I got the trees, can you tell? it was so much fun placing them and trying to randomize them, it just got nicer and nicer.
But then I noticed the trees were a little too green, so I got some Hauser Dark Green and dry brushed the trees a bit.
The Germans achieved a total surprise attack on the morning of 16 December 1944, due to a combination of Allied overconfidence, preoccupation with Allied offensive plans, and poor aerial reconnaissance. American forces bore the brunt of the attack and incurred their highest casualties of any operation during the war. The battle also severely depleted Germany’s armored forces, and they were largely unable to replace them.
The U.S. forces however, got lost, ran out of gas, mostly due to Monty’s adventures in Belgium, and someone back home forgot that Europe has winters, and men get cold.
Once I got the bed installed to the case I needed to make sure it went up and down without any issues. Here is the leg that swings out to support the feet when you lower it:
Next I needed some stoppers to keep the bed from going inside the case too far:
So now the face of the bed frame will sit flush with edge of the case:
Now I can do the trimwork, which involved staring at it for a while. I decided I liked the panel look on the changing table I made so I wanted to replicate the square edges and lines. That involved ripping various widths of poplar down to ¼ inch thick, so I bought a bandsaw to make this task easier. I bought this WEN 10″ model and a ½ inch Woodslicer blade. The widths of the trim pieces are 1 ½ inches, 4 inches, and 6 inches. The saw handled the 1 ½ inch boards no problem, did okay with the 4 inch boards, but struggled with the 6 inch boards so much I ended up using my table saw instead. Here is the 1 ½ inch board:
The motor just isn’t strong enough for the 6 inch boards, and wandered a lot with the 4 inch boards until I figured out a better technique. If I did this again I would probably cut them to 5/16ths of an inch and plane them down to ¼ inch. I figure this saw will be able to handle just about everything else I want to do, but If I ever get to where I’m resawing a lot of wood I will need to upgrade to something more powerful.
Once I got everything cut, it was easy to get it nailed on with some ⅝” brads. I didn’t use glue, but in hindsight I probably should have as a few of the pieces popped off when I moved it to paint. Here it is ready to go with the latches on the sides and a handle in the middle:
With everything installed I gave it a few test runs and there were only a couple of spots where the bed frame rubbed against the case. The frame needed some sanding and softening of the edges with a ⅛” roundover:
Then I added a headboard and took it into the paint booth I set up in our basement:
I draped some plastic on the walls by tucking it into the drop ceiling tiles, and used an old area rug to protect the nasty carpet. The area rug sat on the plastic and really helped seal all of the dust and overspray into the booth. Mrs. McGinty was a little skeptical about this idea, but I proceeded to man-splain all of this manly stuff to her and she eventually came around. Here is the first coat of primer:
My painting experiences have taught me that white paint needs gray primer, and gray paint needs white primer. That way you can see what you’re doing. I didn’t bother painting the inside since the mattress would be covering it up. After this side was painted, I flipped it over and painted the front:
You’ll notice some streaks in the finish. I laid the paint on thicker than I normally would since the surface was flat. As the paint dried, the thinner spots dried first and affected the sheen. It’s noticeable when the light hits it at certain angles, but otherwise only my nit-pickyness can tell. I may stop by someplace that does commercial painting and ask for some free advice.
The weather worked out so I was able to paint the case outside. It was a pain in the ass to move, mainly due to Mrs. McGinty lacking upper body strength and not listening to me, but I was also getting tired of working in it day after day. I finally got it all painted, hauled into the basement, and set up. I added a strap to hold the mattress to the bed frame when it is in the vertical position where the legs attach to the frame:
At this point I realized it sits too low for my dad, so I bought a box spring to raise the mattress up about 5 inches. Perfect height. Then I proceeded to raise the frame up to check the weight, and realized the legs that support the foot end won’t properly close. After some profanity, I figured some blocks that raise the bed 2 ½” inches will be fine. Crisis averted:
As an added bonus, the blocks create some space to hide contraband. Here it is with the mattress:
And the final test…
I used 4 inch lag screws to anchor it to the wall, hitting the studs solidly in 4 of the 6 tries. It’s solid, and my dad says he sleeps great on it so I’m happy with that.
This was really a challenge to build due to the unexpected hurdles and the size.
Sneak peak at my next write up:
This was the display for the Violins of Hope here in Nashville last year. I built the workbench.
We live in a motel right next to I-10 in Ontario Cali; not a bad place and it seems they built a park. Why? We’ll get to that. Bella has insisted we go behind the building next door when walking, so we did, and found this.
Then we noticed a larger park on the other side of the street and went there, and found this.
Founders Garden: A tribute to the Chaffey Brothers and Segundo Guasti, who basically made Ontario bloom into the city it became. Let’s continue…
This is a walking park. No facilities, recreation or even trash cans. It is however, spotless, and we saw very few people walking.
In the retaining pond for the water tower we found a few ducks hanging out; not an easy picture to take with Bella on the leash.
There are nice benches scattered throughout amongst the olive trees; suitable for quiet contemplation or just chillin’ with my little villain, Bella.
Considering where its located, there is a serenity, maybe a zen kinda feel to the place. If your ever stuck in the IE, I recommend a visit.
Oh yeah, there are no signs prohibiting alcohol. Just to be safe I brought a Dogfish Head Sea Quench session sour ale; really good beer. Even though its 4.9% abv.
Note from glibertarians.com legal team: Drunk in public is a misdemeanor in California. If convicted, you may face up to six (6) months in county jail and/or a fine of up to one thousand dollars ($1,000).
Sometimes I consider what would happen if I took that flight attendant job, but then I wouldn’t be here, reading this asshole.
I made a bad economic call on election night 2016, predicting a Trump recession. But I quickly realized that political dismay had clouded my judgment, and retracted the call three days later. “It’s at least possible,” I wrote on Nov. 11, 2016, “that bigger budget deficits will, if anything, strengthen the economy briefly.”
What I didn’t realize at the time was just how much bigger the deficits would get. Since 2016, the Trump administration has, in practice, implemented the kind of huge fiscal stimulus followers of John Maynard Keynes pleaded for when unemployment was high — but Republicans blocked.
NO.SHIT.
Contrary to what Donald Trump and his supporters claim, we are not seeing an unprecedented boom. The U.S. economy grew 3.2 percent over the past year, a growth rate we haven’t seen since … 2015. Employment has been growing steadily since 2010, with no break in the trend after 2016. Still, the long stretch of growth has pushed the unemployment rate down to levels not seen in decades. How did that happen, and what does it tell us?
The strength of the economy doesn’t reflect a turnaround of the U.S. trade deficit, which remains high. Nor does it reflect a giant boom in business investment, which proponents of the 2017 tax cut promised, but didn’t happen. What’s driving the economy now is, instead, deficit spending.
Nice deflection on the unemployment rate, which is indeed at near unprecedented levels. At 3.8%, it is the lowest since 1969. I should also point out you are citing the GDP growth rate. What Trump and his supporters are pointing out, is the GDP itself is at levels we have not seen, as this graph suggests. The truth is, citing either of these statistics without any further context is disingenuous.
Economists often use the cyclically adjusted budget deficit — an estimate of what the deficit would be at full employment — as a rough measure of how much fiscal stimulus the government is providing. By that measure, the federal government is now pumping as much money into the economy as it was seven years ago, when the unemployment rate was more than 8 percent.
The explosion of the budget deficit isn’t just a result of that tax cut. After Republicans took control of the House in 2010, they forced the federal government into austerity, squeezing spending despite high unemployment and low borrowing costs. But once Trump was in the White House, spending was suddenly O.K. again (as long as it didn’t help poor people). In particular, real discretionary spending — expenditures other than those on Social Security, Medicare and other safety net programs — has surged after years of decline.
So there’s really no mystery about the economy’s continuing strength: It’s a Keynesian thing. But what do we learn from the experience?
Politically, we’ve learned that the G.O.P. is deeply hypocritical. After all that Obama-era shrieking about the dangers of debt and the looming threat of inflation, the party cheerfully opened the spigots as soon as it had its own man in the White House. You still see news reports that describe prominent Republicans as “deficit hawks,” and puzzle over their relaxed attitude toward the current flood of red ink. Come on, everyone knows what that was all about.
*Yawns*
We already knew that. Try to keep up, cunt.
This has been said for years by people you have publicly decried as fanatics. Glad to seen you took time away from massaging your prostate with your Nobel Prize to notice. Once team icky is out of power, I suppose you will just shove the prize back up your ass.
Beyond that, we now know that the long period of high unemployment that followed the 2008 financial crisis could easily have been avoided. Those of us who warned from the beginning that the Obama stimulus was too small and short-lived, and that austerity was hobbling the recovery, were right. If we had been willing to provide the same kind of fiscal support in 2013 that we’re providing now, unemployment that year would probably have been under 6 percent, not 7.4 percent.
But at the time, what I used to call the Very Serious People offered many reasons we couldn’t do what textbook economics said we should be doing. The V.S.P. said there was a debt crisis, even though the U.S. government was able to borrow at incredibly low interest rates. They said high unemployment was “structural,” and couldn’t be solved by increasing demand. In particular, workers didn’t have the skills needed for a modern economy.
None of these claims were true. But together with Republican obstructionism, they helped postpone a return to full employment for many years.
If only we tried to prog harder…you sound like that old joke about a medical intern that was visiting a psych ward. He came across a patient that was furiously masturbating and asked the doctor what his problem was. “Oh, he has a condition where he needs to constantly ejaculate, it keeps him busy at least.” Then they came across another patient getting fellated by a nurse, and the intern again asked what his problem was: “Same condition, he just has commercial insurance.”
You’re the first patient.
So are the Trump deficits a good thing? It turns out that two years ago the U.S. was further from full employment than most people thought, so there is a case for fiscal stimulus even now. And the risks of debt are far lower than the Very Serious People claimed.
PROG HARDER!
If we’re going to run up debt, however, it should be for a good purpose. We could be using deficits to rebuild our creaking infrastructure. We could be investing in children, making sure they have adequate health care and nutrition, and lifting them out of poverty.
But Republicans are still blocking any kind of useful spending. Not only are Senate Republicans opposed to infrastructure investment, the Trump administration is proposing big cuts in aid to children, especially health care and education. Deficits are apparently good only if they’re incurred giving huge tax breaks to corporations, which use the money to buy back their stock.
So that’s the story of the economy in 2019. Employment is high and unemployment low, because Republicans have embraced the kind of deficit spending they claimed would destroy America when Democrats held power. But none of that spending is being used to help those in need, or make us stronger in the long run.
Wait…Team Red is opposed to funding infrastructure? And again with the goddamn stock buybacks. Does the Times give you a 401k? If the Times (FINRA Symbol NYT) buys back some of their own shares on the open market, that creates scarcity for their stock, which in turn raises the price of their stock…assuming anybody wants to buy shares in the New York Times. This in turn adds value to any firm or individual that invests in NYT. Given that such investment vehicles, like a 401K, are provided as a source of compensation by many companies, it stands to reason this benefits an awful lot of working-class schlubs.
To continue to promote the fallacy that stock buybacks only benefit the wealthy suggests you are either you are a shitty economist, or a disingenuous cunt. I’ll let you decide which.
After we lost the house, the wife and I ended up at her Mom’s house. Wendy in the spare bedroom and I live in a very small room in the back of the garage with Bella and my cat. Even though we are saving money and my studio is in storage, I still needed a small project to occupy my limited free time, so I went small scale and cheap. How small?
I found some Sherman tanks in 1/300 scale, ordered them, and then came up empty searching for more tanks, what to do?
Dollar tree diorama
I managed to find some scale people that architects use and bought 100 for five bucks, now what?
Off to DT! Purchase glue, spackle, modge, podge, painters blue, florist foam and a strong flat picture frame, oh and some baking soda…
Next we go to Hobby Lobby for acrylic paints and a few brushes, and off we go.
After a few afternoons worth of work this is the result. I love the way the road cuts turned out, the stone looks pretty nice, and the mud/ice mix is just right.
The only thing left is the trees; coming from China, hard to find, but that will wait until next time.
Coming in at a whopping 10 inches square, this the smallest I have done. The men are ¼” tall, the tanks are the size of a quarter, and I’m going blind here. While it’s one of my best, it’s more like a desk ornament than anything else. It may even get sold, but we shall see.
As of this writing, I’m in a motel and the situation is tenuous at best, so this project is in storage til my trees come in. Once they arrive, I’ll bring it out and finish it, hopefully. Lesson learned? Don’t just buy stuff hoping you can find other stuff—Research Dammit! So the next project will be in 1/144 scale, I bought a few, then my friend tells me he has about 14 more, in collectible boxes, these should work.
MOAR TANKZ
The story: December 1944
Elements of Patton’s 3rd Army are northbound for Bastogne and have become hopelessly lost. Upon hooking up with an infantry company, they proceed north. There just isn’t much more to add, perhaps a stray mortar shell?
Link to album, some good pix. Also, gas prices are outrageous, and Belarus Women are as crazy a German Women, until next time…
Hello Glibs, it’s been awhile, but your old Master of Scaremonies the Cryptkeeper is here to provide my annual superfuntimestory of the bestest holiday on my calendar outside of Halloween – Texas Frightmare Weekend! This article is *at least* five times as long as it needs to be, because I know you’re reading this at work and I’m trying to give you an excuse to not get back to that for an extra 10 minutes. You’re welcome. Do keep reading, though – there’s lots of cursing, lame jokes, celebrity stories, and a 40k reference for my fellow hyper-nerds. Plus I had fun last year with our game of, “There are so many links, I wonder which one of them randomly goes to a weird porn site?” that I decided to play again this year. Happy hunting!
To begin with, this shit has gotten completely out of hand. They sold out of Saturday single day tickets (est. attendance this year of 35,000), and the fucking hotel rooms sold out at the main venue within two hours of going on sale. We were able to snag a room at the last second because they caught some dude reserving 20 rooms and trying to re-lease them out at a markup. Thankfully the dumbass advertised them on the Facebook meetup page for the event, so the organizer cancelled his block reservation & they opened the rooms back up. My wife received an automatic update and we jumped on one. True story: we got the last one, and it wound up being a handicapped room. It was YUUUGE. Like twice the size of a regular room. What’s a fucking cripple need with all that space? Don’t they need less space? It’s not like they’re prancing about or have friends that they can invite up or anything else requiring room. Even the shower was much larger. Don’t just take my word for it, here’s a photo. It’s so big you don’t even get the edge of the bed in frame.
Crip room
Now most, if not all of you, are probably mentally saying to me, “Gojira, we know that Texas Frightmare Weekend is always held on the first weekend of May. So why come this year, Dallas Fan Expo, the larger (50k+ attendance) pop culture, sci-fi, and comic book convention that used to be called Dallas Comic Con, moved its date to directly compete? Aren’t they targeting the same people?” Well astute reader, indeed that was the plan – of the FanExpo organizer. Here’s a little inside baseball for you, as was related to me by a buddy of mine involved in the whole sordid affair: FanExpo wanted to be the only game in town & approached the Texas Frightmare organizer, Loyd Cryer, about buying him out. He told them to fuck off and die in a fire (paraphrasing mine -ed). In what is possibly an act of pure spite, which is just my conjecture and in no way libelous, FanExpo moved their event to the same weekend. I think their big-shot corporate overlords thought that the nerdy public is one undifferentiated mass, and that being the larger event with more headline guests, they would draw interest and put a little bit of a beat-down on ol’ Texas Frightmare.
Turns out the Venn Diagram of people who are comic book and pop culture nerds, and people who are hardcore horror fans, does have overlap, but not nearly to the degree that the FanExpo jerks had hoped. I do fear, though, that this blatant act of separatism has resulted in some unfortunate battlelines being drawn and our two populations being given reason to resent and distrust one another. Thanks alot, FanExpo! If I ever see Jonathan Frakes on the street, I’ll fuckin’ kill him and leave a human turd on his forehead and a little note written on a cocktail napkin that says, “Defend Horror” written in his blood and pinned to his body with a little plastic sword along with some photos of those abused dogs from the SPCA commercials.
Interestingly, the above paragraph wasn’t just one long setup to a largely unfunny joke about murdering Will Riker. There really is a distinct difference between the two groups, and if you swing both ways, as I do [insert “Oh My!” George Takei gif], you notice it when surrounded entirely by one group or the other. By and large the horror crowd, where I spend more time, is more…enthusiastic…about ordering their lifestyle around their interests. They don’t just dye their hair, they have a shit-load of tats and piercings, dress somewhat raggedly, curse a lot more, drink a lot more, and are generally more “blue collar” types. They also skew distinctly more conservative. There are a lot more pro-2A shirts, and shirts making fun of liberals, at horror events, than shirts or patches with leftist slogans. Hell, I saw a couple of Confederate flag patches on vests this weekend, and nobody gave them a second glance. For all you aspies rushing to the comments to correct me that it’s actually the battle flag of Northern Virginia or whatever the hell, save yourselves the spittle-flecked outrage. When I say, “Confederate flag”, you damn well know what I’m talking about, so just simmer down and roll with it. If you promise not to be a ludicrous pendant, I’ll not purposefully replace the word “magazine” with “clip” in any future firearms articles I may write.
The thing is, I’m not sure why this is. This is a group of people who are obviously comfortable with, shall we say, non-traditional mores in terms of public behavior, modes of dress, etc., and yet they actually skew conservative. The sci-fi/comic crowd is overwhelmingly leftist, but they also are overwhelmingly just fat guys able to take off their blue TOS shirts at the end of the day and blend back into “regular” society. I can’t help but wonder why this is. I’m sure Ken Shultz has a theory that he’d like to expound on (just ribbing you in good nature, Ken). Joe Bob Briggs mentioned it during his panel, as well, so it’s not just me making shit up…this time.
So not as many photos this year, for which I apologize. If you haven’t read my past entrieson this event, be warned: this is literally the only time of the year I take photos, so I cannot be assed to get good at it because I just don’t care. Anyway, even five years ago, when you purchased an autograph from a guest, it came with a selfie. Now every one of these greedy fucks charges an extra $10, except for a few who are cool.
Bruce Abbot is cool. He does not charge extra.
I will note that they didn’t have glowsticks available at the after party again this year. I think our little art project that I showed you all photos of in the 2017 entry put the kibosh on that for everybody. At least I hope that’s why there weren’t any. I’d love to believe that my one merry band of assholes managed to ruin something for tens of thousands of people. It’d put me right up there with John Dillinger.
Great guests though, and great panels. We had Jeffrey Combs, who given his wonderful Star Trek roles would have been just as at home at FanExpo, but he’s also done great work in horror. I’m a huge Jeffrey Combs fanboy, so this was a special treat for me. We had Meat Loaf, who fell off the fucking stage at his panel and broke his collarbone. Looks great for his age, though, really. Jenna Jameson, on the other hand, does not. Her ass looked like a fucking tray table. I wanted to set my drink on it, then smack her hard in the face and see if the drink fell off. It doesn’t show up in google image search, oddly enough. Trust me, I wanted to add a picture. Traci Lords has aged a bit better, and Cassandra Peterson (better known as Elvira) I’d still drill like an out of control oil rig. The big guns were Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, along with Sam’s brother Ted Raimi. Robert Englund,Lance Henrickson, Tom Savini, and various other regular guests were in the house, as well as…Lee Majors! Scott Ian and Charlie Benante of Anthrax were also present, and the corpse of Tim Curry. Along with many other assorted peoples who had roles in some sequels or other.
The year started off with a screening of Re-Animator on Thursday night, with Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbot, and Barbara Crampton (who, like Elvira, is still super do-able despite being old) in attendance to do a panel. They also had Kathleen Kinmont from Bride of Re-Animator, but really who cares about her. She does reappear later in our narrative in a humorous role, so that’s something I suppose. In addition to their panel at the screening, they had a panel during the main convention.
The Re-Animator panel
The panel was great in that, rather than just tell stories, almost the whole thing focused on the craft of filmmaking, particularly low-budget film making in the 80s. Without going into great detail, they spoke about the long days on low-budget shoots (14-18 hrs per day, as principal photography had to be completed in 18 days), and about how big name actors can get away with being aloof, but working in the nooks and crannies, the only way to get a good performance is for the actors to be completely emotionally available to each other in order to create instant chemistry. They mentioned that, as they all were coming from theater backgrounds, they got together at Barbara’s apartment for a few weeks beforehand to rehearse, which is a big no-no if SAG finds out about it because it constitutes working without pay. Jeffrey mentioned that sometimes having fewer resources forces the director and editor to make tighter, better choices, because when given infinite time and money, some people go overboard and don’t know when enough is enough. He also mentioned that, back when you had to actually film on, you know, film, low-budget productions would purchase things called “ends”. These were the chopped off leftovers of film reels after standard budget films were done using the reels. They’d cut off what was left and sell it cheap. So it was a great way to accumulate film on a tight budget, but you’d only be able to do like 3 minutes on each one and it was annoying to have to work through. As for the audience questions, it’s bizarrely awkward to ask a question to a woman whose tits & bush you just saw, along with her about to get eaten out by a revenant holding its own severed head between her legs (if you haven’t seen Re-Animator, stop what you’re doing and watch it now. It’s better than any Marvel film by x1000).
The Lee Majors Q&A was a bit depressing. Due to the way television contracts were structured back then, he never saw a dime from any Steve Austin merchandise, and indeed claims to have had no idea so much of it was ever produced until he started doing conventions. He spoke about the old snobbery that shut out television stars from film productions, and told a funny anecdote about how he loved Bill Shatner when he worked with him, but that Shat had a tendency to, “die to the balcony”. He explained that it’s theater slang for wildly over-acting. He also talked about how Andre the Giant, when playing sasquatch on the show, pissed in the suit all the time, which was super gross, but was also the nicest guy in person you could ever hope to meet, which was super great.
Joe Bob Briggs did a good panel, and spoke about the state of trash cinema and its relative place in modern film production vs. where it was when he got started way back when. He and I chatted a bit about small towns in west Texas. He didn’t think I’d know a few of the places where he’d lived, but I went to college in Lubbock, and so we shared some fond memories of a shitty place that is populated entirely by people who fail out of that college. Another really nice guy. Honestly, the only person who has ever been a dick to us after all these years that we’ve been going was Billy Zane. I still think that, much like Georgia against Texas this past year, Alabama against Oklahoma in that Sugar Bowl a few years back, or Florida against Louisville a few years before that, he just didn’t want to be there and therefore that magically excuses shitty performances.
We bought a few stupid things, like a full-size xenomorph skull
So I own this now, I guess.
because I’m buddies with that vendor and he gave it to me for wholesale. There were some good costumes, but frankly the best ones were people who come every year, and I already took pictures of them and showed you all over the last couple of years. So below are some pics from this year, but not nearly as many. Karaoke on Sat. night was awful, like always, though everybody was in a good mood. Kathleen Kinmont showed up to rock out, but was wasted and happened to share an elevator with us back up to our floor. She was drunk enough that she didn’t stop singing or rocking out once off the stage – it went for the whole elevator ride. There were no infamous David Arquette episodes, however (fun fact: right before he got on stage that night, he bought me a beer at the bar. I didn’t know until later that he was supposed to have been on the wagon. Whoops). I’m also now turning it into an annual tradition to bum a smoke off of Lance Henrikson. Nice guy, but seriously, American Spirits? C’mon, Lance, I wanna see some fancy Hollywood cigarettes.
The year ended with the Sam & Ted Raimi with Bruce Campbell panel. It was really a treat. They’ve known each other since middle school, and told great stories about each other growing up. Sam busted Bruce’s chops constantly, and they told stories about all the things they did as they went around Detroit trying to scrounge up money to make Evil Dead. Sam Raimi has an annoyingly nasally voice, FYI. Anyway the highlight of the panel was, when half the room is raising their hand to ask a question, a particular person who was picked stood up and asked them their opinion on Mac and Me, a shitty 1988 E.T. knockoff. Now keep in mind, none of the panelists had a blessed thing to do with that abomination of a movie. Nothing. It was the non-sequitur from hell. They were so confused they didn’t even know what he was asking – Ted kept thinking he was asking about “mac and cheese”. The moderator even face-palmed and said under his breath but still audibly into the mike, “You get a chance to ask these guys a question and you ask about fucking Mac and Me?” and you could hear the exasperation in his voice. I mean it was bizarre. The questioner was booed down, and after the panel ended and I was waiting outside for my wife to use the restroom, Ted, Sam, and Bruce came out through that side hallway. They were still talking about that, making fun of the guy and wondering what the fuck he was talking about. Seriously, this is like getting to go back in time and pose a question to George Washington, and all you can come up with is asking him if he likes the new Prius body style.
So that was this years (mis)adventure. I was quasi-drunk for most of it and blew $1,500 in three days, but fuck it, that’s why I fight for $15. I look forward to updating you all on the event’s 15th iteration next year, if you don’t see me in the news for bombing FanExpo beforehand.
TWO evil elevator movies from the same director? You’re fucking telling me that you made one evil elevator movie, looked yourself in the mirror and said, “You know what? Ima do it again. The world needs another killer elevator movie.”Me in front of a legit 73′ Oldsmobile Delta 88, from the film Evil Dead.Somebody dressed as the bad guy from Army of DarknessHere’s one you don’t see every convention: a guy dressed like Dr. Loomis. Though he still had that fucking Walking Dead baseball bat, so fuck him.The “battle Delta”, the Delta 88 transformed for combat at the end of Army of DarknessThis person has cleverly turned a book into a monster. My wife tells me it has something to do with Harry Potter, and is therefore un-Christian.I just thought it was funny that this guy was dressed like a fascist, his name for the karaoke was like “Lord Commander” or some shit like that, and he sang fucking Blondie.I love the difference between horror cons and other cons. Here, for example, instead of ripped dudes in tight clothes saving the world, we have family-friendly comics with titles like, “Lets All Die!”Randos in costumeSome dude dressed as the CreeperThis was a clever one. He’s dressed like Stephen King’s poor character from the movie Creepshow.Clever Nightmare on Elm Street costume. More clever than the 1,000 Freddy’s walking around the convention, at any rate.Remember when I did a series of film reviews that focused on the giallo genre? This guy gets it.The Death Note guy was here the last few years, but the chick’s demon costume was super intricate and she ended up winning the contest on Friday night I believe. The most important thing is she was hot.OK now this is what is wrong with the world. This is the side of the box of a Castle Greyskull re-issue toy. Notice that, unlike, say, the original Castle Greyskull box, the person shown enjoying it is not a 5 year old boy, but rather a 35 year old “man” with a shit-eating grin on his face and I FUCKING WANT THAT CASTLE GREYSKULL.A little kid dressed as Nosferatu. I thought it was cute.A shirt for little kids. If you don’t know what the Pork-Chop Express is, stop reading my fucking column.Another great example of horror culture – a children’s book titled, “I Like To Eat Children”. And yes, I bought it for one of my nephews.Another pretty well done costumeI thought this was clever – the guy made a medusa skull.Remember when I mentioned in one of my film reviews about Anthropophagus, the giallo film about the crazy cannibal who at the end of the movie eats his own intestines? SOMEBODY MADE A FUCKING DOLL FOR THAT MOVIE HOLY SHITWeird nazi porn. “Deported Women of the SS Special Section” and “Gestapo’s Last Orgy”.Shit, it’s better than concentration camp pornThis guy was the rarest thing of all at a convention – an original character. Sadly because it’s an original character I completely forgot it’s name and the youtube channel the people were trying to tell me to subscribe to where they upload their short films.Ash Predator. He’s the Predator, but with a ripped blue shirt, chainsaw hand, shotgun slung on his back, and a deadite-colored severed head of another predator.Scott Ian of Anthrax making sure I know I’m not supposed to be taking a picture of him.Two tattoo artists this year. The wife and I are seriously thinking of signing up for a flash next year, which is really all they do given the time constraints.Randumb decoration on a table. Only at Texas Frightmare.Look in the background – it’s advertising a movie called Velocipastor that we saw for free that Friday night about a priest who turns into a were-dinosaur and saves Chinese prostitutes. It…was…awesome.
Viva Las Vegas, it’s a film, a song, and one of the longest running Rockabilly weekenders in the world. What’s Rockabilly? It’s a style of music that started in the 50’s (primarily in Memphis at a little studio called Sun), had a revival in the 80’s, and has been slapping a bass since then. It’s split up into a huge range of subgenres, some going more punk, others going more “classic” (in this case 1950’s style). Among the fans, there’s also usually an appreciation of classic cars, 50’s fashion, and Americana culture. Pompadours, facial hair, flatcaps, and tattoos are common.
Back to Viva… this year was the 22nd year that the event was held, and for as long as I’ve been going, it’s been held at the Orleans Casino and Resort in Las Vegas, off the strip. The Orleans is known as a locals casino. But over most Easter weekends (when Viva is held), they turn off the standard music, change it over to Rockabilly, and swarms of people with their classic cars and finest 50’s fashion fall upon the Orleans. The event is popular enough that rooms for the next year go on sale before the tickets for the event do, and the rooms sell out in under three hours.
The men have it easy, bowling shirts and work shirts are the standard, with a couple of zoot suits and the like being worn. If you have hair, it’s either a high and tight or held up into a pompadour. The women have a much harder time dolling themselves up, but they go through the work and it shows. However, there are some entire families who dress themselves up in matching garb for the day (I’m not too sure about how much say the kids have, but they’re there).
The Car Show is the highlight. If you can only go for a single day, this is the day.
Over the course of the weekend, there’s burlesque shows, pinup contests, concerts, DJ’s, vendor rooms, dance lessons, make up lessons, fashion lessons, bowling, movie premiers, and other shows of interest to the attendees. And that’s not even mentioning the car show, it’s massive, with all cars (except the ones from movies/TV shows) being pre-1964. If you’re not careful, you could walk away purchasing one of the cars that are for sale.
Now that you know what’s going on there, you’ve decided you want to go. Great, what should you plan for? First, plan on walking a lot. I don’t think I’ve walked less than 5 miles any day out there. Realize that you’ll probably not be able to get a room at the Orleans; however, keep in mind that they have a shuttle to their sister property (the Gold Coast), and the strip. Tickets for the main event come in basically two choices: The High Roller, which gives you access to everything all weekend; or the Car Show, which gives you access to the car show only on Saturday (that will include the vendors in that area, and the bands playing there). If you don’t have appropriate garb, then the vendors will be more than happy to help you out there, but bring cash as some do not take credit/debit cards..
Sweet Pea’s Hooch and Smooch
If you’re going for the first time, I’d recommend going to Sweet Pea’s Hooch and Smooch on Thursday afternoon. It’s the official meet and greet for the event, and then there’s more specific meetups for singles, LGBT, sober, black pin-ups, etc. I’d also recommend looking over the schedule ahead of time, and try to at least get a rough schedule of the events you want to see. Personally, I’d recommend at least one burlesque event, and the Charles Phoenix slide show. Most of the shows happen multiple times (but may be different for each of them), bands usually only play once, but then hang out around the weekender for the rest (I met one of the players from Los Straitjackets that way, it’s not like you can recognize them).
I’ve already got my room booked for next year, and I hope to see some of you there. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s some pictures from this year, and some from years past.
Another last Friday of the month and another scramble to present ourselves as citizens of the world: growing intellectually and emotionally by exposing ourselves to the ideas and experiences of others to better understand that which exists outside of ourselves and empathize with those who think, feel and live differently than we do…and also a lot of genre fiction, mostly because of Brett.
SP
So I picked up Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe by Lisa Randall. With a title and subtitle like that, one might think this is going to contain groundbreaking research. This is, after all, written by someone who, “studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University.”
Well, here is what the author says just two pages in: “This book explores a speculative scenario in which my collaborators and I suggest that dark matter might ultimately (and indirectly) have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaur.”
You know WHO ELSE had collaborators!
OMWC
Unpacking our books, I ran across one I hadn’t read in decades, Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark. In theory, this is a book about critical thinking, examining people’s beliefs regarding alien abductions, faith healing, ESP, spirit mediums, “recovered memory” as part of the Satanic Panic of that time, and many more. Sagan’s continuing theme is that we do not educate our kids well enough for them to develop an effective bullshit filter, and that they don’t learn science properly, it being taught as a collection of facts rather than as a process of arriving at truth (or at least a better approximation of truth). There’s a lot of good stuff packed in there, but it’s difficult to resist yelling and throwing the book across the room since it assumes that teaching must be done by government schools staffed by highly paid government indoctrinators. If only he had examined THAT assumption critically… Lot of gratuitous swiping at religion, much of it deserved, much of it just for effect and moral preening. And somehow, he skims over the evil Janet Reno’s role in sending innocent parents and teachers to jail for secret child sex rituals. Bleh. Read James Randi’s Flim Flam instead.
Twenty years ago, when Food Network was actually about cooking and teaching, there was a wonderful show called Taste, hosted by David Rosengarten. Each week, Rosengarten would take a single ingredient, teach about it, and demonstrate several dishes to feature it. It was stark, simple, no bullshit, and a delight to watch if you were serious about upping your cooking game. I bought his Dean & Deluca Cookbook, and it rapidly became of one of my go-to books when tackling something new. Something bad must have happened because Taste vanished without a trace. Rosengarten hasn’t, though, and I have been reading It’s All American Food for pleasure and to get ideas on things to cook and how to cook them. Like me, it’s divided into two main sections, the first being American takes on ethnic cuisines (where we twist, bend, and blend dishes into something unrecognizable to its native land, but somehow even more delicious because of the mixing of influences- appropriation, if you will), and the second being regional American cuisines, a concept foreign to non-Americans, who generally don’t understand the rich variety of our geographically diverse foods and cooking methods. Well fuck those Euro-weenie snobs, America is a food paradise, and this book is a celebration of that.
jesse.in.mb
Morieux and Tollman – Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexiy without Getting Complicated: Part of my friend’s “Ha, you’re in charge of people…well, let’s fix you” series. Six Simple Rules is short but dense and occasionally feels obtuse, but the ideas that landed have provided immediate paths forward for problems I’d thought were intractable. I see myself referencing the concluding chapter and the rule summaries repeatedly while I struggle through the implications of some of the denser sections.
Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, Switzler – Crucial Conversations I have mixed feelings about this one. It starts off overly self-helpy and frequently praises its own efficacy as part of the way it describes thinking about how you enter into necessarily intense conversations with others. I probably would not have read it if my friend (who has trained with this group professionally) had not pushed it as hard as she did (still trying to fix me), but I’m also glad that I did. It’s helped me avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of saying nothing to avoid conflict and being pushy when I think I’m right in both my personal and professional life and I’ve passed it on to a few friends and coworkers where appropriate. (I was almost done with this one last month but not quite there).
Recipes for the Cuisinart: Food Processor by James Beard: So I was trying to track down a brioche loaf recipe that I used to make when I first started baking. Everything goes in the food processor, rise, punch down, shape into a loaf and let it rise again. Apparently this recipe was ultimately James Beard’s fault from a midcentury cookbooks put out by Cuisinart. I had to have it. While I was messing around on this front I also picked up America’s Test Kitchen – Food Processor Perfection. I’d recommend the latter over the former although the recipes look solid in the Beard one, they’re also largely midcentury. The best bit was Beard takes a bunch of standard recipes and shows how the device can be more effectively used to speed it up rather than following the recipe as linearly. The ATK one seemed a bit obvious until I started hitting how to effectively slice and grind meat. The BF and I have done bulgogi from thinly shaved tritip, meatballs from short ribs and flap meat and a chuck roast lasagna that have each been spectacular. The food processor managed to steal precious counter space from the Kitchenaid this month.
Kevin Panetta (author) and Savanna Ganucheau (Illustrator) – Bloom: Cute gay bildungsroman centered on a family bakery in a small east coast town.
JW
Genji Monogatari by Murasaki Shikibu. Riven promised tentacles and busty women in school uniforms, but this is just an erudite exploration of the psychology of characters who are both alien in their setting, but contemporary and fresh in the way that the author addresses them as fully realized players in their world. While I’d conten-Oh! Beach volleyball. Later gators.
SugarFree
I read a lot of things here and there this month, but the highlight was definitely Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, a novel that contains all the fluids a body can produce, and in excessive amounts. Either a brilliant dissection of the constraints patriarchy places of women’s bodies or a disgusto-porn novel put out by a respectable publisher, it is a pretty wild ride; Walt Whitman taken to the logical extreme:
Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with
doctors and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.
Riven
Well, I didn’t manage to get to the books I said I’d hoped to read this month in our last “What Are We Reading.” Wah wah. But it was tax season! And my birthday! And other excuses! Also, I had some personality conflicts at work, which I complained about at length to jesse.in.mb. He said he had been reading this one book, and it had been really helpful for him. So, I also have been reading Crucial Conversations. I have not yet finished it but I’ve tried to using some of the things I have read about at work, and it has been massively helpful. I agree with jesse.in.mb’s thinking above: pretty self-helpy and self-congratulatory so far. I am hoping to actually finish it in May, but even if I don’t, I’m pleased with what I have taken away from it up to this point.
Can you believe JW believed me? I’m always promising tentacles and busty women in school uniforms–you’d think he would have learned by now.
mexican sharpshooter
This month the best book I read was about a cat named Pete, or Pete the Cat if you will. Today he made a big lunch. Most people think Pete is a child–he’s not. He’s a total stoner and if you need proof, here is a photo of the stoned kitty.
Now Pete was hungry for lunch, and he discovered the sandwich he made was far too large for even Pete with the munchies. He just kept adding things between two slices of bread until he realized he just had a giant stack of food between two pieces of bread.
So he invited a couple buddies over, and they each got a piece of the sandwich.
Has it been a month already? Where does the time go? Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess. It’s been a fun 30 days or so, right? … Right?
Heroic Mulatto
I am currently reading Thrawn: Alliancesby Timothy Zahn. Compared to the first entry in his reboot of the Thrawn trilogy, Zahn does a better job with his characterization of Grand Admiral Thrawn. In the first novel, I felt that Zahn played up the ‘fish out of water’ angle too much and Thrawn’s rise read much more like the diary of an Imperial officer with Asperger’s Syndrome who took too much colloidal silver. With Thrawn: Alliances, we see a Thrawn capable of simple and routine social interaction without shitting his pants mid-conversation. That having been said, as a character, Thrawn now seems to suffer from competence porn syndrome. Zahn has yet to find the middle ground where Thrawn can demonstrate that he is the galaxy’s absolute master of military tactics and strategy while still having a realistic and suitable foible. In the end, it could be that despite having created the character in the medium of print, Zahn’s Thrawn cannot compete with the quiet menace of Thrawn as depicted in the Star Wars: Rebels animated series.
jesse.in.mb
Andrew Mayne – The Naturalist (books 1-3). Ran through these on Audbile pretty quickly. They are easy enough procedurals although the second and third books lost some of the charm that the first book had because the main character had blossomed from a nerd to a thrill-seeking serial killer hunter by the second book.
Arkady Strugatsky – Roadside Picnic. I’d been chipping away at this for a while but had mostly stalled out. I’m glad that I took the time to finish it. The enigmatic ending was perfect for the story (although there’s still something that throws me off about Russian genre storytelling). The afterward by one of the authors is a delightful sampling of what it took to get a bowdlerized Roadside Picnic through the publishing process in the USSR.
I power skimmed a few the books in Humble Bundle’s Eat Like a Geek bundle. Nothing super exciting there. Ice Cube Tray Recipes was a good reminder that I have everything I need to make jello-shots, but a lot of the recommendations were banal for someone who frequently portions and freezes things like homemade chicken stock or caramelized onions in ice cube trays as is. Chinese Street Food looked intriguing. I’m waiting to hear back on a few books with recipes featuring a recently legalized “herb.” I mostly picked it up for the Medieval feasts and Edwardian cooking books, which I’m putting off until I have the chance to dig into them. I really enjoy modern takes on historical cooking such as The New Art of Cookery, A Spanish Friar’s Kitchen Notebook.
JW
I’ve been super busy lately, but I am always ready to make time for my favorite author, Chuck Tingle. His latest works have really opened my eyes to the importance of continuous consent and learning to be comfortable with the occasional dry spell. Mr. Tingle is likely the most erudite commentators on contemporary sexual discourse and is absolutely probably not a pen name of SugarFree.
SugarFree
I read the Ray Electromatic series by Adam Christopher, a science fiction spin on the oft-imitated Raymond Chandler genre. Set in an alternate 1960s where robots–the clanking metal variety–were introduced and then rejected by the public, the lead character is the last of his kind and the only one programmed to be a private detective. Working in a cliched LA full of secrets, lies and sin, Ray untangles mysteries–when he’s not working his sidejob as a hitman.
Riven
Well, I haven’t been able to do much reading outside of investment/work-related articles, but I can tell you about what’s on my bedside stand! …Get your minds out of the gutter; it’s just a big stack of books. OK, it’s a small stack of comic books and two proper books. The first one is Black Jack by our very own Moriah Jovan. Not my usual sci-fi or fantasy, but I am looking forward to branching out while still staying in some familiar territory. (Jack is an “uncouth bond trader,” so maybe there’ll be some interesting finance-related subplot(s)?) I bought this book–and the next one–last August. So. Super busy, or at least too busy to sit down and read a paperback. This month, though! Maybe! The other book is The Very Best of Charles de Lint, which was recommended to me by jesse.in.mb. He had me at “crow girls.” I’m sincerely hoping I can get to each of these in the next month, and give you guys a proper review at the end of April. Wish me luck. Or don’t. You’re adults.
mexican sharpshooter
I read an actual book during my vacation in Ireland. This time I picked 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. Why would I do that? As it turns out most of the B&B’s I stayed in happened to have a TV, and quite frankly Irish TV is disturbingly British which means they must love their game shows…
At any rate, this book is thoroughly researched and suggests many of the lessons we were taught about life in Pre-Columbian America is, to be blunt, wrong. One of the myths that seems to perpetuate the most is that the Americas were an untouched, pristine wilderness when the first European settlers arrived. Not so. What is now postulated is the earliest Spanish explorers arrived in Florida and brought pigs with them. Why pigs? Because refrigerators weren’t invented yet and Spaniards like pork. Pigs often carry diseases and since they are mostly domesticated a plague could’ve jumped from humans to the pigs, or vice versa. Pigs escaped, became the invasive species they still are today, and came in contact with the Native Americans. The Native American’s, of course, had little immunity to these diseases and died in biblical proportions. The explorers left and decades later settlers arrived in time to find that nature had reclaimed most of the continent.
Its a thought-provoking point of view that if you are into history, I would certainly recommend.
Not my best showing. It was not even a little bit good.
Brett escaped his SMITH-family overlords only to be re-apprehended by his employer. If his comments on the meetings he’ll be in today are any indication, I suspect he’ll be returning to the… uh… “welcoming embrace” of the SMITHs before too long. Luckily for you all, my coworkers have been temporarily tamed by a tidal wave of sugar and fat thanks to my office’s 6th annual Pi Day (our first annual Pi Day was just me baking a shitty blueberry pie and telling everyone Pi Day was a thing). My ability to pie crust is significantly better and I’ve gotten weirder with my choices. Anyway, enough about my attempts to manipulate my coworkers with carbohydrates. To the news!
Holy fudge: soft foods helped humans form ‘f’ and ‘v’ sounds –I’mma need some of our cunning linguists to weigh in on this. I spent a year trying to teach little Korean children–who ate an awful lot of 죽 (juk) or soft rice porridge–how to say “fat” instead of “ppat”.
Scientists Call For Global Moratorium On Creating Gene-Edited Babies — I’m reminded of a poignant line from Gattaca on the innate morality of improving our genes through editing: Beautiful piece of equipment there, Jerome. I see a great many in the course of a given day. Yours just happens to be an exceptional example. I don’t know why my folks didn’t order one like that for me.
Six years of practice and both my crust and filling have improved.
This month the best book I read was about a cat named Pete, or Pete the Cat if you will. 
