I got my Jesus Puppet and watched The Star Wars Holiday Special

Christmas 2004!

What a fun Christmas.

I gave my atheist wife the perfect gift- the gift she truly wanted- NOTHING!

She got me my very own Jesus Puppet!

Then V (of Moon Man fame) came over and we watched

Oh

(Itchy mask in the Lucasfilm archives)


my

(We all live in a yellow Corellian Freighter...)



sweet

(Wasn't she that nice lady on Julia?)




Lord.

(Holographic dancer...nice beard)


I hadn't seen it since it originally aired in November, 1978. I remembered being thrilled by the animated sequence, and the look at Chewbacca's home life and family. But I also recalled a nagging sense of real suckery, and upon viewing it this year, I realize there must have been a lot that I simply blocked out. A lot of Harvey Korman, especially.


Harvey Korman as "Gormaanda". One of three characters he plays in The Star Wars Holiday Special. Unfortunately.

The Star Wars Holiday Special tells the story of Chewbacca's attempts to get home to his family (wife Mala, son Lumpy, father Itchy) on the Wookie planet in time for the Wookie holiday Life Day. All our heroes are there: Han, Luke, Leia, R2-D2, C-3PO, The Jefferson Starship.

Talking to my brother, he realized he was a college freshman that fall. I was in fifth grade. Man it really speeds up as you go, don't it? 1978 might as well be the moon.




Harrison Ford as a really mushy Han Solo. He gets all sentimental about the Wookies TWICE in this thing, sort of out of the blue. Something must have hardened him between this Life Day and the events in The Empire Strikes Back. Maybe it was that bounty hunter he ran into on Ord Mantel?



Galactic trader Art Carney helps Itchy the Wookie with the virtual-porn Mind Evaporator. This sequence is just bizarre- and it is hard to stand out as the bizarre sequence in the The Star Wars Holiday Special. There is no better way to describe what happens to Itchy as he watches Diahnn Carroll sing . The old Wookie gets off.



Surrendering the Pink...


Han and Lumpy.




Isn't that Jango Fett's boy? What's he doing helping that Skywalker kid?


Mark Hamill with eye shadow. A ton of it.

Did I force my family to watch this thing? Well I did this year! The wife was downright disturbed by it. (Read her take on watching The Star Wars Holiday Special over here at PatriotActors.) V laughed so hard he scared the kitten into goin' on the carpet. I don't know if viewing The Star Wars Holiday Special will become a holiday tradition, but I feel blessed to have seen it again.

Happy Life Day, Jesus Christ!

(Singing The Life Day Wrong - I mean SONG.)

Jesuspuppet!

The Star Wars Holiday Special links:

Leave it to Wikipedia to have a The Star Wars Holiday Special page. I love Wikipedia.

These folks will really show you around The Star Wars Holiday Special:

starwarsholidayspecial.com Pictures, audio clips- a really nice site. If there were an official The Star Wars Holiday Special site, this is what it would look like. CBS and Fox memos, press kits, the SCRIPT. What more could you want? A Jesus puppet, I'll bet.

Or an article from TheForce.net here

That one links to this terrific breakdown of The Star Wars Holiday Special, on a pro-wrestling fansite (?), WrestleCrap.





Some toys never get born... these are prototypes of action figures of Chewie's familiy, on a model of the groovy Frank Lloyd Wright/Marin County-style Wookie tree house they live in. (All their place needed was a BIG hot tub with an excellent drain trap. For the Wookie fur. )

(L-R- Chewbacca, Mala, Lumpy, and Itchy)

Will lightning strike twice? Shooting Han and Chewie in the Falcon for The Star Wars Holiday Special, The Burbank Studios, Burbank, Ca, @ September 1978.

Worst song ever. Really. I know- the expression "worst song ever" could be applied to a lot of songs. But this thing just makes you want to die.

I've just scratched the strange surface of this thing- Bea Arthur sings this Kurt Weill style beer hall song in the Mos Eisley cantina; Korman, that bastard, does an absolutely humorless robot skit then plays a guy that pours his drinks into a hole on the top of his head; Art Carney tries to do a vaudeville routine with an Imperial Stormtrooper Commander (ugh- if Jackie Gleason saw this thing he probably busted a gut larfing) and Carrie Fisher sings a song to the tune of the Star Wars theme.

It's the best thing ever. Happy Holidays.

The Dumbing

Of course, it's just an unfortunate angle... but with this guy, you just can't help rolling your eyes.

Again.

Not because it's a dumb picture, or even a cheap shot. Or most probably a fake.

It's because with this guy, it's part of the act. It's what people bought about the guy. What they like about him.


President Gump.



bushjob


(found this on tony's pierce's busblog)



But then it seems to radiate out of him, and it catches. He shows up for some event and the advance people don't even bother to check the spelling.

President George W. Bush and Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua Bolton (C) talk
to conferees, above a misspelled sign, at the White House Conference on the
Economy in Washington, December 16, 2004. The White House went all out to
showcase the advantages of U.S. President George W. Bush's ambitious financial
agenda this week, but in the end the 'challenges' proved too much. The word
'challenges' -- a main theme of a two-day White House economic conference that
ended on Thursday -- was misspelled on a large television monitor that stood in
front of Bush during a panel discussion.REUTERS/Reuters TV

From one the Apoplectic Press's Anti-Christmas cards:

If I were Jesus and I dropped by one December to see what the human race had learned from my teachings of love, equity and compassion (for which, incidentally, I was rewarded with torture and crucifixion) only to find a ruthlessly accelerating global epidemic of individualism, possessiveness, debauchery and environmental desecration epitomised by a scandalously lurid, psychotically unsustainable, corporate-sponsored extravaganza of decadence —in honour of my BIRTH!— I would probably beg my father to erase every last trace of the criminally insane human species and start all over again with the amoeba.

I have a question for the Secretary...

Wassup, bee-atch? 


If I was a soldier at a Rummy press conference, I might ask him "why didn't you kill Saddam with your bare hands when this picture was taken, you ghastly eidolon? Mr. Tough Guy? Huh?"


eidolon. nice one, eh?

Saturday Night December 11 in Lake Wobegon

Just listening to A Prairie Home Companion... looking at the pictures from their webcam.

Ah, Crimass.

Friday we shopped

hollywood tree 

Took a vacation day today and for once got an early start on Christmas gifts for nephews, etc. So what if we started late. After picking up useful stuff for the first two nephews on Sunset Blvd. we said screw it, let's just go to El Compadre, the best Mexican restaurant in the Guitar Ghetto or whatever people call that part of Sunset.









I love that they just whacked the "T" off the old Texaco and voila! New gas station! Exaco! They even created new signage to make sure you don't get confused. Nope- it's Exaco alright. Down the street from the Alph's, the Ubway, Arbucks, and Urger King.

This place is a mystery- it's usually closed. But there was a guy there, dressed as a mechanic, working on two cars.




Sunset Blvd. 12-10-04 Near the "there" as in "There is no there there."




So when we get home, there's a firetruck in front of the landlady's. We were sure she was dead.
Turns out they LAFD were practicing. And they didn't let anybody know they were going to practice. So they came very close to killing my octagerian (at least) landlady. I'm glad they're practicing, but jeez... they could call... could schedule... they could ASK for the love of Mike.







Don't break anything . That's what they landlady told us to tell them.

HAPPY DELAWARE DAY!

Delaware (from NASA)


I could barely sleep last night, Delaware Day Eve, listening for the sound of the Ghost of Caesar Rodney and his pony on my roof...

From the dizzying heights of Mt. Cuba to the shores of Slaughter Beach, all the children are singing songs of the First State today- DELAWARE DAY!

In 1933 Governor C. Douglass Buck proclaimed this day henceforth as "Delaware Day", in commemoration of the state's adoption of the US Federal Constitution in 1787.

In 1941 the Empire of Japan tried to besmirch Delaware Day forever by attacking Pearl Harbor. The jerks.



Official State of Delaware website here.

Surprise, surprise...

Tapping the next blog button I came across the conservative blog The Royal Flush. It linked to this political persuasion test. I took it. I am a:

You Are a New School Democrat

You like partying and politics - and are likely to be young and affluent. You're less religious, traditional, and uptight than most Democrats. Smoking pot, homosexuality, and gambling are all okay in your book. You prefer that the government help people take care of themselves.

What political persuasion are you?

Signs of the Season

Jupiter is about to duck behind the moon. This astronomical event, called occultation, will occur this Tuesday, December 7th.

That's right- on Delaware Day. It's kind of spooky, isn't it?

Was it an occultation that the Magi saw on their way to Bethlehem? Could be...this guy thinks so... turns out the "Star of Bethlehem" night have been Jupiter hiding behind the moon @ April 17th 6 B.C. , and the event might be depicted on Roman coins. I love stuff like this.

Apparently, Out of the 48 contiguous United States, only Washington, Oregon and
California are completely shut out of this sky show...

Is it because these are blue states? It works in mysterious ways.

Checking out the wikipedia listing on atheism (this is what I do on a Sunday morning) I came across this delightful quote from Bush pere:

"I don't know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God." -G.H.W.B. 1987

Wait... I'm getting another message from Jesus (you don't think I am? Prove it. Oh, you can't? I like this game) and Mr. Christ tells me he's always thought George H. W. Bush was a toady, a bad father, and an asshole. And he shot JFK.

Golly. Jesus seemed a little snerky.

I found The Gospel of Christian Atheism online. I have a paperback of it in storage somewhere. I bought it based on the title alone in a used bookstore on South Street in Philadelphia. I never read it. Hey- howsbout YOU read it and tell me what it's about? Thanks. I'm busy.

Saturday afternoon with The Moon Man

We love the Moon Man. V had one, Z coveted it. Finally we realized we worked in a top-notch mold shop with an immensely talented staff of artisans and we made an exact copy of V's for Z.

But we sure would have liked to have gone to the original artist and bought one off of him. As a matter of fact, if we ever find the artist, we will ...

All we know is V bought his moon man off of some guy that was selling them out of a van on the side of the road near Santa Cruz, CA many years ago... if anybody know who made the moon man, let us know...

We love the moon man.

Hey, W., you're in Joe's chair...

From Wonkette today.

Only 5 days to Delaware Day! Have you started decorating yet?

Perhaps I've bulked up enough.

The wife always joked that we were "bulking up for the apocalypse"- like we would live off our body fat when the shit hit the fan and we were eking out an existence in the post-apocalypse LA... that was funny and all until 9/11, when the apocalypse became something more than the premise for a cool sci-fi movie.

But after watching a re-run of Frontline's Diet Wars last night, I realized that I might have bulked up enough. Like I am clinically obese. Like I need to lose 60 lbs. to be at normal weight.

Well that's just depressing. I blame all that god damned fructose.

60 lbs. I must be carrying my inner child around in there somewhere (and he's a chubby little fucker, too.)

Good gravy.

(and it was, apparently)

What are you laughing at? What's your BMI, comrade? Check it here.

"The first Thanksgiving" 

"U.S. tradition associates the holiday with a meal held in 1621 by the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims who settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Some of the details of the American Thanksgiving story are myths that developed in the 1890s and early 1900s as part of the effort to forge a common national identity in the aftermath of the Civil War and in the melting pot of new immigrants."

Learn about Thanksgiving here.