Q NOTES # 510: Short Cuts 28

Another one bites the dust. No big loss.

Meanwhile, more Republicans join the House select 1/6 committee, making it a bipartisan effort which will also be investigating the criminal aspects of former guy's attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Q NOTES # 339: Ice

Texas is collapsing under the weight of a severe winter storm that's in its fourth day with no immediate end in sight. The state wasn't prepared for an event like this one, and it's pretty simple to connect the blame for that lack of preparedness to the right-wing politics that dominate state government (see ERCOT for additional information). 

Since his state is facing a catastrophe that's made worse by (R) policies, it was predictable that Gov. Greg Abbott would appear on Fox News with Sean Hannity, attempting to shift the blame to liberals. Most (R) voters in Texas rely on Fox News for their misinformation.

Updated 3:22 PM Wed: Daily Kos is carrying a report on the Texas ERCOT debacle. The moral of the story is simple: When conservatives are allowed to set policy and make the rules long enough, the disasters that result are inevitable. In this case, the policy and the rules involve manipulation of supply and demand to maximize profit-taking.

Updated 5:13 PM Wed: Right-wing AM radio host Rush Limbaugh finally bit the bullet after months of hinting his end was near. I imagine this news will make what was already a rotten week even worse for many Texans. Not all of them, of course.

Updated 5:25 PM Wed: Rick Perry, formerly a gub-mint employee in Cheez Doodle's cabinet, suggests that real Texicans would gladly freeze to death rather than comply with federal energy regulations. The possibility he's right would explain a lot of things.

Quarantine Notes, Day 24

The goddamn problem isn't that there are too many deaths reported by the media, it's that there aren't enough. It's not too hard to imagine where things are headed.

One of my favorite singer-songwriters was the late John Prine, and I've spent hours listening to his music, even memorizing lyrics to some of the songs. Off the top of my head, I can name at least 100 people COVID-19 should have taken instead of John Prine, or at least in addition to him.

Scalia

Fat Tony sleeps with the fishes, and the world is a little brighter today.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. died nearly nine years ago, in April 2007. For those keeping score at home, the game is now tied 1-1.

Reactionary Republican trash have deluded themselves into believing that the election of either Trump or Ted [Red Ooze] Cruz in November is dead certain, and one them has the right to appoint Fat Tony's replacement.

Obama will nominate a moderate to replace Scalia in another of his efforts to mollycoddle Republican assholes in the Senate. This will probably be the last chance the Republican assholes get to confirm a moderate nominee for a few years. They should grab it.

Best case scenario: Obama's nominee is confirmed before November.

Next best case scenario: Republicans stall the confirmation, and President Hillary Clinton shoves a flaming liberal down their goddamned throats in 2017. I have to admit this scenario has more schadenfreude potential.

Roger Ebert

I went to Yahoo this afternoon to perform my weekly chore of deleting spam from the email account I use on Facebook. The Yahoo news headine was that Roger Ebert had finally been claimed by cancer at age seventy. 

I didn't always agree with Ebert about which movies should be avoided, but I almost always agreed with him about the ones worth seeing. He was on a very short list of people whose recommendations I search out and respect. As long as I've had home internet access, I've never paid to see a movie in a theater without first checking Ebert's review in the Chicago Sun-Times. And I admire his skill as a writer. He had a great job and did it well.

And Limbaugh lives on.

Threes

For reasons too numerous to go into, Mrs. bee and I usually do nearly all our television viewing between 7:00 and 10:00 pm, and mostly we watch old movies on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) or reruns of old sitcoms on channels like TV Land. We never watch any of the programs that are hot with the rest of America, especially reality show crap.

So it is that over the years, we've spent many hours watching The Andy Griffith Show, which was most entertaining when Don Knotts was in the cast as deputy sheriff Barney Fife, and while Ron Howard was still a little boy playing Opie Taylor, Andy's son.

One of our favorite TCM movies is "A Face in the Crowd." Andy Griffith plays a character far removed from the sheriff of Mayberry, a guy who doesn't have a likeable bone in his body. Another TCM favorite is the Ernest Borgnine movie called "Marty." Borgnine won an Oscar for that one, and we've seen it at least three times. He plays a bad guy in another favorite, "From Here To Eternity." The more time we spend watching TCM, the more entertaining movies with Ernest Borgnine we see.

At any rate, Andy Griffith and Ernest Borgnine departed this life in the last few days. Both had long and admirable acting careers. They say bad news comes in threes -- I hope that doesn't mean another actor we enjoy seeing checks it in.

One down...

Right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart died from natural causes. I've read enough about this guy to understand this is not a major loss to mankind.

Sad news

When I was in fifth grade, I met a girl who lived several blocks up the street from me. We were in the same homeroom in sixth grade, and sat near each other. The crush that began a few months earlier took roots and I mooned over the young lady for six more years, through high school. Later I found new girls to worship from a distance, but I never forgot that 6th grade crush. A few years ago I met her again at a mini-class reunion -- we had a pleasant conversation and for a few minutes I wondered about what might've been.

That girl, now a 64-year old woman, was killed in a highway accident yesterday afternoon. A car swerved across the center line, causing a head-on collision. As my bro in Houston often says: fuck me to tears.

Sidney Lumet

For several years I've been watching a lot of 'oldies' on Turner Classic Movies, a channel that I find to be more consistently entertaining than just about any other. I've discovered that if a movie was directed by William Wyler, it's definitely worth seeing and will more than likely be an excellent picture. In that sense, Wyler has become a name brand.

Sidney Lumet may have been a notch below William Wyler, as most film directors are, but he still put together a catalog of worthwhile movies that's hard to match. I saw a few in theaters during the 1960s and 70s, and have at least a dozen on DVD. Lumet was another name brand film director, reliably turning out movies I was glad I had an opportunity to see. Unfortunately, resigned from life this week at 86.

Robert Culp

One of the sad parts of getting old is that the authors, actors, musicians and other famous people whose work I enjoyed as I was growing up are all even older than I am, and consequently are starting to drop like flies. My boyhood hero, Steve McQueen, smoked too much, got lung cancer, and died years ago at a relatively young age. Another one, Paul Newman, lasted much longer and resigned from life only recently.

The latest name to show up on the obituary page is that of Robert Culp, who died at 79 after apparently sustaining a head injury of some type. Culp wasn't the huge star that Steve McQueen and Paul Newman were, but if you watched TV from the mid-50s to the mid-70s, you probably saw his performances plenty of times.

When my family finally got TV around 1958 or so, I quickly became hooked on several of the western series that were dominant in prime time in those days. On several of the shows, the gimmick was that the hero carried a unique or unusual firearm. Lucas McCain (The Rifleman) rigged his Winchester for rapid fire, and Josh Randall (Wanted: Dead or Alive) sawed his down and called it a Mare's Leg. Robert Culp played a Texas Ranger named Hoby Gilman on "Trackdown" at that time, and his gimmick firearm was a big Smith & Wesson revolver, unlike most heroes who were armed with the traditional Colt Peacemakers. Robert Culp wasn't as handsome as the typical TV western hero, his character had a funky name (Hoby Gilman), and he toted that cool S&W pistola. All that made him "cutting edge" in the imagination of this pre-teen, and I immediately became a Bob Culp fan.

Skip ahead a few years. Now it's 1965-66 and I'm in college. Westerns have faded as the dominant genre on TV, and have been replaced by spies and secret agents. Robert Culp reemerges on "I Spy" with Bill Cosby, which is a radical racial combination for the period. With Culp and Cosby starring, "I Spy" is the coolest show of its kind, and my bro and I watch it regularly. As I recall, "I Spy" was on Thursday nights, and nearly every week, we would sit around his family room, smoking cigarettes and laughing at how cool Culp and Cosby were. Later, around 1972, they teamed up again in a movie called "Hickey and Boggs." The characters were a pair of private eyes who were nothing like the "I Spy" duo. Rather, Hickey and Boggs were a little shabby and down on their luck --- but still totally cool in their own way.

After I finished college and married, I got addicted to "Columbo." Interestingly, Robert Culp was the guest star on several "Columbo" episodes, playing the murderer. He was just as good as the villain as he was as the hero.

Never a huge star in movies or on television, Robert Culp was interesting to me in every part I saw him play. I spent many an hour watching him on the screen, and he never failed to keep me entertained. Sad to see him go.

Davy Crockett, The Box Tops

Alex Chilton and Fess Parker resigned from life this week, and it's a little sad that there are a lot of younger people with no idea regarding who Chilton and Parker were. In their day, though, they were big.

During my childhood, my family was too late owning television for me to experience the Davy Crockett fad in its full sweep. Fess Parker played the role of Crockett in the Walt Disney TV show, which was very, very loosely based on actual history and emphasized the legendary aspects of his life. The craze was broad enough that the Fess Parker portrayal spilled into movies, which is where I received my introduction. Later I saw the classic 1957 Disney film Old Yeller, probably the definitive 20th century a-boy-and-his-dog story. Fess Parker played the role of the dad, a character appearing at the beginning of the movie and again near the end. After the Davy Crockett thing faded, as all American crazes eventually do, Fess Parker's film career dwindled as well.

Moving on a few years in time, from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s. A group called the Box Tops has a few hit singles on AM radio, the biggest of which, "The Letter," can still be heard today. I'm past grade school, in college; my particular favorite Box Tops single is "Cry Like a Baby." I love that song so much I spend a dollar to buy the 45 rpm version. Somewhere around here, I think I still have a box containing the 45s that I accumulated between 1966 and 1970, and "Cry Like a Baby" would be among those cultural artifacts. Alex Chilton was the lead singer for the group, and despite the band's burst of success, there were people even then who didn't know his name --- I was one of them. Chilton stayed with music, forming a group called Big Star that was a cult favorite in the early 70s, and had an extended career as a solo artist. Once I reached the "Serious CD Collector" stage, I added Box Tops, Big Star, and Chilton solo CDs to the inventory. I consider the Chilton song "Stroke It Noel" from the third Big Star LP to be as lovely as any song from that era in rock music.

The score for the week, unfortunately, is 2-0.

Willy DeVille

The story didn't get much attention, certainly nothing like the Michael Jackson demise, but one of my favorite musicians has died. Willy DeVille recorded at least nine excellent albums as lead vocalist for the group Mink DeVille and as a solo artist. There were probably more than that, but because he was relatively obscure, I was only able to locate and buy nine. His songs "I Broke That Promise" and "Just To Walk That Little Girl Home" are among my all-time favorites. The lone obituary I stumbled across characterized Mink DeVille as a punk group, but their music was nothing like most of the punk rock that was popular in the late 1970s.

Pancreatic cancer, age 58. And Limbaugh lives on.

The man with the big nose

There are a few movies that I've seen several times, and will watch repeatedly: On The Waterfront, One-Eyed Jacks, Birdman of Alcatraz, The Cincinnati Kid, and Nevada Smith are among them. Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, and Steve McQueen were the stars, and (with Paul Newman) were my favorite actors during the years when watching movies was how I spent most of my weekends.

Something those five films in particular have in common is the presence of Karl Malden in an important role. He was the bad guy in One-Eyed Jacks and Nevada Smith, a good guy in On the Waterfront and The Cincinnati Kid, and was convincing in each portrayal.

Did Karl Malden just happen to play important parts in five favorite movies, or were those movies so good because he was in them ? I'm pretty sure his performances made them better movies, which is why I hated to hear that he passed away yesterday.

Good news, bad news

The good news is that Ricardo has apparently ruled out voter ID as an agenda item for the special legislative session. The bad news is that cancer finally got Farrah Fawcett. I wasn't a huge fan, but thought she was a beautiful woman and always liked her attitude when I saw her on late-night talk shows years ago.

About loving books

My father was an avid reader. He was interested in military history, and had shelves full of books on the subject. In fact, as I was growing up it seemed like there were books everywhere I looked. My parents always made sure we kids had plenty of books with stories to read and pictures to look at. My childhood interest in drawing and painting was stimulated by the illustrations in our books and those I'd check out of the public library.

Over the years, I've accumulated hundreds of books. I think I inherited the tendency to collect them from my dad, and I'll probably go to my death leaving stacks and stacks of unread books behind. In the interest of conserving space, I've started giving away nearly all the books I've read and even more of those I don't expect to. The municipal library gladly recycles them for me via their F.O.L. sales.

Although I have so many unread books, I occasionally enjoy reading favorite books a second or third time. I've read Salem's Lot by Stephen King three times, and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. an equal number. I read The Manchurian Candidate twice, the first time when I was in high school and the second last year.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is listed as an exemplar in one of this blog's sidebars, and he's without question at the top of my list of most admired writers. I just finished re-reading his short story collection, Welcome To The Monkey House. I became a Vonnegut junkie in the early seventies, while I was attending BJST in Waco at the dawn of my career in public service employment. I started with a paperback copy of Slaughterhouse Five, chosen at random to help pass the hours in my motel room at night, and was so delighted I quickly bought all his preceding books available in paperback editions and devoured them, too. The beauty of Kurt Vonnegut's writing is that you can move through it rapidly; there's no labor involved, unlike reading, say, columns by George Will or Charles Krauthammer.

Kurt Vonnegut departed this life in April 2007, a few months before I debuted my original blog. In his honor, I'll consider this entry a belated "Scorekeeping" post. It's a sure bet that all my treasured Vonnegut books will remain in the permanent collection.

Movies, authors, etc.

When I went online this morning to check the newspapers, the first headline I saw was that Norman Mailer had died.

Based on Mailer's reputation as one of the most important American writers of the last century, I've collected several of his books without having read them. The one I'm most looking forward to is The Executioner's Song. I've finished just enough of Mailer's work to know you don't get into his books for light, recreational reading. At some point, I'll be so old that all I'll want to do is sit in my recliner and read, and that's the stage in life at which I'll work my way through the Mailer books.

Another American writer whose books I know I should read but haven't is Cormac McCarthy. About 20 years ago, he published a novel set in the old west called Blood Meridian. According to its reviews, this was an extremely violent tale; that got my attention because at the time, I was attracted to violent subject matter. It looked interesting, I added Blood Meridian to my library, and like the Mailer novels, assigned it to the will-read-someday category.

McCarthy more recently wrote a book called No Country For Old Men, which has been made into a movie by the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan. The Coens have cranked out a long list of some of my favorite movies: Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Fargo, and O Brother, Where Art Thou ? are the ones springing immediately to mind. The new movie stars Tommy Lee Jones, who can usually be counted on to make a good picture. The combination of Tommy Lee and the Coens has me thinking I need to see No Country For Old Men. The reviews I read this morning suggest celebration of human decency is not the film's major accomplishment, but that's just something I appreciate, not something I demand.

Another movie I tentatively added to my must-see list a few months ago is Lions For Lambs, directed by Robert Redford and starring Redford, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep. With that lineup, I figured it couldn't go wrong; all the Redford-directed movies I've seen have been worthwhile. Lions For Lambs is a treatment of the war on terror, and as a political statement, has gotten negative reviews. Maybe those result from conservative bias on the part of the reviewers, or maybe it's really just a boring movie. I'm still mentally flipping a coin on whether to see it.

Finally, a movie called Before The Devil Knows You're Dead will be out soon. Like the other two, it appeals to me based on its director (Lumet) and star (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Judging by the reviews, it's pretty dark, so if I go, it'll be a solo flight.