Month: July 2025

80 years of becoming death

It’s the 80th anniversary of the Trinity bomb. Not an anniversary we should be celebrating as such, of course, since the atom bomb can hardly be called a positive contribution to humanity’s wellbeing (though I suppose some of the research into it must’ve useful applications later), and the military’s lack of concern for the residents who were closer to the thing than they should’ve been and their lies about the effects of it directly did those particular people no good. Still, I suppose the mushroom-shaped shadow it cast across most of the 20th century thereafter means we should at least acknowledge the day we all became sons of bitches, to paraphrase Trinity test director Kenneth Bainbridge…

Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967)

“Wastlelands”?

Let’s face it: there are some films you watch primarily if not entirely just so you can say “I saw that film with… that title”. This is surely one of those films, I will confess the title was certainly what drew me at first… director Atsushi Yamatoya had been a screenwriter at Nikkatsu before he went independent, and one of his efforts had been Seijun Suzuki’s infamous Branded to Kill just a few months earlier; this fact made sense while watching ISDW (let’s just abbreviate it), cos on some level you can kind of see this one as being like that except more fucked. It’s considered an early pink film, a genre with no real Western equivalent but this particular example could probably be compared to the “roughies” being made in the US at the same time, but sex isn’t really what drives this film (unlike what I’ve always assumed about the pink genre, with which I’m only really theoretically familiar)… plot revolves around a hitman, Sho, who’s been hired by a real estate developer, Naka, to take out a yakuza gang who have kidnapped his mistress; the leader of said gang also killed Sho’s girlfriend years earlier. Beyond that broad outline… I’m not 100% sure, to be honest; Yamatoya is frankly uninterested is making things easy for the viewer, and I often found myself confused by the timeline being presented. The longer it goes on, the harder it gets to tell what’s happening now, what’s a flashback, and what might just be imaginary (it’s clearer by the end, but the last half hour or so is kind of hard going). ISDW is nothing if not wilfully difficult, but it’s also fascinating and compelling enough to keep watching, and I think it’ll reward rewatches in future.

Schrodinger’s fallout

I really should read Jay Kuo’s Just for Skeets and Giggles series more often than I do; this week he has some amazing stuff on offer regarding things I haven’t written much about because of, you know, reasons, like Edolf’s new political party, the Big Beautiful Bill, the Texas floods, and Grok being fiddled with to make it less “woke” to the point where it went frankly Nazi instead…

But he has a particularly good selection of posts about the Epstein list, some of which I want to preserve here (the Roger Stone freakout I posted myself was in there too, by the way)… I still think Epstein was probably smart enough to keep any such thing (he had a prison record, after all, from having done that sort of thing in the past) in the first place, but if it did exist then it certainly doesn’t now.

I thought the invocation of Dan Bongino in this one was interesting:

In a government full of barely capable misfits, Dan Bongino is particularly notable; he spent a big chunk of his career as a cop and member of the Secret Service, but he seems to be much better known as a media commentator and host on outlets like Faux News, with conspiracy theory bullshit being his stock in trade, and is currently the Deputy Director of the FBI (in which organisation he has never served). I say “currently” because he may not be for much longer, having spoken about resigning over the Epstein debacle… which, if he does that, will result in the most incomprehensible spectacle TrumpCorp can offer, i.e. someone inside the mob refusing to put up with its bullshit. Not that he’ll blame Mushroom Cock for it, of course, even though this bullshit is almost certainly at his instigation, he might leave the job but I don’t see him leaving the cult.

Talking of barely capable misfits:

Oh Oolong, that groot wit mond of yours will get you in trouble one day.

I’ve never trusted Lincoln Project, because, when it comes to the crunch, a bunch of never-Trump Republicans is still a bunch of Republicans. Still, hard to deny when they make good points.

One last one, which isn’t in Jay’s collection but I saw it posted today on BS:

WOOF! Someone’s not interested in holding back, are they? This, of course, is exactly why the Democrats will never let AOC get too far…

Sure, why not

I could’ve sworn I’d written on here before about Nick Adams but a search suggests not? I was, perhaps, confusing him with “Deej” Babet, who I have covered before, I don’t know, so many right-wing cunts have passed through this blog in the last couple of years… Anyway, he’s another right-wing cunt, just look at his Wiki entry cos I can’t arsed enumerating his problems… and Mushroom Cock just nominated him to be the US ambassador to Malaysia, which I’m sure he’s even less fit to be than MC is to be president. Still to be confirmed by th Senate but Drumpf gets what Drumpf wants. The US really is determined to make Turkmenbashi-era Turkmenistan look like a serious country, isn’t it…

Schrodinger’s list?

In the midst of everything else TrumpCorp has been doing of late, they’ve miraculously succeeded in uniting both sides against them on one point: THIS is some bullshit.

The US Department of Justice and FBI have concluded that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein did not have a so-called client list that could implicate high-profile associates, and that he did take his own life – contradicting long-held conspiracy theories about the infamous case.
While campaigning last year, President Donald Trump promised to release files relating to the disgraced financier.
But since he returned to office in January, some of his supporters have grown frustrated with the administration’s handling of the case and for failing to deliver new revelations. […]
According to a two-page Department of Justice (DoJ) and FBI memo, investigators found no “incriminating list” of clients and “no credible evidence” that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals.
Investigators also released footage they say supports the medical examiner’s conclusion that Epstein died by suicide while being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.
Some conspiracy theorists have suggested that Epstein was murdered to stop him from implicating government officials, celebrities and other business tycoons who were involved in his crimes.
FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino had previously questioned the official narrative regarding Epstein’s death – although since joining the Trump administration, both have acknowledged that Epstein took his own life.

The problem with at least one of those “long-held conspiracy theories”, of course, i.e. the one about the “client list”, is that Trump’s own people, in this case A-G Pam Bondi, started that one:

Continue reading “Schrodinger’s list?”

Look sharp!

So I socialised on Saturday night, club called Halo, a goth/industrial event that runs as an annual special event out of Oxford Art Factory… found it a bit flat this year, took me an awfully long time to get in the swing of it, and I think it was essentially just further evidence for what I’ve long felt, i.e. that if you can’t drink at a club (and I can’t, not really, and certainly shouldn’t) and can’t dance at it (which activity was always helped for me by alcohol, and which isn’t helped by my body being what it is) and you’re not DJing at it (which I used to, I had two regular monthly slots, but one of those nights ended and I appear to have been surplus to requirements since the end of 2019 for reasons I frankly don’t know), then it’s probably not really a lot of fun, even more so when your camera is frankly crap and you can’t even get any decent photos of the night… a fair bit of effort in my case for not a great deal of return…

…having said all of which, I will nonetheless not deny the skills of the sword swallower, Sian Jackson (one of various additional performers Halo offers); I only wish I’d got a shot of her when she had three swords down her gullet at once, but given how piss-poor most of the photos I took that night were, I’m glad this one turned out acceptable…

He came, he got it

(post title stolen from a friend on Bluesky—hi Kitty, hi Tim)

Australian celebrity chef Peter Russell-Clarke dies aged 89

Born in Ballarat in 1935, Russell-Clarke began his career at age 14, working as a junior artist at an advertising agency, before moving into freelance cartooning and working as a food consultant for popular magazines, including New Idea and Woman’s Day.
He went on to produce his own cookbooks before shooting to wider fame through his catchy “g’days” which featured in the theme song of his 1980s ABC cooking show Come and Get it.
The show ran from 1983 to 1992, with 900 episodes written and hosted by Russell-Clarke wearing his signature neckerchief.
His appearances on Come and Get It made him one of Australia’s pioneering TV celebrity chefs.
“I realised that the bloke in front of the camera got more applause than the person who wrote it,” he told the ABC in 2017.
“So I wrote myself into the series and I became known as a cook rather than a painter or a writer.”

I share part of PRC’s surname, so, in the 80s when he was at his peak with Come and Get It, the kids at primary school used to amuse themselves singing the theme song with my first name inserted. It was irritating. Still, not going to blame Peter for that, of course, not his fault that primary school kids could be little shits (I mean, I probably was one myself at times, let’s be honest)… Anyway, there goes another one of those people, the ones that were just always there when you were little, maybe not so much as you get older but they’re a presence nonetheless… and when they go, another bit of your own past departs with them. Bye, Peter, looks like you had a pretty decent time among us…