Author Archives: Tom Crippen

How dumb is the Second Amendment?

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I’d say anyone who really, really wants to exercise his right to carry a loaded weapon outside a presidential appearance is probably 1) angry, and 2) not blessed with good judgment. This reassures me!

Of all rights, the right to bear arms is the fucking stupidest. Arizona’s “open carry” law sounds like a delicious refinement on this stupidity. 

Of course, whoever’s head finally pops may not take a shot at Obama, he may just spray the crowd. Or maybe nothing will happen — guessing is part of the fun. 

update, At least he’s smiling. Note: This is the fellow that Allahpundit and Confederate Yankee thought might be pro-Obama because he was strolling with his loaded automatic weapon near people who had pro-health reform signs. What does the fellow himself say? “Taxation is theft.” So there goes the “both sides are packing” meme.

On a brighter note, he tells us, “We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote.” If you lose an election, start shooting. (Via Talking Points Memo.)




AssaultrifleObama_ac556.jpg

 [ added 8’20: The third photo and an accompanying thought: Did the guy change from a white shirt to a blue shirt during the rally? And for a lunatic he is one good-looking man. ]

update, So Uland calls me out in Comments with his views on gun control. He raises good points, so now I’ve expanded my thoughts. They’re presented here as responses to various bits taken from his comments, starting with:

“Is this post for me? Thank you.”

No! I’m just pissed and feeling vocal. But I can see how you might think it was a jab at you, so I apologize for that.  


“First off, the right to carry that exists in some states is not a second amendment right . Related, of course, but those are distinct sets of policy in which special license is required.”

I know that! From my post: “Of all rights, the right to bear arms is the fucking stupidest. Arizona’s ‘open carry’ law sounds like a delicious refinement on this stupidity.” So I get the distinction.

“I don’t think they ‘want to’ carry guns around the president.”

Then they must be sleepwalking or under mind control. What you call symbolic is still a real action, and it’s an action that I very much dislike and resent. I don’t want my country’s political system at such immediate risk of destabilization thru violence.

“Since conceal/carry laws have been passed in many states, the crimes-with-firearms rates have not moved one way or the other.”

What about accidental shootings? And here I’m actually curious, not trying to pose a stumper.


My feeling: guns are fine in the right context, like a firing range or a hunting trip, or if they’re being handled by a security officer who’s been trained decently, but otherwise I don’t want them around. Especially if the person who’s the lynchpin of my country’s government is anywhere nearby. Doesn’t mean I want to ban guns; does mean I think it’s stupid to treat them as a right. If the 2nd Amendment ever gets offed, put me down for any regulations that would prevent spectacles like the one in Arizona.

A final point, an important one. Uland says of the gun fellow’s comment:

he’s saying that a majority cannot vote away the rights of a minority; that’s the premise of inalienable rights/Constitutional system.


First, because I haven’t heard the rest of the fellow’s comments, it’s possible that he was talking specifically about rights. But the quote in question does not specify the minority’s rights as being at stake. And, at any rate, the fellow believes that taxation is robbery, so what he considers a right may well be very different from what people of normal mental constitution might consider a right. So I stand by my summary of his position: When you lose an election, start shooting.

Second, he is definitely not saying only “that a majority cannot vote away the rights of a minority.” He is advocating the resolution of such situations thru force.

And, you know, we have a court system. That’s what it’s for. The guy seems to care about the Constitution as long as it puts a gun in his hands, and after that the law can go out the window. Maybe he’s an Eagle Scout, but he scares me and I don’t like what he’s saying.

Traces of greatness among old Wiki actors

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Who am I kidding? Nobody’s going to link to this shit. But yeah, the last batch was here.

“What Are Little Girls Made Of.” Sherry Jackson. Wiki says Jackson “is probably best remembered today for her role as Terry Williams on The Danny Thomas Show (AKA Make Room for Daddy) from 1953–58.” According to Star Trek associate producer Robert Justman, the sight of Jackson in costume caused William Shatner to sweat and become crosseyed (though I don’t have the book at hand, so maybe memory exaggerates). 


“Dagger of the Mind.” The mad scientist was played by James Gregory, the guy who played Inspector Luger in Barney Miller! (And also the dopey McCarthyite/Communist pawn Sen. Johnny Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate!) He was an excellent comic actor, so good he made you glad the tv was on, but in “Dagger” he played a straight villain and anyway the episode is a real snooze.



… Marianna Hill. She’s credited in Godfather II as “Deanna Dunn-Corleone,” which I think would make her the shiksa (or whatever the term would be for a shiksa equivalent in the Italian frame of reference) who married Fredo and then got too friendly with Troy Donahue. If so, she delivered a great little comic performance. (“Never marry an Italian! They treat their women like shit!”) 

Old actors from Wikipedia, “Mudd’s Women” edition

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Last batch here.

“Mudd’s Women.” Roger C. Carmel, who played Harry Mudd, “was also the voice of Smokey Bear in fire safety advertisements, as well as Decepticon lieutenant Cyclonus in the popular Transformers animated series.” (update, In comments, Joe S. Walker adds that Carmel also appeared “in one of the worst films of all time, Myra Breckenridge.”)


Of the three women Harry Mudd brings aboard the Enterprise, one was played by Karen Steele, who “reportedly earned her first money by spearing baby sharks in the private cove on the estate of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.” In 1970 she lost her agent because she turned down being a regular on a tv series and instead went on a morale tour of Pacific service hospitals. This was during Vietnam. That year she said, “A lot of people in this town just don’t understand me. … They don’t believe me when I tell them I’d rather spend 17 hours talking to General Westmoreland than exchanging amenities at some Hollywood party.”   

Another, Susan Denberg, was “Playmate of the Month” in the August 1966 issue of Playboy. During the late 1960s she had drug problems: “I became hooked on LSD and marijuana … I needed LSD every day, almost every hour…” I don’t think that’s really possible.

Ted Cassidy, Eddie Paskey … it’s more first season Star Trek actors in Wiki

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Jesus, there’s a lot of this stuff. … Memory Alpha is a bit of a millstone; it’s more than doubled how much I have to read.

Ah well. Last batch here. 

“What Are Little Girls Made Of?” … Ted Cassidy. He was huge and odd looking, so he played aliens and monsters (like Lurch in The Addams Family). But he started as a radio personality in Dallas, where he did on-the-scene reporting about JFK’s death: 


On November 22, 1963, shortly after the John F. Kennedy assassination, Cassidy interviewed several of the witnesses, including two very close witnesses, William and Gayle Newman, after the Newmans had appeared on WFAA-TV, but before they left to go to the Dallas Sheriff’s office (no tape exists of that interview for the radio station did not start recording their broadcasts until about 1:45 PM). He also interviewed the manager of his radio station who was in the Book Depository and saw a man run out of the building shortly after the shooting. The manager offered several times to talk to Dallas police who repeatedly refused to interview him.


In 1978 he voiced the Thing on the cartoon Fantastic Four! And the opening narration for The Incredible Hulk. “He also co-wrote the screenplay of 1973’s The Harrad Experiment, in which he made a brief appearance.” The Harrad Experiment is about a college where all the kids get it on as part of progressive education.

Also from “What Are,” a credit for Eddie Paskey, “a U.S. actor primarily known for his role as ‘Lieutenant Leslie’, a redshirt, on Star Trek, in which he is noted for being the most omnipresent actor with the fewest got i spoken lines during the entire series. He appeared in 57 episodes.”

Paskey got into pictures when he was discovered pumping gas in the Pacific Palisades. He kept working at the station on weekends while doing tv guest spots, then quit show business in the late ’60s and “went into business for himself in Santa Ana, California, [eventually] owning and operating an auto-detailing service called The Air Shop with his wife Judy. He sold the business in 2004. Today, he and Judy, along with their 1955 T-Bird, and are members of Hot Rods Unlimited, a SoCal auto club.“

First Season Wiki: more old Star Trek actors

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All right, I got done with the second season. Because my planning is fucked up, I now start on the first season.
Note:  Just came across a site called Memory Alpha, a wiki devoted to Star Trek. Good design and a lot of info, though the material below is all from regular Wikipedia.

“Charlie X”: Robert Walker Jr. was the son of Jennifer Jones. She left his father for David O. Selznick when Walker was three or so, and a year later she won Best Actress for Song of Bernadette. … The character actor Abraham Sofaer’s wife was named Psyche Angela Christian. 

“Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot … Gary Lockwood did a 1968 caper film called They Came to Rob Las Vegas. In 1978 he did a made-for-tv movie called The Incredible Journey of Dr. Meg Laurel. … Sally Kellerman. She wound up as Rodney Dangerfield’s love interest in Back to School (1986). Yikes. … Paul Carr “toured in summer stock with Chico Marx.” His character dies in “Where No Man,” and Wiki says that more or less makes him the first dead redshirt, though none of the uniforms in the episode were actually red. … Paul Fix played the ship doctor but was replaced for the rest of the series by DeForest Kelley. In 1972 the two of them wound up in the same lousy, career-nadir horror film, Night of the Lepus, which was about “giant mutant rabbits” in the Southwest.
“The Naked Time.” There’ an episode of Trapper John, M.D. called “Old Man Liver” and it was written by a bit player in this episode. … The guy who played Amorous Crewman voiced a role in Akira.
“Balance of Terror.” Back in 1932, RKO did a movie called Secrets of the French Police.

More from Wiki about old Star Trek actors

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I’m working my way thru the second season.

In “The Omega Glory” there’s a big lug named Roy Jenson, “remembered by many as the first man beaten up by Caine on the television show Kung Fu (1972).” He also played pro football on the Alouettes, Montreal’s team.


The scientist who creates a mad computer on “The Ultimate Computer” was played by William Marshall, “best known for his title role in the 1972 blaxploitation classic Blacula and its sequel Scream Blacula Scream (1973), and as the ‘King of Cartoons’ on the 1980s television show Pee-wee’s Playhouse beginning with its second season.” But he also did Shakespeare: “His Othello … was called by Harold Hobson of the London Sunday Times ‘the best Othello of our time'” That’s pretty good.

The son of the man who “raised the alarm during the attack on Pearl Harbor” played a proconsul in “Bread and Circuses,” the show’s Roman episode.

In the same episode, the actor who played the oldest and most saintly of the “Followers of the Son” was also author of a book of poems called Forty-Four Scribbles and a Prayer. 

During the ’60s Terri Garr was a bit player in “nine Elvis Presley features. Her first speaking role was a one-line appearance as a damsel in distress in The Monkees film Head written by Jack Nicholson.”


 

Old actors in Wikipedia

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I’m reading Wiki entries on people who have been in old Star Trek episodes.


In “A Piece of the Action,” there’s a guy named Kalo who carries a tommy gun and is ordered around by the big mob boss (who is played by Anthony Caruso). The guy playing Kalo, his name is Lee Delano, studied dance with Martha Graham!

In “A Private Little War,” there’s a witch-temptress played by a woman who later married Zubin Mehta, conductor of the LA Philharmonic. The woman, Nancy Kovack, became a real-life Jackie Collins sort of character, a tv actress who has made it and is now wife of a celebrity jet setter. Kovack is an “ardent and strict” Christian Scientist, known among “Hollywood’s elder generation” for her views. Susan McDougal, a name from the Whitewater affair, worked as Kovack’s personal assistant for a while, and the two of them wound up going at it in court.

The same episode has a big lug in, I think, a white wig, and his name is Tyree. The guy, Michael Witney, who played him married Twiggy in 1977 and dropped dead of a heart attack in 1983.

A burning-eyed 35-ish guy plays the main villain in “Patterns of Force,” the Nazi episode. That was Skip Homeier, and “in 1943 and 1944 he played the role of Emil in the Broadway play Tomorrow the World. Cast as a child indoctrinated into Nazism who is brought to the United States from Germany following the death of his parents.” I never heard of that play. It sounds terrible but so in tune with its era you’d think it would have hit big enough for something of it to stick around in the public memory.

 There’s a John Wayne movie called The High and the Mighty, and a Joan Crawford film called The Damned Don’t Cry. Apparently someone in the Crawford film describes her character as “tough as a seventy-five cent steak.”

Barbara Bouchet played an alien called Kelinda in “By Any Other Name.” In 1970 she moved to Italy and began starring in erotic comedies and erotic thrillers.  “In 1985, she established a production company and started to produce a successful series of keep fit books and videos. In addition, she opened a fitness studio in Rome. … She lives with her family in Rome, where she is a set member of the city’s celebrity social life.“