Month: April 2021
26APR2021 – Quote of the Day
Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.
William Congreve
Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 25 – Bread and Circuses
Holy absurdity Batman, here we go again with “Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development.” It wasn’t enough to have Yangs and Kohms in the episode The Omega Glory. Now we get a planet that has the Roman Empire. But wait there’s more. Rome survives into the twentieth century and their version of General Motors advertises for their latest car model, the Jupiter 8, by sponsoring televised gladiatorial games on their version of Wide World of Sports. Oh the pain, the pain.
Six years earlier a merchant ship the “The Beagle” went missing. Captain R.M. Merik commanded the ship and is known to Kirk because he washed out at the academy because he was a doofus. The Enterprise finds the wrecked ship and Kirk, Spock and McCoy head down to the planet to find the crew. There they are immediately captured, of course, and we find out that Merik is now emperor and called Merikus (nice latinizing). And he’s persecuting the Sun worshippers.
Blah, blah, blah, Spock and McCoy are forced into the gladiatorial arena. Blah, blah, blah, Kirk is enticed by the pretty blonde slave. Blah, blah, blah, Scotty uses some engineering rigamarole to save the landing party when they’re about to be skewered. Merik dies nobly after being a cowardly worm for the last six years. Landing party escapes and leaves the planet alone because of the prime directive. Spock jibber jabbers about the illogic of sun worship and Uhura corrects them that it isn’t “the sun up in the sky, it’s the Son of God.”
Great googly moogly. They must have had nothing. Okay, as parody there is some value here. When the gladiator Flavius fails to convincingly attack McCoy in the arena one of the roman legionnaires whips him and threatens to have a special episode on television devoted to his death in the arena. The tv announcer at the gladiatorial show is obviously done for laughs and is actually quite funny as satire of live tv production. He has dials to allow him to add in cheering, boos, catcalls and laughter. So as comedy the show has some value. But what are the science fiction fans to make of this. I guess that Star Trek had devolved into Gilligan’s Island.
The scenes with Kirk and the blonde slave girl allows at least a modicum of Shatner mockery value so I’ll give the episode a 4 // 5.
The Western View
Today I was feeling smugly satisfied with myself. Yesterday I resisted the comfortable inertia of on-line existence and bestirred myself to do useful and uncomfortable work out in the brambles that relentlessly encroach on the areas adjacent to the woods. Inappropriately dressed in sweats I did battle with thorn bushes that easily pierce denim or even leather. At least I was smart enough to put on a pair of safety glasses. So after several hours of aches and muscle pulls and jabs and scratches and mayfly bites I actually accomplished something I have been putting off for several years. And today it’s raining so the timeliness of getting the job done is what has given rise to the smugness.
So I went out on the lower balcony and surveyed the western view of the place.
And in my pomposity I declared all right with my little world, my little kingdom.
Alright, so that’s the hook for the title; “The Western View.” And I went pretty far to sell it. Now we get down to the point. The Western View of the World is the Republican Democracy that took root in the United States and supposedly swept the planet after the end of the nineteenth century. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the “end of history” all was right with the world and freedom was established everywhere and we were all going to be happy and have 401K accounts and sell pet rocks to each other on amazon.com.
But now that all the real dangers have been eliminated, our master have decided to get rid of all that freedom they told us was our birth right. Turns out freedom is dangerous. No let me come at it from a different direction. Our masters no longer think it is dangerous to take those freedoms away from us. Since the 1960’s the Democrat Party has discovered that they can use black people as a device to make any changes they want to make to the Constitution of the United States. And afterward they expanded it to using any minority group (or even majority group in the case of women) as a cudgel to expand those changes in whatever direction does the most harm to the rights of Americans.
In the name of some undefinable social justice, we have given up all of the rights that originally made us a western republican democracy. We have lost freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to free association, the right to bear arms and now we’ve lost equality under the law. We’ve even been cheated out of the institution of fair elections. What has happened is that the elites have completed the process of gaming the American system of government against its citizens. An oligarchy has taken control of all the institutions of the federal government and has now formed an alliance with all of the corporations that benefit from the subjugation and integration of America into the globalist feudal system.
The American experiment was an attempt to enshrine freedom and the dignity of man into a political and social construct. But like any human system people with bad intent can game it. That deconstruction is now complete. History tells us it is unlikely that we will be able to get it back. Many people claim that any republic will degenerate into a mob or an oligarchy after a very short time. Maybe we were lucky to last as long as we did.
Well my western view has a lot more to feel smug about than the current state of the West. For America all you can do is decide which; fold, flee or fight.
Larry Correia Has an Interesting Post on Self Defense Training
Larry is an urban fantasy author who isn’t woke. That by itself is a rarity enough. And he’s an interesting guy who has an abiding interest in guns. He has a post about a training he took.in Extreme Close Quarter Fighting with guns and knives. The company he trained with is called SHIVWORKS and they have various trainings for real world desperate situations. Here is their site. I have about zero training in any self defense or weapons systems. But my all around awesomeness will probably make up for that deficit. But I do find these training programs very interesting. Thought I’d pass it along for general interest.
25APR2021 – Quote of the Day
How cruelly sweet are the echoes that start
When memory plays an old tune on the heart!
Eliza Cook
25APR2021 – Photo of the Day
24APR2021 – OCF Update
I’ve been going through some of the “Oscar Nominated” movies that TCM runs for a month before the Oscars Ceremony. Lately they have been adding in films from the 1970’s, 80’s and even later. It’s interesting that some movies that I saw when they came out back in the old days really didn’t age well. As an example there was a movie, “Mona Lisa” from 1986. It was Bob Hoskins break out role. He earned an Oscar for best actor. It’s about a small time London crook who is assigned to drive a high priced black hooker to her hotel appointments. The story revolves around his emotional involvement with the woman and his attempt to help her save an underaged girl who has been swallowed up by the sex trade. Some things in the movie are interesting but the grittiness of the portrayal of the sex trade in 1980’s London is a bit much to watch. I didn’t remember it being so ugly and so extremely downbeat. And that movie is just one example. Especially in the 1970s the attempt to portray realism ended up making for a very tawdry product. There are exceptions but it is worth commenting on as a feature of the era.
I have been remiss in finishing off season two of Star Trek and then finishing out season three. It’s because I really am not in the mood for it. I’ve been wanting to start the Jackie Gleason series, “The Honeymooners.” But I am going to rededicate myself to slogging through the rest of Star Trek. It has to be done. But I may decide to start the Honeymooners before I finish. There’s nothing wrong with a little variety.
I spent today outside working in the fields. I have some of the scariest thorn bushes growing at the borders of my woods. The trunks of these things get as thick as saplings, two or three inches thick. If I wait until summer they will form an impenetrable wall of thorn brambles. The thorns are bigger than the ones you find on roses. They are formidable. And we had some invasive trees to remove. There are Russian Olive trees that have gotten way out of control. So I went back there with my triangular saw and my large pruning shears and attacked them with all the enthusiasm I could muster. I’ll have to say I was surprised how much satisfaction you can get from beating up on brush. It was tiring but when I finished the job I felt better than I have in weeks. Physical activity takes your mind off the political madness going on. Sure it is temporary but I really did clear my head.
So with renewed enthusiasm I say to this fallen land we live in, “Bring it on, bring it on!”
Praying Mantises, Children’s Books and Pa – Part 1
My two-year-old granddaughter is a big fan of the books by the children’s author Eric Carle. And one of her favorites is the Very Quiet Cricket. There is a YouTube video of an animated version of the book and one of the characters is a preying mantis that whispers in a hoarse voice a funny sounding “HELLOOOOO!” And that character is my granddaughter’s favorite part of the book. So, she is a fan of preying mantises. And by a strange coincidence so am I. I’ve always liked finding mantises wherever I have lived. And I have found them here in New England too but infrequently.
And so, for that reason I’ve decided to increase my odds of finding them this summer for my granddaughter. She said, “Pa, show me preying mantis.” She calls me Pa because that is what all my grandchildren call me. My oldest grandson made the name up when he was barely able to speak and it became official.
So I have to find her a mantis. I looked to see if any of the gardening supply stores in the area sell preying mantis egg cases. They didn’t so I just ordered some on-line and should have them soon. Camera Girl thinks it will be educational to see the baby mantises hatch out and thinks we should keep a few to raise up. The prospect of finding aphids and then larger insects to feed them sounds challenging but I’ll give it a try.
With any luck by summer we’ll have a few good sized mantises and my granddaughter will learn a little bit about an interesting insect. At least that’s the plan.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) – A Movie Review
I’ll start off by saying this is a terrible movie. But maybe it’s so bad it’s good.
Frank Sinatra is an Army Major named Bennett Marco who is captured along with his platoon during the Korean War and sent into China to be brainwashed to be part of a political assassination plot that the Russians have arranged. The platoon sergeant Raymond Shaw is the assassin and as it turns out his mother, played by Angela Lansbury, is the Russian agent who is his handler. He is programmed to obey instructions that he gets after he’s been triggered by seeing the ace of diamonds during a solitaire game. His mother is married to a United States Senator that she is going to get elected President by having her son assassinate the Republican presidential candidate. If this isn’t crazy enough, his mother gets Shaw to assassinate his own newlywed wife and her United States Senator father in order to further the plan.
So, the plot is pretty crazy but it’s kind of fun in a way because of the way they present it. We get these flash backs of the brainwashing camp. The Russian doctor demonstrates the control he has over the prisoners by having Shaw kill two of the other prisoners on command. And based on the false memories that are implanted in the prisoners Shaw gets the Congressional Medal of Honor for supposedly freeing them and killing some ridiculous number of North Korean troops.
Now this could have been a political thriller that works. But the acting is unbelievably bad. Some of the dialog is borderline ridiculous. For instance, Janet Leigh plays a woman who meets Sinatra accidentally on a train and within a day she bails him out of jail for assaulting a Korean house boy and still decides to leave her fiancé to marry him. And then there is this hilarious karate fight between Sinatra and a fake Korean guy. It’s like something out of one of the Austin Powers movies. One of his karate chops misses and ends up knocking an enormous chunk out of a wooden table. But it looks as if it’s made of styrofoam. I think that fight may have been the inspiration for Inspector Clouseau’s battles against his Oriental House Boy Kato in the Pink Panther movies.
I read that this is considered to be in several top 100 film lists. I guess there’s no accounting for taste.
On a personal note, there is a scene in the movie that was filmed in a restaurant in Manhattan called Jilly’s. Jilly Rizzo, the owner of the restaurant and the guy who is seen tending bar in the movie was one of Sinatra’s closest friends. Jilly was convicted in 1990 of a loan fraud scheme on his restaurant that involved some very old acquaintances of mine. And some of these acquaintances worked at Jilly’s and even knew Sinatra from his visits there. I think the fraud scheme and this movie are in some ways kindred entities. They both possess a spirit of inept dishonesty. A bungled fraud.
So, this movie has a personal connection for me. But that in no way changes my opinion of its quality. If I remember correctly Sinatra did sometimes do some decent acting. I’m going to watch “The Joker is Wild” again because I think he was pretty good in that. I never noticed any acting going on in Ocean’s Eleven. People say he was good in “From Here to Eternity.” That part seemed a little melodramatic to me. “The Man with the Golden Arm” never interested me. Maybe he was good in it. But without a doubt, The Manchurian Candidate was abysmally bad.
Recommended only as camp.