screenshot

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/iran-plane-shot-down-trump-pilot-b2951664.html

 

Last night I watched

Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold, which sounds like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, only it came out nine years before. I bought it on DVD from an op shop about a year ago.

Cleopatra Jones is tall, black and elitely dressed, like an air hostess on her day off in a magazine. She wears silver and metallic purple eyeshadow painted across her cheekbones, from her eyes to her ears,  Bowiesquely. She's a federal agent, I think, who has a CIA protector, played by an actor who reminded me of the annoying dad in Alf. Cleopatra constantly addresses him as Stanley. She wants nothing to do with Stanley.

The opening sequence is a pop song sung over helicopter aerial shots of a boat village and famous floating restaurants, not unlike the opening sequence to The Man from Hong Kong - although that opener is meant to be shot from a hangglider, and its pop song went to number 3 in Australia. Unlike The Man from Hong Kong, the film is fully set in Hong Kong, which is interesting, if you're interested in Hong Kong in the 70s. It looks like it was an interesting place. My memories of Hong Kong are from the 80s, of my Dad having a great time haggling with street traders over a fake Rolex. 

Making the most of the helicopter hired for the opening aerials, Cleopatra arrives in Hong Kong via helicopter. She's here to rescue her two buddies, drug smugglers who are acutally undercover cops. Maybe we're meant to already know this from the first Cleopatra Jones movie, but the baddies haven't seen it, and never discover the men are undercover. That would've called for too much drama, methinks. 

The chief baddie, Miss X, a white American, reminded me of Chris Evert Lloyd. She owns a casino in Macau and has a heroin lab. Her eye makeup is not a touch on CJ's. In the final boss fight Miss X appears to have a male stunt double. Cleopatra kills her with a sword in the guts, then departs Hong Kong via Singapore Airlines.

There are lots of chase scenes: a longish car chase around a dock area (did people used to find this exciting?) then a motorbike pursuit of the almost mute Chen, who's been stealing drug trade from Miss X. The best chase scene is when Cleopatra Jones is hunted by a car down narrow Macanese lanes. At the end of each car chase there's an explosion. I liked the music that accompanies the action, especially the brief running bass line when the hunter's car appears.

One of the signals of time passing in the movie is 'Cleopatra has a new outfit'. Hats feature, as do pantsuits, but her facepaint stays put. When she arrives in the helicopter I don't remember her having any luggage, maybe Stanley helps on this front.

The predominant stunt throughout is the balcony fall. An infinite number of Chinese henchmen in navy kung fu suits tumble from balconies. I guess the movie was a co-production with a Hong Kong film company, but there's no clues to this in the credits. 

At the end of the movie the Casino of Gold's impressive chinoiserie interior is demolished by a machine gun fight. Are most sets blown up at the end of action movies because it saves time/money on the bump out, or do the production crew loathe the set so much they want to destroy it? The violence of the finale -- machine gun battle inside a crowded casino -- made me think about America. 

For some reason one of the extras fleeing the shootout is topless. Also, there's a completely out-of-nowhere 45-second erotic scene partway through, where moodily lit naked women rub oil into each other. Was this spliced from a porno the producers had on file?

The original Cleopatra Jones was a hit, naturally the sequel flopped. Someone on wikipedia cited the decline in popularity of blaxploitation as the cause, but I reckon the blame might be on Star Wars.

rock

rock 

rock rock rock 

rock rock rock rock rock rock rock

rock rock rock rock rock rock rock

rock rock rock 

rock rock rock rock rock rock rock 

rock rok rook rock roc kr o rko kro ck roc kro ck ork corokc ork coro co rk cokr cok rock rok cok rokc kro ckrk cok dkco rk ck ork cko kc kgok ro cko gk cko eokw ok cokr okd coek dk coke kfc oek djc rk ckrhc orojd cok oofofofofofofofofofofofo 

rock

rock rock

rock rock rok rock rock rock 

rock 

rock

rock

https://www.theage.com.au/culture/books/a-comprehensive-guide-to-the-vital-words-that-will-mark-you-as-an-ai-cheat-20251117-p5ng0a.html

conce_tration

Still of a listening Gregory Orr 
as Stanley Kunitz says:
'Here at the monumental door,'

from HoCoPoLitSo.

 

 

the people's game

On Saturday night I switched on Channel 7 to see what was on, because this was the first Saturday night since forever that there was no football on free-to-air TV, because the AFL has sold the rights to broadcast football on Saturday nights to Murdoch pay TV (Foxtel slash Kayo). 

This is what I saw in lieu of the football.

On Channel 7 there was a cop drama of some sort. I saw people punching each other in the face.

On 7two there was Escape to the Country, a boring reality TV show. I saw some green grass.

On 7mate there was a Paul Verhoeven movie, Total Recall. I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger having a vision of a nuclear power station given him by a baby that was part of someone's chest. All of a sudden massive mining machines smash through the walls. The mutants hideout had been discovered. People shot at each other at close range with machine guns. Bullets smash into bodies, blood splattering. Arnold and three others including the chest mutant escape, but they are betrayed, the evil leader and troops have them cornered, the mutant is shot, the baby croaks some last words to Arnold, whereupon the evil leader shoots the baby in the head. In close up the top of the baby's head exploded. 

On Saturday night, instead of the football, I saw people punching each other in the face, green grass, and a baby shot in the head.

oplane crib

This is a close up of a postcard I sent to Louisa two days ago. I couldn't read the sign in it, so I used my work phone as a magnifying glass slash camera. The postcard was of pre-decimal currency Surfers Paradise, printed in West Germany. The close up reminds me of a Marc de Jong painting.

For hire: umbrellas, surf-o-planes, windbreaks, indecipherables, rentable for a few bob. What's a surf-o-plane? A surfoplane sans hyphens is an inflatable rubber mat patented in the early 1930s by Bondi inventor Ernest Smithers. They took off, they hurt your nipples, they necessitated the eventuation of the rashy (or is it spelt rashie - my 2nd edition 90s Macquarie doesn't say, though it does define surfoplane as: 'a small, inflatable rubber float used esp. for shooting waves. [Trademark]')

Maybe the hyphens in surf-o-plane were to get around patent infringements. Smithers did sue someone for selling their own version of surfoplane, and then sold his patent to the infringer.

There's no wikipedia page for surfoplanes, but they get a mention under Pie iron, for Smithers patented a refinement of the jaffle iron (wooden handles). Trove has lots of surfoplane results, and there's a deal of internet surf research and blog posts to read about surfoplanes if you so choose.

Take the aer out of aeroplane and it's oplane. Who in the 1930s had flown in an aeroplane? How many rode a suffixed equivalent? Search for "oplane" in Trove and "exclude aeroplane"; aside from surf-o-planes, there are thousands of chair-o-planes and horse-o-planes (and the odd fly-o-plane and loop-o-plane (from which two youths and a girl walked away unhurt when the main shaft of the machine snapped in 1951 St Kilda)). 

A chairoplane featured at Perth's 1927 Uglieland as the latest mechanical device, alongside 'a performing sheep possessed of great intelligence'. (Aside: Uglieland carnivals were run by the Ugly Men's Association, who seem to have been a little like Habitat for Humanity for post-WWI Perth, until Uglieland's venue White City got shutdown by wowsers and the Ugly Men lost their major source of funds.)

In 1946 while watching a horse-o-plane machine, Charles Foley, 16 was struck on the side of the head by a wooden horse. His mother collapsed in the ambulance to hospital.

Newspaper archive results for carnival rides are either advertisements or articles about accidents. There have been lots of accidents on horse-o-planes and chair-o-planes. Year after year, decade upon decade, deaths and tragic accidents. Not so the surfoplane. It chafed your chest, you might have got dragged out to sea on it, but shooting the waves was way safer than flying machines.

"No title" The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 - 1954) 7 October 1927: 23. Web. 1 Jan 2025 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article32056804>

Minerals Council proposing Kickstarter campaign

 

 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/dec/13/peter-dutton-nuclear-costings-coalition-power-policy-plan-australia

flubdubberies

Hold-! ing mysterious diiH-tiBniotia. in wliijKm, ' over unnumbered immckw flubdubber ! tea. ChaUing atruw ciintcr. with ' pale-eyed and blue-neck led ex('uiit. in ...

Holding mysterious discussions, in whispers, over unnumbered nameless flubdubberies. Chatting across counters, with pale-eyed and blue-necktied ...

"There wasn't much flubdubber,” McKennan said. “You just got a ballgame. If you didn't like it, you could stay home.”

He was also a member of the NRA and was a proud member of the North Country Flub-Dubber Fish Chowder Marching and Playing Society.

Absorbing the impact of Flubdubber in year 2 by Kliff is behind us. A lesser coach would not recover from that and probably be gone

The guy was the town simpleton and everyone called him flubdubber (he used "flubbin'" as his byword). Dad felt sorry for him and hired him

But the most consistent of all is Mama's prize and pet, the chief Flub-dub-ber of them all, Washington 

"There wasn't much flubdubber. You just got a ballgame. If you didn't like it, you could stay home."

"Il n'y avait pas beaucoup de flubdubber. Tu viens d'avoir un jeu de balle. Si tu n'aimais pas ça, tu pourrais rester à la maison." —Art McKennan

Hemingway notched a place in Lite Matuie by shucking polished flub dubber and socking the Reader with what the finicky Call viscera but which he called guts.

fat chance

One Sunday in January, a few days home from a pleasant holiday in Japan, I caught a tram to the city to exchange what spending money we hadn't spent at the first money changer I saw. I got $87 for ¥10,000.

Fresh cash in my pocket, Dymock's bargain books mezzanine was just around the corner. There I had once held but not purchased Kent MacCarter's remaindered California Sweet, while Ouyang Yu, I suspect, eyed me across the floor. That was what, two years ago? Perhaps it was still there, maybe Ouyang too. I would say hello this time, I would say: Ouyang? I had you once as a teacher.

California Sweet wasn't there, nor was Ouyang. There were four recent Vagabonds on discount, an expensive Ron Padgett, a surplus Eavan Boland and someone else from overseas reduced but not cheap. I've bought poetry cheap from the mezzanine before, a Pam Brown, a Gig Ryan, but not today. 

So downstairs I went to the full-price poetry section. There among the Plaths and Lawsons and Rupi Kaurs were two copies of a new Kent MacCarter release I hadn't heard of: Fat Chance. It's full of his plane crash poems, one of which I'd read before. It cost $25 dollars. I held on to it. 

The sales assistant was noting something and ignored me as I stood at the counter. I returned to the top of the queue, she called me back saying, I just had to get down that sentence. Working in a bookshop writing on the job like Kris Hemensley. I guess she was in her twenties. Coming home from Japan I have been overly communicative with shop assistants. I will get less so. 

Twenty five dollars, 24.99, enough for a good lunch in Tokyo for two: set meal, bowl of rice, miso, tea. I am writing this to justify my purchase. I best get on with it.

I read on the train home. The station seemed strange when I got off. Was that the poetry or culture shock? The second read was a before-sleep dip, the third on my front step in the sun.

Before the poems, there's an appraisal by Lisa Gorton and an appreciative essay by Jessica Wilkinson, which is 2.5 pages long - an introduction one would think would belong to a republished edition, a critical framework, maybe. I skipped it for laters.

The opening poem is a vignette about a prize pig, a cameo with what seems a proofing error, a doubling hard to make sense of in the context of prose:

For years, Corndog was a popular attraction at the McLeod County Fair for years...

The plane crash survival and unlikely violent death narrations that follow are in an asynchronous prose, but there’s nothing surplus like that ‘for years’. There are dates or years for titles, flight numbers, make of plane. There are beheadings, strewn tendons and lucky sole survivors. 

Corndog returns in a follow-up vignette to frame the sequence, hence the book's cover - a pink silhouette of a pig, on black, sliced horizontally by a white line and white jumbo jet taking off or tail-ending it. 

More non-fiction constructions come: a letter-to-Santa sequence interlarded with medical details on objects left inside the bodies of patients after surgery; an imagined company history of an eighties cabbage patchesque doll. Then sketches of photos in ten lines, which I liked best, their clipped disjuncture (a tautological phrase, a wishy washy one). And the last poem is good too, a San Francisco... collage? I'd better reread it to check.

Sometimes I justify buying books by thinking of them as gifts. I thought of my friend Adrian taking Fat Chance to the counter, but when I went to his place last week, I decided not to gift it, anxious about his anxiety and passing on something disconcerting.

And now I notice the blurb - 'this feel-bad book of the year' - written by the publisher, I guess upswell's owner maybe. Last week, we went round to sister Natalie's to feed her cat, Kitty, who had vomited on the knotted carpet in her lounge. On Nat's bedside table was a copy of John Waters' Liarmouth: A feel-bad romance. Is feel-bad a genre? Dymock's's barcode sticker files the book under the categories POP and RANDOM.

The poems reminded me of:

• Eliot Weinberger
• Readers' Digest
• Archival photos from 1930s U.S. government surveys with black holes punched through them.

There was a plane crash while we were in Japan, at Haneda airport. We'd flown from Haneda the morning before the accident and watched the news as it broke on TV. Four hundred people escaped down the slides everyone ignores being shown about by flight crew before take off. Five people on a small plane headed to earthquake rescue efforts at Noto Peninsula died. On TV re-enactments were performed by news hosts landing and taxiing model planes across replica mdf tarmacs. An earthquake days earlier had left tens of thousands of mostly elderly people in midwinter without shelter, heat or water. TV experts demonstrated how to keep warm by stuffing plastic bags inside your jacket.

who to

 "is jon bon jovi singing to axl rose when he sings you give love a bad name?"

- 'Hedgehogs are lactose intolerant', pookie.
- Damn, I was really wanting to breastfeed one.

noam

 chomks

s

chomks

cmo

chomsky

is 94

he looks it

he looks like a womble

to me

marsupial mole news

 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-17/elusive-marsupial-mole-spotted-uluru-swims-in-sand/102482890

balloon

 

cheese news

 

I do like marsupial news

 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-30/dusky-hopping-mouse-discovery-scotia-sanctuary-nsw-/102649122

weird ellips...s

today

is international pineapple day

I had an OK day, turned compost

did dishes, made meatballs

wrote a few emails, found out 

about a poetry competition

for Dorothea Mackellar, who wrote

a poem called Colours that features

the evil Darling pea

a native that poisons livestock

a la locoweed in the States.

People in the 19th century

equated themselves to sheep

so if you went off the deep end

you'd be said to have a touch

of the Darling pea

but that phrase went out of favour

before the second world war

from what I can tell in Trove

recent corro

 

I got an email today from colostomy bag.

And I got one from bad eyes.

What strange names they have. 

Someone called yellow nails also wrote to me, as did tinnitus killer. Who are these people? Pain relief sent me a message, as did your dizziness, and your pee. Your pee sent me an email. Hi Your pee, how you doing? How's it going Secret Video. What's been happening Hidden Ear Condition.

I had a dream about Jason Dunstall last night. He had just won the grand final and wasn't wearing any shorts. He had a soft toy over his penis. The soft toy flew off, his penis was huge and droopy like a carpet snake. That was why he won the Grand Final, because he had such a big penis.

Bad eyes would be good name for a dodgy character, as would yellow nails. Yellow nails and bad eyes drift into town, drifters, donogooders. I just checked my nails, they're not yellow. They've got crinkles on them though, a sign of something, a deficiency, maybe vitamin K. 

My eyesight isn't much chop. I met somebody called Stop Squinting the other day. He wants to help me.

Hello, what's your name?

Stop Squinting.

That's a nice name. 

Here's my card.

I can't read it. 

They're like prank callers. Amanda Hugginkiss, or Isyourfridgerunning. But there's no pun, there's no gag.

[Ring ring]

Hello? 

[Hacking cough]

Who's this?

Bad eyes.

Whatchuwant?

I'm looking for yellow nails.

Yellow nails ain't here.

I imagine them as men. Men with weird names. Men who send me messages. Messages I mustn't open. They want to steal from me. Tinnitus killer and Pain Relief. Scammers, criminals, they want my credit card details, they want my identity. They want me to open their messages. There's a knock at the door. Who is it? Yellow nails. I'm not opening the door. Don't let them in. They come at night. Bang bang bang. Who is it? Bad eyes.

san francisco haiku link

a scene from the foot of the street of the jigsaw puzzle you gave up on