Issue 173

News: Why no 201?
For a few years now, I've been watching South Park and, increasingly so, online. I mention this because when I saw the episode "200," and I noticed all the setups for a lot of subplots to be resolved, just some of which were the true identity of Cartman's father (as it turned out, it was Scott Tenorman's dad, whom Cartman fed to him in Season 5), and the return of Mecha-Streisand and the Super Best Friends, including the unveiling of Muhammad. However, it is the last of these which led to the episode being censored. It has aired exactly once, and it has not been released to the official website, all due to threats from Muslims to Comedy Central and Matt and Trey over Muhammad's appearance in a bear suit (and it wasn't even Muhammad in that case, but Santa Claus). Needless to say, the episode was, in fact, awesome, except for one thing: the censorship. Granted, I should have expected that Muhammad would not be seen, and I admit that I even found it somewhat absurd that every single instance of the utterance of his name was bleeped, but the thing that truly made it frustrating was the fact that the speeches at the end were bleeped all the way through. Honestly! What else is there to say? If religious groups have any say in what should or should not be put in any entertainment that isn't their own, I think it is at that point that religious groups have too much power over the world.

Film Idea of the Day: Several teenagers are locked up in a juvenile hall for minuscule crimes. Think of it as Breakfast Club meets Grand Illusion.

Film Review of the Day: The Ruling Class. In essence, the son of a Lord, who thinks he is Jesus Christ, and has to get a more socially acceptable personality, so he goes to an institution, and eventually begins to think he is Jack the Ripper, which turns out to be the more socially acceptable personality. As odd as the plot seems, it is pretty funny, and one of Peter O'Toole's better films, and quite possibly an interesting homage to Dostoevsky's The Idiot.

Quote of the Day: Custer: "Gentlemen, you are the bravest squadron of men it has ever been this southerner's privilage to serve with. And you will need that bravery today, as your orders are to remove my pants and underpants. I will then attempt to force sex on an Indian girl under heavy enemy fire. Are there any questions?"

Custer's military advisor: "Yes, general. Several."

Link of the Day: Nothing this week.

Issue 172

News: My Five Least Favorite Books.
Here is the impetus for writing this book: recently, my worplace decided to pose us in the position of the Last Supper, and I decided to portray Judas (although it turned out to be more of a combination of Peter's position with Judas' elbow, oddly enough), and it came out that some members of the crew actually believed that the figure to Jesus' immediate right was Mary Magdalene, and I ended up blowing up at the person who talked about it. After that, I was browsing TVTropes and stumbled upon their page for the Turner Diaries. I knew then that the next blog entry I wrote had to be about the worst books of all time. So, here's my top five, and, astonishingly to some, Jane Austen's works are not on this list, because, while I do dislike them with a passion, their major flaw is that they are utterly dull to anybody with a Y chromosome, and not facepalmingly stupid.
5. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
Well, the title bucks art historical convention and calls Leonardo simply "Da Vinci", even though it's not his actual surname. It's all downhill from there, with regards to historical accuracy. Just to take one example: The vessel for holding the wine is actually in the picture, but it's not the gilded and bejewled common cup of legend; they're all individual glasses that could have been used by anybody in that time period. Admittedly you can only see it if you're looking at an ultra-high-quality picture, but once you did, Teabing's claim that the Grail is in the picture in the form of Mary Magdalene (actually John the apostle, incidentally, and has been identified as such for many years before most of the other disciples in the picture). For a book that claims to be 99% accurate, I am not impressed.
4. Twilight by Stephanie Meyers.
I am almost certain that somewhere in the Middle East, there are some people who will use this book as an argument against giving women education. In essence, you have a woman who is driven to stalking the one person who doesn't love bomb her as soon as she moves to her new town. And it turns out that he's a vampire, which to Stephanie Meyer, seems to entail simply drinking goat's blood, being androgynous, and sparkling in the sunlight [Well, I'm okay with toying with the symptoms of vampirism, like with Cassidy in Preacher, but narrowing it down to those three?], and worst of all, the vampire has graduated from High School literally dozens of times. WHY IN PLUPERFECT HELL WOULD HE NOT JUST PASS FOR YOUNG ADULT FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE? HONESTLY!
3. Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.
Well, in either book or movie forms, this has to be one of the worst tales in any medium, and there are enough plot holes in either form to fill the Royal Albert Hall. While general consensus is that the book is much better, I admit that I stray from the consensus here for several reasons.
A) John Travolta's Terl is way too entertaining.
B) In the books, the climax is literally 1/3 of the way through. The film's climax, as muddled as it is, is at least in its proper place near the end, probaBLY because it was supposed to be the first half of one long movie.
C) Blatant Ethnic Stereotyping. That is all.
D) Johnny is even more questionable. Johnny is considered a hero after vanquishing the evil Psychlos by destroying their planet, except that, in the book, they're only evil due to another race's mind control. Nobody rethinks Johnny's motives.
TIE:
1A) Left Behind. I've done enough on this subject. I don't need to run over why this is on my list.
1B) The Turner Diaries by William Luther Pierce.
Surprisingly, Pierce is probably the most competent writer on the list. However, what he does to merit the lowest position is to write what is probably the most evil novel I've ever read, especially since it's apparently supposed to double as a how-to guide for a White revolution. What truly astonishes me is that Pierce goes into how crime and punishment under the Order would work after they take Southern California, and it's astonishingly brutal: apparently the only punishment for any crime, whether commited by or against whites (for instance, owning a restaurant that serves all races) is summary execution. This is presented as unambiguously good, even though it's clear that they're clearly worse than The System could ever be. Somebody should probably write a book about how a real-world government would face such an insurrection.

Review of the Day: Since I recently finished reading the first four books of Hubert Selby Jr, one of my favorite writers, I decided to review his books.
Last Exit to Brooklyn. I read about the book in Junior year of high school, but couldn't make it past Tralala, but eventually I made it to the end last summer. It was actually pretty good. Admittedly, I'm not sure whether it should count as a novel or a collection of short stories, but, either way, it's one of Selby's best.
The Room. This is the book I finished reading recently. In fact, it is even more brutal than Last Exit was. In fact, Selby himself couldn't read it after writing it. If you thought a teenaged prostitute getting gang-raped by a dozen drunken sailors was brutal, you haven't seen anything yet.
The Demon. Well, this is his most subtle work of the four I read, less overtly terrifying and more subtle, explaining the motives behind Harry White's increasing evil in scenes less overt than his previous terms.
Requiem for a Dream. Well, Darren Aronofsky got the essence of the story, and a lot of the little things in the novel down to their essence in 100 minutes, but the novel is much less emotionally satisfying, and I think that, in this case, not giving the audience much closure is best, since it's probably best for the reader to imagine what is happening in the end.

Issue 171

News: Why no Update?
Well, I haven't told anybody about this, but I resolved last New Year's to update the blog at least three times a month. However, I haven't been living up to this resolution, and I think it's necessary to tell you why: Two weeks ago, I broke my tooth on, of all things, a chicken nugget. Of course, it wasn't an actual tooth; more of a reconstruction of a tooth that I broke eight years ago. However, before I could get that replaced, I had to have a root canal a week and a half later. Of course, between the nitrous, my listening to Love's Forever Changes [notice to anybody who doesn't want to talk about it: every song on the album is on YouTube, currently playlisted by somebody named sixties4ever13], and the fact that the tooth's pulp was dead, it was actually somewhat pleasant. On Tuesday, I'll be getting a temporary cap, and a permanent cap will soon follow. However, there's also another thing complicating matters considerably: For speech class, I have been working on a group project, and getting everybody together to film it has been a logistical nightmare. Fortunately, there should be enough material to mine several ideas for future issues to come.

Film Idea of the Day: "God Hardened Pharoah's Heart" I'm thinking about an alternative History about what could have happened after Hiroshima. It begins with a plot to assassinate Hirohito to stop him from surrendering. This leads to operation Downfall coming into play. From what I'd heard, the plan was, in essence, to drop seven A-Bombs simultaneously, and then, a few days later (possibly as early as 48 hours after), to have Allied infantry invade Japan without any protection from radiation to kill as many survivors as possible until surrender. The movie itself involves several soldiers trying to survive in the radioactive wasteland that was formerly Japan, trying to kill Japanese combatants, only to die themselves of radiation sickness.

Film Review of the Day: African Queen. As a longtime fan of Humphrey Bogart, and DVD collector, I was surprised that only now was this movie, the only movie for which Bogie won an Oscar, getting a DVD release. I admit that it may not be on par with a lot of his movies, like Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or Casablanca, but it's still a good movie, even if, after the restoration, the cinematography was really not as good as an Oscar-winning Golden Age Hollywood Technicolor movie deserves to be.

Quote of the Day: "Let all the world witness how many different means Fortune employs when she wishes to destroy a man."
__________Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor, memoirist, and first recorded serial killer.

Link of the Day: Nothing this week.

April Fools' Day Message.

For the past century and a quarter, since H.G. Welles wrote his opus "The Time Machine," people have wondered whether time travel is actually possible, and if so, whether traveling to the past is possible or just the future. And after Christine Jorgenson had her sex change and the public was informed of how sex change operations really work, there has been the question of whether it is possible for sex change operations to be totally effective (i.e. whether it was possible to make a male into a genotypic female). Well, in my spare time I have been working on both problems for my master plan, and in the past week, I think I figured out the problems that would make both time travel and fully-functional sex change operations possible. How will they work, you ask? Well, I'm not telling you, but I have decided to explain why I was working on the two problems: I would have my sex changed, and then, I would use the time machine to go back into time to the 1980s, and I would create a time paradox by becoming MY OWN MOTHER! Why? Dammit, if people can accept that Russia would start a nuclear war with Israel without provocation, only for God to render their entire nuclear arsenal useless, all without sparking any debate about miracles, do I really have to explain why I would want to carry out so insane a plan? And I suppose you have to ask, did you really expect to succeed in this plan? And I say unto ye, I did it 35 minutes ago.