The two missing kids from Florida

I keep looking at the news hoping to see that they found the two boys in Florida lost at sea. It's not clear to me what the story is. Were they going to the Bahamas? Did their parents allow them to take the 19 foot boat out on the ocean or not? They were last seen buying $110 worth of fuel. Would they need that much if they weren't going to the Bahamas? For a while, I had the impression that they told their parents they were going fishing and told their friends they were going to the Bahamas but I don't know if this is true. The family had vacationed there and the kid knew he'd need a passport if he was going there.

I know there are worse things happening in the world. The kids were relatively rich, apparently. One attended the weirdly named Jupiter Christian School. It's not every day you see a Christian school named after a Roman god. It sounds like their mothers are continuing to insist that they had plenty of experience boating and knew what they were doing.

They were in a 19 foot boat. It was hard for me to picture, but I had a couple of full-size American cars that were about 18 feet long. Their boat was a bit longer than a 1970 Buick, and that's not big enough. 

I had a great uncle who was half-Indian. He was born in the 1880s. He died before I was born. But he grew up among the Indians and had an uncanny ability to find his way through the woods even at night in total darkness. He amazed people by walking a dangerous trail along the side of a cliff at night in almost total darkness. And HE was afraid to go into the woods by himself. It's dangerous. You can get killed out there.

That's what I think about when I see people who think they're attuned to nature walking off into the wilderness. And now we have people in Florida claiming that sending children out on the ocean in a small boat is part of their "culture". No, it's not. They haven't been there long enough to develop a genuine culture. If they had, they wouldn't do things like this.

Donald Trump and a pitiful girl on TV

Long ago, there was some TV news magazine that was doing an episode on pornography. One segment was a heavy set girl, a porn actress, very cheerful and enthusiastic, who thought she was going to parlay her porn work into a legitimate movie career and that she would some day win an Oscar for best director! Her parents shook their heads sadly.

She didn't seem to have any thought about the movies she wanted to direct, or anything about directing as a job. But she knew she wanted to win an Oscar for it. The Oscar was the goal. Being a director wasn't. Just the Oscar. And it had to be for best director.

That being the case, taking the porn route may well have been her best bet. Her chances of success were practically nil, but that's better than absolute zero. Who knows---maybe we WILL see her walk up there to accept her Oscar.

And that's how it is with Donald Trump. There's no way he's going to become president. But if he acted like a normal, respectable person, his chances would be even worse. If he wants to be president, this is his only hope slim as it is.

Jean-Pierre Leaud

Jean-Pierre Leaud at 14 at the Cannes Film Festival, a glass of wine in front of him as Francois Truffaut chatters away with Jean Cocteau.

And Jean-Pierre today. Or at least more recently. He's 71 now. Seems to have lost the cufflinks and tie.

My God. Donald Trump has a point. Almost.

Donald Trump attacked John McCain, calling him a dummy, ridiculing his "war record" which consisted if his bombing civilians, being shot down and being a prisoner of war.

Trump only attacked him for being captured. If he were a little more on the ball, he would point out that McCain was a traitor. His nickname among the Vietnamese was "Songbird" because he went in singing. Chattered away, telling everything he knew.

Other prisoners, by the way, have said that McCain was not tortured, at least not when he claimed he was.

The Vietnamese have said that he wasn't tortured and told how they got him to talk. They knew who McCain was when they captured him. They knew that his father was an admiral and that his grandfather had a ship named after him. They knew he was used to getting special treatment, so they moved him into another hospital, had him treated by Soviet doctors. They had officers come in to meet him, acting excited to get to meet such an important man. Imagine a Vietnamese officer thrilled to meet John McCain!

He told them everything. Vietnamese air defenses became more effective and U.S. bombing less effective, which is fine with me.

A Spanish psychiatrist interviewed American POWs in North Vietnam and diagnosed McCain as a psychopath. He blathered about how he wanted to be an astronaut and he complained that now he wouldn't be able to become an admiral at a younger age than his father. When asked if he felt any sympathy for the civilians he bombed, he said "NO, I DO NOT." (McCain himself told the same story about talking to the psychiatrist.)

When he was running for president, the lapdog press reported on the special treatment McCain got as a POW and how Vietnamese generals came to meet him, but the fools took it at face value. They didn't know (or pretended not to know) that they were manipulating him and reported that the Vietnamese somehow sensed what a great man John McCain was.

McCain's a racist. He freely told reporters that "I hate the gooks. I'll hate them until the day I die."

Hates them because they rescued him and saved his life after he bombed them. A Vietnamese civilian came out of a bomb shelter and swam into a lake to pull McCain to shore. McCain volunteered to bomb Vietnam because he thought it would advance his career, then was infuriated that they shot him down and took him prisoner.

What a dummy.

Another Bill Cosby rape thing?

I didn't know until recently that there was a "scared straight" episode of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. I never saw it, but it was reportedly full of rape stuff.

According to Cracked.com:

Fat Albert and the gang unknowingly accept a ride in a stolen car, get arrested, and are sent on a Scared Straight tour of the Philadelphia State Penitentiary, was ostensibly produced with a similar goal in mind of teaching children that prison is fucked-up and they should do everything within their power to avoid going there. As Fat Albert and the gang are shown around the prison, the inmates keep howling and laughing maniacally at them in a way that suggests they are either putting on fantastic performances for the kids' benefit, or are just waiting for one of them to get within raping distance.

One pervy-looking guy says, "Oh, you smell so good ... come closer, let me sniff you ..." ... while another guy says, "I want the big one! Give me the big one!" And, just to make extra sure everyone is clear on what's being discussed, a burly inmate says, "When you're out in the yard, or in the showers, you don't have any rights or any protection." (Emphasis ours.) He further explains to the gang that, in prison, you have to do anything that a tougher inmate tells you. He sternly repeats the phrase "no matter what it is" to make sure his point is getting across.

Bill Cosby

I hate Bill Cosby, but, to be fair, he said that he bought quaaludes to give to girls to have sex with them. If he said he bought sports cars to give to girls to have sex with them, would that mean he used the cars to rape them? I don't know what the guy did. If he gave his prescription drugs to anyone, he was committing a crime in any case.

And while I'm thinking about it, when Theo had marijuana and said he was holding it for someone else, what sense did that make? Why would you go around holding drugs for another person? I can see why someone might want you to hold their marijuana for them, but why would you do it? What's in it for you?

Riding Speed, B western

Finally! I saw a B western I liked. It's a B western the way I always envisioned B westerns. Very primitive. Produced by the father of Al Adamson. Called Riding Speed, starring Buffalo Bill, Jr, (no relation to Buffalo Bill Cody). Available on Fandor.

I didn't like Buffalo Bill, Jr's, ridiculous cowboy outfit. But the scenes were very short. There was little attempt at acting. The gunshots had an odd sound to them which made them seem more realistic. It had a lurid subplot. One of the smugglers starts making out with the other smuggler's wife. There are a couple of rather cruel murders which come off worse than most B western murders.

The editing is crude at times. The scenes are short, but they still cut to close-ups, as if the actors couldn't pull off a brief exchange of dialog in one shot.

The desert looks pretty good. Oddly, they seem to be smuggling Chinese into the country from Mexico, and they keep referring to the Chinese using the same racial slur.

It was one of those movies apparently set in the present day---there was a single car in it---but in every other way it was like 1870.

Had better theme music than most B westerns. As in most of them, there was no non-diegetic music.

I liked it a little better than Luc Moullet's A Girl is a Gun, starring Jean-Pierre Leaud as Billy the Kid. Moullet filmed in the mountains of France so he had a more interesting or at least unusual landscape. He saved money by hardly having any horses in it, and he avoided risk of injury by having the actors walk their horse---nobody tried to ride one---which is fine with me. I never understood the appeal of riding a horse. The costumes were better. There were no cartoonish cowboy outfits. The actress has a shirtless scene in a bra which I assume didn't exist in the old west.

I read someone say that Jean-Pierre Leaud, a city boy, looked out of place in a western. But this was good. Jean-Pierre was born in Paris---Billy the Kid was born in Manhattan. I also heard that the young fellow was high on drugs during production.

Jim Carrey posts autistic kid's photo like an idiot

The pictures I've posted on here have mainly been of wealthy celebrities. Someone got mad at me for posting a picture they had taken of Jello Biafra so I took it down. Felt bad about that. I did post pictures of bad tattoos which was probably rude of me, and I posted a picture that was in the news of a high school girl who went to the prom with a cardboard cutout of Justin Bieber. I argued that she should have found a boy in her school with low self-esteem whom she could mold into her vision of the teen sensastion. Some Justin Bieber clothes and hair would do most of the work. You'd also want him to get the speaking voice right and maybe lose or gain some weight.

But Jim Carrey, in a possibly scientology-based hissy fit over a California law requiring children attending school to be vaccinated, posted pictures of Autistic kids on Twitter. He didn't understand their conditions and he was accusing their parents of causing their autism by having them vaccinated. And it seems like a rather extreme invasion of the children's privacy to have their pictures posted on Twitter without their knowledge or consent.

I have opinions that I'm sure are correct but which most people don't share, but I wouldn't dream of giving crazy medical advice for children.

Now we'll see how HE likes having HIS picture

posted without permission!