How did you like that movie / TV show / book?

[LeeVanCleef]

Thomas Lennon (Felix) was actually part of the "Kids In the Hall" of the 2000s, Reno 911. He was the one who always wore the rather inappropriate shorts. Ever since I saw Dave Foley in a Celebrity Poker tournament about 10 years ago, he's been doing nothing but cashing checks... to pay off a bookie, I suppose. He lost the tournament. And, man, does he look different! Clothing-wise he's moved from the middle-school kids section in his Kids days to the Husky Lads department!
Is there seriously anything new that can be wrung from that premise? Sure they can throw in computers and microwaves now, but, damn! Not only was there the first movie and series, there was the one Arne spoke of in the '80s (a "black" Odd Couple with Ron Glass from Barney Miller and Firefly if I remember correctly), then there was a sequel to the movie with Lemmon and Matthau! I mean, damn... it ain't Star Trek! I think we can call the "Odd Couple" universe good and explored.

EDIT: I thought Lennon was part of a Kids-esque comedy troupe. He was a member of The State... which I think was on MTV in the '90s. I was all right, but it was out at the same time Mr. Show was. Mr. Show wins hands-down.

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[sleepy]

Ron Glass. Yeah! I'll take Barney Miller over Odd Couple for a reboot.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

i thought foley was pretty good in the celeb poker series. he had a lot of good zingers and did the host role about as well as it could be done.

apparently both his marriages crashed and burned and he was pretty well taken to the cleaners. so there's maybe the reason he's cashing in now.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

i'm listening to dave's appearance on the joe rogan show and i have to say the stories about his first wife are pretty chilling. apparently he can't even return to his country (canada) because she managed to get alimony at a rate of 3x or 4x what he actually earns. if he goes back he'll get thrown in jail because she also cleaned him out when they were married.

on a happier note, the show starts out with joe and dave talking about the good ol' newsradio days. lot of good behind the scenes stories, and it was apparently one of those casts that loved hanging out together after each episode wrapped.

compared to alf for example (for some reason i read up on the show recently), which sounds like it was the most unpleasant experience ever. main two things seem to be that the puppeteer / voice actor insisted on staying in character at all times, and that the stage was sort of a deathtrap with all these hidden trap doors for people to fall through.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Yeah, there were one or two problems with ALF. First, there was this guy who was enjoying his smack habit while he was writing for the show. And the puppeteer you're talking about was actually the show creator/producer who insisted that ALF be treated like another actor. Taking a look at his IMdB page, he's made a whole career out of bringing ALF back from the dead, whether we want him to or not.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

oh yeah that's right... the producer as well. WP was saying he was a perfectionist who insisted on endlessly re-shooting scenes, driving the cast and crew nuts and killing the ability to have a live audience. and i guess it would be one thing if ALF was a seminal character, but IIRC he was little more than a muppet with a touch of don rickles or someone like that.

but hmm, that writer guy was only on smack? that sounds kind of tame by hollywood / writer standards. dukey-baby made it to almost 70yo on his regime!

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Man, Hunter's story is even more depressing than that. There was an oral biography written about him. After a hospital stay (might have been a heart thing, IIR), his son and wife say that they had to get him drinking as soon as possible, because his body just couldn't live without alcohol and cutting him off cold turkey in his weakened state would have killed him. Man... that's depressing! Kinda takes away from the hedonistic fun of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

fortunately i'm not yet at the dependency stage with alky-haul. at least, far as i know. i can skip a day, a week, months or whatever and nothing happens.

but it's some scary shit. for one, alcohol is excellent at numbing my limb pain, allowing me to do all sorts of stuff that i used to do decades ago. but it also gives me a glycemic spike, which makes me feel like my CFS has vanished for a time. i go from slow and in pain to feeling like a normal person, yeah!

also, i've recently ruined a nice fund i'd built up for years, pretty much by social drinking and trying to be a 'presence' on the square.

oh well. across the pond someone like amy winehouse drops dead because she had built a massive physical dependency, didn't realise it, and tried to just drop it sharply, i guess.

zoiks.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Oh, I think there are very few people alive at that point of alcohol dependence. I thought I was having some issues over the summer, when I was killing a box of Merlot a week. Now, I haven't had a drink in a month. Not on purpose, just because I haven't felt like it. So I think we're safe.
However, free from the shackles of pop urine tests (and, let me tell you, urine shackles are the worst), I have become a fiend for the green. I'm sure that's not noticeable in my posts at all!

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

wow, that's awesome.

for some reason the green (i've tried so far) tends to tense me up physically, altho it's usually a good (creative) time for my mind. one day i need to figure out the right strain for me, i guess.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

I don't think it's as much the right strain as it is how easy it can be to take too much THC. Plus, there's the method. Actually smoking always hits me over the head like a hammer. Vaporizing, however, hits me over the head like a hammer sewn inside a pillow. Much preferable! And, despite that hinky tenseness (a good way to describe it), you wait about 10 minutes and then it's smooth sailing!
As an addendum, what amazed me most about the HST article was the coke usage. If John Entwistle's demise taught me anything, it's that people who are 50+ probably shouldn't do coke unless they've always wanted to see what a coffin looks like from the inside. I wouldn't do that shit again on a bet!

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

yeah, i understood right away that smoking anything is a terrible idea if you're doing it in a regular basis. the occasions i go green, i either eat it raw, vape, or eat he leftovers from vaping. only once did i try bud butter. but each type gives a different kind of result IME.

i disagree about the strains. both from my very limited experience with a couple strains as well as my green study.

so my understanding is that there are two poles-- sativa and indica. one apparently tends towards being THC-rich while the other tends towards being CBD-rich. one tends to hit you in the head while the other tends to hit you in the body. the reason why so much time and energy has been put towards creating so many different strains is because different people like a different mix of those two qualities.

that's my rough understanding, anyhoo.

btw-- if you're in to green you should try supplementing with fish oil. it provides a boosting and enhancing effect IME. if you recall that incident from years ago in which i went nuts over at VPF, talking about god and stuff, that was an otherwise benign combo of green and fish oil... but taken way over the top with some anti-psychotic my doctor insisted on trialing me on for some reason. remember that? :)

 

[LeeVanCleef]

btw-- if you're in to green you should try supplementing with fish oil. it provides a boosting and enhancing effect IME. if you recall that incident from years ago in which i went nuts over at VPF, talking about god and stuff, that was an otherwise benign combo of green and fish oil... but taken way over the top with some anti-psychotic my doctor insisted on trialing me on for some reason. remember that? :)

LOL! It's hard to say, nic... your description fits about every post that Pacdude ever wrote! Jeezum Crow, what was Gordon on, I wonder? I agree that there is a difference in strains, but, when you live in the states that you and I do, we don't get to go into a store and have a budtender pick out what we want! I actually made my first batch of cannibutter last week. It came out looking just like the picture said it would. But, as far as any psychoactive effects, I'd rate it pretty low on the Cheech & Chong scale. Looks like it's time for another visit into Bill's library. This book was a lot of fun to read, as the author goes on a search for the truly dank, and you learn a lot about the green industry. If the book has a drawback, it would be that it was written right before The Great Experiment in Colorado completely changed the picture.

 

[sleepy]

Which is better (or worse)? Life with a straight-laced narc, or life with a paranoid or egocentric stoner? And I'm wondering if the stoners are mellowing in Colorado now that pot is legal?

I was once hit up by Danny DeVito who hit me with the "Are You a Fuckin' Narc?" because I kept to myself. He was living here, posing as a Cuban refugee perpetually in darkface with a GTO for wheels, and I had just stepped out the door when he nailed me. I wasn't hanging with him. Years earlier at the age of 14 I was snipped in the ribs by a pair of sharp wirecutters, by one of their teen players on "introductory Hellos". We had just met. He was presenting himself (indirectly through the neighborhood grapevine, never personally) as a pusher (I wasn't looking for one), and when I did not report it, he turned me on to a joint through one of his associates (pawns) while he stayed out of it. A Teen Godfather...
But I believe the snip was more to do with talking about the biz later when I would finally notice something about them around me....Whoops...

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

when you have danny devito coming up to you, you know it's far too late to go home.

you deal with the crazy life by becoming crazy yourself.

 

[sleepy]

No, I've had enough of that for awhile. Maybe forever. They manged to lose one of my cats (named "Trooper" because of the way she struts, or used to...we'll see I guess) on OSCAR night two Sundays ago. I am not happy with them right now...again.
Always evil.

 

[sleepy]

I wouldn't make any connection to OSCAR night, except that they pulled the very same stunt last year. Trooper vanished on OSCAR night, but showed up four or five days later, banging on the screen door around 3 A.M. I'd love to hear her right now banging on that door.

In both instances, she's been around all year. I'm still feeding the same strays at the door every night. There is nowhere else to go out there, unless someone took her by force. As for any former owners, they dumped her to the parking lot. I took her in on a 40 degree rainy day. She came up and curled around me as a stranger needing food.
They didn't care then, and that was 6 years and 10 dead stray cats ago, all killed by the locals.

Oh yeah. Stray cats = abandoned pets. It's cheaper than the $35 per cat that the city shelter charges, and they will likely end up killing them anyhow. They are swamped. And we are a beautiful society in love with our real estate holdings. Our apartments with no life to be had. We cage the people in drywall cubicles, so that we sit and do Nothing. We hate animals actually.
So the city invented the shelter system as an excuse to eliminate them from the land.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

i watched "going clear" last night. very interesting exposé about scientifery.

it really gets in to the nuts and bolts of how the 'church' gains control over people and turns them in to worker bees. also how they keep a hold of people like travolta and cruise-- pretty much through feeding their egos and having all the notes from their therapy ("auditing") sessions to use against them if need be.

maybe one of the most mind-blowing of the org's stunts is how they forced the IRS to write off the entire debt of their back-taxes. it seems that hubbard never paid taxes, both personally and via the org, and the IRS eventually hit them with a BILLION dollar tax bill. turns out they only had a quarter of that in their coffers. this was 1993, after hubbard had passed and the next tyrant (david miscavige) had seized control.

so unless they could get recognised as a church in order to become tax-free, it meant the shuddering end of the org. miscavige came up with a plan of ordering thousands of his members to sue the IRS and it worked-- it turned in to such a massive headache that the head of the IRS gave in. the church now has several billion in assets and an army of gofers who work for slave wages in 1st-world countries.

scientology is surely one of the most elaborate, ruthless, hide-in-plain-sight, bait-and-switches schemes you'll ever see.

3.5 / 4 stars, easily.

 

[sleepy]

My Brother was into Scientology for awhile, and this is what they told him to think. He wrote it down, to read to himself.
"I am an Artist. I do work. I have value. I am entitled to be paid for my work, and I am entitled to be paid money and respect by others."

Now, it didn't matter what kind of #$%^ he was putting out. The message was to be practiced as a Mantra to self. In other words, behaving as-if, whether factually true or false. If a drunk walked up to you, leaning all over you with breathy spew, he was instructed to repeat the Mantra, "I am an Artist...".

 

[Heineken]

 

[LeeVanCleef]

While I didn't read the Lawrence Wright book the documentary was based on, I did read the attached that was published about the same time. The depravity on display in this book is numbing to comprehend. I realize that Clear wouldn't have time to cover everything, but to skip over the woman murdered by Miscarriage and his pals in Florida was a major oversight. Instead, the filmmaker wasted the viewer's time trying to get us to feel sorry for people who joined a cult. That's something I find particularly tough to do. Anyways, if you read one book on Scientology... and it's not Dianetics... I highly recommend this one.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

god

 

[sleepy]

God? Is that about the book?

And now for the 'low rent' version of same, or similar. Has anybody here ever heard of Tony and Susan Alamo? Pronounced Al-Aw-Mo. They were the local cult responsible for the "Jesus Freaks" that Elton John sang about in the song, "Tiny Dancer". I think I mentioned this before...

http://articles.latimes.com/1998/feb/21/entertainment/ca-21328

They would solicit from the street corners of Hollywood Blvd., picking up runaways and homeless Hippies with the line, "Jesus Loves You". They owned a former school bus with the name of "Jesus" painted on the sides that would take the submissive to the Alamo cult hideaway where they worked for the commune.

They made a point of approaching teens, girls, and anyone who looked beside themselves or who smoked or appeared stoned. But always the young of us, never the older folks. Things didn't work out too well for Tony. Susan died and Tony got busted for 177 years, I think. Tony was the first David Koresh, but he did fare better than Dave.

http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/01/nation/la-na-nn-tony-alamo-arkansas-victims-20140228

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamo_Christian_Foundation

 

[sleepy]

The article states that, after moving to Arkansas in '75-'76, they set up s print shop.
They at least used a print service, else had a print shop here, because the Freaks always passed out leaflets with the heading "The Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation" at the top, and a picture of Tony and Susan right below it. Chock full of text about Life and Depression and how "Jesus Loves You". "But you have abandoned Him...".

We used to play pinball on the boulevard at a head shop and boutique, "The Alter Ego", and I often came home with a back pocket stuffed with two or three or more of those leaflets. The Jesus Freaks were always in direct competition with the Hari Krishna who were doing the same things, but in flowing Orange Robes.

EDIT: The Krishna probably weren't doing child rape though...

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

t'other day i watched sleeper (1973) for the first time in ages. it held up amazingly well for a sci fi-themed flick. although maybe that's because it's so rich with vaudeville and satire.

but to be fair, a lot of the SF principles involved are still quite relevant to today, such as self-driving cars, automated love enhancers, hi-tech recreational drugs, totalitarian regimes and revolutionaries, cloning, advanced agriculture and cryogenics.

it really is a unique masterpiece of a movie, especially considering how many diverse properties were successfully blended together.

i like this poster, too. from the days of caricature and light-heartedness. diane keaton's expression is perfect.

keaton had great chemistry with woody allen. what surprised me a little is that their relationship seems to have already ended before she starred in his films. i'd have to say she's my favorite woody allen actress amongst lasser, farrow and herself.