It... has been reported, to this blogger... that today, March 22nd, has been declared, International Talk Like William Shatner Day.You are, urged... to modify your speech patterns, accordingly.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Today is "International Talk Like William Shatner Day"
It... has been reported, to this blogger... that today, March 22nd, has been declared, International Talk Like William Shatner Day.Saturday, March 21, 2009
JR Hafer recounts "The Legend of Popcorn Sutton"
Over the past several days there have been a lot of tributes to Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton, the incorrigible moonshiner whose rascally and entrenched ways endeared himself to a devoted following not just in Appalachia but across the Internet. As has been reported here and elsewhere in the media, Popcorn took his own life this past Monday, rather than report to federal prison later in the week to begin serving an 18-month sentence for "illegally" making likker.(If you'd like to read more about Popcorn Sutton and his illustrious career, click on the "popcorn sutton" tag" and you can find lots of material that this blog has linked to over the course of the last year.)
Earlier today JR Hafer, a longtime friend of Popcorn's, forwarded along an essay that he had written. I personally think it's one of the finest that has been written about Popcorn Sutton: a man whose life story sounds like the kind of movie that Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam would probably make. You'll understand why I say that when you read JR Hafer's "The Legend of Popcorn Sutton".
Brace yourself y'all: this is one wild tale. Some stuff here, I didn't even know about until now :-)
Tonight, a triumph
This evening, at approximately 7:15 p.m. EST, the most long-term project that I have ever embarked upon - something that has taken up almost 17 years of my life - came to fruition.
And against the fears of how I had thought it would bear out, I am compelled to regard it as a far greater success than I had ever dared hope.
No rest for the wicked though. On to the next endeavor. But tonight, I will allow myself an all-too-rare sense of satisfaction, and share from experience that with patience and steadfastness, just about anything is possible.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Watching LOST and wondering about the Hydra Island runway?
We got a hint of it a few weeks ago in "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham". But this week's episode of Lost, titled "Namaste", gave us our first-ever confirming look at what Kate and Sawyer were put to work on early in Season 3: the runway on the smaller Hydra Island off the coast of the main Island. In this week's show, it was just "conveniently there" for Frank Lapidus to pull off his own "Chesley Sullenberger"-style miracle landing. And it let him bring Ajira Flight 316 down more or less pretty safely (considering that the only know fatality was his co-pilot).So in late 2004, Ben had Kate and Sawyer helping the Others clearing the runway. It must have been fairly well known among the rest of the Others what the purpose of the activity was, because Juliet told them later that it was "a runway" (before joking that it was for the aliens). But the Others have never been seen with any aircraft.
It's only four years later, in 2008, that the runway finally gets used, when Ajira 316 makes its landing.
So are you wondering also: Why did the Others put a runway there? Almost as if someone knew that it would be needed at that exact spot, waiting for Ajira 316?
I found the answer on Lostpedia: probably the definitive Wiki devoted to Lost.
According to the Official Lost Podcast for March 19th, 2009, it was none other than Jacob who ordered the runway to be built.
That both makes perfect sense and begs even more questions about Jacob. Hope we'll get to find out more about him soon, 'cuz he's the most captivating mystery that this show has.
Two chances to watch Popcorn Sutton make THE LAST ONE this weekend
Neal Hutcheson's new and already extremely popular documentary The Last One, about legendary moonshiner Popcorn Sutton (who passed away earlier this week) making what at the time was said to be his final batch of "likker", will be shown tonight at 8 p.m. on The Documentary Channel.
Then tomorrow night at 9 p.m., UNC TV (the PBS network here in North Carolina) will also be broadcasting The Last One.
If you have not had the pleasure yet, I heartily recommend catching The Last One however you can. Neal sent over a DVD of it a few months ago and ever since then it has been making the rounds among friends and relatives. Everyone has said that it's an absolute hoot to watch! Now because of the sad events of this past week, it is also a fitting memorial to an American original character.
Anyone else find this movie poster rather disturbing?
The first poster for Spike Jonze's upcoming adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are...
Financial Post writer asks: Is America ending?
Terence Corcoran of Financial Post has written a sobering article on his blog about the decline of the United States across the spectra of finance and politics...
As an aghast world — from China to Chicago and Chihuahua — watches, the circus-like U.S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets. The multi-ringed spectacle raises a disturbing question in many minds: Is this the end of America?It's hard to disagree with the upshot of Corcoran's argument: that America has become a house of cards that's been living on borrowed time (and money that it doesn't really have).Probably not, if only because there are good reasons for optimism. The U.S. economy has pulled out of self-destructive political spirals in the past, spurred on by its business class and corporate leaders, the profit-making and market-creating people who rose above the political turmoil to once again lift the world out of financial crisis. It’s happened many times before, except for once, when it took 20 years to rise out of the Great Depression.
Past success, however, is no guarantee of future recovery, especially now when there are daily disasters and new indicators of political breakdown. All developments are not disasters in themselves. The AIG bonus firestorm is a diversion from real issues , but it puts the ghastly political classes who make U.S. law on display for what they are: ageing self-serving demagogues who have spent decades warping the U.S. political system for their own ends. We see the system up close, law-making that is riddled with slapdash, incompetence and gamesmanship...
BIOSHOCK 2 is SEA OF DREAMS no longer, will get simultaneous multi-platform release
Ever since that teaser trailer was released this past fall, the upcoming sequel to 2007's BioShock has been called BioShock 2: Sea of Dreams. Now comes word from 2K Games that the "Sea of Dreams" has been dropped from the title. So from now on we can just refer to it as...
"What's in a name?" More like "What's in the game?" So long as it is at least as thrilling and terrifying and thought-provoking as the original BioShock, doesn't matter to me what they choose to call BioShock 2.
And speaking of BioShock 2, 2K has announced that the game - now widely whispered to be coming out this October - will be released for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC at the same time. Which will make lots of people very very happy :-)
The $100 aerospace camera
Four teenage Spanish students have earned worldwide acclaim for the photographs they have taken of the edge of space, 20 miles above the Earth. The students pulled off the remarkable feat with a weather balloon, and a digital camera costing about $100. The instrument packaged that the kids whipped-up contained a means of tracking the balloon after its ascent via Google Earth.Plum amazing. And very cool, what young people are capable of doing these days (or anybody for that matter). Wouldn't surprise me if in the not too distant future, we'll be reading news of some high school student flying into orbit in a home-built spaceship :-)
Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch leads to real-life bomb scare
An east London pub was evacuated after city water engineers spotted an object that looked like an undetonated hand grenade. Bomb experts were called in and spent nearly an hour examining the item.
And in the end, the experts concluded that it was nothing more than a replica of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
No word yet on whether a killer rabbit was also spotted in the immediate area.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Popcorn Sutton has been laid to rest
Yesterday morning, in the hills of eastern Tennessee, world-renowned moonshiner Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton was buried during a small private service. According to Costner-Maloy Funeral Home, Popcorn left detailed handwritten notes about how he wanted the service to be conducted and who he wanted to be in attendance. He was laid to rest next to his mother and father.
Popcorn Sutton's final rest came a little more than a day and a half after he took his own life at his Parrottsville, Tennessee home. He had been directed to report to federal prison this Friday to begin an 18-month sentence for manufacturing untaxable alcohol. Popcorn had told the judge during his sentencing that he would rather die at home instead of dying in prison.
(Eric at ClassicalValues.com has posted some pertinent thoughts about Popcorn's death, including some choice words from his widow Pam Sutton. And since yesterday morning a keg-load of mail has been coming in about that piece by Yours Truly condemning the federal government for murdering Popcorn by driving him to the breaking point.)
On the website for Sucker Punch Pictures, filmmaker Neal Hutcheson - who had documented Popcorn in Mountain Talk, Voices of North Carolina and the acclaimed recent film The Last One - had this to say...
1948 - 2009
Those who were closest to him remember a kind and thoughtful man, independent in spirit to the very end.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Natasha Richardson has passed away
The first time I saw Natasha Richardson, it was in The Handmaid's Tale. Despite a lot of problems with that film (I mostly watched it 'cuz much of it was shot on the campus of Duke University) I thought she radiated considerable poise and dignity in her role. Being a World War II buff, I also caught her in Fat Man and Little Boy. And then later on in Nell... which she appeared alongside real-life husband Liam Neeson.
Natasha Richardson passed away tonight following injuries she received on a ski slope in Quebec. She was then flown to a hospital in New York City, where she was surrounded by her family when she died this evening.
She is survived by her husband, two sons, and her mother, actress Vanessa Redgrave, in addition to many others.
Thoughts and prayers going out to her family tonight.
$1 TRILLION, which may or may not really exist, getting pumped into economy
The Federal Reserve is sending $1 trillion more into the flagging economy via "purchasing Treasury bonds and mortgage securities".
At this point I have lost count of how much money - the evidence for the actual existence of which is about as substantial as that for the Loch Ness Monster - has been "pumped" into the markets over the past six months.
Hyper-inflation, here we come...
"Namaste" again! LOST back in fine form tonight
After an absence of half a month (to accommodate basketball tourneys in some markets last week) Lost roared into high gear again this evening. Tonight's episode, "Namaste", came from the pen of scribe Brian K. Vaughn, who has previously written many of the finest episodes of the series. Tonight it was as solid as ever.
I have officially run out of exclamations and phony expletives that I could possibly used to describe how walloped I am by this show. During the course of sixty minutes, "Namaste" crossed space and time and gave us possibly the biggest breadth of the Island's mythology and geography of any episode to date. Where to begin? Baby Ethan! Radzinsky! Jack meeting Pierre Chang! The Flame! YOUNG BEN! Christian Shepherd! A smidgeon of the Monster! Frank Lapidus (one of my favorite new characters from last season)! Sun kicking older Ben's ass! Hydra Island and the runway! What really happened during the Ajira 316 flight!
All that was missing was Locke. And he's lurking somewhere in 2007.
So Jack's DHARMA job is janitor and "LaFleur" is calling the shots. I'd said last time that I've thrilled at how Sawyer has developed as a character. Tonight, there was the hint that he's finally come into his own as the leader among the Oceanic 815 bunch. Gotta wonder if he's right: that his thinking has saved more than Jack's "rushing into things" ever did back in "the old days".
Not so much an action-packed episode, but still immensely satisfying. Cannot wait 'til next week!
Popcorn Sutton: Dead By Government Bastards!
If you have small children anywhere in the vicinity, please have them leave. Because there are going to be things that I say here, and images that will be shown, that in days of enforced polity would no doubt have resulted in me being hung until dead, and then the house burned down and the ground sown with salt.
Note: the photos used in this article are from Johnny Knoxville's post about Popcorn Sutton's passing. I very much recommend reading what Knoxville has to say, and especially check out the video interview that he made with Popcorn in February 2009.
But may God have mercy, I'm not gonna hold back on this. I'm probably going to blow all the "goodwill" that I've earned as a "Christian writer" with this wad... but this is gonna be said and I don't give a flying rat's ass...
It's official: Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton took his own life, rather than go to prison. Monday he got the letter ordering him to report to federal penitentiary on Friday of this week. Later that afternoon he sent his wife to town for some errands. Shortly after she left Popcorn went to the barn behind their Parrottsville, Tennessee home, started up the beloved Ford Fairlane that he once bought with three jugs of his famous moonshine, and let the buildup of carbon monoxide seduce his weary mind into an everlasting slumber bereft of BATF agents and fame-jockeying prosecutors.
Marvin Sutton – better known as Popcorn Sutton – was an American original. The embodiment of rugged individualism. A paragon of the "live and let live" that once upon a time this country believed in. He was a product of his heritage, a practitioner of his art, and perhaps the last living link to a culture whose decimation is so actively sought by our "progressive" society that only the absence of guns spares it from the appellation "ethnic cleansing".
Monday afternoon, Popcorn Sutton died on his own terms. He left this world a free man.
And it was the god-damned aberration of decency and sanity that is the American government which made him do it.
The same American government that takes billions of dollars from you and me, and gives it to companies that should have suffered the consequences of their own incompetence and gone broke.
The same American government that takes even more money from you and me and passes it along as obscene "bonuses" to the very executives who drove those companies into the ground.
The same American government that has destroyed the industrial infrastructure of this country.
The same American government that lets MILLIONS of undocumented illegal immigrants flood across the border.
The same American government that now has a tax evader as the Secretary of the Treasury.
And yet in spite of all of this and more, this same government would have us believe that a 61-year old rail-thin, scraggly-bearded mountain man was a threat to the national economy?!
There is something that I have never, ever said before, either aloud or in print, but I gladly will now: FUCK THE GOVERNMENT!
So far as I'm concerned, the federal government of the United States committed murder. It didn't have to take Popcorn Sutton's life on its own.
Hell no. It did its damndest to do worse than that.
It had to try to kill his spirit. It had to assassinate Popcorn Sutton as a character. So he had no choice but to deny it the satisfaction of killing him in body.
Popcorn Sutton never harmed anyone. He made moonshine. That is not a sin or something that is morally evil. Hell, Popcorn's moonshine was widely reputed to be the safest product around. Nobody ever got sick or went blind from drinking his stuff (unless they imbibed too much of it). Go watch Neal Hutcheson's wonderful documentary The Last One: moonshining was never something that folks in the backwoods did just for the heck of it. More often than not it was something that was needed. In one of the bonus materials on The Last One DVD, Popcorn demonstrates how moonshine can be used as the basis for a cough and cold syrup. In the days before Wal-Mart landed a Supercenter in every nook and hollow of Appalachia, that was the only way to produce effective medicine.
But the god-damned judges, prosecutors, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms agents, and their worse-than-worthless sycophants and "useful idiots" in a lot of the media, decreed that to make alcohol without a license is a dire sin. And the license itself costs an unconscionable amount of money. Popcorn Sutton didn't have enough coin to open up a full-blown brewery, and he didn't particularly care to either. He just wanted to make enough for his own needs, and a few others.
But the government wanted its cut. How much would that have been? A few hundred dollars? Likely a couple thousand at the most. How much would it have cost to give Popcorn three hots and a cot in federal prison for eighteen months? A helluva lot more than that.
Was that worth wasting the money to pursue, prosecute and attempt to imprison the man? Was it worth driving him to take his own life?
Most people reading these words, know the answer to that question.
But the soulless, heartless, unholy juggernaut of the federal government, doesn't give a damn. Think any of the agents or prosecuting officials in Popcorn's case are going to shed any tears?
Fucking automatons, all of 'em.
And meanwhile, the real criminals of this land are still in Washington, still on Wall Street, still sitting high on the hog and sucking the fruit of our labors. Bernard Madoff? He's just a token gesture. His only "serious" mistake is that he got too greedy. So he'll go to prison for the rest of his life (if even that long) and the bastards of Absolute Power will keep feigning indignity and have to suffer the inconvenience of the occasional "congressional hearing"... and it will just be Business As Usual™.
Because there are different rules for Them and for Us. They can get away with it. People like Popcorn Sutton are too small to "matter". The little people have to be quashed at every turn, lest they get too uppity.
I defy anyone to tell me that there is something right in a country where a well-connected businessman or politician can abscond with millions or billions of taxpayer dollars and escape with a slap on the wrist, while someone like Popcorn Sutton gets hounded to the bitter end.
No one can tell me that there is anything right with that.
Like I said: FUCK THE GOVERNMENT!
Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton: killed by a performance of Prosecutorial Theatre, produced by his country, the United States of America.
He was a Free Man. One of the few who can honestly say they deserve that title. The chains never came to rest upon him.
Can any of us say the same?
You can live on your knees, or die on your feet. You can be safe, or you can be free.
A man chooses. A slave obeys.
Popcorn Sutton was disobedient. He chose his life, all the way to the end.
And if nothing else that I say makes an impression, I will let Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton himself deliver the parting words to those who would enslave others, carved in the footstone that he already had prepared for his eventual gravesite:
Physicist rewarded for work on "veiled reality"
In 1939, a young French student named Bernard d'Espagnat began considering that behind the empirical world of mass and energy, there might be something even more fundamental to our universe than we can measure. Reality, d'Espagnat came to argue, is only the sum of what we have observed... and may be a thin veneer over what is truly at work in the cosmos.
Seventy years, twenty books and many journal articles later on what he refers to as "veiled reality", Bernard d'Espagnat has been awarded the Templeton Prize: a yearly reward of $1.4 million to that "honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works."
If you've an interest in things like physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, the above-linked article is extremely intriguing. I am certainly feeling compelled to go hunt for some of d'Espagnat's work, after reading it.
