Just doing some light reading the other day, and one particular phrase caught my attention: Before a resistance organization can successfully engage in combat activities, its leadership must organize an infrastructure that can sustain itself in combat and withstand the anticipated hostile reaction to armed resistance. - FM 3-18 Special Forces Operations
In other words, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.
Ponder the import of the above sentence in light of whatever long-term preparations you are undertaking, or contemplating.
Think of it as just another way of noting: You don't have enough ammo. Or, probably, enough of anything else.
We sadly note and mourn the passing of comedic icon and quintessential gentle man (whether spelled in both two words or one), Gene Wilder, aged 83. Debutting in Bonnie and Clyde, and best-remembered in starring roles from Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein to iconic performances in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, he was a remarkable talent, a gifted comedic actor, as well as a writer, husband, and father, and both Hollywood specifically and the world in general are now the poorer for his departure. But what a phenomenal body of work did he leave us to enjoy for all time.
Imagine my delighted surprise: Two unfindable movies, which have largely slipped into oblivion, are inexplicably both currently included in the same collection at one's local Wally-World, in the Five-Flicks-For-Five-Bucks rack.
One is Castle Keep, a typically quirky anti-war movie from Hollyweird from about the same time (late '60s-early 70's) as flicks like M*A*S*H* and Catch-22 were all the counter-cultural rage, without being as good as either of them. Directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Burt Lancaster and Peter Falk, among others, between them having 10 nominations and three wins of Oscars back when they meant something besides just a cookie for diversity beans. Still, the flick used to be a staple of late night TV movie fare, and then disappeared forever. Until now.
The other one is the wholly worthy Young Winston, starring a cast of unknown actors including Simon Ward as the titular young Winston Churchill, and including the likes of such other obscure talents as Anne Bancroft (at the pinnacle of her talent and beauty), Robert Shaw, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, Edward Woodward, an unspeaking role by Jane Seymour, and directed by Richard Attenborough. Mayhap you've heard of some of them by now. Being a largely British affair with such nameless featured players, it slipped into and languished in unrecoverable oblivion for decades under the studied ignorance of 20-somethings running studio archives until some wit at Columbia/Sony decided to mine the vaults and let WalMart include it on this $1/movie five pack.
It's definitely worthwhile, worth the price of the DVD by itself if you like a decent flick, and if you can spare forgoing a cup of Starbuck's boiled concoctions just one time, you can catch them both, and three other bits of (well-)forgotten film fare for less than the bargain rates at Netflix.
Enjoy. Get them while they last.
And if anyone ever spots The Secret War Of Harry Frigg loose in the wild, give a holler.
You could tabulate the amount of time I spend watching broadcast or cable TV on-air most years with an egg timer sandglass. Even though (or more likely because of the fact that) I still work in the biz.
But seeing a few minutes of the Clinton News Network (a fully owned subsidiary of Time Warner/DNC) on in the break room last night, plus what I was hearing on the Radio Punditry channels to and from work, one thing is pretty damned obvious, the more so because I don't spend time absorbed in the Idiot Box:
Everybody, every last swinging Richard, is fangs out trying to take Trump down any and every way they can. In broad daylight, before a packed set of bleachers. By everybody, I mean the entirety of the dinosaur media, including Fox, every registered Democrat (but I repeat myself), and damned near every member of the pedigreed country club Republican mainstream, to include Hairpiece's own campaign staff.
Clearly, to the lot of them, Trump is the Viagra they crave in the political world, and his effrontery at getting his nomination in a walkaway has given them all hard-ons to last for months. Something just over three of them, at the moment.
Mind you, Trump isn't my guy, and probably never will be - I've reached the point this year that I may skip the entire damned process as an utterly pointless waste of my valuable time - but such a concerted, shameless, widespread effort to take down a political candidate by firing an entire junkyard at him from low altitude, to see what might hit and damage his candidacy, is simply unparalleled in modern US history. Were they to suborn Trump's own Secret Service detail into stuffing kilo-sized bundles of dope into Trump's coat pockets while he works a rope line, it would not, this election season, be beyond belief.
If Shrillary and the combined anchors at ABCNNBCBS all dressed in picador and matador costumes and came at Trump bodily with darts and swords it wouldn't be any less subtle than what's going on right now, and it instills in me the desire to rebel, with the decisiveness of Charlie Brown tackling Lucy, and kicking the unattainable football right up her ass just once, to teach the lesson. And if not to do so myself, to at least hope that enough voters in swing states do, just to thwart the schemes and plans of our self-appointed betters.
Any self-selected group of ass-clowns panting so hard to elect the Criminal rather than Hairpiece really have a deep-seated need for a flamethrower enema.
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