Guilt

Found myself with a bit of time on my hands this afternoon and went to Pub-D-Hub on my ROKU box to find a mindless public domain movie to watch. I was successful. Movie Notes from the Rust Belt.....Youngstown, Ohio Teenagers Battle The Thing is a 1958 60 minute wonder of vapid entertainment.  No story whatsoever to get in the way of the droning.  Here’s the run-down:  College professor and his students discover a mummified, um, mummy, I guess--cave-man if you prefer--in a cave.  Having never seen a horror movie in their lives, they remove the mummy from the cave and bring it to their cabin in the orange grove.  It manages to re-animate itself and kills a babysitter.  Our heroes call the sheriff, who arrives driving a 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne station wagon.  The entire group manage to kill of the mummy by dousing him (or maybe her, we really don’t know) with gasoline and setting him/her ablaze with a lit flare. And that’s all there is.  The ...

Had a little time to burn this afternoon before I went to work, so I fired up the 46 inch wide screed, high definition Vizio and took a peek into the Pub-D-Hub offerings on my beloved ROKU box.  All fed through my wireless home network.  Is this a grand age we live in or WHAT?!?!  And, we know what this means-- Movie Notes from the Rust Belt.....Youngstown, Ohio And here’s what I found today......  Night Tide from 1961--an hour and a half of Beatnik life from Southern California--Venice Beach and Malibu mostly, but you’ll get the idea of what the El Lay beaches were like before the Beach Boys landed.  Dennis Hopper is the name brand actor here, playing a sailor, apparently AWOL (we know this towards the end of the movie because the Shore Patrol takes him away in a 1953 or 1954 Ford station wagon--OOPS, that would be a spoiler, I guess), who falls in love with a mermaid.  Well, maybe she’s a mermaid, maybe she’s not, but I won’t spoil that part of it. ...

Since I was a little boy (that’s in the 1950s, children), I’ve spent a large percentage of my summer months following major league baseball--I’m  Giants guy.  The San Francisco Giants, that is.  A National League guy.  But it’s pretty close for me to be losing interest these days. Why?  Bud Selig and his idiocy, mostly--you know.....Extra “wild card” teams...more playoffs.....no more differences between the National and the American leagues.....ever expanding divisions.  It just goes on and on with this guy.  It dilutes the game.  Now, apparently, we have some sort of instant replay crap-ola that screws up the game further.  Umpires get into a huddle and decide if it hit the foul pole or not.  Or whatever. But that’s been going on for quite a while now.  Shoot, I didn’t even approve of the concept of divisional play.  But the part that’s driving my around the bend here is that the on (and off) field behavior of the players ...