Month: August 2019

Larry Correia and the Facebook Trolls

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Larry is the author of some very fun urban and high fantasy (e. g., the Monster Hunter books) and the man who originated the Sad Puppy insurgency.  Because of the latter, the whole science fiction SJW troop hates him with a burning passion.  So every now and then they erupt in a spasm of spite.  So they’ve been messing with his Facebook page by reporting imaginary violations.  Larry, being the imaginative type came up with a game to mock this harassment and, of course, was banned again for the imaginary stuff too.  It’s kind of complicated but if you’ve following the Sad Puppy saga for as long as I have you might get a chuckle.

 

“Long live Krasnovia!

 

Banned Again. Facebook Gets Even Dumber, Part III: The Saga Continues

 

 

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 5 Episode 13 – Ring-a-Ding Girl

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Bunny Blake is a Hollywood movie star who is about to fly to Rome to star in a new picture.  She receives a box in the mail and finds that her fan club in her home town of Howardville have sent her a ring with some kind of large stone.  But when she looks into it, she sees her sister Hildy begging her to come home.

In the next scene we are in Hildy Powell’s home where we also meet her son Bud.  Suddenly Bunny shows up in her fur coat and movie star persona.  Hildy is thrilled by the surprise visit but when Bunny sees another Howardville inhabitant in her ring begging for help and she passes out Hildy is panicked and calls the family doctor.

Dr. Floyd examines Bunny and although she seems better, he tells her to rest.  Bunny asks the doctor who is the chairman of the Founder’s Day Picnic to postpone it to another day so she can visit her friends in peace.  He tells her that she has let Hollywood go to her head and refuses.

Bunny decides to go downtown with Bud to get her own prescription and while there she stops in at the High School to ask if townspeople can come to the auditorium to see a cabaret show she wants to put on that day.  Then she goes to the radio station and invites the town to see her show instead of the picnic.  All this seeming selfish behavior angers Hildy but she relents and decides to see Bunny perform.

Now a heavy thunderstorm begins and Bunny sees visions in her ring of herself on an airliner during a storm.  Next she walks out the door into the rainstorm and disappears.  Hildy receives a phone call from the police and is told that an airliner has crashed on the picnic grounds.  Luckily most people were at the high school auditorium waiting for the show.  Then the officer tells Hildy that Bunny was a passenger on the jet liner and is dead.  Hildy is confused because many people have seen Bunny throughout the day.  When she looks around, she sees Bunny’s ring on the floor but the ring is scorched and broken.

This is a ghost story but the twist is that the ghost appears before the woman is dead.  It’s an interesting switch.  Even though I’m not particularly sympathetic to the actress character (she seems a typical Hollywood narcissist) I’ll give this episode a solid B.

 

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 5 Episode 12 – Ninety Years Without Slumbering

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Ed Wynn is Sam Forstmann, an old man living with his granddaughter and her husband, Marnie and Doug Kirk.  Sam has a grandfather’s clock that he tends to compulsively.  He was given the clock by his father on the day he was born and Sam believes if the clock ever stops his heart will stop too and he’ll die.

Doug is upset that Sam is worrying Marnie with all his fretting about the clock.  Marnie is expecting a child and Doug wants Sam to see a psychiatrist to determine if Sam is lucid.  When Sam goes to the psychiatrist, he tells the old man that the delusion about the clock is unhealthy and he should get rid of the clock.

Sam gives the clock to their next-door neighbor Carol, and is happy for the first couple of weeks as he gets to go over every other day to wind it.  But one day he finds that the neighbors have gone out of town for the week and Sam panics.  In the middle of the night he tries to break into the house to wind the clock but the police see him breaking a window and escort him home.

Now reconciled to his own death as the clock winds down he takes to his bed.  Suddenly his spirit, looking like a ghost of himself arrives and tells him his time to die has arrived.  But inexplicably Sam tells his spirit that he doesn’t believe that clock can determine his life and death and the spirit becomes dispirited and fades away.

Now Marnie shows up at his bedside expecting the worst but Sam rebounds and tells her he’s fine and the important thing is her child.  He takes her downstairs to have some hot chocolate and sounds like a new man determined to embrace life.

Ed Wynn was a comedian of the earlier part of the twentieth century.  He did an earlier episode of the Twilight Zone (actually the second episode shown) called “One for the Angels” that was a gentle but entertaining teleplay.  This episode is equally gentle but I would say it’s a little thin.  Not to say bad but not too substantial.  It’s based completely on that old song that ends, “the clock stopped never to go again when the old man died.”  Let’s call it a B-.

 

Fredo Balks

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Watching the video of Chris Cuomo, I was sort of sad to see him demeaned.  I mean anyone who grows up in a large family knows that sibling rivalry and competition in an intellectual environment is stressful.  So, the fact that Chris is sort of the lesser intellect in the Cuomo family is something that many would feel sympathy for.  Of course, the fact that he spouts poisonous lies on CNN about non-Leftists makes him a whole lot less sympathetic.  Sean Hannity was supportive of Cuomo because the incident occurred while Cuomo was out with his wife and young daughter.  This is also something that should be acknowledged.  Being a celebrity doesn’t cancel out your humanity and shouldn’t excuse even your enemies from showing decency around your loved ones.  Once again, Cuomo has never given President Trump or his family any slack when tossing insults and vilifying them about any personal issues that have nothing to do with government.  But let’s just say it’s understandable that Cuomo reacted angrily and forcefully to his heckler.

But then as ever, Cuomo pulled the race card, or slightly less effectively, the ethnicity card.  Chris threatened to throw the heckler down the stairs for what he declared was the equivalent of the “n” word for Italian Americans, “Fredo.”  Huh.

All my ancestors, going back as far as I can determine, were Italians or descendants of Italians living in the United States.  And a good proportion of these were descended from Sicilians.  And on top of that my family is from an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn that unfortunately was steeped in awareness of the Godfather movies.  I can remember back in the 1970s car horns in my neighborhood playing a portion of the Godfather theme.  It was quite sad.  Anyway, I consider myself relatively authoritative on this subject.  “Fredo” is not an Italian American slur.  It’s a mockery of someone who isn’t the brightest bulb in a family with more accomplished individuals.  In the Godfather movies Fredo is the incompetent older brother of Michael who bumbles and fails and finally betrays the Corleones while trying to show that he isn’t a loser.

In the famous scene where Michael confronts Fredo with his betrayal you hear Fredo defend his own actions by blaming everyone else for demeaning him.  He’s the older brother who whose pride has been wounded.

“I can handle things! I’m smart! Not like everybody says… like dumb… I’m smart and I want respect!”

Okay, so Chris Cuomo isn’t exactly Fredo.  He’s got a good paying job at CNN and all the material success associated with being part of a family that has had two governors of New York State in just two generations of the family.  Not bad.  So why does being called Fredo sting so badly?  Well, to be totally honest if you’ve ever watched any of his work on CNN, he does appear sometimes to be an idiot.  And again, in a highly competitive family maybe some unkind comparisons were made by his siblings or parents.  Who knows?  But the most important consideration is noting that no matter what, when a Leftist is attacked his first instinct is to call his attacker a racist.  Poor Fredo.  Well at least Andrew hasn’t sent him out on the lake to sleep with the fish.