Aug292007

Remake Round-up

Genre fans like myself have done a lot of groaning in recent days over the news that Hollywood — which lately seems to be more interested in leveraging recognizable brands (i.e., churning out new versions of properties whose names are already familiar to movie-goers) than in filming original screenplays — is forging ahead with a remake of Escape from New York and that Keanu will be playing Klaatu in a new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. (Actually, he’ll probably be just fine in that role; he even has a passing resemblance to Michael Rennie. It’s just the principle of remaking an undisputed classic like Day that bothers me.) So it came as a pleasant surprise to read about an interview with the eternally awesome Bruce Campbell in which the Brucester puts to rest a number of rumors that have been causing me some concern:

  • Campbell will not be reprising his role as Old Elvis/Sebastian Haff in a sequel to the charmingly goofy Bubba Ho-Tep. (The sequel — supposed to be called Bubba Nosferatu — may still go ahead without him, but I don’t see how anyone could hope to fill those porkchop sideburns the way Bruce did.)
  • There will be no lame-ass mash-up of Freddy (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Jason (the Friday the 13th series), and Bruce’s signature character Ash (The Evil Dead trilogy).
  • There will not be an Evil Dead 4. (Really, what could possibly be left to do after the utter silliness of Army of Darkness?)
  • And finally — saving the best for last — there will be no remake of the original Evil Dead starring Ashton Kutcher as Ash. Said Campbell: “The feedback from the fans was 90 percent negative. It’s going nowhere.”

It’s nice to hear that, occasionally, rarely, common sense prevails…

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Aug262007

Perspective: Downsizing the Bennion Archives

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that one of the descriptors I assign myself up there at the top of this page is “pack rat.” As long as I can remember, I’ve had an almost existential dread of throwing away anything that might later prove to have some sentimental or historical value. That’s why I still have a comic book my dad bought for me when I was six years old.

In addition to this natural tendency toward hoarding, I also picked up a collecting hobby in college. Tracking down, acquiring, and owning all manner of pop-culture memorabilia has proven to be immensely gratifying, for a number of reasons. But there’s a big downside to being a collector, and that’s the difficulty of storing and protecting all your possessions. This point was driven home rather forcefully a little over a year ago, when I experienced an event I like to think of as The Great Water-Filter Containment Failure and Basement Flood of 2006. Briefly, if you don’t recall and/or don’t want to follow the link, my water filter developed a major leak in the middle of the night, and by the time I woke up and noticed it, I had several inches of water throughout the entire basement. This would’ve been disastrous enough if the only possessions down there were my own, but I was also storing a lot of stuff my parents left behind when they built their new house. And most of that was sitting in stacks and heaps right there on the floor, right in the water.

Continue Reading…

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Aug242007

Don’t Mind Me…

Bad-ass me in the spring of '87

Just scanning a couple of old photos for my upcoming high school reunion, and thought I’d share one that I’ve always particularly liked. Real tough guy, wasn’t I? For the record, that’s my first car I’m sitting on, a 1970 Thunderbird that was about the same size as the Starship Enterprise. Well, maybe not that big… maybe the size of the Reliant. Either way, I wish I still had it. And yes, I am wearing a ZZ Top muscle shirt. Hey, give me a break; it was the Awesome ’80s, after all…

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Aug232007

Now We Know Where Starfleet Got Its Inspiration…

So, this afternoon, I’ve been rummaging through a folder of random crap that I’ve been meaning to blog about, looking to see if any of it still interests me, and I ran across the following image:

From high fashion in 1967...

I ganked that picture from this site, which identifies the fancy red vest as “The Cosmoboy,” a then-cutting-edge design from Pierre Cardin which was featured in the August 1967 issue of Cavalier magazine (which I believe was a nudie mag, ahem, gentleman’s lifestyle periodical along the lines of Playboy).

Is it just me, or does that look really familiar? Maybe like… something from the 23rd Century?

...to movie costumes in 1994.

My mom has always told me that if you hold onto an article of clothing long enough, it will eventually come back into style. Guess she was right…

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Aug232007

Somebody Was Seriously High When They Came Up with This One…

As best I can recall, my introduction to the medium of comic books came when I was six years old. I was home from school, sick in bed with a bad cold or the flu or something. My dad went to the local drugstore to get some medicine, and when he returned, he also had with him a little treat that he hoped would cheer me up, or at least distract me in between puking sessions: a pair of what he called “funnybooks.” Which confused me, because they weren’t funny. But that’s beside the point. One was a collection of stories about Superman and his various friends, cousins, and pets. The other (which I found much more appealing, probably due to the semi-lurid cover art) was an issue of a series called Marvel Team-Up.
As the title suggests, the premise of this series was to combine two or more characters who wouldn’t have ordinarily crossed paths in their own titles, and then send them off on an adventure together. In the issue my dad got for me — which somehow is the only one of this series I’ve ever read — the action was played straight. Apparently, however, not every issue was so serious:

Greatest team-up ever!

Spider-Man and the cast of Saturday Night Live? Wow, I’ve got to track that one down… that’s got to be a hoot. Especially if you read it drunk, which is probably how it was written. Click the pic to go to the image source and a synopsis.
Incidentally, I understand that most issues of Marvel Team-Up were self-contained stories. Naturally, that lone issue my dad got me, the only one I’ve ever read — which, to no one’s surprise I’m sure, I still have — was one of the rare two-parters. To this day, I have idea how Spidey manages to free the Scarlet Witch from Cotton Mather’s foul mind-controlling cross-power…

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Aug212007

Shadow’s in Remission!

Shadow looks to the future in his stylish, post-chemo bandages.

The title line says it all: after nine weeks of chemotherapy, Shadow, the Bennion Family Dog, is cancer-free. His veterinarian checked several lymph nodes around his body today and found no sign of abnormalities. My parents’ big gamble worked, and, needless to say, we’re all breathing much easier tonight.

Moving forward, he will continue to receive chemo for several more weeks, just to be sure, but the vet assured my mom and dad that he’s responded as well as any dog she’s ever seen, and he’s got several more years ahead of him. He passed through the whole ordeal with very few problems, aside from picking up a few pounds as a result of the prednisone that was used to shrink his swollen glands. (I suspect the vast amounts of ice cream my folks have been feeding him lately might’ve had something to do with it, too. Time for this border collie to go on a diet!)

My parents have been surprised and very, very humbled by the support they’ve received from their friends (and even a few people who aren’t so friendly) in the local antique-car scene, and I myself would like to say thank you to everyone who took the time to leave a comment here on Simple Tricks or to e-mail me personally. Yes, Shadow is only a dog, but in our family, dogs are people, too, and your compassion has meant a great deal to me.

The pulp-fictional Shadow knew what evil lurks in the hearts of men; the Bennions know what good lies there as well…

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Aug202007

Happy 30th to the Voyagers

Thirty years ago today, the Voyager 2 space probe was launched on a groundbreaking mission to explore the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, followed a couple of weeks later by its twin, Voyager 1. (I never have heard why number two went first…) Like those amazingly durable Mars rovers that appear to have survived even a planetary-scale dust storm, the Voyagers have far outlived their designed lifespan of five years and continue to send back useful data from beyond the orbit of Pluto as they coast toward interstellar space. Lots of interesting information can be had in this article, including the facts that Voyager 1 is currently the most distant human-made object, with a one-way radio message taking 14 hours to reach it, and both craft are getting by on a mere 300 watts of electricity — equal to the output of just a couple of standard three-way lightbulbs — which is provided by tiny nuclear powerplants because they’re too far away for solar power.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built and operates the Voyagers, has a website devoted to the ongoing mission, and from there you can download a retrospective about those famous “golden records” afixed to the sides of the two spacecraft — you know, the “message in a bottle” that invites the alien to Earth so he can become Jeff Bridges and have sex with Karen Allen in Starman…

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Aug202007

Which Tarot Card Am I?

Via Jaquandor, I found this weird Internet quiz that tells you which tarot card best represents you. I have little interest in tarot myself — fortune-telling, ouija boards, and all that “occult” stuff that generated so much hysteria in these parts back in my high-school days have always struck me as eye-rollingly silly — but I’m always up for a time-wasting Internet quiz-thing. So, here we go:

You are The Devil

Materiality. Material Force. Material temptation; sometimes obsession

The Devil is often a great card for business success; hard work and ambition.

Perhaps the most misunderstood of all the major arcana, the Devil is not really “Satan” at all, but Pan the half-goat nature god and/or Dionysius. These are gods of pleasure and abandon, of wild behavior and unbridled desires. This is a card about ambitions; it is also synonymous with temptation and addiction. On the flip side, however, the card can be a warning to someone who is too restrained, someone who never allows themselves to get passionate or messy or wild – or ambitious. This, too, is a form of enslavement. As a person, the Devil can stand for a man of money or erotic power, aggressive, controlling, or just persuasive. This is not to say a bad man, but certainly a powerful man who is hard to resist. The important thing is to remember that any chain is freely worn. In most cases, you are enslaved only because you allow it.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

I’m sure this result would come as to no surprise to the parents of several young ladies I used to date…

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Aug202007

Fall Must Be Coming…

How do I know that the season is changing?

Well, for one thing, the temperature when I left the house this morning was delightfully cool, somewhere in the upper 60s, the first time it’s been that low in several months and a welcome change for this curmudgeonly blogger, who has found this year’s record-setting string of 100-plus days to be just about unbearable.

But the real tip-off was the legion of cute young co-eds commuting up to the U of U this morning for their first day of classes… which, of course, goes hand-in-hand with the Utah Transit Authority’s asinine annual ritual of shortening their light-rail trains just when a reasonable person would expect that they’d need more capacity. All summer long, the trains have been running with four cars and were mostly empty. Now, this morning, with all these new faces waiting on the platform, there were just two cars, and we ended up wedged in like cattle.

Morons.

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Aug182007

Random ‘Net Crap on a Saturday Afternoon

Well, I’ve been been accomplishing nothing fast on this lovely Saturday afternoon. The Girlfriend is spending the weekend at her parents’ place out in Tooele and I was planning to take care of all kinds of mundane jobs around the Compound that I keep putting off, but instead I’ve spent much of the day puttering around my office, surfing the web, IM’ing with some buddies, and listening to Pandora.com. (That’s been a strange journey today. The algorithms that supposedly determine your tastes started me off with Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn”; now, three hours later, I’m listening to Ozzy Osbourne. That either says something about me, or about Pandora, and I haven’t been able to decide which…)

You know what, though? I’m okay with not having done anything noteworthy today. It’s felt damn good to just screw around, actually. I’ve been something of a stress-kitten lately, and I’ve been suffering for it (briefly, I carry my tension in my back and I also tend to sleep in awkward positions, and those two variables reached critical mass about a week ago and left me with a kinked neck that I couldn’t turn to the left without yelping in pain). Well, I just realized that nothing hurts at the moment, for the first time in days. It’s luxurious, and it goes a long way toward assuaging my conscience.

And if that’s not enough, I’ve found some amusing stuff out there today, which I will share with you below the fold:

Continue Reading…

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