The Sporadic Curmudgeon

My good friend and fellow cranky ex-Texan Rudy Balli has alerted me to the fact that Bush’s hometown paper has endorsed John Kerry for President.

Leon Smith, editor of the Lone Star Iconoclast, said:

If we lose subscriptions we lose them, if they put us under they put us under. But sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe is right.

Let’s hope this increasingly rare display of backbone doesn’t get the poor guy the Wellstone treatment. They’ll probably just smear his character and ruin him financially like they do everybody else.

Ain’t It Cool News is reporting a rumor that Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s anime masterpiece Akira is about to be remade by Warner Bros. as a live-action film. And who do the WB brain surgeons figure to be the right person to helm this incredibly complex, nuanced film?

None other than the mono-monikered Pitof, who apparently lost his first name in a horrifying thresher accident when he was a child.

Pitof was the Einstein that managed to make Halle Berry look like a ridiculous buffoon in the regurgitated hairball Catwoman. You know, the movie that pissed all over the original Catwoman backstory for no damned good reason other than that it could?

It’s possible that Warner’s will keep Pitof reigned in on this project out of deference to the millions of fans of the animated film. They take a very dim view of arbitrary changes to their established properties. Kind of like how they refused to allow Batgirl to be Alfred’s niece in Batman & Robin, because everyone knows she’s Commissioner Gordon’s daughter Barbara. Oh. Right.

We’re so screwed.

P.S. My Ain’t It Cool News comment is the one from uglyMood entitled “It might be okay.”

A wonderful man has passed: Pioneering filmmaker Russ Meyer died Saturday at age 82, after several years of ill health.

His old friend and gleeful co-writer Roger Ebert has written an affectionate tribute. In it, Ebert says, “He once told me there was no such thing as a sex scene that couldn’t be improved by cutaways to Demolition Derby or rocket launches.” That’s as accurate a snapshot of the man as you’re ever going to get, right there.

I spent a very happy afternoon with Mr. Meyer myself in the mid-eighties. He walked into the Hollywood art supply store I worked at one rainy afternoon. I recognized him immediately, and told him how much I’d enjoyed his movies over the years. (The first movie I went to after moving out on my own was Supervixens.)

There wasn’t anyone else in the store, and he hung out and talked to me about movies for well over an hour. This is especially remarkable because I was in the middle of a particularly offputting scruffy period.

He was very enthusiastic about a project he was working on, a filmed autobiography to be entitled The Breast of Russ Meyer. It never got made, unfortunately.

He led a big, unusual life, including stints as Patton’s cameraman during World War II and a Playboy photographer in the fifties. Plus, of course, he had relationships with many huge-breasted women and put them in very funny, charming movies where they kicked ass and disrobed repeatedly, and became famous, rich and beloved while doing it. A god among men, in other words.

Goodbye, Russ. We’re gonna miss you.

By his own admission, it’s not unthinkable. Evangelist Jimmy Swaggart recently televised his intent to murder any gay man that looks at him “like that” and then lie about it to the Almighty:

I’m trying to find the correct name for it … this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. … I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I’m gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died.

This is an extremely odd thing for Mr. Swaggart to say, given the alleged omniscience of his God, aka Jehova, Yahweh, the Big Kahuna, Mr. Cranky, etc.. Such pronounced cognitive dissonances are usually found only in the most disturbed members of society, such as serial killers and terrorists.

Another explanation could be that Mr. Swaggart simply doesn’t drink his own Kool-Aid, and has been riding the gravy-pulpit for decades by preying on the gullible and weak-minded.

In any case, it might be interesting to see if there’s any correlation between hate crimes and Swaggart’s travels. I’m not accusing Mr. Swaggart of anything, of course. I’m just sayin’ we should maybe keep an eye on him.

If you look just to the left of this paragraph, you’ll see the rare Whoops!/Food/Genitalia In The News icon combination. Stop and think a moment before making the decision to read further.

The Burlington Free Press is running a report about an ex-minister without a medical degree who has plead guilty to cutting off another man’s genitalia in an impromptu hotel-room sex-change operation.

Unfortunately, that’s not the worst part of this story by a long shot.

The willing recipient of the former God-jockey’s botched sleight-of-gland will be undergoing further surgeries to complete the procedure, yet was only convinced she’d been victimized after finding out about his “checkered criminal history, peppered with allegations of cannibalism and a pornography collection that included photographs of severed genitals.” He served time in 1992 for child pornography, and is currently being investigated for the 2001 torture and murder of a young man.

Given his demonstrated powers of persuasion, I’d say the Church lost a gifted advocate when he switched careers and became a full-time organist.

Editor’s Note: I’d like to take a moment to congratulate the uncredited writer of this AP story for the gleefully disturbing use of the word “peppered” in this context. Well done.