The Wheezer Society

Best Lines from Favorite Movies

My Favorite Halloween Film

"Tell me where the doll is, or I'll rip your arm off!!" Robert Mitchum as 'Preacher' Powell

Stepdads get an early bad rap in 1955's "The Night of the Hunter," directed by Charles Laughton

Ghost Stories For Young People

Happy Freaky Halloween

"Karloff's Koffin" Guest Robert Goulet

Writers Bloc Comix Debuts

I'm working on a new web-based comic strip with high school friend and fellow blogger, Bryce Zabel called "Writers Bloc Comix" which is a timely look at the life of a Hollywood writer. Bryce is a television and movie writer/producer, and was Chairman of the TV Academy as few years back.

As you may know, The Writers Guild of America (WGA) will be going on strike at the strike of midnight on Wednesday, October 31st (yes, Halloween). The TV and film writers' contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers - the umbrella group for the major studios - ends midnight Wednesday, and there are no signs the two sides are close to a new deal. If the strike lingers on, this means LOTS of reruns, instead of the new episodes of your favorite shows. It also means more (ugh!) reality shows, since they don't have writers, per se. Keep up with what's going on at Writers Bloc Comix.

Just in case you were wondering, I'm the one that does the drawing.

Check out the first installment here: Writers Bloc Comix

Best Lines from Favorite Movies

Philip Seymour Hoffman (as legendary Creem Magazine rock critic Lester Bangs):

"See, friendship is the booze they feed you.  They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong.  Cuz they make you feel cool...And, hey, I met you.  You are not cool."

Patrick Fugit: "I know...Even when I thought I was, I knew I wasn't."

Cameron Crowes' autobiographical "Almost Famous"

The Impossible Dream - Dulcinea

In the never ending battle for search engine domination, there's a new gal in town, and her name is Dulcinea. Huh? For those with a literary bent, you may recognize the name from Don Quixote and his "valiant but futile" quest for Dulcinea, the simple peasant woman, who in Quixote's mind is a beautiful queen. Dulcinea - the ultimate goal - the impossible dream. Of course, the correlation here is that we all have searched the internet for information, sometime in futility, sometimes wandering off aimlessly, clicking on bad links, winding up at dead ends and 404's and, like Don Quixote, never reaching the goal of finding Dulcinea.

Well, now, so it seems, that you and I can find Dulcinea, just by surfing over to Dulcinea.com. Once there, were have been promised easy tools for searching the web, "sources revealed and and secrets divulged" as they state on their website. The aim to be your "trusty sidekick" and reveal your Dulcinea. Which leads me to wonder - why they didn't name the site SanchoPanza.com?

Best Lines from Favorite Movies

George C Scott:  "Tell ya whatcha do, Baby...You just start your countdown, and ole Bucky'll be back before you can say 'Blast Off'!"

Stanley Kubrick's brilliant satire "Dr. Strangelove, or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb"

Cost of War

Shooting Up The Needle - Vinyl To Digital

How soon we forget. Yeah, all those old vinyl records that I've been hanging onto since, well, since before CD's. Er, wait a minute... before cassette tapes! So from what I can decipher, the last "album" or should I say, "vinyl album" I purchased was a bootleg Elton John I picked up at the of Django's downtown in the late 70's. I pretty much switched to cassette tapes in the mid-seventies. Angie's last vinyl album was Steely Dan's Aja, which was her first cassette tape as well.

This weekend, after several attempts over the past year, we picked up a Crosley "Director" CD Recorder that plays vinyl records in 33-1/3, 45 and 78 (yes, it came with an "adapter" for the 45's). It also plays three sizes of platters (7", 10" and 12"). It has a built-in CD recorder that captures the record being played. From there, once it's on a CD, it's an easy step to insert in the computer and transfer the entire album into iTunes for easy audio bliss.

And there's a rub to this saga (continued below image).

Remember the scratches? the pops? when playing those vinyl records? Well, those I can live with. It's the goddamned SKIPPING that I hate. Totally forgot about it. The first album Angie picked to transfer was Stevie Wonder's two-album opus "Songs In The Key of Life" from 1976. First side - great, second side, okay. Third side - skip after skip after fucking skip. After the first few I was getting very irritated - possibly from my advancing age.

Who the hell need this crap? What was so great about the "good old days" of vinyl?? So I did what any geek would do - I said fuck it, I'll just download the songs that have the skips.

And that brings me to the realization that, other than a few bootlegs and several weird, strange, odd albums that I've collected in the early years, why in the hell should I waste my time trying to transfer this songs that I can easily download off the internet or purchase on iTunes?