Always been a fan of crap outlaw biker movies. Therefore it seemed right to pick the opening bit of the trailer from “She Devils on Wheels” by Herschel Gordon Lewis as beginning and end for “Letter to the Taxman.”
Lewis’ She-Devils on Wheels (1968) was an attempt to cash in on that era’s biker-pic craze, with the gimmick that the eponymous motorcycle gang, a club called the Man-Eaters, was composed entirely of women who used men as sex objects. It has everything you look for in a drive-in movie: cheap production values, rotten acting, stupid writing, inept direction–the works. Think sub-Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! In fact, take practically any biker flick you have ever seen and turn it up a notch on the Dumb-O-Meter. This film defines the word “nadir.” And yet, somehow, abstract concepts appear much more clearly when glimpsed from the rock-bottom of human experience. Filmed in “Blinding Color” in South Florida with a cast of actual female bikers, She-Devils wastes quite a bit of time with long-held shots of bikes going down two-lane roads, but when the action heats up sufficiently it’s a model of compressed violence and paranoia.
Led by Queen (Betty Connell) astride her full-dress hog, the gals hold drag races on an abandoned airport runway, with the winners getting first pick of the “studs”–a group of nonbiker guys who seemingly exist to service the Man-Eaters–back at the clubhouse. (Enthuses one of the girls: “You treat men like slabs of meat!”) Two of the club members in particular draw Queen’s attention: the petite, scatterbrained club mascot, Honey-Pot (Nancy Lee Noble), who rides a pathetic little Honda scooter; and Karen (Christie Wagner, along with Noble the only professional actor in the bunch), who is under suspicion for the crime of becoming emotionally attached to stud Bill (David Harris). Both these plotlets resolve themselves in true biker-pic style, à la H.G. Lewis: Honey-Pot gets stripped, smeared with paint and motor oil, forced to pull train for the studs, and ends up battered to death, while Karen is compelled to drag her innamorato Bill to a pulp behind her bike. After which she finds another boyfriend.
Brutal as all this sounds, it should be pointed out that Lewis’ brand of splatter–outrageous in the ’60s–is pretty tame by today’s standards. That’s probably why it’s so much fun. Victims generally get daubed with stage blood; special effects are as primitive as the dialogue; and no one, even in the clubhouse orgy scene, so much as loses her bra.
“Angry feminists–not to mention fans of gigantic, dominant women–will no doubt thrill to scenes of the Man-Eaters hassling cops (”Dirty muther-fuzz!”), duking it out with a macho group of guys called the Joe Boys (the girls win, natch), and gaining climactic revenge on the leader of that club, Joe Boy himself (John Weymer), by stringing a wire across a road between two telephone poles, then taunting Joe Boy into chasing them on a bike,” adds the movie critic.
Of course, there is a theme song, “Get Off the Road.”
“This picture is not for children, this picture is not for the squeamish, this picture is not for those who think women sit by the fireplace knitting socks,” goes the voice-over.
Long time readers will be familiar with the code “decoration” found at the footer of the main page and individual posts. It was the result of an error in the page designer’s template files, one of the WordPress default choices for style and look. And the only one I could stand.
After two years, I finally took the time to correct the error, which was trivial, yesterday. And now the virtual lint and dust bunnies are gone. Thanks to Frank at Pine View Farm for taking note and just putting enough of a bug into me to get to it.
Ex-anti-virus king John McAfee is now making the rounds of internet radio, presumably to tell his lengthy story.
And who has he chosen?
The leader of the tin foil hat demographic, Alex Jones. And some guy who was a color commentator for Ultimate Fighting, from the looks of it, a steroidal goon slightly notorious for “choking out” people in video on YouTube.
No links.
With regards to being taken seriously, these were unhelpful choices. That’s my free advice for the day.
Lads, you can do this at home! Take a Google satellite-view beach tour stroll along the northern part of Ambergris Caye in Belize and see if you can spy John McAfee’s center of adventure and intrigue.
The above snapshot may not be McAfee’s home north of San Pedro. But judging by a photo posted on his blog here, it is something of a match.
If you care to waste the time, try it yourself and see if you agree or find a better candidate. At max magnification, it take some time to scan the coast north of San Pedro for about six miles to approximately where John McAfee’s neighbor is said to have been murdered in news reports.
“Sam and I began our ungerground oddessey [sic], not on the day after Mr. Faul’s death, but on Monday, the 15th of October, early in the morning,” reads a recent entry.
As far as being on the lam and intriguing goes, it’s not a bad place to be.
The McAfee blog has been hit or miss. It could use some better copy-editing and style. And McAfee has informed readers all the stuff about drugs posted on another Internet site was a practical joke, so descriptions of what’s real and what’s not are of an undetermined elasticity. For example, McAfee exhibits his enthusiasm for forged press identifications in a photograph. His display of, one presumes, a forged laminate attributed to “The Molokai Island Times” of Hawaii, an inactive newspaper which apparently exists only as a Facebook website with 189 “likes” is here.
Readers will note the curious nature of a Colorado address on the “Hawaiian” document.
More recently McAfee has announced the arrival of a Financial Times of London reporter who will, presumably, investigate and report the truth of the events now surrounding the life of the ex-anti-virus king in Belize.
From Jiefangjun Bao Online, the English website edition of the Central Military Commission of the People’s Liberation Army of China:
16,400 New Entries Added To Military Encyclopedia of China
The compilation of the second version of the Military Encyclopedia of China is drawing to an end with as many as 16,400 new entries added compared to the first version a decade ago, the reporters learnt from the Academy of Military Sciences (AMS) on November 1, 2012. The large number of hot words reflects the leap forward that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has made in its transformation construction.
“Adding such a lot of new entries in only ten years is rarely seen in dictionary compilation,” said Feng Dinghan, head of the Military Encyclopedia Institute of the AMS. “This demonstrates the great strength and fast pace of the transformation construction of the PLA,” he added.
The newly-added entries such as “Military Information Technology”, “Information Grid Technology”, “Satellite Network Technology”, “Accurate Guidance Technology” and “Cloud Computing” in the fascicule on military technology categories are eye-catching. These intensively-added new entries mark the breakthrough and leap forward achieved in various fields of Chinese military technology in the past decade,” said Sun Xiaowen, editor of the fascicule on military technology categories.
“If the new words in the 16,400 entries reflect the speed of the transformation construction of the PLA, while the hot words we are familiar with can be said to reflect the wide range and depth of the transformation.” Feng Dinghan cited several examples, “The frequent appearance of key words such as “joint”, “integration”, “information”, “network” and “combat power generation mode” in the second version of the Military Encyclopedia of China clearly records the footfalls of the PLA during its striding ahead with the transformation progress.
Clearly recording the footfalls during the striding ahead.
Filming usually takes place in the relative’s house. (Henry’s owner donates her cat’s time to Braden.) It is short but challenging. Henry tends to call it a day after about 20 minutes. Braden tries to bother the cat as little as possible, often shooting with a long lens, as a wild animal photographer would do. Occasionally he reverses a shot so it looks as if Henry is turning toward the camera when he is actually turning away.
“That is what $40,000 of film school will get you,” he says.
It takes Braden less than two weeks to make an Henrí video. He films for three days, then spends about a week editing the footage and adding sound. He writes about half the video, about one minute of content, before he starts shooting. He wants to leave room for inspiration.
I’m a fan and not just because I have a tuxedo cat.
If you don’t think it’s funny you can’t be my friend.
A little over two hours of recording, not bad for a quick joke where I had to come up with a song to fit a comical monster movie vibe. And, yeah, except for the drums which are programmed, I do play all that stuff.
If you’re an overseas reader and still haven’t seen it, watch American icon Clint Eastwood.
Grandpa, hair mussed and smelling a bit of drink, his voice trembling, hemming, hawing, cursing a chair.
After six years, Mitt Romney is finally the Republican presidential nominee, but the man everyone’s talking about is Clint Eastwood — who has apparently lost his mind. – the LA Times
