Bubble Bubble, The Irish Troubles

A new episode of my podcast is up and streaming-- "Bubble, Bubble, The Irish Troubles" . . . this one is inspired by Stuart Neville's thriller The Ghosts of Belfast and it is a major improvement from my last effort, which was a rambling and convoluted attempt to cover far too large a topic-- this episode has an eclectic crew of special guests to boot, including: The Hasbro Pop-O-Matic, Detective Sean Duffy, Adrian McKinty, Sinead O'Connor, Indiana Jones, Erin Quinn, Grandpa Joe, The People's Front of Judea, and U2.

This Guy's Picture Is In The Dictionary Under "Man"

High marks for David Graham's new book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon Forest (I give it eleven poisoned arrows out of twelve) but I definitely felt lame and civilized reading it on the beach, nursing a Spring break hangover, my toes in the surf, kids digging contentedly in the sand, contemplating which seafood joint we should frequent in between pages-- this guy Percy Fawcett was a man (despite his first name) and though his adventures eventually killed him, he makes Indiana Jones look like a flower sniffer.

The Best Ride of the Day at Disney's Hollywood Studios

Though I rode The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, I couldn't tell you if it's the best ride in the park (because after we saw the view of Disney Studios from the 13th floor, and then started free-falling and being winched back up-- repeatedly-- I curled into a ball and closed my eyes . . . although I do recollect that my butt levitated off the seat each free fall . . . my intelligent son Alex had the same reaction as me, but my wife and younger son Ian were unfazed, which leads me to think there is something wrong with their brains and inner ears) and although I was very impressed with the 3-D effects of Toy Story Mania, Star Tours, and Jim Henson's Muppet Vision and the real effects of the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular, they don't win the prize for best ride either (and neither does the ride out to Orlando International Airport to pick up my parents: because there are two, count them, two tolls on the tiny connector road called the Beachline Expressway) and so the prize for the best ride on that Sunday was the fourth quarter of the Giants/ New England game-- we caught it after the ride to the airport; four lead changes in the final fourteen minutes and a Giants victory with a one yard pass from Eli Manning to Jake Ballard with 15 seconds remaining to play . . . snapping a twenty game win streak at home for the Patriots . . . once again, though I tried to get out, the Giants have sucked me back in.

Meme Song (Dave Coins an Essential New Phrase!)

From the same mind that brought you the eternally delightful and eminently practical word Tupperawareness, comes another hand-crafted, home-made, and absolutely essential addition to the lexicon . . . once you hear it, you won't be able to live without it; so imagine the scenario: you've just heard a memorable melody, a snatch of a song, just a wee bit of music . . . and you can't forget it-- it's ideal, archetypal, and exemplary, like the Da Duh Da Duh from Jaws or the Dah De Neh Na, Neh Na Nuh from Indiana Jones or the Da Na Nuh Na Nuh Nuh Na Nuh Nuh from Star Wars (Darth Vader's entrance) or the Dah Nah Nah Noo Nah from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and you need a name for this bit of music, and, thanks to Sentence of Dave,  here it is: a meme song (and I can't believe this term doesn't already exist, it makes me wonder if the internet is dumber than I thought).

Non-stalgia

If you haven't seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in a while, you've probably forgotten just how annoying Kate Capshaw is-- she can't hold a candle to Karen Allen-- and she's even more annoying than that little punk Short Round.

Do Radical Islamic Terrorists Desire Red Mercury?

According to urban legend, "red mercury" is a incredibly rare substance which is attracted to gold and repelled by garlic, and it has incredible capabilities; The New York Times explains its purported powers: "when detonated in a combination with conventional high explosives, red mercury could create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb" and-- even more conveniently-- it is rumored that a bit of the stuff could fuel a neutron bomb that could fit in a lunch bag; I hadn't heard of the stuff until yesterday, but apparently the myth of this non-existent material has been around for decades and recently ISIS has been sucked in by the hoax . . . I guess if you're into that kind of eschatological apocalypse, then red mercury is just too damned convenient not to believe in . . . but I've also learned that Graeme Wood's Atlantic article "What ISIS Really Wants" might be exaggerating the fundamental religious element of ISIS's ideology and that the article (and current conservative idiom) might be wrong in saying that we are at war with "radical Islamic terrorists" for several reasons:

1) there are plenty of radically fundamental Muslims who abide by the Koran and aren't violent or on a jihad or in any way associated with terrorism, just as there are plenty of radically fundamental  Mormons who aren't polygamists and plenty of radically fundamental Christians who aren't part of the KKK or The Aryan Nation;

2) we never refer to the Nazis as Christian Fascists, like Indiana Jones, we just say: "Nazis, I hate these guys;

3) there's no reason to constantly associate the 1.5 billion non-terrorist Muslims with the bad apples in Syria;

4) this is probably less of a war, and more about trying to prevent criminal acts from criminally minded people with various abnormal and psychotic and sociopathic and delusional and obsessive and violent proclivities;

5) a terrorist is a terrorist, and scholars are at odds about their motivations, but in the end, if someone is willing to strap a bomb around their waist and blow themselves up in a crowd, it doesn't matter if the act is religious, or indignance over the American invasion of Iraq, or anger because of Saudi cooperation with America or simply because they consider Paris to be the world capital of "prostitution and obscenity" . . . it's still a lunatic act by a lunatic group, and there's no real reason to lump them in with the whole . . . and if ISIS thinks that about Paris, what do they say about Bangkok and Amsterdam?

Spelling Tarantino Is Hard Enough

In his new movie, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino extends the Indiana Jones quip in The Last Crusade (Nazis . . . I hate these guys) into a tense, rich, satirical, funny, gory, violent and extremely entertaining two and a half hours-- the movie has nothing to do with WWII, it is a thinly disguised Western, with the Jews as John Wayne and the Nazis as Liberty Valence . . . and though the best performance comes from Colonel Landa, The Jew Hunter-- polyglot Austrian actor Christoph Waltz-- Brad Pitt delivers the best line, when he's told, "You'll be shot for that!" and he replies: "No . . . more like chewed out . . .and I've been chewed out before."

The Joy of Paraxene

My four year-old son Alex experienced the joy of getting his first allusion-- he knew that the music playing during the start of Chicken Little, while the water tank rolled juggernaut style through the town, was a reference to Indiana Jones and the infamous boulder, and I understood and empathized with his joy, the joy of getting the joke, the joy of seeing the light, the joy of Paraxenes once he found his way out of the canyon.