Happy Fourth of July

Have a happy and safe Fourth of July!

And be careful with the fireworks-- remember that it's all fun and games until somebody gets an eye put out.

And then it's really funny.

Can it really have been ten years?

Thank Ya Ma'am!

Favorite blogger Dale posted a couple of days ago about a train conductor who not only made fun of a dead person but was doing a bad Elvis impersonation. Repeatedly.

Everyone knows that I am the only one allowed to make fun of dead people.

And besides, the conductor can't hold a candle to my son Adam's Elvis impression.

That's my father with him.

In Case They Were Wondering Why Nobody Showed Up For Their Garage Sale...

While on my errands today, I picked up the June 29, 2007 Chicago Reader, which I thumbed through while at Adam's baseball practice today. I don't know why this garage sale ad jumped out at me-- maybe it's because it was missing a key piece of information that someone who would have wanted to go to it may have wanted. See if you can spot it.

He Is Amazing

Yesterday I had a post headlined "Just When You Thought He Couldn't Piss You Off Any More..." He has done it yet again. I just peeked at the New York Times online headlines and Bush has said he won't rule out a full pardon for Libby. This guy is amazing.

Let's party like it's 2009. January 20, 2009.

Party Like It's 1974...

From an editiorial in the New York Times entitled Soft On Crime:

Mr. Libby was convicted of lying to federal agents investigating the leak of the name of a covert C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. Mrs. Wilson's husband, Joseph Wilson, was asked to investigate a central claim in Mr. Bush's drive to war with Iraq whether Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Africa. Mr. Wilson concluded that Iraq had not done that and had the temerity to share those conclusions with the American public.

It seems clear from the record that Vice President Dick Cheney organized a campaign to discredit Mr. Wilson. And Mr. Libby, who was Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, was willing to lie to protect his boss.

Gee, what did you have to hide, dick? Oops, I mean Dick.

Oh, yeah-- I forgot-- you're your own branch of the government.

From the same editorial:

Mr. Bush's assertion that he respected the verdict but considered the sentence excessive only underscored the way this president is tough on crime when it's committed by common folk...

But in this case, Mr. Bush did not sound like a leader making tough decisions about justice. He sounded like a man worried about what a former loyalist might say when actually staring into a prison cell.

Hmmmm... the United States caught in an unwinnable war.... the White House snarled in a messy scandal...Why do I feel like it's 1974 again?

Just When You Thought He Couldn't Piss You Off Any More...

By now you've heard: Bush has commuted Scooter Libby's 30 month sentence for his role in blocking the investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame's identity. Here's the CNN story about it.

Bush said that he felt that Libby's sentence was "excessive" and that the "consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting". Yeah-- when do you think Libby will be given some corporate job? What a hardship.

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Hmmm... I was a Political Science major....

Thanks to Samurai Frog for this one.

Kitsch Will Keep Us Together

When my wife Kim and I met, through online personals ads 2 1/2 years ago, both of us mentioned a love of kitsch as interests in our profiles.

There is no kitsch shortage in our household. Reproductions of old signs, postcards of Airstreams, and lava lamps are among the kitschy things we have.

My main contribution is my b-movie posters. They were a gift from a long-gone girlfriend in the mid-eighties. Her parents made their living working flea markets. She saw the posters at a flea market and bought them for me. I don't think she spent more than $50 for all four of them-- I spent far more having them framed. I looked up the Blood Feast poster on ebay recently and found that it can go for between $400 and $950.

I mentioned the other day, my efforts to save my Blood Feast poster after part of it got wet when my basement flooded.


My favorite parts of the poster are the admonition not to bring impressionable adolescents to see the movie-- who else but adolescents were going to see it?-- and the little blurb "Introducing Connie Mason-- You Read About Her In Playboy." Yeah, you were reading, huh?

I have three other posters that were unharmed because they were on the walls of our living room, rather than in the basement.



Mill of the Stone Women, or Il Mulino Del Donne Di Pietra as it was called originally, is a big hunk of Italian cheese. A writer journeys to a town to write about the mysterious Professor Val, and takes lodging in the local mill-- a mill that the locals call "The Mill of the Stone Women." Hmmmm... wonder if anything nefarious is afoot there?

The dubbing is incredibly bad-- worthy of a Japanese monster movie-- and of course there was controversy. Toward the end the end of the movie, a women's blouse slips down, exposing a tiny glimpse of nipple. Hey, it was 1960.

Mill of the Stone Women came out on DVD a couple of years ago, by the way. Blood Feast is on DVD as well.



Women of the Prehistoric Planet came out on DVD a year or so ago, but only as part of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 collection (Collection #9, for those of you keeping score). Most of you probably know the premise of MST3000-- that a hapless astronaut and his robot companions are trapped on a satellite, where evil scientists force them to watch the worst movies known to mankind. I think the fact that this movie was featured on MST3000 says it all.



The Bellboy and the Playgirls looks like it might be the worst of the bunch-- it looks like it was a bad Jerry Lewis movie but without Jerry Lewis. It has never come out on DVD, which is odd, because it was the first movie written and directed by a guy who went on to a fair amount of fame-- Francis Ford Coppola. This predated his schlocko thriller Dementia 13 (which is on DVD) by a year.

How much do you want to bet that the first thing he did with all the money he made on The Godfather was to hire a team to go out and buy and burn every existing print of The Bellboy and the Playgirls?