Author: Mark Alexander

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Did They Even Read The Book?

After a delay of over a year from its original scheduled release, the third and final installment of the Maze Runner trilogy finally hit the theaters last week. I saw it today and all I can say is…well…that was $7.50 and a little more than two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

Okay, I will admit it’s been a few years since I read the book, and I’m a little hazy on the small details. But c’mon. This was one of those films “based on” a book that the script writer obviously never actually read; the “based on” part being the title of the book, a few of the characters, and precious little else. I suppose I should have expected it; the previous film was just as off-script as this one,

It’s kind of sad because the first film was faithful to the source material and it was a genuinely interesting story. I guess subsequent marketing surveys convinced the filmmakers that there just wasn’t enough blowing shit up in the two subsequent books to attract their desired demographic. and changes needed to be made.

And oh…was there ever a lot of blowing shit up in this last film.

As I read in a review,”By the time the villainous scientist played by Aidan Gillen sighs in the middle of a fight scene, ‘Okay, that’s enough,’ you’ll have long since come to share his weariness.”

That about sums it up.

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Back When the World Was Sane




The desert radio tower in Pahrump, Nevada that beamed Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell across the continent for a generation.

I miss the golden days of the face on Mars, Open Lines, whatever looney outer space conspiracy Richard C Hoagland was cooking up, Linda Moulton Howe and the UFO nonsense, and of course the C Crane radio because Y2K.

That was when late night conspiracy radio was at its finest, before it descended into paranoid racism.

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I’m Going To Hell

“My buddy over at the bar and I are gonna go home and fuck like rabbits. We need someone to film it. Do you know how to work an 8mm?”

“Ladies, have I ever got a surprise in store for you tonight!”

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I Give Up

Insomnia is an evil, evil thing.,

It’s 3 a.m. I woke up about 90 minutes ago and haven’t been able to get back to sleep. I tried all the usual tricks: clearing my head, consciously staring into the black void, counting my breaths, counting backward from 1000, and going to my virtual “happy place.” I even took a goddamned Benadryl as a last resort and nothing. I reached the point where I couldn’t get comfortable (one dog was planted firmly at shoulder level between Ben and I and refused to move), and was just tossing and turning. I didn’t want to disturb Ben any more than I already had, so I decided to follow some advice I’d read once upon a time and just get up for a bit.

I’m hoping it works. Otherwise I’m  facing having to function tomorrow on 3 hours sleep.

Among the many thoughts that poured into my head while I lay there in the dark was something I’d wanted to do for some time: pass on some history.

If you aren’t the first owner/occupant of your current house, how cool would it be to receive an envelope in the mail from a previous occupant, chock full of photos of the house in years gone by—or even better, when it was new—along with a letter passing on some stories of things that happened while they lived there? I know I’d think it was the coolest thing ever.

I realized that one of the gifts of age is my ability to now do that for someone else. Actually, four someones. Two of the homes my family owned while I was growing up were brand new when we moved in. A third (a 1930s era bungalow now in a much sought-after historic district in central Phoenix) was only about thirty years old when we lived there. And finally, while I obviously have no “new” photos of the 200-plus year old farmhouse my grandparents owned in upstate Massachusetts from the 1950s to the 1970s, I do have many photos from that period as well as a few from the early 20th century that they’d acquired while living there.

All these photos are already scanned; all I have to do is print them out, write some letters, and mail them off.

People always say, “If these walls could talk.” Well, I have in my power in at least four cases to compel that.

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I Just Can’t Any More…

I am not generally one to cast aspersions on a fellow blogger (there are so few of us left after all), but I just can’t any more.

There is one blogger who I’ve been following for quite some time. He’s  gay, well-read, and at times a hilariously funny and spot-on reviewer of film and television. But lately, every other post has been about Call Me By Your Name. It’s like he orgasms at the mere mention of it. He’s admitted to thirteen screenings (and counting), and every newly discovered muscle twitch or sideways glance in a screening immediately generates a blog post.

Don’t get me wrong: I’d been eagerly looking forward to seeing this film based on his recommendations for months. I saw the film (which I might not have heard of at all had I not been following him) in December. I liked it. I’d like to see it again. (Ben was not as impressed.) I bought the soundtrack on limited-edition numbered blue vinyl for chrissake! God knows I have impure thoughts about Armie Hammer. But enough is enough, dude.

I understand it’s his blog and he’s free to write whatever the fuck he wants, just as I am. And furthermore I understand from his writings on the subject that this obsession stems in part from his own coming out story; like the young character in the film, this blogger’s first male-on-male sexual experience was with an older man while he was still in his teens, so I get how it reaches deep down inside him and tugs at his heart-strings. And if it takes him to his happy place, fine. But dude—please stop shoving this movie in our face on a daily basis! You’re starting to turn me off to it completely and I can’t be the only one who’s feeling that way. Or, better yet—as I suggested to him in a comment I left on the site which seems to have immediately been deleted—create a new blog that is nothing but Call Me By Your Name.

I like reading his other reviews, but frankly I’m at the point where I’m simply about to drop him from my feed for six months to see any sort of balance returns.

Oh scratch that…six months will be about the same time the BluRay of the film comes out. Let’s call it a year.

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Go Fast

the universe: Okay, you’re a human. I gave you free will and a conscious mind, so you’re free to do whatever you want. So what do you wanna do?

human: GO FAST

the universe: Well, you’re a perfect pursuit predator but if that’s the way you want to evolve, go ahead.

human, climbing on a horse: GO FAST

the universe: Wait what?

human, inventing the carriage, the car and the bullet train: GO FASTER

the universe: I IMPLORE YOU TO STOP

human, trying to figure out lightspeed travel: FAS T ER

human:

THEORETICALLY MAXIMUM FAST

the universe:

How will the people in the ship not get gibbed?

Because the warp drive doesn’t actually accelerate the ship, it just makes the space in front of it smaller and the space behind it larger. Or something.

it works like this

image

Objects cannot accelerate to the speed of light within normal spacetime; instead, the Alcubierre drive shifts space around an object so that the object would arrive at its destination faster than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws.

I love how mankind’s solution to FTL is just to bend to rules of reality a little.

the universe: ok human, with the physical laws as they are you can’t go faster than the speed of light.

human: ok, let me just figure out how to manipulate space time so I can go FASTER!

[Source]

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It’s All Chaos From Here On In

From The Palmer Report:

The sitting President of the United States has been caught committing serious crimes to rig the election in his favor, and then committing more crimes while trying to cover it up. The prosecutors have him all but nailed for obstruction of justice. The president is only left with no-win options. His popular support is weak and his own party is still trying to prop him up, but wary that a few more blows and it’ll become impossible. Donald Trump is now living Richard Nixon’s endgame nightmare, but the outcome is less predictable, because even Nixon wasn’t this mentally unstable.

Welcome to 2018, or 1974 revisited if you like. Trump now has his back against the wall. There are days where he appears to understand that, and days where he’s lost in a delusional haze, but the bottom line is that he’s not getting past this. Maybe he’ll agree to testify for Robert Mueller. Maybe he’ll tell the truth, which would incriminate him. Maybe he’ll lie, which would also incriminate him. Maybe he’ll plead the Fifth, which would incinerate what’s left of his presidency. We have no idea what he’ll do, because even he keeps changing his mind out loud.

We do know, however, that we’re entering a period of chaos. We can see it just from how rapidly the endgame moves are surfacing. Everyone from Trump’s current Attorney General and current CIA Director, to his former FBI Director and his former Acting Attorney General, have all testified about him for the Special Counsel. People like Rick Gates, who didn’t want a deal, now suddenly want a deal, because they know it’s now or never.

All of the players in this scandal are trying to figure out how to play chess in a manner which keeps them from going to prison, and at the center of it all is a mentally deranged “President” who is intent on playing Hungry Hungry Hippos. Deals and confessions and accusations and incriminations will now be the norm. Revelations and bombshells will now land daily, as everyone jockeys for position. Donald Trump’s remaining allies will launch whatever feeble or not-so-feeble counterattack they’ve been saving for the very end. Then we’ll find out that Mueller has had an entire deck of aces up his sleeve all along.

We don’t know precisely what will come next, both because this guy is too unstable, and because when the last guy was in this situation, this was roughly the point at which he quit. Nixon had the sense to understand that he wouldn’t survive the obstruction charges. He knew it was about to finish him politically, so he bailed. What would have happened if Nixon had refused to resign, and he were five times crazier and ten times stupider? Welcome to 2018. Trump will go down in the end. But it’s all chaos from here on in until he does.