Burt Reynolds – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Saturday Music: Beer Run

I’m not saying this actually happened. Because it didn’t. But I may have been smoking cigars in the nude in my backyard when I got the idea, but that’s not legally actionable because I lie about a lot of things and you don’t have pictures.

It’s not a serious song, at all, the next one of those will be on Tuesday. Saturdays will probably be reserved for whimsical songs like this one. The uneven meter is intentional in order to be a bit chaotic due to the song’s subject matter, and I like the way it turned out.

Teasing tomorrow, I’m probably going to post the first twofer . . .

All songs to date are available at this LINK for your use in driving and jamming until we’re up on other platforms.

Cheers!

Beer Run
by John Wilder (apologies to Jerry Reed)

In the backyard drinking beer and smoking a cigar
If this doesn’t sound strange, well, we haven’t gone far
I was drinking Coors Banquet beer in the nude
Because I was solo in my hot tub, it’s not rude

A strange light came down from the sky
As I was only two beers in, I wondered why
A saucer came down and an alien popped out
I waved him over, so I didn’t have to shout

He said, “Hey there John, you’re who I’m looking for”
“We ran out of beer, and now we’re looking for more”
“The only thing we drink is Coors Banquet beer”
“But it’s totally illegal for us to be here”

I said, let me guess, your name is Snowman
He laughed and said, “How did you know, man?”
I said I can see you’re a friend of Jerry Reed,
Let me put on my shorts and we’ll see what you need

No homo

I can see you’re Earth bound and down, starship motor runnin’
You’re gonna do what they say can’t be done
You’ve got light years to go, so you’ve got to get gunnin’
You’re Earth bound, just watch old Snowman run

He laughed and said “You’re right,
“Getting beer, well, this was my night
“Since your blog is about having fun
“I figured Wilder would help on this here beer run”

John Wilder, you’re our only hope

I was only two beers in, and he didn’t know how to drive
So, I figured I could get us to the liquor store alive
We went out front and Snowman and I got in the truck
Snowman could right shotgun but just my luck

Just outside of my driveway I got pulled over by Smokey Bear
But Snowman pulled out a light and went on a tare
Snowman shined a light in the trooper’s eye
The trooper froze, I still don’t know why

Well, we went about twenty places
And picked up about sixty cases
Snowman said, Wilder it’s time to phone home
Don’t shake the beers up, we don’t want foam

I guess I did hit that bump pretty hard

We got his rig all loaded up
He poured me a beer in my cup
He said, “It’s been fun,
“But now, I gotta run

I can see he’s space bound and down, starship motor runnin’
Snowman did what they say can’t be done
He’s got light years to go, so you’ve got to get gunnin
He’s space bound, just watch old Snowman run

And then he left me there alone in the back yard.
I checked . . . hey, Snowman took my credit card!

I’m gonna need that tomorrow, for lunch
And beer . . .

It Came From . . . 1997

“The only good bug is a dead bug.” – Starship Troopers

Grok™ is getting better – this was a first attempt, and normally it requires a lot of wrestling.

OT: probably a Saturday song will drop tomorrow morning. I’ve got three more in can and think that two of the three are the best so far. I may even drop one on Sunday. We’ll see. Going forward I’m going to target dropping songs on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. As I’ve just started, there seem to be an endless spring of ideas that I’ve been hoarding up my whole life, and I’m enjoying making them come to life. Oddly, I’m my new favorite artist. Working on distribution, still on a steep learning curve.

Once again, were’ back. The high of the 1980s is far in the rearview mirror. Now we’re on the long slope down. Still, there were some fun movies. These aren’t necessarily the best movies of 1997, instead they’re the films I think really exemplify the year. As always, they’re in no particular order.

Waiting for Guffman – This is an ensemble comedy where I think the plan was that you have a basic plot and you let the talented, goofy people making the movie fill in the details. Silly? Yes. Life changing? No. One thing from this particular movie that I find very sad is that the opening scene shows the local cops planning on having sniper overwatch for a local harvest festival in a small Missouri town. It was funny in 1997 because it was absurd. In 2025 it’s not. I guess that’s just the price we pay for ethic food. I wonder why we didn’t import only the recipes?

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery – Mike Myers creates a parody of a James Bond® film. The particular genius is that the plot is just strong enough to hold everything together and not get in the way of the comedy. The box office was quadruple the cost, so that worked out okay for Mike. Bonus points for lovingly parodying the details of the Bond™ films, such as naming a female character Allota Fagina. Sadly, this caused the James Bond© producers to make the Bond® films less fun by hiring Daniel Craig.

Breakdown – There is nothing special about this movie other than it is a very competent thriller that couldn’t be made in the time of cell phones. Kurt Russell is good, and J.T. Walsh is suitably evil. Cinematic popcorn.

Men in Black – The X-Files™ was pretty big during this time period, so Hollywood decided to make a big budget science fiction comedy based on a fringe UFO topic. I was this many years old when I found out it was also based on a comic book. It made nearly $600 million 1997 bucks, which would have topped the box office for the year except for that pesky Titanic.

Contact – This was a decent movie, though not one where I look forward to seeing it again. It was decent, not great. Plot summary: aliens send us Hitler pics and instructions on how to build a wormhole.

Air Force One – More cinematic popcorn, where president Han Solo tries to kill Count Dracula on an airplane. Silly action fun.

Event Horizon – My favorite movie on this list. Huge critical and commercial failure and yet they nearly made a TV series based on it before COVID came along. Evil Scientist Sam Neill? Yes, please. If you like cosmic horror and haven’t seen it, you’ve been missing out. Warning: it’s not for the faint-hearted.

Kull the Conqueror – Robert E. Howard was the creator of Conan the Barbarian, and also Kull. This is based around his work, and was originally intended to be the third part of the Conan movie trilogy, but that fell apart. I’m glad. This movie is comfy and is its own thing. I loved it, and am perhaps the only one, since it only made $6 million on a $35 million budget. I guess I would suck as a test audience member.

L.A. Confidential – It came out in 1997, but I hadn’t seen it until recently. It’s a decent film noir, and Guy Pearce does a great job as a smart, young cop eager to get ahead. Huge hit, but I avoided it because I loathe Kim Basinger, who strikes me as a person with the intelligence of a basset hound.

Wishmaster – So an evil genie lives in a ruby. In one scene, the camera penetrates they gem, showing that it contains a vast cavern throne room inside the gem. In the cavern, it moves towards a dark, demonic figure sitting on the throne. During the scene, when the camera finally centered on the genie’s face, I said, “Just sitting ‘round, being evil,” and The Mrs. laughed uncontrollably. That’s now a family catchphrase. Other than that, I don’t remember anything about this movie.

Boogie Nights – This is a very good movie, showing how the depravity, drugs, and money of the porn world lead only to pain and dejection, but I’m sure OnlyFans® will turn out differently. Plus? Stark nekkid Heather Graham. Okay, I have contradictory motivations here. Also, one of Burt Reynolds’ best serious roles.

RocketMan – Cost $16 million to make, made $15.4 million. It was hilarious. The underappreciated Harland Williams plays an accidental astronaut whose space hijinks include space farts. It’s stupid-funny, so if you like adolescent humor, this is your show.

Bean – Rowan Atkinson is an engineer with a master’s degree and also a master of comedy. Who says engineers don’t have a sense of humor? Oh, and this film made $250,000,000.

The Devil’s Advocate – Soooooo much overacting in this horror movie which could have also been titled “Al Pacino’s Vocal Coach Is Seventeen Packs of Cigarettes a Day.” No real desire to watch this one again – it’s not a great horror movie, but everyone liked it, because the boxoffice of $153,000,000 was nearly triple the cost.

Gattaca – This movie is about the dangers of genetic engineering on the future, where it creates a society where beautiful, healthy people are everywhere and bad genes are bred out. The horror!

Starship Troopers – Whenever this movie comes up in the comment section everyone argues about it. Every time. Was director Paul Verhoeven trying to make Robert Heinlein look like a fascist and make the humans as the bad guys? Yes. Did almost everyone miss that? Also yes. To try to make fun of Heinlein, he had to actually quote Heinlein, which backfired in a big way. Heinlein’s ideas in the book Starship Troopers are pretty powerful, but also simple. They glimmered through Verhoeven’s attempt to make a woke film, which counts for most of the good parts of the film. But the other fascist elements he added for the parody boomeranged on him to such an extent that all of the GloboLeft critics he wanted to please by making fun of the TradRight thought Verhoeven was a fascist. I guess he sure showed the TradRight by being pro-human rather than loving bugs. My verdict? The only good things (which are very good) are the parts from the book. The rest is mediocre at best.

Once again, I was surprised on how many movies I liked from this year. Almost every movie is beautiful, but the attempts are being made to push the GloboLeft agenda even further, which is (along with foreign markets) what eventually choked Hollywood. I’m debating if we’ll do 1998, and if so, that’ll be in February.

What did I miss?

How Strippers Explain Life On Mars

“I’m telling you, don’t do it. I’ve got nothing against strip clubs, but I do have something against them at noon on a Monday. The day shift at a strip club? You can’t unsee that.” – The Office

I go to a quantum mechanic – he fixes and doesn’t fix my car at the same time, and I can’t ever be certain about what it will cost. (meme above and top meme as found)

Last week, NASA had a press conference on what they’re calling “the strongest evidence yet” for life on Mars. According to their announcement, the Perseverance rover had taken pictures of a rock sample dubbed “Sapphire Canyon”.

This is a coincidence, since that was the name of the stripper at my bachelor party. The rock was from a site called Jezero Crater, which I assume (based on her face) was the stripper’s real name. As I recall her face was a temporal anomaly: it could stop a clock. The only explanation for this was my best man was on a budget of something like $4.98.

The rock did not work for tips, however, but like the stripper it shows potential biosignatures dating back about 3.5 billion years. These biosignatures include organic materials, chemical reactions that mimic microbial activity, a g-string, and what the scientists called “leopard spots”, which I really hope can be cured by antibiotics.

The people who write press releases for NASA Scientists are cautious, of course; they emphasize that non-biological processes could explain it, like geochemical reactions under specific conditions. But after a year of peer review in Nature®, Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy went so far as to say, “We can’t find another explanation, so this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.”

Unlike Sapphire Canyon.

I hear that most electricians need to strip to make ends meet. (meme as found)

This isn’t the first time NASA has twerked and gyrated with the idea of Martian microbes. Let’s rewind to 1976, when the Viking landers touched down and ran their own biology experiments to hunt for life.

The Labeled Release experiment, led by Gilbert Levin, injected Martian soil with nutrients and watched for gas emissions that meant “metabolism!” These are, in layman’s terms, signs of life chowing down on the snot that NASA sprayed into the dirt.

Positive results popped up on both Viking 1 and 2, but NASA dismissed them. Why? Well, it appears that NASA wanted to not find life, and hunted for explanations high and low until they came up with:

perchlorates in the soil oxidizing everything to
it was Tuesday and we don’t do our best work on Tuesday, to
it was the Bicentennial and we were distracted by the shiny new quarters or
we won the war, go back to sleep.

The scientist in charge still insists to this day that it was life, but NASA just said, “Well, we don’t know what we were thinking with doing an experiment like that. How did you sneak it on the Viking? The experiment never could have found anything. Have you seen Smokey and the Bandit®?”

Fast-forward to the 1990s, and I recall the unveiling of Martian meteorite ALH84001. This fragment of rock, ejected from Mars about the time your mother was born 17 million years ago and crash-landing on Earth the time that stripper was born about 13,000 years back, contained carbonate globules with what looked like fossilized bacteria complete with hydrocarbons.

The scientists noted that these were possible microbial remnants from a wetter Mars. But skeptics piled on: “The fossils were too small because I can’t fit in one, the hydrocarbons could be from space dust or an Exxon® station, and we won the war so everyone should go back to sleep and have you seen The Usual Suspects?”

Do bacteria communicate by cell phone?

Now, we’ve made it to 2025. right on the dot with the rover findings pushing the timeline for life on Mars back to the Solar System’s dawn, around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.

I’ve predicted that we’d find evidence of life on other worlds before (I think but am too lazy to check) 2030, and intelligent life before 2040. Mars counts as “other worlds,” right?

I’m calling this as a win. We’ve ticked the box on “life elsewhere.” Dust off the telescopes, crack open the hot tub and light up a cigar.

Now comes the deeper question: Where did life come from?

Life on Earth is improbable enough. The current theory is that a cosmic vegetable drawer in the Frigidaire™ Galaxy sits for long enough where atoms randomly congeal just the right molecules to morph into RNA, then DNA, slap on some cell walls, and voila, you’re evolving from slime to Shakespeare in just a weekend.

The odds of that?

Astronomically against. Take protein folding: some proteins are so convoluted that the random chance of them assembling correctly exceeds the age of the universe by factors of 10 FOLLOWED BY 77 ZEROES or more. That’s not something that I’m making up. Actual biochemists have crunched the numbers, showing that even simple enzymes require precise sequences that blind luck couldn’t hit in billions of years.

It’s like expecting a tornado in a junkyard to assemble a functional air fryer, but with extra steps involving quantum hiccups, existential dread and daytime-quality strippers named Destiny. So, if life popped up on Mars around the same time as it did on Earth, both in that narrow window post-Solar System formation, random chance starts looking like a lousy bet.

I donated $100 to a charity for blind children, but I doubt they’ll ever see it. (meme as found)

Enter panspermia: the idea that life (or its building blocks) hitchhikes through space on comets, asteroids, or meteorites, seeding planets like dandelion fluff from the movie Alien.

I did a thought experiment and came to this conclusion: it’s the lazy way to colonize the galaxy. There is no need for warp drives and spaceships when biology, gravity, and time does all the work. Spew out spores into the void, wait for them to land on a Goldilocks world, and boom: mold on bread, except the bread is a planet.

Oh, wait: bread doesn’t mold anymore thanks to all those preservatives and microplastics. My bad.

Anyway, biological life is the universe’s perfect replicator, even better than A.I. It’s self-sustaining, adaptive, and cheap. Forget A.I. overlords; this is nature’s von Neumann probe, probing without permission, replicating, and repeating.

I sent it by itself and now its favorite cheese is probe-alone.

But here’s the rub: something had to kickstart the whole shebang.

Panspermia just kicks the can backwards in time: where did the original life come from? And don’t forget the timeline. Life as we know it, Jim, needs heavy elements heavier than the primordial hydrogen: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, the stuff that makes water, proteins, and yes, even PEZ®.

Those only form in supernovae, and it takes time to make enough of them so we’ve got the iron and phosphorus that we need to make steaks on a nice rocky world. The Solar System itself is just a punk at 4.6 billion years old, so early life on Mars or Earth had to brew from second- or third-hand atoms.

No heavy atoms, no guitars so no heavy metal.

What’s the simplest conclusion?

Hmmmm.

Yup.

Intelligent design. Life’s complexity indicates purpose, not at all an accident and the math shows that. To think otherwise is like finding an air conditioning unit in the desert and thinking, “Must be erosion.”

I did give up cleaning my dryer filter for Lent.

The canyon between life and not-life is so vast and the math is so brutal that Occam’s Razor slices away the nonsense, leaving design.

Your mileage may vary. But for now, Mars whispers, just like Saphire Canyon, “You’re not alone.” Whether that’s comforting or terrifying depends on your worldview.

But for me, in a universe this designed, even the stripper jokes write themselves. Life is the easy way to conquer the galaxy, so we have to ask ourselves, are we twerking hard, or hardly twerking?

It Should Have Been . . . 1970s

“Does your physical disability preclude you from coming to the point?” – The Eiger Sanction

In 1970, baseball pitcher Doc Ellis pitched a no-hitter while stoned on LSD, which is less impressive when you realize that in 1970 all the batters were on LSD, too.

The Oscar® is, after piles of cash, the biggest award in Hollywood™. It is when the industry votes on who they feel is the best of their very, very visible profession. Oh, sure, the people who influence more lives, like the guys who invent ways to clean water or manage the building of the interstate highway system get awards, but those are ignored because illegal aliens hadn’t made driving spicey again.

I’ve decided that I’d go through the decades (at least a few of them) and start comparing who won the Oscar™ versus who I think should have won for both best picture and best actor. Since Hollywood® now thinks that men are exactly the same as women, I’ve decided to skip the best actress and just name the one I think is hottest.

After going through all of the movies of the 1970s, they sucked. The 1970s was a dismal, joyless decade of crappy movies, for the most part, which is why my “It Came From . . . “ series is done going backwards into the past.

All movies are from the ones I’ve seen. There are a lot of movies I haven’t seen from the 1970s, and I’m probably better off for that.

Here we go:

1970

Best Picture: Patton. Biopic of, perhaps, the greatest tactical Allied general of World War II.

Should have been: Patton. Reason: I like tanks.

Best Actor: George C. Scott, Patton. Perhaps the best choice possible of someone who could play Patton.

Should have been: Donald Sutherland, Kelly’s Heroes. Disagree? Always with the negative waves, man. Plus, still has tanks.

Hottest Actress: Sandra Dee, The Dunwich Horror. Especially in that one outfit.

1971

Best picture: The French Connection. Didn’t see it because I don’t like the French.

Should have been: Dirty Harry or Vanishing Point (Tie). So hard to choose, so I decided I didn’t have to.

Best Actor: Gene Hackman, The French Connection.

Should have been: Kurt Russell, The Barefoot Executive. A very reserved performance from Kurt Russell of what should have been a long string of Oscars™.

Hottest Actress: Jill St. John, Diamonds are Forever. Honorable mention: The “more buoyant than her sister” Lana Wood (also Diamonds are Forever) in her role as Plenty O’Toole (named after her father).

1972

Best Picture: The Godfather. A movie that came together perfectly for Francis Ford Coppola and is now one that many view as one of the best movies ever made.

Should have been: The Night Stalker. This made-for-TV movie featuring veteran actor Darren McGavin about the exploits of a plucky Chicago newsman is simply more fun.

Best Actor: Marlon Brando, The Godfather.

Should have been: Ned Beatty, Deliverance. What goes on in the mountains, stays in the mountains.

Hottest Actress: No entry. I looked. Dismal. 1972 was probably the nadir for hot chicks in Hollywood©.

1973

Best Picture: The Sting. Long documentary about how people develop allergic reactions to insect venom that I saw in health class. I’ll pass, thank you.

Should have been: The Exorcist. Long documentary about Rosie O’Donnell’s childhood.

Best Actor: Jack Lemmon, Save the Tiger. No idea what this even is.

Should have been: Clint Eastwood, High Plains Drifter. Yeah. Guns. Dynamite. Retribution from beyond the grave. Yeah.

Hottest Actress: Mariana Hill from High Plains Drifter gets the nod – she is also Norman Schwartzkopf’s cousin, so, more tanks.

1974

Best Picture: The Godfather, Part II. Some people like it even better than the first one making it even more classic-er.

Should have been: The Man with the Golden Gun. Bond putting a midget in a basket so he can bang hotties? Yes.

Best Actor: Art Carney, Harry and Tonto. Seriously? Who voted for this crap?

Should have been: Sean Connery, Zardoz. Any actor that can wear that orange jockstrap for an entire movie and not laugh wins.

Hottest Actress: Susan Penhaligon, Land That Time Forgot. Not a lot of competition this year, and she looked great struggling against that quicksand.

1975

Best Picture: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Revenge fantasy where a Native American kills a white guy in the end.

Should have been: The Eiger Sanction. Clint Eastwood, spies, mountain climbing, double crossing, murder.

Best Actor: Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Should have been: Kurt Russell, The Strongest Man in the World. It should have been Kurt’s year, with this poignant portrayal of a victim of science gone mad.

Hottest Actress: That girl at the beginning of Jaws, but I think she was an acquired taste.

1976

Best Picture: Rocky. Tale of a bum who became a boxer. I can play the theme on a bass drum.

Should have been: Rocky or The Outlaw Josey Wales. I’ve seen Rocky two times, I think. I’ve seen The Outlaw Josey Wales about twenty, because when I flipped through the channels, regardless of where it was in the movie I’d watch it.

Best Actor: Peter Finch, Network. Sure, I’ve seen the same clip, but that’s all I’ve seen.

Should have been: Sylvester Stallone, Rocky. His perfect movie.

Hottest Actress: Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Logan’s Run. Close second? Jennie Agutter, Logan’s Run.

1977

Best Picture: Annie Hall. Crap.

Should have been: Smokey and the Bandit. Not crap.

Best Actor: Richard Dreyfuss, The Goodbye Girl, meh actor in crap movie.

Should have been: The Car, The Car. A much better actor with a much better range than Dreyfuss, since during The Car’s scenes, you could hardly tell he was a 1971 Lincoln Continental Mark III, which is pretty impressive acting.

Hottest Actress: Marilyn Chambers, Rabid. The Ivory Snow™ girl grown way up. Way up.

1978

Best Picture: The Deer Hunter, a how-to video on how to win at high-stakes Asian gambling.

Should have been: National Lampoon’s Animal House. Animal House was unique, in that it was a comedy that had a plot, yet the comedy never overwhelmed the plot until the end, and the writers gave up.

Best Actor: John Voight, Coming Home. The world did not need this movie. I don’t have anything against Voight personally, since he’s never hit me up for that $20 I borrowed from him.

Should have been: Tommy Chong, Up in Smoke. It’s amazing what life a Shakespearean-trained actor at Julliard and former astrophysicist Tommy Chong can bring to a role. Or in this case a rolled joint.

Hottest Actress: Annie Potts, Corvette Summer. Another rough year, I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find Annie.

1979

Best Picture: Kramer vs. Kramer. Kramer vs. Kramer was used to normalize divorce to a public that still regarded it as skeevy. Plus? Boring. It would have been better if it were just Michael Richards from Seinfeld arguing with himself for two hours.

Should have been: Alien, Apocalypse Now, The Jerk, literally anything but Kramer vs. Kramer.

Best Actor: Dustin Hoffman, Kramer vs. Kramer. Watching Kramer vs. Kramer made me wish that I could ask Dustin “Is it safe?” for a few hours.

Should have been: Angus Scrimm, Phantasm. Being the Tall Man was an understated role, all he had to do was be evil while the evil dwarves and spike-spheres had to do all the hard work.

Hottest Actress: Bernadette Peters, The Jerk. It was her or Sigourney Weaver in Alien, so I went with cute over space underwear.

Movies got (generally) better and women got hotter as the decade went on. Still, a far weaker decade than we’ll see when (in November) we get to the 1980s where the women were hotter and the movies were better. Oscar®? He still missed most of the best movies and performances, since even though movies were better, the voters of The Academy™ were stuck getting high on their own supply. Your take?

It Came From . . . 1978

“Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.” – Animal House

Grok® was feeling grumpy tonight.

1978 starts feels much farther from 1982, for instance, than four years. As I went through the films from 1978, they trend to be more focused on the past. As an example, of the top grossing movies of 1978, two are set in the 1950s/early 1960s (Grease, Animal House) and the third is a callback to a character that certainly hit peak popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, Superman.

11 of the major release films were sequels in 1978, compared to 25 in 1998, and 37 in 2018. Not remakes. Sequels. These are, as usual, excluded from the list.

The list is in the order that it’s in, and for no particular reason. It is what it is.

The Boys in Company C – Movies about Vietnam were popular in 1978, and this is the beginning of Hollywood coming to grips with the loss of that war. This one made the list because it was R. Lee Ermey’s first movie role. The movie then descends into some weird concept that the Marines need to learn to play soccer in order to beat the Viet Cong. In the end, everyone dies because they got bored playing soccer.

This has nothing to do with the movie, but I’m not going to let that stop me.

The Manitou – It’s awful. It stars Tony Curtis and . . . Michael Ansara? It’s also of an era where everyone starring in the movie is now dead, probably because this film was so bad it ended up killing them. It’s about Tony Curtis (a fake medium) coming into contact with actual Native American spirit power. In order to stop this, actor Michael Ansara plays an American Indian shaman. Basic plot: white people are awful and not spiritual and we killed off all the Indians so we had to hire a Syrian, Michael Ansara, to play one so he could use electricity to stop evil.

Grease – One of the big nostalgia pieces of 1978, it stars John Travolta as a Korean War veteran who meets an Australian in a POW camp. They escape through the use of a flying car.

Looks more like Billy-Bob Clooney Reynolds, but whatever.

Hooper – I really like Burt Reynolds. He had, especially after Deliverance, the chance to be a serious Hollywood star. He decided, “Nah, I’m in this for fun,” and spent the 1970s and 1980s doing whatever he wanted. Hooper is the result of that, as is his expensive divorce from Loni Anderson’s bosom. Hooper, though is not a bosom but a light action-comedy that has a plot that could have been written by two guys after downing a case of Schlitz™, which is probably what happened. It’s a silly movie. But it’s Burt’s movie.

“And your Delta Tau Chi name is . . . Dispenser.”

Animal House – Certainly one of the best comedies of all time if not one of the best movies of all time as well. It took Belushi from star to superstar, and grossed $142 million after being made on a budget of $3 million. It, too was a nostalgic look back, as the Boomers continued to consume movies about themselves – almost every movie on this list was made by an for Boomers. Oh, and it references Vietnam. As does . . .

Do two Chongs make a white?

Up in Smoke – There really isn’t a plot to the movie other than Cheech and Chong getting stoned, but it made massive money – $104 million on a budget of $2 million, most of which was probably spent on drugs.

It took my Brazillianth try to get this image.

The Boys from Brazil – The Boys from Brazil was probably the first time cloning hit the national consciousness. The plot is simple: escaped doctor Josef Mengele wants to clone an Austrian painter to . . . well, that’s unclear. Certainly not paint.

I told Grok just to have fun with that one, and I was pleased.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes – The plot is in the title. Ambulatory tomatoes go around killing people in a comedy horror film that is also somehow a disaster movie. The real joke of the movie is that there isn’t enough plot for a movie, yet it spawned three sequels. I think it succeeded because not because it was so bad, but it was intentionally bad in just the right way at just the right time, sort of like The Gong Show.

This one surprised me for the pun.

The Deer Hunter – Annnnnd back to Vietnam. Is this the darkest movie on the list? Certainly. When the Vietnam dam burst in film, it really burst. This movie is well regarded because it’s got great actors, an intense plot, and is perfectly put together. But it’s bleak. If it’s a movie about America, it’s a movie about a lost America under Jimmy Carter where we looked like the most likely superpower to collapse. But speaking about superpowers . . .

Grok came up with the logo himself.

Superman – It was the most expensive movie made up to that point at $55 million, and made $300 million, so this movie did not kneel before Zod. Was it a movie for kids? Certainly, but plenty of adults had to go see it, too. I think the plot is far too optimistic to be made today, and if Netflix™ were to remake it, Superma’am™ would be a proud black FtM transexual, since Superman™ is already an illegal alien.

Sally doesn’t like being replaced.

Every Which Way but Loose – Clint spent most of the 1970s killing people in places like San Francisco or the Alps, he decided he wanted to do a comedy to “broaden his appeal.” What comedy? Every Which Way but Loose. In it, Eastwood plays a bare-knuckle boxer who roams the United States looking for a girl while accompanied by his best friend and his monkey. It’s sort of like what Smokey and the Bandit would have been if Sally Field was a monkey. Did Clint have a lot of money after all those earlier box office hits? He did. This one made over $100 million on a $5 million budget.

If you know, you know.

Halloween – Halloween is, perhaps, the first modern horror movie that made it big. John Carpenter, who had already done some good movies, decided to make a great movie. It was one of the lowest-budgeted movies on this list, yet made $70 million at the box office. Carpenter was paid just $10,000 to write and direct it, but retained a 10% profit stake. This was the movie that showed what horror movies would become after the Hammer Films Dracula-style movie was no longer the standard.

This is 1978. It’s pretty dark, but America was in a dark place. High inflation, stagnant economy, the Soviets attacking Afghanistan and Americans held hostage in Teheran. It reminds me of Biden’s America, but Carter didn’t have dementia and Obama to blame.

What did I miss?

It Came From . . . 1981

“Chicks dig me, because I rarely wear underwear and when I do it’s usually something unusual.” – Stripes

How did Burt pull Excalibur from the stone? He had Arthurization.

This is the finale of, perhaps, the greatest decade of cinema – ever. It wasn’t on purpose, it was just how the dice rolled that we finished up at 1981. 1981 was a year where I benefited from many things – primarily living in a town with a movie theater, and said movie theater determining the lawful age for entry was defined as, “has money”.

Again, no sequels, but there just weren’t that many sequels in 1981 – people were working on their own, original ideas (mostly, Outland I’m looking at you).

Scanners – I saw this in the theater – how could I miss out? It was science fiction, and looked to be good. I was not disappointed. The movie itself is about psychic soldiers that were the result of a secrete (which is houw Canadians spelle, I thinke) Canadian plan to make super soldiers, or relieve the nausea of pregnant women. I forget which. In the end, there are nearly infinite shenanigans with exploding heads. The movie includes The Prisoner actor Patrick McGoohan, who I like to pretend was just playing the same character that he played in The Prisoner.

I look at the cat soldier in the corner and wonder if this movie was all about the dangers of a little pussy cat.

Excalibur – I’ve never seen a horse ride payoff with such a big surprise as when Uther rode his horse to meet Igrayne not long after the start of this movie. The surprise? The girl that Uther impendragons (with plenty of clanking) was the director’s own 19- or 20-year-old daughter, who played Igrayne. Talk about an awkward family Thanksgiving after that shoot – how could you tell if dad was wanting more turkey if he asked, “Can I see a bit more breast?” Anyhow, this is the classic story of Arthur and the round table and was done perfectly. If done in 2025 by Netflix®, Arthur would be played by an Indian or Pakistani and Merlin would be a sassy black woman who would complain that Arthur didn’t season his meat and if you complain you’re a bigot because England has always been centered around Indians, Pakistanis, and sassy black women.

Outland – What is Outland? Well, it’s High Noon in space, so I guess they could have called it High Moon, unless that was a Cheech and Chong space movie. This movie had no aliens, no super-science. Just what we could expect if Sean Connery was put in charge of a distant space outpost in a gritty dystopian future. The movie probably lost money. This is a rare movie for me in that I read the novelization of it by Alan Dean Foster before the movie came out, so my surprise level was at zero.

Would History of the World, Part 1 have been different if it starred Mel Gibson?

History of the World, Part I – My older brother (John Wilder) took me along with his date to this movie. I have no idea why he did that, but he did, and he had a driver’s license, which meant I didn’t have to hoof it home after the flick. Did I mention that his date was highly religious? I especially enjoyed laughing really loudly at the raunchy jokes (at least the ones I understood) and watching my brother squirming uncomfortably and pretending to be offended. This is my second favorite film by Brooks.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – I had no idea, zero, what this movie was about before going to see it, but from the opening scene I knew I was in the right place. The rather frenetic pacing and action that was used to move the plot along was fantastic – and it left me wondering why more movies didn’t (and still don’t) do the same. What I see for the last decade is that, rather than using pacing and plotting, instead the entire screen is filmed with action, creating a spectacle, but a spectacle that detracts from the characters you’re supposed to be caring about. Not in Raiders. Nope. This movie defined the action/adventure genre through the 1980s, being so much more than what came before, and setting a model that was often imitated.

The Cannonball Run – Burt Reynolds plus the rest of every actor from the 1970s star in a story about the real road race that clandestinely occurred back in the day. It’s hilarious, and a perfect use of Burt’s talents. He ended up making millions that he could share with his ex-wife. Critics hated it, audiences loved it.

“Don’t worry, we have the element of PEZ® on our side.”

Stripes – I don’t know how many people joined the Army because of this movie, but I know that, of the four guys I went to the movie with, two joined up. Both specifically pointed to this movie as the “why”. This is certainly one of Bill Murray’s five best movies. I mean, who doesn’t like Garfield? Regardless, this movie is hilarious, stands the test of time, and started a feud between Murray and Sean Young that apparently lasts to this day. Of course, the number of people who are disappointed in Sean Young is nearly as long as the number of people disappointed that being in the Army wasn’t nonstop madcap fun.

“Snake Plisskin. I heard about you. I heard you were a clown.”

Escape from New York – John Carpenter directing Kurt Russell in a movie about a SpecOp warrior gone bad being put on an impossible mission? Count me in. 1981 was one of those years when it looked like New York was going to implode into a black hole of financial mismanagement, corruption, crime, and filth, and being a prison was probably a better option than being New York, at least until the WWE® singlehandedly brought the city back from the brink of failure with Wrestlemania©. All Hail Hulk Hogan™! Oh, yeah, there was a movie. It’s good, with simple, practical effects and Kurt Russell channeling John Wayne. I’ve seen it dozens of times, but it was best in the theater.

Gallipoli – Mel Gibson is notoriously humorous (except when he’s been drinking) but Gallipoli isn’t funny. I had no idea that the disastrous Gallipoli landing, and the outsized toll on Australians and New Zealanders. Gallipoli was a buddy movie about two young sprinters who joined up and were sent to Gallipoli, where they take part in the Battle of the Nek, which was a fiasco for the Australians. If you haven’t seen it, I fully recommend it.

I don’t recommend the Mel Brooks version of Gallipoli.

Heavy Metal – South Park™ parodied this movie as Heavy Boobage. They’re not wrong. Essentially this is a comic book movie for 12-year-olds that consists of hot, nearly nude cartoon girls and strong warriors with swords and Corvettes™ and spaceships. It has, however, all the plot written at an 8-year-old level. Yeah. The soundtrack was great, and one of the first double-albums I ever bought and also inspired my birthday request for a stereo. But? The movie is just not good. Garfield generally has a more complex plot, though with fewer boobs.

Should this movie be called “TradWife Metal”?

An American Werewolf in London – Studio executives wanted John Landis to put John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd in this movie instead of the Dr. Pepper™ guy and Griffin Dunne. What a fiasco that would have been, though adding a werewolf to The Blues Brothers might have been a nice plot twist. As it is, this is a funny yet poignant horror comedy which is a sentence I’d write about . . . only this movie.

Das Boot – This movie is soooooo long. Sooooo long, perhaps longer than WWII. The first time I watched it, one of my college buddies rented it. I feel asleep and saw the end. The second time I watched it, I fell asleep. Again. I still think I missed about 17 hours in the middle. Or is this movie still going? It’s long. I think the Germans lose.

Mommie Dearest – I watched this movie on HBO® and . . . liked it. I mean, there’s no particular point to the movie, but I enjoyed watching Faye Dunaway screaming about wire coat hangers and giving away Christina’s toys because Christina probably had it coming. One other reason I love this movie? Joan Crawford has Risen from The Grave by Blue Öyster Cult.

The next two are linked for me: Porky’s and Chariots of Fire. What is in common about these two movies? Well, one night a school team went on an overnight competition. As memory serves, we spent at least two nights at our destination. The competition was co-ed. Our coach took us to the movies. As did other teams’ coaches. A girl on a competing team who had expressed, um, strong interest in me also went to the movies. Her coach wouldn’t let their team go to an R-rated movie, but ours would. So, I went to Chariots of Fire.

Okay one wasn’t enough, we have a sequel poster:

Of good movies for a high school boy to take a girl to on a date, Chariots of Fire ranks right up there with Schindler’s List or Das Boot or Ernest Goes to Re-Education Camp. It’s about British people running or not running because it’s against their religion. How do you talk a date into second base when you’ve just spent two hours watching people discuss the morality of running on a religious day?

That same weekend I saw Porky’s in my hometown when we got home. Really, they’re the same movie if you replace religion and running with staring at nude girls in a locker room shower.

Taps – Our final movie of the review of movies from the 1980s is Taps. I promise I didn’t plan that. Taps came out as America was just getting into the Reagan era, and there was a feeling faded glory, that America was slipping away, and that traditions and honor no longer meant anything. Taps really captured that, and to me, it resonated because of the idea that the youth (which I was a member of, then) could make a difference, could be a bridge to the future. Plus? Tom Cruise with an M-60.

Okay, that’s what I found. What (besides Maniac, which I’ve never seen) did I miss?

How An Army Commercial Shows We’re Rapidly Falling Apart

“Chicks dig me, because I rarely wear underwear and when I do it’s usually something unusual. But now I know why I have always lost women to guys like you. I mean, it’s not just the uniform. It’s the stories that you tell.” – Stripes

I didn’t know I was a lycanthrope. I guess that makes me an unawarewolf.

The United States’ Army has a new ad campaign out. The slogan, however, is fairly familiar: “Be All That You Can Be.” This became the slogan of the Army’s recruiting campaign back when they had to convince people to join because driving a fast car like Burt Reynolds while marrying busty blondes was a much more interesting career option.

That slogan lasted from 1980 to 2001, with “Army Of One®” was replaced by Call of Duty™ online mode. The Air Force was encouraged by that slogan, and decided to use “Air Force Of Only One Plane®” since that was all they could afford if they decided to go with the F-35.

But things have not gone well for Big Green recently. I heard in the last year, they actually recruited only one soldier, and he was a decoy. I kid. They had a goal of something like 60,000, but only recruited 45,000. I’m guessing that’s because the other 15,000 decided that working at McDonald’s® was a better option.

Want me to stop telling Rolling Stones jokes? You can’t always get what you want.

And, why not? The videos showing recent Army performance have been, um, less than stellar. From the pullout of Afghanistan, to Biden forcing troops to take the Vaxx or take a hike, it’s been bad. The commercials for recruitment have likewise been horrific. If it’s not good enough for the wise Latina child joining the armed forces and then looking back on her lesbian biracial parents who gave her hormone replacement therapy at age three, well, it’s not good enough for me.

I think the Army missed some real gems in going back to that old slogan. They could have chosen some of these:

Join the Army, where the camouflage makes you invisible to your ex.
Join the Army, and let us take care of your social life . . . because you won’t have one.
The Army: Where you can kill two birds with one grenade.
The Army: If you needed a good excuse to shave your head.
Join the Army: Where you’ll find that “hurry up and wait” isn’t just a saying, it’s a way of life.
The Army: “You’ll learn to stay awake while standing up.”
Join the Army and see the world, through the scope of a rifle.
The Army: “You’ll make lifelong friends. Or enemies. Or both.
The Army, where you can put your Call of Duty™ skills to use, just without the respawn.
Join the Army, and get one free PEZ™ dispenser every year.

Why did the magician sleep at Motel 6®? Because only he could make the stains disappear.

I mean, who traditionally makes up the Army, anyway?

Actually, white dudes. In the terminology of today, people who were born male at birth and score low on the diversity index. Hell, in 2023, I’m wondering when “mail” will show up as a gender – “Oh, baby, put me in the big slot! I’m an oversized package!”

I looked up the makeup of the Army using the most recent statistics I could find. They’re kind of murky, because they don’t break out “Hispanic” by itself. I guess I can understand that. Even though I’ve been described as “so Danish that’s the picture in the dictionary” I can also claim that at least 25% of my ancestors were born in Mexico. Were they Danish?

Yeah. Still don’t understand how they dealt with the sunburn. But Pugsley can check that box on the college application.

2 is a prime number. That’s kind of odd, right?

So, the stats I could find are murky. It looks like the numbers of white people in the Army has gone down 2% in two years from 70% to 68%. And what’s one percent? About 5,000 guys. So, of their missing 15,000, you could make an argument that 10,000 of them might have been white guys that didn’t join up.

I know three kids that were friends of The Boy that were gung ho about joining the military, until November, 2020. Then?

“Nah, I think I’ll work.”

So, to recreate the idea that perhaps the Army wants white guys to join up, the reversion to the “Be All That You Can Be™” slogan was the reaction from the Army. To be clear, they’re still using food made before 1960, ammo made before 1970, so why not a slogan that was made in 1980?

Oh, Francis, where are you now?

Enter the new video. Where in the last few, the only thing not visible was a white guy, this video is chock full of white guys. At one location where the video was stored on YouTube©, the comment section was more disastrous than French naval performance at Trafalgar. I mean hundreds and hundreds of comments that, well, I’ll just post a few of them and let you draw your own conclusions. I did not cherry pick these, and did not see a single, not one, zero positive comments. Feel free to go give a look yourself – the video is here (LINK).

Yup, pretty bad. Both of my sons have received text messages from Army recruiters, heck, as late as 2016, I presented to The Boy the options of West Point and Colorado Springs for colleges. He noped out of both choices. Pugsley is not at all interested.

I am not disappointed – rather, the opposite, and became doubly so after the decision by the Biden Administration to force armed forces members to Vaxx up. Sure, the DOD rescinded the requirement this year on January 10, but that didn’t help the people who already Vaxxed up. Wonder if the VA is going to cover that?

Regardless, I would hazard a guess that confidence in the cohesion of the country is lower than at any time in my life. Perhaps the real slogan should be “Be All That You Can Binge-Watch On Netflix®”?

Energy: We Need Everything. Now.

“No, Jonny. It consumes them. It eats energy: sunlight, electricity, the energy in a living body. Anything it can get.” – Jonny Quest

What do you do with a dead chemist? Barium.

I remember way back in high school gym class when I was a freshman. One day we showed up in the gym and saw a roughly six-foot diameter ball in the middle of the gym floor, as if a majestic bird the size of Alec Baldwin had left an egg for us.

That was new.

Coach said, “Welcome to Push Ball. Wilder and Jones, you two are captains. Pick your teams.” Jones and I were on the football team together, so we divvied up the rest of the boys. I think the girls were doing something like advanced couch-sitting that day.

Coach followed up: “Here are the rules. No rules. If your team pushes the ball into the opposing team’s bleacher, you get a point.” Technically, that was a rule, but I decided not to argue.

Pretty quickly I divined that part of the point of Push Ball was to burn up a lot of energy on a game that was very hard to win. Probably “something, something teamwork blah blah blah”.

But then I looked at the ball. It was filled with air, not Baldwin-DNA-soaked egg yolk, so it wasn’t all that heavy. But it was way too big for any one person to grab.

It wasn’t entirely smooth, though. There were laces.

These laces were like those on a football, except the gap between the laces was big – big enough to slip my fingers through. I developed a plan. I told my guys, “It’s gonna get easy – we’re gonna win. When I say go, get in front of me and block.”

Alternate meme text: “When the weather tells you to dress for the 100’s.”

As we played, I concentrated on rotating the laces towards me. When they were right there about shoulder height, I slipped my fingers in the gaps between the laces, and got a good hold.

“Now!” I yelled.

With the leverage of the handhold, I could easily use the opposing team’s force to pop the ball back towards me, and up. And with the ball gone, my guys got in front and blocked. I ran, holding the absurdly large ball over my head with one hand and slammed it into the retracted bleachers causing the wood to reverberate under the mighty force, scoring the first point.

“THIS. IS. SPARTA!” I yelled. Okay, no I didn’t, it sounds way cooler to pretend that I did. And I sure as hell felt like Thor (not the fake Marvel® one) slamming his hammer and making the lightning crash. Our team really did high five.

Coach blew his whistle.

“Okay, we now have a rule. You can’t do that.”

We had a really good weightlifting facility.

Weirdly, this post is the second one about energy. In one sense, our world is like that game of push ball. We work to innovate and create breakthroughs to better use the energy we have. The number of cars are up in the country, but the miles per gallon are way up, too.

Government would love to take credit for it, but it’s really not the case. Sure the CAFE standards have led to higher mileage, but a lot of that is due to innovation that occurred outside of those standards. When I read that the Trans Am® in Smokey and the Bandit only produced 200 horsepower, I realized that most of the cars I own have more power under the hood, and get better mileage. I always wanted a car with a T-top like the Trans Am™ in high school, so my dates could have had more legroom.

I was considerate that way.

We have become more efficient at using energy, and that’s great. But we find more uses for energy, too. If I lived in the same house today in 1977, right now there would be zero power usage outside of the fridge and the freezer. As it is, I’m watching a silly movie on a huge television while I type on a laptop with alarm clocks that don’t tick from springs winding down. I’m happy for that, because if the alarm clock would go tic-tic-tic all night, it would keep The Mrs. awake and she’d want to toc.

Is my house using a lot of energy? No, but there are a lot more devices in a home today using energy passively, like charging cell phones and security systems and “always on” televisions and computers and garage door openers on low power mode.

I drove up to my garage and saw someone had painted a “3” on it. I thought, “That’s odd.”

Even industry is more efficient, generally, at using energy. Modern manufacturing plants are expert at using what would have been waste heat in all sorts of ways to save energy, which in turn saves money. I mean, don’t be an engineer if you’re not so hot in thermodynamics.

But at the base of all modern industry, energy is crucial. It is the ultimate leverage. One analyst noted that $20 billion in Russian natural gas was used by Germany to create $2 trillion in economic output. That’s stuff made. It’s amazing leverage – $1 in natural gas was the basis for creating $100 worth of added value. Germany would like to start a war, but the rule is that it’s three Reichs, and you’re out.

Energy is that important. And energy usage isn’t a linear progression – it has been exponential. The problem is that energy usage is growing nearly exponentially. If you look at any short-term graphs, it doesn’t quite show it, but here’s one that puts it in perspective. I got it at Our World in Data (LINK) and it’s reused by CC (LINK).

If Ebola grew as fast as the world energy consumption, it would be called Hyperbola.

I think this one graph alone should be tattooed backward on the head of every Leftist who says BuT MUh ALtERnaTivE EneRgy. Eliminate oil, coal, and natural gas, and you have a world that, roughly, has as much energy as 1920.

The world population right now is 7.97 billion people. In 1920, the population was closer to 1.9 billion, which is roughly the number of people on a typical airplane nowadays. In 1920 electricity was only in 35% of homes. In the United States. Most people in the world in 1920 had no electrical power usage at all, heated their homes with firewood or coal, and only saw electrical lights at the picture show. Also, they were, sadly, almost sixty years too early to see Smokey and the Bandit.

Let’s go back to Germany (not the 1920 version) but today. Just $20 billion in natural gas costs $2 trillion in value added. Population is growing exponentially. Energy use is growing exponentially. We’re setting ridiculous ideas that we’ll be all-electric by 2030 by changing rules to limit innovation and declare winners. It’s like Coach not allowing innovation in Push Ball, but this time with real-world consequences.

But those electric cars. They’re powered by . . . what, exactly? Seriously, look at the chart. What? Nuclear we haven’t built? Solar which is so small it can’t be seen? Hydropower which is in decline because it can’t be built? Wind? I can’t see wind outside, and I also can barely see it on the chart.

Looks like the Green Energy Plan is free of charge.

Anyone, and I mean anyone who is not realizing that the Leftist energy pipe dream won’t lead to the greatest suffering that mankind has ever seen, even more than anything Global Warming® could ever cause, even more than both of the World Wars, combined, is deluded.

We need more innovation in energy, and we need it now, because the exponentials in energy use and population require investment to keep ahead of the game. Exponentials are funny that way, you have to be like Alice’s Red Queen and run faster and faster just to stay in place.

The Leftists that want to bring it all down? They deserve to be put into a Push Ball filled with Alec Baldwin’s DNA-soaked yolk.

It Came From 1982

“The Alan Parsons Project is a progressive rock band in 1982. Why don’t you just name it ‘Operation Wang-Chung’?” – Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

A hipster asked me if I liked Indy films, “Sure, I loved The Last Crusade.”

The last time I did a movie list, I did a list based on an entire decade: the 1990s. It was an interesting list, but Aesop made a comment I’ll paraphrase because I’m too lazy to look it up to get the exact quote: “If you did the 1980s, you’d break the Internet.”

And he’s right. The 1980s were, very clearly, a much better decade for movies than any decade since. Before? Probably. There are great movies before and after the 1980s, but I think this was peak movie.

Why? In the 1980s it was very much Reagan’s country: “It is morning in America.” People were starting to feel optimistic after the recession, and people were starting to feel proud again. The movies of the period reflect that. Also, Hollywood® was able to experiment – it didn’t have to get a blockbuster because it invested $600,000,000 in a movie. No, it could do stupid, cheap movies. It could do daring movies. And that let it do exceptional movies. I’m picking 1982, because, like Aesop warned: I don’t want to break the Internet.

Why 1982? Because when I got into the hot tub tonight to smoke a nice Rocky Patel Decade Toro cigar and prepare to write, a video about my favorite movie from 1982 showed up. The following are a list of eighteen movies from 1982 that were better than most movies that show up today. For the most part, they’re in alphabetical order because, again, I’m too lazy to rank them.

But number one for me from 1982 has got to be:

The Thing.

But at least they’ll have lots of pasta to eat down there: penguine.

I had always loved John W. Campbell’s work, and The Thing is one of his best films. No, it doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test where it has women talking to each other. There are no women in the movie. At all. And it kicks ass, so I’m beginning to think the Bechdel Test shows me what movies will suck.

The film featured all practical effects – and that made them more visceral, in some cases literally. Kurt Russell in a beard losing a chess game against a computer and then tossing scotch into the computer from his nearly infinite supply of J&B®. And the result? One of the best action/horror/science fiction movies. Ever. It was considered a flop at the time, and now is considered one of the best movies of all time.

See? That’s why I love the 1980s.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Burt Reynolds. Singing about whores, in a movie about LaGrange, Texas, which if I believed ZZ Top®, is just filled with whores. With Dolly Parton? No, there’s nothing particularly good about this, but, someone in Hollywood thought it was a good idea.

Blade Runner. Stark. Grungy. Set a few years ago. Everyone was sweaty. Also? Everyone likes this movie more than I do – probably my least favorite Philip K. Dick movie. Bonus? I had a girlfriend who I convinced that she was actually a robot. Dick move? No, a Philip K. Dick move.

This movie begs the question: did they have blow driers in ninja school?

The Challenge. Scott Glenn and Toshiro Mifune in a movie about an American who fights ninja-style with office supplies, and, no, I’m not making that up. Utterly awesome. I believe I am the only person on the continent who liked this movie.

Conan the Barbarian. You’ve all seen it. I had read Conan stories before I saw the movie – I was not particularly impressed, but I had to mention this movie. It featured Arnold after he learned to read, but before he learned to act.

Eating Raoul. The best movie about cannibalistic infidelity for profit I’ve seen. It’s also the only movie about cannibalistic infidelity for profit I’ve ever seen.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Little needs to be said about this classic – carrot eating would never be the same in the cafeteria again in 1982. Plus? Sammy Hagar jamming.

Doesn’t anyone knock?

Firefox. Clint Eastwood stealing Soviet jets because he could think in Russian. Special effects don’t hold up, but still fun.

First Blood. Sly making the best Rambo movie before they started to get silly.

Night Shift. There are some actors that should stick to comedy. It may not be a popular opinion, but I think Michael Keaton is one of them. What is it about 1982 and whores? This movie has the lighthearted subject of a morgue turning into a brothel.

An Officer and a Gentleman. It’s like Top Gun, but no flying. Why would you watch this movie? Because you have nowhere else to go.

Poltergeist. The movie that led to making it a law that if you moved a cemetery for a housing development, that you had to movie the bodies, too. Go to the light, Carol Anne!

What do Italian ghosts eat? Spooketti.

Porky’s. This movie was a series of sketches combined with bad jokes and nudity, and those are the redeeming bits. Gets bad when the plot gets in the way. Paging Michael Hunt.

Rocky III. Sly was busy in 1982. But this movie was a good sequel, and probably better than you remember.

Silent Rage. A Chuck Norris movie. It’s not a great movie, but it’s an awesome movie. I know that makes no sense, but neither does this movie. It’s really my favorite Chuck Norris movie – science fiction with karate.

Yup, sittin’ around without a shirt and with my cowboy hat on. Ahhh, 1982, we miss you.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This is the sequel that saved Star Trek. Star Trek the Motion Picture was a dud. This was not. It was the best Star Trek movie, ever. It had the joy and exuberance of the best of Star Trek TOS, plus a worthy villain and a chess game in space combat. There has been no Star Trek after this that has been nearly as good, and probably few before this.

Tootsie. The Mrs. loves this movie. Me? Once was enough. Bill Murray was my favorite part of this one.

The World According to Garp. This was the best Robin Williams movie, period. I read the novel, and this was a movie that could never, ever be made today.

Young Doctors in Love. Excellent movie that’s nearly unavailable today. Also, taught me how to easily test for diabetes.

Yup, that’s just one year in the 1980s, picked nearly at random.

Good times.

What Hockey Taught Me About My Life and My Career (Bonus: Broadswords)

“This is hockey, OK? It’s not rocket surgery.” – Mystery, Alaska

“You da goalie, not Yoda® goalie.” I have to get my hearing checked.

When I was in middle school, one week we played hockey for P.E. Where I grew up it was certainly cold enough for water to freeze – but we didn’t have any water, it being nearly a desert and all. A typical backyard mud puddle in Midwestia is bigger than things we called “lakes” growing up, and you could wade across the local river at flood stage and not get your pants wet. We did, however, have a gym and roller skates.

A group of uncoordinated seventh graders attempting to roller skate on a gym floor for the first time probably looked like a gaggle of hippos juggling wet sheepdogs. I wouldn’t know exactly what we looked like, I was busy studying the wood grain of the floor by repeatedly falling onto the free throw line as my skates stubbornly refused to stay underneath me. The nearly frictionless wheels kept twisting my legs at angles only experienced by crash test dummies, Thanksgiving turkeys, and a stoned Elon Musk.

Why were we so pathetic?

The nearest roller rink was 30 miles away, and what passed for concrete in town was concrete in concept only, with the newest patches of sidewalk having been put down personally by President Roosevelt as he raced Hitler in a sidewalk building contest to determine who had to have Italy on their side. Anyway, what concrete existed in town was broken, jagged, and was used by NASA to simulate walking on the Moon because it was so rough and powdery. If we wanted to skate that left skating in actual dirt, because skating on the highway was illegal in every state in the nation until Virginia just recently legalized 30^th trimester abortions.

I got to be team captain, and no one really argued when I picked goalie as my position. In two teams of horrible skaters, I was the worst. Being goalie didn’t require much skating, just being quick and a lot of intentional falling. As I could fall unintentionally, intentional falling was even easier. The puck was a hollow plastic disk that weighed next to nothing, and I was quick enough to stop nearly every shot.

It didn’t hurt my goal-tending streak that this was the first time that any of us had ever played hockey and everyone was a horrible shot. I’m pretty sure that our P.E. instructor had only the vaguest idea of what the rules were since he informed us that in order to start the game we had to sacrifice the smallest and weakest player in the middle of the gym for the strength of the tribe while drinking Moosehead® beer. Since we were underage, he drank all our beers for us.

We’ll all miss Benji.

As I grew older, there was a period of a few years where I watched actual NHL® professional hockey, until they just stopped showing it on any network I could find. But watching hockey was different than watching other sports – in an average game the players are (at times) going 25-27 miles per hour, and the puck itself is often moving in excess of 100 miles per hour. In the NFL®, the top receivers run about 20 miles per hour for short bursts, but average much less.

Because of the increased speed in hockey, minor differences in starting position resulted in big separations between players as they accelerated across the ice. The importance of that separation is the same in all sports, but I really was able to see it when it came to hockey due to the faster speeds. What’s really important is time and space. With enough time and space, a hockey player can break away from the crowd and attack the goalie one on one. With enough time and space, players can be where the action will be five seconds from now.

The same principle holds in football. With enough time and space, a wide receiver can break away from the defense and score. I think it holds true in soccer as well, but too often the players are just sitting on the field knitting and drinking brightly colored cocktails with whimsical umbrellas and chunks of fruit before they go shoe shopping. I think soccer would be much more interesting if they gave the players broadswords with no real rules or guidance on how they are to be used in the game.

Now, imagine with swords. See? Better already.

But what happens in sports also happens in real life, minus my really cool broadsword idea. The analogy of time and space is incredibly important to people who are trapped on mountains as the storm comes in, or the logistics in supporting an army in the field, or even the position of the individual units in a battle. Put 5,000 men in the right place and the right time and almost any battle in history swaps winners. Heck, 300 Spartans (plus 700 Thespians) changed the course of history and saved Western Civilization. Tell me that Xerxes wouldn’t love to have that one back – lose to the Greeks just the one time and you never hear the end of it.

If only they had compromised, imagine how we’d remember them.

To “maximize” your financial potential, you should use your time and space to be where the action is. Sadly, for my career the right place is bigger cities – huge cities, with populations of millions of people. A bigger city would be okay, but from what I’ve seen of cities, most of those millions of people I won’t like. They just seem to be in the way when I try to drive on the congested roads. Broadswords would be helpful here, too. The city is filled with activities, though. Activities that I really don’t want to do – except for nice restaurants and museums, and getting to a big city four or five times a year is necessary, mainly to remind me of all the reasons why I don’t want to move back to a big city.

Thankfully, though, I don’t need to maximize my financial potential – the mortgage that I pay here in Modern Mayberry is less than 27% of the cost for an apartment in San Francisco, and on a per square foot basis? My cost is 5% (that’s not a misprint) of what I’d pay per square foot in ‘Frisco (the locals love it when you call it that, I hear). That 5% number just includes house square footage, and doesn’t include the 10 acres the house is on.

With life, time is still time, and space is still space. And during a career, money is space AND time. If you only have enough money for this month, you have that much time. If you have years of money saved up, you have that much time (and more). Savings is opportunity. Savings provides options – and those options expand your opportunities. Enough money gives you time and space – time and space to try things, risky things that have higher rewards. Or? Give you time and space to just do what you want.

Which for me is not hockey. I’ve seen enough gym floors, thank you.

But . . . hear me out . . . how about hockey with broadswords??