Balladeer’s Blog first reviewed the New Zealand series The Almighty Johnsons in 2011, and in that review I wondered why the SyFy Channel hadn’t bought episodes of the show. Once again I was just too far ahead of myself. The SyFy Channel has now bought episodes of the New Zealand show about Norse gods and goddesses who incarnated as teens and twenty-somethings. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: November 2014
THE ALMIGHTY JOHNSONS: BALLADEER’S BLOG WAS AHEAD OF THE CURVE AGAIN
Filed under Forgotten Television
BEAUTIFUL CASEY JAMES AND BALLADEER’S BLOG’S BAD SUPERHERO MOVIES
Special thanks once again to the extraordinarily lovely Casey James, Balladeer’s Blog’s Official Movie Hostess! This time around Casey is helping present the first of my reviews of bad and weird superhero movies.
The Golden Bat: the ugliest superhero in the world.
THE GOLDEN BAT (1966) – Ogon Batto is the name of this film in its native Japan. The movie was based on the title character, Japan’s very first comic book superhero who debuted in 1930. That 1930 date puts him years before Superman and Batman in the west!
At any rate for the 1966 movie Japan’s perennial action star Sonny Chiba played the leader of a group of science-oriented commandos in what looked like aluminum foil suits. Chiba and his gang have fancy aircraft like England’s Thunderbirds and their debut mission finds them trying to save the Earth from collision with a rogue planet called Icarus. Continue reading
Filed under Bad and weird movies, Sex Symbols
HAPPY VETERANS DAY 2014
Happy Veterans Day!
Well, it’s been nearly 100 years since November 11th, 1918 saw the end of World War One, or the Great War as it was called before anyone knew a second global conflict would occur. As we all know the date eventually became designated as the day for honoring the people who make it possible for the rest of us to lead our lives in relative safety.
Irrational political partisans often forget that the only reason any of them have the luxury of sitting back and making pompous, self-righteous pronouncements is because of the men and women who go out and actually DO something.
And those men and women do it even though they know that Continue reading
Filed under LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES
ANOTHER BRAVE WOMAN TAKES ON ISLAM
Dr Phyllis Chesler
Dr Phyllis Chesler is the latest member of Balladeer’s Blog’s real-life League of Extraordinary Women, joining figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others who speak out on the misogyny and overall intolerance of Islam.
Chesler’s unique approach focuses on how accusations of “Islamophobia” are the new McCarthyism, used to try to silence all conversations about the threat Islam poses to freedom around the world. Try to imagine it being banned as “Christophobic” to criticize Chistianity and you can easily see how ridiculous that is.
This brave person’s examination of Islam’s abuses includes the area that I often focus on – the fact that the Muslim world was involved in the slave trade long before the western nations were and remains involved in slavery to this very day. Their treatment of women is itself an ill-disguised alternate form of slavery and each year there are more and more Muslim attempts to spread Sharia law to the west. Continue reading
Filed under LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES
COLLEGE FOOTBALL RESULTS FROM NOVEMBER 8th
* HEADLINES *
SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY RULES THE WORLD – Once again an NAIA football team has toppled a team from the NCAA Division TWO. For newbies this is like a 1AA team upsetting a 1A team. The NAIA’s SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY FIRE welcomed D2’s LIMESTONE COLLEGE SAINTS and proceeded to rough them up. In the end the Fire more than doubled up on the Saints, defeating them FORTY-FOUR to TWENTY!
NUMBER FOUR TAKES A FALL – The 25th ranked CAMPBELLSVILLE UNIVERSITY TIGERS managed their SECOND upset of a Top 5 team this season! The Tigers played host to the number 4 team in the nation – the FAULKNER UNIVERSITY EAGLES. The Senior Day spectators in C-Ville witnessed an Instant Classic of a game which at length ended in a 30-21 triumph for the home team. Continue reading
Filed under college football
PULP HERO G-8 AND HIS BATTLE ACES: STORIES SIXTY-FOUR TO SIXTY-SIX
Balladeer’s Blog resumes its examination of the neglected Pulp Hero G-8. This is a story-by- story look at the adventures of this World War One American fighter pilot who – along with his two wingmen the Battle Aces – took on various supernatural and super- scientific menaces thrown at the Allied Powers by the Central Powers of Germany, Austria- Hungary and the Ottoman Muslim Turks.
G-8 was created by Robert J Hogan in 1933 when World War One was still being called simply the World War or the Great War. Over the next eleven years Hogan wrote 110 stories featuring the adventures of G-8, the street-smart pug Nippy Weston and the brawny giant Bull Martin. The regular cast was rounded out by our hero’s archenemy Doktor Krueger, by Battle, G-8’s British manservant and by our hero’s girlfriend R-1: an American spy/ nurse whose real name, like G-8’s was never revealed.
64. RAIDERS OF THE SILENT DEATH (January 1939) – Doktor Krueger is back! Once again G-8’s deadliest adversary returns with yet another super-scientific invention intended to help the Central Powers win the war.
This time around it’s a collection of guns of various sizes that fire deadly artillery and which not only can be transported noiselessly through the skies but can be fired in complete silence. Our heroes are hard-pressed to put the kibosh on Doktor Krueger’s ultimate stealth weapons before they can change the course of the war. Nippy at one point disguises himself as Krueger to bluff some Germans! Continue reading
Filed under Pulp Heroes
LENA DUNHAM CAPTIONING FUN
WHITE CHILD OF PRIVILEGE LENA DUNHAM HAS ANNOUNCED SHE WILL BE STARRING IN A REMAKE OF “ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING”.
THIS COMES AFTER THE PUBLIC FAILURE OF HER SONG AND MUSIC VIDEO “WHEN I’M WITH MY UNDERAGED SISTER I TOUCH MYSELF” AND A RECENT VIRAL VIDEO IN WHICH SHE WALKED AROUND NEW YORK FOR TEN HOURS DURING WHICH TIME ABSOLUTELY NOBODY CATCALLED HER.
Filed under humor
MARIKAS (circa 421 B.C.): ANCIENT GREEK COMEDY
Balladeer’s Blog presents another look at an ancient Greek Comedy. This time around it’s one written by Eupolis who – along with Aristophanes and Cratinus – was one of the Big Three of Attic Old Comedy.
MARIKAS (c 421 B.C.) – This was the second comedy to emerge in the new subgenre of Attic Old Comedy called “the Demagogue Comedy”. Aristophanes led the way a few years earlier with The Knights, his comedy attacking the politician Cleon. The play Marikas finds Eupolis attacking the demagogue Hyperbolus, whose reputation for character assassination by way of overstatement lives on in our language by way of the word “hyperbole”.
As with most ancient Greek comedies Marikas has survived only in fragmentary form. Those fragments, along with contemporary references in surviving works, provide what is known about the play. Marikas, the title character, was used by Eupolis to represent the politician Hyperbolus the same way Aristophanes had used the Paphlagonian to represent Cleon in The Knights. Continue reading
Filed under Ancient Greek Comedy
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO COLLEGE FOOTBALL
It was on November 6th, 1869, that Rutgers and Princeton played the very first college football game “on the banks of the Raritan” as the Rutgers fight song says. One of the things I love about college football is how far back its history goes.
It feels odd to think that Ulysses S Grant was in the White House when Continue reading
Filed under college football
ANCIENT SCIENCE FICTION: NAVIS AERIA (1768)
NAVIS AERIA (1768) – By Bernardo Zamagna. Written in 1768 Navis Aeria (“Ship of the Air”) was the Italian Zamagna’s attempt to take concepts we of today would associate with science fiction and present them in the old, quaint format of Epic Poetry.
The verse story detailed a flight around the world in a flying machine which was basically a sailing ship with four huge balloons around the sails and connected to a main mast. Zamagna presciently observed that one day aircraft would constitute “other Argos to carry chosen heroes” on their adventures. Continue reading
Filed under Ancient Science Fiction
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