MORE SMOKER (ADDED SHOTS)!!!!!!!!

INT. CAVE HIDEOUT:

DR. EVIL (V.O.): "There's an easy way to get them to stop, Smoker. Tell us where the death ray is hidden."

DR. EVIL: "C'mon, man. What good is it to you?"

THE SMOKER: "Is that all you got? I've seen old ladies hit harder than that!"

MARGO: "Stop it! Stop it! Can't you see that he's telling the truth!? He doesn't know where it is!"

DR. EVIL: "Yes, I'm beginning to agree with you Miss Reed. Unfortunately that means we don't need your friend anymore."

DR. EVIL (V.O.): "Robot! Bring the girl to the car! We're leaving!"

Then, to the gang...

"Cut him loose, boys! We don't need him now!"

GANGSTER: "Cut him lo....? I'd rather cut him up! How come he gets to walk?"

DR. EVIL: "Better than that...he gets to dance...with BEULAH! Let her out!"

GANGSTERS: "B-B-Beulah!? Are you sure?"

GANGSTER: "Heh, heh. Yeah, he's sure. Let her out. Beulah just lo-o-oves to dance."

GANGSTERS ALL: (laughter).

DR. EVIL: "Good-bye, Smoker! You'll like Beulah. She's very affectionate. She likes nothing better than a good, long HUG! (Laughs)".

The thugs leave and lock the door behind them.

THE SMOKER: "I've gotta get outta here and get to a phone!"

THE SMOKER: "Wait a minute. What's that sound?"

THE SMOKER: "Hello! Anybody there!?"

THE SMOKER: "There it is again!"

SMOKER: "Who's out there!?"

He looks up.

NEXT: EPISODE 4: "BEULAH!"

Once again, thanks for stills from the Shadowplay blog, URL in the sidebar links.

PHILOSOPHY CORNER

I have a friend who has very unusual opinions about a lot of things, and who you might be interested in getting to know through these pages. I have to emphasize that the ideas expressed in this imaginary dialogue are his and not mine. I disagree with some of what's expressed here, but I like the spirit behind it. It's all so thought-provoking that I thought it deserved to see the light of day. See if you agree.

Oh, and this is not a rewrite of the somber piece that I said I wrote last night. That's on a different subject. Okay, here's the dialogue:

Eddie: "So Paul, let me get this straight. You're a monarchist?"

Paul: "Yeah...well, a constitutional monarchist. It's Biblical."

Eddie: "Ah, so you have a religious reason."

Paul: "Not entirely. Monarchy also makes sense because that's the only way to grow an aristocracy. We need aristocracy so that society can be guided by philosopher kings. We need them so we can have culture again."

Eddie: "But there have been so many evil aristocrats and crazy kings."

Paul: "Fewer than you might think. A lot of what we know about aristocrats was written by ideologues who hated them."

Eddie "What about the rights of man? Are you saying that a Pharaoh is entitled to own me?"

Paul: "Good Grief, no! Just the opposite! The monarch is one of the guarantees that you won't be owned and that your rights will be respected. The king has to answer to God for the stewardship of his people. The other guarantee is the Christian religion and the Judao-Christian tradition. Religion is a more trustworthy defender of your rights than politics."

Eddie: "But democracy allows us to get rid of people in power who abuse their office. It assures a degree of stability because at least 51% of the people get to be happy with the way things are."

Paul: "I think you're naive. The people in power try to set things up so they can't be voted out."

Eddie: "Aaaargh! There's not enough time to thrash this out, so let's move on. What kind of literature do you like?"

Paul: "Oh, Mallory's book on King Arthur, the one that the movie "Excalibur" was based on...some of Shakespeare. Those and 'Old Yeller.' "

Eddie: " 'Old Yeller!!!????' You mean the DOG story that Disney based a film on?"

Paul: "Yeah, that's it. It's a story about duty and the need to accept it with unshakable determination. It's also indirectly about honor."

Eddie: "Honor? Then you must like movies like the old black and white version of "The Four Feathers."

Paul: "Definitely, and the book is even better. The book makes a distinction between different kinds of honor, and reserves special praise for the man who realizes the downside of honor but pursues it anyway. The film's not half bad, though. There's a wonderful scene in it where the girl explains the necessity of honor, but it's not in the book."

Eddie: "Well, I guess you like "The Three Musketeers." That's all about honor."

Paul: "Mmmm...sort of, but it also ridicules it. At the end of the story the musketeers have nothing except their honor. D'Artagnon doesn't get the girl and they're all poor. Their only satisfaction is that they lived a life of honor and are respected by other men."

Eddie: "How about "Don Quixote?" I had to put it down about a third of the way through because the plot was so simplistic, and I hated the anti-heroic message."

Paul: "You should have persevered. The first half is anti heroic, anti-chivalry, but the second half says Don Quixote was right."

Eddie: "Wait a minute! That's not what I heard!...but...Aaaargh! We've gotta close this! See you later folks!"

Paul: "Bye, bye!"

I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M PUTTING UP DILBERT!

I wrote a long and serious article for this spot, but it came off so pompous that I'll need to do a rewrite lest I get stoned in the street. Putting that aside means I have nothing to post tonight except these hilarious Dilbert strips that my daughter just showed me. I'll put up something better tomorrow.

"THE SMOKER" RECAST

I thought I might revive "The Smoker," and I toyed with idea of making him a little like Dick Tracy.

I tried some Chester Gould-type villains.

It didn't look bad.

Man women make great villains.

I've always wanted a heroic chin. Now, thanks to Photoshop, I have one!

THEORY CORNER STORE...CLOSED!!!!!!

Holy Mackerel! The response to the Theory Corner store was a deafening yawn...the worst response to anything I posted in at least a year and a half! Well, the consumer has spoken, no doubt about it. Boy, I knew I was entering a niche market, but I didn't occur to me that the niche might be that small. Oh, well...live and learn.

I'll retire the store while I re-think it. Probably I'll take the advice of commenters who said I should have started by selling my own material first. In the meantime, I'll post as before.

THE THEORY CORNER STORE (PART II)

Greetings Theory Cornerites, and welcome to the Theory Corner Store! It's very rough, but I was getting impatient with my own procrastination, and I figured the sting of seeing it up and imperfect would spur me on to do it right.

So what have we got here? Well, it's a place to sell my own pamphlets, comics and posters, but it's more than that. It's also a place to find oddball items made by other people that blew my mind when I found out about them. I like to imagine that the young Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones, Pasteur, Captain Blood, Rod Scribner, Hugh Hefner, and Alfred Hitchcock would have enjoyed perusing these pages. If I do my job right, then just reading the ads should expand your mind, even if you don't buy anything.

I'll post a couple of ad pages just get the store started, then I'll move it all to a site (not up yet) that's just for that. I'm not abandoning Theory Corner to do this, it's just an interesting sideline.

I'll start with a couple of items that I won't see a cent of profit from. If you want to buy them, which I hope you do, you'll have to deal directly with the supplier, who doesn't even know that I exist. Both of these would make a great present for a significant other. Wait til you see the microscope!

Here's the first thing I'm hawking (above)... a poster showing St. Basil's cathedral in Moscow, arguably the most beautiful building on Earth. It was built in the 16th Century by Ivan the Terrible to commemorate Russia's conquest of Mongolia.

If there was ever a time when conquest was justified, this was it. Mongolia was a voracious barbarian empire which attempted to put an end to civilization wherever it found it. Mongolia, it has to be remembered, nearly conquered Europe and brought an end to the muslim golden age of science and scholarship. They had to be stopped, and crazy Ivan was the man to do it. Legend says that he was so moved by the beauty of the cathedral that he had the architect put to death, so he would never build another building to compete with it.

The black-rimmed version is the best poster of the subject I could find. It's a little steep at 42 bucks, but they've got us over a barrel. Sure, you can download a small picture off the net for free, but this is a case where size matters. St. Basil's is all about volume, and you can't get a sense of that from a post card.

It's also about color. There's a theory that buildings should always emphasize shape, but Basil's is inconceivable without the flamboyant color. It's magical, inspiring, storybook color that makes me want to paint every time I look at it.

Come to think of it, it makes me want to think as well. This is not a traditional building. Traditional Russian architecture put it's onion towers on top of blank, high-walled Romanesque-type walls. The architect here had the insight that the high walls just got in the way...so he jettisoned them, or made it look like he did.

And the triangular silhouette...maybe he was inspired by Norwegian stave churches (above). It's funny to think that the thought-provoking and beautiful St. Basil's shares the same square with the Kremlin, whose blank, brutal walls are the very definition of ugly.

Amazingly the Canon company put up a free color download of a paper model of the cathedral. I'm not really into paper models, but I wouldn't mind doing a quick and dirty Scotch tape version of a couple of the towers. It would give me a tactile feel for the shapes, and maybe a deeper understanding of how color and pattern influences how we experience volume. Anyway, here's the address:

http://www.imagekind.com/St-Basils-cathedral-at-Red-Square-Moscow_art?IMID=e5881cde-029b-41a2-90ae-95aa1888d638


A BINOCULAR MICROSCOPE FOR $60!!!!!

Now comes the microscope! I've blogged about stereo microscopes before, but I don't think I ever convinced anyone to buy one. Maybe that's because the price was so daunting...I bought mine 15 years ago for about about $200. No doubt that a lot of readers thought that was too much to spend for a hobby item that would only end up collecting dust in the closet. That's where mine was til this morning. I haven't used it in years.

You would think that admitting that would end the discussion, but it doesn't. The truth is that I got my money's worth in the first month of use. What I saw through the lenses changed forever the way I think about the natural world. No nature show on TV can substitute for seeing the real thing, say a live insect, seemingly as big and vivid as a chihuahua on your lap. The first time I looked I nearly jumped out of my seat. The insect on the stage looked like a raging monster out of a horror movie. Let me tell you, the world of the small is unbelievably brutal and violent, and the creatures who inhabit it are rigged for deadly combat.

The reason I bring this up again is that I discovered that Edmund Scientific (that's where I bought my scope) is selling a model for $60. Let that sink in! Sixty bucks!!!!! I haven't seen this model, so I don't know what they had to skimp on to sell it so cheap, but the company is well reputed for its optics, and I can't believe they would risk their reputation on something completely useless. At this price the scope strikes me as an unbelievable bargain, even if it does end up in the closet. You simply can't allow yourself to pass through life without getting a glimpse of the hostile and horrific world that's under your feet.

By the way, don't be put off by the 20X magnification, which seems paltry compared to what monocular microscopes offer. Actually 20X is ideal for most tasks, and the 3D effect only works at magnifications like this.

Here's Edmund's address:

http://scientificsonline.com/category.asp?start=16&c=421190

SEXY COSTUME POSTERS

Sad to say, I wasn't able to find anyone who was willing to sell these sexy Halloween costume posters. If anyone reading this knows where these can be had, will you let me know?