I think it was the scene where von Stauffenberg comes sliding in wearing socks, skivvies and an eyepatch that blew it . . .

or maybe it was the scene where Cruise screams into the phone, “Show me the Reichsmarks!”

Then again, maybe it was the clip where he’s walking along with Rommel and yells, “I feel the need, the need for MACH SCHNELL, SCHNELL!”

“The fortunes of Hollywood actor Tom Cruise have suffered a blow with the news that his next big film has been postponed until 2009.

The release of Valkyrie, which tells the story of the 1944 assassination plot against Hitler, was first postponed from this summer to the autumn and is now not expected to appear until next year.”

More at TimesOnline

I think what would have really helped the concept would been having Harrison Ford running from Tommy Lee Jones as a tough Reichsmarschall while tracking Cruise down . . .  ‘The Reichsfugitive’ - or at least Paul Newman beating him in a game of pool in ‘The Color of Reichsmarks’

Bet Tommy will be jumping on couches a lot more this summer.

A great way to combine funeral service and home economics programs at vocational schools!

Now, here’s a way to use those old pressure cookers and leftover Drano between canning seasons!

New Morgue Science: Dissolving Bodies With

Lye

Process Includes Heat, Pressure in Steel Containers

 

 

CONCORD, N.H. — Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest — dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain. The process is called alkaline hydrolysis and was developed in this country 16 years ago to get rid of animal carcasses. It uses lye, 300-degree heat and 60 pounds of pressure per square inch to destroy bodies in big stainless-steel cylinders that are similar to pressure cookers. 

No funeral homes in the U.S. — or anywhere else in the world, as far as the equipment manufacturer knows — offer it. In fact, only two U.S. medical centers use it on human bodies, and only on cadavers donated for research. 

But because of its environmental advantages, some in the funeral industry say it could someday rival burial and cremation. ” It’s not often that a truly game-changing technology comes along in the funeral service,” the newsletter Funeral Service Insider said in September. But “we might have gotten a hold of one.”

more here

Frankly, any technology that keeps a funeral home from selling you a septic tank without holes to preserve your corpse and turning usable land into a minefield of concrete and metal boxes is a game changing technology.

Knowing the funeral industry lobby, though, there’ll probably be laws in most states requiring families to purchase Elvis souvenir decanters to house their new liquid assets.

On the bright side, this stuff could be marketed as diet pancake syrup or drambuie. I’ve even got a label: Soylent Brown.

Sliding scale of public indignation . . .

or, I’m feeling rather derivative today.

First, to get warmed up for all of this, go read the post and thread over at Max’s blog. It’ll warm your heart if you’re over 40 and give you a valuable cultural lesson if you’re under 40.

Second, go to Raincoaster, get a dish of calamari, and read up on some of the hijinks (a and b) of my favorite Russian carp/megalomaniac prince of Mother Russia.

 

Okay, now back to Kolchak.

One of the more delicious TV scandals of my youth was the hue and cry - especially in TV Guide - about “The Night Stalker” episode “Chopper.” All of that outcry that week in 1974 or 1975 was over a scene in which a head rolled - literally. You couldn’t really see that it was a head, just a blurry suggestion that someone was decapitated . It was as if the Hays Board came back to life and was ready to decree that married couples couldn’t appear on television in the same bed unless each spouse had a foot on the floor.

Three decades later, the FCC is levying fines for bare ass on the ABC network show ‘NYPD Blue’ - five years after the scene appeared on the air. If you’re particularly interested in the scene, go here (NSFW). It really won’t tell you much that you probably don’t already know about human anatomy.

 

Now for Prince Vlad.

Long before Putin, and a fair while before the KGB and the Soviet Union, there was an interesting Russian character - Pyotr Stolypin, a prime minister under Tsar Nicholas II. Stolypin, like Putin, had a clear vision of what he wanted Russia to become, and he executed that vision so well that he even had a fashionable piece of neckwear named after him: the Stolypin necktie. His necktie was usually displayed on large wooden racks on platforms with handy trapdoors.

Now, for the purposes of this post, I’m not passing judgement on Stolypin or Putin for their methods, but comparing their respective methods leaves a couple of conclusions. Putin is behaving exactly as one could expect a Russian to behave, and Bush and Cheney would make pisspoor Russians.

 

Tonight’s moral: if something makes you outraged or indignant, take a deep breath. It’s probably happened plenty of times before you were born and will probably happen several times more after you die.

Breaking news: Pic from Waco bachelor party

(from http://mylifeofcrime.wordpress.com)

Looks like a Talking Heads moment to me.

Thanks, rain

If this is the stream of my conscious, then someone sue the Army Corps of Engineers

If the last two weeks haven’t been enough to make you want to test the Secret Service’s protection of presidential candidates, then you’ve broken through the tasteless store-bought pie crust of pop culture to find an incredible mince pie of such juicy morsels as:

- Austria, the only country stupid enough to elect a former SS officer as president and then ignore a well respected man about der stadt as he keeps a shadow family in the basement (the U.S. allows legions of scum to maintain secret chambers of horrors in their homes, but we’ve only managed to elect a wannabe fascist as vice president in the last couple of decades). If they would only use their powers for good - a good sachertorte.

- a presidential election whose attendance may very well have been eclipsed by the opening weekend of ’Iron Man’ (and Robert Downey Jr.’s character flaws are so much more endearing and authentic than those of the current crop of presidential candidates). I’d much rather watch Downey shoot heroin, break in and fall asleep in a child’s bedroom, and then be sincerely contrite in court than I would watch Hillary down a boilermaker and claim to be one of the descamisados or watch Barack play another pick-up high school gym basketball game in that USMC sweatshirt or see McCain in whatever in hell express he’s named his tour bus these days.

- the U.S. oil industry, which continually amazes in its capacity to have butter melt in its collective mouth as it claims that its profits really aren’t profits.

- Paula Abdul’s ability to survive beyond 1990 as a celebrity. In retrospect, Toni Basil should have survived longer. My verdict: Abdul shouldn’t be allowed to teach dance classes for pre-teen pageants, let alone be on television for any reason.

- the American press’ development of enough backbone to ask Dubya why we should believe that Iraq is swinging our way after the past five years. Too goddamn bad they didn’t become vertebrates before the 2000 election.

- corn as the solution to our energy needs. It sounds like an episode of ‘Green Acres’ with Mr Haney, Eb and Hank Kimball as the weird sisters around the silver-soldered copper still as Arnold Ziffel stokes the fire and Lisa makes pancakes.

- I’d question Tom Cruise, but short crazy men have already made their impact on world history at least twice in the 20th century. Are you listening, Adolf and ‘L’il Kim’?

I’ve decided that I’m going to let this election happen in whatever mutated form it takes. I’ll vote, if only because it gives me the moral right to bitch long and hard about the result, but it looks like “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” will be next year’s beach read.

Isn’t that Hopper boy such a sweet young man?

After Raincoaster managed to distract me during lunch with a reminder of what a knockout Anita Loos was, I went trolling through the San Diego Historical Society’s web tease of its Spring 2002 journal and found this . . .

(Image removed per request of San Diego Historical Society, but you can see it here and here)

(Curtain-raising luncheon at the La Jolla Playhouse. Dennis Hopper with a group of local arts patrons, June 23, 1958.)

and I wondered if he’d brought brownies, slipped peyote in the tea or passed around his tank of nitrous oxide.

At least it wasn’t Waterworld.

Another moment brought to you by David Lynch . . . 

If Roger Ailes had any sense of decency about him . . .

he’d have the cast of “Fox and Friends” summarily executed for terminal stupidity.

Apparently, according to Dan Abrams over at MSNBC, the Fox morning crew apparently babbled on about the Lincoln-Douglas debate in the wake of Hillary and Barack contemplating their own L-D style event. The backdrop to the Fox analysis? Side-by-side photos of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

Let me make it easy and in terms culturally relevant to the numbnuts masquerading as morning show hosts at Fox. The Lincoln-Douglas debate involved two white men - one tall and one short, like this . . . .

A paradigm for the new economy (translation: what a bunch of dumbasses)

Here’s a business model for you:

- Market a rapidly developing communications technology with hip commercials, appeals to people’s fascination with being able to use it like something out of Star Trek, and all sorts of imagery about its convenience;

- Set up small boutique shops in malls across big- and small-town America with modern looking counters, wall hangings, product displays resembling an avant-garde art gallery, and young store associates wearing the same pattern polo shirts;

- Advertise service plans that emphasize empowerment, customized features and all sorts of bonus, weekend and nighttime minutes;

- Back all that up with:

* actual phones that don’t have access to all the features advertised

* convenience that comes only after a familiarization course resembling that given to military pilots transitioning from trainers to modern strike/fighter types

* boutique shop staffing to serve chain store customer levels

* product lines that change so often that one can’t get non-essential accessories such as chargers, batteries

* actual service plans that seemingly derive their origin from fizzbin and the terra-celestial cycles of Halley’s comet

* a corporate phone customer service call center which empowers customers to do anything but speak to an actual representative and technician to engage them in providing actual custoimer service.

After spending three hours today to attempt to get an answer about why my cell service was out, I can say wholeheartedly . . . .

 

Fuck Alltel.

 

At least my cuss-o-meter rating may benefit.

*

Bits and pieces

Thanks to Azahar for ruining my self esteem in some ways, boosting it in others, and having a neutral effect in yet others.

What do you get when you cross a Nobel Prize winner, a black radical, a New Zealander director, a British serial killer, a former West German politician, an Irish/New Zealander actor, an American director and a comic book impresario?

Some fat, gray headed guy from Virginia.

Go try it. Why should I suffer alone?

Wet beaver mass

Even the Pope has to attract some beaver. Leave it to the fair and balanced network to give the masses their fill of wet beaver:

Pope Security Police Bag Beaver in East River

Animal Was ‘Struggling’ to Swim Near United Nations   “They did not say if they considered the animal to be a security risk. But “it has pretty big claws,” said Lt. John Harkins of the NYPD SCUBA Unit.”

It’s oddly reminiscent of when Jimmy Carter was chased by some cottontail

(courtesy of Jimmy Carter Library via narsil.org )

Nothing like animal eroticism and public figures, I always say. Now if they could only catch Dubya hammering a sheep . . .