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The Godfather Behind the Scenes
That was fun to watch.
James Caan said just before they shot his death scene, the stunt
men
told him nobody had ever worn that many explosive gel
packs before.
That's gotta be a creepy thing to hear 30 seconds before you
hear, "Action!"
There were lots of good parts, but I had two favorites:
- Robert DeNiro's screen test to play Michael, instead of young
Vito.
- Pacino and Keaton, rehearsing their lines, over and over.
Did you know Martin Sheen read for Michael's roll, too?
Coppolla went on to use Sheen in Apocalypse, instead.
Click Here for a review by a pro.
Too bad I didn't catch it in time to post a VCR Alert - it was damn good.
I bought unleaded regular in K-Drag today for $1.14
There was never an energy crisis - it was just a GREED
crisis by
the Oil Man in Chief and his Vice Oil Man, that's all it ever
was.
The minute Jeffords bolted and broke Smirky's power monopoly,
the price of energy fell.
The greedy Republican whores would never investigate price gouging
by BIG OIL,
because they don't give a damn about the average family trying
to stretch their budget.
The greedy Republicans want more millions from BIG OIL,
so they let BIG OIL rape
drivers and Californians until the Democrats accidentally backed
their way into power.
Hey, BIG OIL, kiss my ass.
And Smirky, you can kiss it, too.
You stole this election so you could rape us.
And the Democrats are like some meek mother who KNOWS her husband
is having
sex with their pre-teen daughters, but doesn't want to raise
her voice or rock the boat
...because it might make Daddy mad.
Has
anybody seen my old friend, the Democratic Party?
Can
you tell me where they've gone?
They
freed a lot of people, but then
I
turned around, and they were gone.
From: britpop@email.msn.com
Subject: Careful, there
Bartcop,
That was quite a little article regarding racism
and I'll bet you're up to your eyeballs
in all sorts of responses (knowing how easily
offended everyone is).
I think Lenny Bruce made some wonderful points
regarding the ridiculousness of words
and the over-importance we place upon certain
words. But as a friend and fan, I would
caution you about the casual use of certain words.
Nigger is a word that is used commonly,
by both black and white folks, in anger and in
friendship, but it is a powerful word.
Years ago, I was drinking with some friends of
mine who are black and one called another nigger.
They laughed as they suddenly remembered there
was a white guy present. One of my friends
mentioned that he had never once heard me use
that word. I told him that he never would.
They laughed but then turned serious. They assured
me that they knew I was a friend and said it was
OK for me to use the word, and they tried to
get me to say it. But I just couldn't. I've seen that word
used too many times, by too many people and heard
the pure, smoldering hatred in its intonation.
It is a word that is used by ignorant people
to give shape to their hatred.
A stupid hatred of a people who look different
than they do.
Now, I am not a gentleman. I have been known
to spout off a stream of characterizations that would
make Charles Manson blush, but that is a word
I will not use. Because such stigma has been associated
with it, because of the deeds that have been
undertaken while using it, because it so personifies that hatred,
it may be a word that just should not be used
by white people.
Maybe that sounds silly, but words are powerful
things.
With them we can inspire our fellow man to make
of himself something closer to divine, or send him off
to do the work of hell. I think maybe we should
treat our words as the powerful weapons they often are,
and choose them wisely.
Just my thoughts on the subject.
I wish you the best.
Tim
Tim, good points.
It reminded me of an incident back at the dorm in college.
A group of blacks and whites were playing poker and drinking.
They were playing "High Chicago" which means it was regular 7-card stud
except
whoever had the lowest spade in the whole got half the pot. It was
a way to keep
people from folding too soon, thereby building up bigger pots.
Towards the end of one hand, the fella with the best hand declared his
win and said,
"So who has the little nigger in the whole?"
One of the black fellas in the game was Vandle Bland - that was his
name.
He grabbed a bottle of beer by the neck, broke it on the counter and
put the broken end
up to the neck of the offender and asked him if he'd care to repeat
what he just said.
He declined.
But that's an example of the power of that word, at least back in the early seventies.
Last thing?
(We will eventually have to move on...)
The "N" word is a lot like a curse word, or maybe it is a curse
word.
Sometimes, if a guy runs into an old friend who you'd lost track of,
he might say,
"Hey, you old son of a bitch, how are you?"
and mean it with affection.
That's how men talk.
But if some burly bozo steps on your toe at the K-Mart and you say,
"You clumsy son of a bitch! Watch where
you're walking," that's not affection.
That's an invitation to a dance - at least in Oklahoma it is.
The final episode of M*A*S*H...
All this talk of Word War II made me think of things that were left out.
Such as: The heroes of Korea and Vietnam were no less brave
than the heroes of Word War II.
When you get drafted, they don't ask you if you think the current
war is a noble effort.
If you lost an arm in Korea or a leg in Vietnam, you deserve
as much respect as anyone from any war.
And it wasn't all arms and legs that were lost.
Remember the final episode of M*A*S*H?
Hawkeye talked a Korean woman into putting her hand over the mouth
of her crying infant so they
wouldn't be caught and killed by the North Korean soldiers.
In the story, the baby suffocated.
It was sacrificed to save the lives of the others. Unable
to cope with that reality, Hawkeye erected walls in
his mind to keep that fact buried. Like a victim of child
abuse, he created a separate reality, and in that reality,
the woman was holding a chicken in her lap and he asked her to
stop the chicken from clucking.
Walking around in a daze, he knew he was bothered by something,
but didn't know what.
Finally, Sidney the Shrink put him under hypnosis and made him
remember - it was a baby.
When he realized he was responsible (in a way) for that baby's
death, he lost his sense of humor.
It was his sense of humor that allowed him to cope with the madness,
the bodies and the death.
The producers didn't want him to leave the war intact, and he
damn sure didn't.
But that was just a television show (a damn good one).
That makes we wonder how many tens of thousands of Americans came
back from Europe
or the Pacific or Korea or Vietnam having lost a piece of their
mind. If you know a veteran
who doesn't want to talk about it, I'll bet there's a damn good
reason why.
Next time you have a chance, do something nice for a veteran.
Bush
Under Strain, a Heartbeat Away
by Robert Scheer
Excerpt:
Hopefully it's true that the extensive
medical intervention provided free of charge by
the socialized
medical system available only to the White House and Congress can
keep the vice president's permanently damaged
heart pumping.
When Bill and Hillary tried to give everyone in America health
care, all the GOP
screamed "socialism, socialism, socialism,"
until the chicken-shit Democrats caved in
and abandoned their president and lost both houses of congress
in a landslide in 1994.
Even if they were going to lose anyway (not the case) the smart
move for the Democrats
would've been to show some loyalty to their president and their
party and their constituents
...but nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
They ran like 8-year old girls being chased by a boy with a frog.
Oh, the gelding Democrats disgust me...
From: dogfolks@cape.com
Subject: Bush's little Bastard
Please......Tell us more!
Anne
Anne, there's not much more to tell.
I'm sure it's buried in the archives of Salon.com,
it was their story.
They were digging into why Smirky had to change his Texas drivers license
number.
Surely, it had to do with his alcohol addiction and his drunk driving
arrests, but while
they were looking, they found a social security number issued to a
George W. Bush Jr,
who was born (I think - I need a staff) in 1974.
When the boy was five, his number was "retired."
It's possible the boy died (let's not go there - yet) but more likely
the mother re-married
and the new husband legally adopted the child, so to help hide proof
that Smirk was
screwing every women who liked a man from a big-money family, they
assigned the kid
a new social security number.
Remember, I'm never a good source for details and facts, but swear to
Koresh, this was a
big story about 18 months ago. Stories like this convinced me that
Smirk would never be the
Republican nominee, but I had no idea the wolves of the press would
turn into malleable sheep
and follow Karl Rove's orders to not write anything negative
about the Boy King.
To this day, if Clinton drops a fork the healine reads,
"Clinton attacks waitress with knife,"
then Maureen Dowd writes a story about how the poor waitress was almost
murdered,
then Hannity and Stooge do a week on "How
Clinton gets away with it," then the vulgar Pigboy
will do fifteen hours on "I told you he was
a homicidal maniac," while Barbara Olson (R-Fries) and
Ann Coulter (R-Fries) write best-selling books on the psychological
shortcomings of our last elected president,
all the time the Democrats are cowering in fear, crying
"We're sorry we nominated a killer."
...meanwhile the Boy King's crimes and failures are dutifully covered up by the whore press.
If ONLY we had a free press in this country.
Let's not forget just a few days ago, the Associated Press was trumpeting
the triumphant
return of the Vice Oil Man when he was still alseep in his goddamn
bed.
The press are bought-and-paid for whores, and they flat-out refuse to print the truth.
WHAT
THE FREE MARKET CAN BEAR
Deregulation And The Big Lie Policy
by RB Ham
Excerpt:
Remember, Smirk standing up there, looking
into the eyes of America and warning sternly:
"We are in the dire clutches of an Energy
Crisis! We need to drill and burn more!
We'll lower your taxes so you can pay
my larcenous buddies in the Oil Biz!"
(okay, maybe he didn't say that exactly.)
As prices spiralled out of control in California,
a Democratic bastion. Everywhere except
in downtown L.A.
You see, L.A. has a regulated market.
No rolling blackouts. No massive swings in prices.
The people are happy, wondering, "What
energy crisis?"
From: egad@nwinfo.net
Subject: Happy 4th of July
Hey Bartcop
Happy 4th of July
I stewed all day about that guy who doesn't want
you to post stuff about WWII.
That guy gives you liberals a bad name.
I hate to break this to his bleeding heart, but
war is glorious.
Look up "glory" in Websters dictionary, and the
first thing it says is "great honor and admiration".
Those guys died by the thousands so he could
have his dumb ass opinion.
What does he think was going on back then?
Does he think Churchill and Roosevelt and Stalin,
and Mussolini, Hitler, and Hirohito
were sitting around a local pub discussing philosophy?
This was a battle for survival for Koreshsakes.
Koreshchrist! Those men knew what they had to do, and they did it.
Bartcop, I have to respectfuly disagree with you.
If Hitler had got what he wanted,
we wouldn't be speaking German; Some strangers
would be speaking German on our property,
because our grandparents and parents would have
been exterminated.
Thats what that war was about. And thats
damn well worth remembering.
Hell, we don't spend nearly the time we should
remembering what those guys did.
If you want to give a small corner of your cyberspace
to pay tribute, I say God bless you.
Thomas Jameson
Thomas, you're probably right.
I got several e-mails saying we wouldn't be speaking anything
if we'd lost that war,
that Hitler was working on the atomic bomb and he wouldn't have been
nice with it.
Like I said, those World War II heroes pulled us out of the burning
building.
Can't forget that...
Against
the law
Two new books make it clear that the Supreme Court's notorious
Bush vs. Gore ruling
wasn't as bad as it seemed at the time. It was worse.
Then
Then get sick...
July Fourth Cornfest
We did the corn right yesterday.
I got the freshest hour-old corn they had (Kandy Korn strain)
and peeled back the husks.
I pulled out all the "silk" and washed the ear really good, then
soaked it in water and re-wrapped
the husks around 'em and threw it on the Bart-grill with the
burgers and Lorena's peppers.
Thinking I was clever, I left the big "handles" on the corn, which
made them about 15 inches
in length, and that proved to be a problem when I tried to close
the lid on the grill to kill the
flames and let the hickory chunks do their smoking magic. That
was a mistake.
Did I mention there was some tequila involved?
Oh, well, adapt and overcome, I always say.
So I had to put the corn directly on the hot lava rocks.
When the burgers were done, I grabbed the corn by the handles
and it was time to eat!
The burgers were great, but the corn was perfectamente.
I coated the corn with the extra creamy, lightly salted, fine,
luxury butter and it was Heaven.
So we watched The Godfather while scarfing down this fine
food, chasing it with tiny sips
of the Miracle at Canaan known as Chinaco Anejo.
I, perhaps, got a little aggressive with the corn eating.
Normally, I eat like an adult, but Chinaco and
fresh corn make me vociferous.
Knowing this could happen, I wore one of my red workout shirts
as a bib.
When I was done, I looked like Sonny on the Causeway.
It was a fine, fine meal.
The Relaxation
Response
by Maureen Dowd - she hates everybody
Excerpt:
George W. Bush got to be president in large
part because he seemed more fun and natural than Android Al.
And now presidential aides and Republican
lawmakers want W. to unwind, just as Karenna Gore and
Naomi Wolf did with their Beta Bore, when
they swaddled him in earth-tone casuals.
Relaxing has always been a leitmotif
with presidents, of course. The two great naturals of modern times
were J.F.K. and Bill Clinton. L.B.J. stewed
over how to be cooler on TV, and Nixon never got past
those flop sweats and wingtips on the beach.
But never has a president who seemed so
laid back taking office had such a hard time recapturing that mojo in office.
He used to be casual in scripted settings.
Now he's scripted in casual settings.
Sent in by: Jennifer Daniels
In her memoirs, Barbara Bush described one
of those most embarrassing moments that inevitably occur,
even on the most carefully advanced of
foreign trips. Along with her husband, then the Vice President,
Mrs. Bush was lunching with Emperor Hirohito
at Tokyo's Imperial Palace.
Sitting next to the Emperor, Mrs. Bush
found the conversation an uphill task.
To all her efforts at verbal engagement,
the Emperor would smile and say "Yes" or "No,"
with an occasional "Thank You" tossed in
for good measure.
Looking around her elegant surroundings,
she complimented Hirohito on his official residence.
"Thank you," he said.
"Is it new?" pressed Mrs. Bush.
"Yes."
"Was the old palace just so old that
it was falling down?" asked Mrs. Bush.
In his most charming, yet regal, matter,
Hirohito replied,
"No, I'm afraid that you bombed it."
...and then, her husband blew chunks on the guy.
And do you remember Bernie Shaw, CNN's biggest idiot (no small
feat) heard a RUMOR
that Bush DIED shortly after throwing up on the Emporer, so pants-wetting
Bernie runs to the
nearest camera and starts to tell the entire world that President
Bush was dead when some guy
came running into the newsroon (I saw this myself) screaming,
"No, STOP! STOP!"
Bernie the Bonehead was three seconds away from having a bad first paragraph in his obit.
"Bernie Shaw, the earger-beaver who tried to
scoop the other networks with the false news
that their president was dead, died
today of complications from a long bout with syphillis."
Want
to see Smirky's self-serving bio?
He used money he stole from you and me to print this horseshit.
Damn, it's not working, and I spent an hour on it.
Smirky's boys must've put some html bomb in there.
When you click to go to bartcop.com/president.htm
it says "js/navbar.js not found."
How can I get past that?
I never asked it to go to ja/navbar.js but that's where
it goes when you click on bartcop.com/president.htm
I need a tech wizard on my staff,
...but first I need a staff.
From: our new friend Peter Sliman
Subject: FISHER PRICE VOTING BOOTH
What it shows me is not that the vote was
subverted, there is no proof of that and the
illustration doesn't prove that. What
it illustrates to me is that the FLA voters would
not be able to WHINE about not voting
correctly with a booth set up this way.
Pete the Republican
Pete, you are wrong, let me count the ways:
First, there's a thing called the "over vote."
That's what they called the circumstance when a voter saw Gore's
name second,
then they punched the second circle, thinking they were voting
for Gore.
When they realized that second hole, stupidly, was for Buchanan,
they tried to erase the hole,
which rarely works, so then they took their pencil and wrote
"I meant to vote for Gore," on the ballot.
All those were thrown out, and there were thousands of
those.
Second, you're saying thousands of retired Jews wanted to vote
for Buchanan,
a man who gave some of his speeches in German with SS banners
behind him?
Why would the retired Jews want to vote for a representative
of the Fourth Reich?
Maybe you spent a little too much time in the sun yesterday.
Who are the Top Ten Conservative Idiots this week?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/top10/index.html
Rock
says his comedy will run out
WASHINGTON (AP) - Chris Rock is worried
about the day when his jokes will run out.
"Nobody's here to stay," the 35-year-old
comedian told AP Radio.
"What's the last hit Michael Jackson
had?"
Rock says he's been "washed up" before
- and could end up that way again.
"I'll be around. Because of my body
of work I guess I'll probably
be famous on some level for the
rest of the life," he said.
"But will I always be able to get a
movie green lit? Will I always sell out concerts? I don't know."
I fully realize I'm no Chris Rock, but I identify with that paranoia.
Every morning when I erase yesterday's edition and stare at that
blank screen,
I think, "I've got nothing - what will I put on the
page today?"
And then I read some mail, run thru my 3x5 cards, read my Voltai
news listen to some Laura the Unloved
and the vulgar Pigboy and most days, something happens
to fill up 40-50K of space on that blank page,
but there's that definite panic when you realize there's nothing
to start from.
Remember a while back when we did "How
will bartcop.com end?"
That turned into a joke, but it was written in a real panic.
How will it end?
On one level, this page is a six-year audition for somebody to
hire me.
I'm not saying I'm Joe Comedy, but sometimes I turn on the TV
and I see such talentless crap,
I can't help but think I could add some sparkle to some half-assed,
half-baked, bullshit NBC sitcom
that they dumped between Friends and Will and Grace
to use as mortar.
What'd really be nice would be a gig writing for SNL or Dennis
Miller.
Koresh knows he needs some balance on his show.
At some point, I'll either get an offer from somebody with money
or I'll just burn out
and stare at the counter that never moves - boy, won't that
be sad.
Nothing is worse than a funnyboy who's not funny.
But I guess it feels good knowing the King of Comedy has doubts,
too.
...wait, ...why am I telling you this? (homage to Harvey Korman)
World
War II facts
by Dee Luigi
Excerpt:
You're my favorite kind of American:
But it looks like you've absorbed some
pretty bad propaganda here.
I'll take it point for point.
From: berkeley@connected.net.nz
Subject: Viet Nam July 4th 1996
Dear Bartcop,
The Fourth passed by uneventfully as usual this
year in New Zealand...but, five years ago
I was in Hanoi (where we were building a five
star hotel 'in the belly of the beast') celebrating
America's Independence Day among 400 raucous
ex-pats and locals, complete with hot dogs
and mustard, real hamburgers, all of the iced
Schlitz you could drink, non-stop rock bands..the works
(sparklers only...no aerial bombardment please).
It was one of the most surreal evenings of my
life. I spoke briefly with the then just-arrived ambassador,
Pete Petersen, who had spent his five years as
a POW not four hundred meters from where we stood.
I asked him if this was as bizarre a spectacle
to him as it was to me, and whether he, in his wildest hallucinations
in captivity, ever imagined anything like this.
He agreed it was unbelievably weird and no, he was too busy trying
to stay alive to give too much thought as to
how amazing one's life might become 30 years later.
Living and working in Viet Nam for a year and
a half was a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Thirty years earlier as a student, and a pre-VN
war vet (US 7th Army Aviation),
we were trying to stop the trains and tie up
the draft in Oakland......a different world ago.
Love your site. Been reading daily for a
year.
Keep it up before they shut you down.
Yours, fairly pessimistically
Pete Sturtevant (B.Arch U.of Cal., '68)
Auckland
Pete, good stuff.
You've made me want to hear more.
Tell me more about Vietnam, or Oakland or whatever.
How'd you end up in New Zealand?
So I'm in the Hallmark
shop, and I'm looking around, and it hits me:
They just don't have any cards that say, "Sorry
to hear about your arrest."
Ba-DUM-dum.
If Hallmark made such
a card, I'd have mailed it to my friend Paula Poundstone.
Other times, other moments, just the idea of
an arrest-sympathy greeting card would have made her laugh.
Laughter is Paula's
line of work. If you didn't know it before last week, you must know it
by now,
what with the on-the-hour news flashes, "Stand-up
comedian arrested on child molesting charges," video
from news helicopters over her house, and the
National Enquirer ready to pay for the story of anyone
who's so much as bagged her groceries.
You can hardly expect
that she's been doing much laughing since she was arrested a week ago.
Really, who would? Pretty much all I've seen
from her is that queasy smile you get when you're nervous
and you're afraid you'll lose it and start bawling,
like at a funeral.
That's what all of her
friends were doing in court with her on Tuesday: laughing to keep from
bawling.
There we sat, in Department S in the Santa Monica
courthouse, waiting for her not-guilty plea, trying,
like Shakespeare, like Woody Allen, to mine that
thin vein of "comic" buried somewhere in "tragicomic."
Can you believe it? This
court accepts MasterCard and Visa, but not American Express?
This is Santa Monica! In Santa Monica, even the
winos accept American Express!
I hear she murdered
Jack Lemmon.
I hear she murdered
Jack Lemmon AND Carroll O'Connor.
I hear she's wanted
for breaking up Julia Roberts and Benjamin Bratt.
I didn't say it was
funny. I said we were trying.
There is only one way
this could possibly be true: that it really, absolutely happened.
But there are so many,
many ways for it not to be true. Even if I didn't know Paula,
I've been in the newspaper biz long enough to
know that.
Details of the four felony
counts--child endangerment and lewd acts with a girl under 14--are still
sealed away.
Her three adopted kids and two foster kids, the
latest of so many she has cared for, have been taken away.
She's been ordered not to contact them--not a
phone call, not a Hallmark card. I think that's been harder on her
than court, or jail, or the arrest itself, the
Santa Monica P.D. leaping over a wall like a SWAT team, snatching the
phone out of her hand and slamming it down and
saying in bad Jack Webb-speak, "It's over."
What brought this on?
Who said what, about whom, and why?
Spite? Someone
looking for a buck? Revenge? For what?
If we learned anything
from the child-molestation hysteria of the 1980s, starting right here with
the McMartin
Preschool case, it is that things that happen
between a child and an adult--from a hug to a diaper check--can be
misinterpreted. Sometimes it happens in all innocence,
sometimes on purpose, by children and grown-ups alike.
When that does, well, then, things can get ugly.
So ugly that a while back, a Tennessee grandfather who saw a
3-year-old toddling alone along a busy road simply
followed the boy, blocking traffic, until a woman picked him up.
He was too afraid of being accused of committing
some crime to commit a good deed.
Outside the courthouse,
in the scrum of her friends and their children, Paula hugged everyone fleetingly.
I almost whispered that dumb Dan Rather sign-off,
"Courage," to her, but I was afraid she would laugh,
and that might look bad on TV.
I've been to Paula's
house perhaps a dozen times, for grown-up "ballot parties" before elections,
and for kids' parties, pingpong and M&Ms
and guacamole, kids shrieking in the playhouse and down the slide.
The party celebrating the adoption of her third
child was so big she held it at the local school, with plate-spinners
and a pony ride.
That was last November.
Surely the adoption would not have gone through if anything was remotely
amiss.
What happened in those months since, what changed,
to bring this about?
I've seen Paula with
the kids--some of them with problems that no one else wanted to take on,
not even
their own parents. If they don't have a patron
saint for patience, I'd nominate Paula.
I'll bet that someone
will look at her house--the toys, the games, the whole place utterly given
over to her
kids' needs--and twist it into the witch's gingerbread
house built just to lure Hansel and Gretel.
The misanthropes say
no good deed goes unpunished.
If we keep clipping the wings off our better
angels, I'll have to start believing it.
Read the Previous Issue
It had everything.
Copyright © 2001,
bartcop.com
Thanks for the fumble, Dude.
