And Yet Another Tough Old Animal

#5 in an ongoing series:

An Aussie mongrel named Jerry.

All creatures that on Earth do dwell . . .

Rio Bravo (1959)

Howard Hawkes movie, script co-written by Leigh Brackett. Stars the Duke as a Texas sherriff trying to keep a murderer in jail despite the efforts of the man's evil rancher brother to spring him. Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and fifties teen idol Ricky Nelson assist him. Angie Dickinson as the Duke's love interest.

John Wayne and Walter Brennan are John Wayne and Walter Brennan: their product rarely varies. Dean Martin is playing a drunk - what a stretch for him! Ricky Nelson is inadequate, but it hardly matters. Climax is nice little example of Chekhov's adage about guns on mantlepieces.

All in all, a pleasant, moderately entertaining Western, though with way too many longuers.

Still Another Tough Old Animal?

I'm still not sure if this article quite belongs in this sequence. After all, Koko is only 33 (just middle-aged in gorilla years), and her use of sign language to complain about her toothache is hardly stoic. Eating the business card, though, trumps all those caveats.

The Village: Brief Review

What an extraordinarily dumb movie. The most obvious explanations turn out to be the answer for both of the major mysteries.

And of course these "explanations" prove Shyamalan to be a pretty clueless city boy, as there's no way the radically circumscribed setup he depicts could really work, economically or psychologically.

This movie continues Shyamalan's downward slide. I admired Unbreakable more than most people, but I actively hated Signs and The Village amplifies that flick's flaws: ponderousness, turgid dialogue, and awkward allegory. You ain't the next Spielberg or Hitchcock yet, buddy, and if you keep this up, you never will be.

Too Sane

I just finished reading L. Sprague de Camp's biographies of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard.* They left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Part of my reaction is surfeit, having read them both in one evening . . . but jeez louise, the word around town wasn't wrong when it said this Lovecraft bio was hostile! de Camp's almost invariable procedure is to quote Lovecraft and to follow up with a challenge, offering his opinions as the final word. In some cases this is justified - Lovecraft was one very weird cat in a whole host of ways - but ultimately it seems egotistical and ill-mannered of a biographer to intrude himself so repeatedly and so obtrusively. It's also obvious despite demurrals that de Camp really dislikes Lovecraft as a person. It seems a clash of temperaments and values: the practical sensible man versus the unworldy dreamer.

There's more sympathy in the Howard bio - you would damn well hope there would be, as de Camp spent much of his career subsisting parasitically on the corpse of Conan - but there's way too much psychobabble for my taste. And even here I feel de Camp finds Howard a little distasteful.

Ultimately I think De Camp was just too sane to really understand people like Lovecraft and Howard. I'm reminded of Damon Knight's comment in In Search of Wonder: "Howard had the maniac's advantage of believing in whatever he wrote; de Camp is too wise to believe wholeheartedly in anything."

I look forward to taking a look at some of the other Lovecraft bios, S.T. Joshi's and maybe Frank Belknap Long's. But not just now. In a few weeks. Right now I'm tuckered out on these two of the Musketeers of the Weird.

*OK, OK, the latter is a colloboration with his wife Catherine and another person. Just in the interest of precision.

One Description Fits All

Last night I noticed this blurb for a movie on my satellite system:

The actions of people trigger consequences which propel new events.

For some reason I can't quite recall the flick's name today.

Speak nothing but good of the dead . . .

Following the above advice, here's a provocative article from last year. I remembered it immediately when I heard of Reagan's death.

Still Another Tough Old Animal

Third in an apparently ongoing series:

Meet Timmy the Tortoise, recently deceased veteran of the Crimean War.

Synchronicity

I received issues of two different magazines in the mail this week: The New Yorker and Asimov's Science Fiction. You wouldn't think they would have much in common, would you? Ah, but they both have stories entitled "Chicxulub," written by T. Coraghessan Boyle and Larry Niven respectively. Both victims of iridium poisoning, obviously.

If We Aren't Living In A Computer Simulation Right Now . . .

. . . we probably never will be.

Insert appropriate sentiment - whatever it should be - here.

The South & the Presidency

I've been thinking a lot about the South and Democratic Presidential politics. Until very recently, I believed unreservedly in the conventional wisdom: that to have any possibility of winning the Presidency, the Democrats had to nominate a Southerner; even better, they had to double-size the order with a Dixie Veep, as Clinton did with Gore.

I did notice that Gore almost won in 2000 without any Southern electoral votes at all (well, aside from Maryland, and I think it's pretty well agreed that Maryland is no longer Southern but has mutated into a Mid-Atlantic state instead). He almost won, in fact, even without Florida. If he had taken either New Hampshire or Nevada, both of which Clinton had carried . . . Well, it's best not to torment oneself with the endless numbers of 'might have beens' from 2000. But even so, this was the exception that proved the rule - that is, tested the rule -- and the rule held. Or so I thought. It was simply cutting it too close. At least a few Southern states were needed to be in play to be able to assemble a winning electoral college bid.

But there have been a spate of articles recently that challenge that wisdom, and they've prompted me to begin to reconsider. The Nation proposed an alternative Southwestern strategy: write off the South, which is lost anyway, and work on building a reliable compensatory base in Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada. Then there was an anti-Southern strategy – or anti-Southern, depending on your POV - article in Slate yesterday, discussing the arrogant sense of entitlement the South has, despite having been responsible for an excessive number of the historical problems that have plagued the country. That piece had a link to a fascinating article in The Washington Post (which incidentially also recommends a southwestern strategy). It's clear this meme's time has arrived.

Were the Democrats to attempt to go with a Southern strategy this year, their choices are fairly circumscribed. A Yankee with a Dixie Veep doesn't seem to carry any water (remember Dukakis/Bentley?), so Kerry/? or (even worse) Dean/? doesn't sound too promising. There are only two Southern Presidential hopefuls in the race right now: John Edwards and Wes Clark. I don't know if Edwards could even carry North Carolina in the fall, much less any other state in the region. And Wes Clark has never been elected to anything before, so we have no idea what kind of pulling power he might demonstrate.

The Republican party is clearly consolidating itself ever more firmly in the old Confederacy. Even with hypothetical Southerners on the ticket in the top, bottom, or even both slots, there may well be no winnable Dixie states for the Democrats, with the possible exception of Florida. (Depressingly, one of the articles suggests that even Florida may be beyond reach!) What strategy will our nominee take? Will he continue to plow money and time into ads and campaign stops for this region, or will he cut his losses and direct his resources elsewhere? This is one of the most important decisions he will make.

I have to say it would be great if some way of bypassing the South to Presidential power could be found, because the most reactionary elements of the Southern character tend to assert themselves in Presidential elections and impose themselves on the nation as a whole. Fundamentalism, racism, violence as a first resort, anti-intellectualism . . . (Gee, can you tell I don't much care for my native region?) I'm not as sanguine as the fellows devising these pretty shortcuts, however, that there is a such a golden path.

My thinking is still evolving, and I will be reading more on this . . .

Another Item For The "Modern Life Is A Parody of Itself" File

A Harrison Bergeron moment in the news.

Two Tough Old Animals

Guess who's still alive: a pet of Winston's.


And it turns out that the oldest chimp in the world is a pretty famous fellow.

Choices, Choices

On the eve of the Iowa caucus and the real beginning of the nomination season, I thought I should put my choice(s) on record. I've done it semi-Australian ballot-style, fav followed by second, third and fourth choice: 1. Wesley Clarke; 2. John Kerry; 3. John Edwards; 4. Richard Gephardt.

I'm aware Clarke is not actively running in Iowa; this is not my pick for that particular contest but my choice for the nomination, as of this snapshot in time. Over the past few weeks the top three guys have shifted their position in my estimation and will probably shift again. There were three constants, however: Gephardt remained at fourth, as he's the least palatable and most marginal of the acceptable guys; and Dean and Lieberman have both remained beyond the pale. (Lieberman is like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense - he's dead & doesn't know it yet. But Dean -- God save the Democratic Party from Howard Dean!)

Later: There is a God!

PETA Fun

Two lovely items starring our favorite animal-rights freakazoids.

First, a nice comic for your little ones, with the charming title, "Your Mommy Kills Animals!"

Next, PETA uses a billboard to inform us of a highly dubious assertion, one which will be of some interest to any dairy farmer's offspring.

Today's Neologism: "Neuticles"

You know, a lot of those of us who pisseth against the wall -- as the Good Book sometimes says; that's men to you heathen -- seem to feel very inadequate. Practically everything they say or do boils down to, "Mine's bigger!"

Here's a ridiculous example of displacement. (Probably not work-appropriate.)

" . . . a book . . . containing nothing but heiroglyphicks"

And there's yet another explanation of the whole Voynich Manuscript mystery. Remember some of the previously proposed solutions: Roger Bacon's notes on his previously unknown scientific accomplishments . . . a sucide manual for the Albigensians . . . a transcription of Ukrainian, Chinese or Vietnamese . . . Leonardo da Vinci juvenalia . . . a text in a synthetic language . . . The latest theory, I report with glee, is considerably less sexy. Pop goes the balloon!

(And if you're not familiar with the whole Voynich Manuscript mystery, read up on it here, as it's far too convolute a matter for me to even begin to explain to the uninitiated here. To whet your interest, I'll just say that the Voynich Manuscript was the prime real-life inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, and that its history involves - either directly, tangentially or speculatively - such figures as Roger Bacon, Edward Kelly, Dr. John Dee, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and Sir Thomas Browne.)

Jumping In The Lake

Well, I've gone and done it: I've joined the wondrous and splendiferous realm of the blogosphere. (Oh, shoot me now!)

My intention for now is to use this as a place to comment on books and film, with an occasional (hopefully limited) excursus into politics. Plus, of course, some of those weird links which would otherwises be inflicted on friends via email.

My personal goals here are: 1) to post with some degree of self-imposed regularity, and 2) to compensate somewhat for my verbal maladroitness by expressing my opinions more completely and precisely in writing than I can in conversation.

And yes, the name of this blog is from an Iago speech. Bwahaha!