Ugh! What a Nightmare!

I had a dream the other night, when everything was still–and it wasn’t of Susannah a-comin’ down the hill.

I dreamed I was standing on the beach, nobody else around, just watching the surf. And then up from the waters rose… Bill Clinton. Larger than life. He wore a wet tuxedo and looked kind of bloated, so I couldn’t be sure if he was dead or alive. And then he advanced toward me…

Of course I woke up.

By and by it occurred to me that this was not as original as it seemed at first. And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. (Revelation 13:1)

No, I’m not making up a wise-guy story to make a political point and abuse Scripture. I really had the dream, just as I’ve told it to you. And I don’t think I need a crystal ball to understand it, either. Neither do you. We need hardly discuss anything so obvious.

Does the current state of our country give you bad dreams?

It should.

Promises, Promises

America took another giant step into the abyss yesterday, thanks to the Supreme Court taking upon itself the authority to nullify the word of God. I’ll have a lot more to say about that in my News With Views column next week, but for the time being, there’s one facet of it that deserves immediate comment.

No sooner had the black-robed maniacs ruled against traditional marriage, than our First Voter Fraud President came out with a pledge.

He promises that he won’t force churches to perform homosexual “marriages”.

Now, he wouldn’t say that unless he thought he could force churches to do it, if he wanted to. After all, his administration is already forcing Christians to pay for other people’s abortions and contraceptives.  So maybe in a month or two, this antichrist will change his mind, and he will force churches to defile themselves with same-sex parodies of marriage.

“But that’s okay,” he will hasten to reassure us. “I sure won’t force anybody to be in a gay marriage. I definitely won’t make gay unions compulsory.”

And then he’ll break that promise, too, because that’s what an antichrist does.

Meanwhile, I have only this to ask.

How far down are you going to sink, America, before you start to come up again–if ever you come up again?

And how much abuse will you take before you won’t take any more?

A Hero for Our Time

After 30 years of fruitlessly campaigning to have hop-scotch made an Olympic sport, Dr. Earwig Nitwit has found another great cause to which to dedicate himself.

We caught up to the unemployed professor of Gender Studies in front of a home in his neighborhood, where he has been protesting all day long.

“These people, they leave the light on till late at night, and they have three kids!” Nitwit said. “They eat meat, and the male adult smokes. They are guilty of Crimes Against the Planet! They are fomenting Climate Change! Wahhaaagh!” At this point we had to terminate the interview because Dr. Nitwit fell down and pink foam boiled out his mouth and ears.

“The president’s speech yesterday really inspired him,” said a neighbor. “Listen, I don’t suppose you could, well, sort of take him away from here? And leave him somewhere…”

Just then the guy from the U.N. Climate Change Panel came along with a stretcher crew, and they packed Nitwit off to his new post as Gender Specialist for Climate Change. His salary will be $666,000 a year.

“What we want,” said the U.N. guy, “is a climate that never, never, never changes! That’s what we’re shooting for.”

God help us.

Our Demonic Leaders

I can’t decide whether the actions of our government point to an incredibly clever scheme to turn America into a Third World basket-case, or whether it’s just a spasm of political vandalism by people who are simply not all there.

For instance: as  Congress prepares to subject the American people to a suicidal “immigration reform” that will flood the country with welfare cases and shatter her finances, suddenly our First Voter Fraud President, our scarcely human Secretary of State, and the rest of the zombies are all yapping about Climate Change again. You remember Climate Change used to be Global Warming until that was exposed as a fraud. Anyhow, the Robot-in-Chief and his creatures are saying the fantastic threat of Climate Change forces them to declare “a war on coal.”

It’s like these people run all around inside a great mansion, setting fires everywhere. You try to put out a fire in the living room, and they’ve started another in the lounge. You run over to the lounge, and they’ve set the kitchen on fire. And so on.

I have come to believe that our country’s leaders are actively servants of the Devil, for whom evil is good and good is evil. I don’t know how else to explain what they do.

Where can we find someone who can exorcise a whole country?

 

What NOT to Do When You Dig Up a Human Skeleton

As reported by the UK Daily Mail Online (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ ), June 16, a couple living in the town of Sarnia, Ontario, while digging post-holes in their back yard, dug up a human skeleton.

Naturally, they called the police. The police had a look-see and decided the skeleton was that of an aboriginal woman who died some 400 years ago.

Imagine the homeowners’ horrified surprise when they were informed that they would now have to pay $5,000 to hire an archeologist to study the site. Wham! Five thousand smackers up the spout–not to mention endless paperwork, and endless wandering inside the bureaucratic labyrinth. They’re probably lucky the skeleton didn’t belong to a more recent murder victim. They will also be deprived of the use of their property until the archeologist is satisfied he’s learned everything he possibly can from the site, which could take years.

And what do we learn from this cautionary tale?

Simply that, these days, the government is your enemy, and will twist and turn any event imaginable into an excuse to take your money. They will never pass up an opportunity to harass and torment you.

So, if you’re digging your garden or putting in a swimming pool, and you should be unlucky enough to unearth a human skeleton–well, now you know what not to do.

Unequally Yoked… to a Jinxed Ship

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers; for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? (II Corinthians 6:14)

If you have ever had any doubts as to the meaning of the Bible verse above, here is a movie that ought to make it crystal-clear: The Ship That Died of Shame (1955). You can buy it from amazon.com or watch it on IMDB here ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048611/ )–and if that link doesn’t work, well, I tried. A few years ago this movie was extremely hard to come by; but not anymore.

In this gritty postwar crime drama, a young and handsome George Baker (Emperor Tiberius in I, Claudius) is left widowed and adrift after World War II and can’t get his life on track again. He chances to meet his wartime buddy, Richard Attenborough, who talks him into a scheme to buy their old Navy patrol boat and put it to use doing some illegal but surely harmless smuggling. Really, what’s so terrible about bringing in Belgian chocolates or fine wines that people really want? And in no time at all, the boys are making good money–and having the kind of excitement they grew accustomed to during the war, only without the gunfire.

But there’s a problem that eventually wrecks everything: Attenborough’s character has no morality whatsoever. His criminal activities, because he craves higher and higher rewards for them, become increasingly wicked–there really is no line he won’t cross. And here’s poor George Baker yoked to him, and can’t get away! That goes for mechanic Bill Owen, too (later to be the star of The Last of the Summer Wine, the longest-running TV comedy ever): he only joined up for old time’s sake, and now he’s trapped.

It isn’t every day you can learn good Christian doctrine from a worldly movie–but of course Christianity is all about how to live in this fallen world.

If you’re not interested in becoming any wiser, this is still a film well worth watching–superb performances, and a tight, suspenseful story. You’ll find it’s worth going to some trouble to see it.

 

Immortality for Chowderheads

I noticed a headline last night on the Drudge Report: Google predicts, in 20 or 30 years, “We can upload your brain!”

Does this mean that, 1,500 years from now, John McCain and Chuck Schumer will still be in the Senate? That no lefty judge will ever again have to retire from the bench? That Mayor Bloomberg will still be banning things when the sun cools and swells into a red giant? [Note to those who take rhetorical flourishes literally: the use of this figure of speech in no way denotes my endorsement of this or any other evolutionary scenario.]

Or is this just another instance of chattering monkeys making grandiose plans for some broken-off tree branch that they found?

Yes–the unbelieving evil humanists are going to give us immortality. “Ye shall not surely die,” the serpent promised Eve (Genesis 3:4). So they ate the forbidden fruit and they died, and the Devil has been conning their descendants with the same false promise ever since.

They’ll upload on to a disc or something everything that’s in your brain, every thought, every memory, everything that makes you you. When the disc gets worn, they’ll just transfer “you” to another. And nothing will ever go wrong with the disc or the computer! And they will never get careless and mix “you” with a commercial for cornflakes  or an old episode of “Let’s Make a Deal.” And it will all go on forever.

You have the Serpent’s word on it.

Have I Written a Clunker???

I don’t know about other authors, but for me, there’s a huge difference between reading proofs and reading one of my books after it’s actually been printed up and published, and other people are expected to pay good money for it.

When I finally get my author’s copies of the book, I always open it with some sense of trepidation. Is it really any good? Will people like it? Or is it more like one of those awful books I review from time to time–full of clumsy writing, silly characters, dopey dialogue, and bogged down in an inane plot? It was with all these daunting questions in mind that I began to read The Fugitive Prince.

How many typos are going to be in it, that should have been corrected? How many pages full of nonsense have I perpetrated? With my mind so full of doubts, it takes me a while to get into the book.

The good news is that, halfway through the book, I’m reassured that it’s all right, after all. Hooray, I didn’t write a turkey! I haven’t cheated my readers! It’s actually good!

It’s quite a load off my mind.

I know I’ll go through the same song and dance with The Palace. Oh, well–that’s just me, it can’t be helped. At least I’m not blase about my work. Maybe if I had 700+ titles published, like Barbara Cartland, or 600, like John Creasey, I’d be able to ease up a bit.

So… I like the book, and now I can’t wait to see if readers like it, too. And of course that’s what really matters.

Another Stinker to Avoid

Last night Patty and I watched the opening episode of The Fall, a new BBC  Two police drama starring Gillian Anderson, the enviro-fascist who was so good as Agent Scully in The X-Files. This turkey can be viewed on youtube or via Netflix–not that you should view it.

Okay, a serial killer is loose in Belfast and superstar detective Anderson is brought in to deal with it. We didn’t see her smile once during the whole broadcast hour–I guess because she’s supposed to be a two-fisted feminist. In one scene she spots a tall, handsome cop working a crime scene; so she has her car stopped and orders her driver to introduce her to the hunk, to whom she immediately gives her hotel room number. If she were a man, this would be sexual harassment. But the whole scene is just a lot of bilge.

The action whizzes by like a snail, a tree sloth, or a glacier. We have that legendary Belfast scenery to entertain us, a landscape on a par with that of Newark, NJ. We get to watch the murderer actually torturing and killing one of his victims–at which point we turned it off. Believe me, you don’t need this show in your life. Avoid The Fall.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I like stories that point us toward a better place than the one we’re stuck in now. In Agatha Christie’s stories, for instance, murder is always a great wrong that must be punished, even if the victim is a loathsome toad who encumbers the earth. And meanwhile her lead character, Hercule Poirot, is kind to humble people and impeccably polite to all. So we wind up getting a glimpse of something better. The world does not have to be Obamaland.

The Fall leaves us stranded in a graffiti-covered killing ground.

They’re welcome to it, whoever they are. Self-congratulating liberals, probably. If that’s the world they want, that’s the world they’ll get.

 

Who’s the Best Sherlock?

Every now and then my wife and I like to gobble up a bunch of Jeremy Brett “Sherlock Holmes” episodes. Most of them were made in the 1980s, and they kept on making them until Brett’s health failed, and he died soon afterward.

These really are superb, and a lot of them are available on youtube. But are they the best? Since the invention of movies, countless actors have played Sherlock Holmes in countless movies about him. It would be impossible to name them all here; but here are a few which I think deserve mention.

*Not the best, but possibly the worst. Raymond Massey, best known for playing Abraham Lincoln, played Holmes in 1931, in The Speckled Band. Years later, Massey insisted this was the worst Sherlock Holmes movie ever. We are inclined to agree with him. In fact, it’s so weird, you really ought to track it down and see it yourself.

*Character actor Reginald Owen, best known for playing Scrooge in one of the many film incarnations of A Christmas Carol, played an uncharacteristically overweight Holmes in A Study in Scarlet. Not a critical success.

*Ronald Howard–not Opie, but the son of British actor Leslie Howard–played Holmes in a weekly TV series in 1954. You’d be surprised how good these were! Howard’s Sherlock seems to have a lot of fun being Sherlock Holmes. These are well worth your while, if you can find them.

*Critics loved Murder by Decree (1979), with Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason as Watson, up against Jack the Ripper. The supporting cast is phenomenal, and Plummer’s Holmes is lively and eccentric. Unlike so many others, this is such a strong film that the Sherlock Holmes star does not have to carry it. Which makes Plummer’s achievement look not quite as fine as it really is.

*For radio drama buffs, there’s John Patrick Lowrie as Holmes in Imagination Theater‘s long-running series. We love Lowrie because he does a perfect imitation of…

*Basil Rathbone! He played Holmes on stage, screen, and radio, and for many of us, he is the Sherlock Holmes. The only fault I find with Rathbone’s many Sherlock Holmes movies–and really it’s not his fault at all–is the setting. The producers insisted on updating Holmes. What a dumb idea! Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, his Watson, both wanted to set the stories where they belonged, in Victorian times–the gaslight era. Their brilliance makes the movies still worth watching today; but the true Holmes fan can only sigh. If only they’d listened to Rathbone! What masterpieces would we have today…

*Finally, the Jeremy Brett series has it all–the right actors, beautifully staged sets, and pretty faithful treatment of the stories. Brett looks like Sherlock Holmes; and the way he plays him, you’re never quite sure what Holmes is going to do. He treats his cases very seriously–and then suddenly he’ll startle you by jumping over a couch or something. David Burke and Edward Hardwicke took turns playing Watson, and their performances blend seamlessly into one other–easy to lose track of which Watson is in which episode.

I’m not terribly interested in “modern” treatments of Holmes, which have him and Watson text-messaging each other. In fact, I have no interest in it whatsoever.