Buffalo Rider

I just saw one of my old high school teachers get run over by a buffalo. That's what became of his character in the movie Buffalo Rider. I was watching the Rifftrax version. The movie was worse than I expected. It got a PG rating, apparently for scenes of terrible things happening to animals and three or four homicides. At least the human deaths were simulated.

My teacher got third billing in the closing credits. As far as I know, he's retired, I would guess in his early 70's.

I mentioned this in another entry. He told the class I was in that he had been in a movie over the summer. But this was a huge class packed with sophomores. It was our first term of high school and we didn't know each other and we didn't know him. No one wanted to be first to enthuse over it. So we just sat there like lumps, not showing the slightest curiosity.

Some of my memories of him:

One time, I saw him walking down the hall alone. He briefly gestured as if he were talking to someone.

He started to say "Jupiter", realized he was talking about Greek, not Roman gods and changed to "Zeus", so it sounded like "Juice".

An idiot kid was mad at him because he apparently reported some of the kid's friends who were drinking beer in the parking lot before attempting to drive home. Sheeland told him he didn't need to justify anything to him and the kid shut up.

He directed a Shakespeare play. I thought it was fine, but I heard him tell another teacher he wouldn't try to put on a play in such a short time again.

One day, he talked about how he borrowed somebody's Harley Davidson. The engine died at a stoplight. He had to kick start it and it wasn't working, and I think he said the thing fell over and was so heavy he had trouble standing it up again, or maybe he just had to push it out of the street. I don't remember. It was forty years ago.

He revealed that teachers talk among themselves about student papers. That's how they discovered that two kids turned in identical papers in different classes. He read part of the two papers in class to show that they were hip to our shenanigans. The paper was very bad which is probably why they were sitting around the teacher's lounge laughing at it.

One time, he showed a picture of an elaborate tomb in Egypt but couldn't remember what it was. I tried to tell him that it was the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut, but it was the first time I ever tried to utter the word "Hatshepsut" and didn't say it right. I can say it effortlessly now.

I debated whether to put his name in this entry. What if he googled himself? Would it make him feel like a celebrity, or like someone was posting cruel memories of times he may have been slightly embarrassed at work?

Joy Reid, gay hater

Joy Reid tried to deny it. Now she's sort of admitted to writing all that anti-gay stuff on a blog in 2006.

The first I heard about it was from an article I read online in The Nation which pointed out that all her anti-gay stuff was pretty typical for a "liberal" blogger in 2006.

It was pretty recently that Democrats suddenly turned pro-gay. In the '80's, Jesse Jackson was the only pro-gay candidate for the presidential nomination and the Democrats were scrambling to get rid of him. More recently, Al Sharpton was the only one in favor of same sex marriage.

As governor, Michael Dukakis banned adoption by gay parents and sent state troopers to remove foster children from homes where foster parents failed to sign forms affirming their heterosexuality. His campaign was pleased whenever gay rights activists protested against him. He thought it would be his ticket to the White House.

Al Gore denounced gays. "It's not just another alternative lifestyle." He supported anti-gay bills by Jesse Helms and vowed he would never take campaign contributions from gay organizations.

You can watch video of Hillary Clinton smiling as an audience protested against her opposition to same-sex marriage.

Remember when Democrats suddenly turned pro-gay? It was the first time I really understood Black activists who thought that white liberals only supported the Civil Rights movement because it gave them something to be self-righteous about.

Many years ago, my family went out to eat. We went to a barbecue place downtown. I was somehow aware that it was the restaurant section of a gay bar. We sat there in a booth. My sister was infuriated that two women were sitting together on the same side of a booth. Gay bar or not, I had no idea what her problem was.

Years later, she knew she was supposed to hate Russia and I could see her struggling to think of a reason why. All she had was that Vladimir Putin was photographed without a shirt.

Later, she and the rest of the Democrats latched onto Gay Rights. The United States had briefly inched ahead of Russia in the area of Gay Rights and they decided to lord it over them.

Russia had repealed their laws against homosexuality ten years before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state sodomy laws, but that didn't matter. Remember the calls to boycott the Olympics in Russia? Homosexuality was a felony in half the states in the U.S. when the Olympics were held in Atlanta. If I remember correctly, Georgia repealed their sodomy law shortly before the Olympics.

Russia passed a law banning people from promoting abnormal sexual practices to children. It wasn't clear if this included homosexuality. Violating the law would get you a $40 fine. No one ever got a ticket for it. Russia is under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights which was going to rule on whether to overturn the law.

But, in the lapdog press in the U.S., pundits wondered what would happen if two male athletes kissed during the Sochi Olympics. What would the Russians do?

They had no idea that it was perfectly normal for two men to kiss in Russia. (See the Soviet movie The Diamond Arm.) In fact, two women athletes in Russia got excited over a victory publicly hugged and kissed. The Russians thought nothing of it, but the U.S. press declared that they must have been Lesbians trying to shock everyone.

Diamond Tongues, Canada, 2015

The story of a sadly struggling actress who becomes increasingly screwed up, making worse and worse decisions to the point that she tries to sabotage those doing better than her. She's cruelly exploited by an acting teacher. At his house, she comes out of the bathroom to find him sitting in the living room in his underwear. She's in the audience of a play she disrupts when it's going too well for the actors.

Trying to be an actor sounds awful. There's another movie called OK, Good about an actor trying to get work in commercials, and a documentary called Camp Hollywood about actors, mostly Canadians, trying to make it in Hollywood.

In Camp Hollywood, we see what actors will put up with for a credit to put on their resume. They work without pay for an obnoxious, possibly coked-up director. For actors who can't manage even to get unpaid gigs like this, there's a book Amazon keeps recommending to me which calls for actors to get a camcorder and make their own zero budget movies.

A book I did buy for someone else (and wrote about here) suggests that actors can earn a pretty good living outside of New York and Hollywood. There's work for them in every large city and there's a lot less competition.

Reading about Allison Mack's arrest for sex trafficking, it turns out that there's a thriving acting community in Vancouver, BC, with actors appearing in Hollywood productions filming in Canada.

Diamond Tongues stars Leah Goldstein. The character she plays comes across as kind of a pleasant airhead. She has blond hair with dark roots. Makes her sad descent into loathsomeness more interesting.

Available on Fandor.

Bill Cosby

Remember when Cosby sent his own daughter to prison? One of Cosby's victims became pregnant and their daughter, Autumn Jackson, was going to sell her story to the tabloids. But first she very kindly offered Cosby the opportunity to buy the story instead. So, of course, Cosby got her arrested for extortion.

At the time, Charles Grodin had a show in MSNBC and was mad at Cosby for his promos on Turner Classic Movies. Cosby said he liked only old gangster movies because the current ones had too much obscene language. I don't know why that bothered Grodin so much, but when the story broke about Cosby's illegitimate daughter, Grodin was outraged by the hypocrisy.

It was far, far worse than Charles Grodin ever imagined.

I didn't like the The Cosby Show or the wave of discipline-oriented family sit-coms it spawned. Finally culminated in the drama Seventh Heaven the star of which turned out to have sexually abused a few children over the decades. I found it embarrassing and perverse whenever people called Cosby "America's Dad". Is that what people want?

Lyudmila Pavlichenko

Long ago, I watched the bonus features on a DVD of Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (Иваново детство). They interviewed the guy who played Ivan, and he said that as a kid he was surprised he got the role because he didn't think he looked Russian. He thought he looked like an American kid.

So, if we take Nikolai Burlyayev's thoughts as a 12-years-old to heart, there is such a thing as being "Russian-looking" but some Russians look American,

Now, first I have to admit, I confused Eve Arden with June Lockhart. Lockhart played the mother on Lost in Space. This entry was supposed flow naturally from the last post about Lost In Space. But now it's just random.

In 1944, Eve Arden appeared in a movie called The Doughgirls playing Sgt. Natalia Moskoroff, the least Russian-looking Russian I've ever seen in a movie.

The movie was a comedy about some Army women staying at a hotel in Washington, DC. There's also a Soviet woman soldier there played by Arden. She was a sniper who had killed hundreds of Nazis, apparently based on Soviet Red Army sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko who was credited with killing 309 (it's believed the actual number was over 600.)

So Eve Arden makes a lot of bad jokes about how Russian women all kill Nazis. Her mother would kill a couple before breakfast each morning.

I'm not really going anywhere with this. So here's a video from a fairly recent Russian movie about Lyudmila Pavlichenko set to music by Woody Guthrie:

Lost in Space was too long

Our attention spans haven't been compromised by all this digital crap we have now. In fact, my attention span was compromised by too much 1950's TV.

"Oh, man. How long does this drag on?" I thought.

It was an old episode of Lost in Space. Did you know that thing was an hour long?

I had been watching a lot of half hour TV dramas from the '50's. Boston Blackie, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rifleman, The Twilight Zone. Trackdown, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

You can watch them in half an hour and get on with your life.

The Lost in Space episode didn't have enough plot for an entire hour. It was pretty obvious how it was going to end, and I always thought it was a children's show anyway, not serious science fiction, so I assumed it would cater to shorter attention spans.

I watched it to the bitter end. I was right of course. The Space Family Robinson was suspicious of the alien family that appeared on the planet a short distance from them. Then Will befriended the alien's kid but the two space families become suspicious of each other when the kids go missing.
 

Hulu doing Fyre Festival documentary series

I've never been interested in music. I have two brothers and a sister who are or used to be musicians, so I've been forced to attend scores of concerts and performances and forced to play music myself. I also don't like rich people, or at least I don't like IDEA of rich people. I might like them if I knew any.

So what do I care about the Fyre Festival? There's absolutely no way an event like this would ever have affected me in any way.

But I followed the story religiously. I couldn't identify with the victims---not the people who paid to attend the festival or the ones who lent millions of dollars to put it on, but I still wanted the monsters responsible prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

They did rip off local workers and businesses, too.

I just hope I'll be able to see the Hulu documentary series about it.