Month: May 2025

RIP Margaret

Loretta Swit, ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan on ‘MASH,’ Dies at 87

Loretta Swit, who played Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on seminal TV comedy “MASH,” died Friday at her home in New York City. She was 87.
Her rep Harlan Boll said she died of natural causes.
For her work on “MASH” Swit was Emmy nominated for outstanding performance by a supporting actress in a comedy every year from 1974-83, winning the Emmy in 1980 and 1982.
Her “MASH” co-star Alan Alda remembered her on X, writing “Loretta was a supremely talented actor. She deserved all her 10 Emmy nominations and her 2 wins. But more than acting her part, she created it. She worked hard In showing the writing staff how they could turn the character from a one joke sexist stereotype into a real person — with real feelings and ambitions. We celebrated the day the script came out listing her character not as Hot Lips, but as Margaret. Loretta made the most of her time here.”

A damned shame. Margaret was a great TV character, and though I’ve always been dubious about the show’s gradual turn from a comedy into a drama as it got older, she definitely benefitted from it.

We never doubted it for a second, Don

If, for some reason, you thought that nice post from Mushroom Cock offering condolences to Joe Biden over his cancer diagnosis was actually written by him, well, he’s just basically acknowledged it wasn’t. Obviously anyone with eyes that can read knew that already, of course, because it was an expression of kindness and generosity, two things that he is fundamentally incapable of feeling, quite apart from it reading like a grown adult had written it as opposed to Krasnov’s usual pissy toddler style… but yeah, anyone who was still doubting the quality of his character for some reason can stop now.

Of course

RFK Jr’s ‘Maha’ report found to contain citations to nonexistent studies

Robert F Kennedy Jr’s flagship health commission report contains citations to studies that do not exist, according to an investigation by the US publication Notus.
The report exposes glaring scientific failures from a health secretary who earlier this week threatened to ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals.
The 73-page “Make America healthy again” report – which was commissioned by the Trump administration to examine the causes of chronic illness, and which Kennedy promoted it as “gold-standard” science backed by more than 500 citations – includes references to seven studies that appear to be entirely invented, and others that the researchers say have been mischaracterized.
Two supposed studies on ADHD medication advertising simply do not exist in the journals where they are claimed to be published. Virginia Commonwealth University confirmed to Notus that researcher Robert L Findling, listed as an author of one paper, never wrote such an article, while another citation leads only to the Kennedy report itself when searched online. […]
The citation failures come as Kennedy, a noted skeptic of vaccines, criticized medical publishing this week, branding top journals the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine and Jama as “corrupt” and alleging they were controlled by pharmaceutical companies. He outlined plans for creating government-run journals instead.

Somehow I’m not wholly surprised that these citations don’t exist, given that RFK Jr.’s qualifications for his job don’t exist either, but I’m still kind of shocked despite that. The report appears to be full of shit and other problems as it is, but the evident number of outright lies is concerning. I fear this gives us an insight into what those government-run journals might be like…

That didn’t take long…

The Coalition is back, baby! Which is not a surprise, I said in my post about the split last week that they’d reunite sooner or later, though admittedly I wasn’t expecting it quite so soon…

The Liberals and Nationals have reached an agreement to reunite a week after their dramatic split.
The Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, will announce her shadow cabinet later on Wednesday after the Nationals endorsed the deal at a virtual party room meeting.
Liberal sources confirmed Ley has started contacting MPs to inform them of their roles in her new frontbench. The shadow cabinet will include 14 Liberals and six Nationals.
Guardian Australia has confirmed former Nationals leaders Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack have been dumped to the backbench.
The two senior MPs spoke out against the Nationals’ initial decision to abandon the Liberals, causing friction among colleagues.

Feels a little bit harsh, given that they were opposed to the split and now the band’s back together… shouldn’t they be rewarded for their loyalty to the idea of the Coalition? Well, no, no they shouldn’t, because Michael McCormack is a hateful piece of homphobic and racist shit, and Barnaby is, frankly, Barnaby, and his loyalties have always been questionable. And not everyone seems to be enthusiastic about David Littleproud’s work either:

While the Coalition agreement has been struck, more Nationals are voicing strong criticism of Littleproud’s leadership, raising further questions over whether he will retain his position leading the party.
Colin Boyce, the MP for Flynn, gave several media interviews on Wednesday blasting Littleproud and refusing to back the leader.
Boyce claimed Littleproud had misled the Nationals and hadn’t provided all the information to his party room about discussions with Ley, and that his initial move to seek exemptions from cabinet solidarity “makes no sense whatsoever”.
“How can you support a bloke that misleads the party room? I’m calling him out, I can’t do it,” Boyce told Sky News.
“You take these four policies that David took to the first meeting with Sussan Ley, again, none of that has come through the party room. It wasn’t discussed. We’re served this stuff up and expected to agree with it with no input whatsoever.”

Boyce was calling for Littleproud’s head almost immediately after the election, and indeed the latter faced off a leadership challenge about a week later from Matt Canavan; I have a feeling Dave’s going to be hearing a lot more of this shit from him. Fun and games ahead for the Coalition for a while…

Well, we’re fucked again, apparently

Terribly sorry for being so late in announcing the latest apocalypse about to end everything, I know it doesn’t give you much time to get ready, but I only just saw this nonsense now in the PIAT Facebook group… I gather this is Ching Hai (vegan), and there’s been some debate on Reddit about whether or not she’s a cult leader… and despite never having heard of them until now, I’m going to say “yes she fucking is”; let’s face it, most normal organisations don’t refer to their CEO as their “Most Compassionate Supreme Master”. Can you imagine Macca’s calling Ray Kroc that? And as a general rule I don’t think most businesses of that sort issue proclamations about the world coming to an end… that sort of shit’s bad for the bottom line. I think it’s probably safe to call Ching Hai (vegan) some sort of cult leader, then… and yes, they DO keep specifying that she’s vegan (kind of like the “peace be upon him” in Islam?) on her official website, per which “the Worshipped Son of God Jesus Christ” was a mere vegetarian; I presume that business with the loaves and fishes disqualifies him from full enlightenment or something.

I’m just not sure quite how being vegan will actually improve your chances of surviving a months-long solar storm, which I feel would be statistically likely to include a number of vegans among its putative death toll… nature doesn’t really discriminate like that, I don’t think. Also, she says in another video on her site that God told her the Earth would explode during the dates specified, which is a somewhat different affair… it’d be a weirdly slow explosion for one thing, but also I presume there would be no Earth left at the end of it, which would kind of wipe out all the vegans, wouldn’t it? However, I do notice the day the chaos apparently ends will be my birthday! So, assuming I’m not one of the 67% that gets killed in it before then, I wonder how many corpses I’ll wind up getting to mark the occasion…

The Oily Maniac (1976)

Well that was something, wasn’t it? I’ve been accruing a fair bit of Hong Kong cinema in recent months, a lot of it Shaw Brothers stuff, and in today’s mail was the new Shaw-Shock box from Imprint… my only prior engagement with Shaws horror was the similarly special Black Magic, also from director Ho Meng Hua, but I shall soon have a few more under my belt. Despite apparently being set in the mid-60s, Oily Maniac just screams mid-70s in much the same way that film does; our hero is a disabled young man (Danny Lee, later of The Killer among lots more) working for a somewhat dodgy law firm who takes his own action against criminals by using a magic spell that turns him into a thing made of oil. This is pretty unrepentant trash (as the title may indicate) on multiple levels, especially the effects, with the titular maniac manifesting as a ridiculous-looking liquid slick; I kept wondering how the film fared with censors at the time, too, cos I also discovered tonight Hong Kong cinema had no ratings cinema until 1988… were kids able to see this monstrosity with all that sex and violence? I imagine this would be Category III these days without much trouble…

Anyway, the film’s music is great, probably because most if not all of it was lifted bodily from other American & European films of the time; you may recognise one cue from a certain film about a shark from the year before. Oily Maniac was something of a slow starter, but once I got into its slightly perplexing vibe I found myself enjoying it more and in the second half I actually became quite charmed by it. There were some bits I could only respond to with applause. Perfectly absurd, but sometimes you just have to admire this sort of thing…

Give generously!

I thought this last one couldn’t possibly be real, but a quick Google search demonstrated otherwise. Alas, there was no actual source that I could see (I would LOVE to know who coined this astounding phrase), but I did find a book review from 2008 so that at least predated brother Adam’s citation. I wonder about some of the idioms and slang he posts, except when they’re obviously jocular ones, but it appears he’s not the originator here… Still, if we can’t quite determine where it did come from, we need to find contexts for reintroducing “give one’s arse a salad” into conversation…

Emilia coming out swinging?

I have mentioned before my fondness for Emilia Clarke. This is from her very first film, Triassic Attack. It came out in late 2010, appearing just before Game of Thrones (which might even have still been in production when it did). I don’t know what’s going on in this scene. I have not seen the film and only know what the Wiki page says about it; there’s something about demonic spirits possessing dinosaur skeletons, and I gather la belle Emilia is only a somewhat secondary character, so I don’t know how much of the film she’s actually in. Unfortunately my fondness for Emilia does not extend far enough as wanting to actually watch the film (or maybe I do like her enough not to watch it?). As such I may never know what exactly is happening in this picture, and I feel I can live with that fact. Whatever. There’s nonetheless something about this picture I find weirdly arousing. I don’t know what that says about me. And I daresay, if anyone else is reading this babbling, you’re dubiously wondering what’s wrong with me even more than I am.