People being hit in the head

 
I used to like The Way of the Dragon aka The Return of the Dragon, (it was going to be called Enter the Dragon but Warner Brothers stole the title.)

Now it bothers me, that scene with all those mafia guys getting hit in the head over and over with nunchucks.

When I was 10 or 12, Judo was all there was. There were no karate schools around here. Now all there is is karate and you couldn't study Judo to save your life. And, ever since Taekwondo became an Olympic sport, all the karate schools started calling themselves Taekwondo schools. Like there's a difference.

I knew a guy who wanted to learn Judo. I told him that karate was supposed to be more effective. He said he didn't want to hit anyone. I told him he could cause more serious injuries throwing people to the ground with Judo that he would hitting them with karate. He said he was fine with with hurting people as long as he didn't have to hit them. Now I understand what he meant.

Now I think Judo is the way to go. You don't learn martial arts just to beat people up; you learn martial arts to beat people up in a surprising way. Karate is so common that no one is going to be bewildered by it anymore.

But when I was a kid, there would be these kids who knew Judo. You'd be standing there and the next instant you were on the ground looking up at them and you had no idea how it happened.

Junior high yearbooks

I came across some yearbooks online from my old junior high school. It's been so many years. The teachers look so young to me now. I was surprised that the janitor from my grade school had been working at the junior high at the time. I never saw him there, or maybe I callously walked right past him and didn't deign to notice. I do remember wondering later why janitors all looked alike.

The kids looked younger than I remember, which started to really depress me. At the time, I thought we were basically adults. Now they look like children and the horrible things that happened to some of them seem so much worse now.

+ There was a kid who was picked on all the time. A few years later, I sat next to him in a class in high school and he kept talking about shooting people with .44 magnums with hollow point bullets. He and his brother both became car thieves in high school. His older brother stayed out of prison, but he was locked up for a few years.

+  A kid who struggled with a serious drug problem and killed himself by jumping into the river.

+ There was a boy, a friend of my brother's, who had several pictures in the yearbook. Everyone liked him. His mother died after a long illness. A few days later, his father disappeared. He had walked into the woods and killed himself.

+ A kid whose drunken father would come home and beat him with a baseball bat. Sometimes his mother would protect him, sometime she wouldn't. He became a drug addict later.

+ A kid who really wasn't very bright. He had a girlfriend who was in high school who couldn't have been very bright either. He didn't come right out and tell us, but he joked and broadly hinted that they had gone into the woods to consummate their relationship. Later, he joked and broadly hinted that she was pregnant. And quite some time later, without explanation, he started making jokes about babies and their bodily functions.

+ A kid who died of an overdose in his 20's.

+ Kids who were friendless and picked on.

+ A kid who must have had some sort of glandular disorder and was walking around with big bushy beard when he was thirteen. He was happy with it. He would hang around in bars.

+ A boy who survived the Khmer Rouge.

+ A Vietnamese girl whose father bribed a guy with gold for the family to emigrate

+ A kid who was propositioned by a man in a park.

+ A kid who said his grandmother made him to go out in the yard to get her a switch. He brought her a dried up stick he found on the ground but she demanded a BETTER switch. He used the cord from the venetian blinds to demonstrate how hard she hit him.

+ A kid who kept missing school due to arthritis.

+ A girl whose grandmother took her for a ride in her new airplane and had to get out the owners manual to find out how to land.

+ A teacher who was taken to the hospital when some young scamps spiked his coffee with LSD.

+ A homely kid the teachers openly hated.

+ There was a kid who would always accuse people of "hassling" him. "Are you hassling me? Are you giving me a hassle?" he would say. He said this a lot. He had little scars that kept appearing on his face. A girl said his father abused him, but I don't know how she knew.

Those are just the ones I knew about and I really didn't know much about what was going on.

Wyatt Earp, Hollywood, 1923

Wyatt Earp at home in Hollywood, 1923

Wyatt Earp went to Hollywood hoping to cash in on movie westerns. Worked as an adviser. I read somewhere he helped choreograph gun fights. He also hung around with a young John Wayne who imitated Earp's walk and his way of speaking.

Charlie Chaplin, Hollywood, 1916

Shotgun Slade

 
Kurosawa's Yojimbo was inspired in part by the work of Dashiell Hammett. It had a seemingly amoral hero who deals with criminals on their own terms and defeats them. Part of the plot was inspired directly by The Glass Key. And it was remade as A Fistful of Dollars, so the private eye genre did have an indirect influence on westerns in the 1960s.  

And, before that, there was Shotgun Slade, a half-hour TV western that aired from 1959-1961.

Apparently private eye shows were edging out westerns on TV at the time, so they compromised. They made a western about a "private detective" in the old west whose weapon is a shotgun-rifle combination.

Had a jazz soundtrack which was pretty good for a western. It really wasn't bad. In an episode I saw, Shotgun Slade brings a weaselly guy who embezzled thousands of dollars from a children's charity to justice and thwarts some train robbers in the process.

Might have been just as well without the combination shotgun/rifle gimmick, though. For one thing, he has to walk around carrying this thing all the time.

Again, the show is public domain. Available on streaming video.

Annie Oakley (1954-1957)

 
I don't know what's wrong with me, but I was watching another 1950s western, Annie Oakley, with Gail Davis in the title role. Less adult than some other westerns. Entirely fictional, nothing in the show related in any way to the life of the real Annie Oakley except that she wore a ridiculous western cowgirl costume and could shoot really well.

In the introduction, we see Annie standing up on the back of a galloping horse firing a gun and precisely shooting a hole in the middle of a playing card a man was holding in his hand.

And yet she never shoots anyone.

In one episode she leaps from a horse onto a moving stage coach being chased by criminals who are shooting at them and had just killed the driver. Annie grabs reins and lets the stage coach guy ineffectually shoot at the criminals until he gets killed, too. Obviously she should have let him drive. She could have effortlessly killed those guys.

She shoots guns out of people's hands and that's about all. She gets kidnapped, her little brother gets kidnapped, and she still doesn't shoot anyone.

It wasn't that they were trying to be non-violent. They had murders in every episode, some of them witnessed by her preteen brother. The kids' uncle is sheriff and he goes around punching people in the face even when conflicts could have easily been resolved.

They just never let women shoot people on these westerns.

One time, on The Big Valley, Miss Barbara Stanwyck was kidnapped and held for days. She finally got her hands on a gun and even then all she did was hold them at bay. They still wouldn't let her kill anybody.

Reportedly, Annie Oakley would have continued at least one more season, but Jimmy Hawkins who played her brother hit his adolescent growth spurt, although I don't know why that should have ended it.

The show is now public domain and available on streaming video.

Jimmy Hawkins (left) as Tagg being menaced.

Justin Bieber has another great big tattoo

Justin Bieber. He uses Regular Scent 

Speed Stick apparently. The tattoo on
his stomach is the new one.

He was such a lovely boy. Which may be the problem. How many boys want to be "lovely"? So Justin Bieber uglied himself up by plastering himself with tattoos like an idiot.

Bieber was in a couple of episodes of CSI when he was sixteen or seventeen. One of the women on the show told reporters that he was a brat which caused her some negative feedback, so she backed down and said that he was really a pretty good actor, a natural talent. The boy could have had that to fall back on. He could have been a singer-turned-actor. But how many movies would Frank Sinatra have done if he had had tattoos all over him? You think David Cassidy would have gotten on The Partridge Family looking like that?

Let's face it: Tattoos are for dummies.

One of the problems is that once they have them, it's too late to do anything about it so people have to be polite and not point out that they've permanently disfigured themselves. 

How many of these people have gone out and gotten more and more tattoos because people politely pretended to like them?

Justin Bieber's degenerate father started getting him tattoos when he was fifteen. Imagine the mind that would do that. Years ago, two subhumans used India ink and a needle to tattoo their screaming, sobbing 8-year-old nephew. Tattooed his name, Billy, on his arm. They went to prison like Bieber's father should have.

I had a friend in junior high school who had a tiny "J" on his arm. It looked like he wrote it with blue ballpoint pen, but it was always there. I finally asked him about it. He mocked me for thinking he had written it on his arm---how ridiculous! Why would anyone write a letter J on their arm with a pen! He explained he tattooed himself. He was going to write his whole name, but it was so painful he stopped at the first letter. Which was just as well. Why would you want a tattoo of your own name? It's only slightly stupider than people tattooing their children's birth dates on themselves. Are they worried they'll forget? And that's only slightly stupider than Angelina Jolie tattooing the geographic coordinates of her children's places of birth on her arm. Where they were conceived would be more interesting. She may be even dumber than her cretinous father. She has "Know your rights" tattooed on her back. It should say "Don't be a flaming jackass".

 Boston, England, 1974

John Rayne Rivello, Kurt Eichenwald

 Kurt Eichenwald

Years ago, there was an "art film" made by splicing clear and opaque film leader together. The film consisted entirely of light flashing on screen, and it contained a warning at the beginning that it could cause epileptic seizures. Apparently the filmmaker thought that a few potentially fatal seizures in audience members was a reasonable price to pay for such a great work of art.

The warning at the beginning of the film included a statistic that it could induce seizures in one in every so many thousand people. So few people saw the thing, it's unlikely it triggered anything.

But there was a cartoon broadcast on TV in Japan that did trigger seizures in a number of people. In fact, when the Simpsons went to Japan, they used this as a gag, like it was a regular feature of Japanese television.

So anyway, an anti-Semitic Trump supporter calling himself "Jew Goldstein" was arrested for sending a flashing GIF to journalist Kurt Eichenwald. Eichenwald is known to have epilepsy. It triggered a seizure.

Since then, Eichenwald received the same image from 40 other Trump enthusiasts.

"Jew Goldstein's" real name is John Rayne Rivello of Salisbury, Maryland. The FBI arrested him and will send him to Dallas where Eichenwald lives. He is charged with criminal cyberstalking with the intent to kill or cause bodily harm. He faces ten years in prison.

John Rayne Rivello's mugshot. Poor fool.

Pic the FBI found of him before 

he cleaned himself up for his mugshot.

I don't know why anti-Semites are using Jewish names online, but I've seen the same thing with anti-Arab racists.

Eichenwald is an Episcopalian, by the way.

According to the Justice Department:

"...Evidence received pursuant to a search warrant showed Rivello’s Twitter account contained direct messages from Rivello’s account to other Twitter users concerning the victim.  Among those direct messages included statements by Rivello, including 'I hope this sends him into a seizure,' 'Spammed this at [victim] let’s see if he dies,' and 'I know he has epilepsy.'

"Additional evidence received pursuant to a search warrant showed Rivello’s iCloud account contained a screenshot of a Wikipedia page for the victim, which had been altered to show a fake obituary with the date of death listed as Dec. 16, 2016.

"Rivello’s iCloud account also contained screen shots from epilepsy.com with a list of commonly reported epilepsy seizure triggers and from dallasobserver.com discussing the victim’s report to the Dallas Police Department and his attempt to identify the Twitter user."

Eichenwald was incapacitated for several days, lost the feeling in one hand and had trouble speaking for several weeks as a result.

So now there's a crowd-funding site raising money for Rivello's defense. Here are some comments from Rivello's supporters:

Kikenwald will lose this case based on his DOCUMENTED actions (drunk as fuck, sleep & medicine deprived), then he will get counter sued. These yids need to be put in their place.

You forget criminal cases generally bankrupt "little people".
This fucker is doing this explicitly to ruin the life of someone with far less money and power.
We need constitutional amendments against crap like this.

Why is the ADL not supporting this victim of anti-semitism, Mr. Goldstein? I can't believe Aryan monsters like Eichenwald (Buchenwald???)!

I imagine that if I pretended I had a seizure bc some guy sent me a fucking GIF over twitter and then I tried to sic the fbi on them that the fbi would no doubt tell me to go fuck my self and quit wasting their time.

Of course not you goyim peasant.

John "Jew Goldstein" Rivello did nothing wrong.

Gas The Kikes, Race War Now

I am new to this story but if a Jew died then that is FANTABULOUS!

Wouldn't it be easier to hire a BLM thug to "discuss" Mr Kikenwald's white privilege in a back alley somewhere?

jews aren't white- AH covered this 80 years ago

Well, one of them's going to prison. Forty others have done the same thing. We'll see if the FBI hunts them down as well. It can't be that hard.

Joey Hensley, incest, artificial insemination, etc

Dr. Joey Hensley

I mentioned a then-X-rated 1950s British movie a while back. A man sues for divorce. He and his wife had resorted to artificial insemination after finding out he was sterile. He turned on his wife and claimed that this constituted adultery.

How could anyone call artificial insemination adultery? But now I read this in Counterpunch.com:

Dr. Joey Hensley is bigoted Tennessee state legislator who has built his political career by attacking the LGBT community. Now courtesy of court records from his divorce we learn that Dr. Hensley has been carrying on an affair over the course of several years with his nurse, who also happens to be his cousin. Hensley also served as his lover’s doctor and prescribed her a steady diet of prescription drugs. Hensley, who was the chief sponsor of the “Don’t Say Gay Bill“, refused to testify at the divorce trial claiming “doctor-patient privilege.” Shortly before this story broke, Hensley had introduced a bill in the Tennessee Senate that would deem babies born through artificial insemination “illegitimate.” Dr. Hensley is, of course, a self-described “family values Republican.” [emphasis added.]

Big Jake (1971)

I don't like Chris Mitchum's hat.

It's not every day that you see children murdered in a movie. Even in a movie like Man Bites Dog, the profoundly offensive French "comedy" about a film crew following a serial killer, the child he tries to kill gets away. When there's a child involved, there's little suspense because you know full well nothing's going to happen to him.  

In this movie, you get the worst of both worlds. You see two children casually murdered in the raid at the beginning, then you sit there knowing nothing is going to happen to the kid who was kidnapped.

Big Jake (1971) is about a rich family in Texas in 1909. A band of outlaws led by Richard Boone raid their ranch, murder several people and kidnap the 8-year-old grandson of the family matriarch (Maureen O'Hara). They demand a one million dollar ransom ($25,281,000 in today's money).

Maureen O'Hara sends her estranged husband, Jake (John Wayne) along with their two sons, Patrick Wayne (John Wayne's actual son) and Chris Mitchum (Robert Mitchum's son) to Mexico, ostensibly to deliver the ransom and bring back the kid, "Little Jake" (played by Ethan Wayne, John Wayne's youngest son).

Shortly before they're to deliver the ransom, the two sons find out by accident that there is no money. John Wayne and their mother decided they weren't going to pay a gang after they killed everybody and they were going to rescue the kid and kill all the kidnappers. It seems like something they should have been told earlier so they could give some thought as to how they were going to do this. If John Wayne had been killed earlier, they would have had no idea there was no money until the kidnappers opened the trunk.

In the end, they kill all the kidnappers and rescue the child. Not much of a spoiler there. John Wayne and his sons all survive. They're strangely indifferent to the death of John Wayne's Indian friend, Sam (Bruce Cabot).

It would have been better if one or both of Big Jake's sons had been killed. Better still if Big Jake himself died. Having the entire family survive made it like an episode of Bonanza or The Big Valley.

As it was, Maureen O'Hara's decision not to pay the ransom was of no consequence. There was no downside. All she did was send her adult sons on an adventure so they could bond with their horrible father. They slaughtered two entire gangs of murderers and came out fine.

John Wayne was too cheerful. Was he always like this? Smiling at every act of violence. Smiling as they set off to kill everyone. How many times did he get punched in the face in this thing? He was 64. In real life, that could have killed him.

Strangely, a lot of people love the movie. There's a guy in England doing a remake.

When I first saw this thing, I took it to be John Wayne's answer to The Professionals.

Orson Welles' last, unfinished film

I heard somewhere that Orson Welles' last, unfinished feature, The Other Side of the Wind, was locked in a vault somewhere in Iran. He apparently got funding from pre-revolutionary Iranian sources. But, no, the 1,083 reels of film were sitting in a French film lab all this time. The film is now being completed and will reportedly be released on Netflix.

How many movies do film labs have lying around? Someone found out that Ed Wood never had the money to get one of his films back from the lab, so they went and paid the charges and released the thing on videotape.

Welles said in an interview that he didn't know why, but he was always really slow on post-production. He could write a script in a week, but once the thing was shot, it took him forever to edit.

We're all doomed

I've been forced to listen to Rachel Maddow a couple of times a day, then listen to her admirers parrot her nonsense. I've always been repulsed by her. She can't talk about killing people without smirking.

From this weekend's Counterpunch.com:

The Democrats are at risk of making the rest of their already frail political agenda, such as it is, collateral damage in their pursuit of a collective fantasy, a mad quest to find ghostly Russian agents inside the House of Trump. No amateur spy hunter has been more intrepid than the Walter Winchell of MSDNC, Rachel Maddow, who has rebranded her nightly show “The Russian Connection.” For two months now, Maddow (annual salary: $7 million) has been spinning nightly sagas of Russian espionage that twist and turn through the dark labyrinths of Washington and end where they began: nowhere. Predictably, Maddow’s audience is swelling as numbed Democrats, still dazed by Hillary’s defeat, tune in hoping for some kind of explosive revelation that will explain the inexplicable from these paranoid potboilers, which often cast the CIA in the most unlikely role of victim.

I fear our long national hangover is just commencing. The deeper the Democrats descend into the Russian rabbit hole, the farther they remove themselves from the working-class people whose defection cost them the election and the longer the odds grow that they will ever revitalize their party as a real oppositional force to the reactionary freight train bearing down upon them.

Trump has probably had the worst start to a presidency since William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia only 32 days after taking the oath. But by all measures the Democrats have fared even worse than the president, and rightfully so. Since Trump’s win, and despite relentless attempts to invalidate his victory, there has been a steady attrition of support for the Democratic Party. The Democrats are now less liked (35%) and more hated (50%) than Trump (44%/47%) and by a fairly wide margin, according to a recent Suffolk poll.

Why is SNL news?

Every Sunday I look at the news on Google, and every Sunday one of the news items is what was on Saturday Night Live the night before. I can understand people being interested in this, but not THAT interested. Was The Carol Burnett Show ever news?

But, then again, some major events of my life were things I happened to see on TV. I had a teacher who, as a child, ran into the kitchen to tell her mother that she just saw Lee Harvey Oswald shot by Jack Ruby on live television. Her mother said, "No, no, honey---President Kennedy was shot." She kept telling her and she kept not believing her.

I'll never forget the time I was in the living room playing on the floor with my airplanes. The TV was on. They interrupted the program with a special news bulletin. George Wallace had been shot.

The reporter said gravely that there was a man there wearing McGovern buttons. "I asked him if he was happy about this. He said no."

I was happy about it. Even back then, I knew Wallace was a racist monster.

Years later, in high school, the principal announced over the loudspeaker that Reagan had been shot. Teachers were disturbed at how happy students were at the news. They told the class they remembered when Kennedy was shot. Some people were happy about that, too, but they were soon embarrassed and ashamed that they didn't conceal their glee. I don't think anyone ever said that about Wallace.

People really hate Clinton

 
Trump has terribly low approval ratings, but Hillary Clinton's are now even lower. I don't know what it means, but fewer people like her and more people hate her than Trump. My guess is that people before the election were telling pollsters they didn't hate her because they were terrified of Trump and now a truer picture is emerging.

For the moment, I'm glad she's not president. We're seeing the beginning of the end of the war in Syria with ISIS and Al Qaeda on the losing end. The one thing Clinton made clear in her campaign was that she intended to start bombing Syria just to keep the war going and to bring the U.S. into direct war with Russia. Obama and his NATO stooges were massing troops on the Russian border in preparation.

I don't know how big a nightmare Trump will be. At least the governments of the world will have serious doubts now when the United States tries to lead them into more wars.

Another thing about TV and movie detectives

As I said about 26 Men, "The rangers' characters were never developed. They were just doing their jobs and their personalities were irrelevant."

I might add that this is true in detective stories in general. The detective doesn't set the story in motion and they're just doing their jobs, following the clues other people left behind. Even true crime stories focus on the personalities of the criminals and victims. The detective's personality doesn't matter. He's just following procedure.

But this is why you have fictional detectives like Columbo and Hercule Poirot. They need quirks to gloss over the irrelevance of their personality traits.

I read a teen detective story where the teenage detective liked to cook. I read a Japanese crime novel and the detective would write haiku.

I always wondered about that. I was in a creative writing class in high school and we were required to write a batch of poems, but the teacher told us we could include no more than two haiku, which I felt was disrespectful to the haiku as an art form. But, in this novel, it turns out the teacher was right. The detective cranked out haiku by the dozens. 

Maybe I'm wrong about 26 Men

I'm probably wrong. There have been westerns set in the early 20th century where the cowboys have stayed abreast of the times and that was never the decisive factor in whether it was any good or not.

Forty-six years ago, my sister was dragged by her middle school friends to see Big Jake starring 64-year-old John Wayne in the title role. Set in 1909, they had cars, motorcycles, automatic pistols, telescopic rifle sights. For all the good it did them. The movie was terrible. Considering the plot, John Wayne was way too cheerful as he tended to be in his later films, like he thought being shot in the leg or punched in the face was great fun. He addresses an overweight machete killer as "fatty".

Strange, even in Texas, that tweenagers would want to see an action film about the elderly. 

In the movie, they kept referring to things as being new. "We'll have a rifle on you. With a real fine sharpshooter behind it with one of them fancy new telescopic sights."

There was The Professionals, set sometime around 1917, which had a boring middle part where nothing happened. The Wild Bunch was good, set in 1913. I saw a little of Joe Kidd on TV one time. And I liked Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker!

The novelty of a cowboy with a machine gun only goes so far.

26 Men

Watched a pretty bad half-hour TV western from the '50s called 26 Men, about the Arizona Rangers, established in 1901 before Arizona was a state. Kind of amazing that Barry Goldwater was born there in 1909 when the rangers disbanded, because the place was still wild west. My grandparents lived contemporaneously with those people. There's nothing in the show to indicate that it was set in the 20th century. It's like pretty much every other western but even more dull.

It was based on real cases of the Arizona Rangers, kind of a western Dragnet, which was too bad because law enforcement wasn't very interesting back then. Two of the episodes I saw had lynch mobs. The rangers' characters were never developed. They were just doing their jobs and their personalities were irrelevant.

A western set in the 20th century could have Communists, anarchists, trade unionists; Jui-Jitsu was becoming popular especially with Suffragettes.

 

Everyone on the show had a Colt revolver and a Winchester rifle, like in pretty much every other western. They could have freshened it up with Mausers, Lugers, machine guns.

Clint Eastwood with a Mauser in Joe Kidd, set in New Mexico

Years ago, there was a TV western called Nichols set in Arizona in 1914. James Garner played a sheriff who rode a motorcycle.

The show could have had car chases. They could have had a really bad airplane.

It could have been more like the Soviet movies such as White Sun of the Desert, inspired by American westerns but set in the USSR in the 1920s.

26 Men was produced for syndication, never shown on any network. I read that surviving members of the Arizona Rangers introduced some episodes but I didn't see any.

Had a terrible theme song and it used the same stock music as Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Arizona is just a big horrible desert. No offense to the people of Arizona, but I don't know why anyone would go there now. Back then, before air conditioning, it was just awful.

The show is public domain and available on YouTube and more than one Roku channel.

It's time to scale it all back

Maybe it is time to scale things back. There's so much to watch and so little time to watch it. Cinema is in upheaval. We could all benefit.

TV series are producing fewer and fewer episodes per season. They're down to ten episodes for some HBO series. They suggested this was a boon----they could go for quality over quantity and they could produce other series to fill their schedules.

They should also make everything shorter.

In the '50's there were cops shows, private eye shows, family dramas, science fiction, westerns--that were only a half-hour long. And that was in the days before computers and MTV, when people read books and supposedly had longer attention spans.

There were fifteen-minute soap operas in those days. You could watch FOUR soap operas in the time it takes to watch one today. Low budget movies back then were only about an hour long. Some were 55 minutes.

And by the way, have you ever seen a paperback book from the '50's? Most are only 150 pages. When people talk about how many books people read back then, THAT'S WHY.

Think of the miserable souls trying to find work in Hollywood. Think of how much greater their chances for success would be if there were two or three times more shows on TV and twice as many movies.

And even if Hollywood doesn't do it, the zero budget filmmakers should. It's bad enough trying to sit through a REAL movie for an hour and a half. A zero budget feature should aim for about 40 minutes. It would make it so much easier on all involved. Nobody's going to see it in a theater anyway. Even DVD's are vanishing. You don't worry anymore about getting your money's worth when you're watching streaming video.

OK, Good (2012)

 
Charles Grodin said in one of his memoirs that he was up for Dustin Hoffman's role in The Graduate. They ended up going with Hoffman in part, Grodin suggested, because he kept complaining about the money. He said that they were offering him less than he got for a TV commercial.

I guess you can do pretty well with commercials. It seems like it would be terrible work for an actor, but a good commercial can pay as good as a movie. According to the internet, actors make from $10,000 to $50,000.

OK, Good shows an actor (Hugo Armstrong) going through a series of auditions for TV commercials. He's also attending a rather intense acting workshop, and he's been overcharged by a print shop that screwed up his headshots. It pushes him over the edge.

It was pretty good, really. Watching the auditions, you realize how much skill it takes. Available on Fandor.

One last Hunter Biden thing

When his son Beau died, Joseph Biden declared that "Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known."

Seems like a pretty obvious dig at his other, jackass son, Hunter Biden.

Hunter did pretty well getting even with his father. First, he took the position on the board of that Ukrainian oil company. That was after the United States overthrew the Ukrainian state and installed a right-wing, Nazi-infested puppet government. Joseph Biden was in negotiations with the Ukrainian "government" at the time. The vice president's office had to put out a statement that Hunter Biden was a "private citizen" and could do what he wanted. They refused to say whether Biden had simply asked his son not accept the position, but they implied that they had no control over him.

Then, by dumping his wife and children and sleeping with his dead brother's wife, Hunter apparently shamed his father out of running for president. It was around the time that Hunter abandoned his wife that Joe Biden announced that he would not run.

You have to admire Hunter. He's taking everyone down with him. His petty sibling rivalry/oedipal conflict may have changed the course of history.

Hunter Biden's wife wisely files for divorce

Hunter Biden.

Hunter Biden's wife has filed for divorce, claiming that her idiot husband has thrown away a fortune and maxed out all their credit cards on prostitutes, strip clubs and drugs. He's also walking around with an $80,000 diamond he bought. Through lawyers, he denied having the diamond, but later admitted it.

I hope he and his dead brother's wife practice safe sex.

Biden owes $313,970 in back taxes and blew $122,000 of the couple's money in less than two months. He's spent a fortune on travel and for some reason checks into more than one hotel a night.

“Throughout the parties’ separation Mr. Biden has created financial concerns for the family by spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations), while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills,” Kathleen Binden said in the the divorce filing.

It goes on:

“In spite of significantly reducing available funds for Ms. Biden and the children, Mr. Biden secretly continued to spend lavishly, while complaining to Ms. Biden through counsel about the financial issues of the family and Ms. Biden’s spending.”

Joseph Biden's son sleeping with his dead brother's wife

 Glassy-eyed disheveled Hunter Biden (left).

 Clueless cuckold Beau Biden being laughed at by his wife (right).

It's been revealed that Joseph Biden's degenerate middle-aged son, Hunter Biden, has been sleeping with his (Hunter's) dead brother's wife. No word on how long this has been going on.

Hunter Biden, a Catholic, abandoned his wife and three children five months after his brother's death.

This was around the time that Joseph Biden announced he would not run for president, claiming he was too upset about his son's death. Now we know the real reason.

Beau Biden died in May 2015. Hunter Biden is still legally married.

Hunter Biden joined the Navy Reserves at age 42 in 2013. He joined in May, tested positive for cocaine in June and was kicked out. He had to get a waiver to join because of his age and he needed a second waiver because of an earlier "drug incident".

"It was the honor of my life to serve in the US Navy, and I deeply regret and am embarrassed that my actions led to my administrative discharge," he said in a statement.

He was in the Navy for one month and was on cocaine the whole time. He was given a twelve-day "training course" to be commissioned as an officer. Yeah, it probably was the honor of his life.

His name was leaked in the Ashley Madison hacking scandal. That was the website for married people who still wanted to date. He claimed that someone was using his name.

When his vice president father was in "negotiations" with the puppet government Obama installed in Ukraine, Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company. The White House insisted this was sheer coincidence. The vice president's idiot, drug-addled son was simply the best qualified for the job.

Imagine if this were Donald Trump's ghastly spawn. The Biden "family" is no better than the Bushes.

Hunter Biden has three children. Beau Biden had two. How do you think those cousins are getting along now?

Yella (Germany, 2007)

Watched Yella, a pretty good German movie.

I started watching it on Fandor and thought, "Is this a remake of Carnival of Souls? No, no. It couldn't be."

Yella is from eastern Germany. She's going off to work in the west and makes of mistake of letting her abusive ex-husband give her a ride to the train station in his Land Rover. He tries to kill them both by driving off a bridge. She crawls out of the water, makes her way to the train station and begins her new life of business intrigue.

Available on Fandor.

Ryan Owens, Navy SEALs

There was an 8-year-old American Muslim girl killed in the January 29th U.S. raid in Yemen. There were eight other children murdered there. I don't know why alleged liberals like Rachel Maddow who claim to stand with our Muslim neighbors said nothing about her while they droned on and on about the one Navy SEAL, Ryan Owens, who got killed, repeatedly showing his picture.

Michael Moore has joined in, also making no mention of the 20 civilians Owens helped murder.

I looked at Mia Farrow's Twitter feed. She pretends to love children---that's her whole gimmick. But the only death she's upset about is Ryan Owens'.

The American girl murdered by Navy SEALs.

Obama had already killed her 16-year-old brother

with a drone.