Let’s wade into some more controversy with the latest Internet temper tantrum: Bill Maher’s remarks on comic book fandom after the death of Stan Lee. While his timing is admittedly tone-deaf, his impression is spot on, however poorly articulated. I crack into the nut of the matter: toxic fan bases.
Don’t you hate it when you’re just enjoying some work of media just because you happen to like it, and some raving idiot out there has to ruin it for everybody? That’s what we have here.
After all these years as a staffie at 366WeirdMovies.com, the list is finally filled! And so it is now safe for me to utter The Movie Which I Dared Not Name – a film so bad, it drives celebrated Chicago film critics to fits of live televised rage.
I got to thinking about it via GoodBadFlicks – one of my favorite YouTube review channels – and their heartwarming defense of one of my favorite weird movies, Nothing But Trouble (1991). What the hell, why not embed that here:
Nothing But Trouble was my veto-proof nominee for the list of weirdest movies ever made, and I’ve caught a lot of flack for it, though everybody has to admit yes, it’s weird. My point (and it’s echoed repeatedly on the site) is that a movie doesn’t have to be good to be weird.
If the Star Trek franchise paints our future under the Federation as, to quote one editorial, “Bernie Sanders on steroids,” then where does that leave competing nerd franchise Star Wars? Under the oppressive thumb of a big bad authoritarian Empire or under the slightly-less-crushing domain of a centuries-old religion guarded by mystics in drab cloaks carrying funny colored sticks, that’s where!
Director William Friedkin last week complained the sequel to his ground-breaking 1973 film The Exorcist sucks runny demon eggs. I can’t disagree, but I will point out that he is responsible for breaking the horror genre in two and dooming us all to a lifetime of rehashed exorcism cliches.
UPDATE – BONUS BUCK: I ran out of space in that article to talk about the “Satanic Panic” movement in the ’70s-’90s, a scare-tactics campaign by the American Christian church that grew more shrill by the year with shock media. Satanic Panic was one of the biggest contributors to turning American Christianity, originally more left-leaning, into the movement of Neocon bigots we know today. But I ran across this video preserved on the channel of the excellent archivist Josh Hadley which gives you an adequate taste for the atmosphere of the time. Feast your eyes and ears on the hilariously paranoid conspiracy theorists at Jeremiah Films, with “The Pagan Invasion – Devil Worship – The Rise Of Satanism.” No, this is not a parody.
Are you offended by what Louis C.K. says? Or Aziz Ansari, or Kathy Griffin, or, for another example I forgot to include, Bill Maher and his ill-timed rant about comics right after Stan Lee passed?
So am I! I’m offended every day, but I have discovered a wonderful secret to cure perpetual offended syndrome! It’s a hard cure, you have to work for it. Here’s a meme to pass around social media and help others find this path to enlightenment:
Every year during the holidays, when dealing with clients from all over the world and having to explain to my fifth Australian what Thanksgiving is and why my whole family’s visiting for it, I vow to write this guide someday. Thanks to the marvelous venue that 123ish.com has turned into, I finally got it done!
So: The International ECommerce Guide To American Holidays. Find out why Groundhog Day is so weird, why we can’t predict when Easter will strike, and why your American team-mates might even need October 30th off. Even if you’re native, you’ll still learn something because I’ve tucked away some little-known chestnuts about the origins of the colored-in days on the United States calendar.
If anybody else has a similar guide for another country, I’d love to find out about it. In fact, if you’re not from the United States, why not write an international guide for your country’s holidays? I, myself, would like more insight on what, for example, a “boxing day” is.
This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.
Commemorative coins exist in a strange twilight of monetary policy. Three committees of Congress oversee the decisions for whom and what gets commemorated, namely, the Committee on Housing, Banking, and Urban Affairs; the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the House; and the Citizens’ Coin Advisory Committee. One can well imagine the kinds of spirited debates that take place as everybody pushes their own pet project.
This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.
More than any other conflict in world history, World War II was a battle of wits. It started with cryptographers fighting the first international “hacking” war in attempting to break the German Enigma machine code; it ended with the scientific race to develop and deploy the atom bomb.
In between, each nation involved challenged its brightest minds to hatch the most advanced schemes to come out ahead – and the money of this era reflects that struggle in its historic record.
We are not living in a dystopia. We are not approaching a dystopia. We are not just around the corner from approaching anything like a dystopia. You can tell you’re not living in a dystopia if you’re able to read this, and you’re well-fed, clothed, warm, relatively safe at the moment, and free to reply with whatever babbling pops into your head.
In the herein linked post, I debunk Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (I refuse to express it numerically) and all the other dystopian literature along with it. Let us stop the paranoia and focus on the real world problems right in front of us for a change.
ADDENDUM: It’s an election year coming up in the states, so the dystopian mob frenzy is boiling over on the web more than usual. This post allegedly by Aldous Huxley is making the rounds lately:
Now that we have that out of the way: This bit of text is a perfect example of a logical fallacy. It tells you that you are always living in a dictatorship no matter what. Even if you are perfectly happy with no problems anywhere, by this quote’s circular reasoning, that’s all the more reason why you’re “enslaved.” No one can postulate any state of being outside of open anarchy (which can also be defined as a “prison without walls”) that does not match this quote’s definition of a dictatorship. If you have walls, open shutdown of democracy, and do dream of escaping, that’s a dictatorship too.
