The Monsters are Silent

I met Bobby “Boris” Pickett in the mid-90’s, at a Famous Monsters of Movieland convention in Universal City, CA. We sat in the hotel bar for about an hour and talked about novelty music and old Universal monster movies. He thought the woman playing the piano in the bar was really cute.

A couple of hours later I watched him perform, what he referred to as “a medley of my hit”. It was, of course, The Monster Mash.

It was a graveyard smash.

Bobby Pickett died of leukemia yesterday. He was 69.

He was one of the good ones.

So long, Bobby.

Searching For Attention

Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve been fascinated with some of the behind the scenes tools that it has, things that show me what articles people are clicking on most, what links they follow to get here, that sort of thing.

The most interesting (to my mind, at least) is the list of search terms that people enter at Google or Yahoo and end up here. Below is a list of terms used in the last day:

patrick glover  
Cho shine        
novelty hillary countdown watch           
cho seung rubber duckies         
parenthetically speaking           
nappy headed hos        
cho liked rubber duckies          
“gun control” -australia 

Now, I realize that people search for some odd things, and I often have to really think about it to figure out how a search term applies to my blog (often the words are from several unrelated entries), but I want to know who the hell is searching for a novelty hillary countdown watch.

This is Not A Review of Grindhouse

So, I saw Grindhouse last night. Liked it a lot, wonderful, weird little movie. Still not sure why they actually expected to make money on it, but that’s a topic for another time. The topic for today is lying.

See, I spent some time reading various reviews online and one thing stuck out, and it’s related to something that’s been bothering me for years. The problem centers around Kurt Russell’s character, Stuntman Mike. In the first part of the Stuntman Mike storyline, Mike is drinking water. He tells another character that he’s a teatottler. Later in the film, we see him drinking whiskey.

Several reviews have listed this as a mistake on Tarantino’s part.

Several reviews have, apparently, been written by morons.

Look, this is a simple concept. When the information you’re receiving in a film is coming from a specific character’s dialogue, you have to consider the possibility that the character is lying. In this case the character has an obvious reason for lying and taking him at his word is just, well, stupid.

Too often people assume that the information that comes from a character’s lips is gospel and too often they call it a mistake when later story elements contradict what the character said.

If you run into one of these people, do me a favor. Smack them upside the head and tell them to stop it.

Mass Murder and Rubber Duckies

My mind doesn’t work like most people’s.

Over at The Smoking Gun, they’ve uncovered several ebay purchases by the Virginia Tech killer, Cho Seung-Hui. It seems that he bought, well, 37 rubber duckies. All from an Illinois dealer who specializes in rubber duckies.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering why Cho purchased 37 rubber duckies and what he did with them.

Me, I’m wondering how the dealer is feeling right now. Imagine finding out that one of your customers, someone who bought a shitload of rubber duckies from you, is a mass murderer.

How weird is that?

Crooked Little Vein

My favorite writer of comics is making the jump to prose. His first novel, Crooked Little Vein, is due out this summer, and may be pre-ordered from Amazon by doing the clicky thing here.

Warning: Not for the faint of heart. Ellis has been posting his research for this book on his site over the last year or so, much of it dealing with sexual undergrounds you never even imagined.

Here’s what Kinky Friedman has to say about the book:

“Warren Ellis writes like a bi-polar Raymond Chandler. Crooked Little Vein injects at least two welcome elements into the tired, clogged mystery field: a a little death and a little life. It’s also funny enough to make you shit standing.”

If you don’t know who Kinky is, here’s what Joss Whedon has to say:

“I think this book ate my soul. Warren Ellis has mapped out the psycho-sexual underbelly of America with a foreigner’s clarity and a lunatic’s glee. Funny, inventive and blithely appalling, this book is Dante on paint fumes.”

So do the clicky thing, ‘kay?

The Elephant in The Middle of The Room

Something happened this week, in Virginia. Something terrible. I’ve spent several days trying to pull my thoughts together on the subject, because I felt that it had to be addressed. Otherwise it would just be sitting there, waiting, like that proverbial elephant.

As always, the best place to start is with the facts. At about 7Am, in a Virginia Tech dorm, Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed two people, then left the scene. Two hours later, the gunmen entered a class building and killed 31 more before taking his own life. Between shootings he tok the time to record and mail a manifesto of sorts to NBC, his way of explaining how things had come to this.

My friend DOF talks about this extensively on his blog. You should read the whole post, but there’s a piece that I’d like to share with you now.

Whenever there is a mass tragedy, there is a wave of sympathy followed by a much larger wave of speculation as to how such a thing can be prevented. Legislators will be grandstanding in front of cameras and microphones, pretending that they know the cause and the solution. TV and radio pundits will go on long after we will all wish they’d just shut up. It will be blamed on lack of gun control, too much gun control, on godlessness, or on religion gone haywire. The finger will point at television, video games, rock music, “goth”, food additives, schools, parents, drugs, alcohol. The solution will be the opposite of all those things, no matter how incompatible they are, plus more guards, more surveillance cameras, tougher laws, and above all, prayer. Lots and lots of prayer, especially in the schools.

He’s right, of course. Everyone will be looking for something to blame this on, something to point a finger at. The issue will be politicized, the drums will start beating.

And it’s all hooey.

Because people don’t want to place the blame where it really belongs. With us.

Seung-Hui Cho was just a kid. A kid with some mental problems, difficulities communicating. A troubled soul. He had problems with kids. He had problems with teachers. He had problems with religion.

At some point along his downward spiral, someone should have reached out, pushed past his defenses. A peer, a teacher, a counsler, a family member, a spiritual leader. Somebody should have made a connection with this kid before he became a monster.

Make no mistake, that is what he became. A monster. A despicable creature that destroyed hundreds of lives.

But it didn’t have to be that way.

How many more monsters are out there, waiting for their moment of fire? How many more of these creatures have we already made? Can they be reached? Can we do anything to prevent more monsters from being forged?

Don’t misread that. I’m not talking about getting rid of video games or violent movies. I’m talking about making a connection, treating those that are different then us as human beings. Being nice.

Once again, DOF sums it up well…

I suggest kindness.  Just random acts of kindness, small words of encouragement to others at unexpected times for no reason at all.  It won’t prevent events like this from happening.  But it will shine a light against the darkness.  Kindness is our most powerful rebellion against tragedy.

Sudden Surges of Idiocy

I seem to be getting a much larger than normal amount of traffic, and a quick look through the various management tools and stats that WordPress provides shows that the culprit is the post about Imus. It appears many people are actually googling the term “nappy headed hos”.

Sigh.

Sometimes I really wonder about people…….

Jack Bauer Does Not Sleep. He Waits.

If you had told me, back in January of 2000, that the kick ass action star of the next decade was going to be Keifer Sutherland, I would have laughed my ass off.

And I would have eventually been proved wrong.

I’ve been watching the first couple of seasons of 24 over the last week or so. I don’t understand how they managed to get a character that tough and that brutal on American television. As the hero for fuck’s sake!

Early in the second season, Jack Bauer (played by Keifer) is in an interrogation room, with his boss, questioning a bad guy. Suddenly he pulls out a gun and kills the guy. As his boss stands there in shock, Bauer grabs the guy by the shirt and says, “I’m going to need a hacksaw.”

A hacksaw.

He cuts off the guy’s head and carries it around in a bag.

You know all those stupid internet jokes about how tough Chuck Norris is? Jack Bauer would gouge out Chuck’s eyes and socket fuck him.

Nappy Headed Hos

I don’t normally bother to post about scandals. They’re almost always based on idiocy (and Don Imus calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team a bunch of nappy headed hos is certainly idiocy of the first order),  but Wanda Sykes was on the Tonight Show last night.

Apparently, the media keeps calling her and asking her what she thinks about the Imus scandal. Her response? Glad you asked…

“Since when did I become the spokesperson for nappy-headed hos?”

Another Giant Gone…..

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the age of 84. I’ve been trying to gather my feelings for a meaningful post all day, and I’ve distilled them down to a single word:

Fuck.