Filed under: Quotes
“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I’ll accommodate them, I’ll rummage around for something to feed them, for a ‘vegetarian plate’, if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.”
–Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
“Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.”
– Hannibal Lecter
Although I pride myself on being a bulwark against change, I recognize that we live irrevocably in the cellular age. There is no turning back. Cell phone use is an incurable infection that has spread from generation to generation as quickly as an Arnette, Texas superflu spreads from redneck to redneck .
This year, Santa Claus brought a phone to my third-grade-or-so nephew. Although what any grade-schooler is doing with a phone other than announcing to his friends which kid in their class has cooties, I’ll never know. At that age, I was too busy throwing my garbage-can lid shield at Red Skull or climbing up the schoolyard slide to get away from a school of piranhas.
I can’t throw stones, mind you. I made my Faustian pact with Verizon years ago and sealed it with my purchase of my Star Trek Communicator ringtone. But there are times and places when catchy ringtones, regardless of whether they are Mos Def or Mozart, should be disabled.
Movie theaters are one such place. Everyone seems to know that — thanks to the little reminders that the management flashes up on the screen prior to showing “our feature presentation.”
Another place is someone’s death-bed. As a loved one is passing away, nothing heightens the sense of tragedy more than the absurdity of having someone’s cell phone blurt out a pop tune as family members hover nearby for some crucial last words, a message from just-this-side-of-beyond. And, just as one should refrain from attending a funeral home visitation while wearing clown shoes, one should also avoid having one’s cell phone burst into the opening bars of a Wilson Pickett tune.
This message in manners brought to you by your friends at Pith Helmet.
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The Fortean Times explores Christmas in the Third Reich: “How The Nazis Stole Christmas”
Today’s Topographic Tuesday is a “Two-Fer.” Earth A.D. is more than just the title of a really kicking Misfits song. It is also the name of the alternate future world created by the King himself, Jack Kirby, for a DC comic called Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth. It is a world in which animals have evolved into intelligent bipeds and humans have become their prey. The title character is a long-haired Aryan youth who becomes sort of a post-apocalyptic Nat Turner when he turns on his lupine overlords.
The first map, pencilled by Kirby and inked and lettered by Mike Royer, appeared in Kamandi No. 1 as a one-page feature: “Kamandi’s Continent”, covering the area of North America of the alternate future.
The world was a brutal, yet surreal, one. It relied heavily on stereotypes. Take for example the Pacific islands. In Kamandi’s world, they are known as the “Orangutan Surfing Civilization.” Chicago is Gangland circa 1920s (only inhabited by robot mobsters). And the easternmost edge of the old Soviet Union is the “Communi-Gear Silo State.”
As a kid from a conservative family in the Expanding Tiger Empire whose favorite comics were Captain America and Sgt. Rock, I wasn’t that crazy about that straight-outta-Haight-looking Kamandi kid, even if he was drawn by Jack Kirby. My favorite character was Captain Pypar, a Bulldog Brittanek. Imagine Richard Sharpe crossbred with UGA, the University of Georgia mascot. The redcoated epitome of Brittanek stiff upper flews.
If I ever run a Gamma World game again, this is the campaign map I’m going to use.
Wednesday, my employer gave me a shopping day. So after buying a few gifts, I headed to the local picture show to see The Golden Compass. It was 1:30. on a Wednesday afternoon, so I wasn’t expecting a huge crowd anyway, but when I entered the theater, I was still shocked to find that I was the only one there. I thought surely someone would be there: bored teens or a family who didn’t get the “Boycott Philip Pullman” email or even one of our few local flies-in-the-ointment. But there was no one except me. So I had to navigate the trek from Oxford to Svalbard solo. Not that I’m complaining. It is pretty cool having a whole theater to yourself. Especially when they rolled the I Am Legend trailer.
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To commemorate the release of the new I Am Legend movie, I present a special I Am Legend-only Photodump Phriday.
First, the most pulpish of the covers of the novella:
(more…)
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I remember last Christmas, when my son was first watching one of the Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer movies, being amazed that Yukon Cornelius, Rudolph’s pistol-packing peppermint-prospecting pal, was not only carrying a firearm in a kid’s movie (and a handgun at that), but was also being portrayed in a positive light. I’m accustomed to typical Hollywood hoplophobia that surfaces everywhere from The Legend of Tarzan to The Beauty and The Beast to A Christmas Story which ensures that everyone with a firearm is portrayed as either a bumbling oaf or a nefarious villain.
Instantly, Yukon Cornelius became one of my favorite Christmas cartoon characters.
Now, Steve Tompkins has posted a pulp adventure story featuring Yukon Cornelius at The Cimmerian.
[ enjoy ]
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Yesterday, I went to see The Golden Compass. I may review it later. During the advertisements and trailers, they showed a video for “Citizen Soldier,” a song by Three Doors Down, which was a recruiting ad for the National Guard. Intertwined with footage of Guardsmen engaged in today’s missions were scenes portraying militiamen from the American Revolution and soldiers of the 29th Infantry Division on Omaha Beach. It was like watching Black Hawk Down, The Patriot, and Saving Private Ryan all rolled into one. This has to be the best recruiting film I’ve seen since Top Gun.
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I love maps. I’ve loved them for as far back as I can remember. Growing up, I always had maps on my wall. At first it was a National Geographic U.S. map on which I plotted my moves in a junior high school global war game. This was later replaced with a U.S. Army topographic map of Kaiserslautern, which was later replaced by a hex-covered map that I made of my D&D campaign world, which was later replaced by a map of Gary Gygax’s World of Greyhawk.
For a while, everyone from Joe Strummer to Charlton Heston made appearances, only to be replaced by photos of my kids. But I somewhere, eventually, a map would unfurl itself on my wall. Even today, I keep a city map on the wall in my office.
It’s almost a pre-req for fantasy books I buy to have a map. Even though I despised Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, I bought the atlas. When I was in college, I spent the better part of a day perusing J. B Post’s Atlas of Fantasy which contained maps of everything from Oz to Yoknapatawpha County.
So, I decided to begin a new feature: Topographic Tuesday. Today’s feature, Lyra’s Oxford from Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass.
Dusty Abell’s deviantART.com site is chock-full of 70’s adventure goodness. His “Classic Seventies Action Figures” poster served as my desktop wallpaper for quite some time. He has also rendered The Micronauts, Planet of The Apes, and DC’s Justice Society of America.
Aside from the Seventies action figure poster, my favorite has to be the cover for the never-to-be-seen comic Hellboy: Polyester, Afros, and The Tenth Judge of Hell. In the “Artist’s Comments” section, Abell gives the background of the image:
mike hated the 70’s, i loved em, this was my appeal to him that it could have legs. it made geof darrow laugh and thats good enough for me. done way back when, and since no ones ever gonna see it anywhere else, here it is. if the piece was colord you’d notice the black fella is in fact ashen white with a white afro, hes hellboys risen from the dead, vietnam vet, zombie partner in the bprd.
Writer Drew Geraci mentions it on his website:
For a few years, Dusty Abell and I were a team and did about 300 pages together. Dusty approached Mike Mignola with this concept which started in a chinese monastary in the 30’s (based on some book he read) and wrapped up in the 70’s, a period Dusty and I would constantly wax nostalgic over. Colored by Dean White, who did a terrific job. From my hazy recollection, Mike was actually interested, but it got put on the back burner, until other new opportunities came in which demanded his time ( like a movie, perhaps?) A shame this project never saw the light of day, isn’t it?
It kind of reminds me of The Mod Squad. One Dead. One Red. One Blonde.
Not since Interstate ‘76 has there been this much retro-70’s Badness.
