Guilt

We're under a tornado and severe thunderstorm warning right now. So what if we're hiding in the basement? What of it anyhow? The rain is pounding and the wind is howling, but we still have internet, cable and power. This can only mean one thing-- Movie Notes from the Rust Belt Youngstown, Ohio..... Courtesy of Amazon Prime and my beloved ROKU box, the movie of the day is that future horror classic of 2008, Surveillance, an hour and a half of dead bodies and really sick situations. We have psychotic small town cops working for an incompetent boss, dead FBI guys (and plenty of others too), lots of profanity, and a pair of really bad folks. 'Course, everybody dies except the two really bad guys and a little girl who seems to have ice water in her veins. In other words, hide the women and children. It's blood bath time. We got, as the fake FBI guy, Bill Pullman, who, to me, will always be the President of the United States who personally fle...

Television Notes from the Rust Belt Youngstown, Ohio..... It gets worser and worser. Why I keep watching (even in commercial-free Netflix Land) is becoming more puzzling by the day. Nevertheless..... The “others” have been uncovered. They look and act a lot more like the Deliverance crew than anything benevolent. As a side thought, I wonder if the writers are on crack. I'm just waiting for some banjo music now. Just when I think that every hackneyed bit of writing has been inserted, we get an hallucinogenic dream sequence by Charlie (the heroin addict). I was wrong that the writers might be on crack. They're on Peyote. There seems to be an overly Christian religious spin in the dream sequence. Women with halos and such. Hmmmmm.......... OK, I hate myself for slamming this program. Really. The show itself is a train wreck and I can't take my eyes off of it. I try, but it just doesn't work. Someday I'll finish the thing, see how i...

Television Notes from the Rust Belt Youngstown, Ohio..... Lost seems to have devolved into an overly melodramatic soap opera. Pity. It had so much potential. I'll probably continue to watch this a little at a time, but, well....... They killed off Boone (the step-brother and one-time lover of Shannon, that rich, spoiled, blond, painintheass who the Arab seems to head-over-heels into, but God himself only knows why) a few episodes ago, but the character lives on regularly in flash-backs. Can never tell for sure, but seems they may have killed off Shannon too—Shot in the chest by accident by the Mexican gansta-girl. She might survive the gunshot. After all, this is, in many ways, Fantasy Island. I keep expecting to see Tattoo peeking out from behind a rock. I'm still not certain why the show garnered so many awards, but I have a thought or two on the subject. One: This show employed thousands of actors, writers, producers, camera operators, stunt men—...

Television Notes from the Rust Belt Youngstown, Ohio Well, Lost is getting dumber by the minute. I'll never be able to finish this idocy. Never. But I'm going to keep after it for awhile. No, the flash-backs have not even abated a little bit, and the story just keeps expanding. Now it seems that the tail section of the downed airplane has survivors on another part of the island, there are aborigines or something (maybe they're the zombies) taking hostages and the Mexican gansta-girl survivor (from the tail section) has somehow become their Queen. There's some information about a communal living experiment dating back to the late 60s or early 70s. Seems that there's something very secretive called the Dharma Initiative too. Gadzooks. Magnetic earth-stuff, I think. There seems to be a Riverworld aspect to this thing too. Our writers and developers seemingly were well-versed in all aspects of both new and old sci-fi and pop culture. Then ther...

Television Notes from the Rust Belt Youngstown, Ohio Spent a wee bit-o-time watching the entire 24 episode first season of Lost, that spectacular from the beginning of the century. I got onto it through my beloved ROKU streamer and my Netflix account. Here's the main deal.....Every episode has on the average about 10 minutes of furthering the story, but that works out OK for me because, like I said, it's via my Netflix account. Commercial free. Each episode only takes about 40 minutes instead of the original 60. In any event, 24 episodes equals about 240 minutes of story. We start with a plane crash—OK, actually the main body of the plane crashes on a deserted island. Wait, not exactly deserted, probably uncharted. In the Pacific. It's tropical, and it is clearly uncharted....maybe not, but at least not on any normal shipping lanes....OK, then. Looks mostly like Hawaii to me. I'll go with Hawaii. An uncharted Hawaiian island. The plane di...

OK, I get it that we have run out of good names for automobile models. Really. I get it. I GET IT. Time was we had Cougars and Mustangs and Electra 225s and Wildcats and Silver Hawks and Hornets and El Dorados and.....well, you get the idea. Names with a little class and excitement.  Even the Gremlin was pretty descriptive. Then, we got a bunch of number and letter combinations. Bizarre stuff. Car models that were just a number. And the Infinity. Wha? Infinite car? Huh? And, what, exactly, is a Prius. Before it was an almost-a-car. OK, I know this one. It's an adjective and it means prior. My question remains. What is it prior to? Obnoxious and Repulsive are perfectly good adjectives too, you know, and they are desperately searching for a car model with which they might be affiliated. Now, it's terrible. The Chevy Volt. Really? No, really? When do we get the Ohm and the Farad? I'd much prefer immortalizing some other animals as car model...

I recently obtained some new video components and needed to inform my Bride of the changes.  This is what I provided: HOW TO WATCH TELEVISION Recent changes in television technology in the living room have necessitated a change in the process known here as “How To Watch Television”. Definitions           The new TV is a high definition Vizio, 47” wide screen with multiple inputs for TV, AV, Comp, HDMI 1, HDMI 2, HDMI 3, HDMI Side, and RGB. Additionally, it is WIFI enabled. The new cable converter is a high definition Scientific Atlanta Explorer (courtesy of Time Warner Cable) and is connected to HDMI 2. The ROKU Streaming Media Player is connected to HDMI 1. The legacy Daewoo DVD/VHS player is connected to AV. Each component is controlled by a unique remote control. Each of the remotes has individual characteristics and capabilities. As you will later see, some of the capabilities overlap, making the ultimate end-game (watching...

I turn on the Weather Channel just about every day—True, they're trying to be something they aren't—To Wit: MSNBC Light—like that's even possible—but I digress..... The Weather Channel is an easy target, but they must like it that way or they'd change their general behavior. I watch it to get the forecast. Nothing else. So I watch until I see the forecast and suffer through whatever nonsense they have before hand. They have a boy and a girl as their co-anchors. No, I don't know their names even though I look in their general direction for a maximum of ten minutes every morning (that's because the forecast is every ten minutes.....get it?). The boy is a nice looking young man with short blonde hair and an easy laugh. The girl is a good looking athletic type who wears clothing that's too tight. She's the one who drives me nuts. This morning, they had a feature on a ten year old boy who landed a bull shark with a rod and reel. His ...

I'm not at all certain just how to term this...The man who was once Saint Timothy has become Lince-O-Scam (my Bride's term, but oh, so accurate). Went into Pittsburgh today and watched my beloved Giants get the dog-snot kicked out of them by the Pirates, 13-2. The first half of the season has drawn to a close with Lincecum getting rocked again. His ERA is around 7 now. Here's the deal—if he's no better than this, then the Giants need to give a face-saving excuse of some sort (blister, hangnail, dandruff) and put him on the DL for a while and let Brad Penny take over that spot in the rotation. The Giants actually have an opportunity to win the West this year and go on to the playoffs. But not with Lincecum guaranteeing a loss every five days. In case you have forgotten, the Giants won the World Series in 2010 without an effective Barry Zito during the year, and without ANY Barry Zito during the playoffs. Zito seems fine now, but the Giants did...

It's been unusually warm in Ohio of late—oh, 90s and up to 100 with humidity to match and daily  thunderstorms. Last night, we tried to catch a baseball game (and 4 th of July fireworks after) with the Class “A” Mahoning Valley Scrappers, but it got thunder-stormed out. Fortunately, I still have power and cable, and that can mean only one thing--- Movie Notes from the Rust Belt Youngstown, Ohio Today's feature (via Netflix) is that 1959 Roger Corman favorite in the public domain, The Wasp Woman. Almost no story to get in the way here. Woman who owns a cosmetics firm is aging and losing business. She finds a scientist who makes an age reverser made out of wasp stuff. The underlying problem is that that, while the wasp stuff does make you youthful, it also turns you into a blood sucking vampire-like wasp thing. You know, yin/yang.....the good with the bad. Vampire-like wasp woman is finally killed off by throwing acid on her and tossing her out of a hig...

Hey, wait a minute................. Here we are in the midst of a really hot late Spring and early Summer. Hotter than usual, if I might hazard a guess. So here's my question: Why aren't the lefties screaming bloody murder about global warming? Might just be that it ran it's course as a cause for those who need a cause in their lives. Might be that it was junk science to begin with. Might be that it's cyclic and has happened before and will happen again, with or without human intervention. Or, maybe it's because there's a Democrat in the White House. Yep. That's it. If there was a Republican as President, we would be hearing nothing but GLOBAL WARMING from every corner. Wait and see what happens after Obama gets unelected. Just wait.

Movie Notes from the Rust Belt Youngstown, Ohio..... This all started because I was running through the woods with my dog, tripped over an exposed root, fell down and bruised both of my knees (now I have kneesles), and am hobbling around. When I have this sort of time on my hands, I watch movies on TV. I apologize in advance. I like Bruce Campbell—What? You never heard of him? Neither had my Bride. So I did a short search on Netflix for Bruce Campbell movies and found, among others, From Dusk Till Dawn II. So I watched it. What a ride, he said with a grimace—FINALLY, a vampire movie that I can sink my teeth into. Made me laugh out loud in places. Great entertainment value here. So I got back onto Netflix and found that there is an offering for the original From Dusk Till Dawn, and even a third entry into the Dusk Till Dawn franchise. When I saw that George Clooney stars in the original, it became clear that I would have to violate a personal principal. I wo...