Category: No News Is Good News

chirp chirp.
I’m gonna add something here soon. At least a list of the many, many films I’ve watched since I last updated. Just haven’t had the time. And when I have had the time, the last thing I want to do is write.

Sit down, kids, and I’ll tell you a tale.
The year was 1993 and Julian Schnabel was getting tired of smashing plates. But before he became a painter turned (really good) filmmaker, he tried his hand at being a painter turned (really awful) singer.
This is the lead-off track from his album “Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud,” which Island Records released two years after the recording. For God knows what reason, I bought a copy. Maybe I just wanted a CD with a giant purple phallus in my collection.
“She’s Dancing, He’s Dreaming” is the best song on the album, and, frankly, isn’t THAT terrible for the first three minutes. The production by Bill Laswell has a vaguely U2-ish vibe. The song was written by Brian Kelly and Pat Place (don’t know much about them) and the lyrics are by Kelly and Schnabel. The drums are Anton Fier, bass Bill Laswell, organ Bernie Worrell, guitar Buckethead. Yeah, I know, a pretty incredible line-up. I imagine they were all extremely well paid.
The problem is the singing. At first you think that he may be able to pull it off as a “this is how an honest man sings” type thing. But not quite. Then you think, maybe it’s simply an “unusual” voice like a Van Dyke Parks or Biff Rose. But then those strained notes come in at 3:17. Ugh.
Mind you, this is the best of the 13 tracks. I’ve never been able to listen to the whole thing.
But did I mention that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a masterpiece?

To the four readers of this blog:
Time has caught up with us.
Blogging is done. It is an antiquated form of communication. And now that Facebook has (or is about to) do away with the auto-feeding of new posts as “notes,” continuing to write here in the manner I’ve done since November of 2004 would be a waste of time.
There will still be updates, and they will come in three forms.
The first, and more frequent, will be the record-keeping of movies I’ve watched. Not to seem snobbish about it, but I’m doing it for me. I find it quite handy to take notes on what I’ve seen. I used the search function on JH.c more than you might think if I can’t remember the name of a movie, but I know generally *when* I saw it.
But I doubt I will search for great images or write more than a letter grade. I may even bundle the entries under “Films I saw this week, Nov 23,” that sort of thing.
The second will be links to articles I have published out there on the web. Again, I know I am writing to a very small, perhaps even non-existent audience, but having this record will be helpful for me.
Thirdly, and this is conjecture, there may be a handful of longform articles I want to write that I can’t find any placement for. These will not be “blog posts,” these will be actual articles. I doubt they will be frequent, but they may live here.
Also, the Star Trek Project will forever live – I’ll continue that each time I read a new Star Trek book.
Okay, signing off. It’s been real. And to paraphrase Bob Dylan, “it ain’t dead, it’s asleep.”

This is merely a grain of sand in a grand Google beach, but from all I know about SEO, if I make sure the name Rick Santorum (or even just the word Santorum) is hyperlinked to its true meaning, I will be able to sleep better tonight.
One day America will be free of homophobia and these shenanigans won’t be necessary. Until then, fuck that guy.

I can’t remember the last time I took to my blog to complain about a restaurant, but, then again, I can’t remember the last time I went to a place as horrible as Queens Comfort on 40-09 30th Ave.
I’m writing this out on my blog and not just posting to Facebook in the hopes that it is indexed high on Google. Anything I can do to deter business to this horrible place is a mitzvah.
Here are the crimes of this rancid, loathsome establishment.
1 – SO EFFING LOUD!!!!
The music is turned up to 11 – and it was good music, too – but it was so earblasting that you had to scream to hear anything. And the place was about 3/4ths empty. I love the “Safety Dance” but I’d also like to hear what my wife is saying when she’s but inches away from me.
2 – Creepy weird dudes everywhere.
I couldn’t tell who was working and who was a friend of the waitstaff. At one point I counted six people in the kitchen – one of them was eating something – none of them were wearing gloves. All of them were young looking dopes that seemed psyched to be living on off-campus housing.
One dude kept dancing (to the loud music, see above) and air-drumming behind my wife’s head. Another guy was drinking a beer.
Our waiter seemed like he had just left a methadone clinic and when I asked a question about an item on the menu, he told me to just “trust the chef.”
Another guy was laying out baked goods on a plate in front. No gloves, no wax paper.
3 – So how’s the food?
Chicken shouldn’t be red on the inside. And corn shouldn’t taste like cardboard. And a biscuit should come with, like, a pad of butter option right?
4 – But a steal?
$14 for a burger? At Shake Shack, fine, but this was just a burger with some weird stuff on it (that’s the gimmick here – nothing is normal, everything is TO THE EXTREME – in this case, a burger but with an Italian street fair sausage on it.)
I hate this place like poison. I will never go back and I intend to post similar reviews everywhere on the web in an effort to deter business so it will close and something else will open in its place. (What was wrong with the Blue Restaurant?)

Recently, with the aid of Matt Patches, I wrote a very lengthy article about the top 100 spaceships.
These two comments are side by side on Reddit.
APeacefulWarrior 1 point 1 day ago[-]
I usually hate long lists broken up like that, but I was honestly a bit impressed at how geeky the guy who wrote it was. I mean, it’s not just that he’s writing up a list of spaceships, but nearly every blurb has a coded joke poking fun at the movie it’s from.
That said, there were an awful lot of flying saucers on that list. He maybe should have stuck to a Top 50.
Aluhut 1 point 4 hours ago[-]
Let me guess: the autor looked at the starship size comparison pic and started writing up a random sentence for every one.
He did not really compare them in any way. It is not more then a list of 100 space ships.
Good job collecting the screenshots but you can forget the rest.

I just learned that Odetta died yesterday. Somehow, despite those influential years at the Bottom Line, Fast Folk Cafe and events at Town Hall, I never saw her perform live. RIP.

Dig this video about my friend Adam. I swear this is the best video you’ll see about traveling with type 1 Diabetes.