Category: [Important images]

Well would you look at THAT

I spotted this on Bluesky a couple of months ago but I’ve been oddly slack about posting it here. I don’t know exactly where or when this was taken, though there is, shall we say, a certain sign of the times in it… but obviously we know who that is in the shot, young man by the unlikely name of Elvis Aaron Presley, captured in his godlike youth. Also there’s some black dude at the edge of the frame, and some other guy looking astonished in a door frame. Hard to tell what had him more transfixed here; was it the culture-changing hip-shaking icon he’d probably seen on TV, or was it THAT GODDAMN DARKIE behind him, walking about in public as if he had a right to be there? Hard to tell from the angle, but I feel it might as easily have been the latter as the former…

RIP Boo Radley

Robert Duvall has left us, at the fairly grand age of 95 and after 70 years on stage and screen. Quite a body of work, maybe not so many big roles in his later films (though he did get an Oscar nomination in 2015), but he kept pretty solidly working until just a few years ago… but until I saw this posted on Bluesky, I never knew about one of his more amusing parts:

Not only was Duvall the Corleone family consigliere Tom Hagen in The Godfather, he was Marlon Brando’s cue card wrangler as well. Brando was already infamous for his use of cue cards, cos he claimed that only knowing the broad outline of a scene actually made his performances more realistic rather than just being the sign of gross laziness most of his colleagues thought it was. And, as you can see above, it appears that even being a major part of the cast didn’t mean you wouldn’t get drafted to hold Marlon’s cards for him at some point. RIP Bob.

Second Best

This would be a kind of desolate photo anyway, but it’s even more so when you know that’s Jimmy Nicol, temporary Beatle… that’s him at Melbourne airport after completing his task of filling in for Ringo on the Fabs’ mid-1964 tour when the latter was ill; once he was good to go again, Nicol was good to go back to the UK and obscurity. I found this on Threads via the Flashbak account there, and some of the commenters on that post were kind of swooning about what a great experience that must’ve been and how he’d always be able to say he’d been a Beatle. And I was interested to discover George Harrison actually threatened to pull out of the tour if Ringo couldn’t play; once they’d calmed him down and all agreed that getting someone to take Ringo’s place was better than just cancelling those shows, Jimmy was brought on board as the ringer for Ringo (sorry).

But what good did it do him? Piss all, apparently; he went from being a relative nobody to the fame of being Ringo’s stunt double and being huge for ten days and then pretty much back to relative nobodyness. Nine months after his Beatles stint, he was bankrupt. Apparently when Paul McCartney read this news, he was moved enough to get him a gig with Peter and Gordon on their 1965 tour, and that seems to have been all he otherwise got from the Beatles. By and large it seems he’d rather forget having been a Beatle, and apparently when he was approached to be part of the Anthology he refused. Per Wiki, he’s apparently still alive but hasn’t been seen in public since the early 2010s. And that photo just became so much grimmer after I’d done that bit of reading on him.

Well done Angus, etc.

Via the estimable Terry Sedgwick on FB:

So that’s two weirdly unsurprising things happened in local politics this week: the Coalition reunited again and Sussan Ley got the arse as Liberal leader. And this apparently leaves the Coalition with a potentially complicated parting gift:

[Ley] intends to resign in coming weeks, sparking a by-election in her massive western New South Wales electorate.
It could be a very interesting and complicated election.
Having served a few weeks longer than Alexander Downer did in 1994-95, and a couple of weeks less than Brendan Nelson after the defeat of the Howard government in 2007, Ley’s leadership is the second-shortest of any federal Liberal leader.
But her tenure as the member for Farrer is the second-longest in the seat’s history.
The seat was held by former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer, a National, until his retirement in 2001.

This could be a headache on two fronts, one being the resurgence of One Nation who are going to want the seat, and the other being the Coalition’s own rules… under which, the sitting member in a Coalition-held seat isn’t challenged by the other side at election time, if the sitting member is Liberals then the Nationals don’t put up a candidate, and vice versa. But when there’s a by-election and there is no sitting member, it’s fair game for both sides… and given they’ve both only just patched up their differences, they probably don’t need this sort of potential tension. Ley has been saying things about clearing the way for Angus Taylor by not sticking around to undermine him, but I feel this is more like leaving a big steaming shit on his doorstep out of spite…

As for Angus Taylor himself…

…THIS is still what he’s best known for all these years, i.e. providing Australia with one of the great social media self-owns. But what has he done otherwise that was actually, you know, useful instead of just inadvertently comedic? I mean, he lost to Sussan Ley at the Liberal leadership contest after the last election; he was clearly considered so piss-poor that the Libs would rather vote for a woman of all things. Today Malcolm Turnbull was calling him the best-qualified idiot the party had ever met. I can’t believe the party couldn’t find a better option; obviously Sussan’s time was up (and I’m kind of impressed they let a woman run them for so long anyway), but was no one else available? This dickhead is the best they can do? How does Dave Shittleproud feel? Eh, whatever. As long as people (especially Labor) keep using that gift of a Facebook fuck-up against him while he’s there, cos that’s what matters most of all…

Insert Carl McCoy here

On a lighter note, Threads (which I still check out most days) has turned particularly silly in the last few hours…

So, the weather in the US has been quite foul lately, even for this time of year, and someone somewhere was inspired to develop the idea that the US “government” has engineered the weather to stop the Biblical Leviathan from awaking and to drive it back into its frozen slumber. This is FUCKING MAGNIFICENT, especially cos no one seems to know how it started nor whether (nearly wrote that as “weather” HO HO) the people who started it  mean it or not. A lot of people do seem to be invoking it sarcastically as a meme, but the funnier and sadder responses come from people not getting the joke (if it is one), e.g.:

Well, in spite of my own education (Matraville Primary 1980-86, Sydney Boys High School 1987-92, University of NSW 1993-97, and two TAFE courses 2001-03), I’ve never seen satellite imagery off the tip of Argentina/Chile before because there’s never been any reason why I SHOULD have done. I generally don’t NEED satellite imagery of anywhere, let alone the arse of South America, my interests and activities generally don’t require that sort of thing. I imagine MOST people are in a similar position to me, in that they don’t take a regular active interest in this sort of thing, but when someone shows them a cool picture like this they’ll say “oh, that’s a cool picture”, they’ll acknowledge it positively despite that… and then some prat comes up and screams at them for not being more interested in science.

Then there’s Paula here:

Here’s something else she seems to be serious about:

I think I’ll pass on that offer, thanks. At least some people are retaining their senses of irony:

And this is hard to argue with too:

As a respite from the horrors, this whole Leviathan thing certainly has been one. And, as a final note, this is also hard to argue with: