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Those who follow the banners of Reason are like the well-disciplined battalion, which, wearing a more sober uniform, and making a less dazzling show, than
sometimes when I drop in, I feel like someone was reincarnated. The following two quotes seem to be appropriate for your discourse:
“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right.”
“I don’t like ass kissers, flag wavers, or team players. I like people who buck the system. Individualists. I often warn people: Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you: ‘There is no I in team.’ What you should tell them is: ‘Maybe not. But there is an I in independence, individuality, and integrity.’” George Carlin
I figured it was time to review Lon Chaney Jr.’s magnum opus. The first thing that is apparent is that Claude Rains was an order of magnitude above the rest of the actors. Well, Rains was two orders beyond Chaney. But I will say that in the non-monster related earlier part of the movie the scenes with Chaney and his father and with the girl were fun to watch. As Larry Talbot, Chaney was engaging and sympathetic. But once he started killing werewolves and becoming a werewolf he became increasingly annoying and neurotic about telling everyone about how tough it was being a werewolf. Me, me, me. Very needy.
Incidentally, they killed off Bela Lugosi about ninety seconds into the only screen time he was given. And to add insult to injury, they didn’t even bother to give him an original character name. They called him Bela! I mean, how lousy is that? They probably paid him by the hour and sent him packing after his scene to save money. Very sad.
And I noticed something very strange about the wolf man character. Right before Larry Talbot goes out on his first killing spree, he notices hair growing on his body. He takes off a white shirt leaving him in a white undershirt (incidentally a wife beater style). Then he takes off his shoes and socks and we watch his feet becoming paws while he is sitting in a chair. Then still focusing on his legs he gets up, apparently heading out the window of his room to go find the grave digger and rip out his throat. But in the next shot we see the wolf man in a dark colored button down shirt.
Now are we supposed to believe that the Wolf Man went into Larry Talbot’s closet, picked out a matching shirt and using his front paws, buttoned it up and headed out for a bite to eat? I don’t know. I mean it was a nice shirt but just how far is my suspension of disbelief supposed to stretch. I feel like I’m being abused here.
Well, anyway, after Claude Rains clubs Lon Chaney Jr. to death with his own silver wolf-headed walking stick, the gypsy lady recites that, “The way he walked was thorny” doggerel over poor Larry’s corpse and the music soars and the credits roll.
But i don’t know. I feel kind of cheated. I feel like Larry’s ghost should have appeared and complained about the bum deal he got. He’s living in California for eighteen years, helping to build the Mt Wilson observatory. Then his elder brother dies so he returns to Talbot Castle to take up the role of heir apparent to his father’s title (baronet?) and after just a couple of days he’s bitten by a werewolf and beaten to death by his own dad. And what fun did he actually have? He only managed to kill one crummy grave digger. It doesn’t seem fair. At least if he’d gotten a chance to sink his teeth into Gwen Conliffe’s throat he’d have a story to tell the other dearly departed monsters like Dracula and the Mummy. But as things stand he seems to have been given short shrift.
Alright. That’s enough. So all in all the movie starts off well and ends a little flat. Perhaps I’ll consider Larry Talbot’s run in with Abbott and Costello more successful.
If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the prey of mediocre minds…. I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest.
In this episode Ralph berates Alice for some small housework chores that she neglected to do. She explains how busy she was but he won’t hear what she’s saying. He threatens to introduce a demerit system to highlight her deficiencies. Alice tells Ralph she’s fed up with his ingratitude and declares that she is going to get a job and with her salary hire a maid to do the housework.
When they go to the employment agency the manager explains that due to the shortage of domestic help the maids have become very independent and unless their employers accede to all their requirements and exceptions, they refuse to accept assignments. Then we meet the available maid, Thelma. She’s taller than Ralph and looks extremely strong. She tells the Kramdens that she doesn’t do heavy jobs like windows and floors because she’s “sickly.” But when she hands Ralph her suitcase to carry for her, its unexpectedly extreme weight drags him down to the ground and he exclaims sarcastically, “Sickly!”
Thelma resists most of Ralph’s demands for her to assume a genteel and respectful manner of addressing him. When Ralph attempts to get her to address Norton and himself politely she mockingly refers to them as, “the simp and the blimp.” When this causes Ralph to explode in anger she quits and leaves.
Now Ralph is forced to do the housework himself since Alice has found a job at the local bakery as the jelly donut stuffer. He tries to recruit Norton to help him with the backlog of chores but they both prove hopelessly inept. Finally, he decides to try and flatter Alice about her appearance in the hope that she will agree to quit her job and resume her wifely duties. After being rebuffed for his obvious flattery Ralph is forced to admit that housework is harder than his job and begs Alice to come back.
This is one of my favorite episodes. Alice has one of the best lines in the series. While sarcastically pretending how much she enjoys mopping the floors and washing the windows she mocks the outdated appliances in the apartment. She says she is so thrilled with having an atomic kitchen. She explains that she calls it that because, “It looks like Yucca Flats after the blast.” Which is referencing the American nuclear testing in the desert southwest in the 1950’s.
In general Ralph’s imperious behavior toward Alice sets the pattern for their relationship. Alice comes off as the reasonable wife but Ralph is demanding and unreasonable. Invariably he gets knocked down a couple of pegs and has to swallow his pride and apologize to Alice. And although this does make him a sort of straw man for Alice to pummel, Ralph manages to make the whole spectacle hilarious and entertaining. And between the physical comedy, the battle of the sexes and the machinations that Ralph and Norton always resort to, the half hour almost always entertains. Highly recommended.
I may have had many projects, but I never was free to carry out any of them. It did me little good to be holding the helm; no matter how strong my hands, the sudden and numerous waves were stronger still, and I was wise enough to yield to them rather than resist them obstinately and make the ship founder. Thus I never was truly my own master but was always ruled by circumstances.
All of these shots save the Spookies were from US Naval museum and the Spookies were from the Air Force museum at Eglin AFB.
F4 Corsair, one of the, if not the premium fighter aircraft of WWII. Corsairs were still in frontline duty 10 years later after all the others were long retired.
A F18 F/A retired from the Blue Angels
SONY DSC
Another view of the F4 Corsair
SONY DSC
A US Marine Corps Vertical take off and landing Harrier. This was originally a pure British design and produced (and used) aircraft. Falkland Islands, remember? When the US Marines thought the Harrier was spot on, it was injected with some US DNA and produced by McDonald Douglas in the US.
2 views of the original Spooky Gunship made famous in the VietNam era. It was based on the WWII era C47 AKA, DC3 & and was armed with .308 (7.62×51 NATO designation) miniguns and could put on quite a night time display, filling the sky with tracers. The gunship concept was considered to be highly successful and has since evolved considerably, currently C130 based and with a variety of types of lethal weapons of various calibers up to and including 105mm howitzers of (ironically) also of Viet Nam vintage.
The Election Fraud in 2020 changed my outlook on American elections. What I saw happen that November convinced me that outright theft of the presidency is completely within the scope of the Democratic Party’s purview. Suffice it to say that I am highly skeptical of Trump’s chances in this election. I assumed they are low; less than 25%.
But then I watched this:
2WAY is a creation of Mark Halperin who was a talking head on one of the networks, I think ABC. Sean Spicer was one of Trump’s first press secretaries. Dan Turrentine is a “Democratic strategist.” I’ve never heard of him. Anyway, Halperin hosts these zoom calls with various Democrat and Republican talking heads and a bunch of everyday people who come on to give their two cents but without any screaming or name-calling. More or less Halperin attempts to be an honest broker who allows both sides to talk about the election without too much spin.
For the last week or two, Halperin has been saying that the inside polls and the early voting data is increasingly good for Donald Trump and bad for Harris. In this short video both Spicer and Turrentine seem to be agreeing with him. Now, I hate to get my hopes up because that is a dangerous thing to do, but it’s getting harder to resist. Well, I’m “all growed up now” so I guess I shouldn’t be scared of working through what’s going on in the real world.
With two weeks left before election day it’s still too early to get too excited about this “trend.” I think this Friday would be a good place to evaluate where the race and the indicators stand. What Spicer thought was that if the Democratic campaign thinks things are going south, they will immediately start attacking Trump with anything and everything they’ve got. Well, that’s interesting. I’m not sure where you can go after you’ve already called him a despotic, demented, unbalanced danger to the republic. I guess Harris can approve a commercial where a picture of Trump morphs into Adolph Hitler or Darth Vader. But I’m interested to see if something like that does surface on my local television station. Of course, this being New England, that would be preaching to the choir and an awful waste of money. But perhaps Pennsylvania and Michigan might be bombarded with such stuff.
Look, I’m skeptical as hell. I’ve been burned before and don’t enjoy getting my hopes up. But I have to confess that with the fallout from the Biden administration looking like a list of biblical plagues not seen since the time of Moses, it’s hard not to believe that the American voters would rise up and demand the end of the Democrats’ reign. So, let’s just say that I’m more than a little interested in the increasingly worried statements coming from the Harris campaign behind the scenes. I’ll review things on Friday and maybe I’ll have more to say at that time. Now that’s cautious and bland enough. Isn’t it?
