Monday has rolled around again, with that special Monday stench – two parts armpit, one part jockstrap. It is rather like New Jersey, only, y’know, worse. (Anyone who has ever driven past Seacaucus with the windows rolled down on a hot day knows what I am on about.)
Nonetheless, we must grin and bear it – the day is almost over, fortunately, and for those of us still toiling through the misery, the Great Mondaydact Browser Slayer is here to make the hours pass by a bit more smoothly.
This week’s theme comes to us courtesy of our good friend in Israel, The Male Brain. Today is the birthday of one of the greatest actors who ever lived, and it seems only fitting to honour that legacy. I hand it over to our friend from here:
April 3rd is Marlon Barndo’s 99th birthday. We should celebrate it. So here goes – bio from Britannica:
Marlon Brando, in full Marlon Brando, Jr., (born April 3, 1924, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.—died July 1, 2004, Los Angeles, California), American motion picture and stage actor known for his visceral, brooding characterizations. Brando was the most celebrated of the method actors, and his slurred, mumbling delivery marked his rejection of classical dramatic training. His true and passionate performances proved him one of the greatest actors of his generation.
Brando, the son of a salesman and an actress, grew up in Nebraska, California, and Illinois. After he was expelled from the Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota, for insubordination, he moved in 1943 to New York City, where he studied acting under Stella Adler at the Dramatic Workshop. He made his stage debut in 1944 as Jesus Christ in the Workshop production of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Hannele, and in that same year he first appeared on Broadway in I Remember Mama. After that play’s successful two-year run, Brando appeared in Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Cafe, George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, and Ben Hecht’s A Flag Is Born (all 1946) and was voted “Broadway’s most promising actor” by New York critics. In 1947 he attained stage stardom with his astonishingly brutal, emotionally charged performance as Stanley Kowalski in the Elia Kazan-directed production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).
Brando made his motion picture debut in The Men (1950), a powerfully realistic study of disabled World War II veterans. In preparation for his role, he spent a month in a hospital paraplegic ward. He received his first Academy Award nomination for his performance in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Kazan’s highly praised screen adaptation of the play, and went on to receive nominations for his performances in Viva Zapata! (1952) and Julius Caesar (1953). Also from this period is The Wild One (1953), a low-budget drama in which he played the leader of an outlaw motorcycle gang. The film became one of Brando’s most famous and served to enhance his iconoclastic image. It also contains one of Brando’s most oft-quoted lines; when asked what it is he is rebelling against, his character responds, “Whaddya got?”
Brando’s sensitive portrayal of a union muscleman who testifies against his gangster boss in Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) won for him the best-actor Oscar and firmly established him as one of Hollywood’s most-admired actors. In 1954 he also portrayed Napoleon Bonaparte in Désirée, and in 1955 he sang and danced in the musical comedy Guys and Dolls. He had continued success with such films as The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), Sayonara (1957; Oscar nomination), and The Young Lions (1958). In the 1960s, however, his career went into a long period of decline. He starred in the only film he ever directed, the western One-Eyed Jacks (1961); now a cult favourite, it was notorious at the time for Brando’s excessive expenditure of time and money. A lavish remake of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) was another expensive flop, and Brando’s recalcitrant behaviour during its filming added to his growing reputation as a troublesome and demanding actor. Most of his remaining films of the ’60s, including Charlie Chaplin’s final film, A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), are forgettable.
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) rejuvenated Brando’s career. As organized-crime boss Don Vito Corleone, Brando created one of the most memorable—and most imitated—film characters of all time. His performance earned him another best-actor Oscar, but he refused the award in protest against the stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans throughout motion picture history. Brando was further vindicated as an actor by his leading role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s sexually explicit L’ultimo tango a Parigi (1972; Last Tango in Paris). He appeared in only five more films during the remainder of the decade—including noted supporting roles in Superman (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979)—after which he retreated to his private Polynesian atoll.
Brando reemerged nine years later to play a crusading anti-apartheid attorney in A Dry White Season (1989) and received his eighth Oscar nomination—his first for best supporting actor—for the role. He appeared in six films during the 1990s, highlighted by a send-up of his Godfather character in The Freshman (1990) and by his sensitive portrayal of an aging psychiatrist in Don Juan DeMarco (1995). He also received good notices for his role as a corrupt prison warden in the comedy Free Money (1998), though the film was not widely distributed. In 2001 he appeared in the heist thriller The Score (2001). Brando’s extensive collection of personal audio diaries—recorded over many years—were the basis of the documentary Listen to Me Marlon (2015).
Brando was something of a paradox: he is regarded as the most influential actor of his generation, yet his open disdain for the acting profession—as detailed in his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me (1994)—often manifested itself in the form of questionable choices and uninspired performances. Nevertheless, he remains a riveting screen presence with a vast emotional range and an endless array of compulsively watchable idiosyncrasies.
Let’s have some Brando pics and memes:
2. As noted in his bio – he studied from 1943, and was working seriously by 1945. So I’m guessing it’s funny but not true
And some videos of the great man doing his thing:
Didact here – fun fact about the late, great Robin Williams: he was FAR more than just a comic actor. Go watch One-Hour Photo, a little-known thriller starring him, to understand just what a great actor he really was.
The Mighty God-Emperor
His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, the Lion of Midnight, may the Lord bless him and preserve him, was indicted on completely idiotic and spurious charges last week – and he is clearly in a fighting mood:
#BasedTucker is Based
Mar 27, 2023
Mar 28, 2023
Mar 29, 2023
Mar 30, 2023
Mar 31, 2023
Dawn of Battle
The Male Brain has been busy this past week, but still found time to gather lots of great content for us. We start with Daily Dose of Masculinity, dishing out red pills left and right:
Wisecrack offers up a philosopher’s take on startup culture:
The Babylon Bee continues to report all the news that is unfit to print, especially in the filthy pages of The New York F***ing Slimes:
Poli-ticking Off
Mark Dice breaks down the horrible realities of the shooting in Tennessee last week:
The dynamic duo over at Redacted examine just how corrupt and evil Big Pharma really is:
Jackson Hinkle unpacks the not-at-all-secret plan that Poland has to annex and occupy western Ukraine:
Дед Сварливый Говорит!
Grandpa Grumpuss grumps, grumpily, about the vast, yawning, and growing chasm between the USSA and Russia in what he calls the real revolution in military affairs – the realm of hypersonic atmospheric stand-off weapons:
It’s All Greek To Us
The good gentlemen of The Duran try to figure out what is going on in Israel – where it appears there is a full-blown colour revolution underway, sponsored and instigated by the US government:
China Syndrome
Winston Sterzel aka serpentza reckons Chinese EVs are blowing up all over the country:
Digging to China looks at the deepening and broadening ties between China and Russia – from a pro-Western lens, keep in mind:
The Bald Truth
Brian Berletic of The New Atlas looks at how American military and political elites are struggling – very badly – to come to terms with the looming failure of their Ukraine Project:
Rulings from the Bench
Judge Andrew Napolitano has a great series of interviews up over the past week, looking at the geopolitical situation and the rapidly unfolding crisis of American power. We start with Maj. Scott Ritter:
And then Col. Douglas Macgregor:
Then LTC Tony Schaffer:
And now let’s turn to former CIA analysts who just want the American people to know the truth – like Larry Johnson:
Plus, Ray McGovern:
Righteous Rantery
Lord Razor of the Fist Clan shreds through the whore-media’s narratives surrounding that awful tragedy in Tennessee:
PJW points out the true emptiness and horror of the lives of “Single Income No Kids” women:
The inimitable, irrepressible Katie Hopkins no longer has any patience for any of the celebritards who go to Banderastan to genuflect before Bellendsky in Queef:
Bad Medicine
Dr. John Campbell is happy to see actual airtime in the BritGov Parliament given to people who want real investigations into the not-vaxx:
Warriors of Faith
Matt Whitman from Ten Minute Bible breaks down one of the most absurd “arguments” against the validity and reliability of the New Testament we have today:
Tha Dizzle is cautiously optimistic about J.P. Sears‘s movement back toward God – away from “spirituality” and back to what is really true:
Dr. Jay Smith from PfanderFilms and Al-Fadi from CIRA International look at how the Lioness of London, Hatun Tash, utterly dismantled the myths surrounding the Koran with the many different qira’at and ahruf:
Manly Men of Manliness
Terrence Popp exhorts men to stop accepting mediocrity in their lives:
Xplained takes a close look at the amazing dedication and seriousness with which Keanu Reeves approaches his training for the John Wick movies:
Burn Paedowood to the Ground
Midnight’s Edge puts the kibosh on the rumours that Alex Kurtzman is on his way out – just weeks after they themselves said he was:
Overlord Dicktor Van Doomcock talks with Kamran Pasha about the rather interesting rumours about a major showdown between Devil Mouse CEO Bob Iger and Queen Karen Kennedy:
Gary from Nerdrotic tries to figure out what the hell is going on over at Marvel:
Ryan Kinel cannot help but be amused by news of huge layoffs at the House of the Devil Mouse:
Go broke, get woke, then CROAK!
The Drinker offers up his thoroughly drunken verdict on John Wick 4:
Reading Too Much Into Things
Your “Science is F***ING WEIRD” moment of the week is from Dawn Pine, and looks at how a hormone shot might be the magical cure for hangovers that humanity has been searching for since… well, the first caveman drank fermented fruit and got shitfaced:
Animals that consume fermenting fruit and nectar are at risk of exposure to ethanol and the detrimental effects of inebriation. In this report, we show that the hormone FGF21, which is strongly induced by ethanol in murine and human liver, stimulates arousal from intoxication without changing ethanol catabolism. Mice lacking FGF21 take longer than wild-type littermates to recover their righting reflex and balance following ethanol exposure. Conversely, pharmacologic FGF21 administration reduces the time needed for mice to recover from ethanol-induced unconsciousness and ataxia. FGF21 did not counteract sedation caused by ketamine, diazepam, or pentobarbital, indicating specificity for ethanol. FGF21 mediates its anti-intoxicant effects by directly activating noradrenergic neurons in the locus coeruleus region, which regulates arousal and alertness. These results suggest that this FGF21 liver-brain pathway evolved to protect against ethanol-induced intoxication and that it might be targeted pharmaceutically for treating acute alcohol poisoning.
Your long read of the week is also from The Male Brain, and looks at the serious methodological and scientific flaws of the polygraph test – better known to you and me as your bog-standard “lie detector”:
Graham was slightly older than most of the other residents of College Hall. She had trained as a nurse before enrolling at Berkeley. In her yearbook photo, she’s turned away from the camera, looking back at the lens with a smirk, her dark hair cut into a flapper bob. Graham’s roommates were suspicious of her clothing and fine jewelry—which, one of them told Detective Fisher, seemed out of step with her modest Kansas family. “She is of the highly nervous type and has been suspected of being a hophead,” Fisher reported, using slang for an addict or drinker. She was one of his main suspects.
Graham showed no emotion as Larson worked his way through the list of questions—until he got to ones about the missing money and jewelry. “Did you take Miss Taylor’s ring?” Larson asked. After she answered a quick “no,” he glanced at the chart.
“The test shows you stole it,” he said flatly.
Graham seemed to stop breathing. She glared at Larson. “I think all these questions are an insult,” she said. “Just because I’m excited and mad at being asked all these questions, the needle jumps, and you think I’m lying.” Her eyes burned with rage. She started shouting. “It’s the third degree, that’s what it is. The needle shoots up and I’m a liar!”
“No one has said you are a liar,” Larson said in a low voice, trying to defuse the situation.
“You’re trying to make me out a thief—that’s what you’re doing. I won’t stand for it.”
As Larson leaned forward to take Graham’s blood pressure reading, she burst out of the chair and charged over to the spinning drums of the polygraph, which were still tracing her body’s increasingly violent movements. Larson and Fisher jumped up and had to hold her back from destroying the equipment as she railed against the men and their machine. Her blood pressure and heart rate were still going up as she tore the cuff off her arm.
“Are you through with this crazy stunt?” she spat.
“Yes, we’re through,” Larson replied.
But Graham was already charging out of the room. Outside, she told one of the other women she had wanted to tear up the charts, and that if she hadn’t been restrained by the equipment she would have “smashed Officer Fisher in the face.”
Inside, Larson and Vollmer exchanged glances. “That isn’t the girl the housemother suspected, but I’m betting she’s the one,” Larson said.
“I don’t think there is any doubt of it, but we have no confession,” Vollmer said. “I’ll have the girl watched. Maybe we’ll get some real evidence.”
Overnight, Larson found out more about Graham from the other women in the dorm. They told Larson and Fisher that Graham had been entangled in several passionate affairs and that she’d once induced an abortion by taking the anti-malaria drug quinine—hardly relevant to the case, but a cause for suspicion by the attitudes of the time.
The next day, Graham turned up at the police department, demanding to speak to Larson and asking to see the chart. Larson and Fisher then interrogated her for 12 hours while she continued to maintain her innocence. Eventually, though, she broke into “an attack of sobbing,” and said that yes, it was possible she might have taken the items in her sleep.
Graham then offered to replace the missing ring and the money if it meant the police would stop investigating her. Larson, always inclined to pursue the truth at any cost, told her that if she was genuinely innocent she shouldn’t make that offer. Fisher, by contrast, told her if she was guilty, she’d be prosecuted whether she replaced the items or not.
They sent Graham home, but she turned up at the police station every day that week, begging to be seen. It was only when she threatened to hurt herself that Larson relented. “During the interview she threatened suicide unless the case was cleared up at once,” Larson wrote, adding that Graham displayed a “very unstable personality.”
But the police still didn’t have a clear confession. Larson arranged another interrogation, and on April 30, at the Berkeley Police Department in the basement of City Hall, he and Fisher supplemented the lie detector with a more traditional interview technique. “Officer Fisher played the role of ‘hard-boiled cop’ with his usual adroitness, and I was her friend,” Larson remembered.
Over the course of the interview, the policemen learned that Graham’s life wasn’t simple, but was, in fact, traumatic: She’d been sexually abused as a child and felt intensely guilty about an affair she’d had with a married medical student before coming to California. After several hours, Fisher rose suddenly to his feet, threatened Graham with the prospect of imprisonment in San Quentin (which still housed women until 1933), and then stormed out of the room.
While Fisher was gone, Graham finally admitted to taking the money and the ring, as well as some items of clothing. In exchange for the confession, she wanted guaranteed immunity from prosecution and to avoid being named publicly.
When Fisher returned, Graham signed a written confession. The lie detector had solved its first case. Vollmer was delighted. He was eager to roll it out on more hardened criminals. “The problem of lying, the bane of the human race for hundreds of years, could now be dealt with,” is how one biographer summarized Vollmer’s thoughts at the time.
But Graham was devastated. She dropped out of university and moved out of College Hall into a hotel while she got ready to go home to her parents’ farm. When she got back to Kansas, she wrote Larson a letter recanting her statement, “saying that she had been told that she was a fool for confessing,” he recalled. “She even denied her guilt and intimated that she had been tricked into a confession.”
Linkage is good for you:
- John V. Walsh notes the impact of the Banderastan War on the Presidential race among the normally cowed and spineless Republicucks, who are rapidly becoming a sort-of-serious antiwar party;
- Unfortunately, that might all be for nought, because American values are very much in decline right now, if the results of the latest polls are to be believed;
- Turns out, there is a gigantic amount of water sitting within the Earth’s crust – but we can’t get to any of it, at least not yet;
- Chinese students will soon get time off to have an actual life, date, and get to know the opposite sex, which is good for them, I suppose;
- Keanu Reeves continues to prove himself to be one of the last action heroes left – as well as one of the most human stars in all of Hollyweird;
- This one about a ginger snap who claims guys never chat her up at the gym because she works out hard, is really just yet another call for attention;
- For the nerds among you – a maths geek figured out a very, very complex mathematical problem using geometry, and yes, I do know what PDEs are (though not the non-linear kind), and yes, they are really crazy;
- Microsoft just fired most of its Indian developers over at GitHub, which should result in a substantial improvement in code quality;
And some more from Dawn Pine:
- A cheating whore loses her best friend because tingles – proving yet again that far too many women in PommieBastardLande are largely (though not entirely) slags to be avoided;
- Remote working has a lot of perks (trust me, I know), but when people start cold-calling you on Microsoft Teams, you know shit’s gone too far;
- A mentally ill man who pretends he is a woman, is pissed because a TSA agent punched him in the balls during a full-body search (which is disgusting to think about, I hope the agent disinfected himself thoroughly afterwards);
- If you believe in the Holographic Principle and think we are in fact living in a gigantiferous simulation, then there might be a way to escape from it all;
- Sweden has banned its military from using TikTok – too bad that won’t help it actually field a decent military;
- There is apparently a bacterium which eats heavy metal and craps gold, which has to be one of the neatest things anyone has ever found;
- Despite all the hype, playing video games does not actually make children violent or stupid – it just makes them lazy and boring;
- The Babylon Bee continues to report all the news that’s unfit to print in the NYFT, about how Whitey is paying Dindus reparations;
- If you want to reduce “inequality” and thereby feel all good and warm about yourself, you might just have to settle for a particularly severe and nasty form of population control;
- We rarely stoop to wordplay around here, but based on this article about what happened to a Rivian owner, we might say that EVs are the pollution to all of our problems;
- Solar flares are bad news for global electrical grids – but damn do they make for gorgeous light shows in the northern hemisphere;
- AI is getting seriously weird and in some ways kind of dangerous – a married father committed suicide after being encouraged to do so by an AI chatbot, which kind of puts the lie to the whole “Three Laws of Robotics” thing;
MUH RUSHIAN KAHLOOOOOZHUN!!!
The Neo-Tsar met with his country’s National Security Council last week, to determine the future of the Banderastan War, among other things:
Those Who Fail To Learn From History…
History lessons of the week:
HALO Nation
Slayergod Remy aka Mint Blitz does his thing while discussing likely developments at 343i:
Learning at the Master’s Feet
Nerd of the Rings talks us through the history of Erebor:
Bring on the Grimdark
Trazyn the Infinite talks us through the history of the Adeptus Custodes:
That’s Not Gone Well…
Wazzocks gonna wazzock:
Kitchen Nightmares with the Angry Scot:
Comedy hour:
Meme Warfare
We begin with a number of dank memes from our good friend, The Male Brain:
Your “boys will be boys” moments of the week:
Onward:
A quick glimpse into America’s future, from the past:
Animal Planet
Your aminules are adorkable moment of the week:
And also your animals are absolute DICKS moment of the week, to balance things out:
And finally, your “Meanwhile, in Russia” moment of the week:
The Lords of Steel
Gym beast props this week go to Jawon Garrison:
Ass-Kicking of the Eight Limbs
They See Me Rollin’…
Palate Cleansers
Shuffle Off
Gingervitis Injections
Livin’ in the Land of the Metal Gods
Rock Out With Your Glock Out
Hot Totty
Finally, here is your Instathot for the start of the week. This is Aurelia from Leszno, Poland. Now, as with most of the Monday e-thots, this one is a statutory warning, because if you go look at earlier pictures of her, she looks actually human – and quite lovely. These days, though, she looks like a surgically sculpted alien. It’s weird and extremely disconcerting, and that makes her perfect for a Monday.
OK, that’s all, show’s over, back to work (or the commute, whichever makes more sense at this time).
0 Comments