Once a year over at my 366 Weird Movies reviewing gig, I turn in one philosophical rant about the nature of weirdness in art. The new one is a little bit of Zen navel-picking speculation I call “Questions Are Beautiful.” It was provoked by a comment somebody made on my review of Cube (1997), saying an analysis of the ontological mystery would make good meat for an essay, so I green-lighted myself to accept the challenge.
Tag: rants
New at 123ish: The Mediterranean Diet, and why It’s the opposite of American eating
Big whoopie, I’m a food blogger now! Well, OK, we’ve gotta fill categories somehow, so it’s been food a couple times. I am far from the only blogger online to rave about the Mediterranean Diet, but it’s the only sensible diet there is to find with real research to back it up.
Naturally, sticking to the Mediterranean Diet is just about the most anti-American thing you can do. Walk home from the store with a bottle of actual olive oil (easier said than done) and a bag of kale and pick-ups like these:
will follow you down the street yelling “FAGGIT!” So I go into how American food culture is one big conspiracy to keep you tubby as a hippo. This brings us to a very topical subject…
MTG Arena has the worst ad for anything, ever
Well, I’m more than on-record as a long-standing Magic: the Gathering geek. But that’s the paper cards. When it comes to the electronic offerings of Wizards of the Coast trying to replicate their paper game in video media, there’s no point in trying to be nice about it: They all stink on ice. After a token attempt to get MTG Arena to run on ANY device I own by ANY means necessary, I lost interest, as I have so many times before. So dismissed has been the video game interpretations of MTG from my consideration, that this is my first time talking about them at all, anywhere.
But have you seen this new MTGArena ad? I saw it on YouTube and was too paralyzed with horror to hit the ‘skip’ button. Good GAWD, people, what the WTF were you THINKING???
There’s so much gone so wrong to unpack here, I barely know where to start…
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The Las Vegas Grasshopper Invasion 2019
Pardon me for sounding so… preachy… but as a prophet I am obligated to share my testimony. The Las Vegas grasshopper invasion is God’s punishment for not believing me when I said this exact same thing happened in Bullhead City, Arizona, back in the 1990s. Bullhead being a tiny town and the 1990s being what they were (I swear we were the only household at the time to discover Internet), there weren’t many to witness it, so now I finally have a back-up confirmed sighting.
Yes, folks, Old testament locust plagues happen!
I love how all the news reports have to reassure panicky people over and over: They’re harmless. They don’t bite. There is nothing to be scared of, don’t panic. What, are people running around screaming in fear of being devoured?
Having braved a plague like this (BELIEVE ME NOW???), I’m afraid I have to point out that they’re not entirely harmless…
New at 123ish: Items of Devotion for Alternative Religion + Join My Cult!
So this was a weird experimental post based on my starting an argument in which I held the position that you can make an Amazon product list out of anything. “Anything?” they said. “Anything, just pick something,” I said. So they said “something for the spiritual category.” And then I was naming the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Bob J.R. Dobbs and they went “Wait a minute, maybe this isn’t such a good idea.” But I said “Too late! Things have been set in motion which cannot be undone!”
And that’s how we got a list of Best Devotional Items For Alternative Religions. With a bonus section where I introduce my own alternative religion: the Cult of the Temponaut! I hope one day to have my cult grow to a world-wide viral phenomenon, just like all the wacky cults we deal with already. I mean, mine is mostly benevolent and nobody can get hurt in it, right? Ah well, we’ll find out, omelets and eggs.
Just remember, physicists have reversed time already using a quantum computer. That’s how you get Temponauts! Start showing them respect before you have to deal with them all at once.
Bad Assumptions Everyone Makes About A Zombie Apocalypse
Iowa thunderstorm season always puts me in the mood for catching up on my horror reading. Call it Pavlovian conditioning from all the years watching mad scientists in castle laboratories working during a thunderstorm. So pawing through my bookshelf, it occurred to me that there’s one horror genre not born of literature, but film.
Zombies, to wit. Vampires, werewolves, mummies, serial killers, ghosts, Jekyll and Hyde, and Cthulhu, they all came from the pages of literature first, then got adapted to film second under the loving guidance of Universal, Hammer, Amicus, and company. But zombies formed on the silver screen, and they took a few decades to catch on there. And only then did they start showing up in literature in the same form.
Sure, technically speaking, the first zombie movie, 1932’s White Zombie, was based on William Seabrook’s 1929 novel The Magic Island. But these were early prototypes, still steeped in voodoo medicine (inaccurate, by the way). What we mean when we say “zombie” now is owed to George Romero, full stop, and then the genre had to drift into literature.
So, here’s a great reading list of zombie apocalypse novels over at Suggested Reads. Oh, yes, they’re all very modern. Quite a few of those have seen their own film adaptation, circulus vitae, including Patient Zero and The Girl With All The Gifts.
But this subject got me to wondering: What is it about zombie apocalypses that make them such a self-contained stock scenario? Their popularity stems from what TVTropes calls the “Cozy Catastrophe.” The apocalypse always just so happens to leave a few lucky middle-class folk who, in between fighting off the brain-hungry hordes, is having a smashing time having the world to loot to themselves.
No more boring office job for me! I’m going Mad-Maxing!
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News At 366 Weird Movies – I’m in a book!
A few of my reviews whirled by over at 366 Weird Movies while I was too busy with other things (week off for Father’s Day and all that). To catch up:
CAPSULE: AGAINST THE CLOCK (2019) – A messy mish-mosh of cyberpunk spy thriller themes, as half-baked as the sloppy CGI fractals and hyperactive jump cuts that frame this abortion of a film.
CAPSULE: KEOMA (1976) – Could have been a contender for the last great spaghetti western, but is ruined by the Soundtrack From Hell. Yes, you heard right, and you’ll wish you’d never heard. You’re asking of course, how bad can this possibly be? Here’s a sample. Now imagine that crotch-splitting abomination going on for the ENTIRE MOVIE. That’s right, it never shuts up, a continuous Greek chorus obliterating every serious moment for the 105 minute run-time.
CAPSULE: HARD TICKET TO HAWAII (1987) – A harmless descendant of Miami Vice, with lots of booby cheesecake and a loose story that has something impenetrable to do with a snake, a toilet, a blow-up doll, a skateboard, and a razor-edged Frisbee.
But let’s get to the important part
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New at 366Weird: The Manitou!
Over at 366 Weird, my latest cinematic safari is a special treat: The Manitou (1978). A serious contender for the campiest Exorcist ripoff ever made, it’s a thrill ride of one “WTF?” moment piled onto another.
Whose idea was it to cast Tony Curtis in the lead? Who decided “native American medicine man” is a close-enough substitute for Catholic demons? Why did the 400-year-old medicine man pick this woman out of the blue to incubate his neck-rupturing reincarnation? Why did they go with a frozen hospital with meat-popsicle nurses frozen mid-wave? Why is this suddenly turning into 2001: A Space Odyssey? And why is it always black magic or white magic, doesn’t magic come in any other colors? We will never know, but even the late, great Roger Ebert had to warn people to set down their coffee before continuing the review.
IMGUR posts: 1980s Action Figures and Vintage Pulp Novel Cover Art
So you all might be noticing by now, I’ve been tinkering around with IMGUR a lot lately. I can’t help getting hold of a social media platform and eventually experimenting with it to see what kinds of nifty posts I can make in that medium. The IMGUR format is underappreciated; it’s more like a super-Tumblr since you can post any amount of text appended to images and chain images together into albums. Not bad for a site that originally started as a side-feature for Reddit.
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Two IMGUR Galleries Revisit Nightmares Of 20th-Century Kitsch
I don’t mean to gripe, but Millennials sure demand a lot of attention. There’s twenty stories about them per day; they’re killing this thing, they’re embracing that thing, they have it tough because this, they react because that.
Meanwhile, Generation X is over here passed over both ways. We got a couple minutes in the spotlight in the 1990s and that was the end of us. Which suits most of us, but when I keep hearing about how rotten the Millennials have it, that’s the part I get sick of hearing about. Money did not rain from the sky before Millennials were born. Somehow I jumped directly from the have-nots line to the “privileged elite” line while still being the same broke-ass slacker I was in 1990.
As an example of Generation X gripes we never got the chance to air, I present “Kitschy Nightmares From Satan’s Thrift Store” and “Vintage Magazine Ads,” both wry observations of pop culture in the mid-20th century. This, kids, is what your poor papa and mama had to live through. Which is why we’re so funny.
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