Month: September 2020

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 16 – The Gamesters of Triskelion

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Another iconic episode.  Alright let’s get it out of the way right at the beginning.  Ratings must have been fading so they hired a Las Vegas burlesque queen in a very revealing costume to give the show a boost.  And as I remember my adolescent self was not opposed to this aspect of the show at all.  Honestly, she was probably the best-looking babe they ever had on the show.  In terms of acting, well it was Star Trek so really, who cares?

Kirk, Chekov and Uhura (boy that’s an odd combination) are in the transporter getting ready to beam down to planet XYZ123 when suddenly they vanish without the transporter even being energized.  Scotty, Spock and McCoy jabber at each other trying to figure out what happened.

Meanwhile we see Kirk, Chekov and Uhura on a distant planet called Triskelion being assaulted by mismatched gladiators with silly weapons.  The hot looking warrior woman named Shahna is dressed in an aluminum foil bikini and armed with a giant-sized bottle opener.  A caveman in a Fred Flintstone suit is armed with a whip and a net.  A relatively ordinary looking guy in hose and doublet named Lars has a letter opener as his weapon and then there’s this really small old woman who doesn’t do very much and maybe also had a giant bottle opener but since I was watching Shahna most of the time I’m not really sure what the other woman had.

Once the Enterprise crew is subdued by the “thralls,” a weird skinny, bald headed guy in a black robe tells them what’s what.  He is the Master Thrall named Galt.  He runs the gladiatorial games for the “Providers.”  The Providers are disembodied brains living in a cavern a thousand meters below the surface of Triskelion and they spend their pathetic lives capturing beings throughout the galaxy with their powerful transporter beam and betting a currency called quatloos on the fights they organize between the captives.  But since they are disembodied brains that live in a cave what they would do with the quatloos they win is completely meaningless.

Meanwhile back on the Enterprise Spock confirms that the landing party is not on the planet below and finding an energy signature in a cloud decides to head twelve light years in that direction to find the captain and company.  McCoy and Scotty whine and complain about this decision and finally Spock has the best non-Shahna moment in the show when he tells them that since he is in command that he will do as he pleases unless (and hear he lowers his voice so that only the two of them can hear him) McCoy and Scotty intend to start a mutiny.  The two complainers immediately started hemming hawing and denying they had any such idea and fall in line with the plan.

Kirk and company learn the hard way that Galt and the Providers use collars on the necks of the thralls to train and punish disobedience.  They seem to learn that there is no escape and no way to resist.  So, Kirk quickly gets down to business and seduces Shahna with his Shatnerly charms.  He hugs and kisses her and tells her about the stars and Earth and how much he likes her.  But in the next scene he kisses her and then socks her in the jaw to get her key to his cell and make a break with Chekov and Uhura.  And since Providers are omniscient, they are quickly subdued and sentenced to die.

Kirk is now doomed to die but first he asks to meet the Providers face to face.  He is transported into the crappy cave that the Providers live in and berates them for their pathetic existence.  At this point the Enterprise reaches Triskelion and is immediately immobilized by the Providers.  Kirk appeals to the Providers’ gaming blood and proposes a wager.  If he defeats a thrall in single combat, he and his people will go free and the Providers will give freedom and training to the thralls to become independent beings on Triskelion.  If he loses then the whole crew of the Enterprise will become thralls.  The Providers decide instead that he’ll have to fight three thralls.  Take that Kirk!  Kirk dispatches the caveman and Lars but the third guy is only injured so he is replaced by Shahna who is still mad about the sucker punch Kirk gave her earlier.  Finally, Kirk takes away her bottle opener and with Lars’ letter opener at her throat she surrenders.  The Providers turn out to be good sports and keep their word and let the Enterprise go free and agree to turn the thralls into people.

There is a maudlin scene between Kirk and Shahna and after the landing party beams up Shahna gets a short monologue where she talks to the sky and thanks Jim Kirk for showing her the road to female empowerment and possibly less-revealing clothes.

So much to say.  Besides Spock’s mutiny game I think the other stand out comedy was Chekov being cornered in his cage by his selected mate, the old short weird looking woman thrall.  She’s smitten with him and he tries to be civil but he’s obviously weirded out by her appearance and overeager attentions.  It’s very creepy.

This show is just overflowing with Shatner doing his thing.  His shirt has been taken away and has been replaced with a harness that reveals his noticeable weight gain.  He’s leaping around kicking and punching everything in sight.  And of course, his amorous moments with Shahna highlight some of the very corniest acting Bill Shatner ever committed.  But I think what I like best is when Kirk is dismissing the idea of the Providers betting “trifles like quatloos” when human lives were so much more meaningful.  There we see Kirk the negotiator, Kirk the gambler.

So, all in all the girl is very attractive, although her eye makeup looked to be about an inch thick.  The plot was amusing and reasonably clever.  The Shatner mockery value was almost off the scale.  I’ll give this an 8 // 10.

 

The Metamorphosis of the Democrat Party

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Those on the Dissident Right have for a while predicted that the Republican Party would by default become the white party.  This was assuming that the Republicans would not be stupid enough to once again purge the party of the deplorables because of their politically incorrect but necessary views on immigration and globalism.  In some senses, the Republican Party already was the white party, in the sense that almost all of its members were white.  But in as much as the Democrat Party had plenty of white people in it, it wasn’t the exclusive white party.

But what has happened instead is that the Democrat Party is becoming the anti-white party.  Now that’s a remarkable process.  The woke areas of the country, the northeast and the northwest are waging open war against white Americans and these radicals are saying explicitly that it’s because they’re white.  Being white is a crime and the only acceptable way to avoid punishment is groveling and monetary reparations.

So far, this new paradigm for the Left has been doing wonderfully.  Corporations and the Media have accepted the Gospel according to BLM wholeheartedly.  Money has poured in and mayors and governors of the blue states have kowtowed and embraced the anti-white agenda hook line and sinker.  The police have been defanged and rioters and looters have carte blanche to vandalize and burn the blue cities whenever and wherever they please.  It’s Antifa heaven.

But there’s an election coming up and Americans get to have a say.  And I would say that there is a pretty sizable number of white Democrats and even some non-white Democrats who may not want to see the anti-white party in charge of the country.  It will be interesting to see how the purple (and even some of the blue) states choose sides in the November presidential and congressional elections.

Currently Joe Biden is trying to thread the needle by decrying violence but affirming his allegiance to racial justice and blaming white people.  And indications from the press are that they’ve finally noticed that burning and pillaging the blue cities is not a winning electoral strategy.  But it’s kind of too late and the Democrats are going to have to win or lose on the horse they’ve backed.

But even looking beyond November, the Democrats have been overtaken by their younger, more militant wing.  And for better or worse they have become the anti-white party.  And now the whites in the Democrat party will see clearly how they stand with “their” party.  They are a hated minority of that party and their place is to shut up, grovel and pay up.  I’m not implying that there aren’t plenty of white people who wouldn’t accept that role in the Democrat coalition.  But I am thinking it is a significantly smaller number than the current white segment of Democrat voters.  And as I mentioned earlier, there are probably plenty of non-white, non-black Democrat voters who aren’t enthusiastic supporters of the Black Lives Matters shakedown either.  After all there are more Hispanic voters than black voters and they are living through the rolling riots in the Democrat cities and maybe they wouldn’t mind having police holding down the criminal activities where they live.

Now that the Democrats have made the leap from a working class / middle class coalition to an upper class / lower class social justice shake down gang there will definitely be a re-sorting going on in the population.  It’s actually very advantageous for the Right that the Democrats have been forced to take sides.  The optics for the party that backs race rioters are not so good.  Americans are frightened and disgusted by what they’ve seen on the streets and on their televisions.  Now is the perfect time for President Trump’s message of law and order and an end to racial scapegoating of white Americans.  Let’s see if I’ve got the numbers right.  Stay tuned for November.

A Hot Dog Program – A Movie Review

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This is not a typical movie review because this is not a typical movie.  And even more unusual, this is a PBS production, which normally would repel me as wolfsbane does Dracula.  But not this time.  This movie is a celebration of one of the great American institutions, the hot dog.

A guy named Rick Sebak from Pittsburgh makes documentaries about Americana and this particular one travels around the United States looking at the multitude of ways that people make and enjoy hot dogs.  Of course, he goes to Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York to discuss the reputed birthplace of the hot dog and while there he highlights the Fourth of July hot dog eating contest at Nathan’s, a truly disgusting spectacle.  Then he visits several hot dog lovers in Manhattan who try to pick between their favorite hot dog and papaya juice restaurants.  From there he goes to Chicago and listens to the Windy City residents declare their variety of hot dog to be the adult version of this American food.  And afterwards he brings us to Georgia, the Carolinas, Ohio, New Jersey and even Alaska where reindeer hot dogs are the standard.

Along the way you’ll meet the mom and pop shops and the industrial scale restaurants and the owners, cooks, waiters and customers who swear by the goodness and special character of whichever local variant they enjoy.  They’ll be boiled, roasted, deep fried or encased in a corn dog.  They’ll be covered in relish, sauerkraut, onions, coleslaw, peppers or baked beans.  They’ll be slathered in yellow mustard, brown mustard, ketchup, barbecue sauce or horse radish.  They can be with or without skin and in Las Vegas you can even get one that’s half a pound and sixteen inches long.

This movie was made in 1999 and what struck me was that the people were from all walks of life and all ethnicities but they all agreed that the hot dog was the American food.  Not German American because it was brought here from Frankfurt or even just white Americans.  Every place they went all kinds of people loved the hot dogs and shared space enjoying them.  I was struck that the scene where the hot dogs were being sold at the Cleveland Indians game probably couldn’t get on PBS anymore because they consider the team name racist.

So, this show is a bit of Americana from before the woke movement would declare hot dogs some form of exploitation of everyone involved.  The movie highlighted the manufacturing of hot dogs and almost glories in the mystery meat status of its ingredients and the unappetizing appearance of the meat paste that makes them up.  And the bizarre sight of hot dogs being shot at high speed out of a machine that strips the temporary skins that the dogs wear while being cooked adds to their allure as a product of industrial age melting pot America.

Of course, all those mom and pop shops and even the big restaurants have now been driven out of business by COVID and the rioters.  And the various ethnicities are at each other’s throats.  And the millennials are all vegan and wouldn’t touch a hot dog if they were starving.  But this movie hearkens back to a happier time in America and celebrates the real diversity, hot dog diversity.  It celebrates the local cultures that all can embrace and enhance something as simple and wonderful as the hot dog.  You can probably rent this from a local library that carries PBS videos.  I rented it from Netflix DVD.  I’ll probably buy a DVD just because I like watching it with my kids and grandkids who have enjoyed it over the years when I had an old VHS copy.

07SEP2020 – American Greatness – Post of the Day – Michael Anton on Trump

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Michael Anton worked for President Trump as the Head of Communications at the National Security Council.  In this essay he provides an eye-witness account in defense of the President’s obvious patriotism and love for the soldiers.  It’s interesting to see how someone who was present when certain comments were made can shine a light on how they can be maliciously taken out of context.

The Donald Trump I Know