NCAA DIVISION THREE – 1. UNIVERSITY OF MARY HARDIN-BAYLOR CRUSADERS ### 2. NORTH CENTRAL COLLEGE CARDINALS (defending champions) ### 3. UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN AT WHITEWATER WARHAWKS ### 4. SAINT JOHN’S UNIVERSITY JOHNNIES ###
5. UNIVERSITY OF MOUNT UNION PURPLE RAIDERS ### 6. LINFIELD COLLEGE WILDCATS ### 7. CORTLAND STATE RED DRAGONS ### 8. WHEATON (IL) COLLEGE THUNDER ### Continue reading
Filed under college football
Independent Voter site Balladeer’s Blog takes another look at the ongoing disaster that is the Biden Regime and its enablers.
BIDEN REGIME POLICIES DELIVER RECORD LOW GDP.
NBC POLL: 71% BELIEVE THE U.S. IS ON THE WRONG TRACK.
WISCONSIN VOTE FRAUD INVESTIGATIONS ROLL ALONG. Law enforcement says election laws “not just broken but shattered”. More HERE. And HERE. And HERE. Including calls to DECERTIFY WISCONSIN’S RESULTS FROM LAST YEAR BY RECLAIMING ITS TEN ELECTORAL VOTES. The 2020 election was at least as corrupt as the 1876 and year 2000 elections.
AUSTRALIAN NEWS: THE WORLD SEES BIDEN FOR WHAT HE IS. More HERE. Says he needs a rest home HERE.
DEMOCRAT GOVERNOR OF MICHIGAN STILL TRYING TO THWART MEASURES TO PREVENT A RECURRENCE OF THE WIDESPREAD VOTE FRAUD FROM THE 2020 ELECTION. It’s always just one of our two corrupt political parties opposing measures to curtail vote fraud.
LET’S GO BRANDON RAPPER HITS #1 ON BILLBOARD’S EMERGING ARTISTS CHART. Courageous defiance of the Biden Crime Family and of Democrat media outlets continues. More HERE.
FOUR OF THE ITUNES TOP TEN ARE VARIATIONS ON THE ANTI-BIDEN “LET’S GO BRANDON!“.
MULTIPLE SOURCES REPORT JOE BIDEN SOILED HIS PANTS WHILE MEETING WITH THE POPE AND HAD TO BE RUSHED TO THE BATHROOM. MORE HERE. And HERE. After the damage this white collar criminal has inflicted on the working class and the poor he does not deserve any sort of consideration. He has ruined countless lives. And he’s an accused rapist. Biden also made a tasteless Mussolini reference. Such a remark would have been the media’s Apocalypse of the Week under his predecessor.
BIDEN CAUGHT FALLING ASLEEP AT THE CLIMATE SUMMIT. An aide had to wake him up. Again, this would have been the media’s Apocalypse of the Week under his predecessor. “When the Continentals met the incontinent” is a good description of imbecilic Joe’s trip.
Filed under LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES, Neglected History, opinion
HEADLINES
GENERALS CONQUER DIVISION TWO – NCAA Division Three’s WASHINGTON & LEE UNIVERSITY GENERALS took it on the road to face NCAA Division Two’s EMORY & HENRY COLLEGE WASPS. (This is like when an FCS team upsets an FBS team) A 7-7 1st Quarter tie became a 21-14 edge for the Wasps at Halftime. The 3rd Quarter ended with the Generals up 24-21 before winning the game 30-28.
TUSSLE IN THE TOP FOUR – Up in NCAA Division Two the number 2 team in the nation – the VALDOSTA STATE BLAZERS – welcomed the 4th ranked UNIVERSITY OF WEST GEORGIA WOLVES. The Blazers held a 27-13 lead by the Half. The Wolves pulled to within 33-27 in the 3rd Quarter, with their rally falling just short in the 4th as Valdosta State held on for a 36-34 victory.
EASY AS ONE, TWO, THREE – Over in the NAIA the (1) LINDSEY WILSON COLLEGE BLUE RAIDERS won 41-30 at the (22) BETHEL (TN) WILDCATS ### The (2) NORTHWESTERN (IA) COLLEGE RED RAIDERS obliterated the visiting (20) DORDT UNIVERSITY DEFENDERS 63-28 ### And the (3) MORNINGSIDE COLLEGE MUSTANGS utterly annihilated the UNIVERSITY OF JAMESTOWN JIMMIES 70-7. Continue reading
Filed under college football
THE GHOST PIRATES (1909) – HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Balladeer’s Blog wraps up another Halloween Month with a look at this novella written by William Hope Hodgson. Just a few years ago my review of Hodgson’s 1908 The House on the Borderland closed out October here. That excellent novel was a forerunner of Lovecraftian cosmic horror combined with traditional haunted house elements.
The Ghost Pirates, published a year later, combined haunted ship tales with ghost stories and themes of the living dead emerging from the sea to swell their own ranks with more doomed men. In addition there is some nice theorizing about the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead.
The story begins in turn of the century San Francisco, as a seasoned sailor named Jessop signs onto an outgoing ship called the Mortzestus. When it had arrived in San Francisco all but one member of the officers and crew fled the vessel, refusing to return and even forsaking the pay they would have received for sailing the ship back to its home port in Great Britain.
That sole member of the original crew, Williams, tells Jessop and other new crew members about the ship being haunted and worse, but Jessop, like the other replacement hires, dismisses such claims. Williams seems a bit unnerved and maybe even unhinged by whatever happened on the original journey to San Francisco. He is bitterly obsessed with completing the round trip and collecting his pay despite horrific incidents that he is obviously hiding. Continue reading
Filed under Halloween Season
Here’s Part Nine of Spider-Man 1970s Classics. For Part One click HERE.
SPIDER-MAN Vol 1 #136 (September 1974)
Title: The Green Goblin Lives Again
Villain: Green Goblin II
Synopsis: This issue picks up an unspecified amount of time after the previous one. It is late afternoon and Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson are walking along after having spent the earlier part of the day, in their own words – “riding horses in Central Park, taking a boat to the Statue of Liberty, and catching a Kung Fu flick on Forty-Second Street.”
NOTE: Not only would that have been a Kung Fu flick from the still-flowing initial wave of Bruce Lee-inspired Martial Arts Mania here in the U.S. but it would also have been when Forty-Second Street theaters showed everything from grindhouse movies on up.
Peter and MJ have not fully started their romance yet, since Peter is still recovering from Gwen Stacy’s death, but Mary Jane is making it clear she wants it to go that way in her usual flirty way. As the couple approach the apartment that Peter shares with Harry Osborn, MJ expresses concern that things may get awkward if Harry is inside, since she and Harry used to date. Continue reading
Filed under Superheroes
The courageous defiance toward senile yet corrupt Joe Biden and his regime continues as “Let’s go Brandon” showed up at the recent World Series game and in the postgame show. Continue reading
Filed under humor, LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES, Neglected History, opinion
Halloween month continues at Balladeer’s Blog with this look at two dozen of my favorite silent horror films.
THE CRIMSON STAIN MYSTERY (1916) – This was a 16 chapter silent serial that contained multiple horrific elements. The fact that it is so little remembered these days makes it perfect for this list, given Balladeer’s Blog’s overall theme. A mad scientist calling himself the Crimson Stain experiments on human guinea pigs in an attempt to create an intellectually superior race. His experiments all fail, producing hideous, mutated monsters. The Crimson Stain organizes his misbegotten menagerie into a villainous organization and wages a campaign of terror on the world at large. A heroic detective leads the opposition against them and tries to learn the identity of the Crimson Stain. Chapters in this serial boasted wonderfully campy titles like The Brand of Satan, The Devil’s Symphony, Despoiling Brutes and The Human Tiger.
THE MAN WITHOUT A SOUL (1916) – A man returns from the dead bereft of any trace of morality or humanity. He now views the people around him as victims and prey.
THE GOLEM AND THE DANCER (1917) – In the very first known horror movie sequel Paul Wegener starred and directed himself once again as the clay monster called the Golem. In this enjoyably “meta” production decades before Scream or The Human Caterpillar II, Wegener played himself. Continue reading
Filed under Halloween Season
Halloween Month is racing toward its end so here’s another seasonal post. It’s a review of the first three volumes of Graveyard Shift, the “monsters as superheroes” series by Jon Malin, Mark Poulton and Aaron Alfeche.
GRAVEYARD SHIFT Volume 1 (2019)
Professor Blood, the Monster, the Bride, Monster Girl, Sea Urchin and Ghost in the Machine. I’d call this team the greatest heroes alive … except they’re all dead. This initial Graveyard Shift installment was a critical and financial triumph, blending horror, science fiction, superheroics and OUTSTANDING artwork into one of the most acclaimed independent comics ever. (Yes, these sequential art visionaries left the creative suffocation at the Big Two publishers to pursue their own projects.)
Each volume is the length of almost 3 regular comic books. The unfolding story in Graveyard Shift also pays homage to many horror classics through the names of several characters and organizations.
Atlantis Corporation, a subaquatic base for scientific research run by a man named Abraham Van Helsing is pursuing many projects for its charming but nefarious founder. One of those projects is an enormous spaceship that is being readied to transport thousands of scientists and colonists into space to explore distant planets.
Another undertaking (as it were) is Project Wormwood, which involves Regen Chambers to restore life to newly slain soldiers in order to form an unbeatable army, and Mind Wipe technology to reprogram the revived dead to know nothing but their new existence as servitors of whatever nation buys them (but really as servitors of Van Helsing himself). Continue reading
Filed under Halloween Season, Superheroes
Even the Democrat media outlet the New York Times is forced to admit that Joe Biden’s inflation has made this coming Thanksgiving the most expensive ever. The Times admitted that every item for a Thanksgiving meal costs more than ever before as Biden’s inflation and supply chain crisis further crushes the working class and the poor. The Democrats stopped being the party of FDR and JFK long ago. Join so many of us and #walkaway from them to become Independent Voters.
A great piece tracks NINE MONTHS OF BIDEN DISASTERS AND FAILURES.
By the way, even Democrat-dominated Austin, TX has put a measure on the ballot to restore lost funding to its police because of the wild increase in crime after the city foolishly followed the irrational Democrat demand to DEFUND THE POLICE last year. Continue reading
Filed under LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES, Neglected History, opinion
Here at Balladeer’s Blog I love sharing my enthusiasms. My blog posts where I provide contemporary slants to Ancient Greek Comedies to make them more accessible have been big hits over the years, so I’ve been trying it with operas, too. Previously I wrote about how Philip Wylie’s science fiction novel Gladiator could be done as an opera. Then I looked at how an opera version of the 1966 Spaghetti Western Django could be done and then an opera based on the novel Venus in Furs.
This blog post starts a look at how the original Dune novel could be done as an entire cycle of operas. If you’re not familiar with the story it is set over 20,000 years in the future, when humanity has colonized many Earth-like planets.
DUNE
LANGUAGE: Spanish. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that most of my fellow English-speakers find English-language operas to be silly. The prosaic nature of the forced rhymes in a language we are well-versed in does seem to rob opera of its mystique and its grandeur.
BALLADEER’S BLOG
SINGERS: Two Baritones, two Bass-Baritones, two Sopranos, one Mezzo-Soprano, four Tenors, a contralto and a Bass.
ACTS: FOUR ACTS
STORY: My fellow Dune geeks may get annoyed with this change, but remember, adaptations for staged performances have to be made very tight. I would start out at the Arrakeen Great Hall as the family and court members of House Atreides have just arrived on Arrakis/ Dune, the desert planet. All the scenes that the book covered while the Atreides family were preparing to depart their home on Caladan would instead play out shortly after their arrival on their new planetary fiefdom. Continue reading
Filed under opinion
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