Month: November 2005

WOO-HOO! The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. On DVD! (Maybe!)

BriscoIt appears that The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. may FINALLY be coming to DVD!

YEE-HAW!!!

TVShowsOnDVD.Com reports:

After years of rumors and finger-crossing, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. will likely come to DVD in 2006. Warner Bros have given me the go-ahead to post the news that it’s strongly being considered for release next year. They haven’t started on the project yet, so they can’t say with 100% certainty that it’s coming, but things are looking good for our boy. We posted news that this was coming before, but that was secondhand info and obviously wasn’t reliable.

This is a show I’ve fought very hard to get on DVD, so I’m excited by the news that it’ll be coming out. It’s currently the 3rd most popular unreleased show on the site, and Bruce Campbell fans are diehards and throw their support behind the actor; I think the release will be successful. We’re very much "in-the-loop" on this title, so stay tuned for more news when we get it [SOURCE].

For those who may not be aware, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. was an outstanding saddlepunk series that Fox aired back in 1993. It’s a lot like the old 1960s series Wild, Wild West–only good (or better).

I didn’t wach Brisco when the show was first on because of the way Fox advertised it. (I.e., as a Western done "Fox style"–wink, wink, nudge, nudge–implying a lot more sexual content than the show actually had.) And apparently a lot of other people didn’t, too.

Fox wasn’t really behind the show and debuted it in the 8 p.m. Friday Death Slot, which is guaranteed to kill programs in short order (as happend to Star Trek Enterprise in its last season) due to the fact audiences are unusually low at that time, making it hard to get ratings.

It aired just before The X-Files (and, you’ll note, when the latter started to get popular the network moved it out of Friday night and onto Sunday–a high TV-audience night).

Brisco lasted only a season, but what a season it was!

I discovered the show when TNT was airing it Saturday mornings, and it was good enough to pull me away from watching cartoons (which was an accomplishment).

The show had tremendous potential, and it’s really a shame that the network didn’t give it more of a chance. It seems to have been a couple of years ahead of its time, because the exact same kind of anachronistic in-joking that the show did was later used to great effect on Hercules and Xena, both shows that were extremely popular in their day.

The program tells the story of a bounty hunter named (are you ready?) Brisco County Jr., who is hired by wealthy San Francisco robber barons to hunt down a particular gang of criminals who (coincidentally), killed Brisco’s father, lawman Brisco County Sr.

That much is more of less standard Western fare, but the show injected numerous sci-fi elements, including the mysterous "orbs’ (metallic devices that look like floating ocean mines) that came from the future and had mysterious powers, like endowing people with superstrength, turning bad characters good, and consuming and trapping evil androids.

The show also featured a lot of anachronistic, forward-looking humor, like a character named "Aaron," who was a knockoff of Elvis Presley and who had invented "day-glasses" (glasses with darkened lenses) to protect his eyes from the sun.

Or Brisco’s rival (and later partner) Lord Bowler, an ultra-macho ex-Buffalo Soldier who’s secret dream was to move to the Napa Valley and plant a vineyard (hence: the origin of California’s Napa wine industry).

Or John Astin (formerly Gomez Addams) playing Prof. Wickwire, a crazy inventor who comes up with (are you ready?) crazy inventions–like rocket-propelled trains and things like that.

Brisco County Jr. himself is played by Bruce Campbell (better known as Ash from the Evil Dead trilogy, which is comedy horror rather than comedy sci-fi western).

Anyway, it’s a great show, and I wanted to give a head-up to other Brisco fans out there that the long wait for (legitimate) DVDs may FINALLY be coming to an end!

Will keep you posted!

MORE BRISCO MEMORIES.

Laudare

Dominicannuns_2

What is your first reaction when you see a picture like this? Is it "It’s wonderful to see nuns in full habit having fun"? Perhaps it is "How charming!" Or maybe it’s just a smile. If these guesses are close to your first reaction, you may be surprised to hear of another gut reaction given by one Catholic:

"Dominican sisters become the last word in the decadent fashion of modern religious life."

GET THE POST.

Back in the Glory Days of the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century, one young nun shocked her sisters by jumping on a table and dancing while merrily clicking her castanets. What happened to this rebel sister? Was she dragged off by the Inquisition, never to be heard of again? It may surprise those shocked by the fun-loving nuns in the picture above to know that dancing nun was eventually canonized and made a Doctor of the Church.

She is known today as St. Teresa of Avila who is famous for saying "From silly devotions and sour-faced saints, good Lord deliver us."

Amen.

Matres, Non Permittite Infantis Vestri Adolescere Esse Armentarii

B16 recently gave a speech in Latin encourating people to learn (of all things) Latin.

Maybe he gave it in Latin so that people would have to learn Latin to find out he was encouraging them to learn Latin.

Anyhoo . . . he also encouraged the teaching of Latin through new techniques, which I AM ALL FOR. The pedagogy in many Latin books (like Collins’s AWFUL Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin) is horribly out of date and seems designed to make learning the language hard on students.

I’d love to see a Latin textbook modelled off of Bill Mounce’s (excellent) Basics of Biblical Greek or an audio course for Latin based on the Pimsleur method.

Unfortunately, none of those things exist.

I’ve noodled around with writing a Latin textbook, but thus far it hasn’t come together for me. I’ve been able to simplify a lot of Latin instruction using a largely inductive method of teaching, but the Latin noun endings system is such a bear to try to teach in that fashion (or any fashion) that I’m not satisfied with the results yet.

Hopefully the pope’s impetus for better Latin pedagogical methods will serve as the impetus for better Latin pedagogical methods.

To go along with new teching methods there are also a lot of new Latin words to be taught. One of the things that

THIS ARTICLE ON THE POPE’S SPEECH

notes is that the group he was talking to

has also published a dictionary, the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis, containing more than 15,000 neologisms translated into Latin.

For those who ever wondered about the Latin equivalent for "computer," "terrorist" or "cowboy," there are now answers.

"Instrumentum computatorium" is the way the Latinitas Foundation refers to computers.

Those who sow violence and terror are called "tromocrates (-ae)"; while characters in Westerns are called "armentarius."

Some of the words of the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis can be consulted on the foundation’s Web page.

CHECK OUT THE LIST
(Thanks to the reader who e-mailed.)

US Troops Beg to Differ

SoldiersThe Christian Science Monitor runs THIS article, in which American service-people in Iraq voice their perplexity at the gloom-and-doom coverage of the war.

While hardly a unique piece, it should be read by everyone with an interest in the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The current national debate is not actually about the Iraq war in particular, so much as it is about whether America has the stomach to really finish anything she starts. It is far more a test of our national attention span than a debate over the merits of the current conflict. We are the ADHD nation, the MTV nation. The truth is, many of us are just tired of hearing about the war.

GET THE STORY.

There seems to be a new understanding about what constitutes a Good War, if not a just one. Many, seemingly, will support a war in theory, but only if it meets the following requirements:

  • Victory must be assured (victory being understood as universal approval from our both our allies and our enemies).
  • There must be guarantees that no civilians will be harmed. Failure to achieve this makes the U.S. guilty of war crimes.
  • There must be no U.S. troop casualties. Any loss of U.S. personnel will be taken as a sign that Things are Going Badly. Only bad guys should be harmed.
  • We must know exactly how long the conflict will take. We are a busy people.
  • There should be a clearly set spending limit. Any overage will deducted from the next war.
  • We reserve the right to Change our Mind in the middle of any conflict. We consider that the above rules are binding, just not on us.

I am thinking of printing the following bumper sticker, a real morale-booster from the far left:

To Our Troops: We Support You!… even though we believe your mission is pointless and possibly evil. We hope you are home soon, you poor saps!

BIG RED DISCLAIMER: This post was NOT written by Jimmy Akin, but by me, Tim Jones, a guest poster. Combox flames should be directed solely at me, Tim Jones. Thank You.

“Set PHaSRs On Blind!”

PhasrYessirree, you’re lookin’ at an honest-to-God PHaSR, right here!

A Personnel Halting and Simulation Response system, that is.

It was recently unviled by the Air Force as a form of non-lethal crowd control and, like the phasers on Star Trek, is a laser-related weapon. (It also looks suspiciously like certain 24th century type III marine combat phaser rifles.)

It shoots a pulsed beam of green laser light that is intended to temporarily blind ("dazzle") the targets it is trained on, making it useful for crowd control and dazzling potentially dangerous motorists who are approaching military checkpoints too fast (i.e., as if to ram through them or suicide bomb or something).

Similar white-light-based systems are already being used in Iraq to stop potential terrorists careening toward military checkpoints, but the new system may be more effective.

An important aspect of the PHaSR system is that it does not (or is not supposed to) cause permanent blindness. Permanently blinding laser weapons do exist, but they are banned under a 1995 U.N. protocol and so are not used.

The PHaSR system seeks to avoid permanent blindness by automatically sensing the distance to the target and (apparently) adjusting the strength of the laser beam it emits (though the military is presently a bit cagey on exactly how this works).

It also uses two different frequencies of light in case the target is wearing goggles to block one frequency.

SWEET!

Now if they’d just develop zatnikitels. You just can’t beat that "one shot stuns, two shots kill, three shots disintegrates" functionality.

GET THE STORY.

P.S. Y’know, this only raises the question of why they never used a sub-stun setting to dazzle people on Star Trek.

Happy Turducken Day?

A reader writes:

I’m Canadian, but I did spend 6 years living in Los Angeles, CA and I do have an American girlfriend so this year I decided to celebrate American Thanksgiving.  The Canadian version is actually in October on what you guys celebrate as Columbus Day.

So for my US Thanksgiving feast I decided to finally make a turducken.  In case you haven’t heard of it, a turducken is what you get when you stuff a chicken into a duck and then into a turkey.  Of course that’s the short version of the preperatory phase.  I took some pictures of the process and a friend of mine was kind enough to post them on his websit.  The last photo is a cross section with labelling.  The stuff between the birds is sausage stuffing and cornbread stuffing.

This particular bird took 10 hours to cook at 225F until the internal temp reached the target of 165F.  I invited 14 friends over to help us feast and we still had half the bird left.  Anyway, though you might find the pictures interesting.

Y’know, I’ve read about turducken, but I’ve never known anyone to actually make it. Amazing.

It’s a good thing turkeys are native to the New World or there’s probably have been a prohibition on this kind of thing in the Mosaic Law.

GET THE PICTURES. (WARNING! Pictures of cooked and uncooked food!)

Bad Reactions

Peanuts_1

I had heard that some people who suffer severe allergies to certain food can suffer reactions because of proximity to, rather than ingestion of, the food in question. For example, I once heard of a child allergic to peanuts who went into anaphylactic shock upon stepping into his classroom, where it turned out that there was a Snickers wrapper in the wastebasket. I believe that child survived. A young woman allergic to peanuts, who went into anaphylactic shock after kissing her boyfriend who had just eaten peanuts, tragically did not survive.

"A 15-year-old girl with a peanut allergy died after kissing her boyfriend, who had just eaten a peanut butter snack, hospital officials said Monday.

"Christina Desforges died in a Quebec hospital Wednesday after doctors were unable to treat her allergic reaction to the kiss the previous weekend.

"Desforges, who lived in Saguenay, about 155 miles north of Quebec City, was almost immediately given a shot of adrenaline, a standard tool for treating the anaphylactic shock brought on by a peanut allergy, officials said."

GET THE STORY.

What a terrible story, but it does shed light for parents on the necessity to determine just how severe food allergies are and exactly what kind of proximity to the food can trigger an attack. It can also show that one person’s food allergy may require an adjustment in eating habits not just for that person but for family and friends.

A One Way Ticket to Cambodia, Please…

KillingfieldsHolland is the country of choice for tourists who want to smoke pot, shoot-up or patronize Amsterdam’s infamous red-light district.
Thailand is apparently a favorite of those interested in sex with children, along with a handful of other third-world nations along the pacific rim, including Cambodia.

Now Cambodia may be adding another category to the lexicon of sin-tourism: suicide travel.

See, apparently 57-year-old Roger Graham (from California – not that there’s anything wrong with that!) is encouraging people to come to Cambodia to kill themselves, as he has discovered that the nation has no laws regarding either assisted suicide or euthanasia. Most of its citizens have long been preoccupied with staying alive, and the whole assisted suicide debate hasn’t really shown up on the radar, yet.

He has a website, though it has been shut down once by the Cambodian government. They are not at all sure that they want their country to be known as a great place to shuffle off this mortal coil, but as yet they have found no legal mechanism to restrict Mr. Graham’s activities.

Chances are that if there is money to be made, little will be done to stop the suicide trade, even if the Cambodian government decides to outlaw the practice. Corruption is a national hobby.

Mr. Graham, who runs a coffee shop and internet cafe, says of his adopted hometown:

"Kampot is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. I get to
see the sun rise and the sun set. I get people coming by and saying
hello with smiling and happy faces."

I could say the same thing about Rogers, Arkansas (where I live), but suicide is illegal here, and incurs stiff penalties (heh). If I am dead, though, what do I care about that? Why fly to Cambodia to avoid having the authorities prosecute my corpse?

I guess most of these folks are looking to be done in by a competent professional. It’s more comforting if you have someone there beside you, even if you are paying them.

Euthanasia proponents will no doubt use the situation as a justification for legalizing assisted suicide – "Look, because we are making criminals of these people, they feel it necessary to fly overseas and have the procedure done by unlicensed practitioners. If we make it legal here, the whole industry can be properly regulated (and taxed!). It is a matter of personal choice, and should be kept between a patient and their doctor. It also falls under the right of privacy secretly encoded in the U.S. constitution.".

If the same voodoo worked to justify abortion, there is nothing to stop it being used to legalize suicide, unless the balance of the Supreme Court tips in favor of life.

GET THE STORY.