The Johnny Bacardi Show

Good morning. It's Sunday. Have you been to church today? No, I'm not in church. Haven't been to church in over ten years and it's been a lot longer than that since I attended regularly. Actually, the Sundays I spend at WLOC (third and fifth) are the most religion I get these days, when I turn up the monitor volume.

Not a lot going on at present to write about, but I have added some links to my burgeoning list at right, and with NuBlogger you (or at least I, apparently) have to post something in order to publish changes to one's template. If you go through the official steps to publish after editing your template, you are treated to a ongoing "publishing"...screen that doesn't stop until you stop it yourself and nothing gets published. The only way to publish changes right now is to publish posts, so I'm gonna ramble a while.

Another thing that irritates me is the PC version of Blogger has little formatting buttons for bold type, italic type, and URL links in the bar above. These are convieniently missing from my IE5 Mac version. Feh. Don't they know everybody uses Macs these days? Just go to the movies. Everybody in movies uses Macs, usually iMacs or Powerbooks, although I've noticed some G4's too.

Another thing about movies that is glaringly ubitiquous is a little thing that I like to call The Obligatory Puking Scene. "There's one in every movie", I'll remark to Mrs. Bacardi, who has taken to rolling her eyes and repeating it along with me. But seriously– 99 percent of films made in the last 20 years seem to feature at least one scene, sometimes more, people regurgitating. Yawning in technicolor. Shouting at the floor. Talking on the porcelain telephone to Ralph. Eating backwards. You get the idea. The only way that filmmakers these days, apparently, can think to get across the notion that people are in some sort of emotional duress is to have them blow chunks. I think I can do without seeing this. I can infer that someone is experiencing turmoil without being treated to rivers of regurgitation. Now, I'm not saying that every film features this sort of thing, but just watch, next time you see a movie, and when someone hurls you can say "there's Johnny B's OPS!" Strangely enough, for a movie that dealt with so much emotional flotsam and jetsam, there were no OPS's in The Hulk.

Two movies I've seen lately: Eight Legged Freaks, which tries to be as fun as Tremors and almost succeeds, and Bandits, with Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Willis, and Cate Blanchett, who I'm beginning to really like. It too was fun, if a bit hard to believe. I also watched a Ray Harryhausen tribute on TCM Friday evening, part of a salute to the great stop-motion animator which has also included airing of many of his best films including The Seventh Voyage and the The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Twenty Million Miles To Earth, a favorite of every kid who grew up reading Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, Jason and the Argonauts, and the immortal Clash of the Titans, pure cheese except when Harryhausen's effects are onscreen. Missing, sadly, was Harryhausen's 1969 cowboys and dinosaurs opus The Valley of Gwangi, long a fave movie of mine even though the story makes very little sense. It's the music. The score for that film kicks my ass every time I hear it...it's a quintessential Western theme song with a memorable melody and great arrangement. For a movie with cowboys and dinosaurs. Gotta love that!

I've added a few great new links, including Dawn Olsen, and Jim Treacher (whom I had blogrolled back in the early days of the Show, but had deleted when his page temporarily went awol). Please feel free to click n' go read. Does anybody do this from my page? Does anybody out there get there from here, or am I just posting these things for my personal use only, to read for my own entertainment and add my blog name to referrer counters and so on?

I'm gearing up for a new Mondo Vinyl-O pretty soon, having listened to several wax platters lately. As far as new music goes, I haven't heard much but I did hear a song from the Thorns album recently and liked it very much. I must buy one of these days. Then I can listen to it while I'm spending my days living in a refrigerator box because I couldn't make my house payment anymore because I'm frigging out of work. I also borrowed a few CDs from a friend- Basher: The Best of Nick Lowe (I love "Seven Nights To Rock" and "Half a Boy and Half a Man"), the Blasters Collection, Prime Prine, along with Prine's Bruised Orange and Pink Cadillac- made a swellio sampler CD– and three Webb Wilder discs: It Came From Nashville, Hybrid Vigor, and Doo Dad. I copied all of them with a clear conscience– I think most of them are no longer in print, with the exception of the Prine cds and maybe a couple of the Wilders. That's what I've been listening to lately, along with Abbey Road, my Summertime Fabs album. Just in case you're interested or something.

I don't have much news about comics to pass on, you'll need to go to Journalista, Egon, Neilalien, Newsarama or Pulse for that sort of thing. Man, is it just me or does it seem like everyone and their immediate family is writing about and reviewing comics? There are a plethora of sites online where you can go and read multiple takes on various issues of various books, including this very one. Is this a good thing? Who the hell knows. I write these little capsules because I like to think that after reading comics since I was four years old, back in the Mesozoic era, I notice things that are sometimes worth mentioning. I just kinda write them for myself, because while I'm no journalist (graphic designer, remember– I've been having a hard time remembering myself lately) I've always enjoyed reading reviews of not only comics but movies and music as well, and I'm just emulating my betters. I don't know if anybody reads them or not. Maybe one or two people– I've been mentioned a couple of times on other people's blogs but nobody ever leaves comments, so I kinda have that shouting in a vaccuum feeling sometimes. I'm not fishing for comments, I'm just sayin', knowhutI'msayin'?

All right, all right, life is short, and you've got better things to do with your time than spend it reading this. Hopefully, where you are the weather is as nice as it is here, and you can go out and do fun stuff with the ones you love and all that jive. You never know when a Reaper is hanging around...

(yeah, I'm still thinking about Dead Like Me...)