Ebook Apocalypse!!!

The night is coming. The night that will never end.

Board the windows. Lock the doors and push our beautiful, heavy bookshelves against them. Hopefully we prepared enough, we stocked up on canned peas and sacks of potatoes and stacks of mass market paperbacks and hardbacks, some of them used and old and bound in cloth rather than shitty cheap crappy cardboard.

Outside, the wind howls like a cliched banshee scream.

They are coming, and we fear it will not matter how well we prepared, for they come on silent wings, their numbers are legion, and they don’t use doors, or windows. Like dire fairies of data they come through the walls, through the very air itself, at the speed of light.

And they want to eat. “BOOOOOOKS….” they moan. Because they want to eat our books, all our beautiful books.

The ebooks have escaped the labs. OH. MY. GOD. Continue reading →

Books and Wonderful (You MUST See This)

As a devoted fan of Buster Keaton, books, and the amazing William Joyce, I have to say The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore may just be the most wonderful short film I have ever seen. It’s currently up for an Academy Award.

You need to see this, probably over and over…

Good Memories of 2011, Day 2: Brandi Carlile

A lot of folks don’t know Brandi Carlile, which is a shame. I’ve been listening to her for a few years now, featuring her music here several times. She’s a wonderful talent. This year, no other artist was there for me as much as she was, in good times and in bad.

Early in the year, her live cover of The Beatles’ “I Just Saw A Face” perfectly captured the wonder and joy I felt when I looked at the woman I loved… Continue reading →

Well, Blow Me Down!!!

Here in the Byrdcave, we’re old fans of Popeye. Not only did I watch the old cartoons countless times growing up, my son and I have each given Popeye gifts to each other. He gave me Warner Brothers’ awesome remastered collections of the classic Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s (which are wonderful, and far better than the later productions which kinda sucked); I have been giving him Fantagraphics’ gorgeous hardbacks collecting the original E.C. Segar comic strips as they come out.

Wilco, in cooperation with King Features Syndicate, has brought us the first hand-drawn Popeye cartoon in over three decades:

I hope Popeye rebounds by hooking up with Betty Boop.

If you never saw them, or need a reminder, or it’s just been too long, here’s one of the Fleischer classics, from 1936, in amazing quality:

And for bonus giggles, here’s a commercial featuring Popeye and Bluto that drove right wingers crazy when it aired:

UPDATE: Of course, now that I think about it, if we watch the Fleischer first, then the Wilco, then the Minute Maid cartoon, maybe we’re actually getting the full story of Popeye’s romantic life…

Don’t Let Me Die Young (Song of the Week, 1/26/2012)

I always wanted to use this tune as background for a balls-to-the-wall fight sequence in a movie.

From 1987,  Duran Duran’s guitarist Andy Taylor (backed up by Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols) shows he can take off the mascara and crank out some actual rock.

Chuck Norris, Reviled & Revisited

Chuck Norris is a dingleberry on the ass of cinema and a toxic boil of  a man.

I’ve blogged about this before, in which I grumped about the Chuck Norris jokes that are so widespread, aggrandizing a man who in no way deserves it, and I offered up my own Chuck Norris jokes to replace them.

I just updated that post with new jokes. You can read ‘em all here.

Good Memories of 2011, Day 1: Electroshock Therapy

 

Yeah, I know. Electroshock therapy? A good memory?

Yep.

I’ve struggled greatly, for years, with chronic, terrible depression, and I’ve done therapy and all sorts of self help and multifarious concoctions of antidepressant meds, but nothing actually worked to any significant degree. I finally got desperate and started looking into electroshock, or as it’s known these days, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Continue reading →

Grewt Ningrich and the Party of Lies

Newt Gingrich.

Newt. Fucking. Gingrich.

This is how bad things have gotten.

I think it’s time to revisit a post I did a while back. It’s primarily about lies in politics, but has a good amount of information about Gingrich specifically that most people aren’t aware of. I’m pretty proud of this piece:

Pants on Fire

Good Memories of 2011?

 

The past few years, I’ve started each new year with a few posts about “Good Memories” from the previous year, things that I enjoyed or that had special meaning to me. So far, this year I haven’t done that. (To see earlier good memories, just click on the “Good Memories” category in the sidebar.)

I have given a lot of thought to doing it, and have a handful of posts in mind, but motivation has been lacking. Last year was largely painful for me, and there aren’t many things that stand out as particularly “good.” And so far this year my depression has its claws in my back and when I try to move forward it just digs in deeper.

Still, the act of writing the posts, of writing at all, is a kick in the nuts to Demon Depression, and I am starting to make some headway again (he typed, hearing the rhythmic sloosh of laundry washing in the next room). So in the next week or two, I plan to get on with it.

I also plan to get back to blogging more in general again. I’ve been in a slump for a while, for a lot of reasons (many of them bad memories), and I know the world needs my wisdoms.

Little Star (Song of the Week, 1/17/2012)

Last night, Stevie Nicks’s cover of “Not Fade Away” cycled up on my musical playlist and my son and I were bop-bop-bop bop-bopping around the Byrdcave, having fun. I told him it was a Buddy Holly song, so that sent us looking for Holly tunes, then we expanded out and started listening to some other early rock and roll greats.

It was only after I started playing it that I remembered how I used to sing the Elegants’ “Little Star” to him as a lullaby when he was a baby, probably the only lullaby I ever sang to him other than Springsteen’s “Pony Boy.”

Bewitching Kate (Song of the Week, 11/29/2011)

I’ve always loved Kate Bush.

Here she passionately performs one of her biggest hits, with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour adding some blistering guitar that really sets things on fire…

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Happy(?) Veterans’ Day

It’s Veterans’ Day. Here are some posts I made today on Facebook:
  • I’m a veteran. Every year on Veterans’ Day, all day long I feel like everybody is trying to make everybody else eat their spinach on my behalf, and shaming them if they don’t eat. Please. I don’t care who eats the spinach.
  • Just want to say thank you to all the veterinarians out there, who keep our beloved pets healthy and safe and only ask for lots of money in return.
  • Today, let’s all make sure to thank all the selfless vegetarians who don’t eat meat so that the rest of us have more tasty flesh to enjoy.
  • Thank you, thank you, thank you to the bold Venusians who have not preemptively invaded our planet and killed oodles of innocents because they fear our weapons of mass destruction.
  • We should all be very grateful to, and show our support for, all the Virginians for their…um…for something, I’m sure.
  • Today, we must all remember to thank our vitamins, who answer the call and help us stay healthy, and even taste yummy when their forms are gummy.
  • Everyone honor our strong vas deferens which bring pleasure to our days and help us exist in the first place.

I’ve been having a bit of fun, joking around about the wave of Veterans’ Day posts that we see every year on this day, and I know not everyone appreciates the humor. I get that, and I’m sympathetic. But I don’t apologize.

I’m a veteran. I’ve had blood on my hands. I’ve lost friends. And to me, though I realize how sincere most people are, Veterans’ Day is a day of jingoism and platitudes, particularly in a time when we send our soldiers to die in wars we do not need to fight, and when we don’t take care of them when they come home.

Yes, we should honor the soldiers who are fighting and dying in our name, but we should do that by making sure they are doing so ONLY when necessary, otherwise we are wasting their efforts and their lives. Honor them by doing all you can to bring them home. Let their spouses curl up with them every night, their parents be able to sleep in peace, and their children grow up with fathers and mothers.

Yes, we should honor the veterans who have fought in our name when ordered, whether misused by their leaders or not. And to do that best, we should make sure they are given the medical and psychological attention they need when they’re back home, and we should make sure they’re given the benefits they’ve been promised (the VA screwed me out of over 80% of my College Fund, and I’m not alone), we should make sure their homes haven’t been stolen by bankers, and we should do all we can to help them find security in our lousy economy.

So yeah, wave the flag if you want to, tell everyone how important it is to honor our warriors, but if that’s the extent of it, it’s meaningless. If you want to thank me for my service, do something that’s going to help those who need help because they volunteered.

Hey! Stupid! (Regarding Occupy Wall Street…)

Hey! Stupid!

Just because you’re making ends meet, just because you haven’t stumbled because of a terrible illness, just because the culture we live in is so awash in products produced from petroleum and by corporations with no loyalty to our country or to you that it’s impossible to avoid their use, does NOT mean that there aren’t huge things wrong and does not mean people should just fold their tents and go home like compliant little sheep.

In a time when our country, and the world, are still bleeding out economically because of the ongoing excesses and corruption of Wall Street and large corporations in general, it amazes me that otherwise reasonable people are dedicating their energy and their bile to trying to tear down the people who are trying to change things.

Really? You stand for the banks? You stand for BP? You stand for all the companies who won’t give jobs here because it’s cheaper to pretty much enslave people in foreign countries? You stand for the insurance companies that will let you die if it saves them a few dollars? Really?

You are the 53% because you can’t count all the way to 99.

The Comedy of Terrors

For your Halloween consideration…

This classic horror comedy stars Vincent Price as a conniving undertaker who resorts to murder to drum up business. Peter Lorre is his bumbling, soft-hearted assistant, Boris Karloff his senile father-in-law, and Basil Rathbone his hardnosed landlord-turned-victim. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, with a brilliant script by horror great Richard Matheson, this is the sort of film Abbott and Costello might have made had they been into Shakespeare and worked for Hammer Films. Very smart, wonderfully entertaining, and family-friendly; we watch it every year.

You can watch it streaming on Netflix, or rent it on Amazon for $2.99.

Happy Hallowe’en (and the Song of the Week, 10/31/2011)

Halloween/Samhain has always been my favorite holiday. To celebrate, here’s Springsteen channeling the raging ghost of Howlin’ Wolf with a perfect Halloween song…

For the interested, here are some posts from back in my blog somewheres related to Halloweeny goodness…

5 Classic Horror Flicks to Goose Your Bumps

…for those who might like to watch something scary and good, I figured I’d throw you a few bones. Collect ‘em all and you can build a skeleton.

These are just five classics, not my all time favorites or anything with that much thought behind it, not in any particular order. All of them are first rate.

5 New Classic Horror Flicks You Might Have Missed

Some more contemporary works that many people haven’t seen, and everybody who loves a good scare needs to.

Saturday Night With Cthulhu

Sebastian’s Voodoo (A Great Short Film)

A wonderful short animated film by UCLA student Joaquin Baldwin. It’s visually amazing, and the story is very moving.

“The Show Is Over” by Nora Keyes

Last Halloween’s Song of the Week, Nora Keyes gettin’ her serious creep on.