Happiness – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them

“Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is.” – Jurassic Park

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” is great hockey advice from Gretzky, but don’t go quoting that at an AA meeting. (“Eh Eh” in metric)

Throughout history, mankind has faced limits. How we vaulted over those limits has defined our progress, and the bigger the hurdle, the greater the payoff. Of note, each of these has led to extreme economic and societal disruption.

1. Fire = Mastery of Energy
Barrier Broken: Darkness, Vulnerability, Need to BBQ
Fire was our first “aha” moment, going back to into deep time – our control of this allowed us to, for the first time, harness energy stored in hydrocarbons at will. Does Grug want warm cave? Grug make fire, make cave warm, cook aurochs steak, eat. Good. Cold hungry Grug sad.

Fire also kept saber-tooths at bay keeping Grug from being a kitty-treat, and turned rock shelters into the original man cave, dreaming of a time when Door-Dash™ would allow people from India to bring bacon cheeseburgers to us.

Simple – if you won’t eat delicious bacon cheeseburgers for a month, no admission to the United States.

2. Agriculture = Beer + Cities
Barrier Broken: Food Scarcity, Invites to Kegger
I’ve written about this before – Evidence from sites like Göbekli Tepe hints the purpose of the site was religious, but also that it was a brewpub. It’s likely early brews fueled rituals that glued folks together. Fire kept us warm, but beer got us buzzed.

The barrier of unpredictable food was shattered when we started planting grain—surpluses meant we could ditch nomad life, build mud-brick condos, and let some dude specialize in carving spoons instead of stabbing mammoths. Result: cities, labor division, and the glorious chaos of civilization, all toasted with a pint. Or three.

Göbekli Tepi: How Beer Created Civilization

3. Writing = Records + Reach
Barrier Broken: Fleeting Memory, Knowledge Becomes Eternal
Scribbling on clay kicked off with debts (“You owe me five sheep after you drank all my beer”) or god-shoutouts. These had taken place orally, but, you know, the last guy I lent a $20 to forgot about it even if I haven’t. Writing cracked the barrier of oral limits and memory.

With writing, knowledge stuck around—grannies didn’t have to recite everything anymore. Pharaohs sent exact orders to the Nile’s edge; Rome ran an empire on scrolls. It wasn’t just records—it was power, precision, and the ability to tell your great-great-grandkids exactly how to brew that beer. Result: generational wisdom, bureaucracy, and legions marching on paper trails.

But you have to feel bad for her – no one hit the glass ceiling that hard since Goose from Top Gun.

4. Wheel = Friction Fighter
Barrier Broken: Immobility, Distance Becomes Cheap
The oldest surviving example of a wheel was found in Slovenia, and dates back over 5,000 years, proving that people were trying to get out of Slovenia even back then.

The wheel smashed the barrier of schlepping everything by hand. Suddenly, a cart could haul what ten Grugs couldn’t—trade routes bloomed, villages linked up, and armies rolled instead of trudged. It’s not sexy like fire, beer, and steak, but without it, no ’69 Camaro™. It’s likely that agriculture made it so we had stuff to move around, and was the real motivator for the wheel, so we could help friends move on the weekend.

Cities got bigger, goods got cheaper, and we stopped throwing out our backs for a sack of grain. Result: the world shrank, and we got mobile.

5. Printing Press = Knowledge Flood
Barrier Broken: Elite Access, Knowledge Becomes Cheap
The wheel shrunk the world, and then Gutenberg’s clunky printing press took writing’s exclusivity and yeeted it out the window. Books went from monk and king-only treasures to peasant-readable pamphlets—ideas like “Hey, maybe the Earth’s not flat” spread like gossip at a dive bar.

The barrier of gatekept knowledge crumbled—science surged, religions splintered, and revolutions brewed. Result: mass literacy, a brain explosion, and the Renaissance popping off like a medieval Ozfest™.

My HP™ printer joined a band – I should have seen it coming: it loves to jam.

6. Industrial Revolution = Muscle Swap
Barrier Broken: Human Power Limits, Horsepower Becomes Cheap
What did we do with all that knowledge and science? Mastered energy. Steam hissed, gears turned, and suddenly one machine outmuscled a village. The barrier of physical drudgery got smashed—factories churned out goods, trains hauled dreams, and kids stopped pulling plows (mostly).

Think of this one as taking the first example, fire, and making its use precise and scientific – it’s no coincidence that thermodynamics was the science boom of the 19^th Century, one that made millionaires out of people who could figure out how to make a heat exchanger. Which is as it should be.

Result: skyscrapers, global trade, and the bittersweet birth of the 9-to-5.

7. Electricity = Power Everywhere
Barrier Broken: Localized Energy
A byproduct of the Industrial Revolution was the power revolution. Edison, Tesla, and pals flipped the switch, and energy stopped being stuck near coal pits or waterfalls allowing the Industrial Revolution to be everywhere. The barrier of “where the power is” vanished—lights buzzed in hovels, fridges hummed, and telegraphs chirped across oceans.

It supercharged industry, lit up nights, and made “unplugged” a choice, not a fate. Result: a wired world, 24/7 life, and the electric hum of progress.

I told my wife if she was cold and couldn’t find her sweater, she should stand in a corner. They’re generally pretty close to 90°.

8. Computer Revolution = Cheap Math
Barrier Broken: Slow Calculation
Now, what do we do with all that juice? From punch cards to processors, computers turned math from a monk’s headache into a microchip’s yawn. The barrier of tedious number-crunching fell—rockets soared, genomes unraveled, and your phone now out-thinks a 1960s NASA lab.

It’s not just speed; it’s scale—billions of ops a second, cheap as dirt, and my computer has more five times more transistors than the number of people on Earth. Result: digital everything, from Moonshots to memes.

9. The Internet = How To Be Everywhere, All At Once
Barrier Broken: Presence at a Distance
Now we had tons of data, but it wasn’t with you. Until the Internet. Ever want to go to the library to get a book? Now I can do it on the Internet without having to ever even haul my PEZ™ powder covered carcass off the couch. I can pull most movies ever made with a click, I can get facts that would take me days to research in 1990: immediately. And I can even order that PEZ® from Amazon™ at 2AM.

Result: Access to virtually all of human knowledge, and cat pictures.

I belong to a family of failed magicians. I have three half-sisters.

10. AI = Cheap Consciousness
Barrier Broken: Mental Bandwidth
Here we are—AI’s making thinking a commodity by meshing 8. And 9. But it is not just crunching data; it’s reasoning, riffing, and dreaming up horoscopes faster than a caffeinated astrologer.

The barrier of human cognition’s limits is cracking—it can synthesize your ideas, spot patterns, and serve it back with a wink, all in real time. Result: a flood of synthetic smarts, amplifying us, challenging us, and freaking us out a little.

We’ll end with these 10. Note that each of these revolutions had massive and unequal impacts on humanity. The implications or 8., 9., and 10. are still unfolding, and number 10. is in its infancy.

Since nobody has time for a 2,800 word post, we’ll pick up the gauntlet of what barriers are left, and where we’re headed with AI, and guess at the economic impacts to come . . . but we’ll do it next week.

Knowing The Face Of Your Father, or, The Best Post I’ve Ever Written About Bronze Age Europe

(Inspired by a comment on Monday’s post)

“It is indeed a pleasure to introduce to you a gentleman we picked up in medieval Mongolia, please welcome the very excellent barbarian Mr. Genghis Khan!” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

I wonder if the most common sandwich in Rome was a plebian J?

The rooster crowed.

Tark opened one eye, peering through the heavy hide covering him. He could see light.

Motion was already starting in the longhouse, and he could see the oak beams above him dimly in the firelight. He could smell the barley and mutton stew that would be his breakfast. Always in a hurry, he jumped up and dressed into his pleasantly cool tunic and pants and bolted down a bowl of the stew. It was warm. It was good.

Tark was eight.

Tark hummed a song to the sky father, the one who had spoken the world into existence, according to the stories the men told around the fire. Tark’s first job was to feed the chickens so mother could get the eggs for tomorrow.

His father, Wulfric, was already up, as usual. Tark had seen that his father was up later and up earlier. Tark noticed that Wulfric always had a wary look in his eye, as if he was never relaxing, always assessing. When other men talked after too much drink, Wulfric listened. Wulfric was tending the tribe’s cattle, their major stock of wealth and the way that they would be sure that they would make it through the winter, even if it was a long one.

Tark’s older brother Branoc, now 16, was already up and practicing with a battle axe – sweat already dripping from him despite the cool air. Branoc was a man, and to be a man, one fought. And to be a man, one married. Branoc would soon be bonded to Lunara. A man protects his woman, a man protects his family. All is right with the world.

Tark and Branoc go through the forest, intermittent sunlight flashing in Tark’s light blonde hair. His blue-gray eyes lit up as they caught deer sign. Maybe a hunt soon. That would be good.

Later, after a day of work and mock combat with wooden weapons and a laughing Branoc, Tark and the family gathered by the fire. Wulfric speaks slowly, telling the stories of their Yamnaya ancestors who rode the steppe and died valiantly. Those tales are the last thing that Tark heard as he drifted off to sleep – dreaming of becoming worthy enough to have a final burial place, a kurgan, worthy of a man of honor. The last thing he saw in the flickering firelight was the face of his father.

Okay, enough of Tark’s life.

Tark was a member of the Corded Ware people, a successor to the Yamnaya. This culture (and its associated genetics) first show up on the steppe in what is today Russia and the Ukraine thousands of years ago and then spread throughout Europe during the thousands of years that followed.

Blockbuster™ franchises followed the Corded Ware people wherever they went, but were ultimately unsuccessful because the VCR had not yet been invented.

This land was harsh, and not only in climate – some writers have referred to it as the bloodlands. Steppe warriors. These were the first humans to effectively use the horse as transport, and were fierce warriors. Most of the skeletons that we’ve found of these people have evidence of combat injuries. This isn’t uncommon.

In roughly 1250 BC, a band of warriors descended on a settlement in the Tollense Valley. The Tollense Valley is in present day Germany. On the day of the battle, current estimates are that perhaps 2,000 warriors fought during the battle – an immense battle for that time in Europe.

Who won? Civilization won.

Steppe warriors have been a sort-of periodic vaccination against societal complacency. Urban areas exist, and the steppe warriors, be they Mongol, Hun, Turk, Scythian, or Yamnaya, have been a cleansing fire that keeps those urban and settled areas vital. I mean, would you build a giant great wall to protect you from cosplay LARPers or furries?

No, not from LARPers. But I would build a fiery moat to keep furries out.

The Corded Ware people were also known to avoid video games. (meme as found)

This crashing wave of martial prowess was built on a selection process that favored honor, planning, and daring. Genghis Khan is related to something like one out of eight east Asians, so I think his strategy paid off. It also forced societies out of their complacence, and kept them invigorated. Stagnant empires in decline were exactly the sort of thing these steppe barbarians were looking for.

I mean, don’t threaten them with a good time.

Wave after wave of first Yamnaya and then Corded Ware people replaced almost all of the neolithic farmers in the region from the Volga to the Rhine on the east and west, and from the Arctic in the north to the Alps in the south, a huge range.

But they also pushed into places like Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula, and into Italy. In the Iberian Peninsula, for instance, many villages consist only of the offspring from the Y chromosome of the Yamnaya/Corded Ware people. They invaded, killed all the men and male children, and took over. The men from those places are erased from genetic history.

Is this how you retrace your steppes? (meme as found)

To a lesser extent, this happened in both Greece and Italy. The early emperors were blonde or sandy brown in hair color, with eyes that were light grey or blue – the Steppe Chads like Tark had found a home, and their genes lived on in emperors. And in people like Alexander the Great, who had heterochromia.

What’s heterochromia? One blue eye, one brown. Steppe Chad’s blood flowed in Alexander’s veins, and probably made up 30% of the genome of some populations of the ancient Greeks and Macedonians.

In Italy, it was also pronounced, with early Latin DNA being 30% or more of Corded Ware origin. Nero was blonde and had blue eyes.

I guess that makes the Yamnaya steppe daddies?

The Italians and Greeks of today are, of course still related to the Italians and Greeks of 2,000 years ago, but there has been a huge admixture of the peoples of the Mediterranean because these were the capital cities of empire. Think New York of 2025 is genetically even remotely close to New York of 1825?

Nope, not at all. And neither was Rome of 200 AD genetically similar to Rome of 100 BC, except, perhaps, in the royal families.

I hear that Nero hid when they went to find him to execute him, covering himself in a cloak. I guess that makes that coat the first chicken Caesar wrap.

The genetics of three to five thousand years of brutal struggle in the bloodlands were flowing in the veins of Octavian, even until the years just before his death . . .

A rooster, somewhere, crowed. Augustus (who had been Octavian) opened one eye. A servant was already there.

One of the joys of youth was solitude, one of the banes of being Caesar was never being really alone. After Julius was murdered, Octavian never let a single man guard him. That would be folly. Besides, Augustus was 74, and when he woke, everything hurt. He remembered bounding up as a boy, but now everything was slow.

Even his waking was an event that set in motion a cascade of events. Three men entered the room. His bath was ready, and, as usual, already at perfect temperature. One had deeply absorbent towels. One had a chalice of wine. The third had brought in a fresh toga, trimmed in the Tyrian murex that was the amazingly expensive purple coloring of the Caesar.

The gardens of his palace by the Tiber were a place of quiet contemplation. He walked them slowly, in silence, his formerly blonde and now grey hair catching the morning Sun, reflecting off of his blue-gray eyes.

A soft echo of the sounds of his guard, training, bring Actium back to his mind, where he finally ended Mark Antony’s planned usurpation of his power. Such glory. The entire world in the balance!

In the afternoon, Senators. Roads. Gaul. Plans of Empire, details for lesser men.

That night, Augustus sits by the fire. Alone. In an unguarded moment, he allows himself to think about what he already knows awaits him: a marble tomb.

He pondered: was he a man of honor? He thought, briefly, of a memory from when he was a child of perhaps four, of the face of his father in dim light, illuminated by the flickering light of a lamp.

The blood of Tark had made a very long journey, indeed.

Lost The Plot: 17 True Things We Forgot

“To tell you the truth, Bilbo has been a bit odd lately.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

Would you call someone who microwaved hot dogs Frank Zappa?

Something went off the rails in the twentieth century. If I were to try to pinpoint it, it would probably be around when Woodrow Wilson was president, as if a large darkness began to descend and ooze through society. It has been slowly corrosive for decades, but the post-2000 years, and especially the Obama years really saw it make insidious . . . progress.

Why?

At least in part because we forgot many of the really important things that we have always known, for the existence of mankind at least, to be true.

Below is a list of 17 True things that people “forgot” for a few decades that have pushed our civilization to collapse:

Men and Women Are Physiologically Different

This has fed the current trans nonsense, and still exists when every single scientific study has shown that the average man over twice as strong as the average woman, and almost always the strongest woman in a study is weaker than the weakest man.

I wrote a book on penguins once. In hindsight, I should have used paper.

Men/Women Cognitively Different

Again, there are basic differences in the way that a woman’s mind and a man’s mind work. Men are better at spatial thinking, reasoning, and math, whereas women are exceptional at waging personal vendettas for petty reasons. Oh, and empathy. Women are good at that, too.

Race Is A Real Biological Fact

Race is really more than skin deep. I once saw a post where the Red Cross™ was looking for more black donors because of the various cofactors that make it a better match for black recipients. More than that, A.I. can tell the race of a patient by an x-ray. So, besides being blood, skin, and bone deep, each race was isolated and separated in time, in some cases by more than 70,000 years (Australian Aborigines). So, yeah, people of different races are different.

Intelligence Is Mostly Influenced By Biology

Anyone who studies intelligence will tell you that at least 50% of intelligence is inherited, and the number might be 80%. Does that mean two absolute idiots might not birth a genius? Sure. It could happen. And there might also be desperate single MILFs less than a mile away, like my computer keeps telling me.

Einstein married his cousin, proving that even his marriage was relative.

Character Is Mostly Influenced By Biology

Growing up in a small town, people would say things like, “That family is no good,” and they were generally right. Are we slaves to it? No. Whereas with intelligence, you can’t hone it, with character you can, which means that maybe not all is lost for Hunter Bi . . . oh, too late.

The Family Is Society’s Atom

Feminism requires that the individual be the atom of society so that women can be EmpOwERed grrlbosses, but that is clearly insanity. No family, no society – it all falls apart.

Culture Isn’t Interchangeable

Tacos aren’t Viking. And culture is far more than a taco. Why lots of people don’t recognize American culture is the same reason that fish don’t recognize water – they’re surrounded by it all the time and can’t imagine life without it.

Borders, Language, Culture, and People Define Nations

Without those, it’s either a country or an empire and not a nation. And if it’s a country, it will Balkanize or be led by an authoritarian.

GDP Growth ≠ Happiness

GDP growth was a focus during the Cold War. Why? We needed stuff to beat the horrific ideology of the commies. We won. But now we try to make an economy larger at the expense of the people. How many rich couples were happier when they were young and poor?

I’m joining a Cold War reenactor group – we get together on weekends with a keg and without cell phones and listen to heavy metal.

Work Has Intrinsic Value

Sweat builds your soul and gives you freedom—UBI and welfare are cages for the human soul.

Competition Drives Progress

And war is the ultimate competition. What has happened to the vitality of Europe as it has the longest war-free period in its history?

Death Is Inevitable

Blue Öyster Cult® said that you shouldn’t fear the reaper, and that’s fairly sound advice. We’re all going to die. The parade will end. To paraphrase Monty Python, we will all become ex-parrots. Focus on the living bit, and add in a little more cowbell.

I hear that when ducks fly over the pyramids, they flock like an Egyptian.

Equality Doesn’t Exist

Equality under the law can exist, equality of rights can exist, but people are unequal in every possible physical, cognitive or moral way.

Authority Exists For A Reason

The Founding Fathers thought long and hard about how to set up self-governance in the United States. They didn’t settle on, “everyone do whatever they want”. Authority in society is required because:

Humans Are Imperfectible

Chasing communist Utopia led to more deaths in the twentieth century than any other man-made condition. People are flawed, and systems have to take that into account.

Is a classy fish sofishticated?

Truth, Beauty, And Goodness Exist

Not GloboLeftist “My truth” but Truth, with a capital T. The same with Beauty and Goodness, both of which the GloboLeft similarly tried to define as nonexistent.

A Divine Presence Exists

YMMV, but everything I’ve seen shows that this is both a physical and mathematical certainty.

That’s a start at the list, and I’m sure you have more. Whenever a society becomes based on ideas that aren’t real, it becomes unstable. Whenever a Man With A Plan® says that they’re going to rebuild society, run.

And when people spout corrosive philosophies that tear apart families and create societal misery, why do we reward them by sending them to congress and or giving them prestigious professorships?

What other things that everyone knew in 1025 A.D. have we forgotten?

Life Is Not Random. This Isn’t A Mistake.

“I refuse to believe that mankind is a random byproduct of molecular circumstance, no more than the result of mere biological chance.” – Alien: Covenant

A LEGO® store opened in my hometown. People lined up for blocks.

There are times that life seems random, chaotic. In our current time, especially, change is moving faster than a Disney™ transvestite can ruin a childhood.

It seems random.

But it’s not.

As I look deeper and deeper into the world, I see that the world, and in fact the entire Universe, is as it is for a reason. That’s a big claim. So why am I certain that this is the case?

Physics, baby.

The Universe is tuned for life. There’s a quantity called the “fine structure constant” which is roughly 1/137. And, there aren’t any units, so I can’t even poke fun at the communist metric system.

What the fine structure constant represents is the relationship between the elementary charge of an electron, how hard it is to make a spark, pi, the speed of lights, and the relationship between wavelength and energy of a photon. So, it’s a lot of stuff to mix up, and I’m surprised the number of lime-flavored PEZ™ bricks in Guatemala isn’t included as well, but I didn’t get a vote.

When photons pass each other do they just wave?

What’s important, though, is that if it were much different than its current value, life doesn’t exist. If the number is much bigger, electrons are bound too closely to the atom this shrinks the size of the atom, making your mother even shorter and denser. I can hear the kids now: “Your momma’s a neutron star.”

Also, chemistry is built around electrons zooming from one atom to the next, so if the electrons don’t move, poof. No steak.

If the fine structure constant is much smaller, important things like carbon and oxygen couldn’t stick together, and, boom. No beer.

Life existing requires this one number being within a fairly narrow range around that 1/137. 4/137 and, zap, no more Toaster Strudels™. Of any flavor.

I wrote a book about using stairs. It’s a step-by-step guide.

Throw everything up randomly, and nothing useful exists. Our Universe is really like Goldilocks was so picky that she had to have her porridge between 112.312°F and 114.452°F (between 4 and 7 liters). Yes, she would have starved.

That’s not all – change the strong nuclear force, the gravitational constant by just a few percent and no useful structures can ever form. Ever.

That’s the big picture. But I’m far from original, and this is far from new knowledge.

The Greeks stole my thunder and had the Fates: Clotho, Larry, and Curly, I think. The Romans had Fortuna: Fortuna was worse than vodka at bringing both prosperity and ruin. The Norns knit the fates of the Vikings while drinking mead and sitting under Yggdrasil. Oh, and Matthew 10:29 would like a word as well:

“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”

Yes, I know that’s not a sparrow.

I generally leave my house within the same thirty second window every day. I know that’s crappy OpSec, but it does soothe my autism. When I’m delayed, I’ve often had the thought that wasn’t without a reason, good or bad. What seems to be random chance is almost certainly not. If I lose a sock, get a flat, or have “stumble” upon an article, it’s just me being a part of the play.

Now it may surprise you, but my life isn’t perfect. There have been goofs I’ve made, and I’ve had both good and bad luck. But I’ll tell you, it often wasn’t something I could perceive right at that moment. The old Chinese parable comes to mind:

A farmer’s horse runs away, prompting neighbors to lament his bad luck. “Maybe,” he replies. Days later, the horse returns with a herd of wild horses. “Good luck!” the neighbors say. “Maybe,” he says. His son, taming the new horses, falls and breaks his leg— “Bad luck! The neighbors sat. “Maybe,” the farmer shrugs. Soon, war breaks out, and the Emperor’s army comes through town, drafting all the able-bodied young men, but the son’s injury spares him from conscription. “Good luck!” the neighbors exclaim. “Maybe,” the farmer repeats.

See, what the farmer realized is that his son might end up married to Greta Thunberg.

Life’s no crapshoot, though – the place was designed for us. There are no coincidences—our wins, our flops, even that flat tire last Tuesday are part of the plan, and it’s no accident you’re reading this.

And we don’t talk about time travel.

The paradox is, though, you’re not a pawn, you’re also the player. Our actions matter. Life isn’t a cosmic slot machine, but the things we do and experience are lessons and mold us, or mold someone else. And it’s in that narrow window that wonderful things happen.

How do I know that?

We’re here. And so is beer. And so is every other wonderful part of creation.

Except for the metric system. The French can have that one back.

What Does Winning Look Like?

“It’s not the money, it’s just all the stuff.” – The Jerk

If I use deodorant instead of mouthwash, when I talk will I have a weird Axe® scent?

I once had a boss that said to me, “John, what gets measured, gets managed.” His point was that if we have details on what’s going on, that drives attention. His corollary was, “So, be careful what you measure.” The idea behind that was that if you spent your time focusing on the wrong things, you’d never achieve what you were really trying to do, sort of like an airline company hiring pilots based on diversity rather than on, well how good of a pilot they are.

Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.

Anyway, if you read the news, the main things that we measure are economic:

GDP Growth
Price of Eggs
Stock Market Level

These are mainly material things. The nice thing about them is that they are very easy to measure.

Fun fact: if you take the population of North Korea and cut them in half, they’ll die.

Does that mean that growth in GDP means we’re winning?

I’ll answer that question with another question: Were people in the United States happier when our GDP was half, in real terms, what it is today?

I think that question is easy to answer: we were happier then.

Let’s look at what constituted a normal life back then. Did we have a society based on greater trust? Yes, yes we did. Kids were free-range, and long summer afternoons blurred into nighttime without ever stepping inside the house until Mom yelled “dinnertime” or when the porch light came on (that was my signal).

Doors were unlocked. Cars were unlocked. The words “porch” and “pirate” had never yet been combined.

There was also a greater presence. People were where they were, mostly. Sure, I’d be reading The Return of the King on the school bus as it winded down Wilder Mountain, but when I was doing something, I was doing it, not marking time until I checked my Snapchat™ feed. People at dinner talked to each other, or if they weren’t talking to each other, there was a reason, not merely that they were distracted.

If I have a birthday party I’m going to have the Beacons of Gondor as a theme. It’ll be lit.

And, yeah, there was a greater depth and complexity of thought that was driven by the input. A book takes patience, it takes time, and it takes investment. A Xeet™? It takes 20 seconds, and that includes thinking about it.

We also thought differently. When I have a problem now where I’m missing information, almost always the answer is just a few clicks away. Back then, we really had to spend time trying to figure things out, and that created a greater depth of understanding about the problem. It was also frustrating and took a lot of time, but it trained me on how to think through to find a solution.

There’s a tip you won’t find on YouTube™.

There was also a greater patience. The first album I ever ordered was promised to arrive in . . . “4 to 6 weeks”. Yes. That’s right. A month and a half. There was no next-day Prime™ delivery. I’d listen to Super Hits by Ronco™ when it showed up, and not a minute sooner. The crush of the immediate didn’t exist, and gratification cycles were likewise adjusted.

Oh, sure, there were negatives, too. I think that medicine is probably a bit better, especially if you base it on cost alone. I’m pretty sure that polio sucked. Lifespan is longer today (though I bet that’s 90% coming from kicking cigarettes). And, with only the mainstream media, there was certainly a lot of Truth that could be hidden. MKUltra, anyone?

And air conditioning. I really like that.

But, outside of air conditioning, I don’t think being wealthier has made us even a little bit happier.

Pavlov rang a bell every time a he felt a breeze. He called it air conditioning.

It hasn’t brought us together. Although we’ve always had that, it wasn’t so visible because most people in Atlanta didn’t care what went on in the Puget Sound, and vice versa. The shrinking of our horizons has magnified the visibility of our divide.

It hasn’t made us stronger. As a whole, I think we are nationally as emotionally weak as we ever have been. Part of that is the wealth. If a person has lived their entire life in a mansion, any step down a cracked iPhone™ screen is a tragedy. A person who lives in a box? They shrug at a thunderstorm.

Is a flock of sheep falling downhill at lambslide?

Adversity breeds strength, and, collectively, the nation has been pampered to the point that they are brittle. I think that is not true of my readers, because I’m guessing everyone here has seen some stuff. I sense the character that adversity reveals in the replies.

So, if all I focus on is the GDP and growth and the price of eggs, then my life will be hollow and filled with an unquenchable thirst, because when it comes to money, there is never enough.

My advice? Be careful what measures you value, because that’s what you’ll become. You might even find that you’ve gained the whole world, yet lost yourself.

It Came From . . . 1992.

“Schwing!” – Wayne’s World

Here’s advice. If you see a big mouse, don’t try killing it with a baseball bat. At least not in Disneyland®.

The cliff is real. As we move from the 1980s into 1992, we see that the world has really changed. Movies, for the most part, have much higher production value – perhaps someone could explain that, but even low-budget B movies looked better than they did in the 1980s. Take, for example, Reservoir Dogs. It was on a budget of $1.5 million (depending on who you believe) and it looks great.

Movies look better. But are they better? There are a few that have passed the test of time, but most are “meh” tier movies at best. Now, not that there isn’t some good (or at least memorable) acting in some of the films. “You can’t handle the truth” Nicholson and whatever Pacino was yelling in Scent of a Woman after gargling gravel are memorable, but the movies themselves are flat, and feel a bit defeated.

Of the top four movies in box office for the year, three are sequels, mainly forgettable sequels. The top movie is Aladdin, from the time that Disney® went from making family entertainment to becoming a strip-miner of popular culture. Only two movies from the top 10 made the list.

Anyway, in no particular order, here are films from 1992. Enjoy!

In Wayne’s World, everyone apparently has Wayne’s face.

Wayne’s World – I always had a soft spot for this silly movie. It’s basically the story of how to stretch a premise for a four minute skit into a 95 minute movie. It’s silly. It’s self-referential. It’s what people were looking for. It was released in movie “garbage time” (February) and ended up resurrecting Bohemian Rhapsody into a hit for the second time and also resulted in a lot of unnecessary whiplash.

Noises Off – A comedy movie about a play with John Ritter and Carol Burnett and Michael Caine chewing their way through their lines.. A huge box-office bomb. Probably 10 minutes too long. Yet, for me, it works. It’s sort of like if the television show Frasier was a movie. I liked it Most people didn’t.

Encino Man – Fat hobbit® Sean Astin and Pauly Shore find a prehistoric caveman (Brendan Fraser) while digging a hole for a swimming pool. They thaw him out, and pretend to be Bill and Ted with a cavemen. A bit of advice: don’t wheeze the juice.

Well, that’s one reason to let her stay.

House Sitter – Goldie Hawn plays a psychotic stalker and Steve Martin plays an architect that she blackmails and terrorizes. Oh, wait, that would be the way it would have been written about in 2020 if they made it and the sexes were reversed. Instead, it’s a charming comedy about Goldie Hawn pretending to be Steve Martin’s wife because . . . reasons. It was fun, and Martin/Hawn have a pretty good chemistry.

A League of Their Own – Geena Davis carries this movie about a baseball league that was focused on the World War II period when it actually wasn’t controversial to assume a woman was a woman and all the able-bodied men were off killing each other and all of the rest of them were making bombs. The film is mainly memorable for Tom Hanks’ line, “There’s no crying in baseball,” which was funny before Me, Too and now it is said that he committed feelings rape. I watched this movie once. It was enough.

To your house in 30 minutes, or the next murder is free.

Universal Soldier – This movie is based on a documentary about reanimated soldiers from the Vietnam era being used to deliver pizzas for Dominos™ in thirty minutes or less. No, I kid. It’s about Dolph Lundgren and Jean Claude Van Damme shooting lots of guns and killing lots of things. Not sure that you need much more in a movie.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer – If you think 1992 wasn’t far back in time, of the top five billed actors in this movie, four are dead: Donald Sutherland, Paul Reubens, Rutger Hauer, and Luke Perry. The one undead main actor is Buffy herself, Kristy Swanson. The movie isn’t great, but it still had some of the spirit of the late, great 1980s comedies. Plus, Kristy Swanson regularly likes my comments on X®. Because she’s based. And not dead.

Wouldn’t all westerns be better if they rode giant housecats?

Unforgiven – This is the Eastwood movie of a lot of Eastwood fans. It’s Eastwood shooting things, so I’m on board, but I put this one below many of his other films. Why? It’s got good dialogue, plausible action, and great actors. So what’s missing in this film? In my mind it’s the fact that essentially every single character is morally bankrupt. That was the trend of movies in the 1990s that got stronger as the decade went along. Give me Josey Wales or Dirty Harry any day over this character.

Captain Ron – This is a weird movie because I could see about 593 actors that could have played each of the roles in this film. In one way, it’s a generic 1980s comedic romp featuring an ex-SCTV comedian. In another version it could have starred Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren killing people on a boat. Which, again, what more do you need in a movie?

Second prize is, as always, a set of steak knives.

Glengarry Glen Ross – For me, this movie is really only 8 minutes long. Alec Baldwin is a tool in real life, but his portrayal of a top salesman is the speech that won him an Oscar™ in the only scene he’s in. The rest of the movie is okay. Another dark, gritty movie with no real heroes.

Mr. Baseball – In this movie, Tom Selleck is turned into an actual baseball, but with small arms and legs and is forced into a Japanese prisoner of war camp where he devises nuclear weapons and bombs Hiroshima and wins World War II. Nah. Not that at all. Tom Selleck is a baseball player who goes to Japan and becomes a better person in a romantic comedy centered around baseball. Everyone else likes Bull Durham better, but I’d easily pick this one over it. I believe that only Tom Selleck would agree with me.

Steven Seagal after he joined Meal Team Six.

Under Siege – Steven Seagal had exactly one good movie. It awas this one.

Reservoir Dogs – Speaking of a cheap movie looking good, this is another one. Tightly filmed on a budget that consisted of Twinkies®, cocaine, and some sort of cheap whiskey, this was the movie that got Tarantino the nod to make Pulp Fiction. Is it his best? Maybe. It’s easily the best movie on this list. Gritty, yet humanity still managed to seep through.

But what if they were actual dogs? I suppose this could be the Disney® version, but then they’d all have to be black labs.

Passenger 57 – In another universe, this starred Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme killing people on a plane. Which, again, what more do you need in a movie?

Bad Lieutenant – This was a movie so intent on being gritty that at times it turns into nearly comic parody. I never saw it at the time, but saw a review of it indicating how good it was and watched it a few years ago. Whoa. No. It’s not good. It’s just 96 minutes of Harvey Keitel becoming increasingly unhinged. Critics loved it.

Okay, it’s Paxton and Paxton, and they’re carrying fireman tools from some Lovecraftian alternate universe, but I’ll go with it.

Trespass – I really like this movie. It’s a tight little treasure run into the heart of a ghetto, and Bill Paxton and William Sadler star as two firefighters who get a tip to where a bunch of gold is. Complications ensue. Again, I really liked it, but I have a soft spot for both Paxton and Sadler, who were/are very underrated actors. Why was it a box office bomb? It featured white guys fighting black gang members right after the LA riots in ’92. Yeah, the market wasn’t ready for it.

1992 continued the demise of the anti-hero and the rise of “everyone sucks” that seemed to permeate the 1990s like a bunch of bodies buried under the crawlspace of a nice house. Sure, it looked great, but something didn’t smell right. The comedies were mostly generic pale imitations of the Morning in America confidence of the 1980s.

As usual, I deleted a few for length. What did you like that I missed?

Bad Luck, Diversity, And Bank Robbers

“Isn’t it supposed to be bad luck for the groom to see the bride in her wedding dress before the ceremony?” – Kill Bill Volume 2

I got mugged by six dwarves. Not Happy.

There is such a thing as bad luck. A neighbor of mine told me a story of when he was a kid. He and his friends were throwing dirt clods at another group of kids. Now, I remember doing exactly that. Dirt clods were perfect for throwing because when they hit the ground, they exploded in a puff of dirt that I pretended was a grenade.

Pretending I was blowing up my friends. Huh, sounds like a Unabomber childhood when I put it that way, doesn’t it?

Regardless, my neighbor said that one of the other kids got a dirt clod in the eye. Why threw it? I don’t think they ever figured that out, but my friend was the only one sued. Why?

Every cloud has a silver lining. Except a mushroom cloud. That’s probably cobalt or strontium.

His dad owned a bank. As I recall from the story, his dad’s insurance company ended up settling the claim. No one said, “Oh, bad luck.” There certainly doesn’t seem to be a place for bad luck in our world, but sometimes bad luck really does happen. I mean, once upon a time a fortune teller that I would have to suffer with eight years of bad luck.

“And then things get better?”

“No, you stop suffering because you get used to it.”

To me, this seems unfair, but remember Law School Lesson 101: never sue poor people. It’s a variation of the Willie Sutton school of law, when he responded to the question of why he robbed banks with the answer of “Because that’s where the money is.”

I want to own a bakery just so when someone walks in and points at a cake and asks, “Is this gluten free?” I can respond, “No, that’s $16.50.”

That’s one part of the equation, but the second part makes it really rough: massive damage awards. Ask Alex Jones about the nonsensical $1 billion jury award against him. Why not a trillion? It’s not like Alex Jones has a billion dollars, and it’s not like they can strip being “Alex Jones” from Alex Jones, so if they take Infowars™, well, he’ll be in business the next day with a new company. And if they take that, yet a new company.

Poor people are lawsuit-proof because they don’t have money. Alex Jones is lawsuit-proof because (like James O’Keefe) his company is him.

Since most companies can’t hide behind the idea of being Alex Jones, they have to have a defense. The defense?

Standards.

David Hogg has personally sold more AR-15s than Palmetto State Armory®.

If a company does the same thing the same way all of the time, and if every other company does that exact same thing the same way every time, it’s now a Standard. While a company can certainly be sued if they screw up, it’s a pretty good defense to say what Ma Wilder described as a weak excuse, “Well, everybody else is doing it.”

So, if you ask Proctor and Gamble™ if they would jump off a cliff if everyone else was doing it, the answer is probably something like: “If that would help us actualize projected profits in the near term and help build organic growth in the sector, that would be a strategy we would engage with.” Or, in human terms, yes, yes they would jump off a cliff if everyone does it. Sadly, this throttles innovative products.

This also leads to a herd mentality in large companies. “Does Disney™ have DEI? Well, looks like we need DEI, too.” These companies realize that there is safety in numbers. Sure, they want to be different, but they all want to be different in the exact same legally non-actionable way.

If being a diversity hire is a good thing, why don’t we publicly name them so they can celebrate it?

This (in part) has led to the extreme pliability of the companies to Woke propaganda, and their quick rebound once Trump was elected. Was Google© all in for Kamala? You bet. Has Google™ swapped their maps to “Gulf of America” at the same time removing Black History Month©, Pride Month™ and scrapped targets to not hire white guys?

Yes, yes they have.

This surprised me. I was expecting these companies to keep being part of the ResISTanCe since they actively opposed Trump during his first term. Either they were neutered during and by the pandemic, or they’re horribly afraid of Trump and Elon. Or they’re worried about the inevitable wrath of Barron when he reaches his full height of 65 feet (1 kiloliter).

In the end, there really is “bad luck”. Now, I don’t think that everything is bad luck, I mean, when that double amputee tried to rob a bank? That wasn’t bad luck.

After all, he wasn’t even armed.

Don’t Stop Now

“You’ll have a grand tale to tell. A tale of victory.” – 300

I guess Kim is chubby because he never had to run for office.

Certainly, the re-election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency has been a remoralizing event. I know that many (me included) thought that the GloboLeftElite would do whatever was necessary to “fortify” the results so Trump couldn’t return to power. I think, in the end the real power that saved Trump was the power of his hair. I mean, like Hamlet said, let the best mane win.

I’m in hopes that he won’t let his worst impulses take this second term of his administration run into the problems of the first. Trump’s main flaw (not his mane flaw, which is flawless) is his desire to “make a deal”. Hell, his book was even titled, “The Art of the Deal”. That’s where he got his greatest successes, and that was the great flaw that was exploited and why we ended up sending billions to foreigners, yet still didn’t have adequate border coverage at the end of his administration.

Scientists have discovered a way to walk through walls: doors.

So, now is not the time to give up – we must hold Trump accountable for the promises he made. He understands that he’s not our leader, that, rather, he jumped out in front of a parade that was already in motion and gave it a focus. When he gets off track, like when he praised himself for the Vaxx®, MAGA crowds booed him. And then he stopped talking about the Vaxx™, because he knew that wasn’t where the parade was headed.

We must remain vigilant. I do think that there is hope, since his near assassination, this has probably focused him like a laser on his own mortality. He knows he has four years to do what he has to do, and that’s it. Possibly only two: the mid-term elections may change the House, and turn his last two years into a gridlocked standstill.

Now, a gridlocked standstill is probably better than when congress is “doing” things and will probably lead to a dozen more impeachments for crimes like “breathing” and “sighing”, so the next two years is key.

The good news is that the GloboLeft is shell-shocked. They’ve created little echo chambers that made them get high on their own supply and think that a (possibly) drunken (allegedly) cocaine-using diversity hire anchor baby that achieved absolutely nothing, ever, that wasn’t given to her would be a good candidate. They were (and are) shocked.

Good friends are like toasters – if you throw one down the stairs, they probably won’t make toast for you anymore.

Good. The GloboLeft are shaken to the core, and we should make sure that it stays that way. If they think Trump is going to be bad, we should, at every instance, agree and amplify.

This isn’t spiking the ball. This is making them crazy.

Oh, sure, they wouldn’t be the GloboLeft if they weren’t already crazy members of a death cult. But we want to amp it up. We want them to not be able to think straight. For the next two years. We want to hijack (whenever possible) their amygdalae (Anonymous Conservative talks about it at the LINK). If you work with one of these creatures, you can get them to go off at the slightest provocation.

Why? They’re already unstable. Don’t let them plan. Don’t give them their safe spaces. Don’t let up. They may be in HR. They may be community members. When they make accusations in public, or on Facebook™ or Reddit© or X®, they sound crazy. They will call you a Nazi. They will say that you are evil. They will sound unhinged. Good. They discredit themselves.

You are needed. Keep the pressure on.

Her liver was 152.

As long as the GloboLeft sounds like the unhinged death cult members that they are, they move the Overton Window our direction.

Make them crazy. If you see a GloboLeftist flaking out at the supermarket, you can walk by and say, “This is MAGA country, missy.” That’s guaranteed to end up with a shrieking fit and a crazed post. If confronted, you can just say, “I was wondering where the pasta aisle was. Don’t have any idea why she reacted so.”

So, keep them busy.

To the non-crazy normies, keep dropping redpills. One story I heard from about a normie was that she was concerned that Trump wanted to “drain the swamp”. When it was gently explained that “drain the swamp” actually referred to the corruption of the Deep State at Foggy Bottom, the response was, “Oh, I can see that.”

Never expect normies to know what’s actually going on, so don’t get complicated. Explaining basic economics might help. Might.

Be reminded that these are the same people that didn’t know who was running for president, so, be gentle, and don’t start with weapons-grade redpills about deportation. Ease them into it. Help them draw conclusions. Point out how the mainstream media is lying or not covering the real news.

Well, maybe Juan in a million.

And remember that X® is our friend right now – the closest we have to a mainstream news platform that isn’t censoring (much).

Don’t cede the Second Amendment. Ever. Not a single inch. Point out that the real killers aren’t law-abiding gun owners, but gangbangers mainly shooting gangbangers, and they’d have guns anyway when everyone else was disarmed. Point out that there is a correlation with more guns leading to less crime. Disarmed people are victims waiting for second responders – armed people are citizens who are the true first responders.

Don’t cede morality. The latest hilarity is the 4B movement, essentially women promising not to engage in random sex and rather wait until they’re in a committed relationship. They expected us to get mad, when in reality we say, “Awesome, welcome aboard! Nobody likes a tramp.”

Are the security people at a trampoline store called bouncers?

Don’t cede love of your country, and don’t cede love of your nation. They’re not the same thing, but don’t give up either.

Enjoy the win. Keep the steel in Trump’s spine. And don’t spike the football yet.

It’s not even halftime.

But for now? We didn’t win by a hair, we won by a whole headful.

And you are needed.

Project 2026: A Joint Trump/Wilder Project

“I believe in cutting useless government projects. I also believe in cutting useful projects, future projects, and past projects.” – Parks and Recreation

People in my town are tired of useless projects. They even put up signs that say “End Construction”.

I know that Project 2025® got a really bad reputation during the election. At every point, Democrats and their GloboLeftElite tried to convince voters that Trump was going to implement Project 2025™. Well, he isn’t going to implement Project 2025©.

Instead, President Trump secretly called me through the voices in my dreams and told me, “John Wilder, after we win bigly, and want to bring to the people Project 2026. See? It’s one better already. It will be such a good program, precisely because I’m looking to you to write it for me. And, also, if you look behind you, you’ll see your cat is melting into a puddle of butter. Very disgusting. You should fix that.”

If I steal a rich man’s dinner rolls, is that highfalutin gluten lootin?

When I woke up, I immediately got to work. So, here, without further introduction is Trump’s Project 2026®™©. It’s the best.

Project 2026 is magnanimous in our inevitable victory. As such, we decree the following for the GloboLeftists who have been left a shattered shell of their former selves:

First, to our opponent, Kamala Harris, Project 2026 hereby grants you an unlimited supply of cocaine, box wine, and pantyhose.
To our dedicated GloboLeftist opponents, Project 2026 grants exclusive access to a portion of the Internet that has been cleansed of all ideas that you might find disturbing or triggering. Thankfully, it has already been created and is called “Reddit™”.
Don’t despair. Project 2026 will commit to a peaceful transfer of power back to the GloboLeftElite sometime after the Sun expands to consume the orbit of the Earth.
You are not required to call Donald Trump “president”. He doesn’t care what you think. You are, however, required to have his picture on your bedside table and publicly praise him during the daily Trump Praise Minute. While optional, your tears will make Trump stronger.
Finally, to the rank and file, you are welcome to live in either Portland or Seattle. I hear Puget Sound is lovely. The train cars will be available shortly for quick and easy carbon-friendly transport.

But if she and Hillary team up for 2028, we could have Cackles and Cankles.

Project 2026 believes that sports are a healthy aspiration for every American. As such:

Football players will now be treated like indentured servants again. Free agency is hereby forever suspended, and athletes will be required to live in the cities they play in and will be paid no more than $23.45 an hour. After their sports career is finished, successful athletes will be allowed to sell used automobiles.
Trans females will now be known as “dudes” and will be allowed to compete in female leagues, made of other dudes.

The Economy will be a priority, and Project 2026 put Elon Musk and Ron Paul in charge of managing it. Our working title for this is the Elonomy.

Imports from the Free Mars Colony will be tariff-free.
The five-dollar footlong will return.

If you work at the Federal Reserve®, are you required to drive a Fiat™?

Project 2026 realizes the immense hardship that illegal aliens have wrought on our nation. As such, we will act quickly to fix these issues.

Birthright citizenship is ended, retroactively, by Project 2026. Barack Obama will be sent either to Cuba or the newly-formed People’s Republic of Hawaii.
The Department of Exmigration will be officially formed, and every celebrity who posted that they will be leaving the country will be leaving the country. By Wednesday. The motto of the Department will be “Buh-bye”.
The Department of Exmigration will also enforce the repatriation of all illegal immigrants starting Wednesday. And ending Thursday, though if you are in line by Wednesday, we’ll give you another 24 hours. Any illegals left after that will be sent to our choice of either India or Nigeria.
Only females of exceptional beauty will be allowed to illegally immigrate. Our policy is, “9 or 10, come on in!” The judging panel will consist of Mel Gibson, Elon Musk, and Johnny Depp. The anticipated formation of GloboLeftist Wine Drinking Cat Lady Einsatzgruppen to hunt down this new national resource will be put down brutally.

Project 2026 has a goal of two hot chicks for every dude.

Marriage and children are important to the United States, so:

Starting in 2026 unmarried mothers will receive no child support nor governmental support of any type. Widows are exempt.
No fault divorce is abolished.
Women and men are barred from receiving child support payments or alimony.
Only married women and men between the ages of 21 and 63 can vote.
An era of free power will follow based on Project 2026’s projection that we can exploit the power of suffragettes spinning in their graves at near lightspeed after hearing that GloboLeftist women, after hearing about Trump’s win, promise to be celibate outside of committed relationships.

I went to a farmer’s party. They really knew how to turn up the beets!

Government reform is top on the list of Project 2026:

95% of all federal employees are hereby terminated. Pack your stuff. The remaining 5% are park rangers and the US Postal Service®. Project 2026 thought for a long time about other groups, but they all have to go. All of them. Except for the Department of the Treasury to collect tariffs and the Department of Exmigration.
The ATF’s mission will be radically changed: their new mission will be to make firearms plentiful and low cost.
The FBI headquarters will be relocated to the Swanson Motel, in Bismarck, North Dakota.
All federal employees except for the Federal Marshall Service will be disarmed, as Project 2026 realizes someone has to bring horse thieves to justice.
Project 2026 understands and values the role of education in society, and therefore will remove the greatest impediment to education: The Department of Education. All employees will be fired, and will be barred from ever working in any educational role again.

Project 2026 realizes that the United States is just one of a whole host of nations. The best one, but still just one. Here follows the changes to International Relations.

International relations, imports, all financial transactions and all telecommunications are hereby ended with India and Nigeria until they show proof that they’ve executed every scammer in the country, or turned them into valuable mulch.
Our new policy in dealing with other nations is, “Why should I care?” If any other nation contacts us for aid, our official response will be “Rub some dirt on it.”

Those guys were always cold as ice.

Project 2026 realizes a strong military is important to protecting our borders, which is all we’re going to do with it.

Every young man will be sent to bootcamp, and will continue in bootcamp until they pass or reach the age of 40. After passing bootcamp, each young man is sent home with all the weapons and ammunition they can carry, including C-4. Additionally, Project 2026 will officially rename C-4 as “serious putty”.
The bootcamps will be along the southern and northern borders of the United States, and a “free fire” zone will be established within fifty yards (six decaliters) of the border. This includes people attempting to escape Trudeauistan.
Most overseas bases will be returned to the host country, with the exception that all on-base fast-food restaurants will remain. Exceptions to this are Diego Garcia and Guantanamo, because Project 2026 finds them amusing.

This is a work in progress, so any suggestions for additions can be provided before I transmit this to President-Elect Donald Trump tonight in my dreams. I hope the cat doesn’t melt again. Such a mess. So buttery. Very disrespectful.

It Came From . . . 1988

“What’s going on, Andy? Is this what you want to do with your life? Sleep all day long and hang out with the Criterion brothers?” – Funny Farm

How do I get a movie from 1988 to show up? Just say Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.

FYI – site getting hit last night by . . . something. Can’t respond to comments from the last two posts, so I will when I can.

I was wrong last month when I mentioned I had only one year to go in the 1980s, there are three. This one is 1988, and, going back through the list of movies I found, 1988 wasn’t particularly a great year. Although the corporatism that started to kill movies in the 1990s had started, it hadn’t hit fully. Some movies were still just fun.

As usual, the list isn’t in any particular order, my descriptions of plots are sketchy, and these aren’t necessarily the best movies, they’re just the movies on the list.

Beetlejuice – The original. Tim Burton makes the most beautiful movies, but unless someone is there to stop him from following his worst impulses, the movies are also very stupid. Someone kept Tim in a box, and he got a great performance out of Michael Keaton as the titular character, and Wynona Ryder was in it before she started being a nutty shoplifter.

Dead Heat – Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo play two cops in a buddy cop movie. The big twist? They’re dead and have been reanimated by a mad scientist so that they can commit zombie-cop robberies. The math seems to be a bit off on this one – if I could reanimate people, I’d probably be looking for a Nobel® Prize rather than committing petty heists with Joe Piscopo. Is it a comedy? Well, one of the character names is Roger Mortis. So, maybe, but the actual cop part gets in the way of the actual movie. The nice thing about this is that it got made even though it’s arguably awful – it’s awful in a good way, as in, “Let’s try this crazy idea” rather than awful in the 2024 “let’s make a woke corporate movie and preach girlboss leftie themes and if people don’t like it let’s call them racist” way.

The same hairy dude was in every generated image. Who knew that PEZ® and beards were related?

Willow – Not to be confused with the new Disney® series that was so bad that they vowed never to show it again to get a tax write-off, this is a story of a dwarf who comes from a village of dwarves and gets into a typical sword and sorcery adventure. Think of it as someone who wanted to do a Tolkien movie but didn’t have the film rights. It ended up being a fairly sweet and charming movie, and one of Val Kilmer’s best performances, ever. I liked it more than most people. Bonus: Joanne Whalley.

Big – Tom Hanks was getting ready to break out as an actual actor, and Big was a stepping stone for that direction, where he ended up playing a kid that made a wish to become an adult. But he was still a kid in his brain parts. Nowadays, this movie would have difficulty being made because Hanks (as a kid in an adult body) has sex with Elizabeth Perkins. Yeah. That didn’t age well. I haven’t checked on Elizabeth Perkins to see if she aged well, but, then found she was a brittle old feminist. Sigh. Looks like Tom dodged a bullet.

Funny Farm – This was an absolute box-office bomb, as I recall, but it is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s essentially Green Acres without the Hungarian accent, but I just love that story, so I can watch nearly endless variations of it. In this case, sportswriter Chevy Chase gets an advance for a book, can’t write it, and steals his wife’s book, exhumes a dead body, tries to set a booby trap for a drunken mailman, and determines that he can live life without being a tool to everyone around him. Unlike the real Chevy Chase.

Is that Susan Sarandon in the middle?

Bull Durham – I put this on here primarily because it is a very good (not the best, but very good) baseball comedy. The Mrs. loves it, so, contractually I’m required to watch it when she watches it. It loses points for having Susan Sarandon associated with it and for being a bit too focused on the romance side of the equation. Best parts? Coach banter and bringing the word lollygagging back. Lollygaggers!

Die Hard – I don’t need to describe this one, since it’s a Christmas favorite. This move turned out perfectly, and was, perhaps, the zenith of 1980s action-adventure movies if you don’t count Predator™ and Terminator©. The twist? Putting an “everyman” into the role of hero. Remember, it’s not really Christmas until Hans Gruber falls off Nakatomi Tower! It is the best end for a movie, Hans down.

Is that Nakatomi Tower in the background?

A Fish Called Wanda – What if Monty Python® never broke up and did more movies? This is as close as you’re going to get to that dream. Fun and funny, and Kevin Kline absolutely steals the show (and an Oscar™) as Otto, a CIA hitman who quotes Nietzsche and believes “the central tenet of Buddhism is every man for himself”. Who knew Buddhists were libertarians? John Cleese plays John Cleese, and Jamie Lee Curtis, sadly, stays mainly clothed.

Vibes – Cyndi Lauper as a psychic stuck with also psychic Jeff Goldblum? Why not? The plot is odd and absurd, with Cyndi and Jeff travelling to the Andes. Yes. The movie involves all manner of silliness with the main focal point to set up odd situations where quirky-girl Lauper can bounce of straight-man Goldblum. Is it one of the best movies of Western Civilization? No. But it did make me laugh.

Tucker: The Man and His Dream – I’m not sure how much of this story is true, but it sounds like Tucker Carlson was trying to make a car after World War II. I’m not sure how this happened, but I think it might have something to do with time travel and Donald Trump’s uncle, John G. Trump, who was an electrical engineer and physicist, and the guy they brought in to steal evaluate Nikola Tesla’s notes so Trump could give them to Elon Musk. I think. Regardless, it was a pretty good movie about a car that certainly sounds like it would have been pretty good, though Tucker Carlson eventually gave up the dream and was later a journalist. You might have heard of him. Two thumbs up.

Young Guns – How much Bon Jovi do you need in a 1980s western? Just a little bit. It also stars the Sheen/Estevez brothers. So, it the singer and actors were all in need of blow driers, but the movie has also been hailed as relatively historically accurate tale of the life of Billy the Kid, with the exception that Kiefer Sutherland is actually only three feet tall, so they had to use a lot of perspective shots.

Oh, yeah, brother!

They Live – John Carpenter took a short story from 1963 and remade it into a politically biting science fiction film where aliens infiltrate and take over American society. Space aliens, not the aliens that eat ducks from the park. Anyway, the film is famous for an amazingly long street fight between Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David (not to be confused with David Keith). It is notable that the alien overlords are significantly nicer than the current Biden/Harris administration, so there’s that.

Scrooged – Another huge Bill Murray hit, and probably the definitive A Christmas Carol adaptation of my lifetime. Bill stars as a success-obsessed executive who takes the place of Scrooge. In a meta turn, he wants to do a live version of A Christmas Carol on Christmas for the ratings after saving Karen Allen from the Nazis. And it pulled in plenty of cash, making over $100 million on a $32 million budget. Not bad.

The Naked Gun – After Airplane!, there was a short-lived television show called Police Squad. It was hilarious, but most people don’t have a sense of humor so it was cancelled. Instead, the Zucker brothers resurrected Detective Frank Drebin and made a movie that made tons of money, and probably drove O.J. Simpson to murder since the script showed how easy it was to get away with murder.

This is way better than the original poster and has 100% more Nakatomi Tower.

Working Girl – This movie should have been the sequel to Die Hard where Sigourney Weaver teams up with Bruce Willis to defeat the German space aliens in a musical with Bill Murray singing the theme, backed by Bon Jovi and Lou Diamond Phillips. If only. I honestly don’t remember this movie at all, so my plot is probably superior to the real thing.

There it is. What did I miss?