The Roving Ambassador of Romance

Ahem.


During discussion of famously unhappy heiresses — namely Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton — I learned of the existence of one Porfirio Rubirosa, a notorious Dominican playboy who kept his name in tabloids during the first half of the twentieth century by romancing a succession of ladies that reads like a Who's Who of Bombshells. The list includes, but is not limited to, the following: Delores Del Rio, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Soraya Esfansiary (wife of the Shah of Iran), Veronica Lake, Kim Novak, Eva Peron, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and of course Duke and Hutton. Beyond his ladies, Rubirosa was the subject of gossip also for the purported size of penis. The Wikipedia states that his member was described by Truman Capote (!) as "an 11-inch cafe au lait sinker as thick as a man's wrist." The Rubirosa wang was so famous, in fact, that today large restaurant-style pepper grinders are apparently known as "rubirosas."

This is perhaps one of the best legacies I've ever heard of anyone leaving, ever.

This is a fact that I find all the more hilarious in light of the following fact: At my birthday dinner, Hannah suffered the indignity of having the waitress's pepper grinder partly disassemble and drop its cap in her risotto.

Death and Life on June 4, 1982

More often than not, I read Ain't It Cool News for movie and TV geek gossip the likes of which I can't find elsewhere. Entertainment Weekly or TV Guide, for example, both love Lost and faithfully report its cast changes and smoke monster attacks, but only Ain't It Cool News writes about upcoming episode with the shameless fanboy frothing — and complementary diehard expertise — that I crave. Yesterday, however, I happened upon an entirely different sort of article that initially caught my eye only by virtue of the headline:

"Death and Life on June 4, 1982"

For those sitting at the back of class, that's my birthday, in the literal sense of the word.

The post details one film lover's viewing of two films that opened in my birthday: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Poltergeist. I've seen the latter many times, but never the former, so I will just take the writer's words assurance of thematic overlap between the two films' notions of life and death and loss and suffering do indeed share some similarities. The author then discusses his own experience with Poltergeist-like explained phenomena, but not in a way that makes him seem like the kind of loony, superstitious spiritualist who usually posts such stories online.

In all, a beautiful piece brimming with unabashed geekiness and honesty about the authors marvel at how pop culture intersected with his life in a meaningful way.

That's what I've been shooting for here, though I fear I've often missed my mark.

This Must Be the Place

It's been posted before, but this song can't stop me from crying on the night of my twenty-fifth birthday.

A nostalgic song.

Home is where I want to be.

Pick me up and turn me round. I feel numb — born with a weak heart. I guess I must be having fun. The less we say about it the better. Make it up as we go along. Feet on the ground, head in the sky. It's okay — I know nothing's wrong.

(Nothing.)

I got plenty of time. You got light in your eyes, and you're standing here beside me. I love the passing of time. Never for money, always for love. Cover up and say goodnight.

(Say goodnight.)

Home. It's where I want to be, but I guess I'm already there. I come home. She lifted up her wings. Guess that this must be the place. I can't tell one from another Did I find you, or you find me? There was a time before we were born If someone asks, this is where I'll be.

(Where I'll be.)

We drift in and out. Sing into my mouth Out of all those kinds of people, you got a face with a view. I'm just an animal looking for a home. Share the same space for a minute or two, and you love me till my heart stops — love me till I'm dead. Eyes that light up, eyes look through you. Cover up the blank spots. Hit me on the head.

Make of it whatever you will. I know I've been thinking about it for years.

Chilled Blue

I'm living in perpetual 7 a.m.

Waking up kills me, though not in the depressed way it did two years ago. Then, I had graduated and contracted West Nile and found myself trapped in a terrible condo on Cathedral Oaks — fevered, jobless, with coyotes howling and large stretches of nothing separating me from anything. Then, I had no reason to get up. Today, as I contemplate my twenty-fifth birthday tomorrow, I have reasons to wake up and go make something of myself, but for whatever reason the May Gray and June Gloom has SADdened me more than it has before.

What's worse than waking up at noon when you didn't intend to? Waking up slight hungover at noon to an overcast sky that nearly tricks you into thinking you could get up in time enough to appreciate the morning.

This morning, I just stared, hoping I somehow hadn't wasted half the day. When I rolled over to look at time, the bedside clock was turned away — likely because the clock itself is now conspiring with the weather to set me up for a fall. (I've actually long suspected the alarm clock of malice.) Flip. Noon, right on the dot.

The next cruel trick comes with opening the window. Necessary to clear the room of the smell of sleeping bodies, opening the window lets in this cold air that gets into my clothes, through the covers I just dove back under. I hate this. The me that was standing in front of the closed window didn't know for sure that the air outside would be so mean. Somehow, this new day could have presented the warm, muggy kind of overcast that we occasionally get here in Santa Barbara. But no — it's the June Gloom, which I feel started especially early this year and I worry may not give way to the beautifully lazy upper-90s days we had here last July.

I'm still in a bathrobe as I type this, because it constitutes appropriate clothes for this permafog. In a former life, I didn't wear bathrobes, except around Christmas and possibly only on Christmas morning for the opening of presents. Most mornings of the year began with the cloudless blue skies that signify a day in which wavy lines would rise up from anything with a surface facing the sun. Not only would bathrobes be inappropriate, but more often shoes and shirts would be as well, at least for the first few moments outside. Lizards would be out, sunning themselves. Here in Santa Barbara, I worry for the lizards' welfare.

I just looked out the window again. Not so much gray at the moment, but definitely icy blue, like how you might paint a picture of Antarctica if you didn't want it to be just white. Icy blue like a pissed-off bridesmaid.

A newsflash: Something changed. The gray remains, but I'm told something has, in fact, just changed, just in this past day. We don't know what, but the closet door knob falls off now. Can I blame the weather for this too? Can I blame the weather for me now being in my mid-twenties as opposed to the comfortable early twenties demographic I previously claimed?

Mario Hacksploitation

Online prowling for obscure bits of Mario trivia has led me to SykoGrafix, a pop culture site that includes two installments of a feature on rare, illegal NES hacks, FreakyNES. Both volumes one and two of FreakyNES showcase some great Mario hacks. Diehards probably already know of them, but I figured it couldn't hurt to post them here.

Somari

mario wears a tank top, apparently

Well-known among both Mario and Sonic enthusiasts, Somari is the Master System version of the original Sonic the Hedgehog title reworked to feature Mario as the hero. Mario seems to be a bit taller than he appears in his licensed games. Oddly, he also has the spin dash move, which Sonic did not pick up until Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The Wikipedia page on Somari claims that it's unknown exactly when the game came out, though the screens claim that the "Somari Team" released sometime in 1994, possibly in Hong Kong, South America and South Africa.

ROMs of it are available online, though many come with the warning that gameplay is a little woogy — it is, after all, a hack — and can freeze up without warning.




For more on Somari, check out the following sites:

• ClassicGaming.com
• Atari HQ
• Sonicology

Mari Street Fighter III Turbo

If the mental leap it took to implement Mario in a Sonic game was a small one, this one clears the moon. A hack of Street Fighter II for the NES — a system for which the title was never released in the first place — plus a bunch of weird palette swaps of the original cast and, for some reason, Mario. Check it out.

The fellow who posted the YouTube video above claims Mario plays kind of like a cross between Ryu and Dhalsim, which I guess makes as much sense as anything else in this strange, strange game.

Kart Fighter

Easily one of the better made Mario hacks out there, Kart Fighter features the original eight racers from Super Mario Kart duking it out, Street Fighter-style. Many have dubbed this a spiritual predecessor to Smash Bros. by virtue of being the first chance gamers got to see Mario and company beating the crap out of each other.

the cartridge art

Note that the above image is a slight re-styling of Nintendo's official art for Super Mario Kart, just slightly redrawn so that it doesn't look like anybody is driving a go-kart, Peach isn't wearing a crown and Mario's hardly in the image. However, everyone is still in the same basic position and standing in the middle of a raceway, now for no apparent reason. Compare:

and what the cartridge art was going for

As the below screenshots indicate, the game looks surprisingly good. Those backgrounds are mostly created specifically for the game, I think, as are the character sprites.

clearly, some of the mario kart special moves have carried over.

toad has never looked so mad. or so tall.

princess lana + chun li = kart fighter peach, apparently

not only do certain characters appear under their japanese name,
but yoshi does so under the strangely over-anglicized yossy.

Some background graphics, however, come directly from the Capcom NES title Little Nemo: The Dream Master, one of which — the mushroom forest — is seen in the Luigi vs. Yoshi fight on this page.

Here's a clip of the game in action.

For more Kart Fighter, check out the following sites:

• Siliconera
• Atari HQ
• Emulation Camp

Tiny Mario Adventures and other such nonsense

There's tragic little info on this title available online, but I'm guessing that's because it sucks. It's the NES Tiny Toon Adventures with Mario subbing in for the main character, Buster Bunny. But if I remember this game correctly — yes, I'm admitting to actually having played the original in my youth — the game gives players a choice between playing as other characters too. That would explain the Sykografix writer noting the odd phenomenon of Mario suddenly turning into Plucky Duck.

RomHacking.net notes that various forms of this game are also known as Super Mario Adventures and, for some reason, Mario 16. Also, the between-stage cutscenes apparently still feature the Tiny Toons cast, leading to an overall nonsensical and half-assed feel. However, the screenshots posted there seem to tell a different story, given Mario's prominence. Also, the overall look of the game seems different enough from the screenshots glimpsed in the FreakyNES article that they might be referring to two completely different Tiny Toons-Super Mario mash-ups.

Here's what I got, from whatever game it may be from.

who is that blue ninja-looking fellow? i suppose we'll never know

however, that's definitely tiny toons villain montana max depicted in the statue.

What can be made of all this? No clue. Some questions are better off unanswered.

In closing, I'd like to say that I don't know who made this games or what possessed them that any of this would be a good idea. (Though I suppose they may have made a quick buck here and there.) But I'm glad they did. And an extra thanks to SykoGrafix for listing these rarities together — again, in FreakyNES Volume One and Volume Two — and prompting me to look into them.

And for more phony Mario goodness, check out "Psuedo Mario, Then and Now."

Holy Smoke

The Indy ran a film feature I wrote on a relatively unknown horror film that was filmed at a seminary here in Santa Barbara in the early 80s. Below is my take on it, in which I manage to discuss its wonderful lameness and investigate how any coherent Catholic organization would permit a horror film to be filmed on their grounds in the first place.

As with my last re-printing of an Indy article, the full names of the people involved have been altered here, just because these people really don't need to be Googling themselves and finding this blog.

Really.

The Strange History of St. Anthony’s and the Diabolical Movie Evilspeak

Something about the marriage of Catholic iconography — with its stained glass, martyr statues, and arcane Latin inscriptions — to the ultimate Big Bad has long appealed to filmmakers and filmgoers alike. That sentence alone should bring to mind some vivid memories of pop culture devilry from the likes of Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, or the infamous crucifix scene from The Exorcist, but the connection goes back at least to movies like 1934’s The Black Cat, which pits Bela Lugosi against Boris Karloff amid satanic-themed mayhem.

It stands to reason, then, that a city as rich in Catholic history as Santa Barbara would have popped up in some point in the horror genre, albeit in a way even film diehards may have forgotten. In 1982, the Coronet Film Corporation released Evilspeak, a dark, schlocky chiller starring Clint Howard — Ron’s brother, perhaps best remembered for his childhood role on the TV series Gentle Ben — as Stanley Coopersmith, a social misfit at the prestigious West Andover Military Academy.

The subject of endless teasing by classmates and faculty, Stanley eventually stumbles onto a diary kept by Father Esteban, a former Spanish missionary priest who became a devotee of Satan. Stanley scans the book into his computer and ends up willfully summoning the power of the devil to wreak fiery and pointy havoc on his foes, à la the finale of Carrie.

Despite its inclusion on Britain’s “Video Nasty” list of inappropriate viewing material in 1984 and its current availability on DVD, Evilspeak seems all but forgotten. It may, however, be of special interest to Santa Barbara residents by virtue of it being filmed almost entirely at St. Anthony’s Seminary. Crews swept in one summer while St. Anthony’s Seminary was out of session and quickly shot a film so shockingly anti-Christian that Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, purportedly loved it and regarded it as an accurate depiction of his faith. Evilspeak hit theaters shortly after, but to little acclaim. Yet it raises an interesting question: How exactly does a film that would seem to glorify all things non-Christian ever get permission to film in an institution of the Lord?

According to St. Anthony’s staffers, the film got the go-ahead after higher-ups approved a preliminary shooting script described as decidedly PG. Though Fr. Mel JXXXXXXX oversaw goings-on at St. Anthony’s for years, his sabbatical in 1980 left Fr. Alberic SXXXX in charge. “We didn’t really understand the nature of the film until after it came out,” SXXXX said of Evilspeak. “It had lots of promise and the script looked okay, and several of us read that. But they kept adding on.”

The content added in after that first script approval, one must conclude, would have probably included the graphic death sequences. The foremost of these is a particularly distasteful scene in which one of the film’s few female characters strips and steps into the shower, where she is messily devoured by pigs. That, coupled with the blood sacrifice of the world’s cutest puppy and the ending sequence — in which a levitating Stanley impales, decapitates, and burns his tormentors in the school chapel, ultimately sending a large cross altarpiece toppling to the ground — make for good reason why Evilspeak did not make the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ top 10 films of 1982.

Perhaps most offensive to Christian sensibilities is the notion of the protagonist — whom Howard plays as the kind of undeservedly wronged loner ubiquitous to most high schools, real or fictional — turning to Satanism. Unlike the title character in Carrie, Stanley seems to have no remorse for wiping out his classmates, teachers, and even the chaplain. The film’s final shot depicts his face, turned demonic with Tron-caliber special effects.

Both SXXXX and JXXXXXXX said they were happy few people saw the film, in Santa Barbara or otherwise. SXXXX said he never bothered to actually watch it, though he does remember hearing that it bombed. JXXXXXXX, on the other hand, did. “I went incognito down to a theater in Ventura to see it,” he admitted. He was not impressed, calling the whole incident “embarrassing.” And that would seem to mark the end of Santa Barbara’s association with Evilspeak. (The credits, however, thank a special appearance by the Dos Pueblos High School marching band, so likely some current area residents have memories of the film.)


Though Evilspeak probably doesn’t appear on too many people’s favorite films lists, its quick run through theaters didn’t render it completely inconsequential in terms of pop culture legacy. A 1997 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured a strikingly similar plot, with an evil tome being scanned into a computer and unleashing demonic forces upon the tech-savvy.

One of the unlucky classmates who suffers Stanley’s wrath — specifically by having his still-beating heart plucked from his chest — is a young Don Stark, who is perhaps best known today for his regular role on That ’70s Show. And Clint Howard somehow managed to parlay starring in movies like Evilspeak into a career. His list of subsequent credits in the schlock horror genre include Night Shift, Leprechaun 2, Carnosaur, and Ice Cream Man, the last of which features Howard in the a title role of a mental patient who processes unpleasant children into frosty treats. Finally, Eric Weston — Evilspeak’s director, who could not be reached for comment — is currently filming the feature Hyenas, which tells the story of human-hyena hybrids who eat people.

In the end, the film offers a strange bit of Santa Barbara history about how a movie of such satanic gore could ever be permitted to film on a location owned by those who might object to such content. And for those curious to rent the film themselves, know this: The only version available on DVD is the uncensored director’s cut, which means more unholy splatter than you would have seen in the theaters anyway.

The 411: Evilspeak can be rented on Netflix.com.

America's Most Misunderstood Blog Post

Two lists, both directly related to Dr. Pepper. First, the history of slogans used to advertise the drink:

• "King of Beverages" (1889–1914)
• "Drink a Bite to Eat at 10, 2, and 4 o'clock!" (1920s–1930s)
• "The Friendly Pepper Upper" (1950s)
• "America's Most Misunderstood Soft Drink" (1960s)
• "The Most Original Soft Drink Ever" (1970s)
• "Be a Pepper. Wouldn't you like to Be a Pepper too?" (1977–1985)
• "Hold Out For the Out of the Ordinary" (1986–1997)
• "It's Dr Pepper Flavour, Silly!" (1997, in Australia)
• "Now's the Time. This is the Place. Dr Pepper Is The Taste." (1997)
• "Dr Pepper, It Makes the World Taste Better" (2000)
• "Just What The Dr Ordered." (2000–?)
• "Dr Pepper, so misunderstood" (2001)
• "Be You" (2002–2004)
• "Solves All Your Problems." (2002–present, in Europe)
• "Dr Pepper: What's the worst that could happen?" (2004, in the UK)
• "One Taste & You Get It" (2005)
• "Can You Handle The Taste?" (2006, in Denmark, Finland and Netherlands)
• "Authentic blend of 23 flavors" (2006, in Canada)
• "Dr Pepper, Nothing Better" (2006)
• "The Dr. knows the right touch" (2006, in parts of Europe)
• "There's more to it" (2006)
• "I Want It All" (2006)

Bad concluding pair. "There's more to it" plus "I Want It All"? That's megalomania.

And secondly, I present a list of all the Dr. Pepper knock-offs ever to grace supermarket shelves.

• Dr. Path (sold in PathMark Supermarkets)
• Dr. Topper (Rocky Top and Clover Valley)
• Dr. Dazzle (ALDI Inc.)
• Dr. Slice and Dr. Faygo (Faygo Family Beverages Inc.)
• Dr. Hy-Top (Federated Group)
• Dr. Smooth (President's Choice) — like the porn star?
• Dr. Chek (Winn-Dixie)
• Dr. IGA (IGA)
• Dr. Perky (Food Lion) — worst OB/GYN ever
• Dr. Bash (Bashas)
• Dr. Bob (Stop & Shop) — as in, "I was raped by Dr. Bob"
• Dr. Weis (Weis Markets)
• Dr. Celeste (The Pantry, Inc.) — as in, "This homeopathic medicine Dr. Celeste gave me does isn't curing my diseases."
  
• Dr. Spice (Target)
• Dr. Hy-Vee (Hy-Vee)
• Dr. Publix (Publix) — too easy
• Pepper, MD (Path Right)
• Dr. Fresh (Marsh)
• Dr. Rocket (K-mart)
• Dr. Radical (Adirondack Beverage Company) — an old burnout who runs a skate shop
• Dr. Shaw's (Shaw's Supermarkets, Inc.)
• Dr. Wild (J G Meyer First Choice)
• Dr. Wow (Topco). — as in, "I was up all night because my roommate scored some Dr. Wow."
• Dr. Riffic (Eckerd)
• Dr. Skipper (Safeway)
• Dr. Bold and Dr A+ (Albertsons)
• Dr. B (H-E-B)
• Dr. K (Costco, Kroger and Fred Meyer)
• Dr. M (Meijer)
• Dr. W (Wegmans)
• Dr. Shasta (Shasta)
• Dr. Thunder (Wal-Mart) — A.K.A. "colon blow"
• Mr. Pibb (Coca-Cola)

[ source: The Wikipedia ]