Artwork by Micah Birchfield

The Red Menace close-up

Two drawings of the Red Menace from Micah Birchfield, who has done the main cover art for the last two Red Menace books and both Crag Banyon Mystery covers.

Red Menace

Twelve Days of Christmas

For the love of God, enough already with the "funny" versions of The Twelve Days of Christmas. They are NEVER funny. (Bob and Doug McKenzie excepted.)

I'm glad the brain trust in Washington banned incandescent bulbs. I was sick of using light bulbs that were inexpensive, efficient, long-lived, brighter and didn't give me mercury poisoning. I'm looking forward to a darker, costlier, more toxic future. We need Washington to do more things. C'mon, people! More things! More things! More things!

Bond. Remington Bond.

A friend used to insist that the James Bond movies starring Remington Steele weren't as horrible as I knew they must be. I stumbled across the beginning of one a number of years ago, so I decided to give it a shot. Remington Bond was mincing around on top of a dam and wound up bungee jumping down the face of the dam, bungeeing upside-down into an open-air toilet stall where a Russian was sitting on the pot. Forget the whole creepy Larry Craig aspect of the scene and forget that the outdoor dam-toilet only existed because a snickering hack screenwriter stuck it out there as a ridiculous setup. Upside-down in the outdoor toilet and face-to-face with a crapping Russian, Remington Bond quipped something like, "Mind if I drop in?" I certainly did. I shut off the TV. Five minutes with Roger Moore, Jr. was five minutes too long.

Who could've guessed that sort of nasty stuff from an adult male who hung around kids making baby talk with his hand jammed up a puppet's rear end? If only there had been some sign...

Goofball Review of Goofball Star Trek Episode "Spectre of the Gun"

At the beginning of this week's Star Trek, the Enterprise is forced to slam on the brakes and leave skid marks across half the solar system when some kid's kite flies out in the spaceway right in front of them.  It's apparently pretty windy up there in the inky blackness of eternity, because every time the Enterprise tries to back up and drive around it, the kite rolls right back in front of the ship.  Damn space kids, why aren't you in school?

Kirk has been ordered into the neighborhood by Starfleet to make contact with a hostile race of xenophobes called the Milkmen, and he's afraid to run over the kite because it's one of those expensive box jobbers and the Milkmen might make him pay for a new one and it's not like he's pulling down bigshot commodore money.

The box kite glows like one of Timothy Leary's hippie daydreams and tells Kirk to get lost.  The Milkmen are washing their hair and aren't interested in Starfleet's vacuum cleaners or encyclopedias.  Kirk says nuts to that and flies right on past the kite, because the best way to ingratiate oneself to a species of xenophobic maniacs is to invade their space and send an armed landing party to their planet. (Frankly, I wish we'd have tried that ourselves in North Korea in our way-off distant Earth past of five years ago when we still had prestige and a military.)

On the planet someone has set the fog machine to Universal Monster Classics and Kirk and his pals are confronted by a giant snake mask with glowing eyes left over from Planet Halloween.  The snake head mask quite reasonably tells Kirk that he shouldn't be there, so Kirk pulls a gun and waves it around to show the Halloween mask who's boss of this here planet, see?

The Halloween snake mask gets mad when Kirk threatens to pop a sci-fi cap in its rattle, and it sends Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Chekov, Sneezy, Grumpy and Dopey to Planet Western.  Yes, that's right.  Planet Western.  God help me.

We learn that the telepathic Milkmen can read minds and somehow learned that William Shatner's Canadian ancestors pioneered the American frontier.  Did I already say God help me?

The buildings in the Western town consist of fake fronts with no side walls and with pictures and clocks hanging in the unrealistic red backdrop sky.  There's some dialogue that tries to explain why the sets are incomplete, but for some reason Spock doesn't mention that in season three the show's budget clearly was slashed from the ten bucks a week from the first two seasons and reduced to whatever they could find under the sofa cushions in producer Gene Rubberbabybuggybumper's office.  Two buttons, a couple of pencil stubs and a roach clip don't buy as many far-out futuristic sets as they used to.

The weird music they played on I Love Lucy when the screen got all wavy at the start of a flashback sequence plays in the background all over Planet Western. The sound department evidently cared pretty much equally as the set department, and instead of varying the music decided to just pop Theremin's Greatest Hits in the eight-track and wander out to the commissary to watch Ben Cartwright eat a tuna fish sandwich.

Scotty can't believe they're on Planet Cowboy.  Because, you know, Planet Indian from a couple of weeks ago made sooooooooo much more sense.

Kirk realizes they're meant to play out the gunfight at the OK Corral.  He meets the Earps, who have brought along their terrible false mustaches to scare Kirk. Kirk tries to be friends by offering them a gallon of the mustache glue he and Chekov use for their wigs, but the Earps are about as interested in what he's peddling as the Milkmen were at the start of the episode.

McCoy meets Doc Holiday all by himself and tries to curry favor by complimenting him on how real his terrible false mustache looks, and I start to wonder that if these Milkmen are such great geniuses at reaching into someone's mind and creating a false reality from the thoughts they find therein, why they can't come up with four real walls and mustaches that don't look like they've been chopped off a horse's rear end and stuck in place with a smear of maple syrup.

Speaking of horse's rear ends, Chekov romances an imaginary bar floozy and Wyatt Earp shoots him when Chekov valiantly stands up to defend the honor of the figment of his imagination.

Bones says Chekov is dead, but there's not much suspense since Chekov has to survive to say "nuclear wessels" years later in the movie where they pick up two whales in California that aren't Scotty and Uhura.

I suddenly realize that if only the costume department had given Kirk a cowboy hat to cover his bald head like Ron Howard, he probably would have been able to leave his wig back in his trailer that week.

Bones, Spock, and Scotty build a bomb out of a can of beans, but it doesn't blow up. They don't realize that for that to happen you have to eat them first.

Wyatt Earp straps on his gun and glues down his mustache for the big fight.

Oh, I got a cowboy on my boots, honey!
I got a cowboy on my boots, babe!
Oh, I got a cowboy on my boots,
An' I'm-a smokin' and-a spettin' my cheroots, Starfleet baby mine!

Hey, do you realize that Bones looks pretty much as old in the 1960s TV show as he did in the movies twenty years later, so he either looked good for 110 or lousy for ninety?

Someone turns the wind machine on high and the air is suddenly full of flying leaves and mustaches.  The only thing holding my interest at this point is wondering if Shatner's wig will fly out the window, through Mission Impossible's front door and land on Martin Landau's wig.

Spock feels up Kirk's, McCoy's and Scotty's faces so that the Earp boys' bullets pass right through them.  Who cares that it makes no sense, it's flying kick time!

Kirk beats up Wyatt and pulls off his mustache but doesn't shoot him, and all of sudden everybody's back on the bridge of the Enterprise and Chekov lives!  Outside, the glowing box kite explodes and the Halloween snake mask Milkman says that he was just a little upset before when he tried to kill everybody with dream cowboys because he had a roast burning in the oven and his wife was out gallivanting with the girls again, and that of course his planet would be delighted to buy some brushes and fine Avon products from the United Federation of Planets, he just needs a minute to slip into something sexy.

As the Enterprise flies off for Planet Milkmen, Kirk tells Spock that man overcame his instinct for violins, so I guess that means there aren't any orchestras in the future but if that's the case how does he explain Jerry Goldsmith, huh?  Or maybe I didn't hear him quite right.  Whatever.

Thank you, Bruce Grossman

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