SO I SAID, "HEY MAN, NICE SHOT!"
Damn, this
William Strier fellow doesn't even seem to be a competent marksman...
even at point blank range!
News cameras were outside the Van Nuys courthouse to cover the Robert Blake murder trial, when Strier just comes and starts shooting at his attorney, Jerry Curry, because he got him less money than his sister received in an estate dispute. He shoots at Curry several times whilst Curry attempts to hide behind a tree, and then just walks away, quite nonchalantly, passing all sorts of reporters with news cameras, until some guys in white, I presume undercover police officers, tackle him. It's quite remarkable video, actually, and not as bloody as you'd think because Strier can't shoot straight. Curry, apparently, was injured and is in stable condition, but, on the video, he was able to walk away so I don't think it was anything too bad.
I've only seen the video from the Court TV cameraman thus far, but, since there were several other people filming Strier, I presume we'll see him shooting from other viewpoints within the next couple of days.
So, William Strier, if you read this, next time you feel like shooting your attourney, do it away from news cameras.
Meh... I feel a little dirty, but, I say, if a teenage girl, whom should really be at a Hallowe'en party and not trick-or-treating by that age, is going to wear a costume like
that, I'm allowed to look for a second or two longer than I otherwise would.
IT'S HALLOWE'EN (AND ANYONE THAT SAYS "SPOOK-TACULAR" DESVERVES TO BE SLAPPED)
Not that I'm all that big on Hallowe'en; when I was a kid, I definitely shared the
Eric Cartman view of Hallowe'en.
Cartman: Hey you guys! [they stop] You know what time of year it is?
Kyle: Of course, dumbass, it's Halloween.
Cartman: That's right, and that means only two more months till Christmas! You'd better watch out, you'd better not cry?
Stan: Christmas?
Cartman: ?Christmastime is presents for me.
But, I don't know if
X-Entertainment's Hallowe'en Countdown got to me or what, but I do feel like celebrating in a tiny way.
So, I sort of had this idea that I'd dress up as
Duneedon from Read All About It (link not working when I checked it at 5:10 p.m., but it was working last week, so I'd imagine it's just a temporary problem), the low budget TV Ontario (TVO these days) educational series from the late 70s and early 80s. Duneedon was a floating silver head alien with hypnotic eyes whom also happened to be the mayor of Herbertville, Ontario, Don Eden, and he had to excavate King's Park to get the mineral he needed to operate the transporter in the Coach House to get back to Trialviron, but the snooping kids, aided by Otto, the intelligent dot matrix printer, and Theta, the talking computer monitor, whom published the Herbertville
Chronicle in the Coach House, smashed the transporter and stranded him. Or something like that. TVO, please be aware that a lot of Canadians and even some Americans whom were kids in the early 80s would buy a 2-disk set of the first
Read All About It series if you sold it. Anyhow, I thought all I needed was a shower cap, silver face paint and some styrofoam to make the collar thing, but I had forgotten that Duneedon had such an elaborate headpiece too complex to make on such short notice, so I abandoned that idea. But I did make the picture of Duneedon I found into a
nifty avvie for the RottenTomatoes.com forum. (I'll put back my regular avvie of Alpha and Kokone from
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou "exchanging data" by kissing on Saturday.)
Also, yesterday, I wanted to rent the cheesy 1986 kids' flick
The Worst Witch starring Fairuza Balk, Charlotte Rae ("Mrs. Garrett" from
Diff'rent Strokes and
The Facts of Life), and Tim Curry, since I had seen it once, many years ago on YTV, or at least just the
lengthy Tim Curry video of absurd weirdness, but I haven't seen it since Matt Caracappa had written his thorough dissection of the film on
X-Entertainment. But I checked 4 different video stores on Sainte Catherine's west of Guy (two Video Movie Land locations, a Super Club Videotron and a Blockbuster) and none of them had it. I guess it's one of those films that is long out of print on VHS. Hey, Central Independent Television PLC, or whomever it is which distributed the film in North America, time to do a DVD of
The Worst Witch (the film, not the Montreal-produced TV series of the same name, based on the same books by Jill Murphy)... and, if you get Matt Caracappa to do a commentary track, I bet you'd sell a dozen times more copies of it, since I think 90% of the people that would be interested in getting such a DVD would be regular X-Entertainment.com readers.
Hmm... I also wanted to rent
28 Days Later, which I saw in July and liked just fine, though, once they get to the mansion with the army guys and throw in all the homages to George Romero's
Day of the Dead, the wheels kind of fall off, but you can rent that just anywhere. So, I was going to walk over to the Blockbuster here in Pincourt but I got caught up chatting with some friends on AIM (e-mail me at Kiyone (at) Tokyo (dot) com if you want my AIM user name) and arrived there just as they were locking the doors. So, my Hallowe'en viewing this year is just
Dawn of the Dead and Tobe Hooper's vastly underappreciated
Lifeforce, which is mostly cheesy space vampire fun, with Mathilda May walking around naked for the entire film and a pre-
Star Trek: The Next Generation Patrick Stewart in a minor role as the head of an asylum, but the scenes of mayhem and teeming infestation on the streets and in the Underground of London, from, roughly, the scene with the prime minister and his secretary, the remarkably unfazed Miss Haversham ("Would you gentlemen care for a cup of tea while you wait"), to the climax in Saint Paul's Cathedral are some of the most intense sights ever seen in a horror movie, and this had a huge budget by horror film standards in 1985, with all sorts of shit blowing up all over the place.
Ah, I gotta start handing out candy in a minute. The kitten's fine, though she loves biting my feet, hands, chin and nose; my brother Nick is coming home this evening and will take her back with him to Toronto until Christmas, when my sister, Alison, in Ottawa will take her. Also, I wrote up a big, longthing about Naomi Klein on Wednesday night, but I was horrified to find out that the Blogger site was undergoing an upgrade, so I lost everything! :`-( I'll retype it this evening, probably.
Fortunately, in regards to the AnimeNation.net forum banning situation, the admin did see things my way, that PortalOfEvil.com forums are not pornographic, so, yes, I was un-banned.
Anyhow, Monday morning, my mother was taking our labrador-mix dog, Sam, out for a walk. She usually goes up Island boulevard (boul. de l'�le for those of you that want to be nitpicky about official street named; it was "Island" for ten years after we moved to Pincourt in 1981, so I still call it that), across Fifth Avenue (the Pincourt one, not the Manhattan one!
Much less glamorous...), up past the Salon de Quilles bowling alley, and to a little bit of road right next to Highway 20 which will service the commercial development between Island and Cardinal Leger boulevards, whenever they decide to build it. Right now, it goes west from Island into the woods about 100 meters, and then there are a few cement blocks preventing you from driving any further. If you're a skater in Pincourt, you'll know exactly which little bit of street I'm talking about. ;-) Also, it's where cops like to hide in their cruisers to pick up speeders along the 20. Well, apparently, Sam started going wild. There were several bags of cat food and a litter box in the little strip of trees between the road and the highway, and then the dog zeroed in on something squeaking in a bunch of dead branches lying on the other side of the road, and... it was a little kitten. A grey-striped tabby. My mother couldn't just leave it there, but she couldn't take it and Sam home at the same time, so, she got the plastic grocery bag she was going to use for Sam's poop if he had "performed", and put the kitten in it and left it somewhere safe, took Sam home, then got the plastic carrier we use for our big fat cat Ember and she drove back to the spot and took the kitten home. Since we have two big dogs, Sam and Luke, our Golden Retriever/Husky Mix, and one big cat who isn't too fond of other cats, Ember, she needed to keep this kitten well-separated, and, really, the only room in the house where that is possible is in the downstairs bathroom, which is only accesible from a door in the back of the laundry room, so there are two doors in between the poor young kitten, which my mother thinks is about 6 weeks old, and our bloodthirsty pets of doom. She put the carrier and the litter box and bowls of food and water and milk and a few toys in the bathroom, which will be the kitten's temporary home for the next week or so. And it's, for all practical purposes (at least when my siblings aren't home) *my* bathroom, so I have to put the kitten in the carrier and leave it on the washing machine in the laundry room when I need to shower or pee. I can describe the cat for you, like all kittens, she enjoys clawing and biting toes and fingers, but it isn't that bad. I got used to it from Ember, and I think this kitten still thinks of fingers as her mother's teats. And she can crawl all over me. She likes clawing up my leg to get to my lap, but she hasn't figured out that curling is the best position for laps yet, so she sprawls herself out on my knees, usually on her back, clawing at any appendages which might get near. Also, sometimes, she climbs up further right on to my shoulders, which is somewhat like a massage and somewhat painful at the same time, and it's not a stable place for her to be. She crawls between my shoulders rubbing against the back of my head. Yes, exactly like Luna did to Usagi at the end of the first chapter of Naoko Takeuchi's original
Sailor Moon manga. Ember did the same thing the first day we had her in 1996, but I think it's just something they do to get themselves or their owner comfortable with them being around. One time, I thought I smelled something bad on the back of my WindRiver hooded sweater... I don't know if it's spit or pee, but I had to change.
It is nice having a kitten which isn't mean like our other cat (well, Ember's not going to read this, is she?), but we can't keep her. My mother mentioned the kitten to both my brother Nick, in Toronto, and my sister, Alison, in Ottawa, and they both want her. But Nick is going to England next February for a week or two and then, perhaps, to South America for a longer period of time next summer, so it wouldn't really be fair for the kitten to move in with him. Alison, on the other hand, already has one kitten and has lots of kitten equipment, like one of those carpeted climbing things with several ledges and a hollow inside, so, obviously, we're probably going to give the kitten to her.
It's a nice story overall, but what sort of bastard leaves a defenceless young kitten on a road right next to a busy highway? I guess the food was there so he feels less guilty about it.
Hmm... sorry, I was busy over the weekend writing a review of the superb anime series
Super GALS! for a certain popular website. I won't say where until after it's up. It's long, so I'll post whatever they delete here. Also, for those of you that do remember the extraneous in-joke filled "Alternate Angle" reviews I, Steve Brandon, used to write for
Anime On DVD, don't worry, the review I wrote here isn't full of useless fluff. I don't need to go off-topic in my reviews anymore since I have this blog wherein I can write about anything I want. I'll leave writing useless off-topic crap in reviews to Harry Knowles, thank you very much. In my defense, though, I was mainly writing about
Tenchi in Tokyo, which did have its moments but is obviously inferior to the
Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki! OVA series and the first
Tenchi Muyo TV series,
Tenchi Universe (which I happen to like better than the original OVA series, actually). The horrible truth about
Tenchi in Tokyo is that every volume was pretty much the same as the previous one, especially technically, so there really wasn't all that much to say about most of the volumes, so, yes, I did get rather silly. Also, I was almost five years younger back then. There are still a handful of my AnimeOnDVD.com reviews I am proud of, like
this "Nitpicker's Guild"-esque review of Tenchi Muyo in Love, the review of the follow-up film
Tenchi Forever, and this review of my all-time favourite anime film,
Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer.
Also, if you're an AnimeNation.net forum member, you might have noticed that
Kiyone, my AN user name, has been "banned". Well, I've written over 4000 posts there and the mods should know by now that I'm not some 13-year-old posting things he shouldn't just for kicks and just to see how quickly the mods react. The story is that this guy did a thread in the AN Hentai forum about the sick gore hentai of
Waita Uziga (absolutely not for the faint of heart... this is artwork of hentai girls with their guts split open or their heads blown apart), so I linked to
this Portal of Evil dicussion *making fun* of the guy's art. This one mod took it as a pornographic site, but it's not. It's salty and of questionable taste, certainly, but
Portal Of Evil and the similarly-themed
SomethingAwful.com, both of which I, and many other people on the board, have linked to many times in the past, are not pornographic sites. There's one indirect link to the Waita Uziga site on the page, but to get there, you have to go to
another page at PoE which explains what it's about. I don't think this is the same as linking directly to a pornographic site. If they want to make a new rule wherein one can't link to *discussions* about hentai on sites like SomethingAwful.com or PortalOfEvil.com, fine, but there's no rule like that *now* so they shouldn't ban me
Ex Post Facto. I sent an e-mail to the admins, so, hopefully, this will all be cleared up by the morning.
