Sentential Links!

It’s time for LINKS! Huzzah!!!

:: And so the Greeks destroyed Ilion and took back Helen
They squashed those Trojans like a ripened melon! (Sean celebrates completing The Aeneid as only he can. Hoo boy….)

:: Oh no, no, no…one does not wait 37 years for marriage to receive the Holy Kitchenaid mixer from her besties for her wedding shower to HIDE that gorgeous piece of equipment! (Don’t do this, men. Just…don’t do this.)

:: And then Reed is always yelling at him and ordering him around like a helper monkey. Jesus, Reed; first you disfigure him, then you browbeat him, and then you turn him into your servant and take his name away? Give it a rest, you yob. Poor guy can’t even masturbate anymore, fer chrissakes. Can you imagine the stress he’s under? (I’ve never liked The Fantastic Four, and I never read more than an occasional issue of it when I was actively into comics, mainly because Reed Richards is an insufferable tool. The one issue that I remember focused on She-Hulk, in a humorous story that had a paparazzi-type managing to get naked photos of her.)

:: Possibly all those years of bad-taste fat-Elvis jokes and ridiculous impersonators have blotted out the cultural memories of who he really was, and why he once excited us. Maybe it’s something more ineffable. Whatever the reason, though, Marilyn’s image (if not her actual work or personality) resonates with younger folks whereas Elvis’ does not. (Well, Elvis Presley’s reputation ain’t going anywhere so long as Sheila O’Malley is around! Read on….)

:: Elvis arrived in Germany on October 1, 1958. Except for a couple of shows in Canada, Elvis had never been out of the United States. He was greeted at the dock by throngs of screaming fans – if anything more insane than the fans in the United States. He signed autographs. You can see how happy he is in the photos and footage, that here he is in a foreign land, with girls who don’t even speak his language, and they all know who he is.

:: I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent on these two volumes, but it’s a lot. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made. I’ve surely gotten more than $70 worth of enjoyment out of them. (Wow, that is a heck of a find!)

:: ‘Blade Runner’ avoids that paradox for too much of its running length, which is why I would like to see someone else take a crack at it. It’s a drama about slavery where nobody ever suggests that slavery is a bad thing, which is a bit too bloodless for a movie with such an angry contradiction right at its very core. The only time we see even a hint of it is when Roy Batty rescues Deckard at the end, an act that gives the lie to the entire notion that androids are incapable of empathy and forces Deckard to confront the truth: He’s a mass murderer, and he never even thought about it. And given that he gets maybe two lines of dialogue after that, I’d call the film at least a little bit flawed. A sequel that really got into the idea, one that confronted the notions that androids could learn how to be human beings…and that human beings can all too easily forget…could be even better than its predecessor.

More next week!