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.
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...
Those who were closest to him remember a kind and thoughtful man, independent in spirit to the very end.
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.
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...
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!
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:
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.
When the Space Shuttle Discovery blasted into orbit two days ago, it might have taken this bat along for the ride. NASA technicians spotted the flying rodent clawed up against the vehicle's external tank during inspections. And it was thought that it would eventually take fly off on its own.But as Discovery roared from the launch pad, a tiny black speck was spotted clinging to the side of the tank. Sure enough, it was the bat.
Nobody has seen the bat since Discovery cleared the tower, but it was last seen still holding on to the vehicle.
Remember kiddies: hitchhiking can be dangerous....
David Blancarte of Manteca, California was 27 when a motorcycle accident cost him the use of his legs. That was in 1988.Then a few months ago Blancarte was bitten by a poisonous Recluse spider. He was hospitalized for five days (Blancarte, not the spider) and during an evaluation, doctors discovered that Blancarte had regained nerve function in his legs. Somehow, the spider bite jump-started his neuro-muscular physiology.
He has been in physical rehab since, and is now walking over 250 feet a day with the help a walker. Blancarte's ultimate goal? "I can't wait to start dancing."
Mash down here for more about the real-life "Spider-Man".
The extremely sad word has just got out in the past few hours that Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton, the world-renowned Appalachian moonshiner, has died in his home.He was due to begin serving a sentence in federal prison this coming Friday, the result of a raid by government agents on his moonshine operation in eastern Tennessee last spring. Following the raid many rallied in support of Popcorn, especially across the Internet. He had also appeared in numerous documentaries about North Carolina mountain culture, and Popcorn was the subject of Neal Hutcheson's recent film The Last One, in which Popcorn brewed (what he claimed at the time anyway) would be his final batch of moonshine. Easily in the eyes of millions, Popcorn Sutton was the living embodiment of a proud but vanishing way of unique American life.
And now he is gone.
Don't quite know what else to say. I am overwhelmingly shocked and grieved by this news, even though I never got the chance I had long desired to meet him in person.
I'm beginning to see some merit to Dad's suggestion: take the top 64 teams, and apart from the teams that deserve to be #1 seeds, pick numbers out of a hat and pair 'em up randomly.
I still haven't given up hope that someday, I'll live long enough to see Elon University go to the Big Dance. Along with witnessing firsthand a real tornado, it's one of my aspirations in life :-)
Sci-Fi Channel's days are numbered: on July 7th it metamorphosizes into Syfy. Which is actually pronounced just like "sci-fi", so nothing really is changing at all. If that makes any sense...Network execs are making the move because the popular cable channel has become about much more than spaceships and monsters. The station now carries reruns of Lost, which handily defies the traditional science-fiction genre. Heck, even Sci-Fi's own Battlestar Galactica is considered by many to be more hard-edged drama than anything fantastical. And the new name is also much more marketable: "Syfy" is now a trademark, whereas a generic term like "Sci-Fi", not as much.
I like it. It looks and sounds pretty snazzy :-)
That looks stunning! Can you believe this is a film being made by mostly teenagers? Well, Marco and his crew are a very talented lot and I'm not ashamed to say this either: I've learned a lot from him that I'm eager to apply to my own productions. This is definitely a rising young name that we'll be hearing plenty more good from in the future.
And if you wanna know more about Normalsville, click on over to the official website! :-)
2K Games came out this afternoon and said that the rumors were false.
A few hours later, we now know that 2K isn't kidding.
Kotaku has broken the news that, in BioShock 2...
You play as a Big Daddy.In fact, you're the first of the lot, a so-called "renegade" Big Daddy who's on the hunt for a Little Sister of his own, according to a tipster who has the new Game Informer magazine in hand. You'll take out rival Daddies with your huge hand-drill and plasmid powers, claiming their wee sidekicks as your own. Similar to the first BioShock, you can choose to either harvest your Little Sister prize for ADAM or you can adopt her as your own.
That Little Sister comes in handy. She'll harvest ADAM from corpses strewn about Rapture, acting as a warning sign for when the Big Sister—the lithe, lightning fast enemy who will hunt your character throughout the game—has you in her sights. Based on her description, it sounds like she'll one hell of a fight.
From what we've heard, players will have access to all the things that made the Big Daddy such a menace in BioShock, with the character upgrades and options available in the first game expanded to keep things interesting. More details can be found in the new issue of Game Informer, which will be appearing in subscriber hands any second now.
And Gameyko has snagged a few more details along with pics of the GameInformer magazine exclusive about BioShock 2. The one on the right indeed shows the player with the drill arm of the "Bouncer"-type Big Daddy.Hurm... don't know what to think about this. I love BioShock, have become a huge fan of its thought-provoking lore. But the notion of playing as a Big Daddy... aren't those things intended to be big dumb brutes that are no longer fully human?
But as good as BioShock was, I'll trust Ken Levine and the crew at 2K to deliver the goods. Even if, at the moment, this looks to be a most bewildering role that they are set to land the players into :-)
Alan Moore's Watchmen is rightly considered to be the most praised graphic novel of all time. And the long-awaited motion picture adaptation has introduced it to many who had never read it before (it's currently the #1 selling book on Amazon.com). But have you ever wondered what Watchmen would have been like if it were written by someone else?Like, say... Stan "The Man" Lee, co-creator of Spider-Man and Hulk and the Fantastic Four, among many other characters?
Comic book writer and commentator Kevin Church recently revisited his 2006 article "Just Imagine... Stan Lee Creating Watchmen". It is a howling scream of a hilarious read!
Now all we need is for someone to show us what Watchmen would have looked like if Jack "The King" Kirby had drawn it :-P
