You May Indulge Yourselves

feel free to customise your own bar ambience.
Is there a setting to add sleaze?

It needs an air of disrepute, with patrons belching and scratching themselves, and grumbling about the state of the toilets.
But enough about this establishment, what about the bar website ?

Is there a setting to add sleaze?
I think that’s what the business next door to David’s fine establishment was for. Funny that the girls never wandered in here to ask us to buy them drinks. [surveys grimy tables.]

I’ll have you know the toilets were given a once-over two Thursdays ago.
Oh, I’m so behind on the current slang … so that’s a “once-over” now? We used to call it a “spray-and-pray”

Back in the day a few decades ago, with friends I’d visit the Hopscotch Bar in Fort Pierre South Dakota. At the back were the pinball games we played. At the front were the strippers, under strict orders from management not to go fully nude, so of course they did. I always thought the strippers looked better from the distance of the pinball games. Proximity had the effect of putting years, miles and pounds on their faces and figures. The Hopscotch held a balance between safe sleaze and outright debauchery. If you really wanted rough-and-tumble, you could find it down the street.
The place is still in operation as the Hop Scotch Nite Club. It seems to have strayed little from its roots. Check out the single yelp review from a ‘travel dancer’.
https://www.yelp.com/biz/hop-scotch-club-fort-pierre?adjust_creative=mapquest&hrid=f_YVL-FEQ_WhRMDfQYog-A&utm_campaign=yelp_feed&utm_medium=feed_v2&utm_source=mapquest

WandaVision has only three episodes left and is still not very good.
I gave up on the cheese after only one episode. And I am a great admirer of Ms. Olsens… attributes.
On a relevant tangent, I would like to take the opportunity to poll your transatlantic audience (phrasing) and ask if anyone can help me find what I am looking for.
I too enjoy a dollop of the cinematic arts and old fashioned speculative fiction but whenever I go on the interwebs and try and read a relevant current culture website all I find are woke scolds, purple haired “scribes” and dolefully banal studio/publisher press releases reposted as “content”
I refer of course to the dreck found at websites such as AVClub, Den of Geek, IO9, etc.. where they offer such sh*te as “Was Ming the Merciless a prototype Orange Man Bad” or “Dr. Who defeats evil space BoJo”
Is there any website where one can find something akin to the ramblings of “The Critical Drinker” but in text form ? ie: conservative preferably but politically neutral at least
UK based is preferable to American (sorry Yanquis) but anything from the Anglosphere will do considering the cultural unicorn I am hunting for.
Thanks in advance, your humble servant, etc.. ad nauseum.

Saw this at Insty this a.m.:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-take-the-penis-off-its-pedestal/
Haven’t we been doing that for the past 40 years? Or is she talking about one particularly stubborn penis?

one particularly stubborn penis
..but enough about Bill Clinton

I’ve completely fallen down the rabbit hole of sailing blogs on YouTube. When the temperatures outside get to a place where distinctions between Fahrenheit and Celsius lose their meaning, spending an hour sailing from Antigua to Guadeloupe with a couple of plucky thirtysomethings is a great escape.
On the plus side, I spent a few hours mending canvaswork for my sailboat while I was at it.

SRC above raises a point which reminds me of a little chore I set myself in December.
I set out to find and download a number of movies I remembered enjoying in the past, and others I have not seen but always meant to. Most of them are out of copyright, so no harm done. There are few films of the past 40 years which even intrigue me. The exception was The Death of Stalin, which I believe was panned by the “critics” and yes, I enjoyed it. If you have not seen it, you will discover that Zhukov was from rural Yorkshire, Stalin was an East End wide boy, Khrushchev was a New York Jew, and there was a Python on the Central Committee.
I started with Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, passing on the link to a delighted lady friend, found the original The Italian Job, and went on from there. Now I have about 40 films, which I will store on a backup drive, and send CDs/DVDs to grandsons who are not impressed by current HollyWeird offerings.
To find the movies, I use BitChute mainly, with occasional forays to the Tube, searching for films by name. To download, I have a program called ClipGrab, which does so well I made a donation.
If anyone knows where I can find a decent print of Bondarchuk’s Waterloo, 1967 I think, I would be very grateful for a link.
I have a feeling that much of the older, good stuff is destined for the Memory Hole one day, but archiving it now keeps it alive.

Not quite a limerick –
There was a young lass from Loch Innis
Whose fondness for sex ran to penis.
She took it in halls, flower beds, and horse stall,
But liked best to be mounted on pedestals.

Some of it is clever, or at least clever-clever, but little of it is interesting
Supernatural had an episode in which the brothers are tossed into a succession of television show knockoffs by a malevolent spirit in order to teach them a lesson. It also goes from cheesy comedy to horror very quickly, and it works very well. Probably because it only lasts for 45 minutes.
Am I going to ruin anyone’s day if I spoil The Big Reveal in WandaVision? Anyone who’s ever read an X-Men comic knows what’s coming, and I’m surprised they’re dragging it out this long.

Journo: “Did you realize there’s a lockdown?”

websites such as AVClub, Den of Geek, IO9, etc
Just one fantasy author – but highly entertaining (both his books and blog).

Fighting the White Devil with breakfast cereal: Get ready for Proud Puffs, a chocolate-flavored, vegan cereal formed in the shape of a Black fist.

More from Chris Rufo.

In practical terms, it is unclear how these “antiracist” programs will translate into academic outcomes. The gap between rhetoric and reality at schools such as William Kelley is almost beyond comprehension: the vast majority of the ten- and eleven-year-olds marching for the utopia of “black communism” can barely read and write. Rather than come to terms with the pedagogical failure of Philadelphia public schools, however, educators have shifted the blame to “systemic racism” and promises of “revolution.”

The desired academic outcome is an ever growing army of unemployed, deranged people ready to kill whoever leftists designate as the enemy? As a famous communist said, “the worse, the better”.

This is just occurring to Scott Adams? This is something that has bugged me about science reporting since I was in college, if not before. Not that I’ve seen much discussion of it in all these years…
https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1361317499673866245

It also goes from cheesy comedy to horror very quickly, and it works very well. Probably because it only lasts for 45 minutes.
Yes, the slow pacing and overplayed central conceit really doesn’t help WandaVision. They’ve stretched the sitcom idea beyond its tolerance. Or beyond mine, anyway. For the first three or four episodes, you sit through a flat, unfunny recreation of flat, unfunny sitcoms, complete with flat, unfunny jokes. It’s almost grating. Only when this sitcom world is disturbed or glitching in some way is there a brief respite, a brief sense of drama. And by the time the wider situation – events outside of the Hex – become clear, a large chunk of the audience will have tuned out.
It’s not entirely bad – there are good moments, and it keeps teasing something fairly wild to come. It isn’t without ambition. But the structure and pacing, and the weekly release format, haven’t done the actual drama, the core of it, any favours. I’m rather puzzled by the seemingly unanimous praise the thing has received.

Do you torrent? Waterloo, decent resolution, readily available. https://www1.thepiratebay3.to/s/?q=waterloo

It can’t be that old. It just can’t be.
I was tickled by the rave courier whose fits of having-it-large are triggered by the beep of a pedestrian crossing.

What is there to parody or to spend three episodes developing?
That’s the thing. As an idea, on paper, it’s not entirely unamusing, and there’s clearly been some thought put into the recreations, lots of detail. But that, in itself, isn’t particularly interesting. It isn’t compelling or much of a reason to keep watching, week after week. Just as the ironic nods to comics lore and continuity – which I’m guessing we’re supposed to find clever and terribly funny – aren’t in themselves particularly interesting. Whatever its cleverness, or imagined cleverness, the thing still has to work dramatically, with pace and tension, and a sense of narrative momentum. Which, so far, it doesn’t. At least, nowhere near enough.

Thank you, Fred, I will have a go.

I’m rather puzzled by the seemingly unanimous praise the thing has received
There’s a sizable contingent of people that are so happy to see their favorite geek fetishes produced with a large budget and real actors that they’ll forgive mediocre writing. And really, WandaVision‘s slow pacing is minor compared to what passes for the standard fans are used to. On a spectrum that has Titans at one end and Mutant X at the other, WandaVision is closer to the former than the latter, and farther along than, say, Inhumans.
the ironic nods to comics lore and continuity – which I’m guessing we’re supposed to find clever and terribly funny
The mark of a good genre show – like, say, Smallville or season one of The Mandalorian – is whether you can inject all the easter eggs and clever references and have the episode still work for someone who has no idea what you’re talking about. Ideally they shouldn’t even notice that you’ve made a reference.
Kevin Feige knew what he was doing, and I get the feeling he saw the train wreck coming and stepped away from the MCU before he could be tainted with the inevitable decline.

Bill Gates is making more pronouncements about how we commoners must give up all the good things in life while he continues to live a life of extreme luxury.
I used to joke that Bill Gates was a better person than Steve Jobs because although Bill wanted all our money Steve wanted our souls too. I was very wrong about Bill.