All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items
Not since his triumph singing “Rocketman” has the listening world been electrified by such deeply moving talk-singing. Be prepared to be shatnered.
I have held off posting the proceedings of the recently held ShatnerKhan II. I hope my time off this week allows me to chronicle the vitally important results of this scholarly event.
The Marx Brothers have the reputation for producing some of the funniest movies of the 1930s and 1940s. This is in some ways deserved but it is by no means justified for all of their films. In addition, no one would claim that the entirety of any of the movies is consistently funny. After all, the number of people who would laugh through a three-minute harp solo is extremely small, probably zero.
But I consider A Night at the Opera their best effort. For that reason, I’ll start with a review of it and if I decide to tackle any of the others it will involve comparing them to the qualities of A Night at the Opera.
The story starts out in Italy with Otis B. Driftwood (Groucho Marx) trying to convince the wealthy widow Mrs. Claypool (Margaret Dumont) to donate $200,000 to the New York Opera in order to cement her place in high society. With the money, the opera company’s director Herman Gottlieb, can sign a famous Italian tenor Rodolfo Lassparri for the upcoming season production of Il Trovatore. There is a love triangle between the soprano Rosa Castaldi, an unknown but brilliant tenor, Ricardo Baroni and the villainous Lassparri.
Tomasso (Harpo Marx) and Fiorello (Chico Marx) work to get Ricardo Baroni signed by Driftwood to the New York Opera instead of Lassparri but fail and the two of them are forced to stow away along with Baroni on the steam ship heading for New York. Driftwood hides them in his closet sized stateroom and this gives rise to one of the funniest scenes in the movie when a troop of cleaning, maintenance and wait staff along with other miscellaneous persons end up crowding into the stateroom with the Marx Brothers and eventually explode out into the ship corridor when Mrs. Claypool opens the door. This scene contains one of Groucho’s trademark wisecracks. With about ten people already in the room a knock comes on the door and Groucho opens it to discover a young woman.
Groucho – Yes?
Girl – Is my Aunt Minnie in here?
Groucho – You can come in and prowl around if you want to. If she isn’t in here, you can probably find somebody just as good.
Girl – Could I use your phone?
Groucho – Use the phone? I’ll lay you even money you can’t get in the room.
The whole plot including the love story is a thin pretext for the Marx Brothers to sow chaos everywhere they go. The climax of the movie is the opera opening night and the three brothers doing everything imaginable to sabotage Lassparri’s performance and provide Baroni with an opportunity to sing as the lead tenor in his place. Harpo (or more likely his stunt double) ends up performing swashbuckling acrobatics in the manner of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and eventually kidnaps Lassparri right off the stage to allow the climactic aria duet to be sung by Baroni and Castaldi.
And just as it looks like the brothers will be carted off to jail by the NYPD, Baroni blackmails Gottlieb into hiring himself, Castaldi, Driftwood, Fiorello and Tomasso and calling off the police in exchange for Baroni and Castaldi agreeing to perform an encore that is being thunderously demanded by the overjoyed audience.
This absurd story line is actually one of the tighter Marx Brother movie plots. Their movies were sort of like a variety show out of vaudeville. In between dramatic scenes you would get Chico playing the piano or Harpo playing the harp. And most of the movies had several comic songs sung by Groucho. In this movie there is also a number of songs and arias sung by the Baroni and Castaldi characters. So, depending how you feel about songs in a movie will decide whether you can tolerate any Marx Brothers movie at all.
As indicated initially I like this movie. That is not to say I wouldn’t prefer to cut out the harp solo. And that is not saying all the comedy routines are equally successful for me. But taking the whole movie together I would call A Night at the Opera a funny movie. And I would say, compared to many of the Marx Brothers movies, the personalities of the brothers are much less obnoxious than they typically are. And it is notable that the production values for this movie produced by MGM are much higher than their previous movies for Paramount. If you are already a fan of the Marx Brothers and have never seen “A Night at the Opera” then I can unreservedly recommend this movie for you. For everyone else, especially those born in the 21st century your mileage may vary.
“Spellbound” is the second book in this series. Obviously since I am reviewing this second volume, I enjoyed the first installment “Hard Magic” (see my review of it here).
In this story the main characters Jake Sullivan and Faye Vierra are once again swept along in the cataclysmic ricochets of real magic altering the world of the early 20th century. It’s 1933 and FDR is coming into office and one of his priorities is dealing with the ‘Actives.” This is the term for humans that have major magical powers. This includes “Brutes” who are inhumanly strong, “Travelers” who can teleport, “Healers” who can cure almost any disease or injury and numerous other special types. In the first book we learned how the Japanese had harnessed Actives as a spearpoint for their war machine in Asia. And we met Jake and Faye. Now they are veteran “knights” in the Grimnoir Society, sworn to use their powers to protect the innocent and destroy those using magic for evil.
But forces within the United States government are conspiring to discredit the Grimnoir and turn the American public against the Actives through a series of false flag operations. This book is the story of the Grimnoir fighting against that operation. But it also builds on the conflict with the Japanese Iron Guard, (enhanced military Actives) from the first book and then clarifies the nature of the forces that had originally unleashed magic into the world and how that will threaten the whole world in the very near future.
Okay, so that’s the setup. Larry Correia is a very good story teller. He paints a very rich picture with his characters and the action of the plot. Even the villains are well written and the story is peppered with historical personages like J Edgar Hoover and Buckminster Fuller who are adapted to fill their roles in this alternate universe. Each chapter begins with a quote from some person, mostly historical, saying something that illustrates how real magic has impacted the alternate universe of the story.
I find this alternate world very entertaining. The Jake Sullivan character is one of Correia’s competent man heroes. He is a brawler who has been treated badly by the world but refuses to abandon the good. Even his enemies have learned to respect his abilities and this allows him to form alliances that otherwise would be impossible. Faye is a powerfully gifted “Traveler” who possess abilities that far exceed what other Actives can do. She is also a very young woman from a sheltered small-town environment who is still trying to figure out how she fits into this strange world she finds herself in.
These two characters are the twin focuses around which the other characters and the plot revolve. The whole story is a straight forward action adventure. There are plenty of good guys, bad guys and even some good bad guys and bad good guys. It’s a combination of Buck Rodgers, The Untouchables and H. P. Lovecraft with some film noir thrown in for good measure. If that sounds like something you might like then pick up the first book Hard Magic and start at the beginning. If you’ve already read it then know that the series is still getting better in book two, Spellbound.
Kirk, Spock and McCoy are in the shuttle craft with Federation Commissioner Nancy Hedford (played by Elinor Donahue of “Father Knows Best” fame) returning from a space treaty negotiation on Epsilon blah blah blah. Hedford has been infected with a rare but potentially deadly disease and needs treatment on the Enterprise to restore her to health. But the shuttlecraft is intercepted by an energy entity that tows the vessel to a planetoid that possess an earth-like environment.
Once there they discover that the shuttle engine and communication devices are inactivated and they begin to worry how they will get back to the Enterprise before Commissioner Hedford dies.
A man appears and introduces himself as Mr. Cochrane and explains that the entity rescued him when he was a very old man dying in a space ship that passed by the planetoid. They discover that Cochrane is the famous Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of the warp drive. And his appearance convinces them that the 239-year-old Cochrane is being kept young and alive by the entity.
The entity has brought them to the planetoid to keep Cochrane company. It turns out that the entity is female and loves Cochrane. But now Hedford is actually dying and Kirk and Spock rig up a translator to allow them to talk to the entity. They explain that not being a woman she can never love a man but that humans cannot live in captivity and so eventually Cochrane will die of loneliness. When they tell the entity that Commissioner Hedford is dying the entity leaves them.
Suddenly Hedford shows up apparently healed and explains that she is both the entity and Hedford in the same body. She saved Hedford’s life by joining her. Now the shuttle can leave and Cochrane asks if the woman will come with him back to civilization. But the entity reveals that her life force is fused to the planetoid and if she left, she would die. Out of gratitude but also love Cochrane decides to stay on the planetoid with the woman. He asks Kirk not to let the outside know that the famous Zefram Cochrane is living on the planetoid. As they’re leaving Spock asks how the peace talks can proceed without Hedford and Kirk says, “I’m sure the Federation can find another woman, somewhere, who’ll stop that war.”
The idea of the story is kind of interesting. A legendary historic figure made immortal by a lovestruck ion cloud. Combining a career woman who couldn’t find love with an alien that needs a woman’s body to actualize the attraction she feels for a man is clever.
But the action we see is kind of lame. At one point, Kirk and Spock rig up a device to disrupt the cloud’s electric field and essentially kill it. But the entity foils their plan and then proceeds to choke them to death somehow. As Shatner and Nimoy writhe around on the floor clutching their throats, DeForest Kelley growls out in his typical outraged way, “Stop it, your killing them!” I mean, isn’t it obvious that’s what the entity is trying to do? Elinor Donahue provides a sufficiently annoying bureaucrat. All things considered, Cochrane and the entity are the only sympathetic characters in the teleplay.
I’d call this a 6. The Shatner mockery score is significantly enhanced by the writhing strangling scene so let’s call it a 6 // 7.
Camera Girl is a remarkable human being but she is, foremost, a woman. And any husband worth his salt will tell you that’s not an unalloyed blessing. One of the many things that separate women from rational human beings is their love of soap operas. And this includes that bane of late 20th and early 21st century life, the nighttime soap. Luckily when we were young, we had children so we were too busy in the heyday of nighttime soaps to watch Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing, Melrose Place and the rest of that bilge.
But now that we are mostly empty nesters it’s no longer safe. And every once in a while, Camera Girl will reach beyond her annoying predilection for cop shows and look for something truly awful. And so it is that I have been dragged kicking and screaming into the demented saga that is Yellowstone. Kevin Costner and a mostly unknown cast (at least to me) ride horses and shoot guns up in Montana trying to preserve their Ponderosa sized cattle ranch from the real estate speculators, Indian tribes, disloyal cowboys, hedge fund pirates and other assorted lunatics who all seem to need killing. And kill them they do. Their enemies end up shot, stabbed, drowned, blown up, or pushed off cliffs more or less with impunity. And within the family, hatred and dysfunction are on full display. The daughter is a foul-mouthed man-eating lawyer. The lawyer son is her foil that she despises, berates and occasionally assaults. The cowboy brother is the hero, I guess. He’s a decorated war hero and his Indian wife and son have left the reservation and live on the ranch now.
The show truly is a ridiculous nighttime soap with egregious plots and ridiculous dialog. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised when I started hearing some of my favorite country artists on the soundtrack. Colter Wall, Tyler Childers, Chris Stapleton, Ryan Bingham and a bunch of other good to excellent country acts provide at least an interesting aural experience to go along with the annoying goings on at the Dutton family ranch.
One other saving grace that the show possesses are the vistas and landscapes that seem to surround you wherever you look in that magnificent big sky country. The juxtaposition of soaring snowy mountains, cascading rivers, verdant plains and technicolor blue skies can be seen sometimes all in one shot. You often find yourself wanting to yell at the actors to shut up and get out of the camera’s field of view and stop ruining the experience of just seeing and hearing the grandeur on display. But unfortunately, thy will go on yammering about whatever crime or deal they are conniving that week.
So that tells you all you need to know about the show. And honestly there is no way I can say I recommend this train wreck of a television experience. It’s a ghastly offense against story-telling. If you’re an enormous Kevin Costner fan I guess you can justify watching it to see him. He is one of the better parts of the show but even that isn’t saying much. And you can just listen to the soundtrack without watching the show. And I’m sure National Geographic has tons of documentary footage of Montana and Wyoming wilderness to watch anytime you want.
I, on the other hand, have to watch. Camera Girl is a woman and therefore barbarically cruel. I can always hope it will be cancelled soon. Damn you Costner.
Larry Correia is the author of the Monster Hunter urban fantasy book series. I’ve enjoyed these books for years and also enjoy his comical Tom Stranger audiobook series. So recently I looked around and decided I should check out some of his other writing.
Back in 2011 Correia wrote an urban fantasy, alternate history book called Hard Magic – Book I of the Grimnoir Chronicles. In this alternate reality magic starts appearing on Earth in the 19th century and by the time of the story, the 1930s, there are various magical powers that have become part of everyday life and corporate policy. For instance, dirigibles and blimps do not disappear from the airs because magical practitioners called “Torches” have the ability to prevent fires from destroying the explosive hydrogen filled balloons with their powers.
There are humans called “Healers” with the power to heal disease and injury by a laying on of hands. And alternatively, there can be an individual called a “Pale Horse” who has the power to cause disease and even horribly painful death with just a touch of his hand. And there are dozens of other powers out there. “Brutes” are able to increase their strength tremendously and toughen themselves to withstand enormous punishment. Some can walk through walls, some teleport from place to place and some can control gravity and density and even the weather.
The outlines of history are similar to the actual history. World War One occurred and the rise of the Japanese Empire is happening but each of these things included large-scale use of magical power. Historical figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Black Jack Pershing exist but they are involved in the magical events. Nikola Tesla is a “Cog” which is an individual whose intellect has a magical quality to it and in this world, he invents magical doomsday devices such as the Geo-Tel which can destroy everything within a thousand-mile radius at the push of a button.
The book has a couple of main characters. Faye Vierra is a teenager living on her adoptive grandfather’s dairy ranch. She is a “Traveller.” Grandpa was able to teach her how to safely use her power because he also is a “Traveller.” What she doesn’t know is that he is a retired member of the Grimnoir Society, an order of magically gifted individuals who pledge to use their power to protect society from the misuse of magic. When evil men show up Grandpa sends Faye off with a dangerous device that he tells her to give to Black Jack Pershing.
The other main character is Jake Sullivan. Jake is a Gravity Spiker. He can change the force of gravity. He can make it stronger of weaker and even change its direction. Jake is getting out of prison for a justifiable homicide that was declared murder. Jake has agreed to a parole condition under which he will assist the FBI and local law enforcement with super strong magical individuals like brutes in exchange for a shortened sentence. But during one of these operations he finds out that there are magical agents working outside the law but not against it. And it leads back to Pershing.
The story knits together a cast of characters inside the Grimnoir Society that are working to prevent the capture by the Japanese Imperium of a Geo-Tel device. A shadowy leader, the Chairman, is a powerful, almost godlike leader whose forces are bent on world domination and the destruction of the United States.
Correia crafts an enjoyable narrative with a full range of engaging characters moving across the country and the world pursuing their varying interests and racing against time to retrieve the pieces of the Geo-Tel before the Imperium can unleash Armageddon. I highly recommend the book and am looking forward to the arrival of the sequel Spellbound.
Takeover is listed as the first book of “Galaxy’s Edge Season Two.” This signifies the end of the first story arc that pitted the corrupt House of Reason against the imperial designs of Goth Sullus with the Legion trapped in the middle. With the end of that chapter we begin this season in the aftermath of that struggle with the Legion reorganizing the Galactic Republic after the defeat of the Goth Sullus and the dissolution of the House of Reason.
All of this change has left almost everything and everyone throughout the galaxy in flux. This is the story of one of those places, Kublar, a world with its own indigenous race now heavily controlled by a government installed from outside by the now defunct House of Reason and also heavily colonized by an aggressive and hostile outside race called the zhee.
An outside force arrives in the form of a private army of mercenaries hired by a man called Arkaddy Nilo. Nilo has a plan to alter the imperial methods of the Galactic Republic and restore freedom to the many worlds that chafe under the rule of the Republic. Takeover is the story of how that plan is implemented by Nilo and of the two primary weapons that Nilo uses. One is a former legionnaire named Carter who leads a platoon of combat soldiers that provide the skills needed to aid the koobs (nickname given to the natives of Kublar) in their fight to take back their planet. The second is a former Republic Navy spy named Bowie who performs clandestine operations for Nilo meant to destabilize the coalition of the House of Reason government, the zhee and a local group of koobs who benefit from selling out the interests of the rest of their people in return for special treatment.
Anyone who has read any of my earlier reviews of the Galaxy’s Edge books knows I’m an enthusiastic fan of the series. The authors Jason Anspach and Nick Cole have created an exciting and inventive universe full of military science fiction fun. Takeover continues this legacy with a new cast and fresh storylines that provide a different direction from last season. The opportunities for expanding the scope of the story are very apparent in Takeover and back story about the nature of the invaders from the “Savage Wars” era is sprinkled in the story line that Bowie inhabits.
The battle scenes are exciting and well-drawn. The characters are interesting and include good guys to cheer and plenty of bad guys to snuff out. And as opposed to season one there are plenty of opportunities for the good guys to actually win the day without sacrificing the whole cast.
Okay, so this is a no-brainer. I highly recommend Anspach and Cole’s Galaxy’s Edge series and I am happy to announce that the first book of Season Two, Takeover, continues the proud tradition of Season One in providing quality military science fiction that you can enjoy. And you can even applaud as the social justice losers in the government imposed by the House of Reason are thwarted and routed by the good guys. What could be better than that?
This episode features the return of Harry Mudd, a character from the first season episode “Mudd’s Women” in which he played a smuggler and con-man that was trafficking in chemically enhanced mail-order brides. This present episode is decidedly written as a comic story.
A new crewman on the Enterprise named Mr. Norman hijacks the ship by overriding the helm and engine room with a Deadman’s Switch that will explode the ship if it is tampered with. He sends the Enterprise to a planet that cannot directly sustain human life but requires domed habitats. When Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura and Chekov beam down to the planet they discover that the planet is inhabited by two hundred thousand androids and one human, Harry Mudd. When Kirk threatens Mudd if he does not release the Enterprise Mudd laughs at him and explains that Harry will give the orders because he is the ruler of this planet. His status is that of an absolute king and his title is Mudd the First. Harry tells Kirk that in escaping from a capitol crime he stole a spaceship and crashed on this planet and the androids took him in. He has had hundreds of beautiful android women created to serve him and surround him with beauty. And he has had one other android specially made, one that looks and acts exactly like his shrieking harpy of a wife Stella. Whenever he approaches her shrine he only has to say, “Stella dear,” and she screams out his name, “Harcourt Fenton Mudd,” and then launches into a tirade of insults and accusations to which Harry only has to shout, “Stella shut up!,” upon which she winds down and goes dormant. Mudd draws great solace from this ritual that allows him to always have the last word.
But Harry also reveals that although he can have whatever he wants he can’t leave. Because the androids desire to have someone to serve they keep him as a virtual prisoner. And so, he is desperate to escape. His plan is to use the Enterprise to sail off to life in the galaxy with some of the androids as his beautiful crew. In exchange he will leave the Enterprise crew on the planet to give the androids someone to serve.
Kirk and his officers attempt to learn something that will allow them to regain the Enterprise before Mudd leaves. Spock learns that there are many series of identical androids, the Allices, the Maisies, the Roberts. But there is only one Norman. He is the central control for the rest of the androids and he may be the key to escape. We also learn that the androids were the servants of a race that came from the Andromeda Galaxy but was destroyed by a nova of their star. Meanwhile the androids inform Harry that they are not going to let him have the Enterprise. They recognize that Harry is a corrupt individual and should be kept away from civilization. They instead will take the Enterprise and use it to contact human civilization and both serve and control humanity for its own good. They intend to become so useful to people that they will leave all action up to the androids. The androids hope to eliminate war and other illogical activities that humans are prone to.
Kirk and his crew and Harry Mudd devise a plan to overcome the androids. They exhibit illogical behavior and say nonsensical things and this has the effect of shutting down the individual androids in a sort of overload condition. Finally, Spock, Kirk and Mudd channel their efforts to overwhelm Norman. The last step is for Kirk to state to Norman that Harry Mudd is a liar and everything he says is a lie. Then Harry tells Norman, “I’m lying.” The paradox of these two statements overloads Norman. Smoke comes out of his ears and he shuts off.
The final scene has Kirk telling Mudd that the androids have been reprogrammed to terraform the planet. Mudd will remain there under their surveillance and will only be released when they decide he has been reformed. Mudd looks at the beautiful androids and decides that he can live with that. Suddenly the Stella android, no longer in a box, runs up to Harry and starts accusing him of skullduggery. But when Harry tells her to shut up nothing happens; she continues the diatribe. Several more Stellas show up and when Harry notices that one of them has the tag number 500 he begs Kirk to save him as the Enterprise crew walks away laughing.
This episode is for laughs and should be evaluated in that light. The Stella gag is extremely funny and one that can be appreciated by any husband no matter how genial his wife might be, bless your heart, Camera Girl. And the end gag with the Stellas is even funnier. The familiarity of Kirk and the other crewman with Harry Mudd’s crimes and foibles is somewhat amusing although at some points taken a little far. Shatner mockery points are restricted to some overacting when Kirk is belittling Mudd about his crimes and misdemeanors. But there’s not much there. All in all, it’s a satisfactory episode. Call it a 7 // 3.
Williams is an economics professor and also happens to be black. He points to the fact that the cities that are burning have been run by Democrats and in may cases black Democrats for decades. Of course the Media will ignore this and just keep shouting Racism! So what else is new?
The purpose of the article is a book review of Rutger Bregman’s “Humankind. A Hopeful History” by an anthropologist named CR Hallpike. But in refuting Bregman’s theory on how different types of human societies interact he points out the fact that regardless of whether you look at primitive hunter gatherers or modern western populations people distinguish between in group behavior and out group, us versus them.
Vox is touting Dr. Hallpike’s latest book, Darwinism, Dogma, and Cultural Evolution, which I think will be published by Vox Day’s Castalia House imprint. Seems like an interesting read. I may pick it up. Anyway, the essay is long but highly interesting to a non-anthropologist such as myself.