RIP David Prowse

The man behind the mask for the good Star Wars trilogy is gone. It’s sad that David and Lucas were never able patch up their falling out, whatever it may have been and given Lucas’ ego, I’m going to side with David.

I knew who he was pretty early thanks to Star Wars trading cards having little facts on the back. They even mentioned his previous career playing the Frankenstein monster in the UK’s Hammer Horror flicks. Plus, they let me know someone else was providing the voice.

Years later I managed to see him in the credits of other films/TV shows. Obviously the only movie which readily comes to mind is A Clockwork Orange, David is a surviving victim’s bodyguard. If you remember, David assists the victim in getting revenge on Alec for past misdeeds. On Hulu, you can see him in a brief part on the UK TV version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. David was also Christopher Reeve’s trainer to get all buff for the Superman flicks.

In his obit from The Guardian, many UK residents remember David as the Green Cross Man which was a campaign promoting road safety. David said it was his proudest accomplishment.

Farewell Mr. Prowse. I’m bummed I never got to meet you at a convention to thank you in person. I appreciate all you did, namely in making Darth Vader scary and imposing.

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Austrian town changing its name for obvious reasons

Now this place makes the news‽ If you watch the movie below you’ll see my point and there’s a clincher at the end. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

…OK, get a little chuckle? I know I was baffled, soooooo…

Google Translate was no help because when I entered the town’s name for the German side, I received the same result in English. For once, Wikipedia was useful. It means “Focko’s People,” and the first syllable is pronounced “FOO” not the English “FUH.” The Austrians probably never gave much thought in centuries past since the F word only goes back a century in English. If I’m wrong, let me know.

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Comments repaired (so they appear)

I gave Picayune a brief respite for several reasons but the big one was my site being unable to display Dana’s cool comment about Alex Trek. Until my friend Jeremy found the solution (workaround), I decided to let matters stay put, give her a chance for others to see her input. Normally, I might find the answer given my profession at Apple. No luck. I’m glad Jeremy had more success after my couple hours of dead ends.

More stuff a-comin’!

How was everyone’s Thanksgiving yesterday given the crap conditions? Mine was pretty decent. I’m already knocking out the 2020 Christmas cards.

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Austin’s MLS team (yawn) has a jersey

This jersey is another reason why I don’t respect nor give a shit for soccer. It’s a living billboard for a brand of overpriced water bottles with a dash of Addidas (overpriced sneakers) and some overnight dot com biz. Oh, there is a little dash of a shield saying, if you forgot, this is Austin playing against Target Department Stores or Bimbo snack cakes (Mexico’s version of Hostess/Little Debbie).

Will I go to the games? Not by choice and certainly not with my money. Even during the pandemic, they managed to put a stadium for this crap in record time while getting a second light rail line will take a generation.

I give Austin’s team five years before it moves or folds. Even our Latin American immigrants prefer something with speed or shinsplints.

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Yellow Rose: Worth Seeing

Alamo Drafthouse is back…sort of. They have social distancing protocols in place which lets you enjoy what makes them special yet it was rather weird, and a bummer. Jennifer really wanted to see this movie while I wanted to get back to enjoying something I greatly miss…seeing movies in a theater!

Yellow Rose tells the tale of a young woman (obviously named Rose) from the Philippines that loves Country music, mainly the Honky-Tonk branch. However, this world is somewhat untenable as she and her mother survive by working in a hotel around Bastrop (an hour from Austin by car). Like most Asian children, Rose’s mother pushes her to excel in school so it will lead to college and on to a more lucrative career; singing/playing guitar is a waste of time.

Then Rose’s friend Elliot helps her out by telling mom they’re going to a church function when in reality they’re headed to the Broken Spoke in Austin to see Dale Watson perform. Too bad Elliot’s sense of direction sucks. The beloved venue is way down on South Lamar yet they spend a good amount of time exploring South Congress and other landmarks near downtown, probably to establish they’re in Austin for audiences outside of Texas. They get in with fake IDs (not sure if this is feasible), they dance, they drink, they meet Dale Watson! Meanwhile, ICE raids the hotel and arrests mom because she hasn’t answered a court summons in a while about her illegal status. Now Rose has nowhere to live and needs to avoid ICE or she’ll get sent back to Manilla; somewhere she hasn’t been since she was a baby.

Mom feared the day would come and gives Rose instructions to look up an Aunt Gail in Austin. The reunion is pretty sour. Gail and mom had a falling out long ago plus Gail’s husband is an asshole who doesn’t want anything to do with Rose. So Rose heads back to the streets (not recommended in Austin) and is miraculously taken by the Honky Tonk culture. From there you need to watch what happens. Will Rose give in to her mom’s demand to return to the Philippines? Will she follow her heart and become a songwriter with the help of Dale Watson? Will she find a compromise? Will she end up joining Austin’s vast homeless population living under our many interstate bridges? Will Elliot be stuck in the friend zone?

Overall, I liked this movie. It’s formulaic. It makes its point on how ICE going after gainfully employed immigrants is asinine with a sledgehammer. It puts Austin in a nice light but please don’t move here. Rose a few touches putting it above the schlock the Hallmark Channel or Netflix are cranking out. It’s a predominantly Austin-based production which didn’t need Georgia-sized Hollywood welfare to be made, therefore it receives a big endorsement from me.

Alamo Extras: Primarily performances of numerous Country Music acts. I didn’t have my infamous notebook with me to write them down. Maybe I’ll remember if there’s a next time. I continue to hold out for this CV-19 to end.

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Back home after my first vacation in, forever

The drive back was faster as it always is when your time away from the grind is over. I’ll bore you all about what I saw, did, ate, etc.; in New Orleans. Having a Yankee accent, I still pronounce the city’s name as two words.

I’ll give you the short version right now, New Orleans did recover from Katrina some years ago, despite the incompetent Republicans and Obummer’s failure to put law-breaking bankers in prison. COVID-19 is another punch in the city’s nards yet some things have re-opened as they were in the first lockdown well before the rest of us. However, they suffer from the same problem as we do in Austin, they’re surrounded by a state full of morons which is leading to a flare up. Thus, we saw way more people who thought the mask requirement didn’t apply to them. You know them: older, White and probably voted for the asshole who won’t concede because it will label them all LOSERS.

At Chez Maggi, the cats remembered me and gave me the look of, who was the lady that fed us later in the morning than we prefer? Agamemnon is getting tons of cuddles. Isis at her leisure.

Now to bed, very exhausted and sore from walking a ton of miles. Yes, I know, it’s the wrong unit but as I said, I’m beat.

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RIP Alex Trebek

If there’s an afterlife, poor Alex is now being mobbed by a million senior citizens like my grandmother who religiously watched Jeopardy. That game show, her soaps and Lawrence Welk. It was just easier to hand her the remote than to argue. Personally, I think she loved the show to see if she was smarter than the contestants. I have to admit, the majority of the questions weren’t terribly hard yet I’m not terribly smart nor well rounded.

Anyway, I knew of Alex long before he was the beleaguered Will Ferrell bit (a skit SNL stole from SCTV). He hosted something on NBC with dice before the Jeopardy revival. My family also have a couple little connections to him.

When my brother Brian was in college, he auditioned for the show during one of their many college student tournaments. Sadly, he didn’t get past the first round. Brian wrote about it but I didn’t have any luck finding a link and he doesn’t recall where it is either.

The other brush with Alex was a real encounter! In the late Eighties, my parents lived in San Diego and there’s some celebrity golf thing there. My mother got to be Alex’s driver at least once. I clearly recall her sharing this story while I was visiting over Christmas or Spring Break. He wasn’t the established celebrity we knew yet so my reaction was obviously, “that’s nice.”

Thanks Alex. Namely for having a great sense of humor regarding the SNL routine and being one of the three people Stephen Colbert retired with.

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Prince wants to travel!

Here’s a little something to brighten up a tense, exhausting weekend. Prince has decided that Jennifer’s suitcase is comfy. It’s always funny how cats love suitcases. I don’t think it’s them demanding to come along because 99% of them hate car travel. It must be the textures and/or shape compelling them to cuddle up in it. Prince is going to be a wonderful pet for a lucky family in the near future.

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Meet the new boss…same as the old boss!

This chapter of never-ending elections and strife in Amerika is over…for now. It’s all over except for the crying, screaming, so on. Georgia qualifies for a recount and I think Wisconsin too but it may not be enough for Orange Foolius. I would love to see him being dragged out of the White House kicking and screaming as Secret Service agents hold him by his limbs. However, he’s a bullshitter. He knows when he’s beat but will find a way to spin this into some kind of moral victory like Palin did for years. Hitler regrouped after his time in a German prison.

The primary combatants will take a breather. Blather worthless opinions to the Punditocracy. Dust off their formal wear for the Inauguration Balls in 2021 with social distancing and polish up their resumes for either an admin gig (as I said above, the Left and Progressives aren’t welcome with the NeoLiberal/DLC’s favored candidate) or join the battle rooms for Nikki (née Nimratha) Haley 2024 and Turn the House GOP 2022. In Amerika, this shit never, ever, ever, fuckin’ ends. Believe me, ol’ Sen. Turtleneck (Hillbilly Land-KY) said the GOP’s number one job in 2009 was to make the Great Equivocator a one termer. He will use every ounce of his power to bring the country to a halt while thousands die and millions lose their homes. St. Reagan would’ve loved him.

I gave up being optimistic when Slick Willie pissed it all away for NAFTA which led to the GOP stranglehold on the House for 12 years. He only got a second term because The Newtster squandered all the Republican political capital on a temper tantrum and Dole ran on the often losing “It’s My Turn” slogan. Well, Wall Street wasn’t big on changing horses while they were raping the country too.

My point is this. Biden’s election is a push. The Democrats gained only ONE seat in the Senate and they will lose both runoffs in Georgia due to Jim Crow laws. Democratic candidate Ossoff is a known loser. I doubt there’s enough Black Girl Magic left to win even one spot, splitting the Senate evenly. If the Democrats were serious, they’d fire Schumer since his picks sucked and failed miserably, even where it could’ve been a slam dunk (Maine). Meanwhile the House gained at least five Republicans, mainly women and Pelosi has reneged on her promise to step down in 2021, the 80-year-old mummy believes she’s entitled to another term of failure as she attacks the future, aka The Squad. Funny, the Squad all won re-election easily AND gained a couple members. The divide in Amerika isn’t by party, it’s by generation, ethnicity and education. The only upside I can see is this might be the Boomers’ last influential election. Their vanguard is now 74. Gen Xs is in its fifties, the Mills are in their thirties and early Gen Z got to vote. From this point on, the three younger generations should start exercising its diversity and clout to overrule the failed policies of the selfish Boomers. The world is on fire and has been for years. If Amerika doesn’t right the ship now, we’re all screwed so count on this being the Chinese Century by 2030. I’m not optimistic though. Over 70 million Americans still thought a lying, bigoted, willfully ignorant con artist was better suited than a technocrat who may be slimy, yet understands how government functions.

Count on me to push Biden and his bitches to the Left. The Green New Deal and Medicare For All isn’t Communism. Remember this. There never seems to be any money for infrastructure, healthcare, schools and housing. Somehow both parties always find it for war, espionage on us, tax cuts and congressional raises. I’ll close with what Harry Truman once said and he was no friend of “socialism”, the GOP dog whistle for Stalinsim.

Socialism is a scare word they’ve hurled at every advance the people have made. Socialism is what they called public power, social security, deposit insurance and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for anything that helps all people.

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Taking some time off…

…it will probably be better for the suspected ulcer I’m developing.

So much for my 400th post of 2020.

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Political cartoonist Tom Toles retires

Yesterday was Tom’s last strip ever. During his long-storied career, he drew/wrote over 15,000 since college. I always thought he worked for the Washington Post the whole time, nope, he joined them 16 years ago to replace another legend, Herblock.

Toles’ work first came to my attention around the Clinton era. Although he leans to the Liberal/Left side, he didn’t spare Clinton or Obama the ridicule they deserved, namely their cowardice on Climate Change…too late now. Before Trump, his ripping on Bush the Lesser with the big, sticking-out ears was hilarious. Orange Foolius is a giant sucker-mouth under a weird hairdo. His style couldn’t incorporate Newt Gingrich’s 12 chins.

Thanks for all the insight and humor. I know many claimed you ripped off Pat Oliphant’s little commentary guy but the little “you,” was a touch you managed to make your own. You and Oliphant really became more along the lines of Dexter’s Lab and The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron. Similar yet different enough to co-exist just fine. Good luck in your retirement.

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First Halloween costume in like…years

Every few years I manage to get a costume past the, I would like to do X stage and actually do it. I didn’t have much choice neither, Jennifer is big on Halloween.

For 2020 I went as a lesser-known prisoner on the Satellite of Love, Steve Minnow; he keeps the place operational until Gizmonics (probably also under a change of leadership) finds a new home not run by greedy psychos who rhyme with Reed Hastings.

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So, November, you’re here

I’ve never been a big fan of Thanksgiving anyway because it became a crappy family gathering for me when I got to high school (when I began to realize they’re psychopaths and selfish). Throw in a horrible election which probably won’t have any decent, conclusive ending given the American Taliban being sore losers. If you didn’t see the recent news, a bunch of MAGAts tried to run off the opposition’s bus with their trucks/SUVs decked out like ISIS terrorists. This was in my backyard on a stretch of I-35 near Austin. There’s a good chance a couple of those assholes were cops Boss Hogg gave the day off.

Anyway, other than a couple extra days off from work (or getting time and a half to cover them), Thanksgiving sucks ass. Americans aren’t really thankful, we just like excuses to stuff our faces. Their willingness to be abused by the airlines continue to baffle me too. Maybe the pandemic will put the kibosh on the ridiculous traditions because the author of Apollo’s Arrow thinks we’re still going to be practicing social distancing, etc. all the way through 2022 and this is even if we have a vaccine. Oy vey! Maybe this month’s header will get recycled a couple more years!

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Pascal was adopted

Pascal’s forever family came for him last night and I regret not getting to say goodbye to the mellow little guy. It’s OK though, I was assured by Jennifer that where Pascal is going has an older kitten (around five months) to keep him company, overcome his separation anxiety from his sisters and adopted siblings and most importantly…teach him how to be a sweet kitty.

I’m confident Pascal will have a happy ever after life. People love “blue” (personally, they’re gray to me) cats. He had so much of Miette’s energetic, curious spark in his eyes and boy did he love to settle down in your lap for a brief rest before return to running around the house.

This leaves Prince and Piper get to their homes.

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RIP Sean Connery

2020 just couldn’t take a break could it, can’t let us enjoy a limited Halloween and have a little pause before the shitstorm election. I know Sean was 90ish yet I didn’t know he had been ill recently. I’m glad he passed peacefully and when he was damn, good and ready.

I practically grew up with Sean’s movies. For a long time, his Bond movies were standard fare on Sundays via ABC but I got a better look at them when HBO in 1980 had an arrangement to show them in order of release. After being the first actor to make the James Bond movies successful, he was a staple of great Sci-Fi and Fantasy movies: Time Bandits, Outland, Meteor! and Highlander readily come to mind. I finally saw Zardoz this year. The obit in Variety was full of crap saying this flick was a misstep. Sure you can tell that director John Boorman was trying to make Sean resemble Burt Reynolds yet you can never disguise a sexy Scotsman. Beyond my favorite genres, his appearances in mediocre (Entrapment, the (UK) Avengers) or inaccurate (The Untouchables) or implausible (The Hunt for Red October) Action movies made them worth sitting through. I always found it funny how they never really did a good job covering up his brogue when he was supposed to be a native-Russian speaker (October), an immortal Spaniard (Highlander, then again, they had a French guy playing a Scot) or a Chicago Irishman (Untouchables). My only regret is The Simpsons never had any success getting him after several parodies of his version of Bond (“You Only Move Twice” is the funniest).

Thanks for everything Mr. Connery. You had a helluva’ life and even if you were in a crap film, you always brought your A game. I hope you enjoyed my youngest cat sharing your name as his shelter designation until I found something more appropriate. May you get your wish of an independent Scotland soon.

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