Month: January 2022

Mike Simonelli Appears on Fox News to Condemn Manhattan DA

photog Current Events , , ,

If you remember last month I linked to my friend Mike Simonelli’s book, Justified Deadly Force.

Last week he was invited onto Fox News to comment on the new Manhattan DA’s policy of refusing to prosecute anything short of murder.  My favorite bit is his answer to the DA’s question on how do we define a criminal.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 20 – The Way to Eden

photog Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, Star Trek, TV Reviews , , , , , , , , , , ,

It goes without saying that I will mock the “space hippies” episode mercilessly.  The plot is that Dr. Sevrin, a bald-headed space hippie with c-shaped ears and his five disciples are looking for the planet Eden where all proper space hippies should live.  He steals a star cruiser but the Enterprise catches him and his merry band.  Sevrin has space plague so he needs to be isolated.  But the disciples help him to escape and he uses ultrasonics to disable the crew and the hippies steal a shuttle craft to land on Eden.  But the plant life is full of acid and poison and so the hippies burn their feet.  When Kirk and company come to rescue the losers, they find one of the hippies named Adam dead through eating an apple (how ironic).  And when Kirk tells Sevrin that he is being rescued he follows Adam in eating a poisoned apple and dies.  It’s a ridiculous plot but the details are even worse.

The hippies are always protesting against the military authority that Kirk represents.  They call him “Herbert” which Spock explains is an uncomplimentary comparison to a character who was a small-minded bureaucrat.  Kirk takes offense when told this.  That I found funny.  Adam and one of the girls are some kind of pathetic rock music duet.  They sing a few songs that are very awful to hear.  And another one of the girls is an old girlfriend of Chekov.  So, we have to listen to the ex-lovers bickering over their lost love.  And finally, Adam strikes up a friendship with Spock based on their mutual love of music.  This forces us to listen to Spock and one of the girls playing a duet on space harps or something.  And during this shindig we see random crew members rocking out by spastically moving their arms and legs in time to the beat.

But the worst thing of all is just seeing these rejects.  Adam is some kind of pop-eyed freak dressed in a tie-dyed loin cloth and go-go boots who spouts synthetic hipster lingo.  One of the half-undressed girls is way too out of shape to be showing so much skin.  And the third male hippie has nylon purple hair and is wearing what looks like a dress.

I feel if they wanted to do this episode correctly, they should have hired the fake rock and roll group the Monkees to appear on the show painted green or something.  That at least would have shown the right attitude toward bad music of the time.

Just for the sake of fairness, Adam did say one witty thing in the show.  After having his physical examination, he recited:

“I’m gonna crack my knuckles and jump for joy

I got a clean bill of health from Doc McCoy.”

With that deathless couplet I’ll end this review by kindly rating it a  5 // 4.

The ZMan Has a Very good Post on the Hive We Now Live In

photog Current Events , , ,

It’s actually two posts.  One on his site and one over at Taki’s.  They both describe the situation we find ourselves in where the bureaucrats now own us.  They tell us what to do and what to think.  These two articles are bang on the nose.  What they can’t say is how we escape from our fate.  Well, except to rise up against it, which no one can say out loud.  Highly recommended.

 

A Gang of Turkeys

photog Current Events , ,

Camera Girl with her hawk eye spotted a group of turkeys walking through the forest.  So, I took my trusty Sony A7 IV and my Minolta 200mm f/4 macro lens with Sony LA-EA5 adapter and flashed off fifty shots of the uncouth looking modern dinosaurs.  I’ll work on them later but here’s a representative jpg.

I guessing the turkeys are looking for food before the big freeze down happens tomorrow.  We’ll be dropping thirty degrees down into negative single digits tomorrow night.  This should be a good test of the supposedly repaired heating system we live with.  A really annoying aspect of the “repair” is that the suction fan has a vibration that is very audible in the living room.  I’ll have to become an acoustical engineer and figure out where some fireproof acoustical insulation will solve that problem.  Oh, the joys of owning a very unorthodox house.

I looked up the name for a group of turkeys.  It’s called either a gang or a rafter.  A rafter sounds like an architectural term whereas gang captures some of the disreputable and disorganized facets of the behavior of a bunch of dopey birds.  And that immediately got me thinking of the Republican lawmakers.  They’re a gang of fat, stupid and disorganized bird-brained followers who couldn’t shoot fish in a barrel.  I think of them because things are going so horribly for the Democrats and Biden that it must be about time for those losers that are supposedly on our side of the fence to help the Democrats out by missing some opportunity to kick them while they’re down.  Already that dope Cruz was yapping about how the January 6th farce was a terrorist attack.  I used to like him but what is wrong with him if he says something stupid like that.  It’s the unforced errors that drive me crazy with these “friends” of ours.

The biggest surprise of 2021 was Joe Manchin stabbing the Dems in the back.  It was wholly unforeseen and miraculously potent.  Combined with the COVID revolt, it has poleaxed Biden’s presidency good and proper.  But I’m waiting for our Manchin.  I’m assuming it will be Romney.  He’s a sniveling coward who loves to play the principled man of honor when he knows it will get him the spot light.  But with the disarray on the left maybe we’ll be spared until the midterms when with any luck they’ll lose the Senate along with the House.

I wonder how long it will take the Supreme Court to make up their minds about the vaccine mandates.  I confess I’m pretty excited about a win there.  That also means I’ll be very disappointed if they fink on us and throw in with the Fauci fascists.  But things seem to be going our way on this in the public opinion field.  People are waking up to the fact that these vaccines are at best useless and at worst a very dangerous thing to do to young and healthy people.  Anyone with children and grandchildren should be paying close attention to the information on both efficacy and safety.  These drugs would never have been approved on a normal testing basis by the FDA.

So, stay warm this week.  The Polar Express will be coming through and providing a good excuse to stay warm and watch some old movies or read a good book.  I’ve been managing to put the time to good use writing.  I produced about five thousand words of prose in the last two or three days.  Not bad.  Of course, I’ve still got seventy or eighty thousand words to go.  But Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Watch out for those turkeys, winged or otherwise.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 19 – Requiem for Methuselah

photog Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, Star Trek, TV Reviews , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Enterprise is infested with Rigellian Fever which is like COVID only dangerous.  Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down to planetoid blah, blah, blah to get unobtanium which will cure the fever.  There they meet the robot guard of the planetoid’s owner, Mr. Flint.  After some posturing Flint agrees to help McCoy make a serum from the mineral.

In his home, Flint has rare masterpieces of art by Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Brahms.  And it turns out he actually is those two men and many other like Alexander the Great, Solomon and perhaps the greatest of all, Donald Trump.  He was a Mesopotamian soldier from around 4,000 B.C. and after being stabbed through the heart he discovered that he was immortal.  And he has a mate named Rayna who wears the form fitting silvery dress that is the true mark of an android woman, which they determine she is.  Of course, Kirk falls in love with Rayna and Flint and Kirk do battle over her.  But when she has to choose between these two manly men her circuits burn out and she dies.  When they return to the ship to save the crew with the cure, McCoy reveals that he has determined that Flint’s immortality was voided when he left Earth and he will die after the rest of a normal life.

This is a very unique episode.  The concept of the immortal human who has been so many famous men is brilliant.  What they do with this concept is not so brilliant.  Having Kirk go through all his typical libido exercises is embarrassing.  But we do get to reach the heights of the Shatner Mockery Index.  I think the best examples of this are:

  • When Flint shrinks the Enterprise to a model about a foot long, Kirk stares into the bridge viewport and we see his huge head looking anguished in the bridge screen.
  • When Kirk first declares his love for Rayna, he makes all the spastic Kirk faces he’s so famous for.
  • When Rayna declares herself independent of Flint’s orders, Kirk starts crowing about how she’s “human down to the last blood cell!”

It’s probably only my subjective enjoyment of the concept of a science fiction story with a man that has lived through all of our history and been so many famous men that saves this episode from my scorn.  Objectively it has many of the same weaknesses that the season three episodes suffer from.  But I’m fond of it for the reason I’ve stated.  So, I’ll mark it as a 7  //  9.