Month: April 2025

The Naked Gun (1988)

Oh, I needed this tonight. There has been some discourse about the new Naked Gun with Liam Neeson that currently appears to be coming out in August; I saw the first trailer for it the other day and am… well, not entirely convinced. I wasn’t sure that it felt like a “Naked Gun movie”, if you know what I mean, but the concluding joke about OJ Simpson was gold and you can’t always take a trailer as being necessarily indicative of the whole film (which I will likely wind up seeing at some point)… and, to be sure, the original film doesn’t exactly feel like Police Squad!, the TV series that inspired it, either. It strikes me now that it’s actually kind of like how the Monty Python movies relate to the Python TV series, in that both clearly relished the opportunity to not only spend a ton of extra money but also to do jokes that were rather more crass than they could’ve gotten away with on TV in those days (“sexual assault with a concrete DILDO!”)… In any case, the new film inspired me to dig out the old one, which I haven’t seen in years. I don’t have the same relationship with the film as I do the series, in that I kept finding new jokes the series even twenty years after first watching it; the film doesn’t really offer me new discoveries like that. But on this rewatch I think I did get a new sense of just how immaculate the comic timing is throughout the film (something like “Drebin!” “Frank!” “You’re both right” is so much funnier than it seems on paper because of how Ricardo Montalban, Priscilla Presley and Leslie Nielsen all deliver it), and just how well cast all the characters are. I still think it runs out of puff a bit in the baseball game climax, and some of the period references are very dated, but for the most part what an absolute delight The Naked Gun still is. The new version is going to have a hard time living up to it.

RIP Elvis Ramone

News just coming through now indicates Blondie drummer Clem Burke has lost the quiet battle he’d been fighting with cancer. He had a pretty extensive career outside Blondie, including a brief stint with the Ramones, and was apparently a large part of why Blondie didn’t break up almost as soon as they’d formed (having rather quickly lost both Ivan Kral to Patti Smith and Fred Smith to Television), and was with them to the end.

Skylab says hello

So Sydney was blessed by this aerial visitor last night. This was caught by this webcam overlooking the harbour and the bridge from somewhere on the north side of town (parenthetically, there’s a remarkable amount of traffic going over the bridge for this time of night), but the clip was uploaded to Facebook separately by someone else and then a friend reposted it, and I accordingly grabbed it to share here. Said friend made a crack about it being SpaceX’s latest experiment coming back to Earth, but it’s not quite as drawn out as that. And I think even Edolf might try and stop his failures hitting a major international city…

Working men are pissed

I don’t know anything about Tom Tiffany beyond what his Wiki entry says (and it makes him sound like a right cunt, too), but I suspect what the American worker really wants more than this tariff bullshit is to see his corpse hanging upside down from the roof of a petrol station so that he/she can spit on him and throw rocks at him. Worked with Mussolini, after all…

This wouldn’t surprise me

I don’t know how true this actually is, but it doesn’t come as a shock. The current regime is so full of incompetents and unqualified morons that I can entirely believe they worked out the whole thing with ChatGPT, which is famously wrong about almost everything. Apparently this explains the Norfolk Island mystery, too:

Trade tariffs imposed on tiny Australian territories that are either uninhabited or claim to have no trading relationship with the US appear to have been calculated based on erroneous trade data.
The data relates, at least in part, to shipments mislabelled as coming from remote Norfolk Island, or Heard Island and McDonald Islands, instead of their correct countries of origin, the Guardian can reveal.
Among the erroneously labelled shipments over the past five years from the island territories are shipments of aquarium systems, Timberland boots, wine and parts for a recycling plant.
According to an analysis of US import data and shipping records, multiple shipments of goods were classified as having originated from Norfolk Island or Heard and McDonald islands when neither the company address, nor the port of departure for the shipment, nor the destination port were located in those territories.
In some cases involving Norfolk Island, which is 1,600km north-east of Sydney and has a population of 2,188, the confusion appears to have resulted from the fact that the company’s address or port of departure is Norfolk, UK, or the destination is Norfolk, Virginia in the US, or a company’s registered address in New Hampshire (NH) has been listed instead as Norfolk Island (NI).
Norfolk Island was this week hit with a 29% tariff on its goods – 19 percentage points higher than the rest of Australia – despite claiming to have no export relationship with the US.
The decision has perplexed the Australian government, with Australia’s prime minister saying it was evidence “nowhere was safe” from Trump’s tariffs. The country’s trade minister, Don Farrell, said it was “clearly a mistake”.

I’m kind of loath to let Mushroom Cock know that, though. He doesn’t like being told he’s wrong and the tariff on Australia might get blown up to 29% instead.

Alas, this does kind of screw up my theory about what really happened with Heard & MacDonald… cos quite apart from how hard it is to actually travel there, you need special permits to do so that are rarely given out, to the point where apparently no one has gone there for nearly a decade. So when I thought more about this, I could only wonder what the penguins were up to in humanity’s absence. Maybe, just maybe, that $1.5m worth of machinery the US supposedly imported from H&M just in 2022 was real? Maybe I shouldn’t rule that out just yet. Who knows what those penguins might be doing…

Meanwhile, in SignalGate

Mike Waltz’s team set up at least 20 Signal chats for national security work – report

Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and his team have created at least 20 different group chats on the encrypted messaging app Signal to coordinate sensitive national security work, sources tell Politico.
The revelation, which cites four people with direct knowledge of the practice, follows heightened scrutiny of the administration’s handling of sensitive information after the Atlantic recently published messages from a chat that included the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, sharing operational details of deadly strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Those anonymous sources told Politico the Signal chats covered a wide range of policy areas, including Ukraine, China, Gaza, broader Middle East policy, Africa and Europe. All four individuals reported seeing “sensitive information” discussed in these forums, though none said they were aware of classified material being shared.
Over the last few days, Waltz’s flippant nature over the protection of national security secrets has been exposed. The Washington Post reported on documents revealing that Waltz’s team had been conducting government business through personal Gmail accounts.

I presume this is one of those things that’s only bad when Democrats do it…

With friends like these…

So this was “Liberation Day”, as Mushroom Cock was calling it, the day he was going to impose new stupid tariffs on the entire world and presumably liberate the US from having a functioning economy… basically he’s putting a 10% tariff on all imported goods plus additional amounts on certain countries he thinks are really screwing the US over. Australia seems to have got off lightly compared to some countries, with these tariffs going far and wide, including the Heard and McDonald Islands. There’s just one problem with that particular place, though:

A group of barren, uninhabited volcanic islands near Antarctica, covered in glaciers and home to penguins, have been swept up in Donald Trump’s trade war, as the US president hit them with a 10% tariff on goods.
Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which form an external territory of Australia, are among the remotest places on earth, accessible only via a two-week boat voyage from Perth on Australia’s west coast. They are completely uninhabited, with the last visit from people believed to be nearly 10 years ago.
Nevertheless, Heard and McDonald islands featured in a list released by the White House of “countries” that would have new trade tariffs imposed.
The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said on Thursday: “Nowhere on earth is safe.”

So yeah, aint nobody here but us penguins. Apparently other Australian external territories have also been targeted as countries in their own right, including Norfolk Island, which does contain people but apparently has no trade relationship with the US, despite which it’s been hit with a 29% tariff, markedly bigger than the 10% we’re being hit with. And one of his other targets is the British Indian Ocean Territory, an archipelago of which only one island is inhabited, that being Diego Garcia… which is inhabited almost entirely by the American military (being as it is a military base jointly owned by the US and UK).

Interestingly, when you look at the full list of countries being targeted, Russia is conspicuous by its absence. I wonder why that might be.