friendship isn't about trust - friendship is about nunchucks

It was with sadness that I read of the passing of Fast & Furious star Paul Walker.
There was a joke - made in good humor - on a recent War Rocket Ajax podcast about Walker and his fellow F&F cast members such as Ludacris and how they do nothing but make Fast & Furious movie sequels, and while that's erroneous in Walker's case, it's at least a true reflection of how he's viewed in popular culture, to the extent that headlines conflated his name and manner of death in a regrettably ghoulish attempt to grab attention with the perceived irony - "Fast & Furious actor Paul Walker dies in car crash" went the headline on the Guardian website, of all places.
But yes, I will grant that Walker is known best to me for his part in one of the more enjoyably daft film franchises of the last decade.  I'm not a big petrolhead and for the most I despise car culture, but Fast & Furious isn't about cars, it's about machismo and what we expect of ourselves as men and the dichotomy between what's expected of us and what we desire for ourselves and why.  They're less celebratory of the macho culture of which they often display a knowing awareness, and ultimately betray themselves as melancholic films despite their low body count and eye-pleasing cast of  models like Walker striding alongside walking parodies of masculinity like the gravel-toned Vin Diesel and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnston.
They're dumb films, but they're not stupid, and if you're on the fence you could do a lot worse than check them out.

You're gonna look pretty funny tryin' to eat corn on the cob with no FUCKIN' TEETH

Charles Napier
April 12 1936 – October 5 2011
Beginning with the dreadful Deep Space, a sci-fi action movie I nonetheless enjoyed if only for the scene where he seduces his co-star by playing sexy bagpipes, but where he also wrestled with a rubber monster back when such things were not post-production CGI but full body costume for some unfortunate and nameless stunt actor, Charles Napier registered on my nerd radar.
He was the voice of an angry redneck general in the Bruce Timm Superman cartoon, played an angry redneck general in Star Trek: DS9, a retired redneck general in the truncated teen wangstathon Roswell - Napier was a regular in my kind of tv and movies and once I knew he was there I started retroactively spotting him everywhere - as a space-hippy in the original Star Trek, the redneck who threatens John Belushi with impromptu dentistry in The Blues Brothers, the desk jockey who sells out the title character in Rambo: First Blood Part 2, the judge in Tom Hanks courtroom drama Philadelphia... oh, and some Russ Meyer movies, too. If you like that sort of thing.
I always liked to see Napier onscreen, to hear that distinctive voice of his even behind animated characters, full of gravitas and a hint of menace - he was a presence as a well as a prolific character actor and I will miss having him around as part of the landscape.

You’re my children and I love you but you’re all terrible at what you do and I feel like I should tell you - I would fire you if I could

My Depressing Tuesday song was going to be Johnny Cash's Ain't No Grave (Can Hold My Body Down), but I thought it would be inappropriate if I did so after mentioning the death of Elizabeth Sladen, TV's Sarah Jane Smith: 1 February 1948 – 19 April 2011 - not a bad run, I guess, and she's survived and remembered fondly, but still a shame.
I always preferred Sarah Jane Adventures to Doctor Who, and on my first forays onto the internet I encountered a few like-minded nerds who liked bad 90s action movies and terrible sci-fi films made for twenty pence in a quarry but who were also into Who and had actually met her in person - this being before she resurfaced in the current franchise of Doctor Who and was appearing at old-school Who conventions - and the consensus was that she was a lovely, approachable and outgoing woman, which is probably worth noting given how most stories of meeting minor celebrities tend to be about how unpleasant the experience was for someone or other. I did not hear a bad word said.

Fine by me - more fish for Kunte

I was saddened to hear today of the passing of Dwayne McDuffie, a writer who I'd thought of mostly as a provider of solid comics about which I had no real complaints (and the Deathlok series I thought pretty fucking sweet at the time but didn't realise he was the writer until today), but with each message of condolence read on depressed forums and blogs I notice he has actually been responsible for a lot of material I thought pretty damn awesome.
Back when I had a job, I drank a lot and I had no time for internets - that shit was just reading to me, like some sort of Star trek version of Teletext - and so I relied on Sky telly for my tv shows, though to be honest my brother and dad got more out of it than I did apart from when I was hungover on the weekend and would lay in bed drinking pints of energy drink/Five Alive topped off with a couple of packets of resolve while I watched Static Shock, Justice League/Unlimited, Batman Beyond (inexplicably re-monikered by the marketing fuckwits as Batman of the Future) - basically Dwayne was a driving force for these shows and without him making them better than they would have been, I'd have had to get out of bed. Probably, I would have gone straight to the hair of the dog and become even more reliant on drink than I am at the moment, but more important than one more drunken Irish idiot working on kidney failure, I would have missed a shitload of great telly.

Godspeed, D.