I watched the speech just now. I liked my version of it better but I’ll give him a solid B. He painted it as a humanitarian problem and also a crime problem. That’s good. He gave a litany of illegal alien crime stories. There were murders, rapes, beheadings, dismemberments, you name it. He laid the blame at the Democrats’ feet for not getting the wall funded. And he compared the five-billion-dollar price tag to the five hundred-billion-dollar trade in illegal drugs that crosses the border every year. He listed the horrendous abuse that happens to migrants being trafficked across the border. He said that 33 percent of women migrants are raped and that many of the migrants are held as virtual slaves in the sex trade. I understand that Pelosi and Schumer will have a chance to rebut the speech but life is short so I skipped listening to them. I’m sure I’ll do better even if I just end up using the time to floss my teeth.
I wonder if there’s a chance that the Democrats will cave soon. If not, I hope the President has a Plan B. I like the idea of getting the military to build the wall. They did a bit of that in Iraq I remember and I’m sure they could get it erected pretty quickly once they got rolling. I’m trying to understand how long the government shutdown can go on before something critical goes wrong. Is the IRS considered important or not? Does this mean I don’t have to pay my taxes? Or does it just mean my refund will be late. Well, from my point of view I don’t care if the government stays shut for a couple of years. As long as the military and law enforcement is funded the rest can just wait.
Well, that’s about all I can think of. It was a short speech and I suppose time will tell if the Democrats will cave. Skeletor Pelosi and Crying Chuck, the ball is in your court.
Last July I posted a review of the Twilight Zone in which I stated unequivocally that all but a handful of the episodes are unwatchable. Once again, the SyFy Channel featured a marathon of the episodes around the holidays and once again, I found myself watching way too many of them. I recorded about fifteen of them on the cable box and proceeded to replay them almost obsessively over the last few weeks. I did find a couple more that I had forgotten were pretty good and kept re-watching the few that I do enjoy. But what became intolerable was having to deal with the commercials from the SyFy Channel each time I watched. Even fast forwarding through became so painful I finally deleted all the episodes in disgust.
The one episode that I had forgotten I liked was “Two.” Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery are soldiers from opposing armies that wander into a deserted city five years after a war has depopulated the world. Surprisingly, the sparse dialog and minimal action work remarkably well and create a genuinely affecting moment.
Anyway, I buckled under the pressure. I went on Amazon and bought the whole series on blu-ray, all one hundred and sixty odd, mostly awful shows. I guess this proves I’m a hopeless addict to bad television.
It showed up tonight and I put on “To Serve Man.” Oh well, at least there are no SyFy Channel commercials. That’s one nightmare I won’t have to face again. That’s at least an improvement.
“Mr. Chambers, don’t get on that ship! “To Serve Man,” it’s a cookbook!” Ahhhh, ain’t it grand!
Here’s my retrospective on 2018, completely subjective of course and whenever I can’t make up my mind or I don’t want to leave something out I’ll cheat and provide more than one choice. And that’s one of the wonderful things about being the boss, you get to break the rules and do what you want.
Best Quotes of the Day
Some are political, some philosophical and some just human nature. The order is just chronological of their appearance on the site.
“In the many forms of government which have sprung up there has always been an acknowledgement of justice and proportionate equality, although mankind fail in attaining them, as indeed I have already explained. Democracy, for example, arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.”
Aristotle
“No state will be well administered unless the middle class holds sway.”
Aristotle
“When there aren’t any smart decisions, I suppose you just have to pick the stupid decision you like best.”
Orson Scott Card
“No one likes the fellow who is all rogue, but we’ll forgive him almost anything if there is warmth of human sympathy underneath his rogueries. The immortal types of comedy are just such men.”
W. C. Fields
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
H.L. Mencken
Carpe diem! Seize the day! Rejoice while you are alive; enjoy the day; live life to the fullest; make the most of what you have. It is later than you think.
Horace
“And this is the simple truth – that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.”
Soren Kierkegaard
If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.
Over the course of 2018 I read and reviewed all eight of the volumes in the main series (first volume linked above) and they only got better as the series went along. It was good old mil-sci-fi space opera. I assume I won’t live long enough to see the end of the series but so far that isn’t a problem. I look forward to the next installment soon and am in no way tired of this particular universe. Kudos to Anspach and Cole. Long may they stoke their dumpster fire at the Edge of the Galaxy!
Vega is an acquired taste for me and as I’ve written about him, “It’s for those who like gritty crime dramas with a staccato, post-modern, minimalist writing style.” Even though my tastes are a little more conventional I appreciate that there is an audience for the more unusual so I look around for interesting stuff. As I’ve said before, your call.
Non-Fiction
The two books listed below provide two different takes on the way to interpret the results of ancient DNA analysis.
“The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution” by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending
“Who We Are and How We Got Here; Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Past” by David Reich
David Reich being an academic embedded in the politically correct culture of the university system treads ever so gently around the edges of how the science of human genetic history should be interpreted. Cochran and Harpending are much more direct and sometimes possibly presumptuous in the conclusions they draw from the evidence. Both books together tell a fascinating story of how much we now know about the complex and diverse origins of the various human populations.
This is a kids’ movie but it far exceeds any of the other “superhero” movies for just plain entertainment value. I won’t say it was as original as the first installment but it mostly kept to the spirit of the original and provided a fun vehicle for parents (or grandparents) to enjoy a movie with their kids.
This is a twofer. For younger folks I’ll only recommend the new version by the Coen Brothers. For people who grew up on the John Wayne movies of old I recommend they view both movies back to back in chronological order. They each have facets to its advantage. Each differs slightly from the source material. But each is a fine movie. And I’ll also recommend the novel that is the source for the movies. It also has facets that aren’t available in either movie.
Music
Country Music
Album of the Year
Colter Wall by Colter Wall
Song of the Year
Pan Bowl by Sturgill Simpson
My music choices are very idiosyncratic so I won’t try to justify them. To paraphrase a recent annoying politician, they just reflect who I am Pan Bowl is an older song from Simpson’s 2014 album.
TV
The only truly notable television I watched in 2018 was the State of the Union address by the president. Everything else was at best just okay.
On – Line Articles
Here are the articles that I thought were informative on our political situation. There were many others that were intersting but these seem to encapsulate the developments in the political thinking this year. Basically it’s the red-pilling of the normies.
American Museum of Natural History, New York City, Sony NEX 5N, Sony 24mm F\1.8 APSC lensmacrophotography with Sony A7 III, Minolta 200mm f\4 macro lens and extension tubes, long horned beetleMonotropa uniflora, Indian pipe, ghost plant, corpse plant, Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f\4 Macro lensSony A7 III with the Sigma MC-11 Adapter and the Sigma 180mm f\2.8 APO Macro EX DG HSM OS for Canon
Yesterday, as I mentioned in my review of Aquaman, I had the some of the grandsons over. After we got home from the movies we played some games and had dinner but later on they got bored and not having much in the way of TV that they were interested in we let them use their parents’ Netflix account to stream a show they liked, “The Flash.” Wow. Now, I know that the WB is one of the worst networks for quality and the low budgets they work with mean that things like special effects and scripts and acting skill are brought down to a sad minimum, but I wasn’t prepared for just how bad it would be. In retrospect I’m a little ashamed at how much ranting I did while they were watching the show. As much as they share my love of mockery, I’m sure I must have been annoying to them. But to some extent it was justified.
The plot, such as it was, revolved around the Flash character and his friends and relatives protecting the inhabitants of Central City from the depredations of various random metahumans of which the Flash is one. Apparently, they were formed by some kind of nuclear incident involving a particle accelerator mishap. The particular episode involved an unfortunate individual called King Shark. He has a shark’s head but wears pants. He’s also about twenty feet tall so it’s not apparent where he shops for pants. He’s a really bad guy and sometimes eats people he doesn’t like but does it in such a slow fashion it’s not clear why they can’t just walk away from him. And despite his obvious evil nature, by the end of the show he is captured alive and once again incarcerated in an Olympic sized containment pool apparently being fed chum and awaiting medical treatment to turn his head human again. Most of the interaction with King Shark is the Flash running around him in circles while the shark head heaps verbal abuse on him.
By the above description you have probably identified the limited dramatic value of the action adventure available in the Flash series. However, these limitations pale in comparison to the real problem with the series, namely, the personal problems of the characters. Probably eighty percent of the air time consists of the various actors whining about their emotional problems. One character is sad about some dead spouse, another about the alienation of not being able to reveal his secret identity, another has feelings of inferiority because he has no super powers, another is worried that a character that doesn’t have super powers might develop them and become evil. The cast behaves like a whole high school full of neurotic teenagers which I assume is their target audience. If I’m being objective, the plots are no worse than what passed for story lines in the old Superman tv show from the 1950s that I watched as a kid. But the emotional immaturity and obnoxious insecurity of all the “good guys” in the stories is appalling. It may be a generational problem but to me this isn’t science fiction it’s a soap opera.
I don’t currently stream television shows or movies so I have to wait for the DVDs to be available to watch shows. For that reason I have just finished watching last year’s sixth and final season of Longmire. I started watching this on a recommendation based on my enjoying the series Justified. Well, Longmire and Justified both have protagonists that are law enforcement officers that wear cowboy hats. I would say that is where the similarity ends.
Walter Longmire, the eponymous protagonist of the series is the sheriff in Absaroka County, Wyoming. His best friend is a Cheyenne Indian named Henry Standing Bear played with ironic humor by Lou Diamond Phillips. Surrounding these two characters are an assortment of characters involved in the Indian Casino opening up and the other commercial developments cropping up in the pristine countryside where Walt lives and on the not so pristine Indian Reservation where the tribal police clash or cooperate with Walt and his deputies. And those deputies try to solve crimes and keep up with Longmire’s two-fisted and gut-feeling law enforcement procedures. And this is one of the unintentionally funny aspects of Walt’s character. At least a dozen times during this series Walt is shot, stabbed, snake-bit or bludgeoned and it’s almost as if he’s some kind of supernatural creature that doesn’t require normal medical attention. He’ll get through the episode or even two and then maybe he’ll have a bandage. Other characters can reflect the results of an injury for several episodes or even longer. Walt just takes some vodka and splashes it on the stab wound or whatever and gets back to business. I mean, sheesh! What is he a Terminator?
A lot of the plot revolves around the machinations of tribal bigshot Jacob Nighthorse as he manipulates the Indian and White populations to launch his casino and change the dynamic between the Reservation and adjacent Absaroka County. In addition, the Connally family has a big impact on Walt’s life. Branch Connally is his deputy and his daughter’s boyfriend. But he is also running against Walt in his re-election as sheriff. And Branch’s father, Barlow Connally is a powerful and under-handed businessman who plays all sides against each other for his own ends.
In addition to Branch, Walt has a deputy named Archie Ferguson (the Ferg) who is not very formidable as a law enforcement officer and a Philadelphia transplant named Victoria Moretti (Vic) who does all the annoying liberated woman clap-trap but is an effective deputy and backs up Walt when things go south.
Other characters include Walt’s daughter Cady Longmire who is incredibly annoying and is a lawyer (of course) and the Tribal Police Officers Matthias and Malachi.
When the series starts Walt is recovering from the loss of his murdered wife. Henry has been helping him track down the killer and Walt’s job is in danger from his erratic behavior.
The show moves through a very long arc throughout which characters go from being allies to adversaries and back again. There are some surprising developments and some of the characters do grow into more interesting personalities.
On its own terms the series is enjoyable although I would not say it was great. Some of the characters grow on you like Lou Diamond Phillips’ Henry. And Walt is the old fashioned John Wayne, strong, silent type who lives by his own code and doesn’t even have a cell phone.
Comparing it to “Justified” I’d say the writing is nowhere near as good but far from bad. It’s a show that can be enjoyed on its own terms but don’t expect timeless drama, just a good cowboy cop show with nice scenery.
I’ve been watching Tim Allen’s Last Man Standing since its beginning. I’ve enjoyed the show all along although the last two seasons’ scripts were definitely at a lower level. Maybe they knew the series had almost run its course and the old writers had started to move on. But what was noticeable was a less skillful plot and dialog. And for all the angst from the left about its right wing slant the point of view was a mild libertarian stance with a few humorous jibes thrown at Obama or Hillary Clinton by Tim’s character (Mike Baxter). And just to make sure no one thought there was an ideological problem the wife played by Nancy Travis is a Hillary fan and a fairly mild feminist. My biggest disappointment was in the final season that only one small joke about Trump showed up in the show. That’s how timid they were. But all that aside, the show was refreshing because Mike was at least allowed to mostly correspond to a normal man of his generation. He wasn’t forced to make believe he didn’t like sports and cars and guns and hunting and fishing. He was pro-military and traditional in his ideas about gender roles and religion and unabashedly American. He spends a considerable time on the screen mocking his Canadian soy-boy son-in-law (Ryan) but at the same time he mentors this young man on family responsibilities for a husband and a father.
In 2017 Disney/ABC was in a snit about Trump being president so they cancelled Last Man Standing, even though it was the most popular show on Friday nights and doing well financially. Tim Allen who has been a staple of ABC and Disney for decades said he was devastated that they pulled the plug on him so needlessly. Next season (2018), when Roseanne Barr’s reboot of her show Roseanne featured a star that had some positive things to say about Trump and did land office business it immediately woke up some network geniuses to the fact that Last Man Standing was ready made to take advantage of that same audience. And when Roseanne’s show was cancelled because she said something politically incorrect about an Obama administration official, well, that same audience was now available for another show that had characters they could relate to.
Because 20th Century Fox was the production company that originally made Last Man Standing for ABC it wasn’t much of a stretch for the Fox Network to consider bringing back the show and hosting it on their network. And that’s just what they’ve done. Boy, this has been some wind up for a tv review!
Camera Girl and I watched the show on Friday night. It was pretty good. They started off with a set up where the Kyle character (one of the sons-in-law) is failing to find his favorite show on tv and his in-laws throw out some lines about networks being bastards for cancelling good shows and how it very rarely happens that a show is picked up by another network unless its fans are truly great. So, light fun, and here we go.
The show revolves around the family being split between conservatives and liberals quarreling about the Trump presidency. But the writers decide to completely leave out Trump’s name. Now that felt phony. Next the Canadian son-in-law Ryan gets so stressed about living in Trump’s America without any way to address his opposition to it that he decides he’s moving his family to Canada. When Ryan’s young son goes missing the family rallies around to find him. They forget all their quarrels and after finding him safe they use the happy outcome to cement their solidarity and agree to look for common ground. As is usual with the show, Mike ends the episode with a vlog from his office at Outdoorsman to talk about the importance of Americans finding common ground and there being two points of view, left and right. He does takes one small jab by saying that “of course one of them already has the word “right” already in it.
So, there it is. The show is back. And it is a nice middle of the road show that stakes out a spot for a character that is an American man who hasn’t been neutered and feminized. Is it a full-throated roar of defiance by the right wing? Hardly. Will it even acknowledge by name the Trump revolution? Hopefully. But so far, the verdict is still out. Is it funnier than last season? Maybe. My plan is to watch a few more episodes and then evaluate whether I’m still going to be standing with Tim Allen’s last man. Did you see what I did there?
Every summer the SyFy Channel features an enormous number of Twilight Zone episodes for no apparent reason. And every year I watch way too many of these episodes. It’s a moral failing of mine. I think it’s because the show was on too late for me to watch when I was young so I felt deprived and therefore overvalued what I couldn’t get. And watching these episodes every year drives home one fact, that most Twilight Zone episodes are stunningly bad.
To be fair, there is a small number of actually good episodes. A debate can be had as to whether there are five or ten good episodes. Opinions and tastes differ but it’s somewhere in that range. Then there are another twenty or so that are watchable. The plots are predictable and the acting is mediocre at best but watchable. That leaves well over a hundred episodes that are actually painful to watch. Let me give an example.
In the episode “King Nine Will Not Return” a man regains consciousness next to his crashed bomber aircraft somewhere in the North African desert during World War II. By the end of the episode you find out this is a dream this man has as a result of his feelings of guilt for missing the mission where the bomber was shot down. So far so good. Psychological pain, some kind of manifestation where he physically visits this time and place and is allowed to heal. Sure, why not. Now what is the scene? You have the protagonist standing around in what must be the California desert yelling and emoting about his anguish for his missing crew mates. It’s like some unscripted improvisational method acting workshop. Five minutes in you’re heading to the kitchen to get some snack or drink just to avoid the whole embarrassing spectacle. I found myself pitying the actor doing the scene and wondering if the experience of performing this drivel might have driven him out of acting and into some honest profession like loan sharking or leg breaking. But every time I returned my attention to the tv screen there he was yelling and grimacing and crying. Mercifully it finally ended and I have sworn a mighty oath to never watch that episode again while there remains any hope at all for intelligent human life to continue on this planet.
Admittedly, not all bad episodes are that horrible. Some are just stupid and annoying. These usually involve mannequins or robots that think they are human. They even did this to Anne Francis in an episode called “The After Hours.” She’s in a department store and by the end of the episode she remembers that she’s an escaped mannequin. I think we’re supposed to be glad she’s found her way back to where she belongs. But it’s all so pointless that you really can’t be sure.
So, most of the episodes stink, but which ones do I admit liking? Here they are:
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
Nick of Time
To Serve Man
Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?
It’s a Good Life
And now I’ll tell you what I like about them. The first four episodes I find comical. The first two have William Shatner starring. You can’t go wrong with Shatner. He was born to act on the Twilight Zone. The terrible dialog and nonexistent direction actually seem to jibe with Shatner’s bizarre overacting tics. “Nick of Time” can’t compete with “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” for over the top hilarity but even in the lesser vessels the Shatnerian touch is still a force to be reckoned with.
“To Serve Man” and “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” are surprise ending stories that I can only think of as jokes. For each, the whole episode is the set up for the reveal. I find them amusing. Let’s say personal preference.
And that brings us to the best and maybe the only truly original story in the whole series, “It’s a Good Life.” The short story is even better than the teleplay but both are very effective. Definitely worth viewing.
So that’s it. If you’re a Burgess Meredith or a Jack Klugman fan there are a couple of episodes you can add and if you’re sentimental there is Christmas episode with Art Carney as Santa Claus that’s kind of cute. But I’d be kidding myself if I said I watched them out of anything other than force of habit. Your mileage may vary but this is my take.
It said Barr tweeted, “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”
The article continued, ‘Barr subsequently apologized: “I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me — my joke was in bad taste.”’
Wow, I was wrong about Barr she is a badass. And it’s cost her big time. Hey maybe Fox can let her have a show on Friday night after Tim Allen’s show.
But doesn’t this make you think that there’s something in the air. Even Progressives like Roseanne Barr are fed up with the Narrative. Even they’re sick of having to toe a line they don’t respect. Roseanne may walk all this back and pay some price involving selling out blue collar people and she might even get back in the good graces (though I doubt it). But something is definitely starting to happen. Cracks in the dam? We’ll see. But the Overton Window is definitely on the move and ultimately all this goes back to Donald Trump.
So, after the success of the Roseanne revival and realizing that the Tim Allen character was also a Trump supporter and that the show had an eight million strong audience Fox which produced the show for ABC has decided to revive it. https://decider.com/2018/05/14/fox-explains-last-man-standing-renewal/
I liked the show. But it was already in its sixth season and the plots were feeling kind of thin. Also most of the political shots at Obama had evaporated and the wife actually was a Hillary fan so that was pretty rough. But I think that since they’re bringing it back on the strength of the Roseanne phenomenon that maybe they’ll amp up the Trump love and compete for the conservative voters. That could work out very well. Tim Allen could really get some mileage playing both sides of the Trump card. Playful shots at the larger than life Trump persona and skillful savaging of the anti-American left would go a long way toward giving the right the kind of red meat they haven’t had from television since … never?
So, welcome back Mike Baxter, long may you vlog from your office at Outdoorsman. And even if it only lasts for a year or two it’s the first time ever that a show came back because it was conservative. What’s next flying pigs?
After finishing up my review of Galaxy’s Edge – Galactic Outlaws, it occurred to me that there was more to say about the category of Space Opera. Some might say that I was a little unfair to social justice fiction fans. After all there must be a significant audience of fans with blue hair and cats who really enjoy girl power super heroes and their adventures in space. So, to say that these are automatically bad just because I heartily dislike them might seem arbitrary and unfair. It might seem that way but it isn’t. And that’s because I am the final arbiter of good and bad in science fiction. I earned this coveted status by living long enough to see everything in the world. So, once again, all Star Wars movies after Return of the Jedi (and even some parts of them before that point) are irredeemably bad and should be cast into the outer darkness where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth. And that lines us up for me to proclaim what does make a good space opera. What follows is:
“photog’s RULE FOR WHAT MAKES GOOD SPACE OPERA” (patent pending).
It needs to appeal to the sense of wonder of the twelve-year-old boy in you. Now mind you, it doesn’t have to only do that. It can also be a brilliant philosophical treatise on the dualistic nature of the universe or a psychological study of the impact of technology on the human race, or even a deathless love story written across the stars of the galaxy. But if it fails to inspire the twelve-year-old boy in you it’s not space opera. It may be science fiction or anything else but it isn’t space opera. And this isn’t even an exclusive precinct of science fiction. Any adventure story has to satisfy that same basic requirement. Take the literature of the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century. A quintessential example that comes to mind is Treasure Island. Here is a story that was tailor made for the sense of wonder of a twelve-year-old boy. It has all the earmarks of the tale of wonder. The boy who loses his father, the quest for riches, exotic locales, colorful and dangerous opponents, the revelation of secret knowledge, the coming of age experience of the world and the people in it. An adventure story is a story for a boy that kindles his interest in the world around him. It leads him to think there is more to life than school and chores. It inspires him to strike out on his own and find his place in the world.
Now I can just hear the modern women and girly men screeching, “Girls want adventure too!” To which I reply “Stop screeching, you’re hurting my ears.” But also, I would say that what girls want is neither here nor there. Boys need the adventure story because it fits their brains. Girls have been told that they want adventure stories so they want them in order not to get left out in the modern #metoo world that they live in. And in fact, I don’t really care if there are adventure stories for girls. More power to them, I guess. What I do mind is that for the sake of inclusiveness they are ruining all the adventure stories that are coming out of Hollywood. And that is why I look for good old (and new) space opera and other adventure stories for my grandsons (and for me).
