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Remembering Hulk Hogan… or at least his TV show

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There’s been a lot of talk lately about the death of Hulk Hogan, a recently born-again Christian, according to reports. He meant a lot to a certain generation of American kids, but they were younger than me, so I knew the man mostly from a 1993-94 TV show that lasted a single season. “Thunder In Paradise” has never made any lists as great entertainment. It was – almost jubilantly – a dumb show. But most people (most guys, anyway) agreed that it was a lot of fun.

The preposterous premise of “Thunder In Paradise” was that two former Navy Seals, played by Hogan and Chris Lemmon (Jack’s son) lived in a resort in Florida and worked brief, exciting mercenary jobs, with the help of their state-of-the-art speed boat, which boasted sophisticated weapons and CGI armor. Former model Carol Alt was on hand for eye candy, and Patrick Macnee (of The Avengers) himself showed up in the early episodes, for some reason. There was also a little girl in the cast, supposed to be Hogan’s ward, who needed rescuing from time to time.

The premise was ridiculous. The scripts were implausible. The acting (especially Hogan’s) nothing to boast about. But the scenery was beautiful, there were lots of girls in bikinis, and every episode offered shooting, running around, and stuff blowing up.

I had no illusions about “Thunder In Paradise,” but I watched it every week, and missed it when it was gone. I remember those days as the end of the fun times in entertainment. I could turn the TV on and not have to worry about receiving moral instruction about the sacredness of sodomy, or the peaceful nature of Islam.

Back then, you could produce a show purely for the enjoyment of men. Nobody agonized over the male gaze. Attraction between the sexes wasn’t considered problematic. We could all have fun – and I’m convinced that fun hasn’t increased in any way since entertainment got its consciousness raised.

Ah, well. That was back when I had dark hair, too.

R.I.P. Hulk Hogan.

(You can watch the whole series on YouTube).

Fiction, Reviews

‘His Last Lie,’ by Erik Therme

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Ryan Driscoll, point-of-view narrator of His Last Lie, by Erik Therme, is a young man in difficulties. He wants to get married to his live-in girlfriend, but has lost his job and is having trouble getting another one. He gets little support from his parents – his mother is distant and disengaged, and his father has never said a kind word to him in his life. Yet Ryan still does them favors, out of a sense of obligation.

He’s just given his father a ride home when the old man shoots himself to death. All he leaves Ryan is a shoebox, which turns out to be full of money. Only it’s not for him. It’s for somebody named Jamie Norton, of whom Ryan has never heard. When he starts asking family and friends about this person, it starts him on a journey of confrontation and discovery, in which everything he ever believed about his life will be turned upside down.

I never entirely made up my mind about His Last Lie. The writing was quite good (in spite of the present tense narrative). My problem with it was that it was highly psychological, and I had trouble judging how realistic the portrayals were. It gets pretty extreme, and maybe implausible in some parts – though I’m not sure.

But all in all, I thought it was pretty good for a small, family mystery story. It certainly kept me guessing. I think I can recommend it, with cautions for language and very disturbing themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Tonight I Said Goodbye,’ by Michael Koryta

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I’ve been pretty impressed with the novelist Michael Koryta, and have enjoyed several of his novels now. Tonight I Said Goodbye is, apparently, his first published novel, and first in his Lincoln Perry detective series. As I read it, I thought – condescendingly – that this was well done, but fairly elementary stuff. I was pretty sure I knew how the plot was going to be resolved.

And all the time I was being taken in. What I thought was happening wasn’t what was happening at all – and the conclusion shocked me like ice water in the face. I was being played by a master.

Lincoln Perry, along with his partner, Joe Pritchard, runs a successful private detective agency in Cleveland, Ohio. They’re not much interested when old John Weston asks them to find his missing daughter-in-law and granddaughter. The case has been all over the media – Weston’s son Wayne (who was, as it happened, a private investigator himself) was found shot to death. The assumption is that he murdered his wife and child, hid the bodies, and then killed himself. John Weston is certain that’s not true. Finally, he goads Lincoln into taking the case.

Wayne Weston, as it turns out, was not as clean as his reputation would have it. He worked almost exclusively for a predatory local property developer, and the names of Russian gangsters keep popping up in the investigation. But it isn’t until Lincoln follows a clue to South Carolina that the case starts exploding around him, and the stakes soar into the sky like rockets.

Tonight I Said Goodbye was a classic detective novel, but better written than most and delightfully unpredictable. I recommend it highly, and look forward to reading the next book in the series.

My only real quibble is poor manuscript setup. For some reason, paragraphs often run together, which can confuse the reader when it happens in dialogue. But that’s probably not the author’s fault.

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In which I pretend to keep my dignity

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Culvers’ battered cod offerings. Credit: culvers.com

The tale of my weekend and Monday is not a cheery one, but I can’t think of another topic. I’ll try to keep it PG rated.

My two-day Waffle Festival was all I hoped it would be. I do a pretty fair Bisquick waffle, if I do say so myself. No doubt there are ways to improve my waffles, but these will do. Sunday, the Great Preparatory Fast, could have been worse. The preparation process that evening… the less said about that the better. It’s over; I’ll say that much. The old friend who served as my driver on Monday is very cheerful and patient, which was necessary because the procedure got delayed a full hour. When it was all over, I bought him lunch. Oh, the joys of solid food! Have you ever had the batter-fried cod dinner at Culvers’? Why does a hamburger place have the best cod in town? That’s one of the great cosmic mysteries. Or paradoxes, or something.

During the Sunday Fast, I searched for the movie “Sunburn” on YouTube, and discovered that it was available there. I was thinking of it, because I’d reviewed The Bind, the book it was based on, the other day. The studio, in its genius, took a hard-boiled, tragic yarn and tried to make it a light action comedy. I remember enjoying it when it came out, but that must have been mostly because of my massive crush on Farrah Fawcett. The movie follows the story’s plot more closely than I expected (though they moved the action from Miami Beach to Acapulco), merely changing the tone of things. But the dark ending had to go, so they substituted a conventional, improbable Hollywood gambit and ended the story on a (very false) light note. One of the worst final sequences I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Watching Farrah, the picture of youthful health and beauty, I couldn’t help thinking of her early death some years ago, the victim of a cancer which (I expect) could have been prevented by the very procedure I was just then dreading.

My great comfort, as I now contemplate the completed ordeal (the results were acceptable), is that at my age I’m unlikely to have to endure many more of these once-every-five-year procedures.

And the moral of the story is – waffles are good, and so is Culvers’ batter-fried cod. I wonder if cod is any good with waffles, the way people now rave about chicken and waffles. Someone should try it. Authentic Norwegian cuisine.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Blind to Sin,’ by Dave White

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I’m not entirely certain why I had so much trouble reading Dave White’s Blind to Sin. It’s a complex book, and demanded some effort in the reading – and I wasn’t entirely certain I was enjoying it enough to make it worth the work.

This is the second book in a series, starring former private detective Jackson Doyle and current private eye (and part-time high school basketball coach) Matt Herrick. Doyle is now serving a stretch in prison, having confessed to murder. He has many enemies in the prison, but has a protector in Kenneth Herrick, Matt’s convict father.

Years ago, Kenneth was part of a successful trio of bank robbers – he and his wife Tammy, plus their driver, Elliot Cole. But when a job went bad and Kenneth sacrificed his freedom to let the other two get away, their family was broken up, and son Matthew was left resenting both his parents, and determined to live a positive, law-abiding life.

When Doyle and Kenneth are released from prison early, though bribery by Elliot Cole, the two freed men are pressured to join Elliot in an audacious scheme to steal a fortune in government money – and Elliot wants to bring Matthew in as well.

What was my problem with Blind to Sin? I guess one difficulty was that – at the beginning – I had trouble telling the characters apart. I found them very similar in their dialogue (and physical descriptions were doled out parsimoniously). Also, the plot seemed to me far-fetched, and the character motivations, if not impossible, at least highly implausible.

And there’s the running theme that Doyle feels a moral obligation to protect “innocent” Matthew, who as a private eye never carries a gun and therefore requires a ruthless killer to defend him. (In the real world, I’m pretty sure,  being a private eye isn’t all that dangerous, and lots of P.I.’s work without guns.)

In any case, I found Blind to Sin heavy going and joyless to read. There are some interesting themes at work here, but it left me flat.

Music

Sunday Singing: Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation

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Today’s hymn was originally written in Latin during the 7th century. It was translated and adapted by the great English scholar John M. Neale (1818-1866). He worked, “Angularis fundamentum lapis Christus missus est,” into the popular hymn, “Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation.” The tune is called “Westminster Abbey,” written by the Abbey’s own organist Henry Purcell (1659-1695).

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, (Eph. 2:19-20 ESV)

1 Christ is made the sure foundation,
Christ the head and cornerstone,
chosen of the Lord and precious,
binding all the church in one;
holy Zion’s help forever
and her confidence alone.

2 All that dedicated city,
dearly loved of God on high,
in exultant jubilation
pours perpetual melody;
God the One in Three adoring
in glad hymns eternally.

3 To this temple, where we call thee,
come, O Lord of hosts today:
with thy wonted loving-kindness
hear thy people as they pray;
and thy fullest benediction
shed within its walls alway.

4 Here vouchsafe to all thy servants
what they ask of thee to gain,
what they gain from thee forever
with the blessed to retain,
and hereafter in thy glory
evermore with thee to reign.

5 Laud and honor to the Father,
laud and honor to the Son,
laud and honor to the Spirit,
ever Three and ever One,
One in might, and One in glory,
while unending ages run.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bind,’ by Stanley Ellin

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I’m still trying to get a handle on mystery writer Stanley Ellin. And I must admit that his 1970 novel The Bind kind of blindsided me. It’s unlike the previous Ellin books I’ve read, less reflective – this one is genuine hardboiled, in the old tradition. The way they wrote before Political Correctness.

Jake Dekker is a freelance insurance investigator, the kind who works with the companies to identify fraud, and keeps half of the payout value if he can prove it. He flies into Miami Beach with Ellie, a sexy young actress recruited at the last minute to pose as his wife. They move into a beachfront home next to Mrs. Thoren, wife of the deceased. Mr. Thoren died in an auto crash, but the insurance people suspect he committed suicide, which would invalidate the claim.

Getting to know the Thorens and their neighbors, Jake grows increasingly suspicious that the dead man had a secret, and was being blackmailed. If he can uncover the guilty secret, he may have leverage to pressure the widow to fess up.

Meanwhile, Ellie is falling in love with Jake, and he’s not immune to her charms. But that will make both of them more vulnerable when pressure is applied from an unexpected quarter.

The Bind was closer to a Mickey Spillane novel than I looked for in a Stanley Ellin story. Jake Dekker is a very hard case, a business-first guy who can be really brutal when it’s called for. Sensitivity is not in his toolbox. His relationship with Ellie is completely pre-feminist – there’s no question here who wears the pants, or who needs protecting. Reading it after all these years, I found that element a little shocking, but… let’s say, I didn’t hate it.

There was more sex than violence in this story, just the opposite of the way a mystery adventure would be done nowadays. And as for the conclusion – well, I think I can say that it’s not a good idea to look for happy endings in an Ellin book.

By the way, The Bind was filmed, after a fashion, in 1979, under the title of “Sunburn,” as a vehicle for Farrah Fawcett, fresh off her breakout role on “Charlie’s Angels.” Charles Grodin played Jake. The studio made the decision to turn it into an adventure comedy (which the book most definitely is not), and it flopped badly. Even Art Carney in a supporting role couldn’t save it. (I saw it myself, and was perfectly satisfied to watch Farrah under any circumstances).

I wouldn’t say I loved The Bind. It’s too much in the Mike Hammer mold for my taste. But it was well done after its kind.

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A tribute to the waffle

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Photo credit: Jodie Morgan twoluckyspoons Unsplash license

I have installed a photograph of waffles at the peak of this post, because waffles are much on my mind of late. I shall explain…

Tomorrow I embark on an ordeal that falls to my lot once every five years. This ordeal involves a procedure whose name I’ve always refused to use in this space. Suffice it to say that it’s a humiliating medical procedure, an examination, which demands certain dietary changes as one prepares. Two days of a low-fiber diet, followed by one day (that would be Sunday) of no solid food at all, and then, on Monday, truth will be sought in my inward parts.

I know that the procedure itself is likely to be okay. As a man who’s never indulged in recreational drugs (I sailed through the swinging sixties and the sexy seventies like Mr. Magoo through a construction site, quite oblivious) I can’t deny looking forward to the relaxants I’ll be getting in preparation. I think the last time I relaxed naturally was around 1957.

But be that as it may, I was not looking forward to two days of low-fiber pablum (is pablum low fiber? I’ve never tried it). But as I studied the list of acceptable foods, I was delighted to discover that waffles (as well as butter and syrup) are kosher.

And that, as the poet said, has made all the difference. For a man who’s always trying to limit his caloric intake, the wonderful waffle has to be a rare treat. They are high in calories, and everything  you’re likely to garnish them with is pretty lofty as well.

But tomorrow and Saturday will be waffle days for this patient. And any day with waffles is okay by me, gastronomically speaking. This reduces the worst of my ordeal to the Sunday fast, which I must endure, even as my going hence.

According to Wikipedia, the word “waffle” derives from a Frankish word “wafla,” meaning honeycomb or cake.

Waffles seem to be the consequence of the convergence of two culinary traditions. The ancient Greeks cooked flat cakes the called “obelios” between hot plates. Europeans, in the middle ages, cooked cakes between hot irons called “fer à hostiesʺ  or ʺhostieijzers” (communion wafer irons) and moule à oublies (wafer irons) in the 9th-10th Centuries (Vikings, conceivably, could have gotten a taste). Around the 16th Century, the Belgians invented the Belgian waffle (which is somewhat different from what we Americans call Belgian waffles – and that should surprise nobody). Personally, I favor the conventional, plebeian American waffle, the kind you get by following the instructions on the Bisquick box.

Back in Scandinavia, waffles are usually a little sweeter than our American ones, and are baked on irons formed like converging heart shapes and eaten as a sweet with the midday meal or supper, often topped by strawberries and whipped cream. Also very nice, but the American variety is one of my comfort foods.

And I shall be requiring some comfort.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Very Old Money,’ by Stanley Ellin

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So, thought Mike, if a tree crashes down in Durie Forest with only servants in earshot, does it make any sound? No, it does not.

Working my way through the works of Stanley Ellin, my new enthusiasm, I come to Very Old Money, a rather odd book that’s kind of an Upstairs, Downstairs comedy (or tragedy) of manners, though a murder is involved.

Mike and Amy Lloyd are our main characters; Amy is actually the center of the story. When they lose their jobs teaching at a posh private school, a friend refers them to a placement service that recruits servants for the very rich. The job Mike and Amy get is a strange and challenging one – they are to work for the Durie family, who are “very old money.” The Duries’ wealth goes back to colonial times. To the Duries, the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers are nouveau riche. The Duries do nothing ostentatious. They live in a vast mansion off Fifth Avenue, but they keep out of sight and out of the newspapers.

Mike is to be their chauffeur. Amy is to serve as assistant to the chief housekeeper, and also as a companion to Miss Margaret, the family’s honorary matriarch, who went blind during her youth, when she was a famous beauty and an aspiring painter. Miss Margaret lived in bitter retirement until just recently, when she suddenly took new interest in life. She asked that a companion be hired for her, specifying that the woman must be very tall – which Amy, conveniently, is.

They soon find themselves embroiled in intramural intrigue. The housekeeper instructs Amy to report to her everything Miss Margaret does, while Miss Margaret insists that she tell no one about her secret visits to a hotel, and the cash she regularly withdraws from her bank account. This places Mike and Amy in an increasingly untenable position, but that’s nothing to what’s going to happen when Miss Margaret brings her plans to a conclusion.

Very Old Money is an unusual crime novel, but I enjoyed it quite a lot. Ellin’s writing and characters are consistently superior. I was particularly impressed by the fact that I was sure I knew where the plot was headed, and was completely wrong (as well as somewhat shocked).

Not a book you’re likely to fall in love with, but well worth reading.

Authors, Goofing

‘Wodehouse Playhouse’

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I did a search on YouTube for a BBC comedy program I remember from the 1970s, “Wodehouse Playhouse.” I caught a couple episodes back in the day, on PBS, and I remembered it as somewhat low-budget, but energetic and fun.

I tried this once a couple years ago and only found one episode, which I duly posted on this blog. But now I find that the whole thing is available. The first episode is above.

(There’s another version on YouTube, and it may be better, as it won’t let me post it here. If the quality of this one disappoints, you might search for that other.)