Although I’m a fan of the film Jumanji I assumed JUMANJI: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) would be the kind of sequel that fails to recapture any of the original’s charm. My friend Ross caught it last year and recommended it, however, so when it turned up Netflix, I gave it a watch. I’m glad I did.
Not long after the original movie takes place (1995), a young man stumbles across the enchanted game, pays it no attention as he’s into videogames — so Jumanji transforms into what he’s looking for. Unfortunately, he plays it … Years later, a Breakfast Club quartet of teens (jock, pretty face, nerd, nerdy female introvert) get sucked into Jumanji and discover they’re now heroic adventurer Dwayne Johnson, nerdy explorer Jack Black, man-killing martial artist Karen Gillen and trusty sidekick Kevin Hart (I’m surprised the character didn’t object to what a stereotype the Devoted POC Servant is).
The only way home is to beat the game but need I say that won’t be easy? Or that they’ll learn life lessons along the way — though to paraphrase Roger Ebert, while life lessons are a cliche, what makes them interesting is whose learning them. The characters in both worlds were fun; the movie as a whole is more humorous and with less of a horror tinge than its predecessor. Still a winner. “There is literally a penis attached to my body right now.”
The fifth season of ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING opens as the previous season ended, with the doorman of the Arconia dead in the courtyard fountain. Our intrepid podcasters Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) are on the case, with the occasional help of Oliver’s new bride (Meryl Streep). The mystery soon spreads to involve the mob (including Mafia wife Tea Leoni), a casino in the basement, billionaires Renee Zellwegger and Christopher Waltz and someone making offers on all the apartments in the Arconia — will the season end with everyone having to move out and away? I wondered if this was setting up for a season ender, which I imagine is what Hulu wanted — they didn’t announce S6 until the day the final episode dropped. Fun, as always. “I’m not a Bond villain, though I do own a white cat. And my father does have an office on the side of a mountain.”
I came back from my Charleston trip refreshed and rested, ready to write. Only of course getting in at 7 Monday night, I limited Tuesday to blogging and attending to bills and such — I knew I wouldn’t be on top of anything more challenging
Wednesday and Thursday I got back into the swing of things. I sent off two stories, “All Happy Families” and “Mage’s Masquerade,” the first submissions since a year ago. I started work on the Local Reporter story due at the end of the month. And I reread the 40 percent of Let No Man Put Asunder that I haven’t worked on yet. I wanted to refresh my mind about what came next so I could structure the story better.
As I thought, there are several characters, including the mercenaries Peacock and Mountebank, who drop out of the story. I’ll have to work them back in. I still need to strengthen Mandy’s character arc (also a problem I was aware of). The climax needs a massive reworking; fortunately I have the new climax already in mind. I’m also unsure whether to set this up as a duology, my original concept, or leave it reasonably standalone with options for a sequel.
I’d intended to start the next bit of rewriting today; didn’t happen. After several nights of rough sleep, I made up for it by oversleeping, which threw me off. A bigger problem is that while I’ve diagnosed the problems with the story, I haven’t figured out the remedy. I think my mind needs to process a little more. So today wasn’t as productive as I expected. Next week maybe — but I have a lot of Local Reporter work to do, and some household IRL duties. We’ll see.
(The warning sign is because the tea fields include cottonmouth, rattlers and coral snakes).
In other news, the dogs are over their digestive issues and in great shape. Trixie missed me while I was gone and was happy to have me back. Here’s a photo of my little angel and one of her toys to wrap up the week with.
Earlier this year, my sister Tracy proposed she, me and my brother Craig have a vacation somewhere. Craig and I agreed. After some discussion, we settled on Charleston SC for the destination. I didn’t want to drive — four hours when I don’t know where I’m going or what sort of traffic/intersections/merging I might be facing didn’t suit me at all. Flying would be at least $500 and that’s with 30 to 45 minutes to change planes in Charlotte NC. TYG suggested Amtrak, I said hmmm. Sure enough it would only be $160 round trip, leave around 10 AM, get in at 5PM.
Well before I boarded the train last Thursday, Amtrak had extended my stopover when I change trains to five hours, so I was now getting in around 10PM. Still better than flying, particularly with all the chaos lately. I showed up at the Raleigh station —
— where we learned the train would be delayed by a half-hour. Annoying but not a huge disaster; I’d still make my connection and what difference did it make which station I delayed at? The same held true as the delay grew and grew before we finally left a little before 1 PM. However the delays did make me frustrated.
We finally pulled in at Wilson NC, a sleepy little Southern town with a small, old-fashioned station.
According to a sign by the train tracks, Wilson is NC’s “first gigabit city.” Sleepy though it looks, it launched a city owned broadband network to provide residents with Internet access. Which is cool. That part of Wilson, though, was not that exciting to sit in for several hours. The drug store across the street was literally selling nothing but prescription and OTC drugs; the cafe was closed. I’d eaten a large breakfast and brought some snacks but by that point in the day, I wouldn’t have minded a small cafeteria. No such luck.
And then my second train got delayed too. And delayed. And delayed. Until finally we left 90 minutes late, with a corresponding impact on my arrival time. And riding a largely empty train in the pitch-black night is not much fun.
The ride back was smooth so I don’t think Amtrak’s become enshittified — perhaps I just caught them on a bad day? I did make it Charleston, regardless, and had a wonderful time. More photos to come.
My blogging about Undead Sexist Cliches focuses primarily on the myths about women: good women don’t use birth control, rape is buyer’s remorse, etc. Men, however, are also saddled with cliches about how they have to behave, many of them packaged into the soup called toxic masculinity. Currently popular how-to-fix-men pundit Scott Galloway’s recommendation — men must “protect, provide, procreate” — sounds more positive. However as Celeste Davis points out at the link, it’s not new — it’s another undead sexist cliche that goes back decades, at least. And it’s a flawed solution, partly because (as I’ll get to), it’s still suggesting there’s a precise path to manhood when as Davis says, we need a garden with dozens of paths.
I’ll pause here to say I haven’t read the book so there may be great stuff in it (you can find some analysis here and here.. Still “Protect, provide, procreate” isn’t some startling new insight, it’s going back to old-school thinking about what a man’s role should be. It would describe the male lead in lots of old 20th century family sitcoms: Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, Leave it to Beaver. And protecting and providing are certainly commendable (procreating is a personal decision — I don’t think it’s automatically good or bad).
However holding this up as the solution to men’s woes reminds me of George Gilder, the anti-feminist right-winger who argued men are animals with no ability to adult unless they have a woman to take care of. Either women marry men and let them become protectors or men become gang-banging, drug-using psychopaths in the street (for the record I was unmarried until I was 50 and somehow avoided that dark path). Ergo, women have an obligation to put their plans and dreams on hold to save men. Which includes giving them kids: if a man doesn’t have the satisfaction of becoming a father, all that he is will be dust in the wind. I don’t know that Galloway would be down with all of Gilder but he does believe without a girlfriend/wife/partner men fall apart.
The idea that Men Must Protect isn’t new either. Not that protection is bad but as Susan Faludi has written, it’s part and parcel of the idea that women need and must accept protection and, conversely, don’t do any themselves. There are women cops, women firefighters, women paramedics, women on the front lines and in the National Guard — framing protection as a male thing conforms to longstanding sexist images. There’s a shit-ton of writing out there about how women must accept protection and men must provide it, even if the woman can handle the trouble better. I sincerely hope I’d take a bullet for TYG if the occasion arose; she’s damn tough though and I could see her ending up protecting me. I’d be okay with that too.
In 18 years of being with TYG, however, I have never had to protect her from anything (unless you count driving her home after surgery). We’re not on the frontier, we’re not living in a war zone; protection doesn’t come up. In evangelical circles (John Piper is one example) this gets handwaved: the man’s willing to protect his spouse, ergo she should accept his role as head of the family who’s word is law. Her submission is a daily thing, in return for an event that may never happen — and as Faludi says, many men when the crisis hit did not live up to their duty.
Which is part of the trouble with Galloway’s prescription: if men are to provide, protect and procreate to feel like a Real Man, then a woman’s role is to be protected, provided for and pop out the babies. Senator Josh Hawley similarly calls for a Christian economy where one man can support his wife and children as God intended — and he’s quite specific that he means “men” not people. They’re supposed to be in charge (more on his views in this article); the right-wing dream of reviving factory work is partly because it’s Manly Work and the dream includes women happily staying home once they have a man to support them. Never mind that lots of women who did have that arrangement walked away from it when they could.
To be sure, some women would be happy with that arrangement, given the right man … but not all. And if a woman brings in more money or the man chooses to stay home as primary caregiver for the kids (or they go without kids), that doesn’t make him less manly, nor does it mean he’s failing his duty. Nor does it make her less of a woman or mean she can’t find a man (my first ever Undead Sexist Cliche post touched on this). Women aren’t a hive mind any more than men: a given woman may need someone who’ll listen when she vents about work or cooks dinner when she’s working late or rehearses lines when she’s memorizing for her role in a play. Being a good husband is about being the man she needs, not following some generic formula.
Just as many women rebelled against the 1950s sitcom style marriage (whether by divorce, getting a job or otherwise renegotiating arrangements), plenty of men were happy to see their own sons move up to white collar work, as Natasha Zaretsky discusses in No Direction Home. Hawley, a banker’s son, former Heritage Foundation intern and lawyer, has never felt any need to prove his manliness by blue-collar work; to paraphrase George Orwell, he probably thinks talking about the alternative of manly labor is a substitute for actually doing it.
Recently TYG and I went to the local Ackland Museum as we do every so often. One of their exhibits was a wall of color, a collection of bright paintings on one wall. I think they set it up well.
Here’s a modern piece of pottery in the design of an old Greek vase.
Here’s some random art
We had to leave the car at the top of the parking garage, which was full for some college event. Can’t beat the view, though.
All rights to art images remain with current holders.
“[Deepak] Chopra and Epstein were in regular contact, joking about picking up girls, attending retreats, brokering lucrative deals and relaxing at Epstein’s residences. Part guru, part wingman, Chopra’s advice to Epstein includes the now widely circulated comments: “God is a Construct. Cute Girls are Real.” “Come to Israel with us. Relax and have fun with interesting people. If you want use a fake name. Bring your girls.” “Anything we share is between us. I share nothing with anyone but trust you.”
When Epstein informed Chopra that a woman had dropped a civil case claiming that he and Donald Trump had sexually assaulted her when she was age 13, he responded “good.”
In a recent conference Melanie Trump denied any connection to Jeffrey Epstein. Here’s some speculation why she spoke up.
“The same man who built an empire trafficking girls was also grooming boys to hate them. He monetized girls’ bodies and radicalized boys against them. He hunted girls and recruited boys. Those aren’t separate phenomena. They run on the same logic. If you normalize the idea that women are owed, that consent is negotiable, that power excuses everything, you don’t just get one trafficking ring. You get an ecosystem. Epstein didn’t have to abuse every girl personally to profit from a world that already excused men who did.” — from an article about how Epstein promoted the manosphere. Which may also explain henchwoman Ghislaine Maxwell’s online activity.
As noted at that link, Epstein made the world worse for women and gender equality. It’s not just him, though. If you remember #metoo, you remember how many women spoke up and said “me too!” They need the support of the system and of individual men: “It would be good if courage changed sides too. This isn’t impossible: one of my male friends, discovering the sexual abuse (this time of young men) rife in his faculty, became a whistleblower, sticking to the facts through counter-accusations and gaslighting. I think, too, of many other male friends, who love their partners, raise their boys well and must want more for their daughters than that they learn, aged fourteen, how to give a rich old guy a great blow job.”
The whole point of writing about Undead Sexist Cliches is that these ideas — women shouldn’t vote, women shouldn’t have sex before marriage, women’s brains aren’t as smart as men’s — have been around decades, it’s only the details that change. Women’s brains are inferior because they’re smaller. Or because the important parts of the brain are smaller. Because the two sides of their brain are less connected than men’s. Or more connected. Because of testosterone. If one rationale goes down, switch to another. The cliche lives on (if you want details on any of these, you can find them in my book).
However there are always new cliches coming up that I haven’t encountered before (which is not to say they’re new rather than new to me). Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the big worry for conservatives was teen moms — babies having babies! Lots of young moms! Usually with a subtext that birth control wasn’t working so we’d better teach all those teenage sluts to abstain until marriage (and pay right-wing groups and churches to provide abstinence only education in schools. There’s always an angle).
Now though, as we face a dwindling birthrate, conservatives are very concerned women need to have more babies, and they need to start young. According to right-winger Dr. Marc Siegel, “the problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19 the fertility rate is down 7% and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation, till they’re more financially secure, maybe they haven’t found the right partner.”
Wow, how crazy. Imagine telling 15 year olds to wait to start a family until their life is more stable, they’ve found a good partner, they can afford a baby. What are we thinking? Think how many more babies she can pop out if she starts young! The problem with birth control isn’t that it lets teenage girls become sexual, it’s (according to Stephen Miller’s wife Katie) that it stops them getting pregnant! An option they hate, which is why they’ve been trying to ban contraception for years (a goal the Toddler administration is in favor of).
Let’s break this misogynistic bullshit down. First, it’s about the claim (as noted at my first link) that America needs more babies to keep our work force up, pay into Social Security, etc (I guarantee you if they axe Social Security they’ll still be demanding women become breeders). It may be the shrinking population is a problem — but simply demanding women have more babies, or taking away the option not to become pregnant, are not the answer. Women are not means to an end. They have their own ends and they’re entitled to strive for them, even if those ends do not include children.
Having a lack of young workers is a problem; fine, let’s solve it. Immigration is a simple way but that means America would no longer be a white-dominant, Christian-dominant nation and that horrifies forced-birthers. Never mind that immigrants have been coming here for more than a century, and despite being shat upon as not Protestant, not white, not Anglo-Saxon, the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the Polish, the Chinese, etc. have become as American as anyone (though Republicans viscerally recoil from admitting this). It will happen with future immigrants too. There may be other solutions, too; if we can spend billions on ICE and on the Toddler’s Iran stupidity, we can fund Social Security and Medicare.
For that matter we could provide serious support for women. Pay for their ob/gyn care. Police companies that don’t provide a space to bottle breast milk. Fund child care. This wouldn’t turn all women into happy homemakers but it might influence a number of them. Republicans have discussed this idea for years; nothing ever happens. One “pro-natalist” couple hand-wave giving financial support in favor of giving women medals for children and deregulating daycare.
Second, but equally important, it’s a way for men such as Siegel and his ilk to shore up patriarchy (one reason proposals that would help working mothers rarely get buy-in from the right). The right-wing shrieks about groomers a lot but they’re fine with teenage marriage and resist efforts to raise the age limit. A girl of 15 is much easier to control; pass her from her parents to a husband while she’s young and she may never learn to stand on her own. She’ll have much less opportunity to get an education or a job because becoming a mom is time consuming. As Anna Kendrick says at the link, men can enter parenthood with a good chance it won’t disrupt the rest of their life; women, not so much. A standard talking point on the right is that this is fine — have your kids, then tackle your career, you’ll have time. As plenty of women have testified, starting into the workforce when you’re late 30s or early 40s ain’t so easy.
If women can’t get an education or an independent income, they’re much more dependent on marrying a man who can support them. Which some shitbag misogynists such as Scott Yenor consider a plus (Yenor wants a world of “public men and private women”). If that also makes it harder for young girls to escape an abusive, violent husband — well, I doubt anyone on the right gives a crap.
I used to think talk about the right-wing seeing The Handmaid’s Tale as an inspiration were a little exaggerated. It’s been quite a while since I was that naive.
It didn’t work for me. That may be because it’s the kind of book that requires quite and leisure, and suffered from me cramming it in between pets and talking to tech support about our internet outage. Or it may simply be that I bounced off it because by modern standards it’s an odd novel; a strange plot, unpleasant characters and like Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, often recounted at second hand rather than shown to us directly.
For those who don’t know, a new arrival on the Yorkshire moors meets his brooding landlord, Heathcliffe. From a servant he learns how Heathcliff’s home of Wuthering Heights once belonged to the Earnshaw family, then came his tragic, obsessive, ultimately doomed romance with Catherine Earnshaw, followed by Heathcliff’s disappearance, to return later as a rich man. Cathy marries one of their neighbors; Heathcliff seduces and marries the man’s younger sister. Everyone’s a mess, obsessive, possessive — it may be the lack of anyone to root for was a factor in not liking it — and this continues into the next generation.
I can see, sort of, why the book appeals. There’s tragedy, obsession, passion, some clever writing (Heathcliffe’s death is unexpectedly anticlimactic), warped characters and the isolated world of the Yorkshire moors in that era, where your “neighbor” might be six miles off. I may try it again some time.
Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard did an amazing job weaving the history of the pre-Raphaelites in with the supernatural; the sequel, Hide Me Among the Graves, was weaker but still good. In MY BROTHER’S KEEPER he attempts something similar with the Bronte family. Like Powers’ Medusa’s Web all it did was remind me of superior books of his.
When Branwell, Emily and Anne are tweens, Branwell leads the unwitting girls to make a pact with dark powers. As adults this entangles the family with the supernatural (though their father later reveals they’ve always been entangled). There’s a brooding, one-eyed, could-he-be-proto-Heathcliff werewolf. The disembodied spirit of a dead lycanthropic god. A cult that wants to awaken the deity. Angry ghosts whose ability to suck out your breath resembles consumption. And a sinister spirit that wants Branwell’s body.
I don’t mind that Powers uses the same hybrid of magic and science as multiple other books; many of them take place in the same universe, after all. I think the big problem is that the cult is too vague a threat — what will they do once they seize power? How powerful are they? — which undercuts any sense of danger. There’s a stage magician who hopes to use their knowledge to enhance his performances; that’s a great idea but he’s not developed or used enough (which hurts the big finish as he plays a large role). Overall, glad I used the library for this one.
LOUIS THEROUX: Inside the Manosphere (2026) interviews a number of online misogynist influencers about their attitudes, their careers and the women in their lives (the interview with one guy’s mother is memorable). While their views are often horrifying, they’re also nothing new to me, though I imagine plenty of people will find the documentary enlightening. And I think Theroux manages to cover their views without presenting them as a reasonable point of view.
What was new to me was how much of these guys shtick is bait for suckers. The hook? Online classes and various supposedly lucrative investments. This isn’t new — Alex Jones made a lot of money peddling crap to suckers — but it’s interesting (and does not excuse peddling misogyny). “When they talk about misinforation on the Internet, this is what they’re talking abouThist.”
As a big fan of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass films, including the horror teleplay The Woman in Black, I had high hopes for THE STONE TAPE (1972). An electronics team working off the radar in an old house (their goal is a crash research program developing tech that will leave Japanese electronics in the dust) discovers weird screams and ghostly visions in the room where they set up their computers. The top guy doesn’t believe in ghosts but in the possibility mental impressions from intense events have been recorded in the stones themselves. Hmm, if they could learn how those impressions reach their brains, that would outdo anything in Japan’s arsenal. Even though it appears this theory is right, unsurprisingly this proves a very bad decision …
This is well acted and well written but it’s never quite chilling enough. The ghosts don’t appear to pose a real threat and the balance between the parapsychological investigation and corporate politics undercutting the research feels off. And the big manifestation at the climax is unconvincing, nothing but a display of flashing lights. Not awful but not good enough. “Look at the words — ‘pray … pray.’”
