#me in my weird brit tv show era

[prephesteryearcelestedeschance]

So weirds goggles just a tiger playajng alarm click with a wriste watch in let's co lage ma bell

鉛筆削り ash trades butterflies on ssAnne before recalling the trade as the capsized ship strikes a path to giant machine island and the release of BUTTERFREEまめ I C iluvjGong 2gumption is it really fair to assume business as usual considering its colisted@Calgary 4themAcreast Global Tetrahedron. Coqpuncher. Molly's sniffing her first gerbils gave her so much then pills this

Somebody's accident promotes megalodon. Vehemently await the golden penis digital

4:1the fortyfifth ratio

Priceless birdgesture it needs time to heal. Grow back anteni

I've never seen her stand up, but I guess she was more, dragging the priest, drunk russian grandmotherTTTripleLamb chop Chop it's that sung, again robe rebellSquad.try run, too wet

I hear they have another bacon up in CanadaDont hate the playroad hate the Gameboy lassquery

Well I am just ignorant.

Cholesterol testing. Too many eggs try bread and grapefruit.

IS is also awaits!For curtain rush

That which releases the highest point of which being that of course Luke Skywalker

If there is a power outage we could feed the straightaway for a month fucking brits

Yes fuck britain

Goosatin1 elfTwo

Then they say hundred where there's visitors to recourse. It's fine its one more mouth to feed.

Whose Carla going to care fore will you come

Farm animals down to dinner

Oo lady cheers Switches

Obviously drunk uncle, but which side?

then some form of emotional dramatization much d'ream out loud am I right.

I was only pretending that I was single he's on that 80s show

Sometimes we deal with pretend minors

Actually Marty, those are dwarves

*Too much monster*by law

Sara Lee pound cake frozen degravitized, yeouch who was running with these

SAMWENsam hill are you

Also ha-lovin it all saints death take your pick, wanna do it on a weekday or do you Care for your offSpring grading well during ruling eras

Ethan fundip ancient book or whatever the quak!

Betty?

Well, Mr. Draper was never one to wake me or Carla from my business, but tonight's an occasion

Best Quality!

The bitch who was Nuerte rook um pedin

Guess so

GARUDAMON: WINGBLADE

MYOTISMON:Next time you won't escape

Not as effective as crimson thunder but we SPQR

Greeit ah

Rat*swipes left*

Joe Swanson: bring it on!

Cornocopiatic resonant chamber

Joey Smeagol Pritchet

Gabrieljackalantern

A composite bow

Get it? GOOGLE™ only has it in unframed broom my man

From ofmice andmen a retarded very strong farmhand breaks a rabbits neck which he loved. Proceed to pardon yourself from curse omajGary Sinese gets his legs walkin... The Gazzette

Lot. Play'n'Skillz

Big question! Listed running time.

How about this titanic if not endurance INTERCE 3rdSr7ptembehr.uno du tried cink hole sickle chefBTo Joy Behar:oyr.d.yak that dude looks like elainedid

Unhappy Maiden

All players just give up a turn.nu5ts some snow dots I win.TinaT:yetttttttiu

PS:on the ground so had plenty money nightlyEz this lil pinky went between fence6Scalar flower pot

I may have ruccesed myself on another platform or roger rabit NES 'and' anvils are two blame, that many upon bars to merge magically enhanced pickaxes where is this Dorn? Not westeros

...gasoline or charcoal

Whose up for construction paper turkeys cut from our hands stenciled to the paper HB.#02

Natasha!h!

Black people take out the Walmart vestibule then leave with the electronics section and sweats

Syked! You got joyBuztYakbahk

Oo a lotion of diamonds

No, it's stew that culls craytored masses how drunk are you!

Pardon your bosomness

Then where do I smudginGold hezakia

Yes way see the blonds doing it with his gloves too three and he putsim on after touching the things or whatever workout in the hell that was staylean skip breakfast book an appointment with Dr.Berenstein for vitamin shots because pills make tv show characters nausea

Beer water,

What time will it give you diareah honey?

Some acronym ain't stopping me happy birthday to you

She thought it's rum but it's wine so money wasted dollars

I clearly recall blueberry wine cell call by fencepost or is that Stephan Shawshank

It was staged crying so it can be fake too, does anyone understand which is the cable box.

Beneficial concert

That's goid

Jan56ePiphanue

Why blink that's tim walz.

I knew him

[6ebe]

Why is the line of duty theme song so good 😐

[2manyfandoms2count]

weird asks that say a lot: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 52, 55, 60, 62, 66, 76, 78, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98.

Thanks for the ask @sakura-soldier! I wonder what all of this says about me haha

1. coffee mugs, teacups, wine glasses, water bottles, or soda cans?

Coffee mugs (to use as teacups though :3)

2. chocolate bars or lollipops?

3. bubblegum or cotton candy?

Cotton Candy! I haven't had any in soooo long but I love it

5. do you prefer to drink soda from soda cans, soda bottles, plastic cups or glass cups?

Hmmm glass cups, because I'm almost incapable of finishing a soda in one sitting so that way I can share

6. pastel, boho, tomboy, preppy, goth, grunge, formal or sportswear?

Preppy!

7. earbuds or headphones?

Headphones

8. movies or tv shows?

Oooh that really depends... I think I'd have to go for TV shows, because I like being able to immerse myself in a story and watch the characters grow (which can be done with movies too, but they're over so quickly :'))

9. favorite smell in the summer?

Freshly cut grass with a slight breeze picking up the flower smells

10. game you were best at in p.e.?

I like to believe it was rugby because I played outside of school, but it probably was something like badminton or sprint

11. what you have for breakfast on an average day?

A mug of tea with two slices of toasted bread with butter and honey (I'm not picky on the type of bread but baguette>>>)

13. lanyard or key ring?

Key rings ftw (I have so many of them)

14. favorite non-chocolate candy?

Haribo's Tagada Strawberries (don't know if they're called that in English but they're great)

17. most frequently worn pair of shoes?

A pair of white converse (which really shouldn't be called "white" anymore...)

24. favorite crystal?

Malachite

26. favorite activity to do in warm weather?

Doing something outdoors but in the shade (either taking a stroll or just chilling/Reading/writing)

27. favorite activity to do in cold weather?

Sitting inside with a warm cup of tea, wrapped in a blanket, watching a movie

30. places that you find sacred?

The countryside at sunset; streets at dawn; Home; old libraries (architecturally speaking)

31. what outfit do you wear to kick ass and take names?

It actually doesn't matter much as long as I'm wearing shoes that click when I walk, because they make me feel powerful (especially a pair of high-heeled, knee-high blue boots with sparkles that are technically my Mum's but which I've worn more than she has haha)

37. suitcase or duffel bag?

Suitcase

38. lemonade or tea?

Tea (it's the Brit in me)

39. lemon cake or lemon meringue pie?

Lemon meringue pie (soooo good, perfect balance of tangy and sweet when done right)

42. jacket pockets or pants pockets?

Pants pockets (but why are they so small for women :') )

43. hoodie, leather jacket, cardigan, jean jacket or bomber jacket?

Cardigan in Summer, jean jacket in Spring, bomber jacket in Autumn (I'd say leather jacket in winter but I don't own one... yet)

44. favorite scent for soap?

Almond

45. which genre: sci-fi, fantasy or superhero?

Definitely fantasy

46. most comfortable outfit to sleep in?

Pyjamas; long in winter and short in summer!

47. favorite type of cheese?

Right now, Flower cheese (hard cheese with dried flowers on the rind), although I also really enjoy a good Comté or fresh goat's cheese (delicious especially with fig jam)

52. favorite font?

I've never really thought about it, but Times New Roman to read, and Arial to write?

55. favorite fairy tale?

Thumbelina

60. if you were a character in an anime, what kind of anime would you want it to be?

I don't watch enough anime to answer this properly XD

62. seven characters you relate to?

Marinette Dupain-Cheng (Miraculous Ladybug), Annabeth Chase (PJO), Hermione Granger (HP), Ginny Weasley (HP), Monica Geller (Friends), Jess Day (New Girl), Anne Shirley-Cuthbert (Anne with an E)

66. favorite flower(s)?

Lilies of the valley, poppies, peonies

76. what’s your favorite potato food (i.e. tater tots, baked potatoes, fries, chips, etc.)?

Curly fries

78. coffee from a gas station or sushi from a grocery store?

Sushi from a grocery store (I don't drink coffee haha)

80. earth tones or jewel tones?

jewel tones

83. writing or drawing?

Writing (although I do love to draw even if I'm not very good at it)

84. barbie or polly pocket?

I can't choose, I really loved both 😭

85. fairy tales or mythology?

Mythology

86. cookies or cupcakes?

Cookies (especially chocolate chip)

91. boxes or bags?

Bags

92. lamps, overhead lights, sunlight or fairy lights?

Sunlight, ideally

94. favorite season?

Ugh tough choice, I can't decide between Spring and Autumn

95. favorite app on your phone?

Tumblr or Discord (aka my time vortexes)

96. desktop background?

It's a picture of the Etretat beach in Normandy

98. favorite historical era?

1900s for the aesthetics

Weird asks that say a lot

[hlupdate]

Here he comes, one of the planet’s most conspicuous young men, stepping out of the London drizzle and into a dusty suburban pub. If there was an old vinyl record player in the place it would scratch quiet. Instead, the two-dozen punters turn hushed and intent, as if a unicorn has just trotted in off the street, and nobody wants to scare it off. “That’s frickin’ Harry frickin’ Styles,” whispers a young man at the bar, “in this pub.” The pop star is asked what he wants to drink and in a voice already inclined to undertones, quietly orders a cup of tea.

A former teen star who is now 25, a happier and rockier solo artist since his boyband One Direction split a few years ago, Styles has hidden himself inside a large, swamp-green parka. He’s tall, around the 6ft mark, and carries himself with a slight stoop. If Styles could only do something about his appearance from the neck up (elfin brow, wide Joker smile, a face that’s recognisable across multiple continents) you sense he could drink in pubs like this anonymously enough. As it is, cover blown, he removes the parka. A woolly jumper beneath has a picture of the planet Saturn on it. Maybe they’ve heard of Styles there, too.

We take a seat in the corner. On nearby tables, conversations start to sputter as people try to keep their own talk ticking along on autopilot while straining to hear what Styles says. I ask him about the sheer strangeness of this and other aspects of fame. Full stadiums, swooning admirers, an excess of opportunity and cash. Why isn’t Styles an absolute ordeal of a human being by now? Keith Richards, at a comparable stage, imagined himself the pirate leader of a travelling nation-state, unbound by international law. Elton John was on vast amounts of cocaine. Meanwhile, here’s Harry, known in the music industry as a bit of a freak, medically, having maintained abnormally high levels of civility in his system. 

Styles tilts his head, flattered. There are others, he promises. “People who are successful, and still nice. It’s when you meet the people who are successful and aren’t nice, you think: What’s yer excuse? Cos I’ve met the other sort.”

Styles read Keith Richards’ autobiography a while back, and he recently finished Elton’s, too. (“Soooo much cocaine,” he marvels.) We talk for a bit about whether extreme dissolute behaviour and artistic greatness go hand in hand. Styles, who has just released his second solo album, Fine Line, the penultimate track of which is called Treat People With Kindness, has to hope not. “I just don’t think you need to be a dick to be a good artist. But, then, there are also a lot of good artists who are dicks. So. Hmm. Maybe I need to start scaring babies in supermarkets?” 

A couple of lads hustle over to offer drinks. A photo is requested; they say they’ll wait. I’m weirdly anxious about Styles’s phone, which is slung on the table in front of him. What must be the black-market value of that thing? If fans were to get hold of it, would they want to open Styles’s music app first, to listen to tracks from the new album, or rush to see his messages and calls, to find out who Styles has been flirting with late at night? The interest in his music has always run at a ratio of about 50/50 with the interest in who he is dating.

It’s a ratio Styles tries to adjust in favour of the music by being vague about his ex-partners, real and rumoured (Taylor Swift, Kendall Jenner, Parisian model Camille Rowe), diverting to discuss his songs about failed relationships. A year ago, when Styles was floating around near this pub in north London, where he lives, and California, where he tends to record, looking for inspiration for the new album, his close friend Tom Hull told him: “Just date amazing women, or men, or whatever, who are going to fuck you up… Let it affect you and write songs about it.” 

Styles, who writes in collaboration with Hull and producer Tyler Johnson, sounds as if he took the advice. The new album, Fine Line, is at its best when capturing late-hours moments, drunk calls, “wandering hands”, kitchen snogs. A golden-haired lover recurs. There are up tracks, down tracks, some with the trippy delirium of harpsichord-era Stones, others with the angsty Britpop swell of strings. While I listened, I couldn’t help scribbling down names, possible subjects. On the lyric “There’s a piece of you in how I dress” I wrote: maybe Kendall? In a song about a lover “way too bright for me”: surely Taylor.

Styles says he keeps to a general rule: write what comes and don’t think about it too much afterwards. The only time he worries about an individual lyric is if it risks putting an ex in a difficult position. “If a song’s about someone, is that fine? Or is that gonna get annoying for them, if people try to decipher it?” Has he ever got that judgment call wrong and taken a bollocking from an angry ex? Styles raises an eyebrow. “Maybe ask me in a month.” 

I quiz him on something I’ve often wondered about. Why are the very famous so inclined to hook up with the very famous? From the outside it looks twice the hassle, with twice the odds of ending badly. “Don’t we all do that, though?” Styles asks. “Go into things that feel relatively doomed from the start?” I ask him why he doesn’t date normals. He seems tickled: “Um. I mean, I do. I have a private life. You just don’t know about it.” 

Styles doesn’t particularly like being asked about his love life, but is amused all the same, as he is about most things. When I ask about the logistics of someone as well known as him dating someone anonymous (“Do you need to give them, like, some sort of primer?”), Styles snorts with laughter. 

“Uh-h-h. Like any conversation, I guess, it’s easier if you’re honest. But I try to let it come up when it comes up. Cos that’s a weird thing to talk about, y’know? If you’ve just started seeing someone, and you’re, like: [he adopts a throaty, mission-briefing voice] So! This is what’s gonna happen!” Styles holds out his hands: no, ta. “I don’t wanna have that conversation, man. It would be fucking weird.” 

And not very sexy, I say.

“Not sexy,” Styles says, “no.”

A quick aside about his accent, which is hard to capture in print. (“Nat sexy, no.”) After a workout in a hotel gym recently, Styles says he was taken aback (“taken abeck”) to be asked by a stranger whether he was speaking in a fake voice. He was appalled. But after so long crossing borders and time zones, living and working between England and the US, the accent has undergone a jazzy remix, and tends to get farthest from its Cheshire roots when he’s around strangers. Once Styles begins to get comfortable in the pub, the flatter, no-nonsense sounds of his youth return. Nowpe he says, for nope. Fook, for fuck.

“What the fook are they?” This was the response of his childhood pals, he remembers, back in the village of Holmes Chapel, when little Harry had the gumption to show up in the playground wearing Chelsea boots instead of the approved chunky trainers. Styles’s parents had separated when he was very young, but there is no origin-story trauma: he has always stayed close to both. His mother, Anne, would praise his singing voice in the car, and when Styles was 16 it was agreed he could audition for a singing contest on TV.

“The craziest part about the whole X Factor thing,” says Styles, who auditioned for the ITV reality show in 2010, “is that it’s so instant. The day before, you’ve never been on telly. Then suddenly…” Suddenly you’re a piece of national property. “You don’t think at the time, ‘Oh, maybe I should keep some of my personal stuff back for myself.’ Partly because, if you’re a 16-year-old who does that, you look like a jumped-up little shit. Can you imagine? ‘Sorry, actually, I’d rather not comment…’ You don’t know what to be protective of.”

By the winter of 2010, Styles was a fan favourite, a key member of One Direction, a five-piece that enjoyed enormous national exposure and gathered millions of fans before any music had been released. Cameras filmed every part of their rise. There wasn’t any time in the dark to practise, test things out, mentally brace. “We didn’t get to dip in a toe,” Styles says. “But, listen, I was a kid, all I knew was: I didn’t have to go to school any more. I thought it was fucking great.” He remembers having a lot of fun, and being well taken care of. He jokes: “Maybe it’s something I’ll have to deal with a bit later. When I wake up in my 40s and think: Arrrggh.”

In February 2012, One Direction were feted at the Brit Awards, hours before they were due to fly to the US for the first time. On TV that night they looked young, silly, chuffed – on the precipice of something huge, and with no clue at all. Their subsequent wonder-run (five platinum albums, four world tours) had its foundations in their ridiculous popularity in the States. Right away, Styles remembers, “We were fuelling a machine. Keeping the fire going.” He remembers it as a stimulating time; maybe overstimulating. “Coming out of it, when the band stopped, I realised that the thing I’d been missing, because it was all so fast paced, was human connection.”

I first met Styles in 2014, around the time the lack of human connection was starting to bite. One Direction were promoting their penultimate album and I’d been commissioned to write about themthe Guardian. Management felt the boys were so exhausted that my minutes in their presence had to be strictly counted. Inside a circle of cripplingly hot lights, while someone ran the stopwatch, we interacted as humanly as we could.

I remember how jaded the best singer in the group, Zayn Malik, seemed. (Malik was weeks away from quitting.) I also remember how flattered and bewildered the others were to be asked a few grownup questions – and not what Louis Tomlinson would later describe to me as “who’s-your-favourite-superhero… all that shit”. Styles was watchful and quiet that day. By total chance, a week later, we were in the same London cafe and he tapped my shoulder. He was having lunch with friends. “Will ya join us?” 

t struck me as a quietly classy move. I was fascinated to see him interact with mates he’d chosen for himself. Styles was dry and funny, older than his years. After lunch we said the usual things about keeping in touch, and followed each other on Twitter. I kept an eye on his updates, about leaving One Direction, releasing an impressive, self-titled debut album in 2017, playing for 36,000 people in Madison Square Garden in New York, acting in Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-nominated war movie Dunkirk. Meanwhile, I did my best to manage the mess that had been made of my own account after Styles’s Twitter follow ignited a small explosion of teenage longing in my mentions. For at least a year I received weekly, sometimes daily, pleas from people who wanted messages conveyed to “H”. Still now, every few days, fans in America, Asia and Europe follow me to “see what H sees” in their timeline. 

He has around 50 million social media followers, and with that comes the ability to ripple the internet like somebody airing a bedsheet. I’ve noticed, though, how rarely Styles directs people to support specific causes, last doing so in 2018, when he encouraged people to join a march against gun violence. Why don’t you use your influence more, I ask? “Because of dilution. Because I’d prefer, when I say something, for people to think I mean it.” He runs his fingertips across the table. “To be honest, I’m still searching for that one thing, y’know. Something I can really stand up for, and get behind, and be like: This Is My Life Fight. There’s a power to doing the one thing. You want your whole weight behind it.”

It’s one of the things that sets Styles apart, the way he puts his whole weight behind the different aspects of this strange job. If you watch footage of him as a guest host on Saturday Night Live last month, Styles plunges in, fully inhabiting the silliness of every sketch. He has good songs in his repertoire (2017’s ballad Sign Of The Times stands out), and would probably admit to some middling songs that attest to his relative inexperience as a writer. But whichever of his songs Styles performs, he goes all-in, trusting that his zest and energy will hold an audience’s attention. He approaches this interview in roughly the same spirit, not enjoying every question, fidgeting, pleading for clemency once or twice, but giving everything due consideration.

I bring up something Styles joked about earlier: the possibility of waking up in his 40s with deferred mental health problems.

“Mm,” he says

Have you thought about therapy, I ask, to get ahead of that?

“I go,” he says. “Not every week. But whenever I feel I need it. For a really long time I didn’t try therapy, because I wanted to be the guy who could say: ‘I don’t need it.’ Now I realise I was only getting in my own way.” He shrugs. “It helps.”

Lately he’s been reading a lot (Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women stood out). He’s watched a lot of Netflix (crime thrillers and music docs). He recently cried through Slave Play on Broadway. I sense in Styles, at 25, a pent-up undergraduate hunger, maybe a desire to make up for lost time. “I’ve definitely been wanting to learn stuff, try stuff,” he says. “Things I didn’t grow up around. Things I’d always been a little bit sceptical about. Like therapy, like meditation. All I need to hear is someone saying, ‘Apparently, it’s amazing’, and I’ll try it. When I was in Los Angeles once, I heard about juice cleanses. I thought, yeah, I’ll do a juice cleanse.”

How messy were the results?

“You mean…?” Styles raises an eyebrow, recalling the poos. “They were all right. I was just hungry. And bored.”

One notable feature of Styles’s solo career has been his headlong embrace of unconventional clothing. A 2017-18 tour could have been sponsored by the Dulux colour wheel: mustard tones in Sydney, shocking pink in Dallas. In a more serious sense, some of Styles’s choices have fed into an important political discussion about gendered fashion. In May, as a co-host at the Met Gala in New York, he stepped out in a sheer blouse and a pearl earring. One evening’s work challenged a lot of stubborn preconceptions about who gets to wear what.

He says: “What women wear. What men wear. For me it’s not a question of that. If I see a nice shirt and get told, ‘But it’s for ladies.’ I think: ‘Okaaaay? Doesn’t make me want to wear it less though.’ I think the moment you feel more comfortable with yourself, it all becomes a lot easier.”

What do you mean, I ask?

Styles is leaning forward, hands folded around his cup of tea. “A part of it was having, like, a big moment of self-reflection. And self-acceptance.” He has a habit, when he’s made a definitive statement, of raising his chin and nodding a little, as if to decide whether he still agrees with himself. “I think it’s a very free, and freeing, time. I think people are asking, ‘Why not?’ a lot more. Which excites me. It’s not just clothes where lines have been blurred, it’s going across so many things. I think you can relate it to music, and how genres are blurring…”

Sexuality, too, I say.

“Yep,” says Styles. “Yep.”

There’s a popular perception, I say, that you don’t define as straight. The lyrics to your songs, the clothes you choose to wear, even the sleeve of your new record – all of these things get picked apart for clues that you’re bisexual. Has anyone ever asked you though?

“Um. I guess I haaaaave been asked? But, I dunno. Why?”

You mean, why ask the question?

“Yeah, I think I do mean that. It’s not like I’m sitting on an answer, and protecting it, and holding it back. It’s not a case of: I’m not telling you cos I don’t want to tell you. It’s not: ooh this is mine and it’s not yours.”

What is it then?

“It’s: who cares? Does that make sense? It’s just: who cares?”

I suppose my only question, then, is about the stuff that looks like clue dropping. Because if you don’t want people to care, why hint? Take the album sleeve for Fine Line. With its horizontal pink and blue stripes, a splash of magenta, the design seems to gesture at the trans and bisexual pride flags. Which is great – unless the person behind it happens to be a straight dude, sprinkling LGBTQ crumbs that lead nowhere. Does that make sense?

Styles nods. “Am I sprinkling in nuggets of sexual ambiguity to try and be more interesting? No.” As for the rest, he says, “in terms of how I wanna dress, and what the album sleeve’s gonna be, I tend to make decisions in terms of collaborators I want to work with. I want things to look a certain way. Not because it makes me look gay, or it makes me look straight, or it makes me look bisexual, but because I think it looks cool. And more than that, I dunno, I just think sexuality’s something that’s fun. Honestly? I can’t say I’ve given it any more thought than that.”

In our musty corner of the pub we’ve somehow passed a couple of hours in intense discussion. We’ll lighten up, before Styles heads home, with some chat about clever films (Marriage Story), stupider viral videos (the little boy who’s just learned the word “apparently”), that favourite-superhero stuff that, after all, has its place. He talks about the curious double time scheme of a pop star’s life – those crammed 18-hour days and then the sudden empty off-time when Styles might find himself walking miles across London to buy a book, afterwards congratulating himself: “Well, that’s an hour filled.”

Before we stand up I ask if he’s minded any of my questions.

He pushes out his lips, possibly recalling them one by one, then shakes his head. “What I would say, about the whole being-asked-about-my-sexuality thing – this is a job where you might get asked. And to complain about it, to say you hate it, and still do the job, that’s just silly. You respect that someone’s gonna ask. And you hope that they respect they might not get an answer.”

I tell him I do.

“Cool.”

Styles has to find those lads who wanted a photo. He scoops his phone off the table and flicks his thumb around the screen. Lately, he says, when he messes around on his phone in an idle moment, it’s mostly to look at videos – clips that his friends have sent him, in which their kids sing along to music he’s made. “Never gets old,” Styles says, beaming.

A few years ago, when he emerged from the boyband, blinking, shattered, he set himself three tasks: prioritise friends, learn how to be an adult, achieve a proper balance between the big and the small. Full stadiums, provocative outfits – Styles genuinely loves these things. “But I guess I’ve realised, as well,” he says, “that the coolest things are not always the cool things. Do you know what I mean?” He grabs his parka and his phone and, a little stooped, heads for home.

[butyouvealwaysbeenthecaretaker]

Pennyworth's depiction of British fascism is so weird. Pennyworth is the DC universe TV show about the youth of Batman's butler; it's set in an alt universe 60s Britain and the menswear is to die for. Anyway, I feel like the writing team are maybe Americans (the Queen would never wear a dress like that, or such ostentatious jewels and tiara, while addressing the nation), but its weird in other ways too. The plot is about an internal faction of Brit fascists trying to take over the country, and their aesthetics are on point. But...They do things like kidnap the Queen and that doesn't read true to me: those morons love the damn Queen. You can't make throwaway comments about "my husband goes to one of these meetings, but all they do is go to the pub and come back singing Jerusalem", where you recognise the kind of nationalistic fervour Jerusalem has, and yet not get that these people wouldn't dream of hurting the Queen. They're also doing race blind casting (in 60s London!), including for the fascist troops and local chapters, and it's bizzare to me that you'd try and do a story about fascism which is divorced from racism. Can you even have one without the other? Well, certainly not in the eras of historic British fascism this story is pulling from in every other way. It feels like maybe they looked at some of the controversy about Hydra and Man in the High Castle, and decided not to bother. Fascism isn't just armbands with birds and nice suits and dodgy moustaches, you know, and it's kinda intellectually/creatively vapid to try and tell a story which evokes this movement without actually depicting anything meaningful about it.

[dulwichdiverter]

An East Dulwich side story

1970s East Dulwich will come to life in a major new Broadway production next year. Local resident Terry Ronald tells us more

Words Seamus Hasson; Photo Alexander McBride Wilson

During a recent excursion to Lordship Lane, the legendary Broadway director Jerry Mitchell remarked with slight bewilderment “it’s really posh around here.” If he was surprised to find a choice of gastro pubs and an organic butchers it may be because the East Dulwich he had envisaged was circa 1970s as depicted in Terry Ronald’s novel Becoming Nancy.

Set in 1979 and based on Terry’s life the novel tells the story of David Starr, a pop obsessed teenager and his quest to play Nancy in the school production of Oliver. So impressed was Jerry when he read the book that he immediately got in touch with his lawyer to buy the rights and next year he is set to bring it to life as a Broadway musical.

Ahead of its debut in New York however Jerry decided to make a visit to the backdrop of the whole play. “Jerry and the writers all came to East Dulwich to spend a day here and to get a vibe for it which was really good fun,” Terry explains sipping on a glass of red wine. He’s having a relaxing evening at the East Dulwich home he shares with his partner Mark.

The following day he’s off to New York, where he will see a complete run through of the show for the first time. “It was really funny to hear this big Broadway director say ‘I want to see the minimart,’ (now A J Farmers) I want to see where the bus stop was, Terry laughs, ‘I want to see Brockwell Park’ so it was great having him here.

“I mean he’s been to London a million times but he probably hadn’t been to the suburbs a lot. I showed him around my old street and the other surrounding streets. Lordship Lane is featured a lot in the book so I talked to him about that.”

So is East Dulwich really so different today to the one Terry writes about in Finding Nancy? “You know, it’s funny because the first song in the show is called East Dulwich and it’s all about how boring it is and how if you’re passing you should just pass on through.

“I suppose for a kid who grew up dreaming about pop stars and Hollywood movies it was a bit drab. It was just an ordinary suburb, that’s what it was for me but knowing what East Dulwich is now and how magical it is, it’s hilarious really.”

Terry is born and bred East Dulwich and after a number of years living in various other parts of South London he returned in 2005 when he and Mark set-up a home together. He says that Jerry and the writing team really enjoyed their visit and that a lot of the East Dulwich he captured in Becoming Nancy can still be found today.

“I think it’s still got that quaintness which Jerry really liked,” he tells me. “The weird thing that I always say about East Dulwich is that’s its maintained its character. When I was a kid I used to go shopping with my grandad on a Saturday morning and we used to go to the butchers, the fishmongers, the little grocers and all the different little shops.

“The supermarkets were quite small, like the Co-op that has always been a supermarket, Wallaces’ it was called at one time, and there was always a market down North Cross Road so in that way none of it’s changed.

“That scene is gentrification now but when I was a kid that’s just what it was like. I think that’s why people like East Dulwich, it hasn’t really changed.”

The book is in many ways a classic coming of age tale, set against a backdrop of 1970’s prejudices at a time when the National Front were making their presence felt. “It’s basically about a boy that gets to play Nancy in the school production of Oliver,” Terry says.

“He falls in love with the boy whose playing Bill Sykes so there’s a whole coming out story and it’s about how his family react to that in that era. When I was a kid I used to go to Rock against Racism gigs in Brockwell Park.

“So there’s also that aspect to it because his best friend in school is a young black girl; it’s about the journey both of them go through and how they confront that 70s sort of prejudice that was around both their stories. I’m not saying it’s easy now (coming out) but back then there were no (gay) role models, there was no one in TV in soap operas.”

The book, published in 2012 was a success critically and received a Polari first book prize nomination. By Terry’s own admission it “wasn’t exactly 50 Shades of Grey sales wise” so it was a pleasant surprise when he got a phone call from his agent to say that Jerry Mitchell had expressed an interest.

“I was working on a one woman show with Denise Van Outen in the West End the day I found out and when I told her she got so hysterical and completely excited,” Terry tells me. Van Outen has previous with Jerry having worked with him on the West End show Kinky Boots.

To say he’s musical royalty is a massive understatement. A Tony Award winning director and producer Jerry has enjoyed success in Broadway and the West End with other hits such as Legally Blonde and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

The music and lyrics for the production have been written by acclaimed writers Stiles and Drew whose past work includes Half A Sixpence and Betty Blue Eyes.

“They were going to do it here first in the West End because obviously it’s very London centric,” Terry says, “but when they did the workshops in America they decided to do it first in Broadway. There’s a feeling that new musicals are working better there than they are here at the minute.

“Also they thought that American audiences would like it because it’s very British.” The cast boasts a number of Brits including Sally Ann Triplett and legendary West End star Jenna Russell who plays Aunt Val. The actor playing David who Terry describes as having the “most flawless British accent I have ever heard” is from Alabama.

One of the themes that runs through both the novel and the play is David’s dreams of pop stardom. For Terry growing up in the 1970s it was an important means of escapism. “I was obsessed with pop music as a kid, I was mad about Debbie Harry and Kate Bush and ABBA.

“I was a real pop person and in fact all those characters feature in the show. The posters in his bedroom come to life and it’s like a funny Debbie Harry who is his kind of spiritual guide in the book.” As our conversation has moved onto music I take the opportunity to ask him about his own pop career which I discovered while doing a Google search. Did he have any chart hits I might recognise?

“Not in this country,” he tells me with a rueful laugh. “My ‘big in Japan kind of thing’ was Spain and Italy and Sweden, I had hits there. I was sort of culty here but never had chart hits.” Naturally self- deprecating he’s being slightly disingenuous when he says he didn’t have chart success here. He has in fact written several chart hits for other artists and even toured with Robert Palmer in the early 90s.

I press him a bit further about his work with other artists. “My biggest hit I wrote was so uncool, “he laughs. “S Club Juniors, Automatic High.” Embarrassing hits aside Terry’s contribution to pop music history is considerable. He has also worked as a voice coach on xfactor and The Voice and since moving from pop to literature he hasn’t stopped writing.

He has collaborated on five bestselling celebrity autobiographies with the likes Pauline Quirke, Tulisa, Michelle Collins and his friend Dannii Minogue. He was also behind YouTube sensation Oli White's bestselling novel, Generation Next, and the #1 bestselling follow up, Generation Next: The Takeover.

A self-confessed musical fanatic has Terry been impressed by the team behind the production of Becoming Nancy. “I think I’ve been lucky because I got on well with the guys doing it, they’ve always let me be involved in the process.

“I’ve had my little ‘Oh, maybe this should be like this’ moments but I’ve really kept out of it because it’s not my show, it’s my book but it’s their show and they’re doing a really good job. I think they’ve done a really beautiful job with it.

“It is kind of weird to see not only something you’ve created coming to life in a Broadway production, looking out of 42nd street but also seeing actors and actresses essentially playing your family. People I know as musical theatre actors and actresses that I knew and admired, that’s weird and nice and exciting, definitely. “

[emmythespacecowgirl]

Hey!! for the weird asks : 8,15,21,29,62,98??💕

Sara!!! omg hi sweetie!!!

8. movies or tv shows?

movies: The Right Stuff, 1917, Dunkirk, The Martian, True Grit (2010), Indiana Jones Series, Jurassic Park, anything MCU

tv shows: Band of Brothers, The Pacific, MASH, Queer Eye, Friends, anything NatGeo

15. favorite book you read as a school assignment?

The Canterbury Tales and all the King Arthur stories (i was a brit lit stan)

21. obsession from childhood?

Dinosaurs, archaeology, airplanes

29. best way to bond with you?

my love language is Quality Time, so doing something fun together while creating a memory and talking about stuff that we're mutually obsessed with :) alsooo send me music! i love song and playlist recs

62. seven characters you relate to?

Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility

Mattie Ross from True Grit (2010)

Don Malarkey from Band of Brothers

Midge Maisel from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Lewis Nixon from Band of Brothers

Jess Day from New Girl

Chandler Bing from Friends

98. favorite historical era?

ooooof uh maybe the 1940s? or the late 50s/early 60s to see the first rocket launches

[chokemeseokjin]

for that ask thing... do em all... all 170... do it 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

OK LET’S DO THIS

1: How tall or short do you wish you were? I wish I was like 5′6″ tbh i’m too tall2: What’s your dream pet? (Real or not) fucking dragon mate3: Do you have a favorite clothing style? I like kinda cute pastel shit but not really girly? does that even make sense?4: What was your favorite video game growing up? Nintendogs?5: What three things/people do you think of most each day: My gf, bees and flowers6: If you had a warning label, what would yours say? Approach with caution, cries easily and afraid of loud noises7: What is your opinion on Mo being unfaithful to Jimin? Unsurprising and relatable (ily)8: What is your Greek personality type? [Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric, or Melancholic] IDK9: Are you ticklish? incredibly pls don’t touch me10: Are you allergic to anything? I’m lactose intolerant so… yeah11: What’s your sexuality? bi bi bi12: Do you prefer tea, coffee, or cocoa? tea i am a brit after all13: Are you a cat or dog person? B O T H14: Would you rather be a vampire, elf, or merperson? vampire fam that’d be so cool15: Do you have a favorite Youtuber? either Dan and Phil or Tomska, Dan and Phil are one in my head ok shut up16: How tall are you? 5′10″ :)))17: If you had to change your name, what would you change it to? Evie bc that was what i was going to be called and I would prefer it,,,,18: How much do you weigh? [Only ask this if you know the user doesn’t mind!] idk fam19: Do you believe in ghosts/spirits? kinda?20: Do you like space or the ocean more? S P A C E FAM THE STARS ARE JUST !!!!21: Are you religious? nah22: Pet peeves? When ppl walk really slowly in the middle of the fucking pavement23: Would you rather be nocturnal or diurnal [opposite of nocturnal]? nocturnal24: Favorite constellation? gemini obviously where my hoes at25: Favorite star? Kim Seokjin26: Do you like ball-jointed dolls? the fuck are they?27: Any phobias or fears? the dark n clowns28: Do you think global warming is real? yes???29: Do you believe in reincarnation? yeah i guess I do30: Favorite movie? Super 8! Pls watch it! support my kids!31: Do you get scared easily? yes like seriously easy32: How many pets have you own in your lifetime? 233: Blog rate? [You’ll rate the blog of the one who’s asking.] BEST BLOG EVER 10/10 WOULD LOVE UNCONDITIONALLY FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE AMEN34: What is a color that calms you? Pastel blue35: Where would you like to travel and/or live? Japan and Hawaii! 36: Where were you born? hospital in my home town37: What is your eye color? very blue38: Introvert or extrovert? introvert39: Do you believe in horoscopes and zodiacs? I think they’re interesting but the ones in magazines n shit are bullcrap40: Hugs or kisses? hugs pls41: Who is someone you would like to see/visit right now? my gf :(42: Who is someone you love deeply? ur mum43: Any piercings you want? more on my ears and maybe my nose44: Do you like tattoos and piercings? yes!!!!45: Do you smoke or have you eiver done so? i have yh46: Talk about your crush, if you have one! how to describe min yoongi,,,,47: What is a sound you really hate? metal being like dragged along something u know what i mean48: A sound you really love? kim seokjin when he gets lines :))))49: Can you do a backflip? no i’m not jungkook50: Can you do the splits? nearly lol51: Favorite actor and/or actress? I lov Andrew Garfield with all my heart 52: Favorite movie? u asked this already but I’ll chose another one soooooooo um Breakfast Club bc i am a white girl53: How are you feeling right now? sleepy54: What color would you like your hair to be right now? same colour it is now tbh55: When did you feel happiest? sleeping56: Something that calms you down? watching youtube videos specifically gaming ones idk why but it’s rlly calming57: Have any mental disorders? [Only ask this if you know the user doesn’t mind!] probably lmao58: What does your URL mean? i want. kim seokjin. to choke me. ok? are we clear? 59: What three words describe you the most? a fucking loser60: Do you believe in evolution? yeah61: What makes you unfollow a blog? posting rude/mean stuff or just if I don’t enjoy their content anymore, i don’t mean any harm or anything lol62: What makes you follow a blog? if it’s pretty/memes63: Favorite kind of person: nice people who’re funny and caring and actually give a shit about me and other ppl, not just themselves64: Favorite animal(s): meerkats, giraffes n bees65: Name three of your favorite blogs. @oh-no-its-mo​ @jinsasleep​ @taechy​66: Favorite emoticon: i’m on my laptop!!!! the sparkly heart!67: Favorite meme: um idk? the in tarnation one is p funny atm tho68: What is your MBTI personality type? fuck i can’t remember the rarest one i know that for sure69: What is your star sign? Gemini, come fight me70: Can your dog roll over on command, if you have a dog? no jfc she wont even sit when i ask the hoe71: What outfit out of all your clothes do you like to wear the most? denim mini skirt thing, tights n some cute top 72: Post a selfie or two? no73: Do you have platform shoes? i am tall enough74: What is one random but interesting fact about yourself? I hate potatoes 75: Can you do a front flip? no jfc76: Do you like birds? yah77: Do you like to swim? I’m baically Rin tbh78: Is swimming or ice skating more fun to you? Swimming i have no balance 79: Something you wish didn’t exist: donald trump80: Some thing you wish did exist: free traveling 81: Piercings you have? 5 in ma ears82: Something you really enjoy doing: writing and dying83: Favorite person to talk to: my gf84: What was your first impression of Tumblr? yo it was awful i was superwholock bullshit asshat i still hate myself for it i’ve been here too long85: How many followers do you have? 983!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY86: Can you run a mile within ten minutes? FUCKING HELL NO87: Do your socks always match? no88: Can you touch your toes and keep your legs straight completely? yes89: What are your birthstones? emerald 90: If you were an animal, which one would you be? dragon91: If a flower could aesthetically represent you, what kind would it be? oh fam a fuckin scabious they’re the shit92: A store you hate? superdrug93: How many cups of coffee can you drink in one day? i had 6 one day it was a mistake94: Would you rather be able to fly or read minds? flyyyyyyy95: Do you like to wear camo? yes sir96: Winter or summer? summer97: How long can you hold your breath for? i can swim a length of the pool underwater98: Least favorite person? donald trump99: Someone you look up to: is it cheesy to say namjoon?100: A store you love? the fat ass topshop on oxford street101: Favorite type of shoes? cute ballet flats102: Where do you live? LDN 103: Are you a vegetarian or vegan? If so, why? bacon104: What is your favorite mineral or gem? i just thought of that fucking goat meme bye105: Do you drink milk? no i would die106: Do you like bugs? some107: Do you like spiders? small ones108: Something you get paranoid about? e v e r y t h i n g109: Can you draw: a little tho i’m sure others would disagree110: Nosiest question you have ever been asked? idk fam i haven’t rlly been asked one111: A question you hate being asked? is ur hair naturally that colour112: Ever been bitten by a spider? no113: Do you like the sound of waves at the beach? yah114: Do you prefer cloudy or sunny days? sunny!115: Someone you’d like to kiss or cuddle right now: my gf jfc how many times have i answered with that 116: Favorite cloud type: penis shapes ones117: What color do you wish the sky was? pink118: Do you have freckles? yah 119: Favorite thing about a person: their laugh120: Fruits or vegetables? fruit121: Something you want to do right now: sleep tbh122: Is the ocean or sky prettier? sky123: Sweet or sour foods? sour? i dont rlly like sweet stuff much124: Bright or dim lights? in between aaaaaye125: Do you believe in a certain magical creature? unicorns i read a book when i was little that convinced me126: Something you hate about Tumblr: drama and ppl caring too much about shit that dont matter127: Something you love about Tumblr: making friends and seeing ppls amazing art!128: What do you think about the least? what a weird question um idk slugs?129: What would you want written on your tombstone? fucking finally130: Who would you like to punch in the face right now? Saitama? to see how much it would hurt131: What is something you love but also hate about yourself? my entire being132: Do you smile with your teeth showing for pictures? i dont smile at all if i can help it133: Computer or TV? computer134: Do you like roller coasters? sort of135: Do you get motion sickness or seasickness? motion yess not sure about sea136: Are your ears lobed or attached? attached137: Do you believe in karma? yes138: On a scale of 1-10, how attractive would you say you are? a strong -4139: What nicknames do you have/have had? El, Ellz, Petra, Sharpay, bitch, hoe, shut up ellen140: Did you have any pretend or imaginary friends? yeah141: Have you ever seen a therapist/shrink? nope142: Would you say you are a good or bad influence to others? Good most of the time143: Do you prefer giving or receiving gifts/help? giving!!!!!!144: What makes you angry? rude people145: How many languages do you speak fluently? two146: Do you prefer boys, girls, and/or non-binaries? anyone who’ll have me tbh147: Are you androgynous? no148: Favorite physical thing about yourself: my eyes?149: Favorite thing about your personality: i guess i’m kind idk150: Name three people you would like to talk to right now in person. my gf (again), Jess and Ellie151: If you could go back into time and live in one era, which would you choose? dinosaurs, i would make them my children152: Do you like BuzzFeed? their snapchat thing always makes me laugh153: How did you meet your spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend/partner? [If you have one.] through this god damn website thanks to pepekwan,  romance at it’s finest kids154: Do you like to kiss others’ foreheads or hands for platonic reasons? yes155: Do you like to play with others’ hair? yes156: What embarrasses you? literally everything157: Something that makes you nervous/anxious: again, literally everything158: Biggest lie you have ever told: i’m straight 159: How many people are you following? too many160: How many posts do you have on your blog(s)? 46,715 JFC161: How many drafts do you have on your blog(s)? none162: How many likes do you have on your blog(s)? 1,758163: Last time you cried and why: i can’t actually remember 164: Do you have long or short hair? medium!!!!!!165: Longest your hair has ever been: nearly to my waist166: Why do you like, dislike, or have neutral feelings about religon? never really affected me tbh, people can believe what they want to beleive as long as they’re not hurting anyone/ pressuring anyone to believe in it too167: Do you really care how the universe and world was created? not really no168: Do you like to wear makeup? yeah u dont wanna see me without it169: Can you stand on your hands or head for more than thirty seconds? no?????170: Did you answer the questions you were asked truthfully? yes I have ur welcome Mo ily

i didnt check this so sorry if there are mistakes lol 

[thewebofslime]

FROM snorting ants with Ozzy Osbourne to that very graphic opening sex scene, Motley Crue's rock biopic The Dirt has left viewers shocked since its release last week. But real life with Motley Crue was "even more debauched" than the Netflix movie, according to their former limo driver Al Bowman. AL BOWMAN 14 Tommy Lee partying in Al's limo in around 1985 In an exclusive interview with Sun Online, Al Bowman, now 60, revealed how he would be tasked with finding the 80s rockers "virgin groupies", driving them back and forth to drug dealers - and even dropping them at strange Satanic ceremonies. He recalls doing countless "condom clean ups" in the back of his limo - and how drummer Tommy Lee would almost tip his car over with rampant sex sessions. "I enjoyed the movie but there was much more debauchery in real life," Al, who now lives in Henderson, Nevada, said. "I mean some of the sexual stuff they used to get up to was kind of disgusting but I guess there's only so much you can fit into 90 minutes. "I drove them for about five years, I became like a fifth member of the band. "I would take them to buy drugs, to pick up girls, to rescue them when they had partied too hard - they'd call me at all hours. "They called me 'Al the rock-n-roll limo man.'" Al, who has driven a host of other stars including Prince, Whitney Houston and Madonna, says all the band members would have sex with girls in the back of his limo - but he particularly remembers drummer Tommy Lee's in-car romps. He says the star was so well endowed that when he had sex with women in the back of his limo, the car "would almost tip over" when they stopped at red lights - while the girls would be "squealing with pleasure". ATLAS ICONS 14 Al (centre) with Motley Crue in a photo taken by legendary rock photographer Neil Zlozower MIKE STOTTS FOR SUN ONLINE 14 Al next to his platinum Motley Crue's Dr Feelgood record at his home in Henderson, Nevada AL BOWMAN 14 Vince Neil with first wife, Beth, in Al's limo in late 1984. AL BOWMAN 14 Mick Mars partying and drinking champagne with then-wife Wendy in the limo Play Video Ozzy Osbourne licks a puddle of his own urine in front of the band in Netflix's The Dirt "Tommy Lee has the biggest weiner I've ever seen on a man and he used to make the girls squeal in the limo," he said. "Because he was so big he just seemed to rock the limo more than anyone else - it was like it was going to tip over. "You couldn't tell when we were moving but when we stopped at a red light the limo would actually be moving back and forth and I would be thinking, 'Please turn green - everyone is looking'. "They'd all get high on coke and booze and screw - Tommy loved to f**k girls in the limo. "Sometimes he'd get himself into trouble - I remember one time when he was in a relationship with a girl called Candace but he'd been with this other girl who had a boyfriend - and all of a sudden the boyfriend came back and started chasing him with a knife. He had to jump in the limo to escape. "One time I took some photos of him and some girls in the limo and gave them to him - but his girlfriend found them and hit him over the head with a pan. "He called me up and said, 'Why did you give me those pictures - she's ready to kill me you a**hole!' "Another time he called me from a phone booth in North Hollywood and asked me for some cocaine to perk him up - then the line went dead - so I rushed to where he said he was and found him blacked out in the phone booth with his sports car still running. ATLAS ICONS 14 Al pictured with the band in another picture taken by Neil Zlozower in 1984 AL BOWMAN 14 Vince Neil, Al, and Rudy Sarszo from Quiet Riot at a Las Vegas party. ATLAS ICONS 14 Al known as "the rock n roll limo man" with Crue guitarist Mick Mars "I had to drag him into the limo and take him home - I saved his a** a couple of times." And Al claims while the band had no shortage of groupies - they were particularly fond of virgins - and would ask him to go find them so they could "pop their cherries". "They were always on the hunt for virgins," he said. "That was my job when I drove on the Shout at the Devil tour when they were playing with Black Sabbath - they would always say, 'Al go see if there's any groupies out there who are are virgins and bring them to us. We want them'. They just wanted to pop their cherries. "I remember one night in Bakersfield during that tour I got two virgins for Nikki and Vince and then they got me my own hotel room as a thank you. "That was a fun night." While Al remembers having a lot of fun with the band - he also remembers they used to have a dark side. He recalls taking various members to creepy ceremonies and rituals around Los Angeles. Al says bassist Nikki Sixx was particularly interested in the "dark arts" and he once gave him and famous occultist Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan, a lift to a strange ceremony at a house behind the famous Whisky A Go Go nightclub in Hollywood. "I remember them having an interest in Satanic rituals and I used to take them to these weird parties at an old mansion in Hollywood where there'd be people doing all kinds of creepy stuff," "Nikki was very much into the black arts, Alistair Crowley, incantations, witchcraft, all of that stuff. "I drove him once with Anton LaVey and they were doing these weird chants. "I had an intercom system so if they put up the divider in the limo I would just turned on the intercom and listen to everything that was going on. "So I heard everything they were talking about. Then I dropped them at this strange house covered in ivy behind the Whisky A Go Go. NETFLIX 14 Motley Crue's story is the subject of Netflix film biopic The Dirt AL BOWMAN 14 Al pictured the first night he ever drove the band - outside their sold-out concert at Whisky A Go Go in 1982 AL BOWMAN 14 Al in front of his limosine with rocker Don Dokken in 1985. "There was some weird ceremony there and it was full of up and coming actresses and they were all into this stuff. "They were in circles and there were candles and blood and horse hair - all kinds of weird stuff. "At the time I just thought 'Ah it's Hollywood - it's all a big horror show anyway'. "I said, 'You guys making a horror movie about witchcraft or something?' But it seemed like serious business for them. "Nikki would call on spiritual forces. I remember asking him, 'What's the deal with all this stuff? Are you trying to call on angels from heaven to guide the band?' "He said, 'No I'm trying to conjure up demons from hell to guide the band.' So I was like, 'Ah so you're calling them up not down?' It was kind of funny." The band's hard partying and excess finally caught up with them in 1984 when singer Vince Neil lost control of his sports car after a night of boozing - killing his passenger - Brit Hanoi Rocks star Nicholas 'Razzle' Dingley - and injuring two others. Al, says he and Motley Crue guitarist Mick Mars saw Vince and Razzle just before the crash at the liquor store in Redondo Beach, California, where they had driven after hours of partying. "Mick had just got his divorce through and was celebrating with four women in the limo," Al said. "We stopped at the liquor store - we all lived in the same area of Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach in those days. "We saw Vince and Razzle and they were both drunk - so we told them to get in the limo. "But Vince insisted in getting in his own car. He drove a Pantera at the time, which was not the most practical car for getting around town - it was loud and huge. "He was always a bit of a show off." Vince was sentenced to 21 days in jail for manslaughter - and he did 15 days of the sentence in July 1986. But Al said as soon as he was released - the rock star couldn't wait to get partying again. "The day he got out of jail - or at least very soon after - I was his driver to a concert at Santa Monica Civic - the bands Dokken and Ratt were playing as I recall," Al said. "Everybody went and everybody was welcoming Vince back like nothing had happened. MOST READ IN TV & SHOWBIZ TRAGIC AMY This Morning fans' tears as Ruth visits colleague brain damaged from nut allergy EXCLUSIVE 50 SHADES OF JEN Jennifer Aniston, 50, looks incredible in latex dress on VERY sexy shoot FEARS FOR KATIE 'Drunk' Katie Price struggles to get words out in ‘hyper’ video with Harvey NIC IT IN THE BUD Nicolas Cage 'files for annulment 4 days after getting married to Erika' ON HER COLL-IDAYS Gemma Collins shows off weight loss in bizarre solar-powered swimsuit "He just wanted to party. As soon as he got out of jail he started drinking again, trying to score coke, getting b**w jobs in the limo. "It was the first thing he wanted to do. Nothing had changed - it was the same old Vince." A representative for Motley Crue declined to comment on any of Al's claims but said: "All I can say is that it seems rather remarkable that four band members had one limo driver who was at all those places, when the band had multiple limos and drivers in that era." Al hit back saying it was "well known" he was a regular driver for the band - and that his photos prove it. GETTY IMAGES - GETTY 14 Vince Neil, Nikki Sixx, Mick Mars and Tommy Lee of Motley Crue at the premiere of Netflix's The Dirt earlier this month ELEKTRA RECORDS 14 The boys liked pretty different back in their 80s heyday - from left to right Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, Tommy Lee and Mick Mars

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

This is of an old article I wrote 17 years ago. I am re-posting it because a lot of people didn’t see it. It takes place in the North Miracle Mile of Los Angeles California. The finale takes place at a movie theater on Beverly Blvd. Like many things in L.A, it does not exist anymore. It is now a patch of yellow grass.

           I went to the Pan Pacific movie Theater a lot in the 60’s and 70’s. It was cheaper than the Fairfax Theater several blocks away. The Fairfax played first run movies and the Pan Pacific played movies that were a couple of years old. Some times they play first run movies. I saw GoldFinger there in late 64.

           When the Beatles were hot in 64, their movie came to my neighborhood theater. This is what transpired. I preface it when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan show….

 A Beatle Memory

 By Stephen Jay Morris

Part 0ne

Tuesday, December 04, 2001

©Scientific Morality

  I remember the Kennedy assassination in 1963.  I was 9 years old.  It seems as though my Memory started at that point in time. I do not recall the 50's, or even the early 60's. What I do remember is that America was a sanitized place. Or, maybe I was just completely sheltered from the real world.  At the time, there was a pervasive melancholy in the atmosphere.  Everything was so sullen.  This didn't jibe with my childish outlook on life; I was carefree.  However, living in a Jewish neighborhood made things especially depressing. Most Jews there were strong supporters of J.F.K.  One day, I was visiting my uncle's house.  There was a hi-fi system in his living room.  At the time, Hi-Fi's were state-of-the-art record players.  There were some record albums on display, facing frontward on the mantle. One was a comedy L.P. entitled, "The First Family"--it was a satire on the Kennedy' s.  I asked my uncle if I could play it and he replied in an authoritarian voice, "Our president has just died and we must show respect for him!"  In my young, critical mind, I wondered why the dick had it on display in the first place, if he was so respectful!

        That was the tone of the times.  Adults were so God damn serious! The only things I cared about in 1963 were baseball and monster movies.  I hated school and my parents. However, I viewed school and parents as irrefutable authority figures to whose dictates I had to submit. I used to play with my childhood friend, Glen.  He lived in a high-rise apartment building near my house.  Our favorite place to play was on the roof of his building.  We would pretend that space aliens hid in the giant air conditioning unit.  We lived in our own little world.  I remember one day, we were playing on the front lawn, when Glen's mother yelled out of the 4th floor window, "Glen! Time to come in!  The President's funeral is about to begin!"  "Ok, mom--I'm coming!" he answered.  Then he turned to me and said, "My mom is making me watch Kennedy's funeral on T.V.  I don't want to watch no dumb funeral on T.V!  I gotta go! See ya."  Yep!  That's what was happening then.

Three months later, word came of something happening across the Atlantic Ocean.  I heard my sister talking about the Beatles; she was telling my mom how cute they were.  I didn't know what she was babbling on about; I thought she was talking about puppets.  It was in early February, on a Sunday night.  I'd always hated Sunday nights-- the last free night before school the next morning.  The local TV station broadcasted my favorite cowboy show.  It was on ABC, I think it was called, “Travels of Jamie Machetes.”  I was about to tune it in on my parents' old Zenith black & white, when my sister came bursting into the living room, demanding, "I wanna watch the Ed Sullivan show!   The Beatles are gonna be on!"  I said, "Tough! I'm watching my show!  She ran out of the room and whined to my dad, "Daddy!!  Stevie wouldn't let me watch Ed Sullivan!"  Next thing I know, my father stomps into the living room like the American Military liberating Italy in 1945; he was taking the moral high road, fighting against my evil selfishness!  He said in that 1950's fatherly voice, "Hey, stupid!  You don't own the T.V. set!  Let your sister watch her show!"  I relented.  My sister stuck her tongue out at me.  My dad was bigger than me, and this depute was not negotiable.  Also, he held the deed to the house and was the final judge. My sister always won the arguments! Because I was older than her and had a penis, she was the innocent victim. No matter what she did--even if she was in the wrong, she was innocent.  She got away with a lot of shit!  My dad was so overly protective of her. I think he was the only man in the world that suffered from "vagina envy." My sister made sure the whole family watched the show.  I hated the Sullivan show!  It was lame, wholesome, family entertainment.  I did like the comedians sometimes.  Most of their material consisted of mother-in-law jokes and self-effacing humor.  Then the big moment came.  I was expecting human-sized puppets, but instead, on the stage were four guys with Moe Stooge hairdos, singing these cute, upbeat, love songs. The mostly teenage-girl audience was screaming at them!  It was like one of those Godzilla movies from Japan.  Usually, females screamed at something terrible.  I remember thinking something bad was happening off camera.  I asked my mom why the girls were screaming.  She replied, "They used to do that to Elvis, and Frank Sinatra before him."  "Who ARE those guys?" I asked my mom.  "Will you shut up? I'm trying to watch the show!" my sister whined. I went to bed in disgust.

A lot of Baby-Boomers will tell you that that was the defining moment in their lives.  Not me.  I thought the Beatles were a bunch of fags!  My defining moment was when the Rolling Stones appeared on the Sullivan show, a year later.  I started to like the Beatles when Capitol Records released "Rubber Soul" in 1965.

In 1964, everywhere you went, you heard Beatles music.  People used to install public address systems by their swimming pools.  The neighbors to our left had one, and the family behind us had one, too.  That summer, while the neighbors had friends over to swim in their pool, you could hear slashing and laughter and Beatles songs.  At the Sav-On Drug Store, there was a whole section devoted to Beatles souvenirs. I remember Beatle lunch boxes, Beatle sweatshirts, Beatle wigs, Beatle board games, and Beatle plastic guitars.  Little did I know that this junk would become collectors’ items!  There were also Beatle trading cards.  They cost five cents a pack. Like baseball cards, they contained a stick of pink bubble gum.  You could smell the gum on the top card.  The cards came in two editions: the black & white set, and then the color set, which sold for 10 cents.  At my school, boys started to wear Beatle boots and combed their hair into bangs. Before they got home, they'd comb their hair back into pompadours so mom and dad wouldn't get pissed off.

At that moment in time, the Beatles were a harmless fad.  America was, and still is, a nation of fads.  The Beatles' management and the record industry calculated the Beatles fad.  It started out that way.  In the beginning, it was a teenybopper affair.  Today, most Beatles fans like this era of the Beatles' career the best.  Yeah, I must admit it's very nostalgic to listen to a 1964 Beatles' song.  However, three years down the road was the outbreak of the Counterculture movement.  A big fallacy is that the Beatles were responsible for this movement.  Nope! They were merely a part of it. In 1964, some ex-beatniks in San Francisco were experimenting with drugs and music and created "psychedelic" music. The Beatles just brought it to a mass audience.  Goodwater conservatives didn't think highly of the Beatles.  1964 was an election year.  Buttons started to circulate reading, "Beatles For President!"  It was all in fun.  The conservatives despised their daughters for getting hysterical at these effeminate looking Brits.  It's the oldest story in the world.  When humans (males mostly) get older, they lose their sexual attractiveness.  Consequently, they become anti-sex monsters.  They hide behind the lofty veil of "Morality."  Actually, it's just a simple of case of JEALOUSY!  Maybe Viagra will change that age-old problem. There used to be a movie theater in my neighborhood.  It was called the "Pan Pacific Theater."  It had that weird, 1950's, post-modern look, like the coffee shops that were built in the 50's.  I don't know when it was constructed, but I remember it burnt down in 1980.  During my childhood, it was the place to go for Saturday matinees.  It was cheap, too: 50 cents cheap!   For that, you'd get a couple of cartoons and a B movie--not bad!  I saw all the James Bond movies there.  In 1964, when "A Hard Days Night" was released, it came to the Pan Pacific.  I went to see it with my 5-year-old brother, Irwin, and my 8-year-old sister, Fay.  When we arrived, there was a line around the block!   This was unusual for this theater, which was called a "walk-in theater."  And it was.  It had only a local clientele.  But not this time!  The kids in the line were in a festive mood.  They had their Beatles shirts on, and sported buttons of their favorite Beatle.  Paul was the most popular.  I listened to the girls in line talking breathlessly about their heroes. The theater's owner--a fat, Jewish, middle-aged man--looked nervously at his youthful customers standing in line.  He was happy that he was happy making money for a change, however, he was uneasy about the possibility of a teen riot.  Around the block, there was another Pan Pacific Theater.  That theater staged an Elvis concert in the '50s, which had resulted in a teen riot.  After that, they never hosted another rock concert again.  The owners of this theater didn't want a repeat of that event.  After all, most of their patrons were old Jewish ladies who would complain about the air conditioner.

When we finally got in, we sat in the back row; all the good seats had been taken.  After the trailers of upcoming beach movies, the movie started and the place went nuts!  The girls were screaming at the movie screen like the Beatles were there in person.  It was unbelievable!  In the middle of the movie, the projectionist freeze-framed a scene and the house lights went on. There was a loud, collective groan from the audience.  The owner stood on the stage and said loudly, "I have gotten complaints about your conduct! People come here to see a movie, not to hear you make noise!  If you do not act like ladies and gentlemen, then I will stop the movie and send you all home!"  Then, the movie resumed and the screaming continued anyway.  I saw some grown-ups get up and go to the ticket office for refunds.  I did see the movie again--a few months later in an almost empty theater.

[tube-thoughts-blog]

Vol. 14

zero stars - terrible, 1/2 a star - dull, 1 star - folly, 1 1/2 stars - lacking, 2 stars - fair, 2 1/2 stars - decent, 3 stars - terrific

--- MTV's 120 Minutes w/ Alan Hunter:

*Alan has to be pulled out of his dressing room listening to George Jones (Sure, George is way too manly for Alan)

*The pinnacle of man towered over by skyscrapers in a very 20th century modern art ad for athletic 80s yuppies who drink milk. Yuppies listen to Phil Collins on evening MTV, not late night 120 minutes alternative bands.

*Wrigley's gum w/ nutrasweet for sweater wearing 80s families to chew on long bike rides.

*Awesomely 80s retro ad for a Casio keyboard drum that has a dorky guy walking around the type of alley Michael Jackson would dance in until he meets a sexy looking keyboard player who would fit right in with Prince's band at the time.

*TSOL "Colors": Another edgy new wave The Cult-esque sounding music video featuring cowboys. What was up with these bands & cowboys? Depeche Mode did it too. Decent.

*Walk in the West "Lonely Boy": Another edgy cowboy themed video? This time with the alt version of Cougar Mellon? This is more bluesy & has some of those awesome 80s video editing techniques with the band superimposed over shots of driving through rural America. Decent.

*The Descendents "Kids On Coffee": Very 80s punk/hardcore aesthetics featuring mugs of coffee & pictures of Molly Ringwald for some reason. Decent.

*Some new alternative records for the week are gone over by Alan. A few hip hop show up. Not sure if these were quirky hip hop acts or if hip hop was still considered a niche.

*Nickelodeon tips from Dennis. Nick still aired the Menace at this point. Now the black & white, non-trying-to-be-a-Teeny-Bopper-Pop-Star-themed show would give tween brats a seizure.

*Hey, "hoppin' & bobbin'" 80s family, sign up for HBO & cable. You'll get a free phone alarm clock too. Huh? Phone alarm clock? Whose dumb idea was that invention? People will never sleep beside their phones & use them for alarms *wink*

*Vomitous preview for a Joan London talk show about being a great mom & Mother's day on the Lifetime Network. Now, Joan stars in a commercial about putting her dear old mom in a nursing home to get rid of her. Ha!

*A generic new wave pop band "The Hooters" in an MTV bumper & performing & bowing, in front of a concert crowd, as a god awful song by them with the lyrics "Day by day" plays.

*Another cartoon graphics bumper for MTV featuring a jackpot machine scroll. More imagination went in to all these old bumpers than has gone into actual MTV programmingin the last almost two decades since the early 2000s.

*Joe Piscopo in a Miller Lite beer ad playing an over the top 80s wrestler, named Python Piscopo, taking over a seedy dive bar

*"Captain EO" a strangely forgotten Disney theme park music video / movie attraction produced by George Lucas & starring Michel Jackson. Looks good if you like MJ's 80s videos & Star Wars.

*James "So Many Ways": An Aussie sounding new wave singer is dancing, around a field of amber grains, like a spastic. Something new wave singers were known for doing. Dancing like a spastic. Nice, soaring, Bono-esque vocals. More than decent via video cliches.

*The Housemartins "Happy Hour": Quirky U.K. band in a pub partying themed video w/ California Raisins style animation. Terrific.

*Get a KODAK Supralife battery & be able to play air guitar longer beside your giant 80s ghetto blaster boombox. Awesome.

*"Did You know?" ad w/ 1-800 number for ordering a Yugo compact car. Pretty cheap too for a new car under 4,000. Not sure how much a new car cost in the 80s, but it would be hard to get a used car w/out 100,000 plus miles on the motor for anywhere near that amount today.

*Pringles Sour Cream & Onion dip chips has the Royal Family going goofy for the flavor.

*The low fi "do it yourself" aesthetics of videos by bands like Gene Loves Jezebel are something corporate produced videos can't re-capture.

*Gene Loves Jezebel "Heartache": Okay, I might have spoke too soon. The band had signed with Geffen records by the point of this video & the earlier clip doesn't apply. This video is slick w/ better camerawork, but the band's music still manages to shine thru. ---- Decent.

*The Bolshoi "A Way": This Brit band takes over some nice mum's quaint home to film aspooky little number for I.R.S. records 80s R.E.M.'s label

*"The Long Ryders" a hopeful "band" (not sure if real), in a Miller Beer ad, perform theircorny bar band rock & roll in a bar in Hollywood near Tower Records.

*Another stereotypical 80s dorky teen (the kind in every 80s teen movie) plays a CASIO keyboard in his totally 80s bedroom for his bored out of its mind hound-dog w/ big ears

*A 50s via the 80s "Leave it to Beaver" type nerd talks in the mirror about Cracker Jacks & then shares them with his sweetheart.

*Wrap up Hollywood hit movies like "The Karate Kid" & "The Al Jolson Story" (complete w/ him in facepalmingly funny black face) for only $29.95

*Soft & Dri ladies deodorant helps a cute black chick get ready for her tv news debut

*MTV's "Make My Video" contest for a chance to make a video for Madonna. Wow! 80s Madonna was iconic, I'll have to admit. Right up there with all the other 80s icons. Pretty to boot. Also included, in winning, is a surplus of Twix candy bars & a Levis wardrobe. I'd like to see some of the terrible entries from the contest.

*Bang "Summertime" an MTV Basement tapes winner: This NYC street video featuring a garage band that looks like KISS minus makeup feels like it would belong more on regular MTV or Headbangers Ball.  --- Fair.

*Cactus World News "The Bridge": A big, soaring U2 sounding band plays for a concert festival. --- Decent.

*Alan insults Cactus World News & blames it on a music article. I admire the bite that MTV wouldn't show today in insulting an artist on their network. They'd be considered a product that would be above criticism today, if they still had vj's or music videos. Still, Alan is the wrong person to be hosting this show, as MTV would soon figure out.

*The Go-Betweens "Head Full Of Steam": Video w/ a band that has a prissy looking leadsinger & Cure video style aesthetics. Nice crooning. -- Decent.

*80s mallrat teens tired of waiting forever for zits to go away get Clearasil & then beat it on their mopad or skateboard to the local foodcourt to gawk at each other while screwing up their skin even more with chocolate milkshakes & greasy pizza slices. The winner: corporate America. The loser: hormonal teens & their scraping to get by parents.

*Toni volumizer makes any 80s chick look like a high fashion sex kitten.

*"Heartbeat of America is today's Chevrolet"... This was a time when picturesque Americana actually might have meant something before global trade sent automotive jobs overseas.These quirky Americans & American made autos have vanished. Replaced by crumbling urban landscapes (Detroit), jobless & depressed people, along with foreign made products & autos.

*Sammy Hagar era Halen takes over MTV for a week. Would have been more fun w/ Diamond Dave. Can't imagine any band taking over MTV anymore much less one like Van Halen.

*The Wind "Good News, Bad News": A funny semi-acoustic duo music act performs for their neighbors in block party black & white video. Close to decent.

*A Brit rock (nobody that I recognize) ex-junkie for a "No Drugs & Alcohol" sober music making experience 1 - 800 recovery number. Being sober is probably why his music career is so forgettable.

*James Brown for MTV. James Brown popular in the 60s & here still recognized on MTV in the late 80s. Current MTV doesn't recognize music much less music legends.

*Cryin' Out Loud "Live It Up": "I ain't no Marxist" a lyrical band w/ "a message." Fair.

*Awesome post-apocalyptic arena combat ad for a "Lazer Tag" toy. "Stadium not included ."Ha. Someone must have complained that their backyard wasn't as fantasy like as this ad.

*"VCR Theater," every night at 2am on The Movie Channel, helps rock lovin' chicks, who sleep with their electric guitar, record a flick. Why the rock & roll theme was included, in the ad, must have been because the ad was MTV specific. Otherwise, it makes no sense.

*Penn & Teller have "blood & fire" as they guest host MTV. "Born to be wild" badasses.

*A rock & roll hotel in "Playin' For Keeps" rated PG13. 80s PG, which GoodBadFlicks.com would tell you might equal a little R rated sex & nudity & language w/ the comedy. I had forgotten this 80s movie. Might be a forgotten gem, might be well a forgotten dud.

*Christy Brinkley for taking a shower & using Prell shampoo. I, like Chevy Chase, am all for getting a little wet w/ the very sexy 80s model Christy Brinkley.

*More bad jokes & bad silver jackets from Alan.

*Timbuk 3 "Future's So Bright, Gotta Wear Shades": A minor classic. terrific.

*Christmas "Big Plans": Clever points for the band name. Clever & quirky video featuring mailroom drudgery. The band escapes into a fantasy world filled with cliche 80s cheesy & weird video editing techniques. Close to terrific.

*Alan's head is now a talking head in an 80s tv set. Silver 80s tv sets w/ either a rabbit's ears antenna or a dial cable box are more art & make me feel more happy than a 60 inch flat screen wall hanging home movie theater experience to watch crappy 20 tens era reality shows on. Those old tvs played awesome UHF local tv stations & awesome at the time cable channels.

*Every day Joes drink Miller beer after they get off work from their blue collar jobs. It's the "American Way" of getting liver disease & addiction & emotional / relationship problems when you're "Born & raised in the U.S.& A."

*"Top Gun, the number one soundtrack" w/ music from Kenny Loggins, Berlyn, & Loverboy. Coming to a yuppie moron's car stereo near you! (unfortunately)

*"Dippity Do" hair styling gel for futuristic 80s weirdos.

*MTV was hip in the 80s, I might not say this enough, & for clarity on how "cool" it actually was... it had guys sticking their fists up chicken butts & wiggling said fist, while their bald heads were covered in whip or shaving cream. Why? Why not?

*The Rainmakers "Let My People Go-Go": Funky, bluesy, quirky, top hat wearing band rocks the house (literallY) while their horn section blows it up out in some rural decay while walking around w/ the bulldog from Little Rascals. Decent.

*Billy Chinmock "Somewhere in the Night": tape cut out, so who knows, didn't look like it was gonna be great for an alt video what w/ its aesthetics of a high style 80s babe walking down a foggy back alley. zero.

I think at this point in 1980's 120 minute alt rock history, they had mistaken alot of the popular bluesy rock of the time for alt rock & mixed it in w/ the Brit new wave. It didn't mesh together well. I guess none of the music on 120 minutes history ever truly did through the changing time periods & trends. At least it existed for a while & was something a bit different.

*Limited Warranty "Hit You": 120 Minutes has definitely gone off, at this point, but the tape has another video for me. It's a new wave pretty boy group. In the style of A-Ha "Take on Me." It's nothing terrible for what it is. Pretty catchy like most of that kind of music was. Decent, I guess.

close to 2 for Alan,  close to 3 for MTV, 2 1/2 for videos, 2 1/2 for ads

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Geraldo Rivera: Exposing Satan's Underground *"This is a horror that will give children bad dreams." We're not talking about Satan,no, it's Geraldo's mustache. Jokes & utter stupidity aside... Seriously, after all his 80s & 90s tabloid garbage "news" hysteria, it's unbelievable that Geraldo still has a career in journalism.* zero stars

Penn & Teller Bullshit!: Ouija Boards & Near Death Experiences *The mind can be deceived through cheap games & brain power-outs.* close to 3 stars

--- DinosaurDracula.com presents Creepy Commercials Countdown:

*Sunkist Spooky Fruit (1989): Eat enough gummy fruit flavored snacks & wake up, from a candy coma, in a cemetery filled w/ animated trees, lounge about skeletons, & purple people eaters from the stars.* 2 stars

*Easter Seals Halloween Coupons w/ Vincent Price (1990): "Halloween doesn't have to be spooky." It's blasphemy for a lame organization to get one of the most symbolically spooky actors of all time to say this. "It should be warm & friendly." Even if it's meant to be ironic & Vincent Price sure reads it that way, it sucks. I want Halloween to be like Halloween 3, and end horribly. Well, at least in my imagination. Candy & fright. Not "safe" coupons.* 1 star

*Coors Light Beer w/ Elvira (1991): If I were an Addams family style disembodied hand & I met Elvira, I would do more than try to hand her a beer. I would crawl down the front of her very open black dress & never come out. Also, I wouldn't mind being at a Halloween party stuck behind Elvira in one of those two person horse costumes.* 3 stars

*Spooky Goop Halloween Make-Up (1988): Be the coolest & weirdest kid on the block going from cheap ghoul face paint to full on Fulci's Zombi grotesque skin.* 3 stars

*The People's Court Frankenstein Promo (1988): Village idiots will kill over daytime trash tv. Dr. Frankenstein & his monster (son?) would have been great guests on Jerry Springer.* close to 3 stars

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Public Access: "My Name Is John Daker" *A mumbling piano lady, of some Methodist church according to her, & a mumbling male singer who couldn't be more stiff. They attempt a song about "The Lord" only for it to devolve into jaunty number about the moon hitting one's eye like a big-ah pizza pie.* either 1 star or 3 stars terrible becoming terrific

--- Red Letter Media presents Best of the Worst: Shakma, Python II, and Beaks the Movie

*Shakma: A crazy baboon on the loose while its victims live action role play in a college animal testing lab.* either 1 star or close to 2 1/2 (for primate slasher premise cuteness)

*Python II: One of those crappy CGI snake genre flicks. A genre that would be further made worse by SYFY & Asylum later on in the 2000s. The python looks startling, in its scenes, but I do not know if that's just all the taco soup, that I ate earlier, talking or what.* 1 1/2 stars

*Beaks the Movie: The VHS box cover says "unintentionally funny." See, hipsters, our VHS ancestors were self aware too. So, this is pretty much an Italian exploitation version of Hitchcock's "The Birds" complete w/ that Eye-Talian auteur creative cliche of animal cruelty. Such a dumb premise taken to its heights of ridiculousness, but M. Night would try it with "The Happening" & there's the "wants to be so bad so bad it's good" but isn't "Birdemic 1 & 2." Not really all that fun, except to Red Letter's Rich.* 1 star

According to Red Letter Media, Beaks is best (by default) Shakma is divisive & Python 2 was supposed to get destroyed by beach birds but they don't like birdseed covered VHS tapes

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Classic Comedy Central: Buddy Scott trio in the elevator *An office worker ant is trapped in his coffin falling a hundred plus floors to hell. He cheers up when a lounge act sing to him the message that he's "heading to the top." Penn Jillette (then voice of Comedy Central) says to "Think positive."* 2 1/2 stars

--- Everything Is Terrible:

*You Gotta Be Kidding Me: The customer is always a pain in the rear of the golf shorts.* 1 star

*They're Coming For Your Kids!: "For the cost of two Cokes," & one soul, they'll become manipulative salespeople of religious literature on their school campuses.* 1 or 3 stars

*The Net: "From astrology to gardening & punk rock."* close to 3 stars

*Telephone Song!: Be correct when you dial collect. Tween girls discover the power of the telephone. They all do.* 2 1/2 stars

*Rock Music & the Occult: "God isn't interested in impressing teenagers." Hence the reason that Satan's rock music is so successful.* 3 stars

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"B Videos 101 Vol. 1" *"Perfect, no one suspects" that Andy Griffith is a bar brawling deviant, that Redd Foxx is from a galaxy far far away, or that Papa Smurf likes to have his salad tossed.* 2 1/2 stars & zero stars for the doo doo Jackson Pollock porno finale

--- Phone Losers:

*Security Cam Pranks - The Kitchen Couple: An outrageous & short lived invasion of boring breakfast table privacy.* either zero or close to 2 1/2 stars

*Home Security Prank Call - Peace of Mind: Every hour on the hour reassurance is bothersome & as comforting as forced prayer.* close to 2 1/2 stars

*Rich Neighborhood Prank Calls: We've been going through your trash, & we don't like what we find.* 2 1/2 stars

*Tenants from Hell - Archaeological Dig Site: Before you hear it on the news, we want to let you know about the giant skeletons & the buried alien technology that we found.* close to 3 stars

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Beavis & Butthead: It's So Cold in the D *"This is hard to dance to." Detroit has fallen on such hard times, the very danceable to hip hop sounds more like a funeral song.*

2 1/2 stars w/ riffing

1 star w/out

5 Dollar Wrestling: Death Match Dance Party *"Blood in the roller-rink."* 2 stars

--- Found Footage Fest:

*How To Have Cybersex on the Internet: "those who have mastered the art of one handed typing."* close to 3 stars

*It Only Takes A Second: "to be safe" or die in a hilariously horrible accident.*

3 stars

*Mr. Nasty - Insult VHS Tape: Mr. Nasty is such a bad insult comedian, he makes Andrew Dice Clay look like Jeffry Ross who looks like Nazi propaganda of a Jew on marijuana.* 1 star

*What Does God Say About Worldliness: "It's better to go to a funeral than to go to a party." Maybe so, but it's not as much fun. So this failed comedian, turned touring for money evangelist, says one can have a fine stable of horses, cars, or women... but HaHa, it's a one way ticket to H-E-L-L. The evangelical sort of brags about having a stable of finely bred horses, by the way. His audience looked like they were at a funeral. No smiles, no laughs, no horses, just misery. I thought they called it the gospel (good news).* 1 star

*Something's Happening: Watching the mucus sizzle. The "stuff that's killing the world" (mucus) of a old man / mucus conspiracy theorist. (What did I just watch?!)* Uh? stars?

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--- Monstervision w/ Joe Bob Briggs: Coma

*Joe Bob has on his gloriously un-politically correct rebel flag western shirt (Joe Bob is just too un-PC for current tv) & he does a funny editorial on the world's obsession with wrapping the everyday garbage products we produce & consume up with so much other wrapping that there's no real garbage anymore just the plastic we used to hold all the crap we consumed.

*TNT had such a hard on for E.R. coming to TNT, Joe Bob says that's the reason the first flick is E.R. creator Michael Crichton's "Coma"

*Drive In totals:  77 dead bodies... 8 breasts 2 living 6 dead (censored)... Brain slicing kidney weighing.. vegetable handling.. organ donating.. plastic covered peni (Devious look on Joe Bob's face as he says this).. death by electrocution...  gratuitous New England antiquing... fire extinguisher fu.. cadaver fu..

*Huggies ad w/ a baby parachuting out of a plane thru fluffy clouds. Don't diapers sell themselves? Babies are cute, sure, but is this to convince new parents of that fact & to make the awful reality of changing shitty diapers not have them wanting to put their brat up for adoption?

*Dennis Miller for dollar collect calls & being a smug asshole. Only good thing that he ever did was Weekend Update on SNL, & Norm was better at it. Fallon & Tina not my choice...Colin Quinn pretty okay...

*Fisher Price Rescue Mission toddler action figures ad... Huh? This isn't Saturday morning cartoon commercial breaks? This is after 11pm TNT. Why the ads for kids & their parents?

*A dog dreams about bacon in the classic "Beggin Strips" commercial. I think this would not be politically correct now either. Dogs can't eat bacon because their owners have to feed them liberal nazi approved gluten free & non-processed healthy meat dog food. Surely no bacon, a little chicken (no hormones) & they'd just love to take meat away from dogs & make them vegans. They don't go that far yet, but PETA probably does with their pets.

*Leann Rimes (sp?) croons the classic country song "Blue" while images of picturesque Maine play in a Red Lobster commercial. Nice combo.

*An ad about the type of toothbrush (Oral B) a dentist uses, & so should you. Dentists also have free access to all the high tech dental cleaning & surgery tools in their office, so why does it matter that they use a certain toothbrush at home? It doesn't.

*WCW's "The Giant" has nostrils so big that he could inhale most normal size people. Check him out on TNT's WCW Monday Nitro.

*Ikea turns a subway train into a kitschy living space for the daily grind passengers. Ikea furniture also is the decor of one of the sub levels of Hell.

*Joe Bob reads from the "trashy" novel version of Coma while he sips from his Budweiser covered in a TNT logo coozy.

*Another of the countless "never need another" "get back to your outdoor life" allergy rx ads. I wonder if evolved alien civilizations, out there in the stars, still deal w/ allergy problems on their planets filled w/ lush plant life...

*Firestone helps a young college age guy & his dog get back out on the road of life in his beat up convertible.  "Saved money too." Sure, mechanics aren't rip off artists.

*Visit the TNT website for NBA news, a Babylon 5 chatroom (you were a legit nerd if you were on a chat site like this in the 90s, not a hipster nerd), even a Monstervision page

*$1.99 Disney toys in Happy Meals has a future out of the closet broadway kid putting on a living room show, along w/ his sister, for his parents who are too cheap to buy real toys or cook an actual healthy dinner for their kids. Harsh, but whatever.

*Kevin Nealon, another Weekend Update SNL alumni, sells out to a collect call ad.

*Antz, one of the early CGI Pixar style movies. Has some of the charm, if I'm remembering correctly, of those CGI cartoon movies for kids, not as obnoxious as most, but the animation hasn't aged well (imo).

*Monks avoid breaking their vow of silence by chewing "Beano" before eating gassy salads at dinner. First semi clever & funny & not despisable ad of the night.

*Digitally restored, & w/ dvd style extras, episodes of Star Trek coming to 1990s Sci Fi channel hosted by Shatner.

*Joe Bob has an I.V. drip ran into his beer to keep with the medical theme.

*Joe Bob makes a joke about Dustin Hoffman being a midget who has to wear platform pimp shoes. ha

*Two patronizing ads to talk about. One w/ a less manly man who needs to get a mid sized Sonoma pick up truck like a "real man." Another about a old maid going to Tru Value to pick up (not truck) a can of paint to match her cat's furball.

*Eggo's new microwave pancakes (I'm sure they're edible?) make a dad believe he's a short order breakfast cook at a greasy spoon diner. One where truckers show up in a family's kitchen in the morning. If truckers are showing up in your kitchen, uninvited, it's not for griddle cakes. It's cause you're gettin' raped.

*Wanna check out what whitebread 90s peoples looked like, view this "So easy to use, no wonder it's #1" America Online 1 800 number commercial

*"Come see the softer side of SEARS" Short story, every time I used to go to the mall ,I somehow ended up entering thru the SEARS appliance section. So, first I was greeted by refrigerators, washers, dryers, color tvs (Dire Straits, wink). The softer side, the SEARS clothing section, was way off in another part of the mall. Some tucked away corner. By the time that I was there, mall anxiety was really getting to me. I wanted to Tom Savini "Dawn of the Dead" special fx kill a few mall motherfuckers. Not really. I'm more timid & just wanted to run back out the way I came thru all the appliances.

*Joe Bob talks about Rip Torn being a good ole Texas boy & having starred in an episode of I Love Lucy. Joe Bob doesn't really like Lucy (me either) but feels like he's seen every episode (me too for some reason).

*Joe Bob blames Nick at Nite for classic tv osmosis, & says we're better off watching "hick at nite." I definitely digged TNT's Monstervision & 100 % Weird, but there were a few late nite Nick at Nite shows worth watching like F-Troop & Dobie Gillis among others

*"Get back to the groovy 60s" w/ flower power & free love? No. McDonald's Big-Macs & fries instead. The secret sauce is almost as good as sex & for 49 cents, the same price a burger was in 1969, I'm in. Don't take the brown acid or Grimace will really freak you out, mannnn!

*Kinkos guido competitors think it's better to have comedy than color printing. Not a bad ad going off one viewing & not having it ran into the ground like tv ads' fate goes.

*"Smile you got French's Smile you got fun." French's mustard. Smile you got heartburn. Smile you got a nasty yellow stain on your white t-shirt. Points for the dog, in the ad, w/ a whole hotdog held sideways in his mouth w/out swallowing. That had to have lasted all of 2 seconds. Dogs swallow everything whole in seconds.

*Cute commercial w/ live bears dressed up like a mama bear & her school aged children little bears. She dresses them up in backpacks & sends them off into the woods to go to school. She packs a lunch of rice krispie treats in wrappers. Bears & people food don't mix. The bears probably destroyed the set to eat all the sticky candy & mauled a few school children once they got to school.

*Motorola phones & pagers give NYC hipster yuppies "wings." It's a fashion model / actress who attended suit & gown parties while also keeping it real w/ her across town jeans & t-shirt boyfriend. Not sure how many regular folks had a cell phone at this point. Pagers were pretty popular yet ghetto.

*Campbells tries to give moms the delusion that their teenage sons will leave the bedroom & the Playstation long enough to have a family meal in the kitchen.

*Hip Hop tapdance meets RiverDance meets the Salsa dance in a TOPS appliance ad. Why they needed to spice up an appliance store grand opening is just a sign of the popularity of River Dance crap at this point in the 90s.

*TimeWarner cable, it's like a bagel penetrated by the Empire State building. No, really, that's the image they put on the screen. Not sexual subliminal at all, wink wink. Either that or they're saying, "Fuck you, New York, pay your overpriced TimeWarner cable bill, 'cause we got our figurative giant dick up your ass!"

*Joe Bob claims to have been kicked out of a convent of nuns. Fox in the hen-house.

*I think it's important to view these old (not too old) ads, because the sinister hand appears, & is more visible given the historical context. It shows that sinister hand has always been around trying to make the world outside the hamster wheel seem prettier than it really is.

*Wear Target clothes & look like a model photographed in stunning black & white photography Yep.

*Tony Danza is the boss of fifty percent off collect calls. These collect calls ads were the pathetic celebrity precursor to things like Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice & Dancing w/ the Stars.

*Preview for James Garner in a TNT original movie along with Kathleen Turner. Ted Turner had a real hard on for old actors like Garner.

*A Geico car insurance fairy ad. Geico were already torturing people at this point? Hmmm.

*Another Geico ad w/ a business guy bumming a ride on the back of a chicken truck w/ feathers flying in his mouth & all over the place. Quirky, but still Geico, & they've worn out their welcome long ago.

*Joe Bob & Reno the Mail Girl discuss Bill Clinton lowering the standards of America's women w/ his flawed Southern charm & looks.

*"Words instead of letters" to the tune of "Sweet nuthins" on Motorola Wings pagers. The era of text messages has begun. Interesting ad for historical purposes.

*A pretty lady leans out of the darkness, turns on a light, & says "Do you see the tar stains on my teeth or smell the tobacco on my breath?" Well, no I don't have smell-o-vision & whatever happened to Targon mouthwash? Smokers just don't give a shit anymore. The rising price of smoking (health, money, & legally) has worn smokers down.

*Clairol hair color. Coloring one's hair can make that person feel like a "natural wo-man."

*Joe Bob thinks that the TNT censors are out to blur comatose boobs because they mistakenly think the sight of them will make people wanna screw nekkid corpses.

*Joe Bob ridicules the plot holes & foolishness involving bumbling security guards & a heroine who is clued in but clueless.

*Coma: A sleuthing surgeon almost sinks trying to stop a corrupt hospital conspiracy of organ harvesting for profit & having a social climbing coworker boyfriend (Michael Douglas) who doesn't, til almost her end, believe her conspiracy.*

running from 2 to 2 1/2 stars for Coma, 3 for Joe Bob, & 1 1/2 for the ads

--------------------------------

The Young Turks: Fox News's War On... Sharks *Clear the waters, sharks, people are number 1.* 2 stars (edit years later: I used to occasionally get news from the turds at Turks. how dumb.)

Public Access: "Live TV Prank Calls To Pro-911 Communist Public Access Host" (youtube) *Bluff & guff.* either 1/2 or 1 star

James Randi & Psychic Crime Solving *Police don't officially use psychics but often rely on their illogical detective work.* either 1/2 (what'd you expect? other than sensational lies by the psychic. which this time didn't happen. therefore dull reading.) or 3 stars

==== The Comfort Zone w/ Ray Comfort:

"Ray Comfort's New Homosexuality Movie" ("Audacity" ha...)

*"People were begging" this Aussie sounding evangelical, Kirk Cameron's buddy, the guy who debated, along with Kirk, atheists.

They were begging him to make a movie about gay ole homosexuality in the non-happy sin sense.

He's also infamous for a video where he talks about evolution & creation using a banana as an example.*

runs from 1 to close to 2 stars

(He's rather polite & there's not a lot of hate towards gays as usual w/ these things.)

(edit, years later:

when you're a shitlib supporter of gay rights, you put them up on a pedestal.

not realizing how truly degenerate they are.

this is way before I saw pics of what really goes on at pride parades.

where oral & anal sex takes place on the street along w/ half naked men in leather & clown outfits performing spankings & bondage acts.

many times, other non-gay themselves equal rights, for queers, supporters (like i was) would bring their families (including children) there to support these pride marches. that's a folly that should open more eyes. not sure it does when one is that blinded w/ the mindset of "don't judge" & "love is love"... ugh... smh in disgust & shame

here I was poking fun at a dumb evangelical (man of faith in a faithless world. an easy target.) & his banana folly

while thinking anyone else was intolerant or ignorant for holding onto tradition in the face of such odd & socially dysfunctional behavior.

forgive me.)

================================================================================

Conan on TBS: James Bobo Fay Got His Hands On Sasquatch Semen *Bobo is willing to "take one for the team" of bigfoot hunters. In the name of pseudo-science & love.* 2 1/2 stars

Kenny vs. Spenny: Who Is Cooler? *Kenny overdosing on black tar heroin or Spenny, Kenny's caring nurse, dressed up like a "Greek rapist" (Johnny Depp)? The obvious loser gets locked in a cold meat locker.* close to 3 stars

"Fan Made Dominos Pizza Commercial featuring a fake The Undertaker" *Okay, so it's the Summer of 1992? It's a few months before the World Wrestling Federation pay per view wrestling show "Summerslam." Beware though The Undertaker has been missing for months. That's not the strange part, no, the strange part is that The Naked Gun's Leslie Nielsen had been out searching for him in vignettes. Dominos pizza was the sponsor. Here, some real nerds borrow a vhs camcorder, their Dominos delivery gremlin of a car, & a nighttime cemetery to film one of their friends dressed up like their hero, The Under-taker, lurking behind a tree while, in said graveyard, ordering pizza through the power of the darkside? Not exactly sure, but he got them to deliver w/out paying for the pizza & only leaving an autographed picture of himself as a tip.* 3 stars for absurd effort

Look Around You: Food *Vegetable orchestra for the Feast of Saint Frankenstein. Featuring a piping hot casserole made out of recycled & dehydrated food that pushes the fat right out of the skin. Or you could stay home & celebrate your birthday with a delivery medicinal-pizza.* close to 3

"New Orleans Airwaves - The Mystery Morgus Episode" *Serialized & shot on grainy film, circa 1960s, mad science lab hijinks w/ all the gloriously ghoulish trappings.* more than 2 1/2 stars

--- Everything Is Terrible:

*Christian Star Wars: It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for an Imperial lazer beam to penetrate the soul of a believer.* 3 stars

*Anybody Can Make Chili Dogs: Knock on a stranger's door & share the message of love topped w/ a variety of condiments to mask the bland taste of grinded pig's anus packaged in a tube form.* close to 2 1/2 stars

*Machine Gun Magic: "They're not for everyone." Just those who can't get enough of that tat-a-tat-tat action.* 1 star

*Police Scanner: The suspect appears to be an obese house-cat.*

either 1/2 a star or fair

*Why Wait For Heaven: The babyboom generation were really susceptible to cult thought & behavior.*

either 1 or 2 1/2 stars (eye opener, I'm now a mindless believer)

-------------------------------------

Manimal: Night of the Beast *Simple bear necessities of wildnerness life trying to be corrupted & turned into a casino resort for the mafia. Robert Englund (not quite Freddy just yet) vs. Manimal. There's a destructive claw, in the movie, but it's not Freddy's. It's Manimal in a ridiculous looking bear suit.* 2 1/2 stars

Men Without Hats - Safety Dance (Literal Version) *"Whack a midget's ass."* 2 1/2 stars for literal 3 stars for original

Angry Video Game Nerd: Seaman for Dreamcast *It has Leonard Nimoy. It eats time & knowledge. It says / does "fuck." It's not logical... or is it? (Cue creepy sci fi music)* 3 stars

The Young Turks: Man Breaks Leg Attempting To Rape Horse *Sadly "it wasn't his first "rodeo"..."* 1 star

Hannibal: Fromage *Lures & lutes. Hannibal gets into a kung fu showdown w/ a fellow serial killer.*

3 stars

Penn & Teller Bullshit!: PETA & Eat This! *Ethical? No. Infact, insanely evil. Emaciated? Yes. ------ Stop expecting results. Start exacting change. Avoid batshit crazy activists at all cost. They'd starve us all.* 3 stars

---- Memory Hole:

*I'm Obese Song: Just tryna tell you people that I'm messed up.* 3 stars

*Meatsack Worshipers: It puts the cow tongue on its skin or else it won't ever get Fritos again.* close to 3 stars

*Salad Tossers: Hidden Valley's behind closed doors food fetishes.* 2 1/2 stars

*Satan's Dinner Prayer: Dig in, hooves first.* close to 2 1/2 stars

*Dance Til U Puke: Achy Breaky Rappers never die. They cry "unbutton my fly."* 3 stars

---------------------

"Munchies" (1987) *Roger Corman produced Gremlins ripoff starring Harvey Korman as a polyester sleazeball bumbling villain. Exists in a quirky America similar to Tim Burton's "Mars Attacks."* running from 2 down to 1 1/2 stars

---- Reel Wild Cinema w/ Sandra Bernhard : Supernatural Sirens

*Creepy Mexican 1940s Universal Horror looking horror short called "Curse of the Crying Woman." Pretty darn creppy, and much more depraved than Universal Horror.

*Sandra wants to slap a bitch (The Crying Woman) & then go get a massage (ha)

*Sandra says not to mess with the hearts of Texas witches or sell your soul to Hollywood

*"The Naked Witch" a story about Bruce Campbell's hipster twenty something year old uncle riding the backroads of Texas, in the 1960s, accidentally bringing back to life buried & vengeful femme fatales. while all the time narrating to himself about it.

*Sandra drops some info about the director of "Naked Witch" filming another flick called "Naughty Dallas" in a strip club owned by Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin Jack Ruby

*Comedian Dana Gould joins Sandra to talk about capes, masks, & restraining orders.

*Sandra gives a hilarious history lesson on Mexican imports including pain killers, ponchos, various other things from Tijuana, & most of all El Santo horror/sci fi movies

*"Samson vs. The Vampire Women"... Watch as El Santo gets "monkey flipped," then puts a werewolf in a "camel clutch" wrestling submission hold. I love typing that sentence.

*1950s retro ad where a woman shows off her Playtex magic plastic bra as she turns completely invisible, except for her underwear, in a grocery store of all places.

*Dana talks w/ Sandra about his friendship w/ Ed Wood's starlet Vampira (sp?). Great story about how she met a rollerskating Bela Lugosi on Hollywood Boulevard. Ha. awesome.

*"The Girl in the Cage"... a 1960s kooky nudie short minus the nudity. We can watch the kitschy siren paw at her bamboo prison, but no nudity. 'Cause even though we're all adults & this is late night, the Puritans who wouldn't ever watch this, & the kids, whose parents ought to have them in bed by late night tv time, might get offended. Nice jungle girl strip tease, none the less.

*Buy a Viva Santo t-shirt from this 1 800 number ad. Do it before Hot Topic puts it up at their store & makes it not cool to wear anymore. Shortly after, they did.

*Grindhouse coming attractions commercials for "The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman"... "Devil Woman" a cobra charming she bitch flick from Asia.... "Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico" a Frankenstein sexploitation feature....

*No surprise to find out, via the credits, that the show's "Film Doctor" is none other than the director of "Basket Case" & "Frankenhooker"

3 stars for the shorts & 3 stars for Sandra

----------------------------------

--- Crematia's Horrorscopes (old school tv horror host):

*Aries "A man w/ a glass eye will try to catch yours as his rolls under a table"... Not a bad way to meet. "Meet cutes" make me wanna puke. Glass eyes usually make me want to puke, too, This however I like.

*Taurus "A gardener will ask you to propagate. Don't do it. Ask him to fix the latch." If you have to be told not to screw your gardener, you need more than your horrorscope read. Gardeners don't look the way sexless middle aged women imagine them to be. No six-pack & tan. Only a mustache w/ bread crumbs in it. "Fix the latch." He's not a gynecology expert, either, I'm sure. If you can afford a gardener, you can afford a trip to the vagina doctor. We're already asking enough work, at slave wages, from our illegal help.

*Gemini "Cockroaches will stage a counter-revolution in your kitchen." Wouldn't that make the cockroaches already the oppressive regime in one's house if that were so?... No hiding when the lights come on. It's the humans crawling around in the dark trying to throw molotov cocktails in order to get access to the cereal cabinet or the fridge. Are they gonna booby trap cans of roach spray so that it will explode in the human's hands? That sounds more revolutionary than counter-revolutionary.

*Cancer "You'll be given a gift that requires batteries." This had to be tame in order to be on basic tv. But is a sex toy joke being worked in here? Not funny & probably not.

*Leo "A poultry farmer will ask you to do foul things, but you'll chicken out." Okay, maybe I was wrong about the last one not being about a sex toy. This is getting pretty grotesque. "Chickening out" hints at being interested in the first place. I don't know too many women or men who'd have to turn over in their heads the notion of doing foul things w/ a guy who more than likely smells of chicken feces even after bathing. Someone might be in to that. Someone w/out a gag reflex (I don't mean that in an oral sex sense).

*Virgo "A woman will view your clothing w/ disdain & offer you club soda." Bad joke.

*Libra "You'll attend a party that reminds you of a bowl of cereal full of fruits, nuts, & dates." First, you need some fruits & nuts to spice up a party. Aren't dates dried up fruit? Who'd want a dried up date? Not the fruit but an actual romantic interest... Who'd be at a party thinking about cereal? besides a really high stoner who couldn't wait to get back to their apt & watch cartoons....

*Scorpio "You'll be invited to the neighbors for a matzo ball but you won't know what to wear." If you're that culturally ignorant, then wear some of your Nazi memorabilia attire.

*Sagittarius "A grammarian will make rude comments about your dangling participle" that's pretty clever, I guess. unless your sexual partner is the grammarian.

*Capricorn "A fisherman will invite you to dinner. Go just for the halibut." Stay to look at his small dinghy. Surprised that she didn't say that too.

*Aquarius "A foreigner will misinterpret your body language & take you up on an offer." What's w/ all the references to stumbling into a bad sexual situation? People who follow the nonsense of the zodiac must be really paranoid about rape.

*Pisces "A phrenologist will ask to look at your wife's bumps." He's a doctor of small bumps. He's not a plastic surgeon wanting to give your wife bigger boobs.

Crematia has a dirty mind.

2 1/2 stars

---------------------------

GoodBadFlicks.com : "Bad Channels" *Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" radio airwaves alien panic meets early 1990s rock & roll cheese plus Full Moon Horror productions animatronics special fx work. Starring quirky & energetic MTV vj Martha Quinn.* close to 3 stars for the review

Idiot Box starring Alex Winter: Episode 1 *Raw animal urges & accounting.* more than 2 1/2 stars

Clerks TV Show Pilot (Disney) 1995 *So sanitized, Silent Bob would have Tourettes trying to sit through it. Jim Breuer would fit in pretty well w/ Jason Mewes.* close to 2 stars

The Daily Show w/ Craig Kilborn: 1996 Bill Clinton & Bob Dole Presidential Debate Coverage *Kilborn struggles to connect w/ the studio audience (I believe there was one & it wasn't just the crew laughing. Or maybe it was. Often quiet.. only minimal laughing noise). The correspondents of the Daily Show invade their first of many major political events. You could tell that the major news journalists didn't really know how to react to it. Nothing interesting to report from the snoozer debate. News of Sammy Hagar fired from Van Halen. A funny bit called "Tesh History" that I forgot about & remember liking back in the day. Craig interviews old school entertainers Joe Balogna & his wife Renee Taylor.* 2 stars

Nickelodeon Arcade (featuring the stars of Nick's Salute Your Shorts) *Donkey Lips & Buttlick (the redheaded scumbag pal of Edward Furlong in Terminator 2) go to a gameshow arcade ran by a quirky black dude in a colorfully loud shirt. The type of arcade that moms imagine. Ones w/ a green screen like on the weather channel & where kids wear bike helmets plus elbow & knee pads just to be safe.* 2 1/2 stars (fond childhood memory)

Reading Rainbow: The Salamander Room (1994) *LeVar visits a NYC zoo rainforest enclosure. Much love to Lynne Thigpen who was the voice of reading the story. An unsung hero of the show. Also, there's a reason the theme song is stuck in many an adult's head years & years after never hearing the song again. Good reason that is.* 3 stars

James Randi debunks an aura reader (youtube) *The aura reader had to pick out the auras or actually sillhouettes of strangers behind a thin white sheet. 2 out of 5 ain't bad, given it's all a game of chance & aura reading is bullshit. But, if I were the aura reader, I would claim that the 1920s style barbershop quartet top hats threw off their chakras.* 2 stars

---- TV Carnage:

*Seamless: On Dr. Phil, today a murder confession, tomorrow the tale of a clutterbug.* 3 stars

*The Bottom Line Is Nice Hair! No Matter How You Get It!: "There's a new you waiting" & he has teased bangs but no bald spot.* close to 2 1/2 stars

*Your Inner Piece: If you are wise, you won't let a white guy wanna be yoga master (yogi) put you into all kinds of awkward stretching positions that resemble sex positions.* close to 2 1/2 stars

*Women Look Amazing When They Fight: Noogies & short shorts. I miss America's Roman gladiatorial days of sexist lady athletics.* 2 1/2 stars

*Sylvia Dogs Do Rule Heaven: Saint Peter has a St. Bernard.* 2 stars

----------------------

Beavis & Butthead: Don't Call Me Dude - Scatterbrain *If you don't know the dude, it's rude.* 2 stars w/ riffing close to 2 stars w/out

Uncharted Zone: Gemma Cretella - Thesis Antithesis Synthesis *Pretentiously wordy hipster techno music white rapper.* 1 1/2 stars

Robocop: Zone Five *This series continues to borrow heavy from Batman & Frank Miller. There's a drug hitting the streets of Old Detroit that's similar to The Joker's laughing gas. The bureaucrats have turned a section of the most crime ridden part of the city over to vigilantes who secretly are the criminals supplying the drug. There's a psychiatrist agreeing w/ the criminals & he's a lot like Dr. Crane in Batman Begins. Robocop's son almost gets corrupted by the vigilantes, similar to a lot of Robin stories.* more than 2 1/2 stars

Rifftrax versus 70's Commercials from CBS's presentation of the Star Wars Holiday Special *"Always look for the union label" & the "extreme melodrama."* 3 stars w/ riffing 2 1/2 stars w/out

Occult Demon Cassette presents "Never Be A Victim" (1990s Stranger Danger) *Be alert, aware, & filled w/ awful anxiety. Has friendly Irish-Canadian police officer Jim scared the shit out of you, w/ his helpful hints about the horrific, yet or not?*  either 1 or 2 stars

"Madman" (1982) w/ commentary from cast & crew *Trends don't always have to be a bad thing. Following in the footsteps of Friday the 13th & Halloween, some young, determined filmmakers scrounge together enough resources to take a camp legend & turn it into another great entry into the early days of the 80s slasher genre.* 3 plus stars w/ commentary 3 stars w/out

American Gothic: Inhumanitas *To living we owe respect. To the dead we owe the truth. To the devil, Lucas Buck, a crooked lawyer owes money & also a corrupted preacher owes his soul.* close to 3 stars or 1 1/2 stars for the horrible CGI / unintentionally funny scene of a poor, old, black man's head on the body of the angel sister pretending to be a waitress.

"Warlock Moon" w/ audio commentary from Joe Bob Briggs *According to Joe Bob, San Francisco & Austin indie filmmakers may have traded ideas about turning the classic children's fable "Hansel & Gretel" into a horror flick. He suspects much marijuana was smoked in the process (ha). San Francisco produced this one, Warlock Moon, which Joe Bob says should have went by its other, much better title "Blood Spa." The Austin connection makes it very similar to & almost a sister film of "Saw" (Texas Chain, that is).*

3 stars w/ commentary & 2 stars w/out

The Higgins Boys & Gruber: Skinny Wizard *Tired of spending your weekend either jamming out to metal in your kitchen/den/living room combo or going to the mall w/ your devil worshiping friend Thad? Straighten up, thanks to The Parents Coalition for Good Tunes.* 2 1/2 stars

Jerry Springer: "I'm In Love With A Gay Vampire" *You'd think that it'd be a drain, but they're great emotional & spiritual support in a relationship or affair.* 1 star

Duran Duran: Rio (Literal Video Version) *"Sweet air saxophone dude, dude, dude, dude..."*

running from 2 to close to 2 1/2 starsw/ literal & close to 2 1/2 stars for actual

"Dirty Shary" ---xxx--- (1985) *She's got a 44. No, not a handgun. A 44 double d breast size & she's using it to somehow help take down a white slavery sex ring.* more than 2 1/2 stars

Cheaters: Anesthesiologist Finds Cougar Wife Cheating *Menopause shouldn't mean a skanky girls nite out addict should pause gettin' some from douchebag hunks just 'cause her hubbie specializes in dulling sensitivity.* zero stars

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Mitchell *"Leaves behind the "great" smell of brute." Joel also leaves behind a great legacy, fleeing in an escape pod after this awful movie. This movie is more anti-drug idiotic than Reefer Madness. Joe Don runs around being a supposed to be loveable drunk, but isn't, always chugging a six pack & shooting first or causing someone else's violent demise, even at one point an innocent helicopter cop partner. However, he's on his moral high horse in forced comedic interactions w/ his high class escort girlfriend who he's always shoving around & hauling off to jail for a small amount of marijuana. Hypocritical. That's on top of the rest shit movie smeared in 70s era country western trucker lowlife swagger Americana b.s. (not just in the also awful soundtrack & not in any cool way).*

more than 2 stars w/ Joel's last MST3K riff & 1 star w/out

5 Dollar Wresling: Storm Maverick, Your Next 5 Dollar Wrestling Superstar *He body slams his pillow, even though it's also his amigo, on his grandma's living room floor.* close to 3 stars

--- TBS Commercials May 12, 1988 (Part 3 on Youtube) ran during the Superstation Movie Presentation of "The Savage Bees":

*The announcer lady talks about how Thursday at 8:00pm prime time, TBS will be showing The Dirty Dozen w/ Lee Marvin & Ernest Borgnine. That shows the huge difference in old school TBS & modern "Very Funny" TBS. The Dirty Dozen is very manly whereas TBS's modern primetime lineup of "Big Bang Theory" is very unmanly.

*Preview for Frank Sinatra as a guest on Larry King Live on sister network CNN.

*80s mallrat tween girls dance about because Lee 'Press On Nails' have just been made for smaller hands.

*Partly animated Murine earwax removal system commercial. My grandparents were of the Depression/WW2 generation. By the late 80s, they were already retired & living comfortably. Products & ads like this remind me so much of their medicine cabinet. TBS reminds me of them, as well. Old war movies, westerns, & Americana sitcoms / dramas.

*A New York Giants linebacker, in full gear, in his locker room spraying athletes foot cure spray on his toes. The brand is NP-27, & the can couldn't have a more generic yellow & red color scheme design or bland logo. Probably why the product didn't last...

*Sleepinal to help 80s adults fall asleep fast. The milquetoast ad man for Sleepinal puts me to sleep just looking at & hearing speak.

*Quirky promo for prehistoric time travel feature "The Land that Time Forgot" on Grandpa Munster's Super Scary Saturday on the Superstation.

*Remember those old Time Life music compilation commercials? The ones where some forgotten entertainer would stand alone in a studio & sing a few lines from each of their hit songs? Well, here's one for "Get the Very Best of Ray Stevens" & Ray is at his best (worst?) as he sings his tunes while dressed up in costumes fitting each silly song. Whitetrash variety

*"Munster, Go Home" promo coming on Saturday afternoon on the Superstation.

Ah, I so miss old school TBS Superstation

A very biased for nostalgia reasons 3 stars

------------------------------------------------------

Extended Play on Tech TV 10/12/2001? *Extended Play was such a better name than X Play. X for xtreme, I guess, sounds like something a group of smarmy ad people sat around & did focus groups to come up with a "cool" title. Adam Sessler a thick head of spiky Billy Idol hair too. There's also no nerd sex object Morgan Webb to lust over. Talk with a visionary computer gaming studio ,Xulu, who wanted to have a realistic space travel simulator. Sad news that the already dead, at the time, Sega Dreamcast wouldn't be getting Shenmue 2, & instead X Box would. Preview for the classic, cute, & addictive "Super Monkey Ball."* 2 stars

Cracked.com : Why 28 Days Later is Secretly About Sex *Everything in this running zombies(? infected?) flick is a metaphor over frustration about humans' urges surrounding fucking.* either 1 star or 3

Brass Eye: Science *Some people say that heavy electricity isn't real. Those people aren't idiots or celebrities looking to be cool standing up for a cause they pretend to understand.* more than 2 1/2 stars

Forbidden Transmission 2: Cultural Fallout *Let's all smoke pot, dat damn fried chicken, do fag stuff. Shucky ducky, quack quack. Grab a slut & pee in her butt* 3 stars

Max Headroom: Baby Grobags *Planned Parenthood presents Baby Grobags from the makers of Hot Pockets. These bundles of joy are smarter than a 5th grader & an adult.* 2 1/2 stars

--- Cinema Insomnia w/ Mr. Lobo: Bigfoot, Mysterious Monster

*Retro 1970s ad for Mattel's Creepy Crawlers 'Thingmaker 2' from an era when little girls wore granny sized eye glasses. Awesome.

*Some 1960s era Go-Go dancing w/ upskirt shots of nice legs in pantyhose & white jungle babes.

*Mr. Lobo wants the viewer to suspend disbelief for the "Godfather of Grunge" Bigfoot

*1950s sci fi film star Peter Graves comes on camera, very grim, to tell the viewers of the film about its earnestness in documenting the truth about Bigfoot (snicker) & to warn them of the horror (let the exploitation begin).

*Vintage trailer for King Kong vs. Godzilla. In it, an American scientist talks about how King Kong's brain is bigger. Go America, boo Japan! Our monster is smarter. But did we not kidnap Kong from Skull Island in the Pacific? Shhh! He's a Yankee, now!

*Lobo & Graves both talk about the Loch Ness monster. Of course, Lobo does it more tongue in cheek. Loch Ness vs. Bigfoot... about as close as we could actually come to King Kong vs. Godzilla. That is if all the crazies are right & reality isn't.

*Parody of those old soft rock romance cd ads that would play on t.v. This one is for cult sci fi character Krankor. For only 9 payments of $9.99 own Candles, Krankor, & You. It will make you want to hug your significant other on a sunset beach while the waves gently break on your feet. Ah... romantic.

*Nice bumpers for Cinema Insomnia using old cartoons. One has a giant, angry motor oil can chasing a cute something or other...

*Lobo is keeping up w/ the latest crypto weirdo through UFO magazines & such.

*Graves tries to pass off modern lizards' ties to ancient times, including the funny little running on two legs lizard complete w/ wacky sound effects, to prove the possibility of Sasquatch... He's no Darwin.

*1950s ad for Gravy Train dog food "Makes it's own gravy" & "looks like beef stew" if you believe Johnny, the hound's owner. Go ahead, Johnny, take a bite. You know you wanna.

*"This could be your terror!" "This could be your city!" so it says in a vintage trailerf or Rodan. The early days of the atomic age had people actually wondering if that were true or not. Or at least shelling out a nickel or dime to see monster carnage.

*American history lesson on Sasquatch. He ("they") migrated from Asia. Oh, no, don't tell Donald Trump. Also, a Brit team, in the 1800s, possibly captured a young one & named it "Jacko." Hmm... a young, repressed weird boylike creature named "Jacko"... Why am I reminded of a chimp named "Bubbles" & a pursuit of The Elephant Man's bones...

*Lobo is having stomach problems out in a park restroom on his hunt for Bigfoot. He'll find another big, hairy manlike creature instead. The North American Gay Bear fetishist.

*Gigantis, the Fire Monster trailer. Bigfoot as an excuse for all the kaiju krazy

*Graves tries to argue the importance of oral statements on Bigfoot to a scientist. The scientist doesn't buy it. He wants hard scientific evidence. Graves brings up the fact that the courts relied on such testimony. Thank science for physical scientific evidence coming into play more now in the courts. It's not 100 percent perfect, yet, but it's far better than a jury believing the same person, in a real trial of importance, who had earlier given a sworn report on their encounter w/ a mythical creature.

*An adult Bigfoot believer recounts his time out camping w/ his Boy Scout troop when Bigfoot was caught sniffing their underwear late one night. This caused the boys to squeal like a Girl Scout. This only proves that Bigfoot belongs not in the list of known species but instead on that of sex offenders.

*Chilly Dilly "The Personality Pickle" a cartoon pickle spokesperson who looks like Jimminy Cricket. A portable pickle snack. Snacks have come a long long way. Picklemania ran wild.

*Lobo visits w/ the director of "Bloodthirst, the Legend of the Chupacabra." American woodsmen are afraid of Bigfoot & Mexican desertmen(?) fear "Goat Sucker."

*Trailer for the above mentioned flick. Looks very low budget & shot on video. Also like a vampire flick instead of a monster flick. The director explained that he believed the Chupacabra was actually another Mexican/South American legend called the Mocha or something Vampire. He admits fans & critics hated his Chupacabra re-imagining & I can easily see why. It sucks.

*Chocolate Toddy dairy bar snack in a can. It's 1950s white people approved. Mooooooo! The poor dairy bar worker guy. What a lame uniform.

*Suburban Sportsman is odd & I don't know what to make of it. A sort of travelogue of Area 51 conspiracy theorist visiting the base, looking at dead sheep corpses, & then going out on the salt desert to use their high powered pistols to shoot lizards for lunch.

*Again, Cinema Insomnia makes good use of stock footage for their bumpers. Comforting midnight jazz & a moon filmed for some long ago tropical flick now shown in timelapse sliding across the night's horizon. Doing late night tv, right.

*Escape from the Planet of the Apes trailer. When the apes arrived here via space ship to the astonishment of the U.S. army. The Ancient Aliens tv show guy w/ the crazy hair... He looks like a Tim Burton concept sketch for his Apes failure of a movie.

*Graves visits a psychic detective w/ a Bigfoot plaster cast hidden in a suitcase. The quack guesses correctly. If it weren't obvious that Graves was fucking w/ the viewer, before, it should be now.

*Lobo tries to hypnotize a waitress into revealing whether or not she served Bigfoot a cup of Joe as one of her countless customers over the years.

*Trailer for the awesome looking stop motion 50s giant monster flick "The Black Scorpion."

*Lame & long winded joke interview w/ a 5th grade teacher about Bigfoot being his former student. Only gets funny w/ a short part about Bigfoot hitting puberty & being smelly.

*1940s looking safety film clip about numbskulls taking risks & turning into grotesque looking figures wearing scary as shit masks from that time period. I think the masks were supposed to make them look like comical fools, but to the modern eye it's ole timey uncanny valley horrifying.

*Lobo sits on a nice pier interviewing Bigfoot's awkward prom date who seems to never have gotten over that night. She claims Bigfoot had a tiny penis.

*Lobo talks w/ Bigfoot's former roommate in college. The hipster playing the part makes sure the shot is framed w/ a Buffy cast photo magazine, a Doctor Who laser disc or vinyl album, & his Superfriends cartoon t-shirt.

*A bunch of hippy investigators went out in the woods w/ tranquilizer guns & cameras to find evidence to force the scientific community to "take a more active role in the hunt for Bigfoot" according to Graves. Also according to Graves, they only came back w/ a handful of fecal matter & hair. Sounds about right. Hippies + or - Bigfoot = Hair + Shit.

either fair or folly for Peter Graves pseudo documentary, 3 stars for Cinema Insomnia's ads & bumpers, more than 2 1/2 stars Lobo, close to fair for the guests

-------------------------------------------------------

Chiller Theater Presents: Doctor Moreau's Happy Pills (youtube) *If only they'd invent a solution to everyday ills.* close to 2 1/2 stars

"Marc Maron Predicts the Future" (youtube) *Doomed, bored, & further restricted. Marc nailed it.* close to 3 stars

Rich Hall: Supermarket Sniglets --1983-- (youtube) *Made up words that should be in the dictionary. An early urban dictionary, but more cleverly absurd & stomachable & not awful slang related.* close to 3 stars

Bill Maher's "Religulous" *Take it on faith & do it because you've always done it, dammit.*

more than 2 1/2 stars

[inkfilm]

The Best TV of 2016

I watched way too much TV in 2016, so I decided to put together a list of the best new and returning shows. Each section is roughly in order.

New Shows

American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson

A powerful retelling of an era-defining event anchored by exceptional performances. I slept on this for too long.

Atlanta

A hilarious, poignant, and bizarre series from Donald Glover - who knew it would be this good? Great performances, fantastic storytelling, and deeply funny writing.

Search Party

Alia Shawkat kills it in her first lead role playing Dory, a directionless young adult who finds herself obsessing over the disappearance of a college acquaintance who was nice to her once. A powerful mixture of Broad City-style New York millennial comedy and detective-style thriller mystery with a truly amazing ending. Watched 7 of the 10 episodes in one day, and I almost never binge-watch.

Lady Dynamite

Maria Bamford's anxious, bipolar energy really shines in her Netflix series. Starts off real odd but comes together beautifully toward the end of the season as it approaches mental illness and newfound semi-stardom.

High Maintenance

An obscure Hulu web series becomes HBO's best new comedy, though it's not really all that funny. Fantastic characterization and insight into human (and other) relationships.

Planet Earth II

More of the same - meaning gorgeous and mind-blowing nature footage captured with cutting-edge technology and narrated by David Attenborough. Each episode ends with a fascinating segment outlining the challenges they faced while shooting.

Chewing Gum

Technically released in Britain in 2015. Manic, dirty, and hilarious.

The Crown

A compelling, sumptuously produced royal drama that brings real life to the British Monarchy. Could use a little more action.

Baskets

Great tragicomedy with excellent performances.

Westworld

Gorgeous, unsettling, thrilling, and a little repetitive.

Braindead

Weird, fun, addictive. Wasn't renewed but kind of ran out of things to do anyway.

Stranger Things

Superb storytelling and soundtrack, but didn't have much to say.

Channel Zero: Candle Cove

Wait a minute, you're telling me that there's a Max Landis-produced show based on creepypasta?! And it's actually GOOD?

Returning Shows

The Americans

The best show on TV just gets better and better. Took me a while to get into it, but I'm thoroughly hooked. Thrilling, unbearably suspenseful, touching, horrifying, tragic, and sometimes pretty funny.

You're the Worst

Takes over for Broad City as the best comedy on TV. An exceptional season made better by shining a spotlight on the only character who isn't the worst.

Broad City

Still amazing, though the fawning Hillary Clinton guest spot rubbed me the wrong way.

Rectify

Touching, slow human drama comes to an exceptional end.

Silicon Valley

It seemed like it might get stale, but this was the best season yet.

Bojack Horseman

"Surely they can't go any darker than last season..."

Transparent

I don't know what it is about those Pfeffermans, but I can't stop watching.

Mr. Robot

Getting really strange. Captivating, innovative, and well-made but not as good as season 1. Spent a lot of time building up to what's basically a cliffhanger. Great but still disappointing.

Regular Show

Still the best 11 minute animated comedy about a bluejay and a raccoon who work for a gumball machine.

Documentary Now

Juan Likes Rice and Chicken was amazing, but their Talking Heads parody was a big letdown.

Lovesick

Netflix wisely decided that naming a show "Scrotal Recall" was too much even for a streaming service. Enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would.

Other Shows I'm Still Enjoying (but don't have much to say about)

Jane the Virgin

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Better Call Saul

Steven Universe

Superstore

Bates Motel

Ash vs. Evil Dead

Game of Thrones

Fresh off the Boat

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Veep

Bob's Burgers

Other Thoughts

Black Mirror

San Junipero is basically a masterpiece, I really enjoyed Nosedive and Hated in the Nation (which reminded me of an X-files movie), Men Against Fire was OK, and Playtest and Shut Up and Dance truly sucked.

Luke Cage

Started off strong, but really lost steam after the first few episodes. Jessica Jones is still my favourite Marvel Netflix series.

South Park

Kind of a scattered mess this season, and not all that funny.

The OA

I loved Brit Marling’s writing and performance in Another Earth (see avatar), so I really didn't want to believe Alan Sepinwall when he trashed her new Netflix series. He was pretty much on the ball - The OA is a hot mess wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a pretty good-seeming drama series.