I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO UPDATE THIS SITE FOR MONTHS. MAYBE TONIGHT I CAN. I LIVE IN CHINA AND ALL OF OPERA.COM IS BEHIND THE GREAT FIREWALL, MAKING IT POSSIBLE FOR ME SOMETIMES TO VIEW THE SITE BUT SO FAR IMPOSSIBLE TO ADD EVEN A SIMPLE UPDATE SINCE MY ALST ONE.
I WENT AHEAD AND GOT A DOMAIN NAME AND THEREFORE I AM OUT FROM BEHIND THE FIREWALL (FOR NOW) AND I HOPE YOU WILL VISIT THE NEW SITE AND SUPPORT IT UNTIL CHINA MELLOWS OUT AND UNBLOCKS A PLETHORA OF BLOG SITES IT HAS UNDER ITS FOOT NOW. IT DOES NOT SEEM LIKE IT WILL HAPPEN ANY WAY SOON BRETHREN.
A concerned and observent reader notes the following:
If it was really blocked by China's great censorwall how could you write this? By vivalamuerte, # 28. September 2007, 00:21:48[/I] [/font] Bill writes:
I use a couple different proxy programs that are able to update blog sites. The fact is that not only is Opera.com blocked in the PRC but that the school I work and live at now has abysmal DSL service and the connection is non-existent or so slow I have to surrender the desire to work hard on the site (and a couple others I began). Sometimes I am lucky and can add a comment like this, but usually it will not let me. I cannot open necessary sites to download new pictures and research topics. I cannot even open images that are 50 or 100 KB in size. My connection freezes up and times out. A site like this depends on fresh images as well as researched information from places lke Wikipedia (which is also banned in the PRC).The truth is that Opera.com is completely banned in China along with a host of other blog and general net sites and the list grows all the time. But there are ways around that, but there seems no way around my poor connection since I cannot use an outside service on the school grounds. I need a special ID card that monitors my IP address constantly to use a public Internet Cafe and the card is only issued to Chinese Nationals. Some places have temp cards for foreigners, but not near me and there are less and less as the government here cracks down more and more on free speech and zombie movies. Ultimately the problems bloggers face here are not due to the poor connections or repressive Internet Cafe regualtions which are taking overly rather quickly, but to the need of the PRC to censor public opinion and free thought. My site is not political and is lowbrow actually, but individal sites are not blocked, rather entire hosts and blog types are banned in one fell swoop and kept on the other side of the infamous Greatfire Wall of China. Sigh. I may try to shift the theme to MSN My Spaces soon as it is sort of more reliable. Once I shift sites (after I have exhausted all means to continue here)I will announce itsaddress in a future post. Good and logical question.
No need to tell you who buxom Nancy's daddy was I hope? She grew up around stars like Elvis and the Rat Pack and all sorts of stellar talent and was signed in the early 60’s to Ol’ Blue Eye’s Reprise label. Success eluded her in the states but she gained a popularity in Europe and Japan that is still strong. She struggled for a hit in the USA and Reprise was about to drop her when things began to change for her after she met songwriter, arranger and producer Lee Hazelwood. Svengali and business whiz, Hazelwood redid not only her image into a chic mid-60’sLondon look but even convinced her to change her singing style and in 1965 she hit the American charts with the sexy and catchy These Boots are Made for Walking (a line from a western with her dad and Dean Martin). She went on to have a string of hits all arranged and led by Billy Strange. Another really big hit from this period is the duet with Hazelwood called Some Velvet Morning and it is a truly unique and slightly psychedelic little pop song. It sounds more like something from the Pink Floyd period with Syd Barrett than a top-40's radio hit from Frank Sinatra's little girl. THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKING [/font]She went to do the really good Bond theme for You Only Live Twice and it is one of the better Bond scores in my humble opinion, but I have hardly seen any of the Bond movies since Live and Let Die. She did some acting during the late 60s and starred along side her pal Elvis in Speedway. She was only singer to have a song appear on an Elvis album while the King was still alive. She would go onto to typify the look and sound of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Her career continued on and she still tours and performs, and when she was 54 she posed for Playboy and looked pretty good in a still innocent sort of way. She was sexy but in a safe and sweet way. The picture I included of her gazing at her own reflection in her underwear would be utterly different if it were Madonna. A good fan site based out of the UK is: http://www.movinwithnancy.fsnet.co.uk/contents.htm[/font] Born Thomas Jones Woodward, who later under advise from manager Gordon Mills changed his name to Tom Jones, was born in Wales and had a rough time getting his raunchy, sexy voice heard over the British airwaves in his early career. I remember watching the This Is Tom Jones TV show when I was a wee lad with my mom and he had all these strange stars from the time like Joel Gray and Petula Clark on there. He always opened with his break though hot song It’s Not Unusual and the gals in the audience just went nuts. In the late 60’s he recorded less and performed more and his shows in Las Vegas were famous for having hotel keys and panties thrown up on the stage. He made friends with Elvis while there and the friendship lasted until the King’s death. WHAT'S NEW PUSSY CAT? [/font] Like Nancy Sinatra he also did a great Bond score for Thunderball. It is my 2nd favotite Bond score after You Only Live Twice. There is no doubt that Jone’s act was head of its time in the sexual tension department, but he retained some style and class in his tuxedo’s and short curly hair style. I recall reading about his studio and TV show guitarist Jim Sullivan. Seems there were two Jims in the mid-sixties doing all the studio work in London really, Big Jim Sullivan and another chap nick named Little Jim to distinguish the two. Little Jimmy Page would give up the safe world of the studio and join The Yardbirds and later form Led Zeppelin. Page was supposed to have sat in some Tom Jones sessions and maybe did some tracks for Its Not Unusual but I am not sure how accurate this is. Jone’s charisma is still alive and in 2000 released the album Reload, and it became the biggest seller of his career to date.
A CRITICAL BULLETIN FROM THE STAFF OF THE URANIUM CAFE [/font] There have not been many new updates added to the Café in a while and some posted there now have been left unfinished. Why you may be wondering? Well we here at the home office have been busy beginning a new project over at Rotten Tomatoes we call The Son of The Uranium Café. It has taken some time to get the project's look and feel up to our standards. As well it has been difficult getting the feel of how the site works and what is able to be done and what cannot be done. The purpose of the new site is to focus on movie reviews exclusively and for our chief reviewer to hone up his skills in a site that will have no other purposes or distractions than commenting on films. The Café is a multi-themed site and as we have said before the problem lies not with what to put in but what to leave out.
There has been talk as well around the office lately of a philosophy based site. The word is that a site has been activated but that the look is too generic for our philosophy section to gain inspiration from. There is some development in the works however and that project may get off the ground here shortly. Yes, some of us here at the staff are concerned with ontologial and existential matters as well as 50 foot radioactive insects
While the Café has birthed a new movie site we will continue to post movie reviews here as well. The Café affords more space and graphic capabilities than what is possible at Rotten Tomatoes and reviews will be shared and linked between the two sites. So while things here are slow do not fear there is more to come in no time. It is also necessary for our archive department to go back several pages, even to the 1st page it seems, and finish posts and make corrections or adjustments in the graphics. It was discovered that the essay on Ambient Music was never completed back when we were doing extensive posting on Robert Fripp. There are other glitches that need tending to and they will be taken care of and we apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you or for increases in psycotropic medications. We hope we are not responsible for the sharp rise in group suicides in Japan though some of the data coming in from our Tokyo office seems to point towards that awful conclusion. Before another group of distraught school kids in Nagoya hurl themselves in front of a speeding subway train clutching their copies of The Suicide Manual we will get the Café up and running again. You have our word. The link to our new movie related site at Rotten Tomatoes is: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/journal_view.php?journalid=428636
YOU GIRLS A BUNCH OF NUDISTS OR YOU JUST SHORT OF CLOTHES [/font] I was finally able to locate a decent quality trailer for Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! on youtube.com. I had a really nice one posted much earlier and the video was removed for some reason and I have held out until another good one came along. On a Russ Meyer note I picked up a copy of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls here in Beijing, along with Jess Franco’s Venus in Furs on the same day, and you can expect comments on them soon. Still one of the great cult classics of all time and Meyer’s best film by far. It is mythic in it rendering and the scenes are like b/w comic book panels with tough hitting comic book dialog that never ceases to titillate and tantalize . The acting and production is amazing(Meyer's directed, edited and photographed it all) and while the movie is utterly unbelievable and even absurd on most levels it never stops drawing you into its surreal and dangerous world. I managed to down load a copy from online. Very good quality really. Amazingly this movie bombed at the box office and did much worse than some of Meyer’s more inferior works. Maybe the mid-sixties was not ready for these tough talking and tougher acting gogo dancers who broke the necks of nerdy hotrod racing wannabes and threw switchblades into each other’s backs during arguments. In any case as time and social attitudes changed the movies became the hit it should have been when it was released. A last note is about the poster and publicity stills for this film. Who is this guy’s neck she is always breaking in the stills and posters, because is not the same guy in the movie. It is sort of weird really. The guy in the film is a wuss in plaid shorts who got in one good blow to Varla’s gut before she rearranged his spinal cord for him. A clip of the neck break scene in posted somewhere in the Café for your viewing pleasure.
Anyone who ever glanced at an old girlie magazine from the 60’s or 70’s (and 50’s too but I never saw any of those) had to have seen the cartoons of Bill Ward at one time or another. There is a new collection out of his work from Seattle’s Fantagraphic Books. I found some samples of his earlier work with Torchy and then a later character called Pussycat. The inks on the Pussycat comic book panels is by Bill Everette and his pens and brush washes enhanch Ward’s pencils beautifully. Ward had a classic near pin-up style of illustrating glamour girls that degenerated, in my opinion, into a crude, hurried style of blatant pornography by the 70’s. In later works the women’s boobs were so exaggerated as to be beyond belief. The men were always weak and powerless towards the physical charms of Ward’s women. He did a lot of work in bondage and S&M as well but none of the samples I found were suitable for the Café. They were simply hardcore. I did not care for where his work went later simply because I liked his early work so much and the change was pronounced and probably done for nothing other than money. His later stuff is not in anyway bad as far as porno cartoons go, what do you expect, but his early work, like Torchy, showed real talent.
Also included here at the bottom are some of his great war propaganda cartoons. I know we are supposed to be ashamed of this stuff as Americans but something about confusing Imperial-psycho-Japanese soldiers with monkeys or seeing a couple Nazis about to get their swastikas splattered just makes me snicker. [/align] THE WAR CARTOONS OF BILL WARD. SHOOT THE ONE'S WITHOUT TAILS, HAHA, THAT IS GREAT!
I cannot see the insides of these mags and will base my assumption on boyhood memory that the contents were probably mostly black and white on a pulpy paper similar to comic book paper. There may have been a few pages stuck in the middle in color that featured the cover girl or some other nubile tart. The stories were men’s stories of the time: detective tales, how to be a better lover, exposes into the world of crime or drugged up hippies and such. Scattered through the mag were really cool advertisements for all sorts of strange things and I am researching the net trying to find good scans of some of these ad pages. It is not easy. But I will not give up.
I guess these gals are not as smolderingly perfect as the vixens that grace contemporary erotica (aka porn) but there is some quality I really find alluring about them. They are not skinny nor do they look like meth or heroin addicts. More the gin and tonic type with some barbiturates once in a while for a socially acceptable nod time. I really like the first picture of the girl on the European looking sports car. What a great magazine title: Scamp. It is simply a good photograph and she looks really coquettish and demure in a naughty fashion. And I want to read that article about how to get flabby without really trying. In fact, I think I did read it!
The next girl looks a little more randy and those are some bodacious eye brows she has contrasting that questionably natural blonde hair. But no matter what is up with her, that is some ultra-sexy outfit she has on and she fills it out just fine. I wonder what that is called? A corset or what? She just looks too sassy for me though. Intimidating as hell.
The next two books do not even have cover teasers to lure you into their pages with promises of exciting reading material. I like the design on these books though. I am sure zebra skin is going to make a come back as a sofa pattern for bachelor's apartments again pretty soon. I really dig that jazzy font for Vivid Tales. That girl is a real down to earth party girl I think. The kind your mother would like. Well, that my mother would like anyway.
All the Adam magazines had these vibrant covers with contrasting lines of color and the models were more times than not in some outfit that made it all vibrate and shake more, like some Victor Wassily painting. I have more Adam covers in albums in my Photos section if you are curious. And why wouldn’t you be? You have to be a real man to be in the Café anyway. So go on, take a look. You know you want to.
My Opera
