Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Mar 25, 2015 11:18:44 GMT -6
Got something bothering you, something on your chest, nagging at your mind, eating away at your very soul? Post it here in Black Hole, where there's a good chance no one will ever read it. *** The other day I was watching a rerun of "Leave it to Beaver". Beaver had just been assigned "Ivanhoe" to read for English class, and he liked it so much, his pointy little head was full of ideas of chivalry, of righting wrongs and rescuing damsels in distress. Okay in the first place, whoever wrote the episode was probably thinking of King Arthur or Robin Hood. "Ivanhoe" is a great novel, but it's not likely to excite the admiration of a nine-year-old. Early in the novel, Wilfrid of Ivanhoe (Ivanhoe is his family homestead name), who has just returned from the Crusades, participates in a tourney under an assumed name in order to uphold the honor of the Saxons against the hated Normans. Even though he WINS, he's badly wounded in the process and spends the rest of the novel recuperating! Only at the end does he finally get out of bed, to rescue Rebecca from a charge of witchcraft by fighting for her honor. So that's out of the way. So poor little Beav goes around trying to do the best he can. He tries to stop the neighborhood bully from picking on girls and younger boys, and all he gets for his trouble is the snot beat out of him while his friends watch. And the audience laughs! LAUGHS! Can you imagine it? A little boy trying to do right and getting knocked down for it? That's supposed to be funny? Not only that, his divinely wise father comes down from on high and tells him that knighthood might have been okay at one time, but it's in the past. Today we tell a policeman when we see a wrong that needs to be righted. "Discretion is the better part of valor," Dad says, which his big brother Wally translates as "don't go standing up to guys bigger than you." Basically they're saying Good Guys in White Hats only happen in the movies, not in real life. So not only is Beav an utter failure at being a knight, his dad politely tells him to knock it off, and the bully gets to go on being a bully. Beav gets to watch the idea of Doing the Right Thing crumble to the ground and die without even a decent burial. And the audience thinks all this is hilarious! No wonder the 50s were so screwed up!
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Post by Atoz 77 on Mar 30, 2015 7:52:46 GMT -6
The trouble with action movies these days is the target audience they seem to be going for is the kids who play these cartoonishly violent para-military games. I liked the first Captain America movie, and the Avengers movie. But this past weekend I had the chance to see "Winter Soldier", the second Cap movie, and I hated it. Literally the only parts I liked where the character parts, just Steve and Sam and Natasha (and sometimes Nick) interacting with one another. The plot was ridiculous and only seemed to be there as an excuse for somebody to start shooting at them every five minutes. Most of the action scenes were done by CGI characters and just looked like video games. Really how much visceral impact is there is watching a game sprite jumping around dodging bullets? I was bored to death through most of it.
A little while later I saw "The Mask of Zorro", a real old school action movie with actual people doing the stunts. The contrast could not have been more stunning.
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Post by Atoz 77 on May 26, 2015 7:19:35 GMT -6
You can learn some interesting things by reading the closing credits. The next time you're watching "Captain America: The First Avenger", pay attention to the pub scene, right after Cap wins the medal for rescuing the 107th from Hydra's work camp, and he's recruiting his "team". Dum-dum Dugan (Neal McDonough by the way; he played Lieutenant Hawk in Star Trek: First Contact") says, "You need to do one thing for me -- open a tab." So Cap goes to the bar to arrange it and the barman complains, "Where are they putting this?" Take a good look at that skinny barman -- he's the body double they used for the pre-Serum Steve Rogers!
And another interesting thing (or not depending on how seriously you take comic book characters); according to the credits, the other Howling Commandoes were Gabe Jones, Jacques Dernier, Jim Morita ("I'm from Fresno, Ace!") and Montgomery Falnsworth. But according to my Marvel comics back issues, there never was a Frenchman nor a Japanese American in the Howlers. There was a Brit, but his name was "Pinky" Pinkerton. Falnsworth was a completely different character from the same era, the superhero known as Union Jack.
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Post by Atoz 77 on Jun 8, 2015 7:23:48 GMT -6
Are you watching the miniseries "Whispers"? I only saw the first episode (to be honest I was just killing time waiting for something else to come on). It's obviously meant to cash in on the interest in the current "Slender Man" phenomenon, but couldn't they have gotten someone to write it who actually HAS children? It starts with a six year old girl who, at the prompting of a mysterious whispery presence called "Drill", picks up a hammer, wrench and screwdriver from the tool box and climbs a tree house in the backyard. This is a great BIG treehouse, mind you, one that must have been left behind by the previous owners. The little girl is actually forbidden to go up there by herself, and when the mother sees her, she calls her back down. The girl simply insists that she's playing a game and she (the mother that is) has to climb up and join her.
Now obviously she is not a Southern mother because she didn't say, "I said Get your butt DOWN here! NOW!" What she does is climb up after her. Once up in the treehouse, she again tells the girl to come down, and once again the girl says she's playing a game, and the mother has to stand on the X she's drawn in red paint on the floor. So the mother plays along! Sorry folks, the last thing you do with a disobedient child is play along with them, because that tells them that disobeying is all right! Nobody with an ounce of sense would have done that. But the mother stands on the X, falls through the floor of the treehouse and nearly kills herself.
At which point I'm asking... how could the little girl have weakened the floor to make it collapse with just a hammer and a wrench and a screwdriver? How would she have had time to do that and paint a red X on the floor? Evidently this is televisionland where a person only has to be out of sight for a fraction of a second to build an elaborate trap worthy of Wile E. Coyote.
The police take the girl into custody and treat her as if they thought she had deliberately TRIED to kill her mother. Which she did, of course, but is that really the assumption a reasonable person would make? Remember they don't know about the mysterious voice, not yet anyway. The little girl would have had to call 911 ("Can you help me? My mommie fell down."), and they would have found the woman unconscious at the bottom of the tree house. The natural assumption would be an accident. Even if the girl claimed that an invisible person called "Drill" had told her to push her, you would naturally assume the girl was upset and making up a story. You wouldn't assume the girl was a psychopath. But that's just what they seem to assume. They even call in two Federal agents to interrogate her (neither of which seems to have the slightest CLUE what they're doing, by the way). Oh, and then they just hand the little girl over to her father and forget about it. She turns up later in the story wandering around a hospital all by herself, and apparently still doing whatever "Drill" tells her to.
Ok so then it turns out that other children are also talking to this "Drill". The female agent tracks down the mother of a ten year old boy who had apparently built a home-made BOMB because "Drill" told him to. The boy had been killed in the explosion and now, at the agent's prompting, the mother suddenly remembers a homeless man lurking across the street (which she obviously had not mentioned to the police). And she is somehow, in hindsight, able to describe the man to a sketch artist in such uncannily accurate detail that the female agent recognizes him as her husband, an Air Force pilot who had supposedly been killed in the crash of his plane months before...!
This is supposed to be scary? Give me a break!
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Post by Atoz 77 on Jun 23, 2015 7:44:43 GMT -6
I can't really say I'm a Stephen King fan anymore. I've enjoyed a lot of his novels in the past, and I suppose he's still one of the greats. It's just that his novels don't have the punch that they used to. They don't hold my interest as well.
I just finished "Revival". The narrator relates how, as the age of six, he met a young minister named Jacobs. Then he tells how this sinister Jacobs keeps popping up all through his life. In his spare time, Jacobs loves experimenting with "electricity", convinced that electrical gadgets can heal people (a lot of cranks thought so in the 60s). Things are going great until his wife and son are killed in an automobile accident (described in horrific detail by King, naturally), upon which the minister renounces God and religion as a great "insurance scam" and resigns.
Just a side note here: I've noticed this in many of Stephen King's novels -- there are no true atheists, just Christians who are angry at God. They lose someone they love and blame God. I don't know if he really believes this is what atheists are like, or if it's simply that only this type of character would fit into his plots.
Okay then, the narrator grows up, becomes a musician, and meets Jacobs again thirty years later when he's a heroine addict and Jacobs is working the carnival circuit, taking "electrical photographs" of people. Only now he says it's not really "electricity", it's a strange form of energy that he's discovered and nobody else knows about. He makes vague references to alchemy and H.P. Lovecraft, and I suppose he's talking about "telluric currents", although he never says so. Those associations meant something to Stephen King, but not to me, not having grown up on Lovecraft. Jacobs hooks him to his gadget and cures his heroine addiction, like that!
So fast forward another thirty years and Jacobs is a faith healer, running tent revivals and healing people with his "electrical" gadgets. The narrator now has a steady, well-paying job working for a recording studio. He does some research and he finds that while Jacobs is curing a lot of people, many of them turn out to have funny side effects (the narrator had had some himself just after his addiction was cured). They do crazy things, a few even commit suicide.
Another quick aside: he claims there are lots of websites "debunking" Jacobs' cures, even though we readers know that his gadgets REALLY DO cure people! Apparently Stephen King has a low opinion of "debunkers" and seems to think they make up explanations without bothering to look into it. This is another thing I have a hard time forgiving him for.
So anyway the narrator tracks Jacobs down determined to confront him with the fact that his "experiments" are dangerous and must be stopped. Jacobs calmly tells him that he already HAS stopped. In fact he knows all about the side effects; they amount to 3 to 5 per cent of the total, and even then they almost always fade over time (as the narrator's own side effects have). Even with medical treatments, that would be considered acceptable. But the narrator of the novel can't seem to accept it. He has been researching "De Vermis Mysteriis" and H.P. Lovecraft's "Necronomicon" on the Internet and he's convinced that whatever Jacobs is doing is pure evil. These are "things man was not meant to meddle with" or some such baloney.
It's always a bad sign when you find yourself siding with the "bad guy" of the novel, but at this point I was. I don't think I EVER cared much what happened to the narrator. He wasn't a very likeable person to me. When I'm reading a novel I often cast well-known actors in the various roles. It makes it easier for me to visualize. In the role of Jacobs I cast Timothy Hutton (Nathan Ford in "Leverage"). As the narrator, Jamie Morton, I cast Wil Wheaton (nothing personal, Wesley; it just the kind of parts you've been playing lately).
So the narrator wants nothing to do with it. That is until a couple of years later when Jacobs contacts him again and blackmails him into helping with One Last Experiment. How does he blackmail him? The narrator's very first girlfriend, Astrid, has lung cancer, and he says he will let her die if he doesn't agree.
At this point things get really confusing to me. A moment ago the narrator believed this stuff was dangerous and shouldn't be meddled with. Now suddenly he's all for it if it saves his first love's life. But he still loathes Jacobs and doesn't trust him. I found this part tedious reading, but I was curious what the experiment was going to be.
In fact, most of the novel is tedious reading, with very little in the way of suspense to prod you on. It purports to show how this Jacobs keeps popping up like a bad penny all through the narrator's life, from the age of six to the age of sixty. The problem is to do that, it has to tell the story of this loser's life. It has to describe in detail his first interest in music, how he becomes a musician, how he meets Astrid, how they have sex for the first time, how they break up, how he subsequently becomes a heroine addict, mixed in with how his mother dies of ovarian cancer and his older sister is shot in the face by her abusive husband blah blah blah and through 90% of the novel I'm thinking, "Come on man, get on with the fricking story why don't you?" But the sad thing is I suppose all those tedious bits are necessary. You couldn't understand how he can be blackmailed without the early scenes with Astrid, for example. It just would have been nice if he could have made them a wee bit more interesting, but I'm afraid that for the most part Stephen is strolling down his own personal memory lane.
And the climax itself is a big downer. It turns out the Big Experiment Jacobs is trying to conduct is supposed to answer once and for all if there really is an afterlife. He's going to let a patient die and then bring her back to life with his gadgets and ask her what she saw. The narrator of course classifies this once again is "things man is not meant to know". Personally, as an atheist, I could have cared less. But what subsequently happened didn't make any sense to me in any case. It was just more Lovecraft references I suppose. I didn't understand it. A lot of the final scenes struck me as gratuitiously gory even for Stephen King. It was like he woke up and realized that the novel as a whole hadn't been all that scary, and tried to make up for it in the final chapter.
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Post by Atoz 77 on Jul 24, 2015 7:52:03 GMT -6
I was channel surfing the other day and happened by "Who Wants to be a Millionaire". Normally I don't bother with it, but a trivia question had just been asked and you know how it is... you can't resist pitting your brain against a trivia question. It was about the 1981 song "Rapture", generally considered the first recorded rap song. The question was: Who recorded it? -- Blondie, Duran Duran, Nirvana, or some rapper I'd never even heard of. Now, the contestant was a man who looked about my age (57 if you must know), so he should have known that the correct answer was Blondie (with Deborah Harry). But the poor schmuck was drawing a blank, so he called his daughter up on stage to help him! As soon as I saw the girl, I could tell at a glance that she wasn't even BORN in 1981! A fact which she confirmed a few seconds later when she said, "Dad, I wasn't born until 1989, so I don't have a clue. And now the whole country knows how old I am!"
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Post by Atoz 77 on Sept 23, 2015 8:15:21 GMT -6
I saw the premiere of "Limitless" last night, and I have to say I wasn't too impressed. The hero takes a drug which opens up "100% of his brain's capacity" or some such rot. Suddenly he can remember everything he has ever seen or read, can read so fast he can go through 20,000 personnel files in 2 hours, can do mathematical calculations in a heartbeat, blah blah blah. I don't buy it. There are still too many unknown variables in nature to allow half of these stunts. For example, how can he calculate the exact place, to the inch, that a subway train will stop? There would be no way for him to know the exact state of the brakes, let alone the reaction time of the engineer. To me it looks more like he's got hold of some new kind of "ice" that makes him THINK he's superhuman.
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Post by Atoz 77 on Oct 16, 2015 7:44:13 GMT -6
Some of these forensic police shows are ridiculous. I was watching "Bones" yesterday, and the victim was s security guard in a museum. In addition to being shot, he was also apparently bludgeoned over the head with a blunt instrument. Follow me now... the wound was so minor, the forensic medical examiner didn't even spot it during the autopsy (partly because the wound was hidden under his hairline, and partly because she was probably distracted by the thought that her friends "Bones" was in surgery, having been shot apparently by the same perpetrator). Well anyway, they manage to extract a few slivers of wood from the wound, trying to identify what he was hit with. Guess what? Somehow from those few splinters they not only manage to identify the exact species of tree, but also CARBON DATED IT, and found out that it was from the 7th century (or somewhere in that neighborhood, I forget exactly)! There are so many things wrong with this, I don't know where to start. First why would you even BOTHER to carbon date a piece of wood? It's lucky they did because it turned out to be from one of their own exhibits. And guess what? They narrowed it down to only one item because -- surprise -- this MUSEUM only happened to have ONE exhibit from that particular century! Amazing! Of course that enabled them to home in on a suspect, when otherwise he had been extremely careful to leave no forensic clues at all. This doesn't even stop to consider how they were able to extract DNA from wood that had been dead for over a thousand years, or how they got an accurate carbon 14 date from such a tiny sample, but hey this is television.
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Post by Atoz 77 on Dec 28, 2015 9:00:52 GMT -6
I was reading an article in the newspaper lately, about the Ten Best Movies of the year, immediately followed by another on the Ten Worst Movies and Television Shows. I got halfway through it before I realized that I never heard of any of them, let alone seen them! I guess they assume that everybody gets Showtime and HBO.
And another "Year-End Review" raved, among other things, about Amy Shumer, and how amazing she was in something called "Trainwreck" whatever that is. Amy Shumer? The only Amy Shumer I've heard of is a foul-mouthed little twit I saw on Comedy Central a couple of times. She wasn't the slightest bit funny, just annoying. I guess it takes all kinds to make a world.
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Post by Atoz 77 on Mar 11, 2016 9:29:11 GMT -6
I wish there was a television program that kept us up to date on what's going on with the space program. When I was a kid, we followed the Apollo program almost obsessively. Nowadays, we have no idea what's going on seriously. I saw some news item the other day where an astronaut had returned having spent a year in the International Space Station. I had no idea he had even been UP there.
Instead of that, all we get is ridiculous, over-sensationalized garbage like "The Unexplained Files". I don't want to hurt the feelings of those of you who may believe in UFOs, but it wouldn't be so bad if they also gave you the skeptical side of the topic. But they're plugging the "paranormal", so they can't let facts get in the way. I was watching one, showing footage of a Russian rocket launch, and as the rocket passed through the light cirrus clouds overhead, suddenly there was a bright, multi-colored aura around the rocket. They tried to pass this off as a "mystery" the like of which no one had ever seen before! Give me a break! It was only the ice crystals in the clouds refracting the bright light from the rocket's exhaust. It was obvious to anyone who has ever seen a parhelion, or mock sun!
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Post by Atoz 77 on Jul 15, 2016 8:20:50 GMT -6
What's wrong with this picture? I was watching a kid's show on PBS yesterday, the whole purpose of which was to get kids interested in astronomy and space exploration. And they did a pretty good job, too. The subject was moons. The characters jumped on their little spaceship and flew to the moon, then they went on Mars to compair Phobos and Deimos. All the way to Mars they were floating around the cabin of their ship in "zero gravity", and yet you could clearly see that the engines of the ship were thrusting away the whole time.
If I remember my basic astronautics, under those conditions they shouldn't have been in freefall at all. In the absense of artificial gravity, they should have been standing on the aft-most bulkhead of the cabin, correct?
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Post by Atoz 77 on Sept 6, 2016 7:54:44 GMT -6
I still haven't seen the new "Ghostbusters" movie, but I have read the paperback. Basically it looks as if they just rewrote the original movie in their own words. It follows the original plot almost exactly except for the love story. There is no analog to Dana Barrett. A lot of details get switched around just for laughs. They don't set up shop in a firehouse. They LOOK at a firehouse, and the counterparts of Ray and Egon go nuts over it, but the "Venkman" character passes when she's told that the rent is over a hundred thousand a month. They end up leasing an old Chinese restaurant. I say "the Venkman character" not because she acts anything like Venkman, but only because she seems to be the central character.
It's difficult to judge from reading the paperback if the movie would be funny. For instance, the guy they hire as their receptionist (their Janine) is just a big, dumb blonde. He doesn't seem to know anything about secretarial work or even how to answer a phone. They hire him because he's gorgeous and he has a "sexy Australian accent". If I were watching this in a movie, I don't know, it might strike me as funny. Reading it in a novel it just strikes me as "huh?" But you see the main reason the original was so funny in the first place was because it was totally unexpected. Nobody had ever done a paranormal comedy before. Now they're all over the place, so just rebooting the original is bound to seem pretty ho-hum in comparison. But yeah, it seems pretty okay.
You can tell it's science fiction because when the Ghostbusters procure the First Ever Empirical PROOF that ghosts exist, everyone assumes that it's fake! The Media stampede straight to a "professional debunker" and slavishly believe whatever he says! Obviously the screenwriters set this movie in some weird parallel dimension completely unlike ours.
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Post by Atoz 77 on Oct 5, 2016 8:07:56 GMT -6
Lately I've been looking at some of the new fall shows on television, and wondering why they always seem to disappoint me. It dawned on me that I'm still looking for something to replace Star Trek. There have been many programs down the years that I've enjoyed watching, and even a few that I looked forward to every week with eager anticipation, but none that was quite in Star Trek's league for consistently giving me something to think about. What I mean is -- Star Trek came around before there was even such a word as "binge-watching". I remember after watching a Star Trek episode, I would be so busy thinking about what I had just seen, I wouldn't have wanted to watch another episode right away. Nowadays we've seen every episode multiple times, and that feeling of fullness isn't there any more, except in a few rare cases. That's what I miss about Star Trek.
Television shows today try to do the same thing by making the plot of the series itself complicated, to keep the viewer continually guessing what's going to happen next. I guess that's the next best thing, but it's not quite as satisfying in the long run.
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Post by Atoz 77 on Oct 21, 2016 8:40:10 GMT -6
I was just reading Stephen King's "The Stand" again (I usually read it every year around Halloween), and couldn't help wondering if holodecks will ever completely replace the simple joy of reading? Just comparing the miniseries that was made back in the 90s to the novel, it's obvious which one is better. It might be nice to see these events playing out on the screen, but you also miss so much -- the thoughts going through the characters' heads, the long stretches of backstory, the bouts of introspection, or just the pleasure of feeling King's words tripping through your mind, making your skin tingle.
And changing the subject only slightly, I was struck once again by the novel's similarity to "Lord of the Rings". Don't tell me you haven't noticed? Stu Redman is Aragorn, Nick Andros is Frodo, Fran Goldsmith is Arwen, and Mother Abigail is Gandalf.
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Post by Atoz 77 on Nov 2, 2016 8:00:12 GMT -6
I've been seeing Elijah Wood lately on commercials for a new BBC series he appears in. You have to feel a little sorry for him, don't you? Look at it this way -- his lead role in "Lord of the Rings" was a once-in-a-lifetime role, and he's already done it. For the rest of his life, he'll be known as "the guy who played Frodo".
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