A few shots from around our neighborhood.
It’s good to live here.
Monthly Archives: May 2025
Republicans hate that reality is against them.
A couple of years back, I blogged about how much conservatives had come to resemble the Soviet communists they spent so many years loathing. As the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel once put it, when you claim the right to rule based on truth, any dissent becomes a threat. Plus it upsets President Snowflake’s extremely fragile fee-fees to suggest he’s wrong about anything. Even though he is.
As Paul Campos (I think) once said, it pisses them off worse that reality itself is against them. Gay marriage, for instance, hasn’t destroyed straight marriage. No pastor has been forced to hold a church wedding for gay couples. Gay people are not more likely to be pedophiles than, say, Christian ministers. Children raised without a male and female parent do not grow up defective.
Women using birth control are not slutty, promiscuous or denying their true nature. Women are every bit as capable as men at — well, anything. Voting, fighting, science, construction, parenting, every human skill has a huge overlap between male and female ability. Many women are better at “male” skills than the average man, just as some men are better caregivers than the average woman.
To take the current administration, tariffs don’t work. Canada doesn’t want to become our 51st state. The Felon is not a political genius who’s erratic actions are some cunning 11-dimensional chess game.
This isn’t new. There’s a notorious quote from W’s first term, where one of his staff sneered that while the liberal “reality based community” criticizes the War in Iraq, W would just sweep onward, creating new reality after new reality and laughing as liberals protested futilely. Of course they didn’t create a new reality: W’s declaration of Mission Accomplished presaged more than a decade of violence and collapse in Iraq as the occupation failed to bring order and stability (thank you, President Biden, for ending it). Reality always wins in the end. Unfortunately that just makes them more delusional, like the communists who clung desperately to the dream of the USSR as a force for world socialism instead of a dangerous dictatorship.
In some ways they’re in tune with the classic political tract Leviathan, which argued the only source for truth should be the monarch. Scientific reality undercuts most of RFK Jr.’s views so science must be crushed. As Paul Krugman says, we’ll see “the administration firing anyone suspected of being more loyal to science than they are to Donald Trump.”
The current administration is “particularly hostile to agencies that generate what they feel are findings that obstruct their own agendas. Safety regulations of all sorts, environmental concerns, climate change, and of course anything that comes within a million miles of suggesting that some groups in society have historically been put at a deliberate disadvantage relative to others: all of it has to go.”
Not only do they have to lash out at dissenters, they have to pretend the Felon knows what he’s doing. Case in point, the head of the United Auto Workers has declared tariffs are great — who cares if rich people lose money on stocks? As if 401ks and IRAs weren’t the primary retirement-funding for millions of working Americans. Or the argument that having overseas workers laboring in dangerous conditions for pennies a day are somehow ripping off American consumers.
On top of that, we have the right-wing media ecosystem where everyone’s scrabbling for attention and the money is in saying increasingly outrageous things. Benny Johnson, who got cash from Russia (allegedly not knowing about it), goes back to the classic, covid as a conspiracy. Newsmax wants viewers angry that bike lanes exist. I’d laugh off all this bullshit but a surprising amount will filter into the mainstream. The lies about schools catering to furries, for instance, are crackpot bullshit but Republicans won’t let go of them.
It’s unfortunate that when things like the Felon’s idiotic tariff policies smash up against reality, all of us will feel the shocks.
A trio of paperback covers for Wednesday
First, Richard Powers, depicting science fiction as only he does.
Second, an Ed Emshwiller cover.
And last, this uncredited one.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Three actors on the edge of sanity!
Cocaine was a wildly popular drug in the 1980s so perhaps it’s not surprising that along with the Hyde-as-cokehead comedy Jekyll and Hyde, Together Again we got a dramatic take on the same idea, EDGE OF SANITY (1989). It’s also a little surprising that it’s the second mash-up of Hyde with Jack the Ripper (following Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde) and the second film where Hyde’s killing spree is a response to childhood trauma (see also Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde). Nor is it as good as any of them.
Henry Jekyll’s (Anthony Perkins) research in the film is based on the real use of cocaine as an anesthetic in the late 1800s. At the time it seemed like a wonder drug, one that could numb the body to surgical pain without the potential harms of chloroform or ether. The film never names the drug but it’s quite obvious, particularly when Jekyll mentions how it peps him up, gives him more energy and generally makes him feel wonderful.
Trouble comes when a lab monkey spills some chemicals on Jekyll’s coke stash, creating vapors that transform him into a freaky-looking version of himself. Worse, it unlocks his hidden self, which turns out to be a pissed-off, vengeful child. As a kid, Jekyll spied on his father getting it on with a woman when the couple caught him; his dad beat him while the woman laughed.
Hyde apparently has no hard feelings about his father humiliating him but bitterly resents the woman, whom he assumes was a whore (much as Bernie Casey’s Dr. Black blames the brothel staff for not helping his dying mother but doesn’t hold a grudge against their male clients), for mocking him. As Hyde he goes out into the streets and brothels, gets sex workers alone, and kills them. When his wife has almost talks him back to sanity, he starts thinking about that woman from his childhood, about a streetwalker who laughed at him while her pimp stole his money … Suddenly he imagines his wife laughing too, then Hyde resurfaces. It’s the embodiment of Margaret Atwood’s line about how men fear women will laugh at them, women fear men will kill them.
The result comes off very much like an anti-drug preachment (kids, don’t do cocaine!) which makes me wonder if that was part of the inspiration. It’s not good and feels more misogynist than Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (the lead women were a lot stronger there) but from the point of view of writing my book, it is an interesting take. “Suppose you found yourself at the edge of a labyrinth — or better still a dark forest.”
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1989) was an adaptation J. Michael Straczynski penned for Showtime’s Nightmare Classics, with Anthony Andrews as a shy, socially awkward Jekyll unable to speak his love for Laura Dern out loud (she is obviously eager for him to do so). Instead he buries himself in his research to manipulate brain chemistry and create a man of pure goodness — which, spoilers, goes horribly wrong.
Andrews’ performance is impressive. He’s a sadly awkward man as Jekyll; as Hyde he looks normal physically but his body language is repulsive (fitting Stevenson’s concept of Hyde as a man who repels people for no clear reason). He’s rigidly stiff to the point his lips hardly move, stares right past the people he’s talking to, rarely raises his voice above a monotone. It’s creepy, though it’s at odds with the idea of Hyde as a man of no inhibitions. Was it that along with his inhibitions his ability to connect was stripped away by the transformation? In any case, Jekyll finds himself hooked on his new life (“Without him, I find the days colorless and sterile.”) leading inevitably to tragedy. A good adaptation, and Dern is always charming to watch. “He thought he could release his true nature, and he did. The poor fool — it was me.”
When I watched the 1990 JEKYLL AND HYDE for Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan, I found it competent and entertaining but not a stand-out. That assessment doesn’t change. Here Michael Caine’s Jekyll, like Andrews, believes in changing people by changing brain chemistry, much to the outrage of Joss Ackland’s Dr. Lanyon. A titan of medical theory, his view is our biology determines our mind at birth; he sees Jekyll questioning this as a personal attack. To complicate things, the widowed Jekyll was married to Lanyon’s daughter and over the course of the movie winds up in an affair with her married sister (Cheryl Ladd)
Caine does a competent job in the lead but nowhere near as good as Andrews or Jack Palance. And the movie hand-waves any details that would make Caine’s Jekyll less likeable. Rather than trample a little girl (the memorable scene that introduces us to Hyde in the original novel), Hyde simply knocks her aside while running from the cops, after which a horse tramples her; Jekyll, rather than buying off her family, treats her injuries. The movie does show Hyde is a monster — he abuses the women he sleeps with and thinks nothing of killing people who piss him off — but we never get a reason why Jekyll keeps turning back into such a monster. “Evil is not a scientific word.”
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Mayday! Misogyny is loose! Here’s some links to prove it.
All those millions of good-paying jobs the Felon is promising? His administration isn’t helping women land any of them. Eliminating Head Start will make it harder for moms to work — why, it’s almost like Republicans want women back in the home or something.
Bizarrely, the administration’s opposition to DEI leads to them dictating other countries must end programs.
“White middle class boys are only slightly less likely to go to college than white middle class girls, with only a 2% college enrollment gap (51% female vs. 49% male). Black male students, meanwhile, comprise just 37% of Black college attendees. Yet the discourse around the “boy crisis” often seems to revolve around the problems faced by white, middle class boys.”
Is the boy crisis the result of pissed-off fathers? Or maybe it’s the right’s increasing contempt for decent male behavior. Or any human decency.
Andrew Tate’s a misogynist and alleged rapist. Our law-and-order administration is keen to set him free.
Missouri wants to create a state registry of pregnant women at risk for an abortion. No way that could be abused, right? Texas to Missouri: hold my beer.
How to be anti-abortion and anti-vax simultaneously: “Certifiable whackjob Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now claiming that there is “a lot of aborted fetus debris” in the vaccine that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella.” You will be shocked, shocked, that he is lying.
Republicans say they hate groomers — but they’re all in on child marriage.
“Feminism is just leftism in a skirt.” — old fart Andrew Klavan who seems to think this is a serious critique.
A cop took a young rape victim for a rape kit, then sexually abused her.
“Of course, the theme in all this is ultimately men creating a sacralized hierarchy that crowns their genitalia at the top. Driscoll once told the men of his church their penis was God’s penis. He said, “Knowing that his penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.””
“It’s always a female human and a male beast.”
Mohler sneered that empathy is “an artificial virtue,” calling empathy “destructive and manipulative. Empathy means never having to say no,” Mohler insisted, attacking the straw-iest of strawmen.”
“Let’s be clear: The Tifton police themselves say this was a miscarriage. They’re not claiming it was an illegal abortion—and even if it were, Georgia law doesn’t allow the prosecution of people who have abortions. So why is this a police matter? Why did they send the fetus to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Crime Lab for a fucking autopsy?”
“The Greens and their supporters (many of whom are, or were shaped by, their support-ees) frame this dispute in a dishonest and self-serving way. They believe that IUDs and emergency contraception are “abortifacients,” they say, because of their religious belief that “life begins at conception.” But that’s a dodge. This dispute is not about the belief that life begins at the moment of conception. It’s about the belief that conception occurs at the moment of ejaculation.”
“Women are presumed to care about other people, and are therefore too emotional to be on the Supreme Court, and even their most blatantly text-based arguments must somehow spring from this well of irrational feeling that sits in their skulls in place of a brain. Men, on the other hand, are presumed to be rational actors, even when they spend most of their public lives behaving with what can only be described as a shocking level of emotional incontinence — behaving, literally, like unruly children, screaming “you’re a dummy!” “no, you’re a dummy!” at one another.”
Remember, though, it’s not all bad: “Things get better and they get worse, at the same time … we’re resisting and we’re being crushed at the same time always, like they’re parallel tracks.” Here’s a look at two women in the 19th century who fought for their rights. And what happened when 90 percent of Iceland’s women walked off the job.
Filed under Politics, Undead sexist cliches
A magical family, a unicorn and witchcraft: books read
THE IMPROVISERS: A Murder and Magic Novel by Nicole Glover is in the same universe as her The Conductors, with a protagonist who’s the grandchild of the detectives there. A barnstomer in the 1930s (based on Bessie Coleman, a real-life black female pilot), she stumbles across a magical murder and investigates, bringing her family in on the case.
The barnstorming opening reminds me what I loved most about the first book (Improvisers is third in the series with) was the period detail; the mystery was the weakest part. This one has less period detail and a lot more mystery (given her eccentric family chiming in, I’d class it as a magical cozy). So not as good.
Comic-strip writer/artist Dana Simpson recently announced she was shutting down her daily Phoebe and Her Unicorn strip because graphic novels were working better for her as a revenue source. That prompted me to pick up THE MAGIC STORM in which Phoebe and her BFF, Marigold Sparklingnostrils, must investigate a strange storm that’s shutting down not only the town’s power grid but magical energy too. As a fan of the strip I enjoyed it, though it felt like the pacing was a little off (more like the strip, not like a self-contained graphic novel).
Reviewing Manly Wade Wellman’s After Dark, I said it came off close to a non-supernatural conspiracy thriller. That’s even more two of the third Silver John novel, THE LOST AND THE LURKING, in which the government sends John to an abandoned mill town that’s become the center of the International Wiccan Communist Conspiracy. No, seriously: the town’s been taken over by witches/Satanists (in this book, they’re the same thing) and they’re now contacting unfriendly foreign powers to do Something (we never learn what).
I like that John’s repeated encounters with evil have toughened his spirit to the point he can shake off most of the cult’s initial enchantments. That makes it disappointing that when things ramp up — he ends up in a very bad situation — it’s resolved by John simply carrying a magic talisman rather than his inner strength (oh, and a literal Magical Negro helps). It’s a disappointing book though I still want to read the remaining two, The Hanging Stones and The Voice of the Mountain (which I remember as the best of the novels). However they’re priced higher than I want to spend so it may be a while.
Image by Simpson, all rights remain with current holder.
From Palestine to Canada: movies
Since watching Life of Python a couple of months back, I’ve been meaning to rewatch MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN (wisely retitled from Eric Idle’s suggestion of Jesus Christ’s Lust for Glory!), which the group considers its last great work and the most fun to work on of any of their movies.
This starts out with the Three Wise Men arriving in a stable for the birth of the Messiah — then realizing this Brian brat isn’t him (Jesus is the next stable over). The child then grows up into Graham Chapman; despite not being the Messiah he winds up sparking devoted worship (“Gather round me, Gourdites!”), political unrest (a lot of satire on the radical left — though I wonder if it isn’t also riffing on the idea of Jesus as a revolutionary against Roman rule) before becoming crucified by error and dying as a neighbor sings “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” (perhaps their most memorable song, even making it into the musical Spamalot). I wouldn’t rank it above Holy Grail but no question it is very good. “It wasn’t meant to be taken literally — obviously it refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.”
LOST HEROES (2014) is a documentary on Canadian superheroes, starting with kids of the late 1930s embracing American comic books and American superheroes as much as children south of the border. When WW II economics forced Canada to stop importing them, enterprising publishers unleashed their own to fill the gap, including Cosmo, Freelance, and the best-remembered, Nelvana of the Northern Lights. While the war ending killed most of them off, there were multiple later attempts such as Captain Canuck, a Silver Age character whose been rebooted multiple times since (I have an issue from the 1980s attempt).
While Canadian publishers have launched other superheroes, none of them have had the success of Marvel’s Wolverine, debuting here on Herb Trimpe’s cover; that Alpha Flight, Marvel’s Canadian super-team, has never been as successful leads to the various talking heads interviewed here to conclude being Canadian is more a hindrance than a help (American superheroes are universal, Canada’s are just … Canadian). Interesting. “The secret of Wolverine’s popularity is that he doesn’t have to put up with you.”
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under Uncategorized
Beware the eyes that paralyze!
No, not these eyes —
Nor this one on the Bob Brown cover —
— but our very own Plush Dudley.
Wednesday night he started squinting in the right eye. Not consistently, but as that’s his bad glaucoma eye, TYG got worried and took him in to the emergency vet while I stayed home with Trixie. TYG will do anything to take care of our dogs, and when she sees a problem, she’s usually right.
The vet found higher than usual pressure, nothing more. This left us both tired Thursday, and I took him in to our regular vet for a second look. By the time that was done, I was off my game and couldn’t accomplish anything beyond research reading the rest of the day. The good news is, his pressure was back to normal (it’s not the first time we’ve gotten a false positive) and he’s not squinting. So perhaps it was some dirt or grit that got into his eye and got washed out at some point.
The rest of the week, though, was productive. Monday I made the edits Stonecoast Literary Review requested on Bleeding Blue, then worked on Savage Adventures.
Tuesday I got a couple of films watched for Jekyll and Hyde, plus I rewrote several pieces and began rethinking the structure. As I learn more about the variety of films, my original chapter breakdown doesn’t look adequate but I’m not sure how to rearrange it yet.
Wednesday was the day for The Local Reporter — a three-hour council meeting to watch, then writing a story on the ever-controversial plans for a paved walkway along Bolin Creek, and one on next year’s budget.
As today is my day for blogging and such, that was it for work. I’d hoped to work on some fiction yesterday but I didn’t have the focus.
I also have two posts up at Atomic Junk Shop, one on comic books slow transition to the Bronze Age, one on a wildly ridiculous Superman story. The Curt Swan cover doesn’t capture how nutty it is.
Overall, a good week of work. And Plushie’s eye meds aren’t failing him yet, which is cool too.
All rights to image remain with current holders.
Filed under Nonfiction, Personal, The Dog Ate My Homework, Time management and goals, Writing
Snowdrop photos
As Snowdrop hides behind the couch, sometimes the easiest way out is under the lamp next to me on the coffee table.
He’s becoming more social, letting us give him belly rubs on occasion. Other times, like this, he’s more standoffish.
Given we yanked him inside just three months ago, we’re getting along remarkably well.
Filed under Personal, The Dog Ate My Homework
Lies, damn lies and shit Republicans say
The classic phrase is “lies, damn lies and statistics” but Republicans make the latter up too. For example, Pam Bondi claiming the Felon has saved 120 million Americans from dying of fentanyl since his election. That’s a third of the population.
Sen. Lindsey Graham thinks it makes perfect sense to nominate the Felon for the next pope. I assume he’s either joking or trying to impress FOTUS with his devotion, but I can’t imagine anyone suggesting Biden — a Catholic — for pope, even as a joke.
Trumper Texas House candidate Valentina Gomez claims Islam is a religion of pedophilia and she’s going to save Texas from falling under sharia law. There’s no risk of the latter happening and conservative Christianity has plenty of pedophiles.
Billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has a simple solution for America’s finances: create a permanent underclass that labors in factories, generation after generation. He assures us the jobs will be easy and allow even high-school graduates with no college to get rich. As discussed at the link, he’s lying.
The Felon’s gone from tariffs putting us all on easy street to saying we should be happy to suffer if it punishes China. He also insisted that the gang identifiers photoshopped onto one prisoner were real.
“Trump isn’t trying to drive tough substantive bargains. Mainly, he seems to want to indulge in narcissism, demanding that other nations humiliate themselves so he can put on a display of dominance. And America doesn’t have remotely enough leverage, even against Canada, to make such demands. You could say that Trump is a reverse Godfather, making offers other countries can’t accept.”
“So, how did Gorsuch so confidently slide from “leather” to “bondage” at oral argument? It sure seems like a good old-fashioned case of lazy, homophobic stereotyping: In his mind, if gay people are around leather, surely it must come in the form of whips, cuffs, and harnesses. Of course, Gorsuch could have easily disabused himself of this notion by spending somewhere between 30 and 45 seconds flipping through the book over breakfast on Tuesday.” — from a look at how right-wingers are caricaturing an innocuous children’s book as a radical sex- ed manual.
RFK Jr.’s latest bullshit: measles vaccines contain bits of aborted babies. Slacktivist points out forms of this lie goes back at least a decade: “Months ago I reported in comments about Pepsi and Nabisco products of which Creamora is one (both these products have been removed from my diet), have been given tissue for the sole purpose of enhancing flavor. I can call this nothing but cannibalism. And that alone is beyond disgust. Remember the movie “Soylent Green’? Charleston Heston. Why in the world has both ‘food and drug’ been combined into one agency? Why?”
Fox News propagandists think respecting people’s rights is “a bad look.” DeSantis wants to get around immigration judges who respect people’s rights by deputizing Florida’s National Guard as immigration judges.
AG Pam Bondi lies that the Felon was elected by an overwhelming majority of Americans. As noted at the link, CNN did not correct her.
A new report from Harvard finds Muslim students the ones most afraid for their safety and about expressing their views. The New York Times’ report on the report focuses on the threat to Jews. Our sniveling president, meanwhile, claims he can arbitrarily revoke Harvard’s non-profit status for not kissing his ass.
They’re still pushing the lies about furries and litterboxes in schools. And Oklahoma schools will now teach the 2020 election was stolen.
I have absolutely no idea why FOTUS is replacing Veterans’ Day with Victory Day for WW I, plus a separate WW II day. Is it because he wants to present himself as a great war president without a war (“That’s because we don’t have leaders anymore, that know how to do so! We are going to start celebrating our victories again!”)? Or just that he’s an idiot and someone suggested it to him as a good idea?
Since allegedly calling a 10 year old kid the n-word, a woman raised more than $300,000 on social media.
