Mental sorbet, 5
No politics, just stuff. Like mental sherbet, but with special consideration for the lactose intolerant.
This first item isn’t political. It’s purely aesthetic. Because here’s the harsh truth: there’s a way a man goes about throwing a baseball. And there’s a way no man ever should — especially not in public. This is an illustration of the latter:
First, there’s no front leg block, which is going to force the hips to drift rather than rotate kinematically. Second, the chest is prematurely open, with the non-throwing hand doing nothing to pull the upper body into activated torque. The release itself is entirely upright, even bending somehow at a positive with respect to zero. The force is actually going backwards, fighting the arm’s last hope at decent extension.
The result is what you see here: a dude who looks like he’s shot-putting an egg — gently. He’s plucking a ripe fruit, hoping not to bruise its delicate skin. His elbow is out and proud; it’s here and it’s queer and it’s unafraid to shout it!
This is the kind of throw you’d expect from a twee metro-sexual who routinely Manscapes. It is abhorrent. It is anti-evolutionary. In fact, it’s as if he’s entirely unfamiliar with his own dominant arm.
It is, when all is said and done, an objective correlative for the feminizing of the West. And I’m embarrassed for having seen it.
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2024 has been a decent year for fans of horror cinema, with films like Strange Darling, The Substance, Terrifier 3, Longlegs, Oddity, The First Omen, Maxxxine, and Speak No Evil all available to view this October.
Also available — streaming right now — is the Dutch original Speak No Evil (2022), which may be even darker than the US remake.
I like to spend the Halloween season revisiting my favorite horror films, a tradition I began a decade or so back when I realized that most of what Hollywood had to offer was mindless offal, a series of lazy jump scares and sound level changes meant to stand in for genuine terror. Big budget, CGI-laden franchise pics with cookie-cutter formulas and predictable performances simply don’t appeal to me. So why not just re-watch Halloween (1978), or The Exorcist (1973), or Don’t Look Now (1973) and save myself certain disappointment?
This year, however, beginning with Longlegs and culminating with Strange Darlings, low-budget horror has proven itself both innovative and — more importantly — genuinely interesting and unsettling. Whether you like gratuitous gore (Terrifier 3), crazy body horror (The Substance), a deeply sinister tone (Longlegs; Oddity) or the kind of psychological horror you get with, say, Seconds (1966), or The Vanishing (1988) (Speak No Evil), 2024 has been a compelling year.
If you’re into horror films, this is a good year to try some of the newer offerings.
— or, I suppose, you could just wait for the next film from The Conjuring universe. Because that in itself is a hellish condition to find yourself in.
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Ordinarily I’d be preoccupied by the MLB playoffs this time of year, but because I live in Colorado — who fields a team that routinely draws several million people to its stadium without being remotely competitive — I’ve let my interest in Major League Baseball lapse. And that’s unfortunate, because for literally decades, baseball was an obsession of mine.
The Colorado Rockies are a stadium picnic, a beer mixer where on occasion an interesting baseball game breaks out.
Thinking on this, in fact, it occurs to me that Colorado itself is a lot like its baseball team: an idea whose execution is secondary to its framing, an image in search of a reality capable of approximating it. What was 30 years ago real and tangible is today a simulacra. It is the decaying California of the mountain west that still believes itself a destination state for the happy and hopeful.
It’s not. It’s the squatter pad for the homeless and the drug addicted; the sanctuary for illegals looking to commandeer entire apartment complexes.
Colorado is Norma Desmond, aged and self deluded. And those of us hoping it reverts to the place we all once adored are all destined to wind up dead, floating in a swimming pool, offering cynical voice overs from the chlorinated great beyond.
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From Dr. Simone Gold:
A study involving 1.7 million children has found that myocarditis and pericarditis only appeared in children who had received Covid mRNA vaccines.
Not a single unvaccinated child in the group suffered from these heart-related problems
This is absolutely shocking.
The larger article is (of course) mostly positive about the mRNA vaccine — and if you go to Dr Gold’s comments, you’ll witness the predictable swarm of human pin cushions explaining to you how many heart conditions in children are acceptable in exchange for their feeling super moral and righteous for doing as they were told.
Ignore that. Children were under no threat of serious harm from COVID-19. The extent of vaccine injury that comes from pumping an experimental drug into those who don’t need it won’t be fully understood for years, if not decades — and even then, the medical establishment and the government functionaries who participated in what amounts to widespread medical malpractice — if not worse — will do everything in their power to bury, dismiss, or “problematize” the evolving data.
Some days I believe in the idea of the multiverse. And on those days, I wish I would have found the off-ramp from this world right before COVID magically emerged from a steaming bowl of bat soup.
— Which just happened to exhibit a furin cleavage site previously engineered in a lab in the US — one associated with the study of coronavirus in bats, which coincidentally used as its principle laboratory the Wuhan Institute, a facility that by pure chance is within spitting distance of the wet market we’ve been told shut down the world for over a year.
Wait, is it really the second week of October? Shit. I’m due for my 16th booster shot…
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Have a great weekend, all! I’m still using beer to dull the pain of my surgery, so if you want to buy me a case or two, I’ll just leave this here.
Or, you could help support by work by upgrading to a paid subscription. Thanks! And I’ll speak with you all again next Monday. God willing.