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What is the Night King’s favorite movie thriller? “Wight Bird in a Blizzard.”

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[THIS POST CONTAINS *MAJOR* SPOILERS FOR “GAME OF THRONES.”]

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That terrifying moment when you realize that the Night King has air superiority, and can probably convert it to naval superiority …

What if he flies over the ocean and “converts” the entire Golden Company as they’re enroute to Westeros from Essos? That way the army of the dead can attack from the south with a navy, in addition to attacking from the north. Things were easier when he couldn’t just fly anywhere and augment his forces wherever he wanted, right?

If the Night King DOESN’T follow this (apparently most logical) strategy, and attack from two fronts, would it be a plot hole?

I at first wondered if maybe the Night King needed to be near his wights in order to animate them. But … the captured wight in Season 7 was alllll the way down in King’s Landing when our heroes showed it to Cersei, while the Night King and the white walkers hadn’t even gotten to the Wall yet.  And that wight up and got jiggy with it just fine.

Bear in mind that Dany’s dragons appear capable of flying virtually anywhere in a very short period of time; fans even decried the “plot hole” when the dragons flew so inexplicably quickly from Dragonstone to north of The Wall to rescue Jon Snow’s wight-hunting party. I suppose we could lampshade this by saying that their speed is indeterminate because they’re magical creatures.

And the undead dragon at the end of Season 7 looked like it was moving even faster than a live dragon, right? This was consistent with what we’ve already seen on the show. The wights, animated by magic, often move a lot faster than living humans.

Yeah, you’re right — it’s a laundry day, which is why I’m procrastinating again by sitting here blogging about “Game of Thrones.”

 

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And here is the latest thing that makes me feel old.

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What’s with all the people in music videos looking so damn young these days?  Did they change the child labor laws?

There was a time when I was daily viewer of MTV (the sedate stuff on VH-1 was for old people), and I rocked hard, people.  It seemed to me that whenever I watched a video, I saw people who were my own age.

Now these videos are inhabited only by people who look young enough to be my kids. And that makes sense, because … they kinda are young enough.  (Yes, I realize the video below for The Calling’s “Wherever You Will Go” was made 18 years ago, but that’s beside the point.)  If the performers in a video today were in their very early 20’s, then they’d be about the right age, if I’d fathered kids when I was 26.

Furthermore, some astute commentators pointed out online Monday night that 2019 is the year in which the original “Blade Runner” (1982) was set.  The opening title card names “November, 2019” as the time when all things Fordesque turn angsty and existential and killer-androidy.  Am I … older than Harrison Ford’s character? I am six years older than Ford was when he made the film.

Now I just feel weird.  Why do I write these blog posts, anyway?

[Update: Today I am learning that “Akira” (1988) and “The Running Man” (1987) also set their stories in 2019?! That’s ironic, given that the future we’ve come closest to is that of 2006’s “Idiocracy.”

I wonder how people in our parents’ generation felt when 2001 arrived, if they’d happened to see “2001: A Space Odyssey” in theaters in 1968.]

 

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Have a Happy New Year’s Eve!!!

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Have fun!  Be safe!  Enjoy!

Make sure you have a designated driver!  Or, better yet … why not be the designated driver?  What better way to spend the first hours of 2019 than as a hero to the people around you (maybe not the hero that Gotham deserves, but the hero it needs right now)?

I’m not sure how I’ve gotten to become such a mother hen in my old age …  Maybe it’s because, in my younger days, I was the one who needed mother henning.

Whatever, just don’t wind up like Gatsby, floating face down in the pool at the end of the night.  (But go ahead and totally be him up until that point.)

Postscript — the quote below, which I rather like, doesn’t appear in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” or its 2013 film treatment with Leonardo DiCaprio.  I’m told that the line actually originates from “Sex and the City” (1998 – 2004).

 

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(VERY hollow.)

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Today’s agenda — help my fellow Greeks breach Troy’s defenses by constructing a vast, hollow wooden replica of my head and having them hide within it.

CALL IT THE TROJAN DORK.

 

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Why did they call it “The Trojan Horse?”

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Why not “The Greek Horse?”  The Greeks constructed it.  Suppose you have an artist friend in Greece, and he or she mails a traditional Hellenic sculpture to you here in America (and hopefully with nothing all cunning and stabby and murdery inside of it).   You wouldn’t call it an American sculpture.  It would be a Greek sculpture, right?

“Troy” is a masculine name.  But does it ever occur to guys named “Troy” that they were named for an archetypal conquered city?

Why is “Trojan” a desirable brand name for a condom?  A small group of Greeks penetrated their city’s defenses with regrettable surprise consequences.

This is the $#/+ I think about when I wake up at 2:35 am and can’t get back to sleep.  I swear I can’t turn it off.

Then Credence Clearwater Revival starts playing in my head and things get worse from there.

 

 

 

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Ugliest Christmas ornament ever?

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I am inclined to think so.

This was a gag gift for a pal of mine — I got it for three bucks at my local five-and-dime.  Unless Picasso designed this ornament (and I don’t think he did), that misshapen, asymmetrical dog’s head is unintentional.  (Is anyone else reminded of Blair in the autopsy scene of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” saying, “That’s not dog?”  In fact … this could arguably be the coolest Christmas ornament ever …)  Anyway, I can’t tell if that stringy brown fur is supposed to symbolize the dog’s bed or just … dog hair?

Somewhere this holiday season, there is a craftsman who should keep his day job.

Do people in the South say “five-and-dime?”  It occurs to me now that I don’t think I’ve heard the expression since I left New York.

 

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“THIS IS ROGUE ONE.”

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That awkward moment after you get a haircut at the mall and you say “You’re a handsome rogue” to yourself in the men’s room mirror, but it turns out there was a guy in one of the stalls who probably overheard you.

 

 

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More vintage Christmas card weirdness.

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Here is another of those strange vintage Christmas cards that I talked about yesterday.  If you wander around Pinterest or Wikimedia Commons, you’ll see that people from generations past often had a sense of humor that is as weird as the average meme-make today.  The card below dates from the Victorian era, and serves as an example of a greeting card that features a brief, bizarre, rhyming poem.

It also illustrates what seems to me to be a common trope.  Vintage holiday cards (which appear to include those for Thanksgiving and New Year’s) often feature the same common subjects that their designers deemed both funny and festive.  These include baby chicks (cute enough), dirigibles (because … blimps are interesting?) and frogs (huh?).

Anyway … the frogs you see upended below are actually serving up a parable to the reader.  (They slipped on the ice, you see, because they disobeyed their mother’s wishes.)  Soooooo, this card was meant for children?  Or … adults with a dark sense of humor who enjoy laughing at frogs’ injuries?

Also … they’re carrying pipes.  How old are these disobedient frogs?

 

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Because nothing says “Merry Christmas” like an undead woolly mammoth speaking in verse while cupids try to kill it.

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Vintage Christmas cards are nuts, as anyone who’s ever gone down that particular Kafka-esque rabbit hole will tell you.  If you do a simple Google image search, you can see that our supposedly dignified forebears evidently toked up a lot around the holidays, whether it was on opium or bathtub gin or cocaine-fueled Coca-Cola or sassafras or whatever.

This might be the weirdest one yet.  The card below dates from 1912, and actually features a handwritten, rhyming poem –a lot of these antique holiday cards feature short, peculiar, rhyming poems; it was almost a folk-art genre unto itself.

Anyway, you’ll see that the poem below describes a woolly mammoth being excavated, and then … resurrecting or something.  (Or is this its ghost?)  The prehistoric animal has a creepy (though quaint and nicely vivid poem) addressing his saviors.  I’m pretty sure it’s about women’s suffrage, though I’m not sure whether it’s for or against.  I’m leaning toward the latter.  The poem gets harder to read toward the end, but … does it describe the female animals leading the males “meekly” to their long-ago death and entombment in the ice?  (And the author’s position is sort of implied by the one-word query, “Suffragette?” circled and written in blood-red letters.)

There are two cupids endeavoring to kill this unholy animal; you can find them in the top corners.  Because it’s a zombie, they are wisely aiming for its head.

“Merry Christmas,” in other words.

What is sassafras, exactly, anyway?  I can honestly you that I do not know for sure.

 

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I know that this is childish for me to go on about. (But when has that ever stopped me before?)

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The trees in Melania Trump’s new White House Christmas display are BLOOD-red.  They’re like something out of the film adaptations of Clive Barker’s “Hellraiser” books. They look like they’re metal frames layered with webs of human capillaries.

It’s a Pinhead Christmas.

(I’m so sorry you have to put up with such weirdness when you visit this blog.  You people put up with a lot, seriously.  But I watch a lot of horror movies, okay?)

[Update: an alumna of mine just piped in — “It is a pinhead Christmas in more ways than one.”  Well played, Madam.]

 

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