our 85th weekly open mike
Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.
6/20/2026
Anything goes: 6/20/2026
27 responses to “Anything goes: 6/20/2026”
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I’ve seen The Godfather and Part 2 once each, 30+ years ago. They’re two really good gangster movies — but holy shit, there are people seriously saying Part 2 might be the best movie ever made? Are you on board with that?
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I & II are both masterpieces, but I think the first is better as a whole film. The second has higher highs, but all the flashback stuff I find romanticized, even cornball.
****In his book “Kubrick”, Michael Herr writes:
He’d watched The Godfather again the night before, and was reluctantly suggesting for the tenth time that it was possibly the greatest movie ever made, and certainly the best cast. “Your buddy Francis really hit the nail on the head with that…”****
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Coppola gets a free pass for having edited all of his movies over and over again. I think he’s spent probably 5 years of his life editing old film and none of it has made them any better.
Apocalypse Now Redux, at least, felt like a real “director’s cut” though with varying results (the plantation scene was interesting but drags, the scene with the Bunnies was pointless and Kilgore searching for his stolen surfboard was like a one-panel Mad Magazine parody of the movie), but then he edited it again 20 years later and cut a bunch of it back out. I think the next one he’ll call “apocalypse_now_final_final_draft_3_revised.mp4”
Editing all 3 Godfather movies into the chronological “Godfather Saga,” which was created for TV miniseries format when he needed some money in the late 1970s and has been revised like 10 times over the years is actually one of the worst things I’ve ever seen made out of a pair of great movies. It arranges the scenes chronologically and the pacing is terrible. I’m not familiar with any director who has bowdlerized his (insanely critically acclaimed) films like this. I would guess these fucked up edits are aired monthly these days from how often it seems to be playing when I’m looking for a basketball game, and to be clear, Coppola is in the room when they’re editing them, unlike a lot of Hollywood meatball surgery he’s definitely responsible.
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(“Bowdlerize” is the wrong word, though they do edit out many violent or vulgar scenes, but I couldn’t think of an English word for “constantly edit something into a different format that ruins what was good about it in the first place.” The German “verschlimmbessern” is close, but I don’t think Coppola ever thought the Saga was an “improvement.”)
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I didn’t know Coppola was addicted to re-editing, à la Geo Lucas. Same as I sure as shit don’t need Star Wars re-edited, Apocalypse Now was exactly what it should’ve been the first time around. The Godfather Saga, that one I’d heard of, but I didn’t know it was made for TV and/or money. We all gotta dance for the fiddler, but it’s sad.
One of the great fringe benefits of being TVless is being spared from accidentally seeing such vulgarity just by clicking around.
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Yeah, everyone thinks Lucas is an asshole for doing it, though in fairness to Coppola is that I don’t think he’s ever taken the originals off the market. Maybe he has (I’m not buying them) but I’ve never had trouble finding the original version of Apocalypse Now. It seemed Lucas tried to remove every single version of the original trilogy without his shitty CGI characters patched in and other dumb “fixes.”
With the Godfather Saga I’m just mystified that a man who made great movies would waste so much of his time maintaining and continually updating a shitty version of said great movies.
Did you ever come across that Ray Bradbury short story, “There Will Come Soft Rains”? It’s about this fully automated house of the future that continues to operate even though its owner (and everyone) is dead. That’s what cable TV is like now. It feels like maybe nobody is watching. Maybe they’re all dead or (SPOILER) maybe I am? The programming just looks glitched or maybe someone died in the control booth at the station or wherever the hell it comes from, like multiple channels just air 1 show per day, like 12 hour blocks of nothing but the same show, every day.
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I read “There Will Come Soft Rains” many, many years ago, when I was a pimply sci-fi geek. Still remember it vividly. It’s less and less science fiction, and soon enough it won’t be fiction, either.
Binging a TV series can be fun. Something like Gunsmoke, which ran for 20+ years, has hundreds of episodes, they’re all stand-alone with no need to see them in chronological order, so there’s definitely an audience for those long blocks of back-to-back eps. My pal Leon watches 3-4 Gunsmokes daily. And by TV standards it honestly was a good show, so I can understand the cable channels airing such programs all afternoon and evening.
They’re butchered, though. Eps that originally left 12 minutes an hour for commercials are re-redited to hammer in 18 minutes of commercials, so whatever was good about the show gets bludgeoned away.
Yeah, the distinction between Lucas and Coppola is that Lucas suppressed the films that people loved best, while Coppola is content to merely milk ’em. George Lucas can sit on a landmine, btw.
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Coppola’s re-edits are all interesting, if not as good as the originals. And yes, he has never suppressed the originals, in fact always releasing the versions of each film together as sets on disc.
All these boomers are doing this… some kind of sideways dementia… Lucas, Coppola, Mann, Malick, Scott, etc.
There are at least eight versions of Mann’s Manhunter, for christ’s sake.
Tati and Chaplin did this decades earlier, though, so nothing new.
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Long as they’re not doing the Star Wars suppression dance, fuck that, I can enjoy a good director’s cut. I’ve seen either three or four different movies called Blade Runner. I still prefer the narration, prolly because that’s the version I saw the first dozen times I saw it.
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Oh lord, not the narration… I have a 35mm scan of that version, but it’s unlistenable. When I want to to really watch that one, I go for the “Final Cut.”
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I concede it’s a better film without the narration, but the original is comfort dystopia for me.
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I dunno, man. I’m twice the age I was when I saw them, so maybe there are elements that I missed, but I remember two very good movies. Excellent, yes, masterpieces, yes, and the first was better, yes, but if someone pointed a gun at me and demanded a list of the ten best movies of all time, neither half of The Godfather double feature would be on my list.
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trump starts a war, never says why, handles it stupidly, tries to surrender with a worse deal that thew Obama deal he ripped up, and iran rejects the surrender and closes the strait again. AND HIS PEOPLE STILL LOVE HIM.
I’m looking fwd to news from you today.
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It’s been a doozy of a day, might not get to the news until tomorrow, sorry.
Yeah, Trump has great support from the mis-informed, the un-informed, and fully informed but fascist. It’s enough to ensure he never faces justice.
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OK, here it comes…
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Apparently Tulsi Gabbard was getting instructions on what to do, what to say, and to stop doing that thing with her eyes on TV for a decade:
Good thing she wasn’t in a sensitive position or anything.
On the plus side her career finally makes sense. I mean that there’s an explanation for her bizarre switches on practically everything a person can switch over. She gave the speech nominating Bernie Sanders at the DNC in 2016, ran for president as a Democrat and endorsed Biden when she lost in 2020, and by 2022 she was in rural Illinois speaking at rallies for the local right-wing Republican candidate for governor, an extremist intentionally boosted by JB Pritzker so he’d have an easier time in the general election. It was all because her maniacal Hare Krishna faction groomed her for it and she never cut the puppet strings.
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Wow, Gabbard is even worse than I’d known. Knew she’s transitiioned to the dark side, but I’d always assumed the switch was motivated by money or plain nuttiness. Always assumed she was at least Tulsi Gabbard, but now I’m wondering if even that’s giving her too much credit.
An odd observation: The Washington Post has a solid paywall, which prevents me from reading anything they publish unless I can find it republished by some other source. But they’re letting me read this article, free, no login, not even the ordinarily-required email registration. Mr Bezos really wants this information out there.
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Wow, that’s interesting! There’s a chrome/chromium extension called “Bypass Paywalls Clean” that works until it doesn’t, and then you have to hunt down a new version. WaPo is usually the first site to counter a new version, but it works for now. (Have done deep dives every time I have to find a new version and from what I can tell it’s a clean extension.)
You’re right, in the end I’m not even sure what “Tulsi Gabbard” is. Here she is as a teenager in a video where her creepy father acknowledges he’s not allowed to marry her, and therefore screw the gays:
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Half a dozen adblockers and paywall-climbers are on my machine, but Bypass Paywalls Clean isn’t one of them. It’s been removed from the official extensions list at Firefox, and the underground installation instructions are beyond me. I’m stumped any time I’m at a github or git-anything site, and I’m hesitant to download a zip file from a Russian git-site.
But I’m not worried about having no access to Washington Post articles. The Gabbard piece is interesting, but the Post no longer does much that’s required reading.
“Tulsi Gabbard” was raised in a cult, according to the comments under that video, but it’s not an excuse for the awful human she’s become. So sad she couldn’t marry her brother, though.
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I went to the casting call, 6th street NYC, for extras for Godfather2,
19 years old with a pony tail, they said to cut my hair and they might consider me…
hell no i wouldn’t cut,
one of many mistakes in life, probably…-
I love the fact that the billboards in the background are hyping up the fact that they made a movie out of the book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsIqDxssLYg
These guys also were not cast in the movie. 🙁
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“The Godfather is now a movie.” Great ad campaign. Wonder what college grad came up with that brilliant billboard.
Fun video. Funkadelic!
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You kept your integrity, but lost your chance at movie stardom. Wise choice.
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Mom took a fall Sunday, and worse fall on Monday, and the paramedics thought she was bruised but not broken, but she’s been in more pain every day since.
Katrina decided to take her to what’s laughably called “urgent care,” and she even called ahead to have an appointment, so we wouldn’t spend hours waiting in the lobby. And this was our today, which was certainly shitastic.
I bused over early to help get Mom into the car, which is always difficult and precarious, but moreso when she’s in great pain. We showed up on time for the 10:30 appointment, checked in, and they told us the doctor was running late, “It might be half an hour’s wait.” We were there for six hours total, and got called in to see the doctor at 1:15.
The doctor wasn’t a doctor, she was a physician’s assistant, but answered to “Doctor” when my sister and mom spoke with her. She asked Katrina what she’d given Mom for the pain, and Katrina said two Tylenol every four hours, which is what’s recommended on the bottle, but the PA scolded her and said that’s “too much Tylenol.”
Then she ordered X-rays, but the place had no Hoyer lift and Mom can barely stand, so the X-rays took almost two hours with Mom screaming in pain much of the time. At one point I said no and sat her down, because she was simply too wobbly as she tried to stand.
After all that agony, the PA wrote a prescription for one dozen low-dose Percocet pills, with zero refills, which is almost certainly not enough, in either dosage or number. And she again scolded Katrina not to give Mom more than four Tylenols in a day.
On the drive home, we all three agreed that Mom will still get two Tylenol every four hours if she’s in pain. As for the Percocet, if Mom’s still in pain when the prescription runs out, I know a guy, and I’ll get her an illegal refill, maybe at a higher strength.
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“Urgent Care” is part of the private health scam. They don’t staff enough regular doctors, so appointments quicker than two weeks out are impossible to get, but for an extra $75 you can see an “Urgent Care” doctor who’s not really a doctor but theyre always short staffed too.
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The weirdest thing was, the urgent care facility wasn’t busy at all. There were two patients in the waiting room when we got there, and I don’t think there were a dozen in the six hours we were there. Even if the only health care pro on duty was the PA we saw, they weren’t really short-staffed, just short-competenced.
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