While filming Citizen Kane, director and star Orson Welles likened making a movie to playing with a toy train set, and that playful inventive spirit shines all throughout the movie.

None other than The Flying Dutchman himself, Honus Wagner!
Was a fixture at shortstop for the Pirates around the turn of the 20th century, amassed all kinds of baseball milestones and records.

Judge:
Dudes: Whoa… epic!

I’ve always been into freeform radio stations that color outside the lines, college stations like WPRB from Princeton, WFMU from NY/New Jersey, KFJC near the Bay Area, etc., have discovered a ton and a half of stuff that’s way off the beaten path and has caught my ear.

Here’s a good example I picked up around twenty years ago from KFJC, it could have been any one from too many choices to count, but for some reason this was the first song to pop into my mind right now.

If memory serves, I believe it’s a field recording taken in the Sahara Desert, a nomadic people from around Morocco or Tunisia, and can only imagine the magical environment, close my eyes to try and visualize the crisp dry Saharan air at night, a large bonfire, the sky exploding with stars above, and this trance-inducing, mystical chanting.

Halima Chedli Ensemble - “Touhami Dikr”.

The kind that gets struck in the face with a wooden paddle and it seems like they’re saying - “THANK YOU SIR MAY I PLEASE HAVE ANOTHER?”

For a long time it was Huevos Rancheros, but that got nudged into the #2 spot when I discovered Eggs Benedict.

What’s with the number buttons being available with no “OK” or “Enter” option?

I’m afraid they might be a whole bunch of oldies but goodies:

2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Empire Strikes Back.
Miller’s Crossing (the third movie written and directed by the Coen brothers, from 1989).
A Bridge Too Far (from 1977, a sprawling, star-studded epic about the Allies and their costly, ill-advised and ultimately unsuccessful Operation Market-Garden in WWII).
A Bout De Soufflé. (Godard’s seminal French New Wave cannon blast).
From Russia With Love.
The Spy Who Loved Me.

Diamonds, or any sort of gemstone, as trying to sell those things would probably be as risky as stealing them in the first place.

I still get all verklempt about it.

Ok, this happened in another school near my own, a catholic school run by priests strict to the point of unreasonable, asshole-level old school strict, they even applied corporal punishment every once in a while.

The story spread like wildfire, there were a ton and a half of cross-school friendships between that particular school and mine. This was “somewhere in Mexico”, to keep it anonymous.
Strap in, it’s a long story but it’s a doozy.

There was this really overweight kid, he wasn’t bullied or anything, he had friends and everything.
One day in the middle of class, he raised his hand - “May I be excused? I really need to go to the restroom”, and the dismally unsurprising response was - “Certainly NOT! Learn to hold it in! bE a MaN!” A few minutes later, a foul stench spread across the classroom. The kid didn’t say anything, he just got up and walked out, as everybody stared in a stunned silence.

Everyone in class stormed the windows from inside to see the kid as he walked across the school yard towards the restrooms, on its’ own building, and locked himself inside. One classmate suddenly yelled out - “The shitter!”, and within a few seconds the entire classroom joined in a loud chorus - “THE SHITTER! THE SHITTER!”

Par for the course with these sociopathic and incompetent priests, everyone knew there was no paper in the restrooms, a common occurrence.

This poor kid stayed locked inside the restroom as a teacher here and a priest there knocked on the door and attempted to negotiate. This went on for a couple of hours, until the kid’s brother arrived at school, walked across the yards, carrying a fresh change of clothes, knocked on the restroom door and was let inside.

By this point, everything in school was at a standstill, every single student in every single classroom was glued to the windows, staring in silence. You could hear a pin drop. Then the door opened, kid and his brother walked out, and headed for the school exit.

Then one kid shouted - “The shitter!”, and now the ENTIRE school, from every classroom window, joined in the chorus - “THE SHITTER! THE SHITTER!!!”

The poor kid never did return, he transferred to another school. On the one hand, surely out of shame, but on the other, because the casual, mindless and indifferent cruelty the goddamned priests imposed on children. In a more empathetic, humane school, this would have not happened.

Here’s the cool epilogue - when this kid attended high school some years later, nobody bothered him about the incident, he had his own band of friends, went to parties and everything. When the story was told, the emphasis was on the asshole priests. That’s a comforting thought.

YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!?

Ah, I see somebody listens to the Blank Check podcast, the Special Features one on Patreon!

Also RIP Martin Mull.

Hell is real… you’re looking at it.

Even if it didn’t quite invent the genre - The Rutles predates it by half a decade, there could be earlier examples - it most definitely defined it.

“America was great once… before the libruls took it over! Things were so much better when I was young… not like this weird shit now around me… it’s not ME who’s grown older…! …it is YOU who’ve gone weird! Why should I change! I refuse to change! That would require… making an effort! I refuse to change! Damn libruls! Damn libruuuuulssss…!!!”

Don’t you find it extremely suspicious how this narrative is being pushed HARD just a few months from the November election, when switching candidates is near impossible to successfully pull off, and not a year ago?

It’s called a “talking point” and republicans have perfected the dark art of negative political “divide and conquer” campaigning. Just like in 2004 when they made legitimate Vietnam vet John Kerry sound like a coward, and draft-dodger baby bush sound like a patriotic hero.

Well guess what? They’re doing it again, now with the orange parasite as fascist god king object of worship.

Btw, in election you don’t elect a god king, but entire branches of the federal government with many thousands of appointees and employees. You are also electing the same at the state and municipal level.

Do you want a government based on science and reason, or one led by superstition and unreason?

You have more than enough information to simply vote DEMOCRAT all across the board this November.

Fake news, comrad… I mean pardner.

For my Art Metal band, Caligula’s Ring.
For my Spanish-language Hip-Hop Reggaeton crew, Los Zánganos Del Rap.

Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of either genre.

We’re gonna need a note from your volcanologist.