Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 8/18/23
"Mother's Little Helper" Edition
ArmadilloCon has come and gone and with it the last of the convention feels for the year, unless, by some miracle, I end up doing a show in October or the like. I love ArmadilloCon, because even though they are changing to meet the needs of the current crop of fans, they have managed to remain focused on literary SF/F—books, comics, etc. Sure, we do other media, too, but for the most part, the written word is what we celebrate.
The show is not without its shenanigans, however. Here’s me, moderating the Fannish Feud panel, wherein the fans go against the pros to try and guess what nonsense the attendees filled in on their surveys. This panel has become its own thing over the years, a kind of performance piece for all involved, and those behind the scenes have build buzzers that work (the actual sounds) and a program that faithfully recreates the board, right down to the “RAAAAUGH!” sound of a strike.
I love this panel, but it doesn’t love me back. I’ve always wanted to be Richard Dawson, but I usually just end up being Steve Harvey. At least once during this panel, I inevitably turn to the audience and say, “You’re the reason why I drink at this show.”
The best example I can give you comes from the question, “Name a Monty Python movie.” Five answers on the board. Let’s do them right now, shall we?
Holy Grail.
Life of Brian.
Meaning of Life.
…uh, Oh yeah! And Now for Something Completely Different.
Five, huh, what’s the fifth one? Got it! Live at the Hollywood Bowl.
That’s that, right, and pretty much in that order.
This is what I was dealing with:
No, you’re not reading it wrong. Seven dorks wrote in a Mel Brooks movie. Seven of them. The fifth one? I don’t remember, but it was something along the lines of “The Meaning of Brian.”
The pros were guessing all sorts of things. They swung wide and tried A Fish Called Wanda. Given the survey, a good guess. They tried Jabberwocky. Another great guess. Someone in the audience shouted out, “Fawlty Towers!”
A guy in the front row scowled and said, “That’s not even a Monty Python movie.”
I yelled, “It’s got more fucking Monty Python in it than The History of the Fucking World, Part 2!”
Thankfully, not all of my panels produced an aneurism. One of my favorites was “Starship Smackdown” wherein we made brackets and pitted interesting ship against interesting ship.
Alan Porter’s substack has the results of the Starship Smackdown panel, if you want to see how we fared. Also, go check out Alan’s substack. He’s one of us, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
Now back in North Texas, we’ve hunkered down under punishing heat in excess of 110 degrees or more, with so-called ‘air conditioning’ being no help whatsoever. In our car, you can turn the air on full blast, into your face, and you can feel the column of air vrooshing out of the vent. But if you put your hand six inches above that cool column of air, there’s hot, humid air instead. It’s not cooling the car; it’s cooling the parts of the car that intersect with the columns of air. That’s insane.
A few days ago, we got a respite: 88 degrees and a bit of a breeze out of the north. Everyone was running around outside like it was the first snow of winter. Any other day, in any other part of the world, 88 degrees would illicit comments like, “It’s getting hotter out there,” but for us, it was a forty degree drop in temperature—the different from 80 degrees to 40 degrees.
Don’t tell me we aren’t the frog in the pot of boiling water.
The Bunker is well-stocked with water, a small ice maker (for pouring down our pants), and various drink additives to keep our hydration levels high and replenish the electrolytes escaping our bodies like rats off a sinking ship.
Health and Wellness Update: Pills, Pills and more Pills
If anyone has a tar pit they would like to recommend, I’m in the market. This has been a week of medical revelations. On Monday, I had my right shoulder x-rayed. It has been bothering me for a couple of months, now, and I thought it was because I pulled a muscle carrying the dog up and down the stairs. We tried muscle relaxers and they took the edge off, but I was still hurting—that nerve-kind of pain that radiates down your arm? Like a pinched nerve.
My NP told me to get an X-ray so we could rule out any possible rotator cuff problems. So I did that. Thankfully, the lab wasn’t busy and they were able to get her the results of the X-ray the next day, when they were going to draw blood.
God, is there anything worse? I can’t do it. I just can’t. It absolutely shuts me down like nothing else. My body goes into a panic mode that you have to see to believe—cold chills, flop sweat, dizzy, nausea...I’m singularly unpleasant to get blood from. And here’s the deal: a wide swath of the medical profession is maliciously unsympathetic about it, too. WHY ELSE would they say to someone who is pale, shaky, and trying not to pass out, “Wow, I’m having a really hard time getting to your veins; they just keep rolling on me! That’s crazy!”
No, it’s not, you vulpine harridan. My body doesn’t want to give up any of its vital humors. I’m fighting for my life, here, and you’re giving me the blow by blow on all the ways you’re trying to siphon my claret? And I’m PAYING YOU FOR THIS?
The regimen, these days, is this: I take a Xanax about an hour before my appointment. It doesn’t keep me chilled out, but it does lower the volume on life and it takes longer for the panic to set in...and when it does, it feels farther away, not as intense.
I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.
To add insult to injury, the NP told me, “We got your X-rays today, and you’ve got arthritis in that shoulder.”
What. The. Hell.
Arthritis. In my shoulder. Me. Arthritis. At 53.
After I voiced my displeasure at that diagnosis, the NP turned to the head of Bunker Ops and said, “My goodness, I have never heard him use profanity like that before.”
She gave me pills. For my shoulder. My arthritic shoulder.
This is the first time I’ve felt my actual age. For the rest of this week, I’ve been thinking about what a drag it is getting old. I’ve not been this pissed off at life since I found out I needed glasses to read.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Hidden Strike (Netflix)
John Cena is a mercenary on the other side of the world, using his moral compass to stamp out the chaos. He refuses to take a job that gets his fellow merc brother killed, and Jackie Chan steps in on the other side of the kidnapping to figure out who’s who and what’s what. Will they team up to get revenge/make things right?
The short answer is: Yes, of course they do. This appears to be the movie that was held up for several years and nearly didn’t get released, due to COVID-19, Cena’s big mouth, production delays, and lots more. It’s a thing, or at least, it was a thing. Now it’s just big fun, watching these two bounce off of one another.
There’s a tonal shift in the film, with the first half being pretty straightforward and then lightening up once Cena and Chan are onscreen together. I don’t know if Cena has figured out what kind of movie star he wants to be yet; some parts of this movie remind me of Tango & Cash. Other parts are almost a throwback to Chan’s Police Story movies, when he was doing less martial arts and more running and gunning. Don’t worry, Chan still has moves, and we get to see them. I’m pretty sure if you’ve read this far you’re going to watch the movie anyway. It’s a solid, enjoyable, old-fashioned kind of action film that we rarely see anymore.
Twisted Metal (Peacock)
John Doe is a milkman, running supplies to the various walled cities across Post-Apocalypse America. He gets an offer he can’t refuse: drive to Chicago, pick up a package, and bring it back to San Francisco. If he can beat the clock, he gets to live inside the walls and retire from the open road.
Falcon/Cap Anthony Mackie and Brooklyn 99’s Stephanie Beatriz are over the top, intentionally so, in this hyper-kinetic, foul-mouthed, blood-soaked series, based on the line of best-selling Playstation games of the same name. I never played the games, myself, but I still feel very qualified to comment on this, because I absolutely adore the sub-subset of science fiction that involves people strapping twin .50 caliber machine guns on the side of a muscle car and mowing down anyone that gets in the way. While a few James Bond movies are certainly the progenitor of this type of film, it began in earnest with Deathrace 2000 (1975), a cult classic exploitational satire of modern life and the media, directed by Paul Bartel.
In fact, it’s very difficult to make this kind of movie and not compare it to Deathrace 2000, so thoroughly did that film squat down on the genre and mark its territory. And yet, Twisted Metal, with its many excellent examples of Car Fu, kinda-sorta knows it’s not reinventing the wheel and instead decides to eschew cleverness and wit and just go for repeated hammer taps to the viewer’s skull. It’s enjoyable, in the same way that every once in a while, you want greasy pepperoni pizza on a mediocre crust, not because it’s the best pizza you’ve ever had, but because you want that specific taste sensation. I watched it one episode at a time, after seeing the first two, back-to-back. A little goes a long way. If any of you people reading this are into Car Wars or Gaslands, this needs to go into your research file for things to swipe for your next game.
Sorry about the arthritis. I'm a few years older than you, with my own checklist of "Damn, I'm old" ailments. I had that eyeglasses moment when I was 12 and realized I would never be a fighter pilot or astronaut.
I kinda regret missing ArmadilloCon this year but driving a car for 4 to 5 hours on I-35 (depending on construction) is one of those things my body doesn't want to do any more. I'd forgotten about Fannish Feud. I always enjoyed the absurdity of it.
Since you're not going to the inaugural P-CON in DFW in September, I'll drop a line afterward and let you know what it's like, in case you'd be interested in the future.
I'm sorry about the shoulder. Small relief, but you're not alone. The last time I had to get mine X-rayed it was at urgent care, and the doctor took a look at the film, puffed his cheeks, and asked, "how long has it been like this?"