternoon. I tried watching The Phantom Menace last night and fell asleep. That's the third time that's happened when trying to watch it.

This morning I cued up Phantom Menace again over breakfast and finally managed to watch it to the end.

If you had asked me to bet everything I owned on the length of Episode I versus the original, I’d have lost it all. The original feels like a brisk 90-minuter while Ep.1 feels like a three hour slog, but Wikipedia says they’re a bit over 120 and 130 minutes, respectively.

When the Boomers have all died off and the GenX-versus-Millennial war kicks off in earnest, the Star Wars prequels are going to be the Fort Sumter of the conflict.

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Ouch.

Something had my back all jacked up last night. I didn't get a lot of really good sleep.

Hopefully tonight will be better.

I did have a really long detailed dream that was likely caused by watching The Three-Body Problem before going to bed. Very science fictional dream. Lots of space kablooie.

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Fingers crossed...

Looks like it's time to reread Neuromancer. (Just kidding. It's always time to reread Neuromancer.)

Did you know...?

That's the building we used to jokingly call "Broad Ripple's skyscraper", before the neighborhood sprouted a jungle of 4- and 5-story "mixed use" residential/retail spaces.

It was a professional building, with dentist's offices and whatnot on each floor. Now it's owned by the bohemian Hotel Broad Ripple.

Hence the big peace symbol.

Back during the Cold War, conservative Boomers and Silents called that "the footprint of the American chicken". 

GenX and Millennials mostly knew it from the button on Private Joker's helmet cover, next to the scrawled "BORN TO KILL" slogan. Occasionally, on posters or fliers touting a Sixties hippie-themed school function, a clueless X'er or Millennial would hilariously get it mixed up with the Mercedes-Benz three-pointed star logo.

I once heard a fundie preacher... I've mentioned that I grew up in a Baptist concentration camp, right? ...tell the congregation that it was actually a secret satanic symbol; an inverted cross with the arms broken. I guess when you're looking for the devil behind every bush, you get a lot of false positives.

In actuality, as I learned while reading P.J. O'Rourke's essay "Among the Euroweenies" in Holidays in Hell, it originated in 1958 as the logo of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It's a combination of the semaphore signals for "N" and "D".

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Overheard in Front of the Television...

Watching Batman on MeTV last night... the episode from the second season with Otto Preminger* as Mr. Freeze ...I mused aloud:

"When I was a kid, if you’d asked me “Who’s freakier, Colonel Hogan or Bruce Wayne?”, I’d have been all “Oh, Bruce Wayne for sure. I mean, he runs around with a teenager in tights and booty shorts” which just goes to show that you never can tell."

*Three different actors played Mr. Freeze in the TV series. George Sanders played the role in the first season, but was unavailable in the second, so Otto Preminger got the part. According to Wikipedia, "Due to tensions and difficulties on set in Preminger's two-part storyline, Eli Wallach replaced Preminger in the role of Mr. Freeze for the final two-part storyline of season 2." That sounds like an interesting story, which I'm fixing to look into. Preminger was a controversial dude, but his Mr. Freeze is the most memorable of the trio, and probably why heavily-accented Schwarzenegger got the part in the execrable Schumacher flop, Batman & Robin.
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Urban Myth...sorta.

Alligators lurking in the sewers of Manhattan is one of the hoariest urban legends there is. It even spawned a godawful B-grade monster movie in 1980, which is everything you'd expect from that schlockiest era of cinema.

It seems that, as with most legends, there's a tiny kernel of truth from which it sprouted...

He discovered an ad from the 1930s in Popular Mechanics offering live baby alligators for $1.50 to sate a “rage for Baby Alligator pets” sweeping the country.

“Just hatched in the deep marshlands of the South, at an amazingly low price. These corking little pets will be shipped to you by mail, carefully packed — safe arrival guaranteed,” the ad read.

On Feb. 9, 1935, a group of teenagers in East Harlem spotted a gator down a storm drain, lassoed it and pulled it up with a clothesline — all eight feet and 125 pounds, according to the New York Times. When it snapped at them, they beat it to death with shovels.

“I’ve described this as New York City’s greatest true-ish urban legend,” Michael Miscione, who served as the Manhattan borough historian from 2006 to 2019, told Time Out in February. “It is an urban legend because there aren’t any alligators in the sewers, but there was at least one alligator in the sewer.”

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Yum!

Bobbi has pics and a cooking description of yesterday's delicious roast, which we ate while watching the finale of the first season of The Lincoln Lawyer. 

She has really got the process of doing those on the grill down to a science.

I really, really enjoyed The Lincoln Lawyer. Good television, and I hope the second season holds up to the first.

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Spoiler no spoiling!

Before I write anything here, let me get a few things out of the way: The guy in that movie was dead the whole time, Tyler Durden didn't exist, and Darth is actually Luke's dad.

If you're a normal human being on the internet, you sometimes complain about spoilers.

It's especially prevalent in the streaming era, where sometimes an entire season gets dumped on the 'net all at once. Some folks will then binge watch the whole thing in a weekend. Others, like Bobbi and me here at Roseholme Cottage, will watch one episode an evening.

When you stumble across a couple of friends on Facebook or a couple of coworkers at the water cooler talking about the show, and they're binge watchers while you're a trickler, you can blunder into a discussion containing the dreaded spoilers.

We don't have any fixed modern etiquette on when it's okay to drop spoilers into conversation. I mean, conceivably I just ruined Fight Club back there in my opening paragraph for someone who never watched it.

Well, in the immortal words of Professor Farnsworth, "Good news, everyone!"

It turns out that spoilers really don't have any measurable effect on people's enjoyment of a story. I mean, everybody went to go see Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy even though we'd known how it ended for 46 years, right? 

Don't take my word for it, though. Smart people with lab coats have checked the math, and it turns out...

"The truth is, we are just as likely to get caught up in a story even when we know what is coming — perhaps because more significant factors determine our enjoyment of narratives rather than simply waiting to learn or guess their resolution. Humans are hard-wired not just to absorb facts but also to lose themselves in stories and attune themselves to the characters and plots unfolding on the screen."

I still wouldn't go around gratuitously spoiling recent stuff, because that's just tacky, but I'll be less likely to get cross with someone who inadvertently lets slip the fact that Soylent Green is people.

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"Nova" means "Doesn't Go"

Literally half of everybody in this hemisphere speaks Spanish, and y'all didn't think to run the title of this movie by one of them?

Can't wait to see the new Netflix movie literally called "SUCKS" pic.twitter.com/eweWn1MMTS

— Lalo Alcaraz (@laloalcaraz) March 15, 2023

Icy Hot Stuntaz

Vulture has a pretty good piece on why there should be Academy Awards for stunts...and also hands out their own "Stunt Oscars" for the past year.

This year, Best Aerial Stunt was over before it started, a total gimme.

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So Bad It's Good

VHS Revival has a great review & hilarious behind-the-scenes dissection of one of my favorite schlockily terribad '80s Golan-Globus action flicks, Bloodsport, which was Jean-Claude Van Damme's movie debut.

Bloodsport‘s plot is so simple it makes the most primitive 16-bit game seem complex by comparison, but that’s the beauty of it. Van Damme’s training ― though again said to be of real-life origin ― has fighting game bonus round written all over it. Dux is subjected to a series of trials designed to sharpen his instincts and test his mettle, like catching fish with his bare hands, fighting blindfolded, DRINKING TEA blindfolded, and, in what seems like something of a (ahem!) stretch, is even tied to a makeshift torture rack, the very same that were designed to dislocate joints and tear out limbs. Van Damme, who is subjected to such nonsense for real, certainly earned his meagre $25,000 fee.

The review is worth reading in its entirety.

So yeah, Van Damme's first movie role, which he landed by impressing a movie producer with his roundhouse kicking talent while waiting tables in a posh restaurant, paid him twenty-five grand. That's something like sixty long in 2023 dollars, which seems like a bargain to me, but I've never hired anybody to star in a kung fu movie so I can't be sure.

The movie is based on the BS war stories and drunken fabulations of noted Bullshido master Frank Dux, whose claims include winning a Medal of Honor while participating in super secret missions as a USMC reservist in the early Eighties, in between occasionally competing in apocryphal underground death matches like the one in the movie, or the ones in which Pam from Archer fought to pay for college.

I gotta say, you kids who weren't around in the days before the internet really missed out on the golden age of bullshit. Teenage insecurity tends to lead to wild tales of girlfriends in Canada or your friend's brother's uncle's 200mph Trans Am, but nowadays everybody's got Google in their pockets and can fact check your ass, and so people tend to get mocked right out of the habit of telling easily disprovable whoppers by the time they graduate high school. 

Not back then, though! The world was full of Frank Duxes! Any Army-Navy store of any size had a handful of regulars who spun tall tales at the cyclic rate with a glorious disregard for plausibility. While only a few hundred SEALs served in Vietnam, every neighborhood gun store had at least three or four of them.

I guess that's part of the nostalgia of Bloodsport for me. Anyway, if you haven't watched it...you can stream it with Amazon Prime...it's a hoot.

Dream Team

The crew who turned out the Private Snafu cartoon shorts for the U.S. Army during WWII was practically a Who's Who of animation at the time...

"As the ringleader of this circus, Major Capra — later Colonel Capra — oversaw not only the Snafu shorts but also the highly successful Why We Fight series, which would win him an Academy Award for “Best Documentary” in 1943. Typically, these projects were outsourced to local studios with the necessary time and resources at their disposal. When it came down to finding a group of animators willing to take on Private Snafu, Disney proved too expensive and too dictatorial, and so the contract went to Leon Schlesinger’s Warner Bros. Cartoons studio. At the time, the boys of “Termite Terrace” (as the studio was known) were still relatively obscure. In retrospect, though, the talent roster behind the Snafu cartoons reads like a pantheon of animation icons: Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, Frank Tashlin, and the “Man of a Thousand Voices” himself, Mel Blanc. Into this mix, add Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. “Dr. Seuss”), then working as a political cartoonist for the leftist New York newspaper PM, and the merry mashup is complete."

Surreal World

This New Year's Eve special on Russian state TV was wild.

During Russia's New Year special on state TV, they openly addressed the West to say, "Like it or not, Russia is enlarging!" The rest of the clip should give you a general idea as to the mood in the studio. pic.twitter.com/EcBxhEabS0

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) January 2, 2023

I was sure I'd seen it someplace before, and then it hit me...

You's Trollin'!

We've known that Trump was infatuated with the movie Sunset Boulevard for years now, since before he was president, in fact. It was generally an inside baseball factoid to people who'd been watching him get needled since the Spy magazine days, although his reference to it after the 2020 Oscar ceremony made it more public knowledge (and started the inevitable Norma Desmond jokes, especially post-November.)

But when Olivia Nuzzi made his fascination with the flick the armature around which she wound a New York magazine piece, the former POTUS overreacted with his usual pique.

When a lolcow overreacts publicly on social media, that's just chum in the water for trolls, and the Sunset Boulevard-based trolling commenced with a vengeance...

Okay, I know what trolling a lolcow in order to get a reaction looks like, and this is straight-up trolling a lolcow to get a reaction. 🤣https://t.co/fUGyrGLbhg

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 2, 2023

Jeezis at this point he is getting his face trolled off by people hoping to get a good outburst out of him on his low-budget Twitter clone.

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Please Don't Suck

With the success of The Peripheral, apparently William Gibson's a hot property in Hollywood once again, all memories of Johnny Mnemonic having been lost in time, like tears in rain.

Apple TV+ is going to be doing Neuromancer, and boy are my fingers crossed for it not to suck, because it's one of my favorite novels of all time.

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I LOL'ed...

“Merry Christmas, kid. Let’s recreate one of the most iconically heartbreaking scenes in SciFi movie history. It’ll be fun” pic.twitter.com/SRGQoajyEZ

— Michael Tichy (@MichaelTichyNP) December 2, 2022

(And, yup, it's a real thing if you want to make a morbid little action figure tableau. Maybe get one of those tritium vials as a warp core prop.)

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