Virginia Creepers in Charlottesville.

Artwork by George "I-Gor" Chastain. - http://myweb.wvnet.edu/e-gor/tvhorrorhosts/

Well, that was a blast and then some. For those who don’t know what Virginia Creepers is, (and shame on you for not knowing) it happens to be an excellent documentary done not long ago that showcases the Horror Host traditions of The Old Dominion. The film goes back to the now, unfortunately, lost (as in there is little to no footage of them in existence anywhere) horror hosts of the 50’s such as Ghoulda, Ronald and Hazel Witch and runs up through the modern era of with the new ghouls on the block like Dr. Sarcofiguy and Karlos Borloff and the Monster Madhouse crew. Along the way we get to see such horror host institutions like Bowman Body who was even honored with an official resolution from the Virginia General Assembly recognizing and thanking him for his public service and, no joke here, had a sandwich named after him that exists to this day and Count Gore de Vol who has pioneered internet horror hosting. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as how many guys are covered in this film. But, far more importantly, the thing is just fun as hell.

See. to be good at horror hosting for longer than a cup of coffee it has to be something that you enjoy doing. It has to be something you love. Each and every guy and gal ghoul who has made a mark in the field is someone who enjoys it and that vibe comes through in the documentary. Every interview looking back on a career and every fan interview looking back on the host(s) they grew up with is filled with this vibe and it’s captured perfectly by the director. And when the film isn’t focusing on an interview it’s giving you clips from the shows where anything and sometimes everything could and did happen. In the simplest terms; the film is really, really fun.

If you grew up with any of the guys featured in the film then the film is a fantastic walk down memory lane. If any of the guys are new to you then the film is an amazingly informative and incredibly joyous introduction to them.

So, where does Charlottesville come in to play? Well, last weekend I received a nice little Halloween gift in the mail in the form of the limited reproduction of the DVD cover (see above) and the DVD that I had pre-ordered some time ago. Jenn and I watched it and we both enjoyed it. Then, thanks to the wonders of Facebook, we found out that they were having a theatrical screening in Charlottesville as a part of a film festival. Oh, and a nice carrot added to the thing were appearances by long time favorite of mine Count Gore de Vol as well as Dr. Sarcofiguy and Karlos Borloff who are both doing a lot to bring horror hosting to new audiences. I couldn’t resist that. And the drive up was made a much easier thing to do as a family thing since Jenn, her mom and I were already looking at taking Ian up to the apple orchards to pick apples and look at the fall beauty of the foothills that lead into the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Higher, Daddy!

What a view

So, easy fit into the day’s planning. And, man, was it worth it.

After a fantastic morning with my wife, my mother-in-law, my father and I watching Ian run around like a little maniac on a hillside and pick apples like there was no tomorrow we headed into town and made our way to the theater. Shortly after we got there the guys behind the film (Sean Kotz and Chris Valluzzo) showed up. Both guys were great and neither of them threatened me with physical violence for sullying their fine production with my short interview. Shortly after their arrival Gore, Borloff and Sarcofiguy arrived. Of course, I immediately mugged them for autographs.

Dr. Sarcofiguy and I

Karlos Borloff signs his card from the Horror Host series as well as the poster prints for Virginia Creepers and Every Other Day is Halloween.

Count Gore de Vol getting mugged (by me) for autographs

After they recovered from the deranged fan incident we all went in to see the film. If anyone out there reading this has the chance to see this film in a theater and with an audience… Jump at the chance and do it in a heartbeat. The experience of the film, the fun factor at least, is just jacked up tenfold. It’s a real blast to watch this with a group of fellow horror host fans. And, honestly, you don’t need to be a horror host fan going in. Neither my mother-in-law nor my father were real big horror host fans, but the film really had them liking several of the hosts and the art form of horror hosting with a new appreciation of the craft and the performers.

And, on a personal level, the guys were all great. John Dimes (Dr, Sarcofiguy) is really a great guy to chat with, Dick Dyszel (Count Gore de Vol) was as gracious as ever when it came to fans (and nuts like me) and Jerry Moore (Karlos Borloff) was… Wow… That man has more energy and is more animated than just about anyone I know. He also seems to be a really, genuinely great guy.

Beyond just the general banter with a fan; Moore was as outgoing as he could be with everyone, handed out free cards and DVDs and did whatever he could to make everyone there know that he appreciated the fans and the support for Monster Madhouse. He also went out of his way to help my poor, suffering wife.

See, we had a plan at the start of the day. Yeah, planning something and expecting a two year old to go along with it… What fools we parents be. But, still, we had a plan. We figured that running through the orchards, up the mountain, down the mountain and around the trails would wear little Ian out. We thought that Ian, who normally goes down for a nap at around 2 PM, would be zonked and gone by the 2:30 start of the film. Nope. Didn’t happen.

It seems that seeing Gore (who, thanks to Halloween viewing of his Legacy DVD series this year Ian could identify by name and did so loudly several times) kinda hyped him up. That was then followed up by having Borloff play with him for a few minutes. By the time the movie started he was not going down. So Jenn, deciding that I was the big fan of the film and her mom and my dad had never seen it, took Ian outside the theater so as to not have him bother the other paying customers. And then she got a little help. It seems that Moore’s fine singing voice (yes, he does sing, plays rock & roll and has a CD of monster themed music) is aided by his love of a good smoke. So, whenever he went out for a smoke break during the film he made silly faces for Ian and played Ian’s version of hide and seek/peek-a-boo with him. By the end of the movie Ian had decided that Karlos Borloff was the greatest thing since Max and Ruby and Borloff may well be Ian’s new favorite person for the foreseeable future. He really, genuinely seems to be a good guy.

So, yeah, jump at the chance to see the film in a theater if you can. And buy the DVD. And, while you’re at it, swing by all the guys’ sites and support ‘em. You’ll be helping to keep a uniquely American art form alive and, more importantly, you’ll end up enjoying yourself.

This Man is an Idiot.

Glenn Beck…

Glenn Beck... Idiot

The newest idiot supreme in Conservative talk. I’ve watched the man and you would have to be drunk, high or simply mentally challenged to believe that he makes the least bit of sense.

But, by the power of playing to the lowest common denominator, he has some of the best ratings on Fox News. Seriously, they need to take the word “News” off of their name and go ahead and replace it with “Cult” or “Imbecile Nation” if they want to have truth in advertising.

Odd Observations as a Parent…

Ian has gotten into a show about two little pigs. The show is called Toot & Puddle. The only thing that I can ever think when that thing is on is…

Did they name the characters after the two thing their target audience likes to do on purpose or was it just a weird coincidence?

And 25 Plus Years of Gore de Vol Later…

25 years… Yeah, that’s about right. It’s been a little over 25 years now that I’ve been maybe geekier than even some of my geek friends. But I say that, I should note, in a proud way.

I turned 13 in 1983 and my parents had recently moved into a small little (and for me, mostly useless) town that was just South of Richmond, VA. Unlike a huge chunk of the surrounding counties and towns, this place was serviced by a relatively small cable provider who, unlike the then giant (Comcast) in the Central Virginia area, carried programming out of Washington, DC. Seemed a bit odd even at the time. Neither channel 5 nor channel 20 were major players on the growing national cable scene. I just assumed that the cable company couldn’t afford bigger channels and kind of mentally wrote them off.

Then one night in late 1983 or early 1984 that changed…

I was always a night person. I always stayed up kinda late. On one of those late nights I was channel surfing for some odd reason. Maybe it was that whatever I normally watched was having an off night or was in rerun. I don’t know, just can’t remember. All I do know is that I surfed across WDCA Channel 20 and into an old b&w horror film that I’d seen before and remembered liking a bit. I put the control box down (calling it a remote control by today’s standards is just a joke) and settled in.

The movie went to commercial and I went after either a snack or a drink. I walked back into my room a couple of minutes later and found… something… on my television that wasn’t the something I had been watching a few minutes earlier. Rather than my bugged eyed monster flick picking back up where the action left off a few minutes earlier I was confronted by some strange looking vampire on a wobbly dungeon set going on about something while a bad church organ’s notes were fading out in the background.

I had no idea what this silliness was. Why were they screwing up my movie? Why were they wasting my time with this?

I was not a happy camper.

And then something… happened. I honestly don’t remember if it was something that made me laugh or some really interesting bit of trivia that he said about the film I was watching that I was previously unaware of, but I suddenly found the guy much less annoying. By the end of the show I even found myself liking the guy.

Next week I didn’t channel surf into the program that I now knew was Creature Feature with Count Gore de Vol. I went straight to channel 20 at the start time listed in the paper’s TV guide and was ready to enjoy another film hosted by the Count. This went on for several weeks before the TV listing was for some odd little film that I had never heard of before. I mean I had flat never heard of it before.

That gave me pause. I didn’t know what it was, most of my friends at school had certainly never mentioned it and it had never played on the good cable channels that aired all the classic horror films. Would I give up SNL for some nothing horror film that nobody had ever heard of and I had no idea if I would like the thing? Yeah, I would. Why? Because the guy hosting the film was easily as much fun as the film (if not more so) and, not that I had realized it yet, I was a fan of Gore de Vol more than I was of Creature Feature’s features.

To be honest, I don’t even remember what it was (more on that concept later) and all I remember about it is not liking it very much at the time. But Gore had me laughing like a fool at each and every break in that forgettable film.

That happened a lot actually. Creature Feature played some great old films in its time, but it also fleshed out its bones with what most sane people would consider some real stinkers. Early on I viewed Gore as the icing on the cake when they were showing some of the great old films from the classic age of horror, but my still developing (but occasionally slow) brain started to realize that this guy was the cake as much as the good films. He was just a pineapple upside down cake to go along with the good films’ rich chocolaty goodness. Even the shows featuring the bad films were cake, they just didn’t have that second serving of chocolate cake.

So, yeah, I was hooked and a loyal fan. And, and this may sound odd at first, I think I had become a bit of a student as well. Gore did something that was pretty damned unique in my (then, admittedly limited) experience with all of the grade g and lower horror films out there that were more often than not made with no budget, no time, no studio support, no quality equipment and, sometimes, no discernible talent behind or in front of the camera. He made them fun. No, he didn’t just make his skits fun and thus his part of the show fun, but he made the bad stuff in the film fun. Whether it was by interviews with people who knew what went on during a film’s creation, trivia that let the viewer at home know what was going on and how that sorta kneecapped what was the final product or whether it was making fun of aspects of the film in a lighthearted and very often loving way he made you understand that some of the bad old films had a charm to them that you weren’t going to see in them if you weren’t willing to look.

This is a guy who loved his job, seemed to love just about all the films that he showed (but not, I’ve now learned, The Beast of Yucca Flats) and could, by it seemed sheer force of will and the amount of joy and fun he was able to convey through that little TV screen to infect the viewer with, make you at least a little bit of a fan to some degree or another of the films he was a fan of. And, in the way he presented and hosted some of the films Creature Feature aired, you really did see the charm in some of the films that you would have otherwise have turned off.

I’d like to think that I would, as a proud horror geek, have gotten there myself. There’s a small DVD store worth of films that I know, love and enjoy now that most sane people would pass up and that’s actually been a good thing in my life. I’ve corresponded with, met and, in many cases, become friends with a lot of people because of conversations started about films like Oasis of the Zombies, The Vampire Happening, Manfish, The Devil Bat, Son of Ingagi, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die and other films that have titles that simply cause confused looks on most people when mentioned. And, interestingly, the people who I’ve met and become friends with don’t fit the negative stereotype of the type of “geek” that most people hold in their minds. They’ve come from all walks of life, they’ve all had their own interesting and different life paths and they’ve all been people that have enriched my life in some way or another.

So, as I said, I’d like to think that I would have gotten there myself. But I didn’t have to. I had Gore de Vol leading the way and showing me what fun these “bad” films often really were. And along the way he kept me constantly entertained. His show was filled with a parade of colorful characters, interesting trivia, enlightening interviews and the occasional Penthouse Pet. It was, in many cases then unknown to my 13, 14 and 15 year old mind, also crammed with more innuendo than you could believe could be packed into such small segments. All I knew at the time was I was always enjoying myself when Creature Feature was on. I was a full blown addict and anyone wanting to suggest a 12 Step program could go to hell.

And it seemed that I wasn’t the only one. Gore ran contests and promotions on his show that seemed to get huge responses from the DC area people and his Halloween bashes, giant parties held at huge locations around DC, seemed to draw huge crowds every time out of the gate. Man I wanted to go to those so badly that I was almost a brat about it. Never did though. Funny story about that later. But it’s safe to say that I was ready to go well into my late teens as a rabid fan and would be getting to those bashes on my own as soon as I could drive a car. Likely with or without a legal driver’s license…

And then they did it. My parents moved just after the start of school in 1986 and I was now without a cable provider that carried WDCA Channel 20. I went insane. I was a one teen letter writing campaign and bombed the local Comcast office with letters and calls. They had to pick up WDCA Channel 20. They just had to. There was no discussion in the matter. Somehow, unfathomably, they were unmoved by someone insisting that they had to get a TV channel on their lineup so that some really annoying kid could watch Creature Feature with Count Gore de Vol every Saturday night. Yeah, I can’t understand it either.

So, sadly for me, my association with the good Count had been finally and fatally severed by the financial needs of my parents and the unreasonable bean counting of the Comcast suits. Time to move on.

Didn’t quite work that way though. Elvira was well on her way to national fame and lots of people I met who liked cheesy sci-fi and horror were well acquainted with Commander USA from the USA Channel or Joe Bob Briggs and his Drive-In Theater on The Movie Channel. People were talking about these hosts around the lunch table at school and I, of course, was there to say, “Yeah, but there’s this guy in DC who just blows them all away.”

And not only did I talk about him, but I swiped from him as well. That comment way up above about “more on that concept later” is about to get latered. As time went by, in between talking about my favorite horror host and outright stealing his gags when talking about films, I hit a point where I actually remembered more about Gore from the shows than I did some of the films. Hell, there were actually things that I remembered for years while being completely unable to tell you what film was on when Gore was doing his bit.

If there was any doubt about it before it was now dispelled. I was a fan of Count Gore de Vol over and above many of the movies he hosted. If you gave me the option of seeing a film uncut and uninterrupted VS seeing the same film cut, edited and hosted by Gore… “Good evening and welcome to creature Feature…”

Fast forward well over ten years. Hell, fast forward somewhere around fifteen years really. I’m having my at least twice a year discussion with someone about how much fun this guy in DC was while the general topic is cheesy horror films and, as a shortcut to explaining, hit the Google. As the net grew and more and more people got on the information superhighway you could be rest assured that someone someplace was putting just about everything somewhere on the web. I’d actually been lucky before and hit on some good pictures and even some video. Well, this one time something interesting popped up in the Google search. There was actually a site out there getting enough hits to be on the first page of the search called countgore.com. I clicked on the link and expected to find a really nice but kinda small fan site. What I found was Count Gore himself.

It seems that through countless new owners and the changing times where bean counters where becoming program directors rather than people who knew how to program a local station the good Count had gotten a fairly large stake through the heart only a year or so after I lost Channel 20. The new owners of the station decided that local programming was just so much nonsense and a waste of money. Hey, why be local, unique and supported in the community when you can be the same as 50,000 other stations across the country?

But, in classic b-movie vampire tradition, Gore went to ground, regained enough strength to crank that big ol’ toothpick out of his chest and returned with a vengeance. In 1998, he became the web’s first weekly horror host and he’s coming up on his 11th anniversary of the program as you read this now. (Well, unless you’re reading this some time far removed from June 29, 2009.)

And he has been a very busy little undead body it seems. Getting into everything he’s done for the horror host community and its fans would at least triple the length of this post. You can get the 411 by looking up his site or checking out the great doc (now on DVD) called American Scary. But it’s safe to say that Gore is as entertaining as ever and has been doing things that have allowed newer hosts like Karlos Borloff and Dr. Sarcofiguy to be introduced to new and old fans alike.

And the man gives his old fans the opportunity to get a great nostalgia kick. He owns all of the Gore de Vol material so any film that is in public domain that he still has the bits he did for the aired shows he can put together into a DVD that is, in pretty much most respects, the original show as it aired minus those things that break up the fun by trying to get you to buy something else that you really don’t need. And thanks to those DVDs and others I, or rather my parents, scared the snot outa my wife.

About two years ago now my wife and I had our first child. To say I was stressed and freaked would be understating it in a major way. At one point I think I actually stressed myself into a worse condition than what my wife was in right after the birth. So she looked at me, told me that we had some extra money that she wouldn’t hold against me spending on something that I might enjoy or might want to do and that I should go ahead and just do something for myself. Low and behold, Gore was having a sale on his website. For what was really a steal by any standards he was selling off 8 DVDs (16 shows) of the web program, 4 shows from the classic WDCA days, 4 DVDs known as the Legacy Series that are basically Gore’s best bits, an autographed glossy, a t-shirt (the one I’m wearing above) with the show’s old logo on it and a replica of the old Channel 20 Gore fan club card for what was really a nice price.

With everything else that had been going on I passed up on his DVDs before, but with my wife’s blessing I grabbed this fan pack in a heartbeat. Glad I did too. The web program discs are no longer being sold. There is a 5th classic program though and I did make sure that it was on my Christmas list last year.

Long story short (too late) they arrived and my wife and mother-in-law discovered that my wife was actually stuck being wed to a giddy 13 year old boy. I did a Creature Feature bender that would have driven most sane people stuck around me at that time to thoughts of my murder at their hands. But I was happy.

(Funny story alert from above coming in now.) I started with the Legacy series. Again, the movies may be good, but I figured out a long time ago that I was a fan of Count Gore’s more than some of the creatures he featured. Little did I know the effect that would have on my wife.

My parents, now with their first and only grandchild to coo over, were just about daily visitors at that time. They were over while I was playing the Legacy DVDs one day and the topic on the disc at that moment was the big Halloween bashes that Gore threw. I jokingly jerked my thumb in the direction of the TV and reminded my mom and dad that it was still the great tragedy in my life that they wouldn’t drive all those hours from just South of the Richmond area to DC just so that I could be there in person.

My father rolled his eyes and went on to tell my wife that they’d been hearing about this thing, this complaint about how they let me down so horribly by not taking me to some DC party to see some guy who dressed up funny and showed bad movies, for 25 years. 25 years he emphasized. Several times. And with great aggravation (jokingly) coating his voice. Yeah, my wife knew she had wed a nut for sure by that point.

Fast forward just shy of two years. I get an update email from Gore’s site about some little doc being screened at the AFI Theater in Silver Springs, Maryland on the 27th of June. The subject of the doc was one Dick Dyszel and his long career as Washington, DC’s Bozo the Clown, Captain 20 and, most important of all to me, Count Gore de Vol. The tickets were $10.00 a pop and, on top of the movie, there would be a chance to chat with the man of the hour and see some memorabilia from good old days of DC’s then locally programmed Channel 20.

My wife took one look at it and said “NO” in a very firm voice that made it clear that no argument would be allowed on the matter.

“No,” she said’ “I am not putting up with 25 plus years of you complaining about that like you did with your parents. Buy the tickets right now and we’ll stay the weekend with my sister up there. But I plan to be married to you for at least 25 years and I am not putting up with 25 years of complaining about not getting to go and see Gore de Vol in person and how it was all my fault like you’ve done to your parents since you were a teenager.”

So, despite a bout with poison ivy (that actually worked in my favor) early in the week and more road construction than I thought you could drive through in one trip that short, I found myself here on the evening of the 27th.

Artwork by George "I-Gor" Chastain. - http://myweb.wvnet.edu/e-gor/tvhorrorhosts/

Great film. Great, great film. As much as I loved American Scary I found this one to be better by far in every way. I don’t know if that’s just because it was so much better or because I have been a fan of the subject of the film for so long, but it was just a great way to spend the evening in a theater and, from what was said, will be an even better filled out DVD later this year. Even the “poor” wives and friends that we of the Gore fandom dragged to the show were laughing out loud and loving it. Plus the Q&A was great (did learn something a bit odd and very funny about my favorite Forrest J. Ackerman interview) and I finally got to thank the man for how much entertainment and joy he’s given me for all these years. So, yeah, 25 years is way to long too wait for some things, but it was worth it.

However, thanks to dinner after the show I’m now committed to taking my wife to several dinners each year at the Tastee Diner in Silver Springs. It seems it’s the first really good “diner” food she’s found since leaving the Jersey zone.

http://www.tasteediner.com

The things my wife makes me suffer through…

Is Boxing Dead?

   That may seem like an odd question to most people, but if you’re an MMAfan you’ve likely heard that notion floated as a fact rather than a question. Boxing is old, slow, boring and all but dead. It’s being replaced by mixed martial arts as the big fight sport in town.

   Now, you can point to lots of things that make convincing, if purely anecdotal, evidence. Boxing isn’t carried on the networks like it was in bygone years, it doesn’t have any new huge stars that are the household names of past generations of boxers and the day after water cooler talk about boxing is diminishing while the day after water cooler talk about MMA is on the rise. The people in the press and on the web that are pro MMA also push the idea that boxing is now seen as a very limited form of fighting sport with no where near the appeal of MMA’s fast and furious action.

   Well to them I say, and I do say this as a huge MMA fan, bullshit.

   Boxing is every bit the entertaining fighting sport that MMA is. Does the limitations of “just punching” mean that there’s less action? Maybe. But the restrictions on what you can do often means that you have to fight smarter to be a top fighter. Boxing is like a chess match of sorts. You have to go in with a game plan and you have to have a strategy that allows you to impose your game plan over your opponent’s.

   The pro-MMA critics of boxing make the same mistake that the pro-boxing critics of MMA make. Many boxing fans disparage MMA because the fighters often go to the ground and then just “role around” for minutes at a time. They just, say the boxing fans, flail about while kicking and hitting at each other. The problem with that criticism is that it shows a complete lack of what is going on when you have two fighters who are well schooled in amateur wrestling and Brazilian Jujitsu. If you understand those two things and have any basic knowledge of them; you’re looking at two fighters who are making move after counter move after move like a very physical chess game. Two top tier fighters are working a mental game that’s every bit as difficult, if not more so, than the physical game.

   It’s much the same with good boxers. Two good fighters can put on a boxing match that’s every bit the metaphorical “clinic” that fans refer to good matches as. Good boxing is a science. A good boxer is as much brain and strategy as brawn.

   Even the often thuggish “Iron” Mike Tyson proves that rule rather than disproves it. Tyson was a beast in the ring when he had the proper trainers, managers and team around him. Once he lost the right people and began to become surrounded by the wrong people his fighting style changed. Tyson rarely had to depend on strategy in the ring because of his power, but there were a few fights where he displayed actual advanced knowledge of the sweet science. Once he lost the people that pushed him to be a fighter rather than just a brutish thug who depended on rushing in and overpowering his adversary he began a massive downhill slide as a fighter. Even after all of his problems he should have been a better fighter when he returned to boxing. Instead he was often beaten by boxers his age range or slightly older who were fighting smarter fights than him. When he started fighting based on power he broke and, occasionally, broke down in the ring. He became a “fighter” who cried to his corner men in the Lennox Lewis fight that “I can’t beat him” in between rounds.

   If more fighters get into boxing and become smart boxers; we have a recipe for great fights. And we’re seeing some really good up and comers out there now. Manny Pacquiao is a good example. He just destroyed odds on favorite Oscar De La Hoya a little while back. Good fight to check out if you can find it.

   But I’m sure you’re ready to say that most of what I’m saying is opinion and not hard facts. Well, I’ve got some hard facts for you. As of this writing a boxing card is the biggest sports related PPV of 2008.

Top 10 North American PPV buy rates, 2008

1. Boxing:Oscar De La Hoya vs. Manny Pacquiao, Dec. 6, 1,250,000

2. UFC:Brock Lesnar vs. Randy Couture, Nov. 15, 1,010,000

3. Wrestling:WrestleMania, Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Paul “Big Show” Wight, March 30, 670,000

4. UFC:Georges St. Pierre vs. Jon Fitch/Lesnar vs. Heath Herring, Aug. 9, 625,000

5. UFC:Lesnar vs. Frank Mir, Feb. 2, 600,000

6. UFC: Quinton Jackson vs. Forrest Griffin, July 5, 540,000

7. UFC: St. Pierre vs. Matt Serra, April 19, 530,000

8. Boxing: Felix Trinidad vs. Roy Jones Jr., Jan. 19, 500,000

9. UFC:Chuck Liddell vs. Rashad Evans, Sept. 6, 480,000

10. UFC:B.J. Penn vs. Sean Sherk/Tito Ortiz vs. Lyoto Machida, May 24, 475,000

   And, as you can see, the #3 PPV card had a little drawing power help in the form of boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.

   Boxing isn’t dead. Boxing isn’t slow and boring. Boxing is just getting the short end of the promotional stick right now and it’s getting unfairly criticised by a bunch of know nothing MMA fans in the exact same way that a bunch of the old guard fans of boxing are flinging their uninformed criticisms at MMA. Boxing is still an art form when done right and it’s a solid part of MMA’s standup game. To denigrate it just because you’re “an MMA fan” or just to try and convince yourself or others that  your favorite fight game is the greatest thing since sliced bread doesn’t make you an MMA fan. What it makes you is an uninformed idiot talking out of your backside.

   And, again, I say this as a huge MMA fan.

See you at the fights.

Forrest J Ackerman 1916 – 2008

R.I.P. Uncle Forry.

“Forrest J Ackerman, who influenced a generation of young horror movie fans with Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and spent a lifetime amassing what has been called the world’s largest personal collection of science fiction and fantasy memorabilia, has died. He was 92.“

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2008/12/forrest-j-acker.html

Can We Just Laugh At Them Now???

You’ve gotta love the chat-show-Right and the conservative news media. When Obama and Hillary were fighting it out over their party’s nomination the talking heads on the Right were bemoaning the “fact” that Obama’s success was proof that even Hillary was “too conservative” for the now fringe controlled Democratic party. His winning the nomination was, so they said, the nail in the coffin of the Democratic Party since it was clearly a party out of touch with Main Street America and in bed with the farthest Left nutjobs.

Then we had the actual election run up. The talking point was that Obama was the most liberal candidate ever run by the Democratic Party and his voting record was the most liberal of anyone who ever served in Congress.  Why, he was even more liberal than the last twenty Democratic candidates that the Right claimed was the most liberal human to have ever been alive!

And what Obama campaigned on was the greatest threat ever known to our country! Why it was, so the conservative talking heads said, unabashed socialism! Obama was running on a platform that was so shamelessly socialist that it put him just to the left of socialist Russia.

And then he won.

Suddenly the same talking heads that called the man the most left voting, socialist running and fringe candidate ever fielded by a political party were saying that his election victory was in fact a victory for conservatism. Despite almost a full year of their own words to the contrary; the new talking point that they pushed with completely straight faces was that Obama ran as a conservative. He won the election because he espoused conservative values and promoted a conservative platform for his candidacy.

Oooooooookay.

So now we flash forward to today. I’ve been listening to Fox News (I know, my first mistake.) on my XM today. What’s the talking point this weekend? Obama the liberal leftist fringe guy is abandoning his left leaning ways and snubbing the Left Fringe. How? He’s abandoned his liberal and socialist campaign promises that destroyed our economy with his election and he’s appointing conservative Democrats to his cabinet now that the ship has hit the sand financially so as to calm Wall Street and Main Street. He is being “dragged from the far Left” and toward the center by the state of the economy.

Ooooooookay.

Why are any of these guys still employed? How can anyone take these mouth breathers seriously at this point? I mean, even the biggest Kool-Aid drinkers that tune in to these guys must have their heads spinning just trying to do the mental gymnastics to keep up with this comedy. Two really big jokes here.

(1) The talking point that these guys have on Obama’s picks is that it’s a bunch of warmed over Clinton appointees. Obama is setting up The Bill Clinton Administration 2.0. Now most of these guys have books, archived editorial columns and/or recorded comments from the 90s. I don’t remember these wonder dummies calling the Clinton Administration a “Conservative” administration. I pretty clearly remember the exact opposite actually. I mean, they’re still bring up Clinton and the “ultra-liberal” things he and his administration did as the cause of the economic meltdown and social problems we have now. Well, at least they do when they’re not claiming that this is the “Obama Economy” every third sentence. But now the talking point is that these same guys were all part of a conservative Democratic movement and a sign that Obama is abandoning the ultra-extreme leftist platforms that he ran on (while running as a conservative) just a few short months ago. Oooooooookay.

(2) Are they on drugs? well, I mean besides Rush who we all know partakes from time to time. I mean, the only people who can make a string of statements like that and think it’s logical and coherent are usually stoned out of their minds. Seriously, try and say the whole thing and not laugh yourself silly at the stupidity of it.

The combined talking points of the last year: Obama was the most fringe left running candidate that the Democrats ever ran, but he won by running as a conservative. However, he’s now abandoning the fringe left that he ran to during the campaign in order to reassure Wall Street by appointing “conservative Democrats” to his future cabinet who were themselves a part of the ultra liberal leaning Clinton administration and are themselves responsible for the socialist policies that destroyed our economy and, skipping right over eight years of the Bush economic policies and twelve years of a Republican run Congress, brought us the disastrous “Obama Economy” that we now have.

it’s gotta be drugs. Even I wouldn’t have thought that this many of the Fox News crew and the chat show goons that have been joining the chorus were this shameless and hypocritical. Fox News and Clear Channel Communications needs to implement mandatory weekly drug tests pronto quick. It may be the only way that they can salvage what little credibility they ever had.

**** 38 ****

   It happened. It came and went and pretty much nothing fell off, broke down or started flashing its “Maintenance Required” light at me. Just about one week ago I turned 38.

 

   It was a pretty good three days. I took the time off from work to do some things so my actual birthday was fairly relaxed. I had a nice lunch with my parents, wife and 16 month old clone, I opened a few gifts and I finished out the course needed to make me legally able to hunt in Virginia. Kind of a big goal to get back into hunting. Have you seen the coast of quality meat these days?

 

   Since no one cares about the grey hairs, aches, pains and assorted issues that come with aging yet another year and taking yet another proverbial step towards geezerhood; I’ll just jump to the stash!

 

   Basically, I’m set for late night DVD watching for about a month. Well, it would have been a month once. Nowadays, thanks to the unreasonable woman I married thinking that or child will be scarred for life if he sees quality horror films before freaking 8 years of age, I may have about a years worth of viewing pleasure. But anyhow…

 

    One film that I can watch with Ian in the room is a cool ass war film called Tae Guk Gi. Buy this film. On to the horror stuff.

 

   My slightly early gift was the complete Nightmare on Elm Streets series in a metal embossed box with collectable bonuses. It’s even got 3-D glasses. After that came a flood of really nice DVD collections containing some great, some not so great and some so bad they’re good films in them. Werewolves, Vampires & Zombies (10 movies on 3 DVDs) is over 13 hours of schlock horror that should keep me quite happy for a long time.

 

   I got a very nice 2 disc Paul Naschy collection containing Curse of the Devil and Werewolf Shadow AKA Werewolf VS the Vampire Woman. The thing that sets this set apart from others is that they have the original Castilian soundtrack with English subtitles as a viewing option. That’s a pretty cool deal since both films were actually fairly well done but kinda killed by bad dubbing for American distribution.

 

   Bloodsucking Cinema is a nice little Starz documentary that I saw some time ago and is now on DVD. Nice little doc about the origin and evolution of the vampire movie. Not definitive, but very nice nonetheless. Got a nice 20 movie pack called Vampires & More from up north that covers films ranging form the 1922 Nosferatu to Oasis of the Zombies. Included in the rescue parcel was also an awesome Hammer Films double feature that included Countess Dracula and The Vampire Lovers.

 

   Count Yorga, Vampire followed up the rear just in time to save me from the pain and anguish of living with the death of my old VHS copy recorded off of the USA channel. That rescue came along with the historically important double feature of Count Dracula’s Great Love and Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks. I say they’re “historically important” because they’re from Elvira’s Movie Macabre series. One day when Ian is old enough, he to can learn of the amazing assets she had to contribute to horror history.

 

   One thing that showed up that my wife will actually let me watch with Ian in the room is 1955’s The Complete Adventures of Robin Hood Season One. Not a bad version of Robin Hood if you’ve never seen it. It’s the one with Richard Greene as Robin Hood. And lastly on the DVD list was Dragon Dynasty’s The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. A great film that I would recommend to anyone out there. Oh, and there was also the Carson Christmas DVD.

 

   My in-laws are flipping the bill for my hunting license this year as well, so I’ll be killing Bambi maybe as soon as the end of the month. I just have to hook up with the G-Man and set up a good day.

 

   So, yeah, much movie greatness this year. Still doesn’t help with the whole feeling of geezerhood thing though…

So… Oprah Has More Brains Than Obama?

     “Winfrey was a member of Trinity United from 1984 to 1986, and she continued to attend off and on into the early to the mid-1990s. But then she stopped. A major reason—but by no means the only reason—was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.”

http://www.newsweek.com/id/135392

Ok, I have no idea…

   Can someone please tell me where “than” came from? No, not the word itself; I wanna know where my usage of it came from. I was looking through my rough drafts and notes from the last two months and noticed that I’ve been writing/typing the word “than” in certain places.

   “This is greater than that.”

   “I felt that it was less dangerous than our other options.”

   I have no idea where that came from. I remember back in the second or third grade (early 70s) when we still had the usage comparisons for “then” VS “than” in English class, but then it all but disappeared from all of my later courses and school text books. I don’t even think that it’s considered improper English anymore to just use “then” all of the time. But somewhere in the last few months I’ve started using “than” where appropriate and I have no idea why that just started happening on its own like that.

   So, where did the “than” come from?