Idaho Senate goes full Nazi

Cocaine Bear is the movie we never knew we needed

"Let's make a movie about a 500-pound bear who gets tanked on cocaine and eats a bunch of people" has never been said by anyone. Ever.

Until now. And it's a good thing someone did.

Director Elizabeth Banks - no stranger to far-fetched concepts; after all, her "breakout role" was in this 2012 flick about kids killing each other that dragged the GDP of Samoa through the box offices - certainly knew what people came to the theater to see, and delivered: the bear ate someone within the first five minutes of the film. Then there's a long interlude before the second kill for character development, but that's okay. You can only have a bear eat so many people in one film before the audience starts asking if that's all you have.

Logically enough, most of this film's $35 million budget went to a CGI company to create the animated bear. I mean, you probably wouldn't want to use a live bear for this - the real-world Cocaine Bear died of an overdose and, so far as we know, didn't eat anyone before he died, and it might be hard to hire talent if they knew they were going to be eaten by a bear during filming. I've been asked to do some crazy shit in my time in the workforce, and even I would put my foot down at that. For some reason I don't think the CGI company they used ever saw a real black bear; the head is too weirdly shaped to be credible. However...considering that this is a movie about a coked-up bear that eats people, the shape of the beast's head isn't all that critical.

Ray Liotta is fantastic as Syd, the druglord living on borrowed time. His bosses have promised to kill him if he doesn't bring back all the cocaine that was thrown out of the airplane in the first thirty seconds of the movie and he knows two important things: the cops, who don't give you your drugs back, have half of it and the bear ate the rest. Unfortunately for him the bear killed him, but this may be fortunate for him because the guys who were going to kill him would have taken their sweet time about it.

Keri Russell does a respectable job as Sari, a nurse and single mother of a rebellious daughter. She winds up in the action because her kid has decided to ditch school to paint an en plein air picture of a waterfall.

The rest of the cast is straight out of a Coen Brothers movie.

Cocaine Bear doesn't succeed in spite of the ludicrous nature of its premise, but because of it. Elizabeth Banks has singlehandedly destroyed the B-movie industry with this film - now you'll need good actors and proper dialogue to pull off your cheesy movies. Think of your favorite B movie, and Cocaine Bear is head and haunches above it.

There's a rather charming scene where Sari's daughter and her friend find a brick of cocaine the bear hadn't gotten around to eating yet and try to take some of it. They try to eat it rather than snorting it and realize doing cocaine is not the hobby for them.

At the end of the movie the only one who comes out with a good outcome is...the bear. She's kicked her drug habit and is living happily with her cubs while all the humans are either traumatized for life, shot dead or converted to bear feces.

Be forewarned: If you don't like cursing in your movies don't go to this one. Everyone swears, and swears heavily.

If cursing doesn't bother you, shift your brain into neutral and pony up a few bucks. You'll enjoy yourself. Just hope they don't make a sequel. One is all we need.

Does the "J6 Choir" fall into the "Son of Sam" thing?

“Son of Sam” was David Berkowitz, a New York serial killer who made short bleached hair very popular in New York City for a while - since this asshole specialized in killing women with long dark hair, thousands of women with that kind of hair got it cut super short and dyed blonde as a safety precaution. Anyway, they passed a law in New York State to keep Berkowitz from profiting from his crimes.

In the last couple of days the Goodyear Blimp - any 365-day period in which Trump isn’t president is a good year - and twenty of the people he got thrown in the stockade have conspired to release a new hit single. Does this count as profiting from their crimes?

NTSB preliminary report on the East Palestine derailment

Cat etiquette question

If you need to remove your cat from your bed to make it, is it proper to put the cat back when you are done?

If you ever met Jimmy Carter, check in here

In 1996, the odious racist Jesse Helms was running for reelection against former Mayor of Charlotte Harvey Gantt. President Carter came to Fayetteville to speak at a campaign rally for Gantt. Among the first things he said was an admission that Jesse Helms was a distant cousin of his..."so we're here tonight to bring Cousin Jesse back home for good!" The crowd loved it. After the speech President Carter shook the hand of every single person in the room.

Wonderful, very fine man - Carter, not the racist fuck he was campaigning against.

Is Textualism a synonym for Laziness?

Last night my paper ran a story off the AP feed about how the Supremes' latest gun control ruling - that all gun control laws have to be rooted in our nation's history - is causing a lot of panic in the lawmaking sector. Basically, you've got to read 300 years of the history of this nation to decide to make a law regulating gun usage. You know, when this nation was founded domestic abusers were allowed to have guns so in 2023 we've got to let them keep them, something like that.

I'm at the point where I won't be surprised if the Supremes overturn Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108, which governs the lighting system on cars, because what color headlights should be aren't in the Constitution...or if they decide to overturn an internet-fraud statute because the Internet isn't mentioned in the Constitution. (We will not dwell on two facts - unlike the states, who tend to use their constitutions as dumping grounds for laws they want to make hard to overturn, the US Constitution is a broad outline of how to run the country; and that in 1789 there were no headlights or Internet for the Constitution's authors to regulate.)

Okay. So back to the point. I suspect the real motivation behind textualism - the legal theory that any law has to conform to the Constitution as it was originally written over 200 years ago - is that it's simply easier to say "James Madison didn't put this in here so you can't have it."

The catalytic converter from the Wienermobile was stolen

Don't get your hopes up on Trump seeing justice even if he is indicted

Donald Trump did NOT change his home of record from New York to Florida for golf, taxes, climate, lack of liberals, the quality of Alzheimer's care in that state or any of the other reasons old rich Republicans move to that state.

The reason is probably more insidious: He chose Florida because of its leadership. Of all the state chief executives in America, Dictator Swamp Stalin is probably the most likely one to trigger a constitutional crisis by ignoring an extradition order from one of the states who are currently after Trump's ass.

The MAGAts are missing a prime chance for pearl clutching

I know they're 100-percent butthurt over "Lift Every Voice and Sing," Rihanna singing "Bitch Better Have My Money" and...well, whatever the hell else they are pissed off about...but did they notice the backs of the players' helmets and the end zones?

End zones first. The NFL started stenciling the words "It Takes All Of Us" and "Inspire Change" into the borders of the end zones in 2021.

As for helmets, players were allowed to wear End Racism, Stop Hate, It Takes All of Us, Black Lives Matter, Inspire Change, Say Their Stories or Choose Love on the white bumper pad of their helmets since the 2021 season.