Month: September 2023

Shaking that body line?

One of the oddest news stories of recent days has involved Lauren Boebert, one of the worst people in the current iteration of the Republican party (and that’s no mean feat, of course), getting chucked out of a performance of the musical version of Beetlejuice. The initial story was peculiar enough, in that she was apparently enjoying the show a little too much for the people around her, generally being obnoxious and also vaping, which a pregnant woman in Boebert’s vicinity apparently asked her not to do and she refused, whereupon theatre staff came out and politely but firmly advised her to leave before they called the cops.

So far, so amusing, especially when she denied vaping but a security camera caught her doing just that. However, it appears the camera may have caught her doing a bit more:

Newly-released CCTV footage appears to show Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and her companion getting inappropriately handsy during a performance of Beetlejuice the musical, which she was kicked out of on Sunday.
In the footage, Boebert’s companion — identified by several news outlets to be 46-year-old Quinn Gallagher — could be seen groping Boebert’s chest in the middle of the show, before Boebert appears to place her hand by his crotch and whisper something into his ear.
The clip went viral on social media and sparked uproar.

Oof. If Lauren and Quinn were indeed copping feels of each other, and that’s kind of what it looks like, this is a particularly bad look for Boebert, who has a particular loathing for trans folks and drag shows. And here she apparently is offering a over-the-pants heej, in a space that would’ve had several kids in it (Beetlejuice being more or less considered PG by the theatre). Whoops. Even funnier is that her apparent current beau (she’s in the middle of a divorce) is a Democrat who owns a bar that hosts drag events.

Anyway, this is without doubt the best thing to come out of this silly story:

Just say no to VHS!

Here’s an image that has me wondering. I don’t see an exact date on it but I’m guessing it has to be 1980, cos I can’t imagine that Buck Rogers was available to buy before at least the end of the first series (which Wiki tells me was the end of March 1980)… might be 1981 cos that’s when the second series aired, but anyway, this means we’re in the age of home video (indeed, by 1980 VHS already had over half the home video market ahead of Beta). Very early days of it, to be sure, and I suppose some amount of overlap between the old home media and the new one was inevitable (much like VHS and DVD overlapped for a while), video wasn’t going to completely displace film immediately… but it just has me wondering now how long the big studios continued selling their product on film rather than tape. I know Blackhawk Films was still selling prints into at least the 90s, but they were a specialist outlier, not one of the majors; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a definitive date for when the latter finally gave up on super 8… though I rather suspect this ad here was among the last of its kind.

“Original”

“Original”. It’s almost like the 1933 King Kong that this film was remaking didn’t exist or something and hadn’t been available on American TV for 20 years by the time this was made, and also hadn’t had a succesful theatrical re-release just five or six years before. I know movie posters are supposed to hype up their product, but there’s a difference between hype and, frankly, lying…

Whacks mask

An Italian poster for 1953’s House of Wax. I must say, I’ve seen more than a few movie trailers that have given away too much of the film they’re advertising, but I can’t think offhand of any other movie poster that, you know, gives away the film’s climax like this does…

Tucker tells us a joke

I mean, this is absolute bullshit and Tucker knows it, he doesn’t believe it for a minute; the left is too busy shitting on itself and dividing itself into different clumps that insist all other leftists are the wrong sort of left to remember it actually has a common enemy (and the latter is NOT small-l liberals they think are inches away from being properly right-wing but they don’t do anything to try and drag them leftwards). Tucker knows this is shit and he’s just trying to whip up panic in people who know nothing about the left; if the latter were anywhere as together as Tucker wants these idiots to think, they’d actually have something to be terrified about…

No shit

Popular nasal decongestant doesn’t actually relieve congestion, FDA advisers say

The leading decongestant used by millions of Americans looking for relief from a stuffy nose is no better than a dummy pill, according to government experts who reviewed the latest research on the long-questioned drug ingredient.
Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously on Tuesday against the effectiveness of the key drug found in popular versions of Sudafed, Dayquil and other medications stocked on store shelves.
“Modern studies, when well conducted, are not showing any improvement in congestion with phenylephrine,” said Dr. Mark Dykewicz, an allergy specialist at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine.
The FDA assembled its outside advisers to take another look at phenylephrine, which became the main drug in over-the-counter decongestants when medicines with an older ingredient — pseudoephedrine — were moved behind pharmacy counters. A 2006 law had forced the move because pseudoephedrine can be illegally processed into methamphetamine.

I actually worked at a pharmacy here in Sydney briefly back in 2000. Most of my work was actually packing medications for the unfortunate residents of various nursing homes around town and we didn’t do much walk-up traffic (there was another pharmacy up that did the normal daily pharmacy business), but we got a few people rocking up and I do recall at least one instance of someone coming in to buy REAL Sudafed, and that person had to have their details recorded in order to do so. That was, as I indicated, some years before the US evidently decided the meth risk was too great, we were actually way ahead of them there, and meth is still a problem anyway. Needless to say, the news that phenylephrine is comparatively useless should only come as a surprise to those of us who’ve never had a cold…

By the way…

…Remember the other thing that happened on September 11, but in 1973? Remember that? Yeah, the US government would probably rather you forgot about that one and focus on the one that happened to them. But remember the other one too, and the thousands of people estimated to have died as a result of that, and the US’ disinclination to bring freedom back to Chile like they did with Afghanistan and Iraq.

Gollum will survive

I’m always kind of amazed when I find something that’s been on the Internet for years and somehow no one I know has mentioned it. In that spirit, I offer you this video on Youtube since 2011 of Neil Gaiman, Adam Savage, and how the latter performed “I Will Survive” through a massive nosebleed in character as Gollum. One of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. I can’t believe it’s taken me until now to discover it.