Mike Kuchar, Pugratory Junction (1997)

A lovely underground video from 1997. A 40 minute camp melodrama by Mike Kuchar starring Donna Kerness, best known from Kuchar's "The Craven Sluck" and glam-punk rocker Kembra Pfahler. A mother and daughter compete over men and for their place in the world of exploitation film. Quite a bit of nudity, funny dialog. There's murder, sex, corporal punishment. A brilliant movie. Filmed in New York.

Mike Kuchar and his late brother, George, always had a very innocent quality, which is strange since their movies tend to be somewhat dirty. 

Available here on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg1E3jr8m2o&t=468s 

I've thought for some time that zero budget movies should top out at 40 minutes. If it won't be shown in a theater, there's probably little reason for it to drag on for an hour and a half. Shows that analog video can look pretty good. Shows the importance of music. Most of the conversations are dialog between two characters. 

Maidentrip

So now I'm watching a documentary about a Laura Dekker, a 14-year-old Dutch girl who became the youngest person to sail around the world alone.

She did most of the filming herself.

She basically lives as a hermit for two years. It seems extremely dreary. She becomes increasingly warped and becomes annoyed being around people. She talks about herself as a sailor, but she doesn't mean earning a living at it. Just wants to be a weirdo with a seventh grade education who almost never leaves her boat.

There must be safer, more comfortable and cheaper methods for doing what this Dutch girl did to herself.

George HW Bush's dirty joke

We know the dirty joke Bush told Heather Lind when he sexually assaulted her.

He said that his favorite magician was David Cop-a-feel.

That makes it so much worse.

George HW Bush groped actress

Photo of sexual assault in progress.

Remember when Angela Merkel recoiled as George Bush, Jr, walked up behind her and tried to give her a Harvey Weinstein-like massage? Watch it here on YouTube. I just figured he didn't know any better. But it turns out Bush, Jr, is from a family of Harvey Weinstein-like sexual predators.

Bush, Jr's, ninety-three-year-old father gleefully admitted to groping actress Heather Lind and telling her a dirty joke while his horrible wife looked on.

According to the Washington Post:

In a brief response to the allegations, which Lind detailed in a recent Instagram post that she has since deleted, a spokesman for the 93-year-old former president did not explicitly deny Lind’s account but said in a statement: “President Bush would never — under any circumstance — intentionally cause anyone distress, and he most sincerely apologizes if his attempt at humor offended Ms. Lind.”

Lind said the incident happened when she met Bush four years ago during a promotion of a historical television show she was working on.

Lind played Anna Strong in AMC’s Revolutionary War-era drama, “Turn: Washington Spies,” which premiered in 2014. She said Bush “sexually assaulted” her as she stood next to him during a photo op.

“He touched me from behind from his wheelchair with his wife Barbara Bush by his side. He told me a dirty joke. And then, all the while being photographed, he touched me again,” Lind wrote on Instagram.

Lind said Barbara Bush “rolled her eyes as if to say ‘not again’ ” when she saw what happened. Jim McGrath, spokesman for the 41st president, said the former first lady has no comment.

Lind also said that a security guard later told her that she shouldn’t have stood next to Bush.

The 34-year-old actress is the latest to accuse a prominent figure of inappropriate sexual conduct.

I thought it was a gag when I first read it on some site I never heard of. But, no. It's true. It's horribly true.

I wonder what the dirty joke was he told.

What would rich movie directors do if they were reduced to poverty?

On the set of Night of the Living Dead

It's like when I worked at the car wash. One of the boys was promoted to assistant manager. It didn't work out so they fired him. I guess it would be too demeaning to be demoted back to your old job, so they get rid of you completely.

I've wondered about movie directors. Look at some of them who started out making very inexpensive independent movies. John Waters would be an extreme case if you go back to his work on double 8mm. But there's also Spike Lee. She's Gotta Have It reportedly cost $175,000 in 1986, ($396,000 in today's money). Would Jim Jarmusch or Robert Rodriguez go back to making really cheap movies if they had to?

As I recall, Rodriguez' El Mariachi cost something like $7,500. It was shot on 16mm. All but $400 of the budget went to film and processing. Today, he could use digital effects for muzzle flashes, blood spatter and bullet strikes. So, in theory, if he shot it now on digital video, it might cost $200.

I know that people think they've debunked this, that the studio had to spend a lot to prepare El Mariachi for theatrical distribution, but that wouldn't be an issue today because it would go straight to video.

There's Alfred Hitchcock. He talked about his days in silent film. They spent very little on movies back then---so little that he and his cast and crew were in their way to Germany to film a movie and he was informed that they would have to smuggle the filmstock into the country to avoid paying duty on it.

Truffaut, in his book on Hitchcock, noted that if some disaster struck and Hollywood had to go back to silent film, Hitchcock was the only major director who be able to continue working. But would he?

There were directors in Iraq who started filming with camcorders after the U.S. imperialism destroyed their country.

I don't know what my point is. I guess, don't feel sorry for these rich guys who can't get tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars to make their lousy movies. All the great directors go into decline if they live long enough. Let 'em decline.

Look at the number of movies (he calls them "films") Woody Allen churns out year after year, getting cheaper and cheaper as he goes on. When he made Match Point, he found he had no money left for music. He made a deal with a company that put out a CD of public domain recordings of Caruso and used that.

Of course, Allen's movies aren't that cheap. I won't be happy until they're filmed in and around his apartment with a camcorder. And not a prosumer camcorder. A regular camcorder.

Mack & Myer for Hire

Ah, the golden age of television! When was that, anyway? And WHAT was it? Were they talking about live TV dramas?

Because I'm sitting here watching Mack & Myer for Hire. A terrible 12-minute TV sitcom from 1963. Mack and Myer are handymen by trade. They dress a little like Abbott & Costello but look and sound nothing like them. Over 100 episodes were filmed in the one year the show was in production. They were shown on local TV programs---shows that were often hosted by clowns that would show cartoons or Three Stooges shorts.

Filmed with a two camera set-up, according to Wikipedia.

Look at a show like Modern Family. Each episode is 21 minutes not including commercials. Each episode has three storylines, and each story gets almost equal time. So each of the three subplots is less than seven minutes.

A twelve minute show like this would give you plenty of time. In fact, it could be a little too long for a single storyline. You could intercut between two plots.

But it was just awful.

Miyam Bialik, Harvey Weinstein

 
Miyam Bialik claims to be a "bleeding-heart liberal" even after she donated money to the Israeli military as it was slaughtering people in Gaza in 2014. They killed over 525 children and left thousands more injured and maimed. She was outraged that anyone would dare criticize God's Chosen People. She grew up in Reform Judaism and is now Orthodox, yet she calls herself a "proud feminist".

The term "bleeding heart" refers to the heart of Christ, by the way.

She has a PhD in neuroscience but refused to vaccinate her children. She found out who Jenny McCarthy's pediatrician is, took her children to him specifically because he was anti-vaccine, then claimed that her pediatrician being okay with it justified her refusing to have them vaccinated.

Bialik friend Jenny McCarthy assaulting modestly dressed Christian teen.

Now Bialik has written an article in the New York Times about Weinstein and his sex crimes. She starts out talking about how people made fun of her looks, how she dresses and behaves modestly and no one's ever harassed her.

"I still make choices every day as a 41-year-old actress that I think of as self-protecting and wise," she wrote. "I have decided that my sexual self is best reserved for private situations with those I am most intimate with. I dress modestly. I don’t act flirtatiously with men as a policy."

If she's never been harassed or had any contact with Weinstein or anyone else involved, why was she commenting at all? When people pointed out the obvious, that she was blaming Weinstein's victims, she responded by claiming that they took her comments out of context.

Bialik went on Facebook and Twitter: “A bunch of people have taken my words out of the context of the Hollywood machine and twisted them to imply that God forbid I would blame a woman for her assault based on her clothing or behavior. Anyone who knows me and my feminism knows that’s absurd and not at all what this piece was about. It’s so sad how vicious people are being when I basically live to make things better for women.”

There wasn't much context to take anything out of. All the criticism of it I've read discussed the article as a whole.

From the Israeli paper, Haaretz:

...She seems to buy into the theory that Orthodox Jewish education peddles — as do other fundamentalist religions — that covering oneself up and avoiding unnecessary physical contact with men makes women less vulnerable and more empowered. When you don’t expose skin, you can still be exposed to danger. All one has to do is read the testimony of pious Orthodox women who have been assaulted (often by upstanding Orthodox men and rabbis in their own communities) to dispel this myth.

The article continues:

Some of us feel we’ve been around the block with Bialik before. Her self-described “bleeding heart liberal while socially conservative” brand may be geeky, religious, vegan and modest, but it’s as much a lifestyle brand as Gwyneth Paltrow’s is, replete with multiple books and a website.

...

In the past, however, when her words appeared on friendly turf like her own website, and before that the Jewish parenting site Kveller, she was somewhat shielded from the public reaction — even when it came to hot-button issues like Zionism and Israel.

Now that she is playing in the big leagues of The New York Times op-ed page, she can no longer get away with complaining that her words are being “twisted” or distract us with a Facebook Live confessional. She must either stand by her clear implication that it is her “conservative choices” and not being “the hot girl” that have somehow kept her safe from the Harvey Weinsteins of the world — or apologize for saying so.

Chariots of the Gods

The author of the book. He didn't appear in the movie.

 
I told this story before somewhere on here. When I was in junior high school, a social studies teacher got completely off the subject and described how the statues on Easter Island were carved by space aliens using lasers. And once they were carved, he asked the class, how did the aliens move them around?

Someone suggested cranes.

No, he said.

Trucks?

No, no, he said. They wouldn't need that stuff. They would just use an anti-gravity ray! It was so simple.

He lost me there. Yes, he lost even me. And I believed in that crap back then.

Another social studies teacher generally believed in evolution, but he thought humans were the result of aliens breeding with apes. 

I don't know which I saw first, Chariots of the Gods or In Search of Ancient Astronauts. I just learned today that they were same movie with a different narrators.

I just watched Chariots of the Gods on Fandor for the first time in about 45 years. I can see why I was creeped out by it when I was in the fourth or fifth grade. I went to see it in the theater with my mother and brother. As we left the theater, I was convinced. It must be true. There was no other possible explanation.

I was surprised that my mother never considered the possibility. She didn't say why. It wasn't worth thinking about.

All these years I assumed it was produced in Utah like some of those other crap documentaries, but, no, it was made by Germans and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Documentary features must have been awful back then.

Rose McGowan, Harvey Weinstein, Ben Affleck

Rose McGowan is mad at Ben Affleck. Affleck condemned Harvey Weinstein, but didn't mention that he already knew he was a rapist. Affleck knew, McGowan said, because she told him. Weinstein raped her and instead of telling the police, she told Ben Affleck. I don't know what she expected him to do.

Rose McGowan is only talking about it now because she's quit acting. She kept quiet about Weinstein for ten years until the statute of limitations ran out. How many women did the Zionist Weinstein victimize in that time? Why didn't she put a stop to him? If she had called 911 ten years ago, it's likely that Weinstein would still be in prison today.

Police departments in New York and L.A. are scrambling to find criminal charges they can file against Weinstein. New York City police are contacting other police departments to alert them to crimes he may have committed in their jurisdictions.

So should Affleck, Matt Damon and others have risked their careers to bring down Weinstein when his actual victims wouldn't even call the police?

Of course they should have! They're millionaires. They get paid a fortune they don't deserve for doing something other people would do for free if they could. If they won't lift a finger to stop a serial rapist, what good are they?

I can't understand why these people didn't have more enthusiasm for bringing down a pig like Weinstein.

Shia LaBeouf

Well, crap. I hoped Shia LaBeouf would end up on a chain gang in Georgia. He just got probation and has to go to anger management. Racism management is what that scumbag needs. And since he was bragging about having a house full of guns, he needs a felony conviction that would bar him from owning firearms.

Thought Spiral: Andy Kindler, J Elvis Weinstein discuss Jerry Lewis

 
Listened on YouTube to episode 24 of Thought Spiral, the podcast featuring Josh "Elvis" Weinstein and Andy Kindler. Their discussion turned to Jerry Lewis.

Andy mentions that it used to be that, in comedy teams, the straight man was considered the more important performer. That's why it was Abbott and Costello and not Costello and Abbott. The straight man got paid more.

This brought them to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

Here's what I managed to transcribe. Kindler's comments are in bold.

Listen to the whole thing here.

Did you know----were you annoyed when you first found out---or did you doze off to sleep when you first found out the straight men were paid more in comedy. Or did you not even buy that as a truth?

I never really----I never really worked through it. It's never been an issue for me.

I am fascinated with it. Because the straight men, they go, Oh, yeah, the straight man used to get paid more. I don't understand it. Why?

Well--

Could Bud Abbott go [makes Lou Costello-like noises].

I saw a self-serving interview with Jerry Lewis---

(Laughter) Or should you just say, "an interview".

--talking about he and Dean breaking up. You know. And he would go We had to break up because every article was about Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. And Dean was there, too. But every single one---how could he take it? How could he take it? Every single article was Jerry Jerry---

I would bet that even in his later life, Dean Martin--that would make Dean Martin turn red.

I'm sure.

...

You heard that in that interview---I heard the interviews, it's almost every interview, he's talking about, I knew how funny Dean was. I knew how funny Dean was. Nobody knew! They all loved me. I mean, even like, who got more babes? Interestingly enough, I did.

Right--You'd think because---

Whose singing did they enjoy more? Mine!

Right--

But he's---what an asshole he must have been---I don't know---may he---and I don't really care whether he rests in peace. I don't care if he rests in peace or if he's agitated and rests for eternity saying LAAADYYY! You knew something was coming like that.

I was hoping.

Jerry Lewis is somebody that, if you love him, you love him.

Right.

And I love him for King of Comedy.

Yeah. That's the only thing you love him for. That's the only thing you'll ever cite.

No, I think that the kitchen sink comedy that he did--

Yeah

--did make me laugh sometimes. And also, laughing AT him is one of the greatest things of all time.

Right.

'Cause, like, when he had that variety show and he had Charlie Callas as his co-host and he built up the bit that Callas was going to do and then it bombed.

…

Well, I mean what's weird--I mean is, his legacy as showbiz asshole is so much longer than his period of being a star. It's like 40 plus years of him being known in the public consciousness as this fucking blowhard asshole, based on his thirty years of success.

Yeah and also I think nothing gave him more pleasure--and to everyone else's chagrin--when he would turn on an interview. I mean, I would like to listen to it, but----"So where did you live while you were doing that movie?" DOES THAT MATTER?

Right. Maybe you could do your homework.

So----his passing---- [hesitates]

Come on.

His passing did nothing for me. ---no, I feel sad in a way.

It makes me feel better for writing all that stuff  I did about Jerry Lewis. I was right to focus on the child abuse, though.

Ecstasy, Hedy Lamarr, 1933

Do people still know about this? It seems like I read about it more than once in the 1970s, that Hedy Lamarr had a lengthy nude scene in the 1933 European film Ecstasy. I guess that after going through years of nudity-free cinema in the 1940's, '50's and much of the '60's, Americans were startled to learn that there was such a thing as nudity way back then. Nudity is no longer a novelty and I don't know how many people know who Hedy Lamarr was anymore, so her big nude scene is no longer interesting trivia.

So I finally watched Ecstasy. It was listed in the "silent films" section of a Roku channel. It was essentially silent with no intertitles. It was completely nonverbal except for some muffled German dialog.

I've heard that, in the silent era, that was how films were judged----the fewer intertitles it had, the better it was as a movie.

It looked pretty modern, good quality print. Had a lovely crane shot.

Hedy marries an older man. She's disappointed on their wedding night. They don't consummate their marriage. Unhappy with their sexless union, she runs home to her parents. She rides horseback to a river where she swims naked. She unwisely leaves her clothing draped over the back of the horse which runs off forcing her to chase after it naked. This is how she meets a virile young engineer she starts sleeping with.

It wasn't the first movie with a nude scene, not by a long shot. But it's believed to be the first mainstream movie with a simulated sex scene and female orgasm.

Harvey Weinstein, Troy Duffy

Troy Duffy. Avoid this moron.

There was a documentary in which Harvey Weinstein didn't appear but played a role off-camera. Overnight was the story of moronic bartender Troy Duffy. I've written about it before on here.

Duffy was from Boston, was in a band. Boston wasn't big enough for them so they took the band to Los Angeles. He wrote a screenplay called Boondock Saints and was about to sell it to some other producer, so Weinstein, just to ruin the deal for other guy, rushed in and bought the script without reading it. He gave Duffy a better deal, letting him direct the movie and throwing in a recording contract for his band that no one had seen or heard.

Documentary filmmakers went to work filming the rags-to-riches story. It didn't turn out the way they thought. It was released with the title Overnight.

I haven't seen it in a while. I can't remember all of it. But Duffy was a moron. He thought threatening people was a good negotiating tactic. He said, "We got a deep cesspool of creativity here." He refused to pay anyone in the band, he thought Harvey Weinstein wished he were him, he said he showed up at meetings hungover wearing overalls and he thought this was admirable in some way.

When things start to fall apart and he doesn't know what to do, he says, "Is there anyone else we can threaten?"

There's a scene where he speaks to Ray Carney's class at Boston University. He starts pointing at individual students and telling them they will never make it in the movie industry.

I don't want to give away the ending, but it doesn't go well. He finally makes the movie but with a lot less money for different producers. And he made such a bad deal with them that he gets nothing from DVD sales or television. All he gets is a cut from the brief theatrical release which was only done to publicize the DVD.

Poor fool.

Ronan Farrow, Harvey Weinstein

Ronan Farrow

I don't even LIKE Woody Allen.  I just don't think he molested his daughter. The accusation against him was that he sexually abused her on a single occasion on August 4, 1992, between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. at Mia Farrow's house in Connecticut. There were four witnesses present---Moses Farrow who was thirteen, two nannies and a cook. One nanny said that Allen and Dylan were never out her sight for more than five minutes. Moses was with them the entire time and said that nothing happened. The cook says that it didn't happen---at no time did Allen and Dylan disappear together causing everyone to scramble to find them.

Mia Farrow made the accusation the very next day, so the memory was fresh in everyone's mind.

The one nanny who said it COULD have happened later wrote a book in which she professed her love and devotion to Mia Farrow.

I think it's terribly suspicious that Mia Farrow is still friends with Roman Polanski and is dismissive of his sex crime, and I think it's extremely weird that Ronan Farrow's comments about his sister's alleged molestation usually take the form of jokes on Twitter.  And his mother keeps retweeting them.

Soon-yi Previn is a 47-year-old millionaire with a masters degree from Columbia. If she was victimized by her husband she can say so herself. She and Allen have been together for about thirty years.

I don't like Ronan Farrow's attacks on his father. I don't like his work in the Obama administration meddling in other countries. He was working for Vietnam War criminal Richard Holbrooke who was part of the ghastly Phoenix Program.

But I've got to give him credit. Ronan brought down Harvey Weinstein. He made himself look like a big shot in the process, of course, but it's about time.

Harvey Weinstein

“Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings.”
--Marlon Brando

Everyone has turned on Harvey Weinstein. There's not much you can say to question the motivation of the wealthy movie stars who are accusing him of sexual harassment and in some cases rape. Brad Pitt physically threatened him after he harassed Gwyneth Paltrow, but Matt Damon and violent recidivist criminal Russell Crowe helped quash a New York Times report on Weinstein's sex crimes in 2004.

Reporter Sharon Waxman had traveled to Italy to report on Fabrizio Lombardo, who Weinstein put in charge of Miramax Italy. "According to multiple accounts, he had no film experience and his real job was to take care of Weinstein’s women needs, among other things," she said.

Weinstein lumbered into the New York Times newsroom demanding they stop the story. He was a major advertiser in the paper.

"After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted," she reports.

Rose McGowan attacked Ben Affleck for issuing a statement that he was "angry" about Weinstein harassing and assaulting women, but not admitting that he already knew about it. McGowan claimed that she told him about after Weinstein attacked her and that he responded, "GODDAMNIT! I TOLD HIM TO STOP DOING THAT". He knew about it and all he did was tell him not to do it anymore?

Hillary Clinton has denounced Weinstein as have the Obamas.

I just hope this will be the end of him. Is it too late to send him to prison? I hope at the very least that he won't be rich anymore.

The Piano, 1993

I finally watched The Piano only 24 years after it was released. I had gotten the gist of it watching Siskel & Ebert and from other reviews. A lot of people made fun of it for this, but I thought Harvey Keitel looked okay naked. He looked healthy but plausible for a guy in his 50's, not like the middle aged body builder movie stars they have now. He was 54 then and looked like he could beat the crap out of Tom Cruise.

Wouldn't it ruin a piano to leave it out on a beach for days?

Anna Paquin was only 9 when they cast her in this thing. She had no acting experience. She won an Oscar for it and she's been working steadily ever since. There are people who are opposed to children acting, but that's the best time to do it. Adults never have that kind of instant success.

I remember when she won her Oscar. She was interviewed on her way in. Apparently the grown-ups didn't want her getting her hopes up. She told the reporter, "I'm not going to win," and seemed to really believe it, although that may have been her Oscar-winning acting at work. A reporter commented that she should have an interesting acceptance speech if she won.

She looked truly surprised when Gene Hackman read her name. She walked up and stood for a few moments even after the applause died down trying to catch her breath before thanking everyone.

The movie was okay I guess, but I didn't especially like it.

A disturbing fact about the Flying Wallendas

The seven-person chair pyramid that killed two of them.

The Flying Wallendas are circus performers best known for doing high wire acts without a net. As you might imagine, a number of them have been killed and horribly injured over the years.

According to Wikipedia:

In the following years, Karl developed some of their most impressive acts, such as the seven-person chair pyramid. They continued performing those acts until January 30, 1962 when, while performing at the Shrine Circus at Detroit's State Fair Coliseum, the front man on the wire (Dieter Schepp) faltered and the pyramid collapsed. Three men fell to the ground, killing Richard Faughnan, Wallenda's son-in-law; and nephew Dieter Schepp. Karl injured his pelvis, and his adopted son, Mario, was paralyzed from the waist down. Dieter's sister Jana Schepp let go of the wire to fall into the quickly-raised safety net, but bounced off and suffered a head injury. [emphasis added]

Mario was 21 when this happened.

Why on earth were these people allowed to adopt children?

Mario at age four already forced to perform dangerous stunts.

Kindler, Weinstein, Thought Spiral, Modern Family

Looked for a picture of them doing the podcast, but I could only find stuff like this.

So I was listening to Thought Spiral on YouTube. This is the podcast where comedians Andy Kindler and J Elvis Weinstein engage in long, free-flowing conversations. They likened it to My Dinner with Andre at one point. Apparently they talk for hours and Weinstein edits it down to a little over an hour. They've done over twenty of these things. It's amazing that they can keep it up.

I learned things I didn't know. I was surprised that Andy Kindler uses so much marijuana. He said he participated in some of these podcasts while under its influence. He kept losing his train of thought and had to ask what he was just talking about.

Kindler mentioned that he once auditioned for a role on Modern Family. 

By coincidence, I watched a video of the cast of Modern Family.  They sat on stage. They took questions from an audience, but the person would ask a question then they would all sit there without saying anything, each actor apparently waiting for someone else to answer.  That's the trouble with a large ensemble cast----no one takes charge.

Someone asked who they'd like to have as guest star on the show. There was awkward silence. Then Ariel Winter spoke up. Andy Kindler, she said. Then more awkward silence. Then the two boys, Nolan Gould and Rico Rodriquez, named an actress they apparently found especially attractive and they high-fived. Nolan is a member of Mensa and supposedly a genius in real life and Rico plays Manny who at least thinks he's terribly smart. They wrecked that illusion. (Sorry, kids.)

I know this isn't very interesting. But it's a shame Ariel Winter didn't know Kindler was auditioning. She could have pulled a few strings.

Hub City (1997)

A pretty good short about Lubbock, Texas, hometown of Buddy Holly. Fifteen minutes. The filmmaker said he was scouting locations for another movie, so we see some interesting spots, often run down, perhaps abandoned buildings. Most are static camera shots of static subjects so it could have been as a filmstrip, but that's okay. With narration about the city, Buddy Holly and his death.

Available on Fandor

I never entirely understood the appeal of Buddy Holly, but I don't listen to music in general so what do I know. I've also never understood what people like about Texas. People who are from there seem to like it. I lived there for a couple of years when I was six or seven. If I had children, I'd never let them attend school there and I would be in constant fear of being railroaded for a crime I didn't commit and ending up on death row, a surprisingly common occurrence there, although the percentage of the overall population wrongfully executed would be fairly small. The United States in general is one big hell hole in that regard.

Scotty Beckett in happier times

Since I wrote about some terrible incidents during Scotty Beckett's sad decline, here are photos of him in what I hope were happier times.

With Jane Powell, Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor.

 

Ishmael Reed on Trump calling Kaepernick a "son of a bitch"

When I was kid we noted that the term "son of a bitch" was an insult to one's mother. Over time we stopped thinking about it. Elderly Massachusetts billionaire John Kerry cheerfully referred to one of the Secret Service agents assigned to protect him as a "son of a bitch". I knew a woman who called her own son a son of a bitch.

But I knew a Southerner who worked at a gas station where he was attacked by a customer. There's no self-serve in this state. He pumped this woman's gas and she became enraged when some dribbled on her twenty-year-old Nissan. As he wiped it off, she called him a "son of a bitch". He took this as an insult to his late mother and called the customer a cunt. She punched him. He staggered and realized he was starting to black out. She was about to punch him again so he grabbed her by the head and threw her to the ground. The woman called the police and whined that he attacked her. A geezer who witnessed it talked to the police telling them the terrible thing he had done.

After the police went, he asked the geezer why he was defending her.

"Never hit a woman," he said.

"She hit me just like a man."

"Never hit a woman," the geezer repeated stupidly.

Don't call people "sons of bitches". Not everyone takes it in good humor.

Which brings me to this. Ishmael Reed writes about the protests now going on in the NFL (read the full article here):

One of the CNN commentators, a Trump supporter, asked why a demonstration that was conducted by Kaepernick spread after Trump’s provocative remarks? Trump has criticized the NFL before. Good question.

Is it because he referred to the mothers of Black players as “bitches,” a taboo in Black culture? Basketball players like Kevin Durant breakdown into sobs at the very mention of their mother’s names. These mothers are often single parents who make extraordinary sacrifices in order that their male children avoid death at the hands of their misguided peers or by the police. When it came time for my younger brothers to be ambushed by the police, a rite of passage that every Black kid has to traverse, my mother warned the two policemen, who were assigned to harass my younger brothers, that she was a domestic servant in the home of the mayor’s family. They backed off. She was a Southerner before she moved to the North and often Southern Blacks relied upon good White people to protect them from racists.

Mother reverence is also something that is fixed in Black tribal memory. Mother’s Day in Black churches is the most important date on the church’s calendar. Booker T. Washington said that for his White slave-owning father, there was no difference between a cow and his mother.

So, calling Black mothers bitches recalls a time when Blacks were bred and treated like animals. Even White feminist pundits, the only women who are acceptable to the networks, didn’t pick up on this angle of the controversy, which adds to the feeling held by Latina, African American, Native American and Asian American feminists that White feminists have little empathy for their issues. Some of the pundits’ comments might be the reason that Blacks are prone to hypertension. Like the ignorant ESPN commentator who told Black sports commentator Stephen Smith, on the twenty-seventh of September, that the police only kill Black criminals, which doesn’t explain why Blacks of all classes are harassed, including a famous Black tennis star, who is currently in court with the policeman, a member of the NYPD, who tackled him. A case of mistaken identity. Even the Bush administration issued a report proving the existence of Racial Profiling.

Winky on Rocky Jones, Space Ranger

Winky, second from the top. Posing with a space ladder.

I should quit doing this, but I turned on a movie to put myself to sleep last night. It was called Menace from Outer Space. They just strung together episodes of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, an old syndicated TV series from the mid-1950's.

25-year-old Scotty Beckett played Rocky Jones' sidekick, Winky. I don't know why they gave him such a stupid name. Beckett had been a Little Rascal for a short time then became a prominent child actor in Hollywood. He was friends with Elizabeth Taylor and Roddy McDowall. As an adult, he became a drunk and a gambler, but refused to pay gambling debts or repay loans. He was arrested after an armed robbery at a hotel. He was found passed out drunk in the hotel basement with a gun but not the money.

Because he didn't have the loot and the clerk couldn't positively identify him, Beckett was charged only with possession of a weapon. He got out on bail and fled to Mexico with his wife and 3-year-old son. They ran out of money. He used his acting ability to pass fake cashier's checks from a nonexistent bank to local merchants. When Mexican police tracked him to the hotel where they were staying, he tried to sneak himself and his family out. Police spotted him and Beckett and the cops got into a gunfight. Luckily for all involved, no one was killed.

Beckett spent four months in a Mexican jail before being sent back to the United States where he plead guilty to the weapons charge and was given three years probation. He must have felt pretty stupid running off to Mexico when all he got was probation anyway.

But, of course, that ended his role on Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. Kind of weird that Winky was such a tough customer in real life.

Shooting in Las Vegas

I was awake late last night watching the news from Las Vegas on RT. At that stage, in the immediate aftermath, they were reporting twelve dead. I thought, well, it could have been so much worse. I didn't hear any more about it until I got home from work and, my God, it was much worse.

ISIS claimed responsibility but police say the guy had nothing to do with them. Is ISIS taking credit for things it has nothing to do with as a matter of policy or do they really not know?

The killer's father had once been a 280 pound escaped bank robber who was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. He (the father) ran a Bingo hall near here while he was hiding from the law.

Gun sales dropped once Trump became president. Gun nuts honestly believe their own nonsense. They thought Obama was going to take away their guns so they bought all they could while it was still legal. Stock prices for gun manufacturers have gone up now. Mass shootings are a boon to the gun companies.

Guns are for morons. The reason pawn shops are full of them is that nobody needs them. They cost a lot and they're of no use to anyone so they're the first thing you get rid of. Who do they think they're going to shoot?

V.J. Jerome, The Negro in Hollywood Films, 1950

A link to the pamphlet, The Negro in Hollywood Films, by V.J. Jerome published in 1950. Jerome was chairman of the National Cultural Commission of the Communist Party, USA, at the time. He was the first person to be questioned by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in Hollywood.

https://archive.org/details/negroin00jero

He discusses and is critical of some then-recent films, Pinky, Intruder in the Dust, Lost Boundaries and Home of the Brave as well as earlier, blatantly racist movies. Mentions the fact that, for some reason, American movies about the Civil War were almost all pro-Confederate.  

Lousy royal children

"Do you like this new Royal Baby? The first one was OK I guess but I don't like the new one. This new Royal Baby is an asshole."

--MST3k's Bill Corbett on Twitter

The English are finally starting to attack the royal family again.

“When Prince George goes to school, they [the media] look at his jumpers and, you know, £150 ($200) for a jumper, that’s a food bill for a family of four for a lot of people and that’s outrageous and people are outraged by that,” the Sunday Express quoted Anti-monarchist Dent Coad as saying.

“We had all the media attention recently when Prince George started school," said Labour counciller [sic] Ken Ritchie. "We don’t know if he will grow up to be as bad as his grandfather or maybe his great grandfather. Or that he will be as bland as his father. All we know is that at some stage George will be king, unless we change the system or unless he has an unfortunate illness or accident.”

This was reported by Fox News, outraged that anyone would criticize the royal family. They were inexplicably defending a literal welfare queen and her chronically unemployed spawn.