"Evil From The Eighth Dimension!"

Typical

There I was, sorting out my laundry - O the excitement of my rock and roll lifestyle - and having a quiet think about what the Intro for Thursday's blog ought to be, because a noisy think makes the voices in my head much too loud for comfort, and what do I come across?  Three different things one after the other that would make either an Intro or a decent secondary item.  The Muses are like buses in that sense, nothing for a couple of hours and then three at once.  Art!

     Yes, Your Humble Scribe is yarking and barking about one of his favourite films, "The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension".  Again.  I need no more justification than whose blog is it?

     'Flop' is harsh yet accurate, as the film cost $17 million back in 1984 and only made back $6 million.  One of the reasons, as per "The Guardian" was the cinematic competition that came out at the same time: "Ghostbusters", "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Star Trek III".  Actually they got that wrong - it was "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" that came out in 1984, and you're welcome from Conrad the fact-checking Nazi.

     Let me put up the quote that caught my attention from a trailer on the arcane technology known as VHS.

     Mission Control: Buckaroo, The White House wants to know is everything ok with the alien space craft from Planet 10 or should we just go ahead and destroy Russia?

• Buckaroo Banzai: Tell him yes on one and no on two.
• Mission Control: Which one was yes, go ahead and destroy Russia... or number 2?

     

     Don't worry, they make the right choice.  The Black Lectroids, you see, had threatened to destroy Minsk with a particle beam weapon, which the Sinister Union - still around at the time - would automatically interpret as a first strike, unless their sworn enemies, the Red Lectroids, were tackled and neutralised.

     If none of that makes sense to you, allow me to poach the description up on "Box Office Mojo".

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

Adventurer, brain surgeon, rock musician Buckaroo Banzai and his crime-fighting team, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, must stop evil alien invaders from the eighth dimension who are planning to conquer Earth.

      If that still doesn't make sense, don't worry, as one critic did describe the film as apparently leaving half the script out.  Conrad prefers to think of it as allowing you, the audience, to fill in the backstory or just accept that there is more here than meets the eye.  Art!

     What a cast, too: Peter Weller, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Clancy Brown, John Lloyd, Damon Hines, Vincent Schiavelli, Dan Hedaya, John Ashton and Jonathan Banks.  You'd have trouble putting a cast like that together today.  Jonathan still had hair on his head back then.  Art!

     Peter - I can use his first name as we're such good mates* - went on to much bigger things with "Robocop", where his attitude and behaviour mirror those of Judge Dredd, although with more warmth and humour.  He is also a musician in real life, but plays trumpet not guitar, with his band 'Fly Naked' and if Art will put down his bowl of coal -

     In case you were unaware, Jeff Goldblum is also a musician, playing piano, and he and Pete have played together over the years.

     "The Guardian" reporter, one Paul F. Verhoeven - no relation to film director, this PFV is an Ocker - also explained that Pete is now a PhD ('Doctor of Philosophy') in the field of Italian Renaissance Art.  Okay.  I did not see that coming.  Moreover, he has just written a book on the subject.

• Buckaroo Banzai is available to stream on Amazon Prime. Peter Weller’s new book, Leon Battista Alberti in Exile: Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting, comes out 1 May

     Also - 

     I think this is the comic book I bought years ago, now I may have to track it down in the Comic Cave.  Gee thanks Steve.  Conrad is sure there was a villain named 'Hanoi Xan'' in the mix, and Lectroids.  Okay, now I HAVE to track it down, curse your necrotic eyes Steve**.

All Set, Tesla?

I have just found a report in my news feed from another British broadsheet, "The Telegraph", which is the diametrically-opposed political converse of "The Guardian", and used to be called "The Torygraph" as it was so conservative.  O my do they have it in for Elong Tusk and his revvy buzz-box on wheels.  Art!

     Today figures from Q1 were released and they're going to make poor Elong weep a bit.  As you can see from the data above, the share price has fallen by $142 in Q1.  Conrad is not an economist but thinks this is a bad thing.  

     To quote some of the 'Telegraph' info, Tesla's net income fell by 71% in Q1, down to $409 million which is the worst total for 5 years.  Overall sales were down to $19.2 billion, which sounds like a lot to my ears, yet it's a 9% drop far worse than anticipated.

     Because it's the 'Torygraph' they take a swing at people not buying his buzz-box: "Left-wing drivers have mounted a boycott of the company’s cars in response to Mr Musk’s decision to take a position in the Trump White House and the president’s tariffs are also impacting the business."  Perhaps also being an arrogant, offensive, opinionated bumbletuck interfering in politics across the EU also has something to do with it?  Take note of the second part of that sentence, because the Orange Land Whale's economies of oafdom are biting Elong on his nethers.  Art!

Bet he's not smiling now

     While Elong was running DOGE, cutting budgets, getting rid of staff and whooping on his teenaged minions, he wasn't running Tesla, and Surprise! a business doesn't run itself.

     <lays in extra supplies of popcorn>

The Perils Of Being A Grumpy Old Fart

Grumpy, admittedly, boring - hopefully not.  Art!

     I took a screenship rather than trying to copy and paste, because I've copied and pasted a whole lot of stuff today, which ups the Word Count but makes me look lazy.  Art!

     Dog Buns! I thought.  It only came out in <checks> 2013 and they're doing a remake already?

     Well, no, ha ha silly Conrad.  What the poster meant was - Art!

     That'll teach me to be old and out of date.  Bah!

Matters Of Munitions In Mordorvia

All day people on Twitter - take that cruel jibe as well, Elong - have been posting stills and video clips of explosions at the 51 GRAU arsenal to the east of Moscow.  These are enormous explosions, visible from fifty miles away.  Clearly, Something Had Happened.  Art!

     The secondary explosions and fires are still raging and I'm typing this up at 00:20.  Villages for miles around the ammunition depot have been evacuated, as unexploded ordnance has been falling up to six miles from the depot.  The Ruffians claim it was caused by a fire, itself caused by poor attention to fire protocols.  The Ukrainian response may only be along the lines of "O Dear.  Anyway.", because if it was them, they aren't going to confess how it was done.  

     ANYWAY I wanted to put up this item because the BBC has a comment from one of the Ruffian officials involved in the follow-up.

"Alexander Avdeyev also threatened journalists and residents with fines if they shared unofficial information about the blast."

     'Follow-up' spelled 'Cover-up'.  They've done this with previous Ruffians posting film clips of ammunition depots becoming the world's most expensive firework displays, sending the FSB in to track them down and threaten them to keep silent or retract.  The sheer size of this depot going BANG may make that impossible for them;  I have seen reports that over 100,000 tons of ordnance were stored there.

Conrad Is Curious

I mean, wouldn't you be?  Art!

     However - that word again! - it's 00:30 and I need to be up early to get a shower, as we may be having a remote meeting, so maybe tomorrow.

Laterz!

*  This might be a dirty great lie.

**  Steve - in charge of memory round here.  Bit of a slacker, to be honest.