Two points of irritation for the day

First, I’m handing out propers to Charlie Crist, the Republican governor of Florida. The state has a law restricting polling places during early voting to being open only eight hours per day. This, of course, is stupid; people with regular nine-to-five jobs couldn’t get there for that, which defeats the purpose of early voting. So Crist did a little executive order thing, extending those hours to twelve per day (7-7). This was absolutely the right thing to do.
Many members of his own party hated it. They are afraid that more voters means a McCain loss in the state. It seems to me that if more people voting means your party will lose, you need to change your party, not the voting procedures. But it isn’t the GOP I’m angry with over this; I don’t expect much from them anyway, and they’re in full “the sky is falling” mode at this point. My problem is on the other side.
While most Democrats have been just happy with these developments, a few are running all over the place telling anyone who will listen that Crist did it to revenge himself upon the McCain campaign for picking Sarah Palin to be VP instead of him or whatever. Basically, they’re saying that he knows McCain is going to lose anyway, and he’s doing this for selfish reasons to make himself look good.
You know what? What Crist did was right. And he did make himself look good, and it’s fine that he looks good, because when you do the right thing you should look good. I don’t care what his rationale was. We want people to do the right thing, and you don’t have to be a member of a particular party, or subscribe to a particular political philosophy, to do that. We should be applauding him for actually protecting the rights of the people of his state; there has to be a reward for serving the public interest, or people will stop doing it. So, if you’re one of those on the left who has been questioning his motives today, shut up. You’re part of the problem.

Second, there’s Rashid Khalidi.  The Palin, who still lacks both the competence and the vision to make the case for her own ticket, has been trying to scare people by talking him up (though she has not yet mastered the pronunciation of his name) and now the knuckleheads have taken up the chant that he’s some sort of radical anti-Semite.
Now, I’m not going to defend Khalidi. I don’t know much about him. He might well be anti-Zionist, which is a perfectly respectable political position to take. He might also be anti-Jew, which is not at all respectable. I have no idea. But he is NOT an anti-Semite. Khalidi is Palestinian, which of course makes him an Arab. That means, for the benefit of all the half-witted right-wing talking heads out there, that HE IS SEMITIC HIMSELF. To save them the trouble of looking up the word (a skill which they appear to lack) I offer this quick definition:
SEMITE—a member of any of various ancient and modern peoples originating in southwestern Asia, including the Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs.
The name Semite actually comes from the language group common in this part of the world (the Semitic languages), which includes both Hebrew and Arabic. It is regional, not ethnic. Yes, people in this country frequently use the word to mean anti-Jewish, but that isn’t its actual definition. I usually let it slide when someone is talking about, say, Pat Robertson, because it still basically makes sense in those circumstances.  However, it absolutely does not make sense when you’re talking about an Arab.
What I’m saying is that Rashid Khalidi can no more be anti-Semitic than fire can be anti-heat, or I can be anti-cool. If the closed minds out there absolutely must use fancy words, they should at least take the trouble to find out what those words mean first.

Happy Birthday, Virginia Leith

Today, brothers and sisters, is Virginia Leith’s birthday. I hope everyone is as excited as I am.
Wait, what’s that? You don’t know who she is? Well, lemme tell ya about a little movie called The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Or, possibly, The Head That Wouldn’t Die (it’s listed as the former in the opening credits, but the latter in the closing credits…surprisingly, they don’t seem to have put very much thought into this movie).
This is one of the real Trash Classics. There’s actually a sort of plodding, grotesque grandeur to it, and though it isn’t majestically awful on the same level as “Manos” The Hands of Fate, it is one of those that I felt compelled to actually own on DVD. Not the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, either. The actual, unedited, original film. It’s terribly delightful.
It’s a pretty simple movie. I won’t go into too much detail (you really should see it for yourselves), but here’s a quick synopsis: A brilliant young surgeon, Dr. Bill Cortner, has developed a revolutionary new technique for transplanting organs and limbs and generally working medical miracles, but the scientific community looks down upon his work for some reason never fully explained (his own father, also a doctor, tells him in one memorable scene, “You shouldn’t experiment until you KNOW the results!” which, as MST3K pointed out, indicates that Dad isn’t too clear on the meaning of the word “experiment”). So he works at his country house, conducting his experiments in the basement along with his assistant, Kurt (who works for Dr. Bill in hopes that his shriveled arm can be healed). Pretty standard mid-century mad-scientist set-up, really.
Just as Dr. Bill is about to go away for a romantic weekend with his nurse/girlfriend, Jan Compton, he gets a panicked phone call from Kurt that something has gone terribly wrong. So he and Jan race out to the country house. Problem is, Dr. Bill is a less than perfectly skillful driver, and in one of the worst celluloid imitations of a car crash ever, he loses control and sends the car rolling down a hill. Tragically, Jan is killed in the crash, though Dr. Bill is thrown clear and escapes injury.
The car is on fire and Dr. Bill can’t save Jan…entirely. So, he cuts off her head and takes it with him. Hey, don’t judge the man ‘til you’ve walked a mile in his shoes, okay?
Next thing we know, he’s keeping Jan’s head alive until he can find a body for it. He does this by leaving it propped up in a saucer of dark liquid with lots of tubes running in and out. And for the rest of the movie she just sits there, whispering (no lungs, you see) in a vaguely threatening way at poor Kurt and repeatedly (and famously) pleading, “Let me die.”
Meanwhile, the search for a new body for the love of his life inevitably leads Dr. Bill to a strip club (well, a burlesque hall...it WAS 1962, after all). ‘Cause, I mean, where else would you go, right? Two of the dancers get into a catfight over him, which scene is probably the whole reason they made the movie, so he leaves and instead chooses a nude model that he used to know years ago in some way the movie is far too lazy to make clear. They head back to the summer house, and of course hilarity bone-chilling terror ensues.
The movie is notable for two reasons. First (SPOILER ALERT as if anyone cared) it has probably the greatest death scene in the entire history of motion pictures. When Kurt’s arm is ripped off by the monster in the basement closet (the result of the spectacular failure of an earlier experiment), he takes a full five minutes to die (trust me, it seems longer). He staggers around the basement, spraying and smearing blood everywhere and moaning. Then he wanders upstairs into the living room, staggering and moaning but inexplicably leaving no blood (a few minutes later, when Dr. Bill and his chosen victim show up, she sits in the chair Kurt had recently collapsed into and doesn’t realize anything is up). Then he goes back into the basement, staggers around a little bit more, slumps into a corner, moans for another minute or so, and finally dies. And while all this is happening, of course, his arm is clearly visible tucked inside his lab coat. Words can’t do this scene justice; you have to see it (it is inexplicably not up on YouTube, but if I can figure out how, I’m gonna fix that).
The scene is legendary, and has had homage paid to it by many filmmakers since, including Joss Whedon himself in the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is impossible that the filmmakers didn’t realize how ridiculous this scene is. They must have decided, “Well, we wanted to make a good movie whose popularity would last for decades, but we clearly haven’t managed that, so let’s just put in a death scene at once so mind-numblingly tedious and jaw-droppingly bizarre that we’ll be remembered for that instead!”
Worked.
The other thing that makes this movie notable, though, is Jan herself. She’s become a Trash Classics icon, known as “Jan in the Pan” thanks to the riffing of the MST3K boys (and this film, the first of the Mike Nelson era, provided one of the best episodes ever; if you have Netflix, I urge, nay, beg you to rent it here). She is equal to Ed Wood’s Criswell or the inestimable Torgo. Her face (and only her face) is on T-shirts and posters, her name is a running joke among a certain subsection of our society, and the actress has drawn adoring crowds at horror conventions across the country.
That actress, of course, is Virginia Leith, and as I said at the beginning of this entry, today is her birthday (where else but here could you get information like this?). She’s 76 and still plugging away, so raise a glass to her tonight for the forty-plus years of joy she’s provided bad movie fans everywhere. Happy birthday, Virginia. I hope your next 76 years are as good as the first 76.