Archive for the 'Pop Culture' Category
February 2nd, 2012 by Wil
Wealthy Fla. man adopts adult girlfriend as his daughter.
A wealthy polo club owner in Florida has legally adopted his longtime adult girlfriend as his daughter in a legal maneuver that critics say is an attempt to shield his assets ahead of a civil lawsuit over a deadly car crash, The Palm Beach Post reports.
Goodman, founder of the International Polo Club Palm Beach, legally adopted Laruso Hutchins, 42, as his daughter on Oct. 13 in Miami-Dade County, according to court documents, the Post reports.
…
In a previous ruling, Kelley said a trust set up for Goodman’s two minor children could not be considered as part of his financial worth if a jury awarded damages to the Wilsons. According to the adoption papers, Hutchins is immediately entitled to at least a third of the trust’s assets as his legal daughter since she is over the age of 35, the Post reports.
On the down side, he can now be arrested for molestation if he has sex with her.
January 29th, 2012 by Wil
As a kid, I was a big fan of Marvel Comics, as any self respecting kid should be. In those days, Bill Mantlo was a writer for a number of Marvel titles; he was perhaps best known as the creative force behind a toy-based comic series called The Micronauts drawn by my favorite comic artist, Mike Golden. (Mantlo also did some work on Spider-Man, The Hulk, ROM, Howard the Duck and an obscure favorite of mine, The Human Fly.) I was nosing around on the web (not looking at porn) and came across this report on the very tragic turn Mantlo’s life has taken. He left comics, became a lawyer (that’s not the tragic part) and suffered a devastating brain injury in a hit and run accident. He now sounds barely functional and his brother has had a aggravating battle with insurance companies while trying to maintain Bill’s health. Sad stuff.
Bill is gaunt, almost skeletally so. His skin is pale and pasty, the product of getting very little time outside. His short hair is lank and unwashed. His teeth are yellow and have not been properly cleaned in some time. He turns 60 on Nov. 9, 2011, but he looks more like 80.
The victim of a closed-head brain injury from nearly 20 years before, Bill cannot move from his wheelchair to his bed without help, nor can he feed himself, go to the bathroom or conduct any other kind of normal physical activity unaided. He can move his arms, but the fine motor control in his hands is very poor. He needs someone else to put his glasses on for him, and when he wants to take them off, he can only drag his hands across his face and let the glasses clatter to the floor.
A nice appendage to the article is this collection of comic covers of some of Mantlo’s work. It really reminds me how much I enjoyed comics back in the day.
January 27th, 2012 by Wil
One thing that has always interested me is the fact that movie directors, when pontificating on their work, will often discuss lesser characters, like the main villian’s third henchman, as if a lot of thought went into these characters. A director might say something like, “It was important to understand the motivation for Lightning Soldier Number 3. What was his motivation? I came up with a back story that he had been raised in a southern ghetto without a father figure and his life of crime had come naturally. I think [actor] Thomas Dobswell did and excellent job of bringing this to life in his 4.3 seconds of screen time.”
For a long time I was baffled by this. And, as a fiction writer, I was intimidated. Did I need to be developing a deep sense of character for my accessory players, many of whom come across as rather one dimensional anyway? Lately, I think the answer is no. Movie directors (and writers) are just being pretentious fuckwads on this subject.
November 17th, 2011 by Wil
The New York Daily News reports that one of the last surviving actors to play a munchkin in “The Wizard Of Oz” has died.
The 4-foot-5 Slover died of cardiopulmonary arrest Tuesday afternoon in a central Georgia hospital, said Laurens County Deputy Coroner Nathan Stanley. According to friends, as recently as last weekend, Slover appeared at events in the suburban Chicago area.
Slover was best known for playing the lead trumpeter in the Munchkins’ band but also had roles as a townsman and soldier in the film, said John Fricke, author of “100 Years of Oz” and five other books on the movie and its star, Judy Garland. Slover was one of the tiniest male Munchkins in the movie.
There’s a recent picture of him at the link. He had a remarkable hairline.
When I lived in Los Angeles, I would often hang out at the Culver City Hotel which had a restaurant where the munchkins frequently dined during the making of “The Wizard Of Oz.” John Wayne kept a suite there in his later years.
November 15th, 2011 by Wil
The former Penn State assistant football coach speaks.
“I could say that I have done some of those things. I have horsed around with kids I have showered after workouts. I have hugged them and I have touched their legs without intent of sexual contact,”
Gee, did you fuck them in the ass without intent of sexual contact?
May 27th, 2011 by Wil
With all the nonsense passing for headlines these days, you might not be aware of the legal debate examining the most important question of our times: can you copyright a tattoo? Posters for the upcoming movie “The Hangover II” feature a character adorned with a facial tattoo that closely resembles the very famous tattoo worn by Mike Tyson. As a result, the tattoo talent who designed Tyson’s tattoo is ticked off and suing. The Volokh Conspiracy considers the merits of the case.
The Copyright Act sets out the requirements for copyright protection: you have to have an “original work of authorship,” and it must be “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.” There’s not much question that Whitmill’s design is an “original work of authorship” — if it were painted on canvas, for instance, there’s no doubt that it would receive copyright protection. The harder question is whether Mike Tyson’s face is a “tangible medium of expression.”
The statute says that a work is “fixed in a tangible medium of expression” when its embodiment in a material object is “sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration.” By my reckoning, the tattoo here clearly fits the bill: once it’s on Tyson’s face, it can be perceived by others for more than a “transitory duration”; though the latter phrase could, I suppose, be so narrowed as to not include the “transitory duration” of, say, Mike Tyson’s life, that would be at odds with about a million copyright precedents. [The “transitory duration” language has been construed to eliminate things like a “buffer copy” of a file inside a computer, which is deleted after 0.01 seconds or so — or the evanescent images on a television screen, which vanish once they are projected onto the screen).
Back when I lived in Los Angeles, I was once passing through the parking lot of my local burger joint, “Howard’s Bacon and Avocado Burgers,” and I looked over and saw Mike Tyson walking past his car. He had the distinctive facial tattoo, and looked at me wearily as if to say, “Yeah, it’s me. Get over it.”
May 24th, 2011 by Wil
As reported at the Onion AV club:
Songwriter Joseph Brooks, the Oscar-winning songwriter and director behind 1977’s You Light Up My Life and its hit title track, has died after an apparent suicide, reportedly by suffocating himself with a plastic bag hooked up to a helium tank. Brooks was awaiting trial for allegedly luring numerous aspiring actresses to his apartment with a Craigslist ad, then sexually assaulting them. While he was charged with some 127 counts of rape and sexual abuse, he maintained his innocence in a suicide note. He was 73.
Boy, still raping at 73. He must’ve been eating a lot of Asian ginseng.
Brooks was a former writer of ad jingles like Maxwell House’s “Good To The Last Drop Feeling” and Pepsi’s “You’ve Got A Lot To Live”; he accrued plenty of wealth thanks to their success, but not the fame he desired. …he embarked on a series of his own self-financed films, beginning with the Didi Conn-starring romantic comedy that was his biggest hit—though most of that had to do with the Debby Boone version of Brooks’ title song, which ended up being the most popular record of the 1970s, staying at No. 1 for 10 consecutive weeks.
Sounds like Brooks might have had something other than coffee in mind when he wrote “good to the last drop.”
HAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAW!!!
May 5th, 2011 by Wil
It turns out architects have gone ahead and designed and built the first zombie proof house. It’s a giant square compound made of dense materials and is apparently impenetrable.
If there ever is a zombie holocaust, the owner is going to have the time of his life calling up friends and saying, “Hey Bob, so I hear there’s a zombie attack? You say they already ate your wife and daughter? I’m just hanging out here playing my Xbox.”
May 3rd, 2011 by Wil
The LA Times notes…
Yvette Vickers, an early Playboy playmate whose credits as a B-movie actress included such cult films as “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” and “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” was found dead last week at her Benedict Canyon home. Her body appears to have gone undiscovered for months, police said.
Vickers, 82, had not been seen for a long time. A neighbor discovered her body in an upstairs room of her Westwanda Drive home on April 27. Its mummified state suggests she could have been dead for close to a year, police said.
February 27th, 2011 by Wil
You have to respect the genius of Charlie Sheen. Three years ago he realized that “3 and 1/2 men” was garbage, but he knew that no network would cancel their most successful show. So he initiated a seemingly nonstop binge of whoring, drug abuse, paranoid ranting and general insanity as part of his master plan to destroy an inane sitcom that was violating the basic laws of humor. Charlie, I raise my glass to you.