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Edward Gorey
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Edward Gorey (1925-2000) - Haunted America, 1990
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TCMFF Day 3 Dana Delaney and Eddie Muller will be introducing THE BIG HEAT, 12:15 pm at TCL Multiplex House 6. Ms. Delaney wrote an article about Gloria Grahame for Noir City Magazine. You can buy a print copy: https://bit.ly/4b3r21c or a digital copy: https://bit.ly/3xI6Mnz
THE BIG HEAT (1953): In this seminal noir, a police detective (Glenn Ford) whose wife was killed by the mob teams with a gangster's moll (Gloria Grahame) to bring down a powerful racketeer (Alexander Scourby). Lee Marvin steals the film as Grahame’s abusive boyfriend and eventual object of her revenge. Dir. Fritz Lang
THE BIG HEAT will screen a second time tomorrow at #TCMFF. 11:45 AM at the TCL Chinese Theatres Multiplex, House 6.
urdith6 reblogged
Maryland vs peta
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
It’s a universally known fact that you don’t fuck with our crab cakes here in Maryland.
Unfortunately, that second billboard is a photoshopped fake. BUT the real billboards that went up are just as fun!
So PETA put up that top billboard in 2018 in Baltimore, and the restaurant across the street, Jimmy’s Famous Seafood, put up a response. They also debuted a beer called, appropriately, PETA Tears, but I digress.
The ME was a subtle call out, a warning shot if you will.
But earlier this year (2023) right in time for Lent in very catholic Baltimore, PETA decided to try again.
To which Jimmy’s decided fuck that, let’s get two billboards this time. (WaPo)
No lie, ‘savor the sacrifice’ is my new favorite tag line.
*peers out the window* Weird shit, mostly. It's fun living here.
Did I mention all the Weather we get close to DC? Sometimes we get hail in summer, it rains whenever the hell it wants, it drops to just above freezing and shoots back up to hot, it's turned me into a barometer.
(In Gaithersburg, when my husband turned 13 in early July of 1989, it hailed for twenty minutes before returning to pure sunshine. he didn't have a Bar Mitzvah due to dyslexia issues so he got nature's approval instead.)
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Jason of Star Command (1978-1981)
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Eighty Percent
[ID: A comic by Sophie Labelle (@assignedmale).
Panel 1 of 4: A random person tells Stephie, "We shouldn't allow kids to be trans because 80% end up detransitioning."
Panel 2 of 4: Stephie rebuts, "That number is from Kenneth Zucker's study from 30 years ago, in which he claimed to have "cured" some gender non-conforming kids of gender dysphoria with "reparative therapy"―a form of torture. Half of them never even expressed gender dysphoria!"
Panel 3 of 4: She continues, "The researcher's clinic was eventually shut down after he was revealed as a fraud, and his methods recognized as inhumane and unethical. His results were never reproduced.
Panel 4 of 4: She continues talking to the random person, "Actual, recent studies consistently estimate detransition rates to be between 1 and 2%". The random person dismissively replies, "Ok well I got my studies, you got yours. Agree to disagree."
End ID.]
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Your nightly MST3K. Good night, and normal view.
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I love this skit from MST3k because it takes 4+ minutes to do a joke that only like 30% of the audience would get even back when it aired.
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Tokyo 1980s
Perhaps the world of 2044 will be as different from ours as 1979 now seems from our present time. But let us also echo this wish into the future— may they have peace and happiness.
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How to shatter the class solidarity of the ruling class
I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me WEDNESDAY (Apr 11) at UCLA, then Chicago (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!
Audre Lorde counsels us that "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," while MLK said "the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me." Somewhere between replacing the system and using the system lies a pragmatic – if easily derailed – course.
Lorde is telling us that a rotten system can't be redeemed by using its own chosen reform mechanisms. King's telling us that unless we live, we can't fight – so anything within the system that makes it easier for your comrades to fight on can hasten the end of the system.
Take the problems of journalism. One old model of journalism funding involved wealthy newspaper families profiting handsomely by selling local appliance store owners the right to reach the townspeople who wanted to read sports-scores. These families expressed their patrician love of their town by peeling off some of those profits to pay reporters to sit through municipal council meetings or even travel overseas and get shot at.
In retrospect, this wasn't ever going to be a stable arrangement. It relied on both the inconstant generosity of newspaper barons and the absence of a superior way to show washing-machine ads to people who might want to buy washing machines. Neither of these were good long-term bets. Not only were newspaper barons easily distracted from their sense of patrician duty (especially when their own power was called into question), but there were lots of better ways to connect buyers and sellers lurking in potentia.
All of this was grossly exacerbated by tech monopolies. Tech barons aren't smarter or more evil than newspaper barons, but they have better tools, and so now they take 51 cents out of every ad dollar and 30 cents out of ever subscriber dollar and they refuse to deliver the news to users who explicitly requested it, unless the news company pays them a bribe to "boost" their posts:
The news is important, and people sign up to make, digest, and discuss the news for many non-economic reasons, which means that the news continues to struggle along, despite all the economic impediments and the vulture capitalists and tech monopolists who fight one another for which one will get to take the biggest bite out of the press. We've got outstanding nonprofit news outlets like Propublica, journalist-owned outlets like 404 Media, and crowdfunded reporters like Molly White (and winner-take-all outlets like the New York Times).
But as Hamilton Nolan points out, "that pot of money…is only large enough to produce a small fraction of the journalism that was being produced in past generations":
For Nolan, "public funding of journalism is the only way to fix this…If we accept that journalism is not just a business or a form of entertainment but a public good, then funding it with public money makes perfect sense":
Having grown up in Canada – under the CBC – and then lived for a quarter of my life in the UK – under the BBC – I am very enthusiastic about Nolan's solution. There are obvious problems with publicly funded journalism, like the politicization of news coverage:
And the transformation of the funding into a cheap political football:
But the worst version of those problems is still better than the best version of the private-equity-funded model of news production.
But Nolan notes the emergence of a new form of hedge fund news, one that is awfully promising, and also terribly fraught: Hunterbrook Media, an investigative news outlet owned by short-sellers who pay journalists to research and publish damning reports on companies they hold a short position on:
For those of you who are blissfully distant from the machinations of the financial markets, "short selling" is a wager that a company's stock price will go down. A gambler who takes a short position on a company's stock can make a lot of money if the company stumbles or fails altogether (but if the company does well, the short can suffer literally unlimited losses).
Shorts have historically paid analysts to dig into companies and uncover the sins hidden on their balance-sheets, but as Matt Levine points out, journalists work for a fraction of the price of analysts and are at least as good at uncovering dirt as MBAs are:
What's more, shorts who discover dirt on a company still need to convince journalists to publicize their findings and trigger the sell-off that makes their short position pay off. Shorts who own a muckraking journalistic operation can skip this step: they are the journalists.
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"I run to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday"
Jean Brooks in The Seventh Victim (1943)
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please im begging you to watch patrick swayze roller disco in skatetown usa (1979)