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From the Washington Post news section:
Woman suspected of killing doppelganger to fake her own death
By Victoria Bisset
January 31, 2023 at 10:18 a.m. EST… The case of the German Iraqi woman living in the southern city of Ingolstadt, named as Shahraban K. by German newspaper Bild, has shocked many in Germany. Her parents had traveled from Munich to Ingolstadt to find her after she stopped answering their calls — and found her car and the body on Aug. 16.
Police began investigating and issued an initial statement about a homicide, saying it appeared the woman had been the “victim of a violent crime.” But doubts quickly emerged about her identity as DNA and fingerprint evidence from the victim did not match that of the missing woman, and as police heard “rumors” that the missing woman had been seen driving around the local area, police spokesperson Andreas Aichele said in an interview.
A day later, police determined “completely new circumstances” in the course of their investigation and arrested the missing 23-year-old, alongside a 23-year-old Kosovan man, on suspicion of homicide, police said in a statement.
The victim has been named in German media as Algerian Khadija O., also 23, whom investigators say looked “strikingly similar” to the missing woman.
At the time, authorities did not give a motive for the killing.
Now they believe that the suspects came up with a plan to find someone who could pass for the young woman, “who wanted to go into hiding because of a family dispute” and therefore decided to fake her own death, according to a statement released by the prosecutor Monday.
Police say they believe that the suspect “chatted with several young women” who looked similar to her online and attempted to lure them into a meeting through false promises.
On Aug. 16, the two suspects traveled to the Heilbronn area, in the neighboring state of Baden-Württemberg, to pick up the victim from her home, police said. They then took her to a wooded area and stabbed her multiple times before driving back to Ingolstadt, where they left the body in the back of the vehicle.
This is rather reminiscent of Nabokov’s 1934 Russian-language novel Despair set in Germany in which the narrator hires a homeless man whom he sees as his doppelganger to pretend to be him and then the narrator murders the hireling to collect his own life insurance money. Like in Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky (whom Nabokov despised), the narrator thinks his perfect crime is a work of art.
But … spoiler alert … the narrator/murderer, who is not quite right in the head, is the only person in the world who thinks the bum looks like him. So when the cops find an unknown dead man dressed in the narrator’s clothes, they go looking for the narrator to ask him a few questions.
It’s something of a parody of Crime and Punishment. Nabokov, whose father was murdered, didn’t like murderers and didn’t think much of them, and didn’t like Dostoevsky going so deep into one’s head in C & P. But that’s kind of a self-defeating premise for a novel.
It’s an okay novel, but it’s clearly practice for Nabokov’s later flawed narrators in his English-language books, such as Charles Kinbote, a mad college professor who believes he is Charles the Beloved, exiled king of Zembla, in Pale Fire.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
I like your quiz show fueled Connections. But how do you bother reading the paper? I fell out of that years ago.
It would have been a clever plan . . . in 1884, or so. But had this chick seriously never heard of fingerprints? DNA? dental records? I guess they don’t have those CSI shows in Germany.
Many Moslems don't believe in educating their daughters.Replies: @Art Deco
Hey Steve, speaking of doppelgängers, there’s a murder trial going on in New York right now, featuring a Russian lady. I have a good friend from law school who is actually involved in trial.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/30/viktoria-nasyrova-left-dna-behind-in-poison-cheesecake-cake-ada/
Also! Ugandan woman who didn’t quite understand how metal pipe gates work was awarded over $10 million of taxpayer funds by a Utah judge. She lost her head somehow.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/31/esther-nakajjigo-arches-decapitation-lawsuit-award/
No one was representing the taxpayers, of course.
10 million dollars is a drop in the bucket of the federal budget, and of course no amount of money could bring her back or compensate for the trauma of her loved ones, especially her husband who was drenched in her blood. But the government has no excuse to not do proper maintenance in national parks.Replies: @bomag
I gather you fancy metal pipe gates should work like this:
Attorneys for Ms Nakajjigo’s family argued that the US National Park Service were negligent for not securing a metal traffic control gate that whipped around in high winds and sliced through the car’s passenger door, instantly killing her.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
The couple in the car and all the musicians sued the County for failing to engineer the swinging gate so that it couldn’t be forced to swing out instead of just in. Many neck braces in that courtroom. The plaintiffs in the party were understandably vague about what actually happened alleging they went to the beach, something, something, the vicious steel pole came flying out of nowhere and mowed them down. The very sharp attorney for the County had to tease out the details. Plaintiffs attorney in voir dire asked us if we would be prejudiced about one of the plaintiffs not being in court to testify because he had subsequently been sent to Folsom to do a stretch on an unrelated matter. An expert witness on automobiles and accidents presented an analysis of the physics of the incident during which he gave the expert testimony that the large American car with two passengers in it would have weighed about 2400 pounds.
We the jury went into the deliberation room, all looked at each other incredulously and found for the County in about half an hour.Replies: @kaganovitch, @Joe Stalin, @HammerJack
Also a film starring Dirk Bogarde, by Visconti (I think), Despair. Otchayanie in Russian. Okay novel is an accurate assessment.
Not on the Arabic-language channel, anyway.
That’s a pretty vibrant story. I’m sure the Bavarians are amused.
If you can’t find a doppelganger, manufacture one: In The Teeth Of The Evidence, by Dorothy L. Sayers (link) (a short story. Yes, pre-DNA-analysis).
For fun, look up “the Rouse case” mentioned in the story.
http://toomuchhorrorfiction.blogspot.com/2020/05/by-reason-of-insanity-by-shane-stevens.html
Der Spiegel is doubtless burning the midnight oil figuring out how this is really Thilo Sarrazin’s fault.
Doppel Indemnity
Here’s a similar case from the US involving Russian immigrants https://nypost.com/2023/01/30/viktoria-nasyrova-left-dna-behind-in-poison-cheesecake-cake-ada/. Apparently the poisoner, who failed to kill her victim, intended to steal the lookalike friend’s identity.
[Smile]
I saw the picture, which starred Paul Henreid and Joan Bennett.
What the hell kind of journalism is this, where they refuse to report the dead vic and the living perps’ respective names? Why should we believe this isn’t all a work of fiction?
Even when the dead vic is a child, you still provide the complete name.
Would it be offensive to suggest the introduction of tranquilliser darts?
https://youtu.be/ZmInkxbvlCs
It worked for Mary Ann Simpson in Body Heat.
I suppose Shahraban’s parents were unhappy about her association with her Kosovar boyfriend. And clearly they were right.
More details and pictures here.
So, an Iraqi and a Kossovan murder an Algerian in Germany.
Truly a tale of the modern world.
To paraphrase an early 19th century English traveller, academic and public lecturer in the United States, on being asked to give his opinion on potential improvements in the he nation,
“Every Iraqi should murder an Algerian and be hanged for it”.
On the one hand, Arabs like to do the most pointless things in the most convoluted way. On the other, native German criminals include homosexual cannibals. Is this a step up?
What the hell kind of journalism is this, where they refuse to report the dead vic and the living perps' respective names? Why should we believe this isn't all a work of fiction?
Even when the dead vic is a child, you still provide the complete name.Replies: @Peter Lund
Not in Germany, no 🙁
I don’t know anything about this aspect of German culture but I think Americans love these types of shows because it’s a way to cope with the astronomical crime rate the US has. Germany’s crime rate has been much lower, presumably even after Merkel’s Million Muslim Migration, so they probably don’t have much psychological need to cope by watching stories of criminals getting nabbed by the law.
Steve Sailer may have wanted to reference Nabokov and Dostoevsky in order to show that he's a literary guy too among other things, but he'd have probably found it quicker to write this column in reference to some episode of The Rockford Files. Come on, iSteve, which episode was it? (I hope Angel Martin is in it - the actor died recently, BTW.)Replies: @ChrisZ, @Sam Hildebrand, @Mr. Anon, @James J. O'Meara
No fake deaths needed here:
Steve’s favorite topic in Steve’s favorite City: Lots more for everyone!
https://www.theepochtimes.com/chicago-crime-rises-61-percent-in-2023-violent-offenses-spike-while-governor-insists-crime-coming-down_5014788.html#new_tab
https://cwbchicago.com/2023/01/chicago-woman-randomly-stabbed-4-people-while-on-bail-for-randomly-stabbing-a-woman-in-bucktown-prosecutors-say.htmlReplies: @Peter Akuleyev
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/fe/50/bf/fe50bff5491452181fb0cd656b439e39.jpg
https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/31/esther-nakajjigo-arches-decapitation-lawsuit-award/
No one was representing the taxpayers, of course.Replies: @AndrewR, @JR Ewing, @Achmed E. Newman, @Art Deco, @Alfa158, @Anonymous Jew
Did your parents raise you to be such a disgusting person or is this a form of rebellion against them?
10 million dollars is a drop in the bucket of the federal budget, and of course no amount of money could bring her back or compensate for the trauma of her loved ones, especially her husband who was drenched in her blood. But the government has no excuse to not do proper maintenance in national parks.
Not a good argument.
the government has no excuse to not do proper maintenance in national parks.
Maybe the workers and supervisors for that particular item should be on the hook. Problematic that an amorphous blob known as "taxpayer" is supposed to pay; suffer; and somehow not let it happen again.Replies: @AndrewR
Shorty should have dropped the knife but many cops really will use any excuse at all to kill people. It’s sad this issue has become a catalyst for racial division instead of real cultural and political reform.
The apparently Toyota enamored family revealed this little tidbit concerning Lowe’s “no leg to stand on” condition:
“Yatoya Toy, Lowe’s older sister, identified the man running from police as her brother. She said his legs had been amputated after an altercation with law enforcement in Texas, although the family has no more information about that incident.”
Aside: waiting for wife to collect passport today, was ‘round the block of San Francisco’s Department of Public Heath. Though having seen it in videos, it was a new experience to “very own eyes 👀” witness “folks” needling substances into thighs above pulled down to the knees pants; followed by slow motion crumpling to pavement. Several police cruisers sailed past as I sat parked…can total dystopia be far off?
Very good description of the culture. Indians too; they seemed to have passed this influence onto the workings of the government and business world in the GCC at least.
It was obviously well worth bombing all those Serbs so that Kosovans could be free (to leave Kosovo and murder people elsewhere).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia
Hmm. Isn’t that what Russia only did to Ukraine after 9 months of war and the attack on Kerch? AFAIK they’ve left the water supply alone.
It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Would it be offensive to suggest the introduction of tranquilliser darts?
This immediately reminded me of the Idaho college murders. The suspect, a grad student in criminal justice, probably thought he was to big-brain to get caught by the local yokels in Moscow.
2) Even in a fairly small community surveillance cameras are everywhere.
3) Cell phone records enable tracing a person's whereabouts.He may have been aware of advances in DNA tracing, but probably didn't realize DNA could be extracted from the knife sheath he accidentally left behind.Replies: @J.Ross, @James J. O'Meara
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/fe/50/bf/fe50bff5491452181fb0cd656b439e39.jpg
https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/31/esther-nakajjigo-arches-decapitation-lawsuit-award/
No one was representing the taxpayers, of course.Replies: @AndrewR, @JR Ewing, @Achmed E. Newman, @Art Deco, @Alfa158, @Anonymous Jew
I’m not sure it was because “she didn’t know how pipe gates work”. The gate was unsecured and the wind blew the gate into car while they were driving. She was just sitting in the passenger seat and was decapitated. Pretty gruesome and pretty negligent. It also sounds like there were similar, less lethal, accidents and the park service knew well that leaving the gate unsecured like that was dangerous.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/fe/50/bf/fe50bff5491452181fb0cd656b439e39.jpg
https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/31/esther-nakajjigo-arches-decapitation-lawsuit-award/
No one was representing the taxpayers, of course.Replies: @AndrewR, @JR Ewing, @Achmed E. Newman, @Art Deco, @Alfa158, @Anonymous Jew
This is precisely why the Founders specified the right to a speedy trial. They say decapitated heads can still testify for hours later.
Balderdash! (Kinda goes along with “doppelganger”.) Crime mystery novels have been around well before the 1970s increase in crime, and there were a myriad of B&W TV detective shows in the 1960s, way before CSI.
Steve Sailer may have wanted to reference Nabokov and Dostoevsky in order to show that he’s a literary guy too among other things, but he’d have probably found it quicker to write this column in reference to some episode of The Rockford Files. Come on, iSteve, which episode was it? (I hope Angel Martin is in it – the actor died recently, BTW.)
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3AfrikLKLyU/XO7iIYi2dqI/AAAAAAAAAcw/iIQsCHXbNTgdeMmO72xuY_5Iz45LlFTCwCLcBGAs/s1600/doubles%2Bkate.jpgReplies: @Peter D. Bredon
Seriously, Stuart Margolin was great in The Rockford Files. He was in Kelley's Heroes too, in a much more subdued roll. He had the best nervous voice in the business. RIP.Replies: @Muggles
Anyway, let's also remember all this goes back to Fritz Lang, whose M and Mabuse films predate the American noir films (which Lang himself contributed to when in exile in Hollywood).
Speaking of noir, while Steve brings up a lousy novel by the overrated Nabokov, when reading the news story I immediately thought of Jim Thompson, maybe because I just finished his Savage Night.
Considering all the unsolved murders in black communities every year, apparently low-IQ black thugs get away with committing perfect crimes all the time.
If someone were to take down all the “racial division instead of real cultural and political reform” flypaper, what attractions would be left at The Unz Review?
Life imitates art.
Germans are, when it comes to psycho-disgusting crime, not over-represented.
I think that psycho champions are Mestizos/whites from Latin America, Japanese & Chinese. Russians and Ukrainians are also well represented.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/fe/50/bf/fe50bff5491452181fb0cd656b439e39.jpg
https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/31/esther-nakajjigo-arches-decapitation-lawsuit-award/
No one was representing the taxpayers, of course.Replies: @AndrewR, @JR Ewing, @Achmed E. Newman, @Art Deco, @Alfa158, @Anonymous Jew
Also! Ugandan woman who didn’t quite understand how metal pipe gates work
I gather you fancy metal pipe gates should work like this:
Attorneys for Ms Nakajjigo’s family argued that the US National Park Service were negligent for not securing a metal traffic control gate that whipped around in high winds and sliced through the car’s passenger door, instantly killing her.
I still don't get from that writing whether the gate whipped around right as Ms. Nak' s car passed or if it was open at a 45 degree angle or something, and they came through at night. Was the car stopped?Replies: @Greta Handel
“The case of the German Iraqi woman”
WTF is a German Iraqi?
Anyway, I am reminded of the very underrated movie Bowfinger, which is probably the last decent movie either Steve Martin or Eddie Murphy made:
And I dig your James Burke reference. As you (perhaps inadvertently?) indicate, sometimes things just remind people of other things.
Anyway, Steve’s point about Nabokov’s distaste for Crime & Punishment is news to me, and interesting. I read it as a freshman in high school and really didn’t like how it got in my head. Weirdly my daughter is reading Crime & Punishment now, and just yesterday I was telling her about my long-ago unpleasant experience with the book. I hadn’t thought about that for many years.
Me, after C&P I couldn't watch "Pretty Woman" without barfing.Replies: @Joe S.Walker
https://nypost.com/2023/01/30/viktoria-nasyrova-left-dna-behind-in-poison-cheesecake-cake-ada/Replies: @bomag, @Mr. Anon
Russians have a thing about poisoning people.
I gather you fancy metal pipe gates should work like this:
Attorneys for Ms Nakajjigo’s family argued that the US National Park Service were negligent for not securing a metal traffic control gate that whipped around in high winds and sliced through the car’s passenger door, instantly killing her.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
My joke was intended in poor taste, of course, but I did go to the article linked to to try to figure out what happened. Thanks for including the explanation, Art.
I still don’t get from that writing whether the gate whipped around right as Ms. Nak’ s car passed or if it was open at a 45 degree angle or something, and they came through at night. Was the car stopped?
This fascinating sub-thread confirms that Mr. Sailer’s blog is a copium den for disaffected white guys.Replies: @obwandiyag, @Achmed E. Newman
10 million dollars is a drop in the bucket of the federal budget, and of course no amount of money could bring her back or compensate for the trauma of her loved ones, especially her husband who was drenched in her blood. But the government has no excuse to not do proper maintenance in national parks.Replies: @bomag
10 million dollars is a drop in the bucket of the federal budget
Not a good argument.
the government has no excuse to not do proper maintenance in national parks.
Maybe the workers and supervisors for that particular item should be on the hook. Problematic that an amorphous blob known as “taxpayer” is supposed to pay; suffer; and somehow not let it happen again.
Don’t know whether to Agree; LOL; or Thank.
To add to Steve’s literary references: Ingolstadt figures in “Frankenstein,” as the university town where (IIRC) Victor creates the monster. It’s also a setting in the 1931 Karloff movie.
Steve Sailer may have wanted to reference Nabokov and Dostoevsky in order to show that he's a literary guy too among other things, but he'd have probably found it quicker to write this column in reference to some episode of The Rockford Files. Come on, iSteve, which episode was it? (I hope Angel Martin is in it - the actor died recently, BTW.)Replies: @ChrisZ, @Sam Hildebrand, @Mr. Anon, @James J. O'Meara
Angel Martin (Stuart Margolin) died? May he rest in peace. I loved that character, too, Achmed. He was ubiquitous on TV in the ‘70s. Did a million episodes of “Love, American Style”—or so it seemed.
I still don't get from that writing whether the gate whipped around right as Ms. Nak' s car passed or if it was open at a 45 degree angle or something, and they came through at night. Was the car stopped?Replies: @Greta Handel
Who cares about the facts, other than that she was Ugandan? That’s what tickled your funny bonehead.
This fascinating sub-thread confirms that Mr. Sailer’s blog is a copium den for disaffected white guys.
Trying to think of a comment for this story. But for once I am stumped.
had this chick seriously never heard of fingerprints? DNA? dental records?
Many Moslems don’t believe in educating their daughters.
Literacy rate, female (15+): 96.05%
Literacy rate, male (15+): 98.62%
Literacy rate, female (15-24): 99.45%
Literacy rate, male (15-24): 99.55%
Completed lower secondary school (female, 25+): 71.27%
Completed lower secondary school (male, 25+): 80.93%
Completed upper secondary school (female, 25+): 58.83%
Completed upper secondary school (male, 25+): 64.46%
Completed post-secondary (female, 25+): 36.44%
Completed post-secondary (male, 25+): 38.85%
NB, the median age of a woman over the age of 25 in Saudi Arabia is around 42 years. The bloc of girls who did not attend to age 15 when their male peers did (about 9.5% of all girls) would have been leaving school around 1990, give or take.
There was a plot line in a recent show where a Mexican drug lord faked his own death in a similar way. In this instance, he had been grooming the unsuspecting doppelgänger for the eventuality, even hiring a dentist to fix his teeth so their dental records matched.
Steve Sailer may have wanted to reference Nabokov and Dostoevsky in order to show that he's a literary guy too among other things, but he'd have probably found it quicker to write this column in reference to some episode of The Rockford Files. Come on, iSteve, which episode was it? (I hope Angel Martin is in it - the actor died recently, BTW.)Replies: @ChrisZ, @Sam Hildebrand, @Mr. Anon, @James J. O'Meara
The doppelgänger plot was a required episode in any crime/sci-fi TV series in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
BTW The latest “Mass Shooting,” this time in Lakeland FL, fits the iSteve formula with 11 wounded but apparently no deaths. The usual drug dispute, doppelgangbangers, not a MAGA white guy in sight.
But back on topic, I think faking your own death and starting life anew is a common fantasy and thus a staple of crime shows, movies and mystery writing . Ripping off the insurance company is often part of the plan too, of course. (e.g. Five Miles to Midnight, with Tony Perkins and Sophia Loren)
There’s a clever Mannix where a hard-nosed businessman fakes his own death — in this case to find out who’s really trying to kill him. Joe has his hands full, because everyone hates the guy. When he finally reveals to his estranged wife that he’s very much alive, she barely bats an eye and greets him with “Hello Paul, how were things in Hell?”
Note that both perp and victim were “beauty” bloggers and so probably didn’t spend much time on any blog dealing with matters more than skin deep.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/30/viktoria-nasyrova-left-dna-behind-in-poison-cheesecake-cake-ada/Replies: @bomag, @Mr. Anon
At least these vibrant foreigners won’t leave us bereft of interesting Hitchcockian crimes. Dateline would get pretty boring with nothing but middle-American oafs who offed their spouses.
I wonder if that Viktoria Nasyrova woman was fast-tracked for her visa? We’ve got to fill that vital labor force demand for dominatrices. When Russia sends us its scheming S&M sex-workers / identity thieves / poisoners, they’re just not sending their best.
Steve Sailer may have wanted to reference Nabokov and Dostoevsky in order to show that he's a literary guy too among other things, but he'd have probably found it quicker to write this column in reference to some episode of The Rockford Files. Come on, iSteve, which episode was it? (I hope Angel Martin is in it - the actor died recently, BTW.)Replies: @ChrisZ, @Sam Hildebrand, @Mr. Anon, @James J. O'Meara
Ah, c’mon Jimbo, don’t tell me that! You’re killin’ me man! You’re killin’ me!
Seriously, Stuart Margolin was great in The Rockford Files. He was in Kelley’s Heroes too, in a much more subdued roll. He had the best nervous voice in the business. RIP.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/fe/50/bf/fe50bff5491452181fb0cd656b439e39.jpg
https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/31/esther-nakajjigo-arches-decapitation-lawsuit-award/
No one was representing the taxpayers, of course.Replies: @AndrewR, @JR Ewing, @Achmed E. Newman, @Art Deco, @Alfa158, @Anonymous Jew
Many years ago I was on a civil lawsuit jury involving a swinging gate just like that, but luckily no one was seriously hurt. A group of musicians had finished a recording session on a rap album, drove to the beach to party and stayed late into the night. When they drove from the parking lot up to the street they found the gate had been closed and locked for the night. They got out to figure out what to do and decided to use their rental car to push on the swinging pole until the chain and lock snapped. They then swung the gate open, but instead of swinging it in, swung it outward into the street. A car going past hit the pole sending it flying back in and mowing everyone down.
The couple in the car and all the musicians sued the County for failing to engineer the swinging gate so that it couldn’t be forced to swing out instead of just in. Many neck braces in that courtroom. The plaintiffs in the party were understandably vague about what actually happened alleging they went to the beach, something, something, the vicious steel pole came flying out of nowhere and mowed them down. The very sharp attorney for the County had to tease out the details. Plaintiffs attorney in voir dire asked us if we would be prejudiced about one of the plaintiffs not being in court to testify because he had subsequently been sent to Folsom to do a stretch on an unrelated matter. An expert witness on automobiles and accidents presented an analysis of the physics of the incident during which he gave the expert testimony that the large American car with two passengers in it would have weighed about 2400 pounds.
We the jury went into the deliberation room, all looked at each other incredulously and found for the County in about half an hour.
F! the HONKY TAXPAYERS.
The 1979 novel “By Reason of Insanity” takes manufacturing a doppelgänger to the extreme. This novel is not for the faint of heart.
http://toomuchhorrorfiction.blogspot.com/2020/05/by-reason-of-insanity-by-shane-stevens.html
The couple in the car and all the musicians sued the County for failing to engineer the swinging gate so that it couldn’t be forced to swing out instead of just in. Many neck braces in that courtroom. The plaintiffs in the party were understandably vague about what actually happened alleging they went to the beach, something, something, the vicious steel pole came flying out of nowhere and mowed them down. The very sharp attorney for the County had to tease out the details. Plaintiffs attorney in voir dire asked us if we would be prejudiced about one of the plaintiffs not being in court to testify because he had subsequently been sent to Folsom to do a stretch on an unrelated matter. An expert witness on automobiles and accidents presented an analysis of the physics of the incident during which he gave the expert testimony that the large American car with two passengers in it would have weighed about 2400 pounds.
We the jury went into the deliberation room, all looked at each other incredulously and found for the County in about half an hour.Replies: @kaganovitch, @Joe Stalin, @HammerJack
We the jury went into the deliberation room, all looked at each other incredulously and found for the County in about half an hour.
A rap album, eh? Structural Racism at work, my friends.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/fe/50/bf/fe50bff5491452181fb0cd656b439e39.jpg
https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/31/esther-nakajjigo-arches-decapitation-lawsuit-award/
No one was representing the taxpayers, of course.Replies: @AndrewR, @JR Ewing, @Achmed E. Newman, @Art Deco, @Alfa158, @Anonymous Jew
To be clear, I don’t like excessive damages or African immigrants, and I don’t want to sound like Tiny Duck but….the car appears to have been driven by a White Frenchman.
It’s supposed to be unpleasant!
Me, after C&P I couldn’t watch “Pretty Woman” without barfing.
Also the plot line of Fletch
The couple in the car and all the musicians sued the County for failing to engineer the swinging gate so that it couldn’t be forced to swing out instead of just in. Many neck braces in that courtroom. The plaintiffs in the party were understandably vague about what actually happened alleging they went to the beach, something, something, the vicious steel pole came flying out of nowhere and mowed them down. The very sharp attorney for the County had to tease out the details. Plaintiffs attorney in voir dire asked us if we would be prejudiced about one of the plaintiffs not being in court to testify because he had subsequently been sent to Folsom to do a stretch on an unrelated matter. An expert witness on automobiles and accidents presented an analysis of the physics of the incident during which he gave the expert testimony that the large American car with two passengers in it would have weighed about 2400 pounds.
We the jury went into the deliberation room, all looked at each other incredulously and found for the County in about half an hour.Replies: @kaganovitch, @Joe Stalin, @HammerJack
Standard Ghetto Lottery circumstances… like all those police encounters in Chicago where the City settles out-of-court and the City Aldermen proclaim the plaintiffs should have gotten MORE money because money is what the White folks generate so WTF do they care?
F! the HONKY TAXPAYERS.
Fassbinder, one of his few films with a star in the lead.
Dostoyevsky’s father was said to have been murdered too, but the accused were found not guilty. Did Nabokov resent that?
Me, after C&P I couldn't watch "Pretty Woman" without barfing.Replies: @Joe S.Walker
Haven’t read Crime and Punishment for many years, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a version with Julia Roberts in the boots.
Middle Easterners were a mistake.
Things seem to have gotten dumber in Ingolstadt, famous as the (post war) home of Audi and more sinisterly the birthplace the Adam Weishaupt and a setting for the novel Frankenstein.
Rule number 1 when trying to fake one’s own death: don’t keep hanging about your old neighborhood.
Support your local police.
Hey – double amputees can still be dangerous.
This fascinating sub-thread confirms that Mr. Sailer’s blog is a copium den for disaffected white guys.Replies: @obwandiyag, @Achmed E. Newman
You certainly do have a handle on these chumps.
Regarding the Anthony Lowe case in Huntington Park: There seem to be no confirmed incidents of anyone bringing down even small game with a thrown knife. Even the heavy sickle-shaped multi-bladed throwing knives used by some African warriors were almost entirely for psychological effect. The myth that a thrown knife can kill is so counterfactual and yet so strangely persistent, even among literate people and, evidently, peace officers, that it makes one despair for humanity’s exi —
Oh right, sorry. We despaired already.
The Fassbinder film, which was released the year after Nabokov’s death, was the very model of the sort of portentously moralizing pretend-highbrow-yet-stone-middlebrow “meaning”-injecting travesty that Nabokov could barely force himself even to mention.
This comes from DEEP inside. My parents met in his class.
Seriously, Stuart Margolin was great in The Rockford Files. He was in Kelley's Heroes too, in a much more subdued roll. He had the best nervous voice in the business. RIP.Replies: @Muggles
Margolin was great in Rockford . Really, all of their actors were great choices. His presence could carry an entire episode.
I was/am a great Rockford fan.
The plots were interesting, usually, and the fact that Garner was often clueless and put upon by nearly everyone he dealt with had a great depth of reality about it.
Who else on TV lived in a crappy single wide trailer on the beach? (Malibu no less, you can find the spot on the Internet!) Was usually broke and had a scrappy Dad who was a semi retired long haul trucker. Was hounded by creditors and viewed with suspicion even by his cop buddy.
Really, it was the most honest show on television.
A show like this should be a hit on modern TV/streaming. But I guess a sympathetic but honest depiction of actual American lives now is beyond imagining. Instead, the modern Streaming Media are all losing billions trying to convince enough people to watch their dreck and pay for it every month. (Yes, all streamers are currently losing money doing this! But wait till next year…)
Maybe a bankrupt Netflix or Disney will finally impart some reality to the Media Moguls.
Meta Rosenberg (Rockford producer) and James Garner should be laughing at that…
But I think it all works because of James Garner. Leading man handsome, but inoffensively so; credible both in his craven as well as defiant moments; a fantastic voice with a snappy line delivery. “Real” in all the ways you observed. I think I enjoy his performance more now than I did as a kid watching in first run.
I’m not sure there’s an actor today who could match him (maybe Vince Vaughn, but he’s too identified with comedy). That’s at least part of the reason there’s no modern counterpart to Rockford (though God forbid anyone should ever try a “reboot”).
Your point about the current crop of producers being incapable of portraying a regular guy sympathetically is definitively another factor.
Are you kidding, the production would have so many aircraft accidents, it would put an airline out of business. The denial of the most obvious facts of reality is the reason television and entertainment media exist, and everyone in the industry knows that and agrees with that, or they'd be at the fringes or out of the industry. Witness the "Russia" nonsense and the flat denial of leftist rioting and the making-up of Maga riots (The Good Fight). Witness the "journalistic" reception of the third episode of The Last Of Us, which jettisonned all connection to the story to stage an original standalone Call Me By Your Name playlet. A barrage of disgusting headlines cheering with self-defeating gay FaekThusiasm, like a conspiracy of fans who snuck into the theatre to watch their guy, don't care what the show is, erupt into noise whenever their guy is on stage, and ignore everything else.
The 70s was the heyday of a certain kind of idiosyncratic, anti-establishment, uniquely good at his job, outsider with a big personality. Rockford is within the category but barely since it's more about recreating classic noir with a constellation of goons and dames, better examples are a climate novel (yes, a climate novel) I cannot recall the title of (X's Storm), or ffolkes (The WWII Italian Black Prince and the Sea Devils are transplanted to Disco Age Scotland to save Maggie from non-Irish terrorists: much of the film is enjoying Roger Moore's obstinate laird insist on things). Mitchell and Dirty Harry are also textbook examples, but it's too easy to do this type of character as a policeman, and often more interesting to see him as something else. Three Days of the Condor is a double example because Von Sydow's character counts too.
The reason we saw so much of this archetype in the 70s is probably because everybody knew someone like him, and audiences liked him. Now, if you described such a character backwards (and omitted the fictional entertainment context), zoomers wouldn't know what to say, and older people would start to build a mental image of Uncle Ted.
For maybe twenty years or more, corporate and computer culture deemed such a stick in the mud to be obsolete. Conformity was technical competence. There is reason for hope, though, in the rescue of Twitter by Elon Musk. Recall the tweet of the grateful employee who described, before, sitting in meetings about what imoji should look like, and after, pounding Blue Rats like in college and cranking out a genuine technical improvement to the guts of the system in one night. Big Tech just fired a ton of people, but, from what I can gather (The Wall Street Journal was curiously unhelpful in this matter), they were largely the sort interested in holding meetings about imoji.
There was a recent TV series titled Bosch, which I did not see, but which proves my point after contradicting it. Apparently it was one of these, it was popular with middle aged and older white guys (who would remember the 70s or 70s media) -- and not many other people.Replies: @James J. O'Meara, @James J. O'Meara
Here you go (I finished Season 3 - then the DVD player went tits up):
Peak Rockford Files
Jim Rockford - In Pursuit of Carol Thorne
Inflation indexed to the Rockford/Davenport basket of goods
Rockford Files: Bug v Land Yacht
Jim Rockford in the days of decent denominations
Rockford Files - cars, smart-ass remarks, etc.
Rockford Files update and one minor POS
The Daily Stupid, edition #53643- Part B, and the near-daily Rockford file
Rockford Files: Pizza, wine, and coffee - and a BIG THANKS to our commenters
For Mr. Ross, there were too many small plane crashes to match reality. There weren't any airliner crashes, but, OTOH, it's strange to see a 707 taking off from Los Angeles turn into a 747 on approach into New York.Replies: @J.Ross
Steve Sailer may have wanted to reference Nabokov and Dostoevsky in order to show that he's a literary guy too among other things, but he'd have probably found it quicker to write this column in reference to some episode of The Rockford Files. Come on, iSteve, which episode was it? (I hope Angel Martin is in it - the actor died recently, BTW.)Replies: @ChrisZ, @Sam Hildebrand, @Mr. Anon, @James J. O'Meara
Yes, and let’s not forget the Krimi genre, as German as the Italian giallo.
We have Fellowship of the Ring, they have Fellowship of the Frog.
Anyway, let’s also remember all this goes back to Fritz Lang, whose M and Mabuse films predate the American noir films (which Lang himself contributed to when in exile in Hollywood).
Speaking of noir, while Steve brings up a lousy novel by the overrated Nabokov, when reading the news story I immediately thought of Jim Thompson, maybe because I just finished his Savage Night.
Wait a second, hasn’t anyone (including me) referenced Better Call Saul? When Lalo evades Gus’ assassins, he goes underground and, along the way, stops off at some house where there’s a guy who looks like him is stashed away just for such emergencies; Lalo suggests he shave off his goatee, then kills him and his wife, and plants the body to be ID’d as his. I guess they don’t have fingerprints or DNA in Mexico either.
I think they were doing a kind of call back to the introduction of Angel Eyes in The Good the Bad and the Ugly.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3AfrikLKLyU/XO7iIYi2dqI/AAAAAAAAAcw/iIQsCHXbNTgdeMmO72xuY_5Iz45LlFTCwCLcBGAs/s1600/doubles%2Bkate.jpgReplies: @Peter D. Bredon
Like characters drinking and smoking, it sure helps with the screenwriting.
In “The Killer Shrews” the characters spend 80% of their screen time mixing drinks, drinking, and mixing another drink. Oh, and smoking.
Other directors, like Coleman Francis, will show entire car trips, including parking; otherwise the viewer might be confused about how they got there.
BTW, nice use of umlauts. Somebody around here still has some respect.
Nice. They all look alike anyway. Needs umlauts though.
There actually is a PW subplot in CP: Raskolnikov (whose name means something like “atheist” or some other on the nose name typical of Dos) befriends an underage hooker with a heart of gold who teaches him Christian forgiveness and makes him read the Bible. I think this part made Nabokov puke.
It did for the detective show what Married with Children did for (or to) the sitcom.
Many Moslems don't believe in educating their daughters.Replies: @Art Deco
That may be true, but it’s stopped being common enough to show up in the metrics much. Here’s some data from Saudi Arabia in 2018 / 20:
Literacy rate, female (15+): 96.05%
Literacy rate, male (15+): 98.62%
Literacy rate, female (15-24): 99.45%
Literacy rate, male (15-24): 99.55%
Completed lower secondary school (female, 25+): 71.27%
Completed lower secondary school (male, 25+): 80.93%
Completed upper secondary school (female, 25+): 58.83%
Completed upper secondary school (male, 25+): 64.46%
Completed post-secondary (female, 25+): 36.44%
Completed post-secondary (male, 25+): 38.85%
NB, the median age of a woman over the age of 25 in Saudi Arabia is around 42 years. The bloc of girls who did not attend to age 15 when their male peers did (about 9.5% of all girls) would have been leaving school around 1990, give or take.
Muggles, I agree entirely with your endorsement of “The Rockford Files” (you left out the great theme music; but come to think of it, it goes without saying).
But I think it all works because of James Garner. Leading man handsome, but inoffensively so; credible both in his craven as well as defiant moments; a fantastic voice with a snappy line delivery. “Real” in all the ways you observed. I think I enjoy his performance more now than I did as a kid watching in first run.
I’m not sure there’s an actor today who could match him (maybe Vince Vaughn, but he’s too identified with comedy). That’s at least part of the reason there’s no modern counterpart to Rockford (though God forbid anyone should ever try a “reboot”).
Your point about the current crop of producers being incapable of portraying a regular guy sympathetically is definitively another factor.
The couple in the car and all the musicians sued the County for failing to engineer the swinging gate so that it couldn’t be forced to swing out instead of just in. Many neck braces in that courtroom. The plaintiffs in the party were understandably vague about what actually happened alleging they went to the beach, something, something, the vicious steel pole came flying out of nowhere and mowed them down. The very sharp attorney for the County had to tease out the details. Plaintiffs attorney in voir dire asked us if we would be prejudiced about one of the plaintiffs not being in court to testify because he had subsequently been sent to Folsom to do a stretch on an unrelated matter. An expert witness on automobiles and accidents presented an analysis of the physics of the incident during which he gave the expert testimony that the large American car with two passengers in it would have weighed about 2400 pounds.
We the jury went into the deliberation room, all looked at each other incredulously and found for the County in about half an hour.Replies: @kaganovitch, @Joe Stalin, @HammerJack
Thanks for your testimony. I too was party to a similar case–decades ago when I was young and naïve. My passenger and I came within inches of a similarly gory death, but fortunately most of the damage was to the car. That’s all I was seeking recompense for, but I was a poor college student and definitely didn’t know the ropes. In my case I had managed to slam on the brakes in time to save our lives.
I hired an attorney who agreed to take the case on a contingency basis–she said I had an excellent case. But some time after fact gathering she started to drag her heels, and stopped returning calls. Finally she announced that the government was claiming sovereign immunity and that was that. (The gate in question was on state property.)
Knowing no better, and being extremely busy, I let it go, and used my credit card to repair my car. Not sure if I’d do any different today, actually.
If I’d been just slightly slower on the brakes, and we’d been injured or killed, how would the state’s culpability have been magnified to the tune of eight figures? In the case of the Ugandan woman, all we have is the testimony of her husband and the personal-injury attorney–which we’re instructed by several here to take at face value, and not to question. Frankly (levity aside) I’m skeptical of the facts as related.
The best predictor of a conviction in personal-injury cases is not the circumstances, the actual responsibility of any party, or any of the relevant facts. It’s the nature and especially the gruesomeness of the injuries. Is that how the law’s supposed to work?
This immediately reminded me of the Idaho college murders. The suspect, a grad student in criminal justice, probably thought he was to big-brain to get caught by the local yokels in Moscow.
Yet it did not occur to him that:
1) The local yokel police department could seek FBI assistance.
2) Even in a fairly small community surveillance cameras are everywhere.
3) Cell phone records enable tracing a person’s whereabouts.
He may have been aware of advances in DNA tracing, but probably didn’t realize DNA could be extracted from the knife sheath he accidentally left behind.
I thought when you meet your doppelgänger you’re supposed top kill him.
Anyway, Dostoevsky wrote The Double and Nabokov thought it was his best work.
"Young William Wilson (Marco Stefanelli) is busy torturing a pleb when his double first appears, in a flashback as the mature William (Alain Delon) confesses in director Louis Malle's segment of Spirits of the Dead, 1968."
https://www.tcm.com/video/214006/spirits-of-the-dead-william-wilson/
But I guess a sympathetic but honest depiction of actual American lives now is beyond imagining.
Are you kidding, the production would have so many aircraft accidents, it would put an airline out of business. The denial of the most obvious facts of reality is the reason television and entertainment media exist, and everyone in the industry knows that and agrees with that, or they’d be at the fringes or out of the industry. Witness the “Russia” nonsense and the flat denial of leftist rioting and the making-up of Maga riots (The Good Fight). Witness the “journalistic” reception of the third episode of The Last Of Us, which jettisonned all connection to the story to stage an original standalone Call Me By Your Name playlet. A barrage of disgusting headlines cheering with self-defeating gay FaekThusiasm, like a conspiracy of fans who snuck into the theatre to watch their guy, don’t care what the show is, erupt into noise whenever their guy is on stage, and ignore everything else.
The 70s was the heyday of a certain kind of idiosyncratic, anti-establishment, uniquely good at his job, outsider with a big personality. Rockford is within the category but barely since it’s more about recreating classic noir with a constellation of goons and dames, better examples are a climate novel (yes, a climate novel) I cannot recall the title of (X’s Storm), or ffolkes (The WWII Italian Black Prince and the Sea Devils are transplanted to Disco Age Scotland to save Maggie from non-Irish terrorists: much of the film is enjoying Roger Moore’s obstinate laird insist on things). Mitchell and Dirty Harry are also textbook examples, but it’s too easy to do this type of character as a policeman, and often more interesting to see him as something else. Three Days of the Condor is a double example because Von Sydow’s character counts too.
The reason we saw so much of this archetype in the 70s is probably because everybody knew someone like him, and audiences liked him. Now, if you described such a character backwards (and omitted the fictional entertainment context), zoomers wouldn’t know what to say, and older people would start to build a mental image of Uncle Ted.
For maybe twenty years or more, corporate and computer culture deemed such a stick in the mud to be obsolete. Conformity was technical competence. There is reason for hope, though, in the rescue of Twitter by Elon Musk. Recall the tweet of the grateful employee who described, before, sitting in meetings about what imoji should look like, and after, pounding Blue Rats like in college and cranking out a genuine technical improvement to the guts of the system in one night. Big Tech just fired a ton of people, but, from what I can gather (The Wall Street Journal was curiously unhelpful in this matter), they were largely the sort interested in holding meetings about imoji.
There was a recent TV series titled Bosch, which I did not see, but which proves my point after contradicting it. Apparently it was one of these, it was popular with middle aged and older white guys (who would remember the 70s or 70s media) — and not many other people.
"Yes, Cordelia, great bosh."
--Brideshead Revisited.
2) Even in a fairly small community surveillance cameras are everywhere.
3) Cell phone records enable tracing a person's whereabouts.He may have been aware of advances in DNA tracing, but probably didn't realize DNA could be extracted from the knife sheath he accidentally left behind.Replies: @J.Ross, @James J. O'Meara
The media loves their crazy geniuses, but away from movies, mental dysfunction joins mental dysfunction, and psychopaths are often not only impressively stupid (witness the 4chan pasta from the anon claiming to do intelligence testing in prisons, which is borne out by research and anecdotal experiences [eg, Anthony Daniels] but much quicker to read), but worse, they normally have a dangerously inflated sense of their ability. A third tendency is the behavior of going into psychiatry precisely because they know something’s wrong with them and they want to fix or understand it.
Raskol = schism [wavy equals] schizoid. I think “schizoid” and “alienated” were in use at the time to describe mental illness.
Atheist is “ateist,” and similarly unlike raskol is neveruyushchiy (unbeliever).
2) Even in a fairly small community surveillance cameras are everywhere.
3) Cell phone records enable tracing a person's whereabouts.He may have been aware of advances in DNA tracing, but probably didn't realize DNA could be extracted from the knife sheath he accidentally left behind.Replies: @J.Ross, @James J. O'Meara
Hey, he still got a 97 on the final, even missing those questions.
Poe, nice.
“Young William Wilson (Marco Stefanelli) is busy torturing a pleb when his double first appears, in a flashback as the mature William (Alain Delon) confesses in director Louis Malle’s segment of Spirits of the Dead, 1968.”
https://www.tcm.com/video/214006/spirits-of-the-dead-william-wilson/
“German Iraqi”. In this story, it’s a couple “with Belgian passports”:
Couple leave ticketless baby at Israeli airport check-in
First time I saw this video, I could not stop noticing how strongly it appeared like a bunch of cruel men are sadistically shooting a scared great ape.
This fascinating sub-thread confirms that Mr. Sailer’s blog is a copium den for disaffected white guys.Replies: @obwandiyag, @Achmed E. Newman
J.R. Ewing kindly gave me the information I was missing. Thanks for nuthin’.
OK, then, I’m guessing you guys would not have a problem with a link bomb here to Peak Stupidity posts about the show. Yes, it’s likely my favorite of all time. (Monk, a show my Dad liked, is also a detective show with funny “human interest” stuff too – not my style, but the character Monk would have fit in very well more recently, during the recent PanicFest unpleasantness.)
Here you go (I finished Season 3 – then the DVD player went tits up):
Peak Rockford Files
Jim Rockford – In Pursuit of Carol Thorne
Inflation indexed to the Rockford/Davenport basket of goods
Rockford Files: Bug v Land Yacht
Jim Rockford in the days of decent denominations
Rockford Files – cars, smart-ass remarks, etc.
Rockford Files update and one minor POS
The Daily Stupid, edition #53643- Part B, and the near-daily Rockford file
Rockford Files: Pizza, wine, and coffee – and a BIG THANKS to our commenters
For Mr. Ross, there were too many small plane crashes to match reality. There weren’t any airliner crashes, but, OTOH, it’s strange to see a 707 taking off from Los Angeles turn into a 747 on approach into New York.
Yeah, I smile when I think about that guy. He and Jim Rockford have me thinking about re-starting the trend of calling people turkeys. I need help from you all, though.
In any event, it led to the birth of a new superhero: Turkey Volume Guessing Man!
https://youtu.be/E1FwyR0LWVg
Are you kidding, the production would have so many aircraft accidents, it would put an airline out of business. The denial of the most obvious facts of reality is the reason television and entertainment media exist, and everyone in the industry knows that and agrees with that, or they'd be at the fringes or out of the industry. Witness the "Russia" nonsense and the flat denial of leftist rioting and the making-up of Maga riots (The Good Fight). Witness the "journalistic" reception of the third episode of The Last Of Us, which jettisonned all connection to the story to stage an original standalone Call Me By Your Name playlet. A barrage of disgusting headlines cheering with self-defeating gay FaekThusiasm, like a conspiracy of fans who snuck into the theatre to watch their guy, don't care what the show is, erupt into noise whenever their guy is on stage, and ignore everything else.
The 70s was the heyday of a certain kind of idiosyncratic, anti-establishment, uniquely good at his job, outsider with a big personality. Rockford is within the category but barely since it's more about recreating classic noir with a constellation of goons and dames, better examples are a climate novel (yes, a climate novel) I cannot recall the title of (X's Storm), or ffolkes (The WWII Italian Black Prince and the Sea Devils are transplanted to Disco Age Scotland to save Maggie from non-Irish terrorists: much of the film is enjoying Roger Moore's obstinate laird insist on things). Mitchell and Dirty Harry are also textbook examples, but it's too easy to do this type of character as a policeman, and often more interesting to see him as something else. Three Days of the Condor is a double example because Von Sydow's character counts too.
The reason we saw so much of this archetype in the 70s is probably because everybody knew someone like him, and audiences liked him. Now, if you described such a character backwards (and omitted the fictional entertainment context), zoomers wouldn't know what to say, and older people would start to build a mental image of Uncle Ted.
For maybe twenty years or more, corporate and computer culture deemed such a stick in the mud to be obsolete. Conformity was technical competence. There is reason for hope, though, in the rescue of Twitter by Elon Musk. Recall the tweet of the grateful employee who described, before, sitting in meetings about what imoji should look like, and after, pounding Blue Rats like in college and cranking out a genuine technical improvement to the guts of the system in one night. Big Tech just fired a ton of people, but, from what I can gather (The Wall Street Journal was curiously unhelpful in this matter), they were largely the sort interested in holding meetings about imoji.
There was a recent TV series titled Bosch, which I did not see, but which proves my point after contradicting it. Apparently it was one of these, it was popular with middle aged and older white guys (who would remember the 70s or 70s media) -- and not many other people.Replies: @James J. O'Meara, @James J. O'Meara
I’d never thought I’d ever hear Mitchell and Dirty Harry in the same sentence, much less as examples of the same anything. Mitchell! As Joe Bob Briggs said of comparing Dr. Strangelove with Incredibly Strange Creatures, yes, they are both on film stock.
“Who’s the puffy guy who’s a big blurry sex machine?” “Mitchell!” “That Mitchell is one fat-” “Shut yo’ mouth!” “Just talkin’ bout Mitchell.”
A gloriously filthy and vile TV pilot that became perhaps the greatest episode of MST3k. You haven’t lived till you’ve seen Joe Don Baker, the human cheesesteak, climb in bed with Linda Evans, hooking a six-pack along with his toe as he does so; next to the bed is a nightstand with a bottle of baby oil.
Don Siegel only wishes Dirty Harry had snappy dialog like this:
Mitchell!
Are you kidding, the production would have so many aircraft accidents, it would put an airline out of business. The denial of the most obvious facts of reality is the reason television and entertainment media exist, and everyone in the industry knows that and agrees with that, or they'd be at the fringes or out of the industry. Witness the "Russia" nonsense and the flat denial of leftist rioting and the making-up of Maga riots (The Good Fight). Witness the "journalistic" reception of the third episode of The Last Of Us, which jettisonned all connection to the story to stage an original standalone Call Me By Your Name playlet. A barrage of disgusting headlines cheering with self-defeating gay FaekThusiasm, like a conspiracy of fans who snuck into the theatre to watch their guy, don't care what the show is, erupt into noise whenever their guy is on stage, and ignore everything else.
The 70s was the heyday of a certain kind of idiosyncratic, anti-establishment, uniquely good at his job, outsider with a big personality. Rockford is within the category but barely since it's more about recreating classic noir with a constellation of goons and dames, better examples are a climate novel (yes, a climate novel) I cannot recall the title of (X's Storm), or ffolkes (The WWII Italian Black Prince and the Sea Devils are transplanted to Disco Age Scotland to save Maggie from non-Irish terrorists: much of the film is enjoying Roger Moore's obstinate laird insist on things). Mitchell and Dirty Harry are also textbook examples, but it's too easy to do this type of character as a policeman, and often more interesting to see him as something else. Three Days of the Condor is a double example because Von Sydow's character counts too.
The reason we saw so much of this archetype in the 70s is probably because everybody knew someone like him, and audiences liked him. Now, if you described such a character backwards (and omitted the fictional entertainment context), zoomers wouldn't know what to say, and older people would start to build a mental image of Uncle Ted.
For maybe twenty years or more, corporate and computer culture deemed such a stick in the mud to be obsolete. Conformity was technical competence. There is reason for hope, though, in the rescue of Twitter by Elon Musk. Recall the tweet of the grateful employee who described, before, sitting in meetings about what imoji should look like, and after, pounding Blue Rats like in college and cranking out a genuine technical improvement to the guts of the system in one night. Big Tech just fired a ton of people, but, from what I can gather (The Wall Street Journal was curiously unhelpful in this matter), they were largely the sort interested in holding meetings about imoji.
There was a recent TV series titled Bosch, which I did not see, but which proves my point after contradicting it. Apparently it was one of these, it was popular with middle aged and older white guys (who would remember the 70s or 70s media) -- and not many other people.Replies: @James J. O'Meara, @James J. O'Meara
“Charles, the nuns say modern art is all bosh, is it?”
“Yes, Cordelia, great bosh.”
—Brideshead Revisited.
Lots of filler in the hour long dramas. I always preferred the 30 minute western dramas, like Have Gun-Will Travel and Wanted Dead or Alive. The writing had to be efficient.
I don’t know what an umlaut is or what it means, just a bad speller and autocorrect had the little dots over the “a.” Sorry to disappoint.
The MST3k episode Riding with Death features the eponymous “film” — .actually, two episodes of a failed TV series, Gemini Man, stuck together for a theatrical release to make back some of the investment. It’s 70s as all get out, and Jim Stafford (“Spiders and Snakes” and little else) constantly refers to people as “turkeys”. Now I wonder: did people say “turkey” all the time in the 70s, and both shows reflect that (like the Fonze’s “Heyyyyy!”) or was Stafford doing a homage to Rockford?
In any event, it led to the birth of a new superhero: Turkey Volume Guessing Man!
Here you go (I finished Season 3 - then the DVD player went tits up):
Peak Rockford Files
Jim Rockford - In Pursuit of Carol Thorne
Inflation indexed to the Rockford/Davenport basket of goods
Rockford Files: Bug v Land Yacht
Jim Rockford in the days of decent denominations
Rockford Files - cars, smart-ass remarks, etc.
Rockford Files update and one minor POS
The Daily Stupid, edition #53643- Part B, and the near-daily Rockford file
Rockford Files: Pizza, wine, and coffee - and a BIG THANKS to our commenters
For Mr. Ross, there were too many small plane crashes to match reality. There weren't any airliner crashes, but, OTOH, it's strange to see a 707 taking off from Los Angeles turn into a 747 on approach into New York.Replies: @J.Ross
By plane crashes you’re talking about real gaan hours and I’m talking about what happens when at the counter you declare not twenty cigars but information that will lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton.
Not a good argument.
the government has no excuse to not do proper maintenance in national parks.
Maybe the workers and supervisors for that particular item should be on the hook. Problematic that an amorphous blob known as "taxpayer" is supposed to pay; suffer; and somehow not let it happen again.Replies: @AndrewR
How many people successfully sue the federal government each year, and what is the total sum?
Plenty of claims paid by gov't up and down the line. Saw a blurb where Baltimore paid out more claims against police than they had criminal convictions in court, or some such. Throw in the insurance industry, a quasi governmental deal where a chunk of it is collective punishment via "tax" (premium) money.
I understand that stuff happens, and sharing the burden. But there is a component of unfairness when suing the gov't insulates those that acted wrongly, or failed to act.
The Yugoslav wars were our great misguided moral crusade of the late 90s. Today it’s Ukraine.
Yes, her. But before that there’s the story of how she becomes a prostitute, and that’s just gutwrenching.
Brevity aside: is this further testimony supposed to prove that you didn’t lose your head somehow up in #4?
Steve's favorite topic in Steve's favorite City: Lots more for everyone!https://www.theepochtimes.com/chicago-crime-rises-61-percent-in-2023-violent-offenses-spike-while-governor-insists-crime-coming-down_5014788.html#new_tabReplies: @jimmyriddle
Chicago woman stabs a stranger. Gets bailed for $2k. Immediately goes on another stabbing spree. Bail upped to $20k.
https://cwbchicago.com/2023/01/chicago-woman-randomly-stabbed-4-people-while-on-bail-for-randomly-stabbing-a-woman-in-bucktown-prosecutors-say.html
Not sure how that is germane.
Plenty of claims paid by gov’t up and down the line. Saw a blurb where Baltimore paid out more claims against police than they had criminal convictions in court, or some such. Throw in the insurance industry, a quasi governmental deal where a chunk of it is collective punishment via “tax” (premium) money.
I understand that stuff happens, and sharing the burden. But there is a component of unfairness when suing the gov’t insulates those that acted wrongly, or failed to act.
It’s an okay novel, but it’s clearly practice for Nabokov’s later flawed narrators in his English-language books
Most people, if they were bilingual, would probably prefer Nabokov in Russian. His style is more natural, and he even seems human at times. His English is full of cold calculation and artifice, since he had to compromise for it not being his native language. I suppose there is an argument that the artifice was what made Nabokov more original and interesting in some ways in English.
Why?
In Russian, his near-autistic desire for a string of "newly found metaphors" (he had a better word for it) or , as his fellow academics called it, 'otstraneniye' (seeing that which is normal from a strange point of view) is , except in his best and most human passages, relatively annoying to anyone who knows the great Russian poets and prose writers whom he strenuously emulates or parodizes from the top to the bottom of the page (with some humorous relief in the form of his intermittent verbal imitations of witty comical drawings as comical relief - and please note, I think his poems are pretty good, but .... but unless great poets of his generation are numbered in the dozens, he was not one of them).
And yes, I am familiar with thousands of lines of good Russian poetry, and I know where the "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain" stanza comes from (Khodasevich and one or two others) and I know where "A rainbow, with angelic suddenness, appeared..." (the first line of Dar, The Gift) was written in almost the same way a little earlier (or maybe not....). Not saying the poor man was not a top of the line pasticheur and a top-of-the-line second-rate entertainer, but saying ... he was not all that much better in Russian than English.
But I could be wrong, I often am ....
https://cwbchicago.com/2023/01/chicago-woman-randomly-stabbed-4-people-while-on-bail-for-randomly-stabbing-a-woman-in-bucktown-prosecutors-say.htmlReplies: @Peter Akuleyev
Nabokov could have turned that into a novel about a rich wastrel who puts up the $20K just to see what would happen next.
Raskolnikov means “schismatic,” or so I read years ago. Apparently the name of the town in The Brothers Karamazov can be translated as “Pigsty.”
Joe Don Baker was great as a good ‘ol boy CIA agent in the original Edge of Darkness miniseries.
Most people, if they were bilingual, would probably prefer Nabokov in Russian. His style is more natural, and he even seems human at times. His English is full of cold calculation and artifice, since he had to compromise for it not being his native language. I suppose there is an argument that the artifice was what made Nabokov more original and interesting in some ways in English.Replies: @anonymous
His prose is the same in English and Russian, but comes off worse in Russian.
Why?
In Russian, his near-autistic desire for a string of “newly found metaphors” (he had a better word for it) or , as his fellow academics called it, ‘otstraneniye’ (seeing that which is normal from a strange point of view) is , except in his best and most human passages, relatively annoying to anyone who knows the great Russian poets and prose writers whom he strenuously emulates or parodizes from the top to the bottom of the page (with some humorous relief in the form of his intermittent verbal imitations of witty comical drawings as comical relief – and please note, I think his poems are pretty good, but …. but unless great poets of his generation are numbered in the dozens, he was not one of them).
And yes, I am familiar with thousands of lines of good Russian poetry, and I know where the “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain” stanza comes from (Khodasevich and one or two others) and I know where “A rainbow, with angelic suddenness, appeared…” (the first line of Dar, The Gift) was written in almost the same way a little earlier (or maybe not….). Not saying the poor man was not a top of the line pasticheur and a top-of-the-line second-rate entertainer, but saying … he was not all that much better in Russian than English.
But I could be wrong, I often am ….
Nabokov’s novel Oтчаяние was pretty close to this.
– “Are you afraid of him?” (laughing)
– “You’re damn right I am!”