MURDERCYCLE (1999) – Okay, I want a Ghost Rider vs Murdercycle film! ESPECIALLY with Nicolas Cage as Ghost Rider. Anyway, despite the title, this movie is a nice throwback to the days before so many low-budget filmmakers were trying to be intentionally over-the-top and campy with their productions and titles in hopes of garnering sales from a reputation for being so-bad-it’s-good.
Flicks like Suburban Sasquatch, Rubber, Lycan Colony and the Birdemic sequels take some of the joy out of bad movies in my opinion with their calculated awfulness. I prefer to soak in films that were trying to be straightforward but whose creative teams lacked the budget or the talent to fulfill the production’s potential.
Murdercycle was at least played straight without those constant winks and nods from the cast like we get in so many would-be Psychotronic movies today. The only cutesy in-joke comes from the names of several characters and it’s never acknowledged by the dialogue (see below).
Let’s take this from the top – an object from space lands near a Top Secret government facility concealed within a seeming shack in the middle of nowhere. It’s not a meteor but an alien weapon and when a man on a dirt bike draws near the fallen object he falls victim to its jack-in-the-box/ face-hugger tech.
In a bit of business that put me in mind of the 1980s Bruce Campbell movie Moon Trap, the alien device fuses with the nameless biker AND his motorcycle. The result is a deadly biomechanical entity that is part humanoid, part motorcycle and part alien Terminator. We have our Murdercycle! Continue reading
DUTCH HENRY – Henry Borne, spelled Bourne in some sources and Born in others, was born on July 2nd, 1849 in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. His parents were fresh from Germany and the old “Deutsch-Dutch” confusion on the part of non-German speakers led to Borne’s eventual nickname Dutch Henry. 
Come 1874 and Dutch Henry was living on the Texas Panhandle. He was on hand at the storied Adobe Walls store called Myers & Leonard’s when the Second Battle of Adobe Walls began on the morning of June 27th. A combined force of several hundred Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa warriors attacked, led by Comanche Chief Quanah Parker (at right). 
THE SICKLE OF FIRE (1896) – Written by Charles Kelsey Gaines, an American author who set this particular short story in British Columbia. The main characters are our narrator and a scientist named O.D. McKazy.
FARMER PEEL – Gunslinger Langford Peel got the nickname “Farmer” Peel through the same sense of irony that earns some tall people the nickname Shorty and some fat people the nickname Slim. Peel was always well-dressed and smooth-tongued and the furthest thing away from the image of a Farmer that you could get among the high-stakes gambler/ gunslingers of his era. 
Once again, Mary Harris Jones – aka Mother Jones – speaks with Balladeer’s Blog despite having passed away in 1930. 
The Marvel Comics run of stories based on Robert E. Howard’s Conan character from 1970-1993 helped maintain the character’s place in the public consciousness after the end of the Pulp Magazine era. 
CONAN THE BARBARIAN Vol 1 #46 (January 1975) 
Before long he passes through the village of Sfanol, where he sees the inhabitants about to burn at the stake a beautiful young woman named Stefanya. 
Our hero saves Stefanya from this fate and learns she was being burned for her service to the late sorcerer Zoqquanor now that he is no longer alive to protect her. The panicked woman tells Conan that they must retrieve Zoqquanor’s body from the ruins of his castle, which was leveled by the same superstitious villagers who tried to burn her alive. 
Over 10 million viewers watch the first night of the NFL draft every year. While those figures pale in comparison to the Super Bowl, you can bet industry insiders are all glued to their screens. Pundits endlessly pore over pick possibilities in the lead-up and will start speculating on how new arrivals will contribute to their franchise the second a draftee puts on his new team’s cap for the cameras. 
Eric July aka YoungRippa59 has launched what he’s calling the Rippaverse. July has been touting this independent publishing project for quite some time and, after investing $200,000 of his own money and, having now raised well over 2.25 million dollars more, went live with his website on July 12th. UPDATE: He is now over 3.7 million dollars. People know a good thing when they see it.
Rippa’s first superhero is called Isom and his 96-page debut book is lengthy enough to deserve the term Graphic Novel. And this is just the start of a brand-new superhero universe that Eric vows will compete with Marvel and DC eventually. 
As promised, Balladeer’s Blog returns to some brief looks at assorted Pony Express Riders as seasonal posts now that the Frontierado Holiday is fast approaching. (It falls on August 5th this year.) Frontierado is about the myth of the old west, not the grinding reality.
IRISH TOMMY – Thomas J. Ranahan was better known as Irish Tommy during his days as an Expressman (the official title of Pony Express riders). Ranahan was born in Ireland on August 28th, 1839 and his family moved to America in 1841, settling in Vermont. 
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