Saturday, June 13, 2015

It's Time To For Me Start Documenting Things...

...because it is evident that some arsehat has been coming to my house and scratching and etching things into the face of the bricks. Years ago, just after we first moved in, we noticed several swastikas and initials BM etched into the bricks among other things. They slowly multiplied over time. I told a neighbor about it, back then, and he said the son of the former residents had those initials. He also told me that the guy was a certifiable kook. I sat out at night waiting to see if I'd catch him and, soon after I started watching, the incidents of new ones just stopped. Once or twice in the 20 plus years that we have lived here, I have wondered if something was a new defacement of our homes exterior walls but I always just figured it must have been an old mark that I had either missed or forgotten about. The stuff we saw today though is definitely new.

This afternoon, after a BBQ, my son pointed out not initials but a complete name etched or carved into a brick on the side of our garage. The initials of that name are the same initials that the guy used to etch into the bricks. It seems our once resident kook may be back. We looked at the front of the house and found numerous new markings there too. Those are not carved or etched into the bricks so much as lightly, very lightly scraped into whatever grime is covering the bricks. One of the marks is a pentagram; is that the Twilight Zone theme music I am hearing right now!

Come Monday, after I have given the walls of my house a decent inspection for more such damage, I am going to report this to the county police. I want to start documenting all of this and also want to find out if anyone who goes by the name carved into the one brick has a local police record. If we have a nut job visiting and defacing our property, I want to make sure that we get our tax payer's worth of police involvement as well as having documentation that this is happening should this nut decide to take it any further and possibly accost my family members. I am not going to the police with the expectation they will do much of anything but it would be nice if they are already aware of the guy doing likewise elsewhere and can lock him up after I give them more such info. I most certainly am going to file a report with  them to assure it is all documented so as to cover my arse in the event I am forced to legally defend my family from a wackadoo. I certainly hope it does not come to something like that but it is certainly an uncomfortable feeling knowing there is a nut job etching his name, pentagrams and other symbols into the bricks of my home with something hard enough and sharp enough to mar brick and thus that could quite possibly be used as a dangerous weapon. Who knows what someone like that might try to do to us should we inadvertently stumble across him while in the act. It is also unsettling that maybe the same person used to scratch swastikas into the bricks as well many years ago. 

Maybe I will get lucky and the guy doing it will have a massive coronary or get arrested and sent to jail or just suddenly become normal and will no longer be a problem. My luck though never seems quite that good. Seriously, someone who is unstable enough to do shit like that may need some serious mental treatment and I for one would like to help assure he gets it, so off to the police on Monday I will go. I may also have to pick up some legal cans of OC spray for my wife and mother-in-law.

All the best,
Glenn B

The Saturday Morning Sci-fi Ritual - What Happened To It?

Way back when I was a young kid, one of the great things about Friday nights and Saturday mornings (and sometimes afternoons) was that you could plop your butt in front of the tube and blast off to other worlds or fight alien creatures right here at home. Friday night and even more so Saturday mornings (for us little kids) were sci-fi time. I got to enjoy an awful lot of science fiction movies from the 50s and 60s on television (and a couple in the movie theater now and then) when I was young. It did not matter much that we only had a black and white TV for at least several years of my youth, a lot of the older movies were in B&W anyway and they were all great adventures regardless. When we got a color set, it just got better and the science fiction seemed all that more real to me.

After watching a couple or few cartoons - beginning with Colonel Bleep (the first cartoon to air each Saturday morning), it would be time to delve into aliens worlds, radiation poisoned America, the minds of madmen, forbidden jungles yet unexplored or anything more adult than a cartoon. Movies like The Creature From The Black Lagoon, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Plant, The Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Them, or probably what is one of my all times favorites if not actually my favorite 1950s sci-fi movie - The Thing From Another Planet (aka: The Thing) were their for our viewing pleasure and to fire up our imaginations. Getting engrossed in those films and maybe even being scared to the point of just about peeing in your pants was a right of passage back then and it was a sort of a ritual.

The other part of the ritual surrounding those movies was that after watching a good sci-fi, it would be out onto the street to play with my friends and imagine we were one of the adventurous characters in the movie that at least some of us had mutually watched unknown to one another at the time we were watching. Those were the days when we spent time alone watching a movie much like a kid today with a video game but the big difference is that after the movies we got together, socialized and played those parts - many times for hours on end. Too bad kids today do not do likewise. They all seem more self centered and engrossed in their I-pads, smart phones, video games, I-pods and so on that they have forgotten how to have fun playing together (unless they play a video game against one another but I mean physical play not video bullshit).

For those of you that do remember those days, or in other words are at least half as old as Methuselah like me, here is a short video clip that lists the so called 20 best sci-fi films of the 1950s. I don't agree with all of the selections, I think some great ones were left off of the list and some others were placed out of order of how good they were but that is personal taste. Regardless of what I think about which were best, this video is sure to bring back some fond memories to many of you older folks around my age.



I was going to include a video of the top 10 sci-fi movies of the 1960s but the video gives honorable mention to Barbarella which starred that commie loving cunt Jane Fonda and which also gave the number one rating to one of the worst sci-fi movies ever, in my opinion, 2001 A Space Odyssey. So, I did not bother to repost it here. How 2001... got number one and Planet of The Apes was rated as number two in comparison is beyond me but I am guessing that is how leftists would see it. I say leftists because of the inclusion of Barbarella as an honorable mention. Oh well, there were some excellent sci-fi movies in the 60s and that holds true for every decade along the way to now.

Of course, the best sci-fi movie of them all was made long before I was born and was made when my mom (RIP) was only 8 years old. Although the special effects and film techniques for a movie that old have been far surpassed today, and a lot of the acting was pretty corny, I still get a thrill out of watching it now and again. Now that I think of it - I suppose this one is my all time favorite, I think it may even beat out The Thing From Another World (hard to say right now, I guess they are running in a dead heat). Yes, I am talking about the 1933 classic King Kong. It is a sci-fi adventure movie like no other and none is ever likely to match it except maybe The Thing or possibly The Fifth Element (one of my other all time favorites in the sci-fi genre). Watch the trailer for King Kong here, or you can rent the whole thing on YouTube, Amazon or Netflix:



King Kong - it was and remains one heck of an excellent sci-fi movie, maybe the best ever and will always be among the very best I have ever seen.

Seeing those trailers makes me wish I could wake up on any Saturday morning, turn on the tube watch an episode of Colonel Bleep and then a decent to excellent sci-fi film. Those days seem to be lost forever though with the crap on TV in the early AM on Saturdays nowadays. Makes me wonder what happened to all those old movies and what happened to the ritual of Saturday morning Sci-fi.

All the best,
Glenn B