View Obscura

 From The History Channel On the morning of October 25, Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury came into Tombstone for supplies. Over the next 24 hours, the two men had several violent run-ins with the Earps and their friend Doc Holliday. Around 1:30 p.m. on October 26, Ike’s brother Billy rode into town to join them, along with Frank McLaury and Billy Claiborne. The first person they met in the local saloon was Holliday, who was delighted to inform them that their brothers had both been pistol-whipped by the Earps. Frank and Billy immediately left the saloon, vowing revenge. Around 3 p.m., the Earps and Holliday spotted the five members of the Clanton-McLaury gang in a vacant lot behind the OK Corral, at the end of Fremont Street. The famous gunfight that ensued lasted all of 30 seconds, and around 30 shots were fired. Though it’s still debated who fired the first shot, most reports say that the shootout began when Virgil Earp pulled out his revolver and shot Billy Clanton point-blank in the...

 It seems that Fred and Barney have an eccentric neighbor who collects strange objects and fights with his wife constantly. When the fighting stops the two stone age sleuths deduce that eerily strange behaving Alvin Brickrock has chopped up his wife and hidden her remains in an old trunk. This 1961 classic episode of The Flintstones barrows it's title from the late 50s television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents and parodies the plot of on of the Hitchcock's most famous films Rear Window (1954). Just like Jimmy Stewart's character L.B. Jefferies in the film Fred and Barney spend the majority of the episode trying to convince their wives Wilma and Betty that they aren't crazy and that Brickrock had indeed done away with his wife. In the end, of course, it is revealed that Brickrock had really killed his wife but not in the way Fred and Barney thought he did. Indeed having a trained Piranha-keet is a very effective murder weapon if you want to dispose of an disagreei...

One of the things that my wife and I really miss from our life in California is watching Japan Railway Journal on NHK. Being lovers of both trains and Japan the show seemed a natural fit for us and we fell in love with it immediately. Over the couple of years that we watched it we learned so much about all the wonderful tourist railroads in Japan plus a great deal about the country itself. Luckily for us NHK is now streaming the show via their website and on YouTube. The show was on hiatus for some time due to the Covid-19 pandemic but is back on the air with a new host Cathy Cat (an internet video personality) who is paired alongside longtime show commentator Takagi Ryo, Ph.D. (Professor at Kogakuin University). Over the years the show has cycled through several hosts including Russell Totten, Sarah MacDonald and Nathan Berry. We watched a couple of episodes last night and in the first episode Cathy Cat seemed kinda wooden and out of her element, but in the second she seemed ...

Over the last week I have been obsessed with creating the ultimate 80s hard rock playlist on Spotify. I call it the 80s Rock Block and here are this weeks top ten hits from that playlist.   1. If I'd Be The One - .38 Special 2. Back In Black - AC/DC 3. Sign Of The Gypsy Queen - April Wine    "Sign of the Gypsy Queen" is a song written and originally recorded by Lorence Hud. The song became a hit in Canada when released as a single in 1973. Hud's version appeared on his eponymous debut album. The song reached the top 5 on the West Coast, #3 on CJRW-FM in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, and peaked at #16 nationally on the RPM 100 chart.   April Wine had more success with a hard rock version of the song in 1981. It was the second single from their album The Nature of the Beast. The song reached #40 on the Canadian Hot 100, and #57 in the United States on the Billboard Hot 100, and #19 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks.   This version has become popular on...

 Way, way back in the 1980s my father plunked down a fair amount of money to have giant NASA sized satellite dish placed in our back yard because he was sick and tired of paying for cable TV. For a few years my dad's plan payed off and my family enjoyed free programing beamed down from orbiting objects in the far reaches of space above. That is until the TV networks got wise and started scrambling their satellite feeds.  One of the advantages of getting your TV beamed down from satellites orbiting over North America was that you not only received broadcasts from the United States but from Canada as well. One of the feeds that I could tune in was the Canadian music video channel MuchMusic. The channel featured a lot of great bands from Europe and Canada (naturally) that never made it onto American radio or MTV. Beyond expanding my musical taste I was also exposed to commercials for products and brands that I had never heard of. Who knew that Hostess sold potato chips in Canada?...

 Who is Faye Valentine: Faye Valentine (フェイ・ヴァレンタイン Fei Varentain) is a wanted bounty head and a member of the bounty hunting crew aboard the Bebop.   Although appearing to be no more than 23 years old, Faye is actually around 77 years old, having been put into cryogenic freeze after a space shuttle accident, wherein she spent fifty-four years in suspended animation.   During her adventures on the Bebop, Faye crosses paths with Spike and Jet twice and makes herself at home aboard their ship the second time around, much to the consternation and disapproval of the two men, both of whom have their own reservations about women in general. - Wiki Faye is an arrogant and lazy character, as she is often seen lying around while the others work on a bounty and spending a lot of her time taking care of her appearance. She presents a long series of bad habits such as pathological gambling, alcoholism, excessive consumption of cigarettes and cigars, unwarranted violence, an...

 Netflix has just released the first trailer for their live-action adaptation of the hugely popular 90s Japanese anime Cowboy Bebop. The trailer is done in the style of a retro 70s grindhouse movie preview and it is ultra cool.  I can't wait for this one! Here is the info on Cowboy Bebop from Netflix: COWBOY BEBOP is an action-packed space Western about three bounty hunters, aka “cowboys,” all trying to outrun the past. As different as they are deadly, Spike Spiegel (John Cho), Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), and Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) form a scrappy, snarky crew ready to hunt down the solar system’s most dangerous criminals — for the right price. But they can only kick and quip their way out of so many scuffles before their pasts finally catch up with them. Based on the beloved anime series, COWBOY BEBOP is executive produced by André Nemec, Jeff Pinkner, Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg of Midnight Radio, Marty Adelstein and Becky Clements of Tomorrow Studios, Ma...