NEWS OF THE WEIRD: Stories of the strange, the sublime, the supernatural, the silly and the stupefying

I wonder if the link between chicken pox vaccines and the children developing autism is more or less tenous that the link between a mother like Jenny McCarthy with an IQ of about 75 having a child with a mental disability?!?!?!?!

Just wondering.

Could be that low IQ, lots of plastic surgery and anorexia cause autism in children. The world will never know...

This is a news story from 1987 but I had to include it anyway.

California City Sues Boy, Age 7:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE6DA133DF93BA25757C0A961948260

I Sold My Kid For Beer and Meat!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28629054/?GT1=43001

mfrendo:

As far as the chicken pox party, it seems far more civilized than the [M]inutemen, lets-kill-all-who-come-over-the-border parties that are so common in Texas...or is it the white robed "ghost" parties that are big over there now. I actually feel sorry for you, I mean, it must be hard to keep track of all the different types of racism in one state!! And are the state sanctioned deaths of the mentally handicapped televised yet?

LOL... Oh, once again, it's funny 'cos it's true. There's not a lot I (or anyone else, for that matter) can say in defense of a state where certain rural counties commonly feature pickup trucks with reinforced rear bumpers, so as to better support the chains that are attached to them (and their intended cargo). And I'm not particularly a fan of the legislation pursued by the city of Farmer's Branch (right down the road from where we live), that was designed to make it illegal for property owners and managers to rent houses, apartments and trailers to illegal aliens. Neither would I support laws designed to deny them the ability to purchase food, gas, or baby formula, which in my opinion would be equally cruel, retarded, and pointless legal exercises. That being said, my state pride is neither incumbent on nor susceptible to the actions of a few hatemongers, zealots and morons, since they're universal and no country or state can effectively protect against THEM, either.

When it comes to the Minutemen Project, however, well, there we're going to have to agree to disagree. I wouldn't call myself a "supporter" of that initiative, exactly -- their ranks are too swollen with the intolerant and xenophobic, not to mention the mentally ill, though I must admit it seems these days the group goes to pretty impressive lengths to imbue public-minded civic virtue, discipline and good sense in its front-line assets, after a rocky beginning back in '05. But neither am I opposed to their surveillance of the U.S. border (ANY border), so long as they have the permission of local property owners, respect germane laws and regulations, abide by decisions and practices implemented by legitimate national security and law enforcement agencies and personnel, act humanely and with compassion for nonviolent interlopers, and are strictly unarmed. (It's that last bit, especially, that proves the critical sticking point preventing me from contributing financially or materially to their organization.) Frankly, I don't think there's a damned thing wrong, immoral or illegal, with interested private citizens acting in a manner that supports and contributes to the security of their homeland, so long as they don't band together to form a private army. Nor is there anything wrong with ANY country wishing to secure its points of entry, for ANY reason, whether it be for reasons of security, social stability, economic protectionism, or even cultural retrenchment. I don't know why the U.S. gets so slandered for behaving in the same manner as every other nation-state in the history of the world. No nation can afford to simply let everyone in, the righteous and the wicked, the wealthy and the destitute, the able and the feeble; I might wish it were so, but ALL resources are finite, and I don't think it's immoral to look after one's own, first and foremost, before looking outside. Charity begins at home.

Now, however, let me be clear: There's something very, very WRONG with this country's (legal) immigration policy, and not in the way you might think. This nation is built on the idea that we are the City on a Hill, a beacon of hope and liberty and opportunity to all the nations, all the peoples, all the religions of the world, that we are a place where the abused and the segregated and the downtrodden and the desperate can come to better themselves, their families and their generations to come, and along the way better the nation, too. I believe in that, but I also believe that it's NOT enough merely to WANT to come here; you must be willing to work, to abide by the established rules of the society, and you must be WILLING TO INTEGRATE. I doubt if I could find work in France, or Japan, or Iran, if I failed to learn the language. Why should the majority of a place bend over backwards to accomodate every parochial custom of those minorities who seek to profit from it, when said minorities hold themselves apart and refuse to join the larger community and insist on having their every eccentricity catered to simply because they demand it?

...I realize I'm generalizing, here, and such corporate statements must always be incomplete, unfair and substantially inaccurate. But my broader point remains: I wish our LEGAL immigration bureaucracy was such that so many deserving migrants weren't essentially forced into illegal actions in order to seek safety and prosperity here, but I can't change the world all by myself. I want my country to be a welcoming place to the sick, the maltreated and the forgotten, and I think we are all richer for their existence, as our neighbors and colleagues and friends; but there must be rules, and there must be process, and there must be an effort to deny the uninhibited migration of those who would do harm to our society -- the criminal, the selfish, the warlike -- while extending every possible aid, comfort and assistance to EVERYONE else. America's current immigration policy is not only incompetent, it's retarded, and criminally biased to boot. Case in point:

In the third quarter of 1992, my third year on active duty in the U.S. Navy, I volunteered for temporary assignment to Joint Task Force GTMO, ostensibly a "humanitarian" multiforce mission whose stated goal was to provide medical services, shelter and relocation assistance to the tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands, ultimately) of Haitian citizens who were fleeing that desperate nation following a military coup that had recently deposed its first freely elected president, the Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Haiti is a particularly pathetic nation, and it pains me that such a swamp of disease, hate, and want is even permitted to exist in anything resembling its current form in a hemisphere dominated by the world's only remaining superpower. For decades the Haitians were essentially prisoners of a series of corrupt and abusive martial regimes propped up by the Duvalier tyrants, 'Papa Doc' and 'Baby Doc', petty despots who'd squandered the tiny Caribbean nation's meager bounty and pissed it away on their own entertainments and those select few cronies they didn't off while keeping its population in the worst kinds of abject poverty, misery and penury. In 1991, in the wake of that fall's junta, the army-backed secret police began broadening the scope of their arrests, incarcerations and summary executions, expanding their horzions beyond mere political opponents and extending these horrors to pretty much anyone who struck their fancy in the name of preserving "order": the well-educated, the wealthy, the Western and the well-established, especially professionals of every stripe, be they doctors, lawyers, engineers, or teachers. Faced with confiscation of property, revocation of liberties, removal to detention centers and even being relieved of their lives, many Haitians opted to flee their homeland and set sail across the treacherous Windward Passage, one of the most deadly straits on the planet, in the hopes of reaching the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or at least American territorial waters outside that base, located near the southeastern tip of that island. Unfortunately, those with access to ships, boats or dinghys were the first ones to leave, and the Haitian navy -- so to speak -- did their best to prevent their escape into international waters, blocking and boarding some, sinking others with all aboard. The population left behind, grown frantic by the daily purges and lack of basic resources, began tearing down their own homes in order to fashion what can only generously be termed, "rafts" to afford them passage across a deadly waterway even the most technologically advanced and well-keeled craft often have difficulty traversing. God only knows how many tens of thousands perished at sea, drowned, starved, dehydrated, and/or shot up by their own countrymen. None actually managed to reach American shores or sovereign waters. Over the course of two and a half years, better than 40,000 were rescued at sea by the Navy and U.S. Coast Guard, adrift and largely rudderless, at the mercy of storms and the elements and pirates and t.heir own failing health, many of them clinging to the bodies of their own dead family members, friends and neighbors. Those that survived were ferried to Gitmo, since if we returned them, they'd be summarily executed for treason by the Haitian army. The dead were dumped overboard in international waters. In late '92 I spent two and a half especially soul-killing weeks at sea aboard a Coast Guard cutter, the WEMC Mohawk, supervising precisely that sort of evolution: sorting the (barely) living from the dead, and ensuring those left temporarily alive weren't watching when we checked their fellows' swollen and blackening bodies for vital signs, stacked the corpses in the middle of their desperate ramshackle deathtraps, evacuated the contraptions, and sank them. You'd be surprised how quickly you can become efficient at such an awful process.

But that's not the point. Once the surviving Haitians were communicated to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo, were medically screened and evaluated for their various "complaints" (I know, right?), interviewed by the State Department and INS (now ICE), certified as acceptable from an immigration / asylum standpoint, and processed, about eighty-five, ninety percent were packed into military transport planes and sent to the U.S. for resettlement. What happened to the rest? you ask. Well, they STAYED in Guantanamo, in what I might laughingly refer to as "temporary housing": pest tents stacked practically on top of one another, first at the disused former airfield, then at a location called Camp Bulkeley, a 100,000-square-foot concertina- (read: razor-)wire-enclosed desert compound tucked away in a remote corner of the U.S. installation, guarded by hundreds of young men wearing BDUs and pointing M14s at 'em, to make sure they didn't escape I guess (as if there'd be anywhere in that part of Cuba to go that could offer anything better in the way of accomodations, I mean once they made it past the guard towers and mines and snipers guarding both sides of the "Cactus Curtain" separating U.S. soil from Castroland). I was one of 'em.

"Temporary housing" was the U.S. military's euphemism for thousands of open-to-the-elements (and in southeastern Cuba, "the elements" are pretty stark, and occasionally lethal), dirt-floor camping accomodations, the best of 'em offering actual mosquito netting, with no flush toilets or reliable water supply, no electricity or air conditioning, and only a single permanent structure, the camp medical clinic, standing at the center of what I can only describe as a concentration camp offering a somewhat less efficient manner of killing its inhabitants than those employed by the Nazis. (Eventually wooden "lodges" were erected by the Seabees to serve as community dormitories, but I'll get to that later.) The reason? EVERY SINGLE ONE of the Haitian refugees that made their way into U.S. custody were, by an Executive Order signed by President Ronald Regan, required to undergo, along with various other medical screening exams, a test for HIV/AIDS. And somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of the population of Haiti, across all economic, social, and cultural boundaries, were infected, and per that same Executive Order, they could not be permitted entry into the proper United States. Since the U.S. Navy's base at Guantanamo Bay was technically located outside the U.S., it was thought that they could remain there, and that so long as we provided them no permanent facilities, the U.S. could plausibly argue that we were seeing to their humanitarian needs while plausibly denying that they were the actual responsibility of the U.S. Government to feed, clothe, and provide long-term medical care to. In other words, they were free to expire at their own speed, apart from whatever surviving family members, friends, neighbors, or countrymen they still possessed, in this dirty, choleric moonscape in the middle of a functional desert, constantly observed and corralled by members of the U.S. military who they sincerely thought might just shoot them dead at any moment, one nation's military being pretty much interchangeable with another's in their wholly understandable perspective. But they would not be allowed entry into the U.S. and access to that nation's cutting-edge medical services, because it was against U.S. law to allow the AIDS-infected into our country, lest they spread the infection among actual Americans.

I got a medal for this. Even today I feel like puking whenever I think about it.

[Continued...]

[Concluded...]

It gets worse: I arrived at JTF GTMO just as the most seriously ill were beginning to die. As a senior NCO assigned to Headquarters Company, one of my duties each morning was to liaise (a word that does not actually exist outside of the U.S. military) with the Coast Guard Detachment Commander and the Interdiction Forces Commander and find out how many more HIV+ Haitians had appeared, like inadvertent scarecrows, in the middle of the night at the camp, having been liberated from one death sentence and delivered to face a somewhat less arbitrary one. (Testing was by that time being conducted while they were still at-sea, by regular Coast Guard and Navy medical personnel, so that they could be segregated from the "approved" transients as quickly as possible once arriving at Gitmo, forestalling, it was hoped, the inevitable, emotionally charged scenes that resulted when the miraculously delivered suddenly learn that some of them won't enter the Promised Land after all.) Then I'd call up the Camp Bulkeley Quack Shack and get the count of how many Haitians had died during the night. The Major I reported to had a large dry-erase board next to his desk, eerily similar to that flanking President Laura Roslin's chair on Battlestar Galactica, and each day I had to change the numbers posted there, reflecting the alternately newly arrived and newly-departed. Sometimes more than once a day. I never indulged my alcoholism so often, or so enthusiastically, as those five months I spent attached to JTF GTMO, at the height of what we sarcastically called the Great Haitian Nation Migration.

And then there were the riots. Not long after the Seabees began work building the Haitians only slightly less despicable quarters -- with actual concrete floors, running water, a permanent mess hall, a chapel, even -- the interred migrants figured out that this wasn't a good thing, that it meant that there was NO intention of EVER allowing them into the United States, to rejoin their families and what communities of transplants existed in the U.S., to make a new life for themselves, until they died of some obscure AIDS-related malady... That they were doomed to be imprisoned forever in an open-air prison even less inviting than the dying country they had originally fled. They went berserk one night, setting the wood structures afire and attacking the surprised and confused military personnel unfortunate enough to have been on duty that evening. Several U.S. military members were wounded by rocks and wounds sustained after having been beaten with sticks, cricket bats and two-by-eights. A handful of Haitian refugees died, none as a result of gunfire. They were trampled to death by their panicked countrymen, who were trying to break down the gates, beat down the troops, beat feet away from the out-of-control inferno consuming their only homes in a desert where there was a surfeit of fire hydrants.

I wasn't on duty that night... I was on the roof of the BEQ (Bachelors' Enlisted Quarters), getting ripped on Coronas, my almost-nightly routine. But I was on duty the second time they rioted, and helped prevent the camp clinic from being overrun. A couple hours in, I watched a man throw his ten-year-old son into a concertina fence in an effort to either distract the military or, quite possibly, kill him before he could die of AIDS or wholesale neglect. I and an Air Force Master Sergeant waded into the fence to rescue him, and we did. Neither of us developed AIDS, though we were covered with nasty cuts and had been exposed to literal quarts of infected, newly-shed blood. The kid was in the base hospital for a week, having nearly bled out before we could reach him. The sergeant performed CPR while I held a gun on his father.

I got another medal for that. More importantly, I never had to stand a watch at Camp Bulkeley again. Major Hancock saw to that.

Some weeks later certain Very Important People in the U.S. finally took notice of what was going on down there, and an "investigative team" of comprised of various politicians, celebrities and journalists flew two private jets to GTMO and demanded access to the refugees. They landed at the Naval Air Station on the west side of the base / Bay, were ferried over to the east side, and took Humvees to the burned-out, but by now largely reconstructed detainment facility. As a highly-decorated member of Headquarters Co., I was offered the chance to hobnob with the well-to-do, and maybe get interviewed. I took it. I drove the #4 vehicle in the convoy, ferrying Vanity Fair photographer Annie Liebovitz, New York Representative Charles Rangel, and a couple of minor-publication journalists to and from Camp Bulkeley. Once there I watched the delegation's nominal spokesman, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, commune with the migrants, don a handmade multicolored shawl, accept some prayer beads and declare the beginning of his hunger strike, out of support for the plight of the camp's detainees. He made all sorts of international news with that expression of empathy and solidarity. Two hours later I sat in my vehicle and watched him scarf down a Quarter Pounder With Cheese, some fries and a strawberry shake at the base McDonald's before boarding an LCT back to the air field. His meal didn't make nearly so many headlines.

Here, then, is my point: If the Haitians interred at Camp Bukleley hadn't been Haitians, but had been Canadians, Russians, Cubans, or, yes, Mexicans, there's just NO WAY they'd have been left to rot there. Because, see, the U.S. Government ISN'T a disinterested party, ISN'T even-handed in its consideration of immigrants, and ISN'T an honest broker when determining who's let in, and who stays the f@$% out. We offer preferential treatment, give special consideration, provide certain ethnicities and nationalities and religions a leg up on the competition, so to speak, that assures one person's welcome into our land, while rejecting another's. If you're a native English-speaker, come from a communist nation, are fleeing a country whose embarrassment is politically desirable, you go to the head of the class, no questions asked. If you hail from a dirt-poor Third World Hellhole whose only utility to the U.S. is as a cautionary tale about where not to spend your vacation time, like Haiti, well, then you're shit out of luck, pal, and sorry 'bout the AIDS and your family getting slaughtered and your home being a pile of shit and all. And, yes, if you happen to have been born in a country conveniently located right next door to the U.S. and wander across the border seeking a better life (and, really, who ISN'T?), for damn certain, you get preferential treatment, and if you doubt that for one moment, then try being a Haitian or a Sudanese or a Rwandan or a Somalian or an Ethiopian or a Laotian or a Cambodian or a Tibetan or a Kurd, and see what kind of reaction you get when YOU try to apply for a visa. And then see how the equally unqualified and alien Mexican next to you in line gets, by comparison, welcomed with open arms, handed all sorts of Spanish-language publications guiding him to social services and outreach missions and employment centers and potential communitities, is afforded free medical care and Government assistance, not to mention contacts and resources in a multitude of political action committees and civil rights groups and charitable initiatives, and THEN tell me how unfair the U.S. is to its southern neighbor and that country's emigrants. Where were all the bleeding hearts when that poor unlucky bastard, whose only crime in life was in being unfortunate enough to have been born in one of the world's true banana republics, flung his child into razor wire out of the sort of madness most of us can barely even imagine, let alone comprehend?

(I have no idea what happened to him, btw, or his father, or Max, the sweet old man who gave a crucifix he'd made for me out of leather that he had cured, treated and cut all on his own, with no tools or chemicals at his disposal, out of the skin of a banana rat he'd caught out by the fence one day. I left GTMO with a Joint Service Commendation Medal, a Humanitarian Service Medal and a Letter of Commendation from JTF GTMO's Commanding Officer, Colonel Zinser, bad dreams that continue to haunt me today, and a strong and heartbreaking desire to discontinue my period of active-duty service in April, 1993, after having planned to re-up for another five years when my original enlistment expired. Some months after I departed, not long after President Clinton took office, the remaining HIV+ detainees were granted unconditional asylum and were removed to the United States, and Camp Bulkeley was closed down, its personnel disbanded, and "JTF GTMO" became just a bad memory... Until Camp Bulkeley was renovated and repurposed as Camp Delta, and another Joint Task Force Guantanamo was commissioned to house and process the camp's new detainees, who are largely if not uniformly in my opinion, anti-American activists, criminals, terrorists and non-uniformed combatants, who have never to my knowledge lived a day in that Godforsaken place without a roof over their heads, air conditioning, hot showers or catered halal meals. I wonder at the ACLU, who were so quick to join the cause of these detainees, but who largely ignored the plight of so many Haitians who were neither a threat to, nor a declared enemy of the United States. I wonder at a society that is so keen to welcome one migrant group, many of whom break U.S. law the moment they set foot on American soil, and are so unconcerned by pretty much all others. I wonder at a country that picks and chooses who "deserves" to seek a better life here, and who doesn't, and tries to justify such judgements with politics in the face of such suffering as no one should ever even be forced to imagine, let alone endure.

[Sigh] But even all of this is off the point, really. The Minutemen have never, to my knowledge, fired a weapon at a migrant trespasser, have never impeded the proper authorities, have never threatened the health or safety of any of the illegal immigrants they've encountered, and on the whole have conducted themselves with commendable restraint, civility and thoughtfulness. This is still, lest we forget, a sovereign land, and one built on the notion that a nation's laws are the basis of its validity, its morality, its very right to exist. Those laws are not perfect, and are on occasion both misguided and cruel, but they exist for a reason. We, like EVERY SINGLE OTHER NATION ON EARTH, PAST OR PRESENT, have laws that make it a crime, if not an act of actual war, to enter our sovereign territory without certain approvals, permissions, and prerequisites. We may disagree about the need for those laws, that need to monitor our boundaries and safeguard our territory, but NO ONE, whether born here or arrived here, can be reasonably expected to respect ANY of our laws, if they can simply be ignored for having violated them at THEIR convenience.

We have laws, and we also have, inexplicably, a national Government both unwilling and unable to enforce many of them. There is a gap, a wide gulf, separating what we proclaim from what we do, a deep chasm of hypocrisy and futility. The Minutemen stand in the breach, and so long as they behave responsibly, lawfully, and humanely, I will defend their right, in fact their responsibility, in doing so.

Moving on...

And wait, speaking of the economy, didn't the biggest reason for the economy's failure (one George W...) actually hail from Texas??

Not to defend the man, who is quite simply the greatest disappointment of my political life, but there's more than enough blame to go around, there. Though, as President, he has both the privilege of taking the credit, and the responsibility for taking the blame, when the economy succeeds, and when it fails. I have very little sympathy for the man. Like so many people in positions of power, knowledge and influence, he should have seen the train a-comin', but was either too foolish, too weak or too distracted to step out of its way. Moreover, he let EVERYONE get run over. I like the man immensely, and honor his intentions, and applaud certain of his actions. However, he failed us, in so many, many ways. I don't regret having voted for the man, four times in fact, twice for Governor, and twice for President, considering who his opponents were. But I sure do find myself wishing there'd been another option on the table sometimes.

So, really, it's your fault we're all having economy troubles...if the cross and lighter were put down by your fellow Texans (and no, I'm def not putting you yourself in this category, fyi...even my joking has certain limits) on occasion to actually read the ballots this country might not be where it is now!

Funny. But, the KKK -- or racism -- not to mention, intolerance -- is hardly a market cornered by the Republican Party, or by Texans, or even by Americans, is it?

Anywho. It's a good debate, and I don't mind hearing contrary opinions, even unflattering ones. I don't even mind being wrong, now and again (it happens). But California still sucks great big hairy dead donkey balls. [Grin]

ETA / P.S.: Be sure you STAY in school, mfrendo, my, mmm, friend, oh. Learn somethin', willya, and teach this prickly old sonofabitch the error of his ways. And forgive me my occasional digressions, and frequent hot-bloodedness, and come to Texas one day and we'll have a couple of Shiners, and some buffalo burgers, and I'll let you beat me at cribbage, and we'll laugh, both of us, at those damned yankees and those damned Presidents and dem damned Cowboys. And I'll buy the beer, and you can flip the burgers.

Returning now, quite possibly to the relief of all, to our irregularly scheduled programming...

This is one of those rare moments of synchronicity, when weirdness and film collide in a breathtaking, awe-inspiring cosmic orgasm of improbably inebriated silly-assedness. Therefore, without further ado, I bring you today's NEWS OF THE WEIRD, from Variety.

Folks, you may want to sit down for this one: Jackie Chan Whacks Off in New Karate Kid!

I shit you not. The once-great Chan's career is now in full-on mental masturbation mode.

F@$% me, I just can't read any more. I'm out.


By comparison, THIS is "acting"

I absolutely cannot see Jackie Chan as Mr. Miyagi, especially since Chan looks younger than his age. To play Miyagi, you probably have to look old.

Hopefully we don't see some Joel Grey in Remo Williams makeup used to make Chan look old.

Probably too old and definitely not enough star power, but I could so see George Takei as Mr. Miyagi. Can you not hear him in that perfect Sulu voice saying "Daniel-San"?

Hopefully we don't see some Joel Grey in Remo Williams makeup used to make Chan look old.

LOL! On the other cla... erm, hand, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins is one of my very favorite guilty-pleasure films, and Grey's Chiun is, hands-down, one of the most reliably quotable characters EVER committed to film, right up there with Kurt Russell's Wyatt Earp, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator and pretty much every role ever portrayed by Clint "Get off my lawn!" Eastwood:

"You move like a pregnant yak."
"I can see the deadly hamburger has done its evil work."
"Watches are a confidence trick invented by the Swiss."
"You are a clumsy oaf. You move like a monkey in heat."
"Women should stay home and make babies... Preferably, man-child."

...Besides, it's Remo Williams that first turned the world on to the sultry, sexy truck-stop waitress voice of future Starfleet captain Kate Mulgrew:


Set your phrasers on, "purr"

Yeah, Slumdog Millionaire might have it's club but Swedgin and I are card carrying members of the Remo Williams fan club and, dare I say it ... I dare, the Flash Gordon fan club.

Watched Ice Pirates again recently.

Tore up my club membership card soon after, *lol*

A_Roode wrote:Yeah, Slumdog Millionaire might have it's club but Swedgin and I are card carrying members of the Remo Williams fan club and, dare I say it ... I dare, the Flash Gordon fan club.

Watched Ice Pirates again recently.

Tore up my club membership card soon after, *lol*

I am in the Flash Gordon club. Flash Ahhh Ahhhhh

As you could tell when I posted that song in the Fantaverse Music thread.

I'll join the Flash Gordon fan club too, if only to show my support for Brian Blessed and that hearty voice of his....

Everyone I show 'Flash Gordon' to loves it. Usually I have to ply them with booze and then tie them to a chair first, but still. Gotta love the dvd they put out last (?) year with the interview by Lorenzo Semple Jnr describing the film and it's production. Priceless!

Surfer, Brian Blessed is a favourite of mine as well! Always wonderful to see him.

Have you got the soundtrack Donte? Great stuff!

I have an original on vinyl from when I was a boy. How's that for Queen/Flash Gordon fanboy love?!?!

First album I ever purchased and I still have it. Yay me!

Donte77 wrote:I have an original on vinyl from when I was a boy. How's that for Queen/Flash Gordon fanboy love?!?!

First album I ever purchased and I still have it. Yay me!

I feel sorry for your wife if she has to listen to that on a regular basis. [GRIN]

No sadly I have no player. Just a stack of albums and a stereo with CD only.

I really need to get one though.

Donte77 wrote:I have an original on vinyl from when I was a boy. How's that for Queen/Flash Gordon fanboy love?!?!

First album I ever purchased and I still have it. Yay me!

Oh that rules man!

Record players are still fairly easy to find. And I think a friend of mine told me that she got one for Christmas that came with a cd burner. I could be wrong about that but a little research should give the answer. I've got a stack of vinyl sitting around too waiting for the return... not optimistic.

I want one of these:


It will allow me to play my CD AND records, as well as am/fm radio too.

silversurfer19 wrote:I want one of these:


It will allow me to play my CD AND records, as well as am/fm radio too.

read the reviews--supposedly they are junk.. nowadays you're probably better off going to a Good Will (or the local equivalent) and buying a used turntable.. there's no market for 'em nowadays except for as novelty (in which case they're junk) or as professional DJ equipment (in which case they're too overpriced for home recreational use)

That always seems to be the case. Either too expensive for home use, or just a piece of junk. But it does look ever so pretty....

Swed, that was a hell of a post earlier. I won't repost it because it's bloody long, but I'm down to get some beers and grub when either a) I'm in Texas, or b) you're in Cali, whichever is first. Count on it.

Responding / commenting...

...Slumdog Millionaire might have [its] club...

Haven't seen it yet (hoping to this coming weekend), but seeing as it's directed by Danny Boyle, who helmed Shallow Grave, Sunshine, 28 Days Later... and Trainspotting, I'm prepared to like it immensely.

...[Swedgin!] and I are card carrying members of the Remo Williams fan club and, dare I say it the Flash Gordon fan club.

Add Time Bandits to the list, and we'll schedule a DNA test to make sure we're not brothers, or clones, or identical twin cousins, or something.

Watched Ice Pirates again recently.

Another good one. Take a drink every time they go sdrawkcab.

Tore up my club membership card soon after...

Don't worry, Roode, you're still in the Man Club. [Looking down, wistfully] We can't all be so lucky.

Flash Ahhh Ahhhhh

"Do you want to live forever", Infernal? "Hawkmen: DIIIIIVE!!!"

...Brian Blessed and that hearty voice of his...

Another satisfied customer! "Hawkmen: DIIIIIVE!!!"

Everyone I show Flash Gordon to loves it.

By comparison, nearly everyone I flash becomes nauseous, Herald. Hm. Go figger.

Usually I have to ply them with booze and then tie them to a chair first, but still.

I am somehow reminded of my early dating life.

Gotta love the dvd...with the interview...describing the film and it's production. Priceless!

I have it, just haven't watched it yet. (I do that... You should see how many unread, barely-read or only occasionally thumbed-through books I own...)

...Brian Blessed is a favourite of mine as well! Always wonderful to see him.

DIIIIIVE!!!

Have you got the soundtrack...? Great stuff!

I actually DON'T own the soundtrack at present. Hm... A shame my birthday's so far off...

I have an original on vinyl from when I was a boy. How's that for Queen/Flash Gordon fanboy love?!?!

LOL, I may have owned that at one point, myself. And had it on my adolescent dresser, leaning against Van Halen's Diver Down, The Clash's Combat Rock, Peter Gabriel's Melt, Def Leppard's On Throught the Night, Dio's Holy Diver, The Moody Blues' The Other Side of Life, the Heavy Metal soundtrack LP and, of course, Rush's Signals. ALL of which, sadly, were boxed and sorted in my garage in early December, 2001, when the back half of our home caught fire and burned, reducing my childhood and college (I was a deejay, at the end of the Vinyl Era) record collection, substantially, to a very large, amorphous, congealed puddle of aggregated acrylate audio awesomeness and big hair.

First album I ever purchased and I still have it. Yay me!

[Expletive deleted]

I feel sorry for your wife if she has to listen to that on a regular basis. [GRIN]

She new what she was getting into. No pity.

...[S]adly I have no player. Just a stack of albums and a stereo with CD only.

Like having a glove, but no ball or bat. [Looking down again.]

...[A] friend of mine told me that she got [a record player] for Christmas that came with a cd burner.

Those multiformat consoles used to be pretty expensive. It's nice to know someone's still making 'em, and probably much cheaper (in terms of price point, not quality), too.

I've got a stack of vinyl sitting around too waiting for the return... not optimistic.

Some years ago, pre-Millennium, I was browsing at a college-town rummage sale and someone had a shoebox full of classic 8-tracks: stuff like KISS' Alive II, Cheap Trick at Budokan, Priest's British Steel, Toys in the Attic by Aerosmith, Frampton Comes Alive! I didn't have an 8-track player by then, 1996 or so, but the station did, so I was actually thinking of buying a few and playing 'em in back of PSA readings and programming announcements and the like, I thought that would be a fairly cool retro sort of thing to do in the midst of the grunge half-decade. A few minutes later, I'm checking out a gently used original Star Trek Concordance (some things never change), and thinking of relieving myself of four bucks or so, and these snot-nosed little bastards, couldn't have been more than 16 or 17, are sorting through the 8-track shoebox and saying things like, "Cool, Journey Escape! For Atari!" The dumbf@$%s thought they were 2600 cartridges, I guess. I very nearly stomped over there and subjected them to a barrage of cruelly pointed mockery, before realizing how pathetic that would make me for doing so. I let it slide. For all I know they tried to play with Stevie Nicks on a dusty old 1970s game console. (Wouldn't be the first joystick she got plugged into, I'll wager.)

However, perhaps I digress.

I want one of these...

Funny, we got one of those for Missus Swedgin's grandparents some years ago, back when they were alive, only black. Kris Kristofferson never sounded so good.

...[R]ead the reviews--supposedly they are junk...

Now he tells me. (No wonder they left us rocks in their will.)

That always seems to be the case. Either too expensive for home use, or just a piece of junk. But it does look ever so pretty...

Unaccountably, I'm reminded of several of my ex'es.

Swed, that was a hell of a post earlier.

Glad it made an impression, mfrendo. We still need to come to a consensus on some aspects of our discussion, but it'll keep. It's not like the Minutemen, the border (for lack of a better word), or Mexico is going anywhere. [Grin]

...I'm down to get some beers and grub when either a) I'm in Texas, or b) you're in Cali, whichever is first.

Doubt I'll ever make it out to Cali, again -- been there once, saw the ocean, went to Mann's Chinese Theater, met my soon-to-be-father-in-law, saw Universal Studios, went to a Dodgers game, proposed over a pile of purple mashed potatoes (it was, you must remember, California), and left again, just as quickly as possible, before I joined the cult. Not to mention the half-year I spent in San Diego learning sonar systems, but that doesn't count -- I barely left the base.

Count on it.

Will do. Shiner Bock, buffalo meat, and Texas ain't goin' anywhere, either. [Grin]

Swedgin! wrote:

Add Time Bandits to the list, and we'll schedule a DNA test to make sure we're not brothers, or clones, or identical twin cousins, or something.

Awwwww Swedge, you didn't just go all Time Bandits here did you? I still have the movie poster which hung proudly in my batchelor house until the future Mrs. moved in, and suddenly down came all of the old movie posters including, just off the top of my head, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Excalibur, The Song Remains the Same, The Sting, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network.

Love TIME BANDITS!!!!!!!! It should have ben on my GP list as well

Why is it that when a woman and a man meet, the first thing she thinks is, "Oh I can change him", and the first thing a guy thinks is, "Boy I hope she stays just like this"?

Awwwww Swedge... I still have the movie poster which hung proudly in my [bachelor] house until the future Mrs. moved in, and suddenly down came all of the old movie posters including, just off the top of my head, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Excalibur, The Song Remains the Same, The Sting, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network.

PLEASE tell me you still have them, lovingly rolled and packed into hermetically sealed plastic cases, in a place of subterranean honor along with the remainder of your manhood, in a place no visitors to your domicile are permitted to enter. PLEASE. Give me SOMETHING, for cryin' out loud.

Why is it that when a woman and a man meet, the first thing she thinks is, "Oh I can change him", and the first thing a guy thinks is, "Boy I hope she stays just like this"?

Because, in that moment, they're both either drunk or horny, and frequently both, and therefore not thinking clearly, quite.

Swedgin! wrote:

Awwwww Swedge... I still have the movie poster which hung proudly in my [bachelor] house until the future Mrs. moved in, and suddenly down came all of the old movie posters including, just off the top of my head, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Excalibur, The Song Remains the Same, The Sting, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network.

PLEASE tell me you still have them, lovingly rolled and packed into hermetically sealed plastic cases, in a place of subterranean honor along with the remainder of your manhood, in a place no visitors to your domicile are permitted to enter. PLEASE. Give me SOMETHING, for cryin' out loud.

That would be what is known as the Man Cave. And yes, they are all still in there just not displayed. At least she did still allow me to display: http://comicartfans.com/GalleryDetail.asp?GCat=1284 And, again, it's funny how I say, "Allow"

Why is it that when a woman and a man meet, the first thing she thinks is, "Oh I can change him", and the first thing a guy thinks is, "Boy I hope she stays just like this"?

Because, in that moment, they're both either drunk or horny, and frequently both, and therefore not thinking clearly, quite.

Now you tell me