Bite Me, Tony

Okay, so let me just get this out of the way right here and now. All my friends, both in the real world and on Facebook, are insisting that I absolutely must see Steven Spielberg's remake of West Side Story . And the critics seem to like it, too, with some calling it "masterful" and "charismatic".  Well, then. I get it, I do. You guys all love the movie, and you want others to share in the love. It's the same way I feel about most of Quentin Tarantino's movies, Fellini, all the incarnations of Twin Peaks , and Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman .  A lot of my friends and fellow moviegoers don't care for the movies (and TV shows) that I love, and probably haven't even seen most of them. These films simply don't appeal to them. See what I'm saying? I just really don't have any interest in seeing West Side Story . I didn't love the first version when I saw it at age 12 (or whenever it was reissued for the big screen) and I didn't love i...

Well, as is sometimes the case, I was almost finished doing something (in this case, writing a rather lengthy book review on amazon) when an unexpected event occurred (a sudden power outage), causing several hours worth of work to be lost in space, if not to the ages. It was a good review, if I do say so myself, but amazon does not allow reviewers to save their material as they write and, while I had a premonition that it would be just my luck for a power outage to occur at just the wrong time today, I still didn't bother to save my work in Word. My misfortune, but that's the way it goes. The world will have to wait to read my brilliant and incisive review of the very late James Robert Baker's posthumously-published, transgressively savage, darkly comic, AIDS-era noir, Testosterone. My brilliance and incisiveness occurs in fits and starts and doesn't, as a rule, translate well to the page, so well, now you know. It could be awhile before the Muse pays a return visit.  A...

  I'm not sure why but I'm feeling much less bah-and-humbugish than I did at this time last year. Perhaps it's because I did all my Christmas shopping early for a change, or maybe it's because COVID has abated enough to allow us to get out of town a few times, most recently to visit some of C's family in North Carolina. One thing that definitely makes this Christmas season a thousand million trillion times better than last year is the fact that that ludicrous, lying, gobsmackingly awful, wonky-haired orange ogre no longer occupies the Oval Office of The People's House (aka The White House) in Washington D.C. True, he's just up the road a ways at Smarm-a-Lago and if the wind is coming out of the north-northeast, you can catch the distinctly Trumpian stench of bloat and corruption. However, all things considered, better he spend his down time in Palm Beach, scheming and bloviating, than in any official capacity in the U.S. capitol, wherein a perceived lack of ...

Adentalventure So, today's dental visit went pretty much as expected. And then some. We go to the dental school to have our teeth worked on and a couple of weeks ago I was informed that I needed 3 (count'em) new fillings! However, when I went in today I thought I was going in to get my teeth cleaned. I was quickly disabused of that notion by the dental student who whisked me back to her lair and strapped a bib around my neck. The hot dental student I'd had last time popped by to say that he was still with his 9:00 patient so Banshee.....he was wearing a mask so I mayn't have heard correctly, but it sounded like..... "Banshee is just great and she'll be doing your filling today." Okay. Damn. Banshee immediately got to work stretching my mouth open with an object roughly the size and shape of a life preserver. By the time she got it all stuffed in my mouth, she really needed an assistant mopping her brow. My mouth, in agony, and of sufficient proportions to ...

Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been 21 days since my last confession. Okay, not really. It has been 21 days since my last blog post . But you get the drift. A blog post can often feel like a confession and maybe, in fact, it is, at least in some respects. A lot has happened since my last confession. We got our second (Pfizer) COVID vaccine and endured zero side effects. Simultaneously, my doctors went all DEFCON 1 when some routine blood work indicated my kidneys were in imminent danger of failing; somehow that drama seems to have cleared up without much ado, other than my having to drink a white powdery concoction (Lokelma) four times a week while keeping an eye on my potassium intake.  Then, looking like a cross between a furious Shrek and a mustache-less Mr. Potato Head, there is the lumbering behemoth from the Coral Gate condominiums who has, for reasons unknown, decided that I am Public Enemy Number One ( possibly because I put on a face mask as he approached ...

It's Groundhog Day and, per the forecast of Punxsutawney Phil, we are in for six more weeks of winter. Not exactly terrible news for us here in South Florida but surely a hellish prognosis for much of the rest of the country. Yesterday, the Northeast was hit by a massive winter snowstorm that is ongoing even as I type these words. They're expecting 9-15 inches of snow and it isn't expected to let up until tomorrow. Furthermore, there are already electric power outages, and tidal surges flooding the streets in some areas of Queens, among other places. It's bad enough being in the swampy chowder of South Florida when a hurricane knocks out the power in mid-August but I can't imagine losing the heat when the temps outside are in the 20's and 30's (or below)! Can I?   Actually I can. Once, many years ago, I was living in a house in Oklahoma City with a good friend who was a shy,  mild-mannered banker by day, Brobdingnagian drag queen by night (towering 6'4...