Jesus the Vampire's Landing Spot

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA is a 1964 film based on the 1961 play of the same name written by Tennessee Williams. Directed by John Huston, it features Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr. The preface to the story shows Episcopal priest the Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton) having a "nervous breakdown" after being ostracized by his congregation for having an inappropriate relationship with a "very young Sunday school teacher." Two years later, Shannon, now a tour guide for the bottom-of-the-barrel Texas company "Blake's Tours," is taking a group of Baptist school teachers by bus to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The group's brittle leader is Miss Judith Fellowes (Grayson Hall), whose 16-year-old niece Charlotte Goodall (Sue Lyon) tries to seduce Shannon. Fellowes accuses Shannon of trying to seduce Charlotte and declares that she will ruin him. Sue Lyon has notoriety for playing the title character in "Lolita" (1962)...

It is with great regret that I must inform readers and followers of the Landing Spot that my friend and blog contributor Joshua Schneider has died.  I met Joshua via Disqus and quickly found that we had a similar worldview, especially regarding politics, and when the Disqus channels folded he was one of the first to create an alternate website using Site123. He also created a page for me that I never really got the hang of using. He was a pilot and a fan of aircraft in general along with old warbirds, and he shared my interest in the B-17 Flying Fortress, the WWII heavy bomber which helped to smash the Nazi War Machine. Joshua maintained homes in the Philippines and in the Carolinas, and often sent me photos of lovely Asian ladies. I received an email from his daughter Lilla around a week ago, informing me of the news of his passing on 7 October 2019. She related that she still had the picture that my daughter had painted for him, and that she planned to frame it and keep it in...

Here is another astronomy video from Alex McColgan, the owner of the YouTube channel Astrum.  The episode explores the fourth planet from the sun, Mars.  The average distance of Mars from the sun is 142 million miles (228 million km). It is the second smallest terrestrial planet, with a diameter of 4,212 miles (6,780 km). Mars' year is 687 Earth days, and a day on Mars is 24 hours 37 minutes. The average temperature on Mars is -80 F (-60 C) Temperatures on Mars can vary from 95 F (35 C) to -195F (-125 C). The Martian atmosphere is very thin and is 95% carbon dioxide, with a pressure equivalent to .08 pounds psi, or 610 kilopascals. I will be seeing if other videos are available on his YouTube channel in the coming days.

Published on Oct 12, 2019 Star Trek writers and executives have had a lot of ideas, but most get red-shirted before they hit the airwaves. It's too bad, because some sounded awesome. Here are some great Star Trek projects we never got to see. In 1992, the city of Las Vegas drew up an ambitious and, we have to say it, enterprising plan to bring more families to the Strip and boost the gambling revenue: They would pull tourists away from the flashier casinos, with a full-size model of the Starship Enterprise. The original plan spared no expense. The Enterprise would be built exactly to the fictional specifications of the TV show, omitting, unfortunately, the phasers and photon torpedoes, making it look like the old gal plopped down right in the middle of Vegas. Guests could tour the ship and witness faithful reproductions of the sets from the TV shows and movies, and with no exterior supports (to keep the reproduction faithful) the ship was a minor engineering miracle, somethin...

THE LOST BOYS is a 1987 American horror film directed by Joel Schumacher, starring Corey Haim, Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland, Jami Gertz, Corey Feldman, Dianne Wiest, Edward Herrmann, Alex Winter, Jamison Newlander, and Barnard Hughes. The film is about two brothers who move to California to a fictional beach town called "Santa Carla", and end up fighting a gang of young vampires.  LINK TO MOVIE: https://ok.ru/video/44106451678

ENJOY! This is one of my favorite classics, and I always watch it around Halloween. It's a personal tradition. -Tex

MY COUSIN VINNY is a 1992 American comedy film directed by Jonathan Lynn, from a screenplay written by Dale Launer. The film stars Joe Pesci, Ralph Macchio, Marisa Tomei, Mitchell Whitfield, Lane Smith, Bruce McGill, and Fred Gwynne (in his final film appearance). The film deals with two young New Yorkers traveling through rural Alabama who are arrested and put on trial for a murder they did not commit and the comical attempts of a cousin, Vincent Gambini, a lawyer who had only recently passed the bar exam after several unsuccessful attempts, to defend them. Much of the humor comes from the fish-out-of-water interaction between the brash Italian-American New Yorkers (Vinny and his fiancée, Mona Lisa) and the more reserved Southern townspeople. LINK TO MOVIE: https://ok.ru/video/31898733086

This documentary is being presented as a public service; it is censored across Canada according to reports. Comments are welcomed.

Greetings to all from everyone's favorite vampire! I figured I'd try my hand on an article that is not quite political but definitely generates controversy, the concept of the "unalienable right" to free speech.  Currently, free speech is coming under fire from many on the far left. They wish to silence those they disagree with by labeling their remarks as "hate speech", and demand that "offensive" remarks be censored. They are even floating the idea that those who utter opinions they dislike should be arrested, as in the city of New York with regard to the utterance of the phrase "illegal alien". That stated, I do not at all think that our rights are "unalienable" or come from some god, as our rights can easily be curtailed by our fellow man by employing martial law. Martial law is a glaring proof that our rights vanish like a fart in the wind if circumstances become unfavorable for whatever reason, or if some despot gets...

Bat*21 is a 1988 American war film directed by Peter Markle, and adapted from the book by William C. Anderson, novelist and retired United States Air Force colonel. Set during the Vietnam War, the film is a dramatization based upon the rescue of a U.S. air navigator shot down behind enemy lines in Vietnam. The film stars Gene Hackman and Danny Glover with Jerry Reed, David Marshall Grant, Clayton Rohner, Erich Anderson and Joe Dorsey in supporting roles. During the last days of the Vietnam War, USAF Lieutenant colonel Iceal E. "Gene" Hambleton (Gene Hackman) call sign BAT-21 Bravo, is flying on board an EB-66C electronic warfare aircraft, engaged in electronic countermeasures preparatory to a major bombing strike. Without warning, a number of SA-2 Guideline SAMs are launched from North Vietnam, targeting their aircraft. A massive SAM explosion tears off the tail and Hambleton, in the navigator's position, ejects as the sole survivor of the six-man crew. LINK TO MOVIE:...

Here is another astronomy video from Alex McColgan, owner of the YouTube channel Astrum.  The episode explores the closest planet to the sun, Mercury.  The average distance of Mercury from the sun is 36 million miles (58 million km). It is the smallest terrestrial planet, with a diameter of 4,880 kilometers (3,032 miles). Mercury is more like the moon than a planet, as it has no atmosphere to moderate its temperature, which can vary from 800F (430C) on the dayside, to -280F (-174C) on the nightside. Mercury's year is 88 Earth days, and its day is 59 Earth days long, which illustrates a 3:2 orbital resonance. That means the Mercury completes three axial rotations for every two orbits it makes around the sun.

October 22, 2019 By Lisa Baertlein LOS ANGELES (Reuters) United Parcel Service Inc’s new Flight Forward drone unit will soon start home prescription delivery from CVS Health Corp . The service, which will debut in one or two U.S. cities in the coming weeks, shows how the parcel delivery company plans to expand its upstart drone business beyond hospital campuses. “Flight Forward will work with new customers in other industries to design additional solutions for a wide array of last-mile and urgent delivery challenges,” UPS Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer Scott Price said. The Atlanta-based company this month won the U.S. government’s first approval to operate a drone airline, leapfrogging rivals like Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Wing and clearing the way for the expansion of Flight Forward. UPS, which owns 251 jet aircraft and charters nearly 300 more, is building its Flight Forward business at a time when U.S. drone delivery is in its infancy. Regulati...

By Bronson Stocking Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) are demanding swift action to protect transgender migrants attempting to enter the United States. In an eight-page  letter  to Trump administration officials, the senators implore the administration to reverse immigration policies they consider harmful to transgender migrants and other vulnerable populations. The policies they want reversed? All of them! The populations they consider vulnerable? All of them! "We write to express alarm over reports detailing the abuse and neglect of trans gender migrants and asylum seekers at the border and in U.S. custody," the letter states. "We ask you to immediately reverse policies that harm these vulnerable individuals and take swift action to protect the health and safety of transgender migrants." The senators then call for "alternatives to detention, including release from detention on recognizance, parole, and community-based alternati...

This movie was suggested by a reader of the Landing Spot, and I welcome movie suggestions from all readers. There are a lot of good flicks out there that I haven't seen. I'm wondering if Landing Spot readers would like more "controversial" subjects offered here, such as the direction this nation is headed toward, the origin and the existence of man, and so forth.  I'm open to the idea of political and metaphysical discussion on this blog, as long as blatant dogmatism is avoided. Marcus Aurelius said that "all is opinion", and I think that is one of the wisest observations ever made. Please let me know if you would find such subjects acceptable, and topic suggestions would be appreciated. I have some ideas of my own for op-eds as well, though I am not really a fan of either subject. I figure I will start with a reading of the Constitution so that people will be familiar with the text. That said, we return to the movie, the following blurb is courtes...

THUNDER ROAD is a black and white 1958 drama–crime film directed by Arthur Ripley and starring Robert Mitchum, who also produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay. With Don Raye, Mitchum co-wrote the theme song, "The Ballad of Thunder Road." The film features Gene Barry and Jacques Aubuchon. Korean War veteran Lucas Doolin (Robert Mitchum) works in the family moonshine business, delivering the illegal liquor his father distills to clandestine distribution points throughout the South in his souped-up hot rod. However, Lucas has more problems than evading the U.S. Treasury agents ("revenuers"), led by determined newcomer Troy Barrett (Gene Barry). This movie was requested and I found a decent copy, so here goes. LINK TO MOVIE: https://ok.ru/video/288639421091

The movie tonight is just a tad late - I am very busy! KILLDOZER! is a 1974 made for TV science-fiction horror movie, adapted from a 1944 novella of the same name by Theodore Sturgeon. A meteorite crashes onto the Earth's surface on an island off the coast of Africa. Countless years later, after natural forces have buried it and restored the local environment, six construction workers are boated to the island to begin work building an airstrip for an oil drilling company at the crash site, the uninhabited island.

--By Matthew Dunnyveg President Trump has decided recently that there is nothing in Syria worth a single American life or a single American tax dollar.  Not surprisingly, liberals are in hysterics over this most sensible of positions.  Back when Bush II was president, war protestor Cindy Sheehan was the liberal darling du jour; she received saturation coverage.  Proving that liberal motives are never humanitarian, when Baraq was elected, Sheehan coverage mysteriously went down the memory hole despite Baraq's continued prosecution of this war.  Now that Trump wants to fulfill Sheehan's wishes to extricate the US from these wars, liberals are now demanding more blood.  This is hardly the first time liberals are responsible for millions of Third World deaths. When was the last time we heard about Biafra and what happened there?  The name "Biafra" for most people no doubt invokes images of a cheesy elitist liberal masquerading as punk rocker Jello Biafra....

The Landing Spot presents an Adam Schiff Documentary or: The Outer Limits: THE MUTANT. Perhaps there is little difference, as both characters seem to be mutants anyway. At least with Reese Fowler you knew what you were getting: a deranged mutant who didn't want to be left behind, whereas with Adam Schiff you have a deranged madman who is convinced of his delusions of grandeur! And for those of you that may not like my poking of fun at some overpaid, underworked, soft-palmed criminal - well, I guess you'll have to suck it up, 'cause I don't give a shit. LINK TO VIDEO: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6rau01

By BRIAN NIEMIETZ NEW YORK DAILY NEWS | OCT 16, 2019 | 4:53 PM Neil Patrick Harris is on the mend following an accident at sea. The former “Doogie Howser, M.D.” posted a photo of himself on the other side of the scalpel Wednesday in an Instagram posting from the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital. The 46-year-old actor said he injured himself a couple months ago by stumbling onto a sea urchin, whose tiny spines pierced his hands and caused an infection. “Had surgery today,” wrote Harris, who famously played a teenage surgeon 30 years ago on the popular ABC hospital comedy. “I tripped and hand planted onto a sea urchin almost two months ago while climbing rocky cliffs in Croatia.” https://www.nydailynews.com/snyde/ny-neil-patrick-harris-hospitalized-sea-urchin-20191016-yi6jq7na6rev5bpada7tet6cbu-story.html

THE CAREY TREATMENT is a 1972 film by Blake Edwards based on the novel A Case of Need , credited to Jeffery Hudson, a pseudonym for Michael Crichton. It stars James Coburn, Jennifer O'Neill, James Hong, and Pat Hingle. Dr. Peter Carey (James Coburn) is a pathologist who moves to Boston, where he starts working in a hospital. He soon meets Georgia Hightower (Jennifer O'Neill), with whom he falls in love. Karen Randall (Melissa Torme-March), daughter of the hospital's Chief Doctor, becomes pregnant and is brought to the emergency department after an illegal abortion. She dies there, and Dr. David Tao (James Hong), a brilliant surgeon and friend of Carey, is arrested and accused of being responsible for the illegal abortion. Carey does not believe his friend to be guilty and starts investigating on his own, despite strong opposition by the police and the doctors around the hospital's chief. LINK TO VIDEO: https://ok.ru/video/1703454837390

Another astronomy video from Alex McColgan, owner of the YouTube channel Astrum. The star of this video is not a star, but a planet called Neptune, the eighth planet from the sun. Its diameter is nearly identical to that of Uranus, at 30,600 miles (49,245 km), but at 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion km) from the sun, it is nearly twice as far as Uranus. The average temperature at the cloud tops of Neptune is -392 degrees Fahrenheit (-200 degrees Celsius). The winds on Neptune are the highest measured in the Solar System at 1,300 mph (2200 km/h).

It’s not healthier for you. It doesn’t technically come from the Himalayas. But pink salt’s appeal has exploded nonetheless. The Atlantic | Amanda Mull For decades, I was under the impression that salt is white. Table salt, sea salt, kosher salt, whatever—the sky is blue, the salt is white, and that’s just how things are. Then, about three years ago and for reasons that were not clear to me at the time, much of the salt I encountered was suddenly pink. I bought some pink salt, but I didn’t know why. It seemed like the right thing to do. Specifically, almost all pink salt is branded as Himalayan. Most of that comes from the enormous Khewra Salt Mine, situated between Islamabad and Lahore in Punjab, a bit south of the actual Himalayas in Pakistan. Those salt veins, formed when ancient seabeds were pushed inland, are hundreds of millions of years old, and legend holds that the site of the mine was originally discovered by Alexander the Great. Now pink salt is available...

I don't usually involve myself in political articles, but this time I feel that I must. The Goebbelsian propaganda rag, the Washington Post, has decided to berate Donald Trump and his supporters for not throwing even more American soldiers into the yawning jaws of death. Some clown calling himself Max Boot is wringing his hands over goddamned muslim Saracens who seem to LOVE killing each other and have done so since the Seventh Century CE. Why, and how is it  OUR responsibility to intervene in these idiotic goddamned millennia-long blood feuds between ignorant, arrogant, over-emotional, dogmatic inbreds, whose first response to ANYTHING is to resort to VIOLENCE like a pack of fucking uncontrollable chimpanzees? I'd be willing to bet that if Hillary Clinton was running this dying nation and pulled our troops out of Syria , Max Boot would be endlessly praising her for having made such a "noble and brilliant decision" - with his nose so far up her sagging prolapse...

Misinformation about one of the safest herbicides ever produced has created a lucrative business for ambulance-chasing lawyers and NGOs—at the expense of native species. By Ted Williams Oct 14, 2019 9:00 You’ve seen the ads flooding television and social media : “Have you been exposed to weed killer Roundup? If you have cancer, you may be eligible for compensation. Call our law offices … ”  In 2018 and 2019, California juries ordered Roundup’s producer, Monsanto, to pay multimillion-dollar compensations to four non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients who claimed to have been sickened by Roundup (one of dozens of formulations with herbicide glyphosate as the active ingredient). As a result, there are now close to 20,000 lawsuits against the company from people who also allege that exposure to Roundup gave them cancer.  The California verdicts will almost certainly be ...

I missed posting last night's movie due to work intruding, so for tonight's features, the Landing Spot presents two Charleton Heston flicks... The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973). Carry on; I have more work to do. LINKS TO MOVIES: OMEGA MAN: https://archive.org/details/TheOmegaMan1971 SOYLENT GREEN: https://ok.ru/video/224648104534

In the early 1500s, Leonardo da Vinci designed a hypothetical bridge for the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. It was rejected. Over 500 years later, an MIT team has recreated the design with a model and have showed that it would have worked. Da Vinci's design incorporates architectural techniques that would have not been seen for another 300 years. By David Grossman Oct 10, 2019 Researchers at MIT have proven Leonardo da Vinci correct yet again, this time involving his design for what would have been at the time a revolutionary bridge design. Although clients rejected da Vinci's work at the time, over 500 years later, the researchers have proven that his bridge would have worked. The famed Renaissance Man made his living working with wealthy patrons—people like Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, who commissioned his painting "The Last Supper." But da Vinci did not want to limit himself to Italian patrons. When Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire pu...