Tuesday 12 November 2024 21:39:14 AM CDT
Saturday 9 November 2024 19:22:13 PM CDT
Nick Carter
is a little younger than James Bond, having been created somewhere in the 1960s but James Bond didn't really get to be famous until the
1960s when the movies started. As far as I know there weren't any Nick Carter movies but the books were better and there were a lot more of them.
The Bond novels were so-so if you were into action-adventure stuff as that really wasn't the point. The movies often didn't resemble the book far
beyond the title and general plot as the idea was to make money. They did that well and were sufficiently entertaining that I've watched many of
them dozens of times, the last one I watched even once was License to Kill - the rot was creeping in and while I liked Timothy Dalton a lot I doubt
that I would have continued watching them even if he hadn't been replaced. I saw Pierce Brosnan in something or other and he was pretty good but
I don't remember what it was so.... anyway the old Bond films were fun and I still watch one now and them if I'm hanging out in the house with a movie
channel on in the background and one comes on. Sean Connery was the best and while I liked Roger Moore in some stuff I didn't get excited about his
Bond. Now where was I? Chris usually has something snarky to say by now.
Nick Carter the spy is according to some sources a reincarnation of the late
19th century dime novel character
that survived into the pulp era.
That Nick Carter was a PI and I guess by the 1960s or so spy novels had taken a big chunk of the gumshoe audience so Nick becomes a spy. Carter
doesn't just have a license to kill - he's a Killmaster. Apparently a Killmaster is pretty rare - he's number three and only about a dozen make
appearances in the 250+ books published over thirty or so years. Of course Axe (the agency Carter works for) is pretty small and super-secret
to there aren't a lot agents of any killing skill level.
One or so critics commented that "Nick Carter out-bonds James Bond" and as real-world spy stuff goes he is more realistic. The Bond films were
spectacular action and special effects and clever humor but not very realistic. Not even not-very realistic. The Carter books are based on
events and conditions of the time in which they were written so we get some Vietnam-related stuff (what
Appointment in Haiphong
is about) and of course lots of Russian and Chinese shenagigans with terrorism (mostly the muslim kind) but you also get leftover Nazis out for revenge
or trying to revive the Third Reich and occasionally a Japanese baddie upset about the war.
The books were ghost-written by various authors with Nick Carter billed as the author. Most of the writers are quite good - were in some cases
as
Jerry Ahern
and
David Hagberg
have passed on and the series ended over thirty years ago I would imagine quite a few are no longer extant. Some
like Jerry were already commercially successful while others rose to prominence after writing for the Killmaster project.
As I said David Hagberg wrote our featured work and almost two dozen others and they're among the best. What it's about is a U.S. Army brigadier
general who was a POW in Vietnam and for some reason has absconded back to the joint and is killing off some of the commie officials. Axe is ordered to
find him and bring him back as quietly as possible and Nick gets the job. A little improbable his Nick and a smokin' hot Chinese-American agent
sidekick being stuffed into the back seat of an SR-71 because they gotta, ya know, get there fast. The smokin' hot babe isn't improbable - there's
at least one in every adventure. And in bed with Nick. Probably you could take out some equipment and stuff six food dude and a Chinese gal in there
but... hey, it's a spy novel and it's not that over-the-top. The description of the Blackbird having to get a drink from a KC-135 because it can't
make the trip on one tank is pretty good - Hagberg was fluent in technology. Carter and his associate get it on the average number of times I guess
(not sure what the average is of women or number of time each) but it seems about right.
Generally a minor character or two don't make it out alive. Sometimes they're sympathetic and sometimes they aren't, and sometimes in between there.
The humor is sparse and low-key. Espionage and stuff is serious, especially people gettin' kilt and all.
"Word out of Hanoi. From a contact we know only as Maurice." Hawk lifted the other corner of
his mouth as he looked gratefully at Willow. "Your tracks are covered. Bu Chen said nothing. He
never got the chance. His body was found in a sand pit about a mile from Phu Thone's villa.
Killed by the men who took him in custody for stealing a bicycle."
"For stealing a bicycle?" Willow repeated.
"No, for having six thousand dollars in British gold pounds wrapped around his middle. The
soldiers killed and robbed him as soon as they discovered he was carrying a small fortune. So
Hanoi can only suspect he might have known something. They're frustrated. What they can put
together is too fragmentary to produce any clear picture. They'll never uncover the truth."
OK, lessee what we got this autumn Sadderday afternoon. Idunno if the guy in Brookland is serious or just foolin' around. He needs to get a domain name
and attach it to his blog. I thought it was that way a while back but may be misremembering. Jonestown paper about the same - hardly anybody reading the
paper but I already commented on that. Maybe some read the website but their traffic don't look like much. Other guys seem to just have something up so
they can sell ads to the car dealers and whatever.
Anyhow, getting back to the election, the folks in Wynne told the malcontents to pound sand and over in Parkin I believe it was.... get Parkin and Earle
mixed up...
Parkin tossed their mayor
in a close vote of 193 to 180. I wouldn't be surprised if
Cackles
got all 373.
Nothing new on NEA Report and Jonesboro Right Now
got sports. They tell you many points some guys scored in a basketball
game and who won some high school football games (Wynne got whupped) but they can't provide a name for a guy that's been arrested and mugshotted and at least
briefly in jail. On the plus side the sports articles provided a couple of....
What, Chris?
Yeah, that wouldn't be prudent. Chris is right more often than a broken clock. Slightly.
NEA Report guy doesn't do sports, or much else most days. Jonesboro Right Now had something about the election on account of some
folks that didn't have the vote go their way
are unhappy. No, not the dimocrats. They always
lose bigly in Arkansas in statewide races and win locally in just a handful of places. Nah, I'm kinda ashamed of my ancestors (a smidgen of Cherokee
on both sides of the family) not so much cashing in on the casino business when it's allowed - don't approve meself - but if the constitution was
changed to let them to it and now it's been changed to not let them do it in places where the people don't want them... like I said it's a tad
embarrassing.
Guy wants to
abolish the state liberry board
because they held with corrupting children's minds - or at least didn't seem to have a problem with it - I'd be good with it. Like the federal education
department it gives just a little bit of taxpayer money to schools and then uses it as leverage to make them do bad stuff. Get rid of both would be good.
You guys in Little Rock take care of the library thing and the new administration in the swamp will take care of that other matter.
Sunday 10 November 2024 13:32:43 PM CDT
Not much news from the usual suspects. Maybe they don't work weekends except for sports and that's college and high school so they
got that out of the way yesterday. Even the tellyvision didn't have anything worth mentioning. The syndicated pundits on the newspaper
are aggrieved at the
national
and
state
levels. Fortunately most Arkansans
vote pretty sensible
and that doesn't seem to be changing except a little for the better. A 60/40 ain't what I'd like to see but some of that forty percent aren't bad people, just misguided
or not paying attention.
I haven't put my custom ad-blockers on this new rig yet so I'm seeing all clickbait stuff. I guess somebody must be clicking or they wouldn't be there. The ones that
are supposed to tell you some secret stuff if you put a soda bottle full of used motor oil somewhere of something I just google it and find out what it's about without
giving'em a click. Same with paywalls - there's nothing so exclusive that no one else has it. It may take a bit for it to show up elsewhere but it will. As a feller said
if you're the only person in the world that knows something it probably ain't so. And if you click on something about Brazilian bikinis.... anyway I gotta tune them a bit
more. Meanwhile I see stuff like this:
Meanwhile I ain't gonna cry about the last pic 'cause I ain't gonna look at it or any of'em and unlike
Sgt. Reese
I know tech stuff so I know what a
penetration test
is and having a semi-hot chick in the there is kinda sick. And you ain't getting all the free TV you want from some little box that
Billy Mays
would be embarrassed to pitch. I did think he shouda been beaten with many stripes for the Awesome Auger thing. I live in the country and
got two gig fiber runs from two different companies a hunnderd feet from the house and still gotta pay if you want the Netflix and such.
Okey-dokey, believe I'll knock off and snooze for a while. I'd like to think that the next seventy-one days will be boring and everbody just
talks about the
dawn of the Golden Age
on 20 January but somehow I got a feeling there's
some as don't want it that way.
Monday 11 November 2024 11:42:13 PM CDT
That's from
Pyramid
in 1978. Since it was about the pyramid mania of that era it's appropriate that there is a humor infusion in
Pyramania.
No,
that
was a Def Leppard album. You Can't Take it With You is a reference to the Egyptian obsession (for those who
could afford it) with taking possessions into the afterlife.
Charon
and the River Styx were not Egyptian (we get that from the Greeks for
OBE
graduates. Is that still as millennials say 'a thing'? I guess it's millennials that say
that. I can't do millennial-speak because starting every sentence with 'so' isn't just cringey but I wouldn't know
when to put a comma/pause after the 'so' or not. Robert E. Howard in his Conan tales called what is today Egypt
Stygia so there's a connection I guess. Let's go with that.
What's news in NEA today? It's Monday but it's a holiday (Veteran's Day is still a holiday isn't it?) so maybe the
news people aren't back at work yet. Maybe something will turn up late in the day. Not that we want any crime but
it seems to be a regular thing. In fact
this
just came in. Apparently the Memphis folks are working today. TTYL.
They didn't come up with much. KAIT and NEA Report both had the thing about the asthma research but first there's
an ugly crime. No
dead burnt bodies and veins in you teeth but a pretty sick
and
low-class individual
at Black Rock. I used to drive through there a lot at considerable risk as I was leaving Paragould on 412 and that road was a twisty
two-lane and a lot of big truck traffic. Haven't been that way in a few years and dunno if they've improlved it much, adding passing
lanes and such. Way back in the day I and a couple of colleagues in a Taurus station wagon was going to a couple of small places up
in Misery and freezing rain started as we got up into the hilly area. Finally had to stop and it was at some motel - not a chain like
Super 8 and such but a old-fashioned one had a restaurant and all. Ended up getting iced in the three days and nothing to do but eat
and drink and sleep and watch television. Restaurant was good and the bar didn't run out of likker and we had a pretty good time.
Main thing I remember about Black Rock is that's where a lot of white rock comes from. Light grey rock anyway - there's a big quarry up
there - guess that's what you call it - where they get the stuff for driveways and such. There used to be a big chunk of it painted black
there on the highway with "Black Rock" painted on it. It got broken and you could see it was the grey rock painted black. Anyway I'm waiting
to see a mugshot of this dude since he didn't have one up. Nobody else had anything on it but maybe the telly folks will pick it up in a day
or two. Checked the detention facility he was supposedly taken to but nothing there yet.
The
asthma thing
looks like something syndicated. The attributed author is apparently at
this outfit. In Texarkana. Texas. Okey-dokey, I guess if someone in Texas
wants to talk about asthma in Arkansas...
What, Chris?
Beats me. Probably an forked AI tool. The only reason you fork generally is to change the behavior from what the creators built. Problem
is the forkers are usually a small subset of the original maintainers and in some cases may not include any of the original crew.
What?
Need you ask? Now shut up a minute and I'll do it straight. The NIH gave two thirds (approximately) of a million taxpayer dollars to the
the
Arkansas Children's Research Institute.
Much money as they waste on other stuff it's good to see the kids getting some attention. Giving billions to criminal regimes in eastern
Europe and the Middle East all. But I wondered about the headlines about Arkansas children being specially adversely affected by asthma.
I see so many of those clickbait articles about how Arkansas is the worst place in the world to live and then you see one that says Arkansas
is fifth from the bottom. I kinda like it here myself and I've lived in some other places and visited some more. So I wondered if someone
clicked on one that said Arkansas is the worst place in the world to live if you're a kid with asthma and figured that would do as well as
anything else for filler.
"What, Chris?"
Of course I know but I'm not gonna say it.
Tuesday 12 November 2024 11:42:13 PM CDT
Still no mugshot on the miscreant from Black Rock and the other outlets don't have anything. Should I commentate on the
Jonestown paper political cartoon? Nah, let's move on. Nothing much in the Wynne paper,
Jonesboro Right Now
and
NEA Report
both report that the dude that got
four percent
of the votes for mayor has
endorsed Copenhaver.
Whatever. Also reported by both is the acquisition of a
Blytheville clinic
by
NEA Baptist.
Good to see something that isn't being gobbled up by St. Bernards. Theoretically having two large
Medical Industry
entities in NEA should be good as competition usually is good for the consumers. Unfortunately who the consumer uses is who their
insurance will pay for so they don't get much choice.
KAIT also reported the
mayor
and
hospital
news so there's a backlink for each.
They also had
this bit
about the Democrats in the Arkansas Senate. The whole half dozen (of 35 total) of them don't like a rule change. Seems three Republicans voted
against it - not bad considering how many pansy Republicans there are. Quite a few of them would run as dims if they thought they could get elected
that way. Arkansas is in pretty good shape and the noise the malcontents make is just noise. The recent election indicates most of the country may
be moving that way. Good times.
May take the rest of the day off so any new stuff will have to wait. Later muchachos.
=============================
[Verse 1]
Well, I sympathize completely
But there's nothing I can do
I am just a humble servant
With a message here for you
Well I know you have good reasons
And there's things you've got to do
But the boatman won't be waiting
And he's leaving here with you
[Chorus]
And you can't take it with you
No matter what you do
No, you can't take it with you
Not the place you're going to
(One more mile)
(One more road)
(One last bridge)
(One less load)
[Verse 2]
Well I sympathize completely
But there's nothing I can do
I am just obeying orders
I'm a simple soul like you
Well you really are persuasive
But I've heard it all before
And the boatman's getting restless
As he stands upon the shore
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