Month: January 2024

Outnumbered, outdumbered

The anti-woke backlash has, if nothing, exposed a bunch of absolute numpties for what they are; all these people getting uptight about Doctor Who treating trans people like normal human beings and so forth, well, clearly they’ve never watched the fucking thing or they’d have known the show’s generally progressive tendencies over the decades. This is how I know Emily Compagno here knows bugger all about Star Trek (quite apart from getting the Vulcan salute wrong); Fox were malding about the next Star Wars film having a female director, and she said that’s why she watches Star Trek instead. You know, Star Trek, that un-woke, un-feminist TV franchise. The one whose original series admittedly had no female directors but did have a number of female writers including D.C. Fontana, some of whose episodes are among the best of the series; meanwhile, Next Gen did bring at least one female director on board (who did a bunch of episodes on that, plus some on DS9 and Voyager), and the more recent iterations of Trek have had even more female directors, like Hanelle Culpepper who’s not only female but BLACK. Political correctness gone mad, obviously. To say nothing of the multi-ethnic and multi-gender casting of the show, and the fact that Number One in “The Cage”—you know, the very first produced episode of the show—Number One, second only to the ship’s captain, was female. Emily, I’m not even a Trekkie and I know all this, which is more than I suspect you do. Fucking clown. No wonder you’re on Fox, a REAL network would never have hired you…

EDIT (a few hours later): And if you won’t hear it from me, hear it from someone who REALLY knows what he’s talking about:

A baby of blood?

Well HERE’s something I wasn’t expecting to discover at this time of night, nor indeed at any hour. I’m not even remotely surprised, of course, that the Italians would have a crack at a King Kong knockoff, and presumably before Dino De Laurentiis’ impending remake had even finished production; the latter didn’t open until just before Xmas ’76, and this thing was being promised for just two months later. (I presume, of course, the remake was what motivated this rather than the original).

But that Mario Bava was the prospective director? THAT confuses me. I mean, I don’t suppose there’s any inherent reason why Bava couldn’t have made such a thing, but I just can’t envisage him stooping to such a blatant ripoff of this sort… I know his career was tanking after the recent debacles with Lisa and the Devil/House of Exorcism and Rabid Dogs, but even so. At any rate, Baby Kong was not, in fact, ready at the end of February 1977, nor at any other time. I don’t know whether to find that sad or not.

One nation under chud

As I said the other day, I’m trying to be more positive on here, so here’s a good news story:

Former Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, the pentecostal evangelical Christian who made international headlines in 2015, has now been ordered to pay a total of more than $360,000 after refusing to issue a marriage license to a local same-sex couple that year, ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in support of marriage equality.
Davis, who once told supporters she is a “soldier for Christ,” was ordered by U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning on Tuesday to pay attorneys of the couple $260,104 in fees and expenses, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports. She previously was ordered by a jury to pay the couple, David Ermold and David Moore, a total of $100,000 in damages. In March of 2022 a federal judge found Davis had violated the couple’s constitutional rights.
While the elected county clerk, Davis was jailed for several days after defying a court order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Citing her personal religious beliefs, she had claimed she issued marriage licenses under “God’s authority,” and refused.
“The question is simple — did Davis knowingly violate the law? The answer here is clear — yes,” Judge Bunning wrote in 2022. “Ultimately, this Court’s determination is simple — Davis cannot use her own constitutional rights as a shield to violate the constitutional rights of others while performing her duties as an elected official.”

Granted, this is hardly good news for Kim Davis, but this really is the right way for this story to end; nice to know that at least some level of American government, however low, holds its people accountable if they refuse to uphold the law.

Reading in 2024

Saw someone on Bluesky posit this as a bit of a reading plan for the year:

This Corey is rather more sensible than the Corey we were looking at earlier, it must be said

And this seemed… eminently possible for me, something about this just struck me as good. Cos I don’t really do plans of this sort myself, I have always said I’m too much of a mood reader for that sort of thing, but something about this seems viable for some reason. Even I could pull this off. I have been informally aiming for an average of one book a week anyway… which, to be sure, I was also aiming for last year, and, well, that didn’t exactly work out, but maybe if I actually make a post here that’ll make me more likely to stick to it. Accountability and all. I particularly like the one short story every day thing, that’s something that seems especially doable, to which end I began tonight with Mr Woolrich’s Nightwebs collection and the story “Graves for the Living”, and I think I’ll read two stories tomorrow to make up for missing Monday. Like I say, posting this here should make me more likely to stick to the plan; we’ll see how it goes, anyway…

Not a MAGAt, America

Oh no! Punks are getting political! Who could have expected such a thing?

Rock band Green Day altered the lyrics of their well-known song American Idiot to criticize Donald Trump during a televised New Year’s Eve performance.
During a set on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, the lead singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, replaced the line “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” with “I’m not a part of the Maga agenda”. The song was originally released to criticize former president George Bush in 2004.
Green Day fans flocked to social media to share the live performance during the New Year’s event with host Ryan Seacrest.
This isn’t the first time the band has targeted Trump. The rock band previously scorned the former president at the American Music Awards in 2016, and responded to Trump’s indictment in August with limited edition merchandise featuring his mugshot.

People seem to be losing their very shit over the idea that a punk rock band of all things might have a political angle to their work, and that they might slightly (cos how much difference is there between “redneck agenda” and “MAGA agenda”?) update a reference in one of their older, political songs. AND on the Dick Clark NYE show of all things, you know, the show devised by the guy who pioneered that form of musical miscegenation called rock’n’roll on American TV in the 50s and had not only mixed black and white performers on stage but similarly mixed black and white audiences with segregation… the height of wokeness I tell you. Still, all those punk fans disappointed in Green Day now can listen to someone like Skrewdriver instead, I suppose…

2025: illegal to be male, presumably

I don’t know how old this screenshot is, but I’m guessing 2018 if the first date mentioned in it is the year after that. Doesn’t say much for Corey’s predictive abilities, does it? For one thing, he was evidently writing this in the middle of the Drumpf era, and there was never any danger of any of those things being outlawed while he was running the shitshow… especially not white nationalism, if they outlaw that, that’d wipe out a large chunk of the Republican party.

As for Corey himself, it’s 2024 now and he’s still all of those things. Especially white.

The Jews didn’t steal anything from me; I was born in a Catholic hospital. Though Corey would probably find that just as bad. Seriously though, as a circumcised lad myself, few things irritate me more than the “intactivists” of the anti-circumcision movement, especially when they insist I should take personal offence at the absence of a piece of my body I never had in the first place AND I CAN HARDLY MISS SOMETHING I NEVER HAD TO BEGIN WITH CAN I… but also it leaves itself open for, let’s face it, rank antisemitism of the above sort. Which I feel ultimately underlies a lot of that movement anyway.

Then again, a few posts down his Twitter page, Corey does laugh at some libertarian chud whining about the restaurant he was dining at getting a surprise visit from health inspectors, because apparently the idea that inspectors should make sure that dining facilities aren’t breeding salmonella behind the ovens or something is abhorrent to him… so apparently Corey actually can recognise a genuine idiot worthy of pointing and laughing at sometimes? See, I actually said something good about him! I found a possible redeeming feature! I’m trying to be more positive on here where I can, so I found something good even about this otherwise clearly ghastly individual… sort of… didn’t I…?

How about that queen

So I went on Mastodon, saw a couple of people mentioning the Danish monarchy, was puzzled by what that was about… then a bit more scrolling and I saw:

Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II has announced her surprise abdication in a new year TV address.
She will formally step down on 14 January, which will be 52 years to the day since she became queen.
“I will leave the throne to my son, Crown Prince Frederik,” she announced.
The 83-year-old is the world’s only reigning queen and the longest serving current monarch in Europe, taking the throne after the death of her father King Frederik IX in 1972. […]
Crown Prince Frederik, like Britain’s King Charles III, is known for his passion for the environment. He has vowed to “guide the ship” of Denmark into the future.
His wife, Princess Mary, grew up on the Australian island of Tasmania and was working as a lawyer when the pair met in 2000.

At least the good people of Denmark don’t have to suffer the infernal cost of a coronation, cos apparently the Danish monarchy doesn’t bother with that; all they do is put out a formal announcement on the day that Fredrik is now king and Australia’s Very Own Mary Donaldson is now queen, which obviously saves a lot of money and time. That’s a lesson Britain could do with learning…

Start your year right

Admittedly this wouldn’t work on me cos “Sister Ray” is one of my favourite songs and I would be dancing (or at least making bodily movements approximating to same, seeing how I can’t really dance as such) for the whole length of it if you did that. Still, if your friends are less musically advanced, it might be worth trying on them, especially if you use the Legendary Guitar Amp Tape version:

I think they’ll stain more than just the carpet if they hear that. While we’re on the subject:

White Light/White Heat has always been my favourite Velvets album. My first encounter with them was actually a TV documentary about Andy Warhol which featured a bit of performance footage by them at the Factory (the famous one where the police bust them). I was, accordingly, confused at first by the debut album cos it didn’t really sound like that (I do think it’s a great album, of course, but it took time to come round to it), whereas WL/WH immediately sounded like I’d always thought they would, going by that short bit of film in the Warhol thing. Probably the most obnoxiously recorded album made to that time, and it wouldn’t have much competition for some time to come (its few immediate competitors that I can think of offhand include the Cromagnon album—which the fellow behind the “Sister Ray” video above also has a video on—and High Tide’s Sea Shanties, both from the following year). Favourite VU album, one of my favourites by anyone.