#29

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A Selection of Greenfield Village Photos

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#25

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The Return of Jack Collier (Chapter One)

The Return of Jack Collier

A Jack Collier Story

By Brett N. Lashuay

 

 

A quick catch up: Jack Collier is still in a coma, after being shot by Jill Piper at the end of Jack and Jill. While we were waiting to see what would become of him, his secretary Debbie told us a surprising story which changed how we’d look at him and his past. We begin with Jack’s fate still very much in question as we begin…

Chapter One: Coming Up For Air

Vuvuzela

These white people, they refuse to integrate. They go to South Africa, can't even speak the language*. They even bitch about the local customs like the Vuvuzela** instead of embracing the land they've decided to visit. They should be sent back where they come from.


*Yes, I know one of the languages is English, but let’s face it, no one from either America, Australia or The UK speaks it very well these days and none of them speak it like the locals do. Also, be fair, no one actually speaks The Queen’s English very well. Mostly because she keeps changing the rules! Cause that’s how Lizzy 2 rolls mutha fucka! Can’t nobody tell Beth twice how to speak her language, right? She can just, like, say what she feels? And if people don’t like it, then like whateva. She'll just tell you to fuck off cause she’s like The Queen and shit! Ya know? Don't fuck with Big E, she will get Phil Dog to bust a cap in yo ass.

**Yes, I am once again refusing to hate something just because the internet told me to.

#24

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Video Game Movies

This video just gave me an idea...

The reasons video game movies suck, are the same reasons most movie novelizations suck. Going from the new media and asking to down grade it to the old media is a bad idea. It doesn’t seem to work properly. You can start from a book and turn it into a movie or a video game, but turning a video game into a movie or book just doesn't work as well. It can work, but it rarely actually does unless you take away a lot of the things that make it a game and turn it into something that's almost unrecognizable. I seems you can dumb a concept down, but you can’t really smarten it up without adding on huge amounts of scaffolding.

Partly it’s because if you make a game into a movie, you end up with a B-Movie. Do a death-per-minute count on a game sometime and see what sorts of movies match up to those numbers. It’ll either be a war movie or something direct to video. I’m not saying that this makes games bad, just that they’re not movies and shouldn’t try to be. It’s a separate art form (and it is an art form Mr. Ebert) that follows a different set of rules. We don’t expect a movie to conform to the rules of painting, and I don’t think we should try to make video games conform to the rules of movies.

Twilight Moms

I keep seeing this photo about the Twilight Moms, and to be honest, I think it's hooey. I remember lots of 40 something men talking about when Britney or the Olsens were going to turn 18. I remember the “Countdown to Legal” clocks. I remember being very creeped out by guys discussing how cool it would be when... the girl who plays Hermione in Harry Potter, was going turn 18 and do a spread in Playboy. It was creepy because she was like 15 at the time. No one actually called the cops though, no one bitched, everyone got on with their day.

No one made a big deal about these guys drooling over these under–aged girls. It’s just been accepted that men will look at young girls, always has been.

I think people are just pissed because women are being active in a way that they've always been told to be passive. Girls aren’t supposed to drool, and they’re not supposed to be interested in fit, hard, muscular, and worst of all young(!) men. The little boys posing as men, particularly the ones who are soft, flabby, weak, and worst of all, old(!) don't like it. These bitches are our tree house and they brought their girl-cooties with them! OH NOES!

Fuck! We’re going to have to… I dunno, learn not to be douchebags all the time or something. We’re going to have to learn where a clitoris is, or not to leave our undies on the floor all the time, or even (GASP) listen when they talk or some shit. I mean seriously, once they start panting over young boys (like men have been panting over your girls since the year dot) then shit is going to start getting real! They may want to vote next! Hell, any minute now they might start resenting us smacking them around when we’ve had a bad day. WOMEN! I tell ya!

#23

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A moment of stupid

I had a really stupid moment the other day. I was reading the news and this story about 4.2 million gallons of oil are gushing into the Gulf of Mexico everyday jumped out at me. The reason it did is the moment of stupidity. I actually had a moment where I thought “Is that still going on? Is there still oil gushing in?”

I knew there was still oil in the Gulf, and I knew that the clean up effort had barely started, but for some reason I thought the well had been plugged or had run out or something. I think it’s because this has been going on so long that my brain had sort of assumed that they’d at least fixed part one of the problem. I ask you to please remember that this is a self-admitted moment of stupid, probably brought on by a lack of sleep. I have since slept and acceptable amount of time.

Still, has anyone else had a moment like that? Where you sort of assumed that the problem was being dealt with by clever people in government and industry? You know, the ones who are working together to build a brighter future for us all? Yeah, those guys from the shorts they used to make in the ‘50s. Then you wake up from your fever dream of jet packs and atomic cars (seriously where the hell is my atomic car?) only to find that neither group can manage to save the day? I’m not actually blaming anyone who hasn’t managed to stop the leak by the way. As far as I can tell, that shit is fucked up in ways that science and industry hadn’t quite anticipated. It seems that I can blame BP’s board for not making sure that their platform was safe. As far as I can tell, they had things secured with bubble gum and the dreams of Chinese orphans.

Now, I don’t wish to blame the manufactures of Bubblicious, but their fine product should in no way be used to secure oilrigs. I have no idea about the use of Chinese orphans dreams, I personally use the Faith in Santa from American Schoolchildren when I need a really strong bonding agent. Well, that and fairy farts, but I think it’s a given to say you use fairy farts as a catalyst to make Santa Faith stick.

Open Letter

Dear Ma-ti,

Look, we’re all very sorry we made fun of your power. It was very mean of us to claim that Heart is a useless element, or even to suggest it wasn’t an element at all. That was both thoughtless and cruel. For that, we deeply and sincerely apologize. Okay?

Now will you get to the rest of the Planeteers, yell “Heart!” and fucking summon Captain Planet already? Seriously dude, this letting the Gulf get buttfucked while you sit around negotiating who gets to be on the Burger King Glass is a dick move of epic proportions.

#21

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#20

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#19

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Debbie's Story Part Seven

Debbie’s Story

A Jack Collier Story

By Brett N. Lashuay

 

Read last week’s entry here

 

 

Part Seven

December 20^th

Mandolin Rain

#18

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#17

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#16

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Frank Miller's Hamlet

The soldier rides off, I ask God to be with him, since he sure as hell doesn’t seem to be with me. I look at the two schmucks they sent with me, I send them away. I need a moment alone, time to reflect. I need to think about men. What are we? Animals that just eat and shit and fuck? A beast? Nothing more? If there is some kind of god up there, watching over us, he didn’t give us these great big brains for nothing. I can’t stand around like some sort of coward, just saying that things have got to get done, not while I’ve got the strength to act.

I watch as the army marches, for nothing more than the joke that fame and fortune awaits them. I feel sort of ashamed as I stand here watching. Dad’s dead, murdered. Mom’s stained, made a whore to my uncle. All of Elsinor under that son of a bitch. I’m going to kill him. Some how. From now on, all my thoughts are going to be bloody, or they won’t be worth a damn.

Oh for the love of Zaxxon's Missile launcher!

This... this isn't a joke, is it?

I just saw the Sony Move and... and... it's a Wiimote!

Oh man! NO! Sony, don't rip that off. The wiimote is the reason I don't play many Wii games. Well, that and there are only a few titles I want to play. Since anything that isn't a Nintendo exclusive is ugly as fuck on the Wii, most the games I've bought are for the PS3 and the Xbox. I really, really hate wiimote flailing. It's not very fun, it's actually painfully at times, and unless Sony is having better luck with its tech, it just won't work. I haven't found a motion controller yet that works worth a damn. Some of the point and click stuff is okay. Zack and Wiki seemed alright, although I only watched Syd play it.

Part 15

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Please wait until you get my signal

05

Hey, pictures.

More

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Debbie's Story Part Six

Debbie’s Story

A Jack Collier Story

By Brett N. Lashuay

 

Read last week’s entry here

Part Six

December 13^th

Follow You Down

 

Anywhere you go, I’ll follow you down, I’ll follow you down, but not that far.

Gin Blossoms

 

BP Boycott

Let’s look at the problem of s boycott of BP seriously for a moment. Now, I won’t go into the problems of boycotting gas stations (most of which are owned by small business owners barely scraping by with food and cigarette sales) because others have gone into that. I won’t even go into the problem of directly boycotting BP at all. Others have already beat that horse and I think its dead. I want to address the problem of how can you be sure that you are actually boycotting BP?

Let’s go with something on my desk, a can of Pringles, yeah, that’ll do. Let’s have a look at the can, shall we?



Yup, Sour cream and onion.


Colorful cardboard tube with foil inside and a plastic cap. What’s the point I hear some asking.

Some of the chemicals that process paper are petroleum based. At least, they can be. The chemicals that go into dyes, emulsifier for those dyes, and so on are also petroleum or can be based on petroleum. The plastic coating on the outside of the tube, the inside of the tube, the cap itself are all obviously petroleum based.

That’s one can of Pringles. Unless I call Proctor & Gamble and demand they tell me where the printers, tube makers and cap makers get the materials for their products, it’s useless my demanding where they get the fuel to gas up their trucks. Go a head and put “Petroleum By-Products” into your favorite search engine, then try to figure out were the makers of each of those by-products gets their raw materials. You’d have better luck trying not to buy things that were made in China.

BP has hundreds of subsidiaries. Hundreds. They sell to almost every industry on the planet, in one way or another. This is a big group people, it’s more than the consumer’s price point at the gas station.

This is why the dream of “Let the market sort it out” is a dream. No matter how mad you are at BP, you can’t hunt down all the things that might have BP’s product in them. Not unless you dedicate your life to the prospect. I’m sorry to burst your little “Power to the Consumer” bubble, but it’s not realistic in this case. If you don’t buy BP gas, you’re only hurting someone who barely makes pennies on the gallon and might make nothing if you use a credit card, since the service fees literally erase their profits in some places.

The only thing you can do is to get really angry and make sure everyone knows how angry you are about this. Hope that Obama and company are as socialist as the conservatives said he was because the only thing that can beat down an offender that large is a government that’s just as big as them. I really hate to tell you this, but this company is so big that you not fueling at a BP station isn’t going to hurt them very much. We’ve got to make sure that they understand the full depth of our outrage. Write a letter to your senator, and get your friends to do the same. Make the government take their assets, sell off their company and use the money to pay for the clean up. Get these people arrested, and make sure they do time in a jail in a state that was directly affected by their monstrous spill. Don’t just take your business elsewhere, but get out the goddamn pitchforks and wave some bloody torches.

Hell if you really want to start something, buy BP stock. Then you’ll be a shareholder, which is about the only group these people actually feel they’re answerable too anymore. You can do it, but not just by deciding to buy gas somewhere else. And it’s not like Exxon is some paragon of environmental friendliness either. I mean, where are you going to go for that gas? Pretty much all the oil companies suck the big one on that point, BP just seems to be the worst.

Funny thing, the Western

I’ve postulated before, but clearly not online because I can’t find evidence of it, that the Spaghetti Western is like Film Noir all over again. Film Noir took a genre that was growing stale, the crime picture, and injected new life into it by adding what at the time was controversial subject matter. Many of the themes contained with in Film Noir are things the mainstream public weren’t either unwilling to discuss or didn’t want to have in their movies. They were able to get away with making these films because they were B Pictures, which means they were made for much less money and thus could still be profitable even if most audiences rejected the film. They often starred B Grade actors or A list people who’s stars had fallen or decided to slum it for a day or two in order to make a more interesting picture.

The Spaghetti Westerns were much the same, taking the worn out Western* for a ride and injecting much needed life into it. Like Film Noir they were cheap, often being made with bits of capital collected from investors all over Europe and starring one or two Americans who were slumming. The only this was that the social morays they wanted to challenge were so taboo that you couldn’t do them in Hollywood at all. Most those things are on the… well… seamy side of things. There were more graphic levels of violence than people had seen before, there was a certain amount of nudity and there was the sort of treatment of women that you just don’t get anymore… with good reason. It’s not even that you can’t do some of those things, but you really shouldn’t. It’s not needed, there is no statement to make there anymore, unless you want to make a statement that you’re still 14 and have no idea how to deal with women… YES I’M TALKING TO YOU ELI ROTH!

Much like Film Noir, Spaghetti Westerns come and go every once in a while. About ten years ago, there wasn’t a lot of people talking about Film Noir besides a few cinema geeks. Slowly the Noir ball started rolling and about five years ago, there was a pretty big wave of Film Noir things suddenly available. I might be my perception, but I seem to remember three companies rolling out Film Noir collections, box sets and what not all at once. In less than 18 months, my collection went from 5 or 6 movies that were called Film Noir to about 30 or 40. I don’t know how many really, I haven’t counted in a while, I’m guessing.

My point is that it had gone from something only movie geeks talked about to something everyone was talking about. For the last two years or so, I’ve been hearing people talking about Westerns and the Westerns of this style specifically, in the same sort of way that they were talking about Film Noir a few years before the DVD explosion happened. I can’t help if people had something kindled by Deadwood, since the serious rumblings started just as that was being canceled. The difference of course is that just about every Western (Pasta based or no) is already on DVD. Whatever horse picture fetish you have from Tom Mix style to John Ford and all the way to the Italians and beyond, you can already get sets, collections and so on. So there isn’t a stream of new discs coming out for you to discover. However, there may be a resurgence going on anyway. There has been a steady stream of New Westerns being made since at least the mid 90s, and some of them have been pretty good. Not many of them have been really big though, they’ve all either been small independent pictures or made only a small dent at the box office. I just wonder if there isn’t going to be a sudden surge of popularity in the mainstream soon.

Part of the reason it’s in the forefront of my mind is that I played Red Dead Redemptionand so a lot of people have sort of come out of the closet as it were as being long time Western fans. The game has been doing fairly well, and it’s really fun if you want to play it. I’m just find it interesting and wonder if a lot of people are going to star clamoring for more westerns.

Personally, I came late to the Western party, but for a good reason. See, Westerns always looked the same to me. All those John Wayne movies where he struts all look exactly alike to me. I’ve seen pretty much all of them as well as every other damn western made between about 1956 and 1989, but with a few exceptions, I really am lost at sea. It’s all guys, being sort of manly in a very Conservative Golden Age sort of way while the women act all submissive and shit. Then they all go on horsey rides, because that was really the only reason they wanted to make these movies. Unless you’re watching an Italian western, then the men are being sort of manly in a very Film Noir sort of way. Tough, but more because they’ve been beaten hard by life instead of because that’s the way Regan likes them. The problem is, all the Spaghetti Westerns more or less look the same too. A lot of guys in long coats and ponchos riding across what is supposed to be the American west, but is CLEARLY Spain or northern Italy.

I actually know more about Westerns from reading about them then watching them. I’ve got a fair few, and I’ve seen a few since my childhood. I should point out that there is a break in my life, about age 18, where I started to really pay attention to movies and things that came before that can become sort of blurred. Unless I’ve seen at movie in my later years, after I started hunting down movies to study on my own, I really can’t distinguish the memory of one western from another. Which one had John Wayne wearing an eye patch? Fucked if I know. Hang on… True Grit, unless he wore one in two movies. My point, and I do have one, is that it seems like the time may be right for everyone to take the old six-shooters again. Might be that we’re due, it would be interesting to see this generation have their hand at the most heavily used genre in film history. Could be cool, but then it could remind us why we put westerns into mothballs in the first place.


*If I tried to talk about how the Western as a genre has risen, fallen, risen again and then fallen hard only to be resurrected it would seriously side track me. Suffice to say, there were a lot of westerns made once upon a time, but by the ‘70s or so it was a more or less dead genre. It’s only kept on the merest hints of life support these days with the occasional movie coming out now and then. Yet, there are still movies being made and there does seem to be at least a small a market hungry for more.

Another post filled with photos

12

Debbie's Story Part Five

Debbie’s Story

A Jack Collier Story

By Brett N. Lashuay

 

Read last week’s entry here

Part Five

December 6^th

The World I Know

My cat, Fancy

I went outside to throw some bread to the geese and their two babies. The cats slipped out while I was at the door. Vienna got run off by the parental geese, Fancy did not. The goose came running at Fancy, who ignored it and kept in the direction she was walking. The goose fell back a few steps and ran up to Fancy again, wings splayed, hissing loud. Fancy looked at it for three seconds and then hissed at the goose, and the goose fucked off.

That's our Fancy.

With one little hiss, Fancy explained to the geese that while she had no problem with them being in the lawn, she was the boss applesauce. She is the head fuzzy butt in charge around these here parts and fuckin' with her could be seriously bad for your health. I just loved how the goose shuddered itself for a second and then just walked away as if to say "Oh! It's you! You um... you look different from the back."

Frankly, and honestly, with no hyperbole or exaggeration... I LOL'd.

Movies I bought

I bought Black Belt Jones, along with three other Blaxploitation (or as the box calls them 'urban') movies and 10 Spaghetti Westerns tonight. Syd says I am my father’s son. I say that one of the westerns has Ringo (Mutha fuckin') Starr in it and both sets were cheaper than the Amazon price actually. Saved about $7 by getting them at Best Buy... which is sort of interesting.

Probably a few Retroflix Reviews coming out of this.

Fruits are of the devil

We can’t ban guns yet, some politicians are still alive.

I really hate election years.

So, I was sleeping right. Actually sleeping. In bed and everything. I was having a wonderful sleep for four glorious hours… when the doorbell rings. I decide it must be some delivery and try to go back to sleep. But then the bell rings again, and AGAIN! Must be a package I need to sign for. So I rush down stairs, if only to stop the swinging and the ringing of the bells, bells, bells. Of the bells, bells, bells, bells!

So I get down stairs, and what do I see? Some jackass who wants to be county commissioner. Now the guy can clearly see me, in my torn t-shirt, my pajama pants, my hair going in 937 different directions and my eyes which are clearly resenting this being open bullshit. So the guy sees me and I know he does because he apologizes for pulling me out of something.

Now, a human being would have said sorry, handed me a note, and walked away. This guys isn’t a human being though, he’s a republican. Well, former republican because he’s running as an independent. I guess the party chose a tea-bagger who has seen the inside of more prisons than I’ve seen the inside of gummi bear bags. I know, because he told me. He told me many things over the course of the next seven hours as he talked and talked, and talked and talked and talked. An endless stream of stats and promises and the rolling and tolling of the bells. Of the bells, bells, bells; of the bells, bells, bells, bells!

Now you may ask, why I didn’t just tell him to piss off, or slam the door in his face. Well, I had just been woken up and it honestly didn’t occur to me. What was occurring to me was that the closet with the weapons was right next to me. I could have opened the door a crack, grabbed the tire thumper and let him know how I felt. That seemed like too much effort though. I thought he’d be done soon, but he kept going on and on and on.

So he left eventually and I was allowed to go back to bed, but of course sleep was beyond me at that point. This happened hours ago, but I had to sit and weep for a while about having a nice sleep spoiled and then consider my vengeance. This is all I could come up with.

If you vote for Will Molnar for Oakland County Commissioner, he will ruin your sleep and probably rape your pets. I suspect he’s probably the sort of person who read Twilight as well, so fuck him.

YAR! Photos!

Bird's Nest Soup

Who was the first person to decide to eat bird's nest soup? It’s can’t be hunger, because there are birds RIGHT THERE! Why eat the nest when you can eat the birds?

All I can think is you've got the Emperor of China sitting around and saying... "*Sigh* I'm bored of lark's tongues and jellied squid brains. I want something... I dunno... different. I wish someone could get me something new. I'm tired of the same of stuff."

And you've got this poor cook, sitting there with that look, you know? “But... but... but... It took me weeks to work out jellied squid brains.”

And his assistant comes in with this little shell of bird’s nest. “Have you seen this? Comes from Singapore.”

“What is it?”

“Some kind of nest or something.”

“What’s it made from?”

“Swiftlet puke, mostly.”

“Is it easy to get?”

“No, it’s really expensive. Don’t know why anyone would bother gathering it.”

“GIMME!”

“What?”

“SOUP! I’ll show that inbred so-and-so!”

And thus bird’s nest soup was born.