Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Mickey Spillane's Latest H-Bomb! - KISS ME DEADLY opened in Los Angeles May 18, 1955.



One evening, Hammer gives a ride to Christina, an attractive hitchhiker on a lonely country road, who has escaped from the nearby lunatic asylum. Thugs waylay them and force his car to crash. When Hammer returns to semi-consciousness, he hears Christina being tortured until she dies. Hammer, both for vengeance and in hopes that “something big” is behind it all, decides to pursue the case.

Where postwar noir exposed the underbelly of America by allowing the struggles in its shadows to see the glow of celluloid, "Deadly" turns that light into one so bright; it leaves a silhouette behind, as if cinema itself has been leveled in an atomic blast. The film screams onto screen with an opening scene that immediately alerts audiences to its explosive intentions. Out of the blackness of the theater we see a woman emerge wearing nothing but a trench coat, standing in traffic risking her life desperately trying to hitch a ride.

Opening scene:



The Kefauver Commission, a federal unit dedicated to investigating corrupting influences in the 1950s, singled this out as 1955's number one menace to American youth. Because of this, director Robert Aldrich felt compelled to conduct a writing campaign for the free speech rights of independent filmmakers.


All three of the female catalysts appear separately to Mike Hammer as barefoot and (implied) naked under either robes or trench coats: Christina (the good) on the highway, Velda (the wise) in her apartment, and Lily (the evil) at her hideout.

Features an answering machine that records to a reel to reel tape recorder.
Included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" and among the American Film Institute's 2001 list of 400 movies nominated for the top 100 Most Heart-Pounding American Movies. A film made quite specifically to attack the novel it was based on and the far-right ethos it represented; director Robert Aldrich also described it to one interviewer as "anti-McCarthy and anti-Macarthur".

Despite intensive research it is almost impossible to completely uncover the circumstances that led to the existence of two endings, the complete ending with scenes showing Hammer and Velda escaping to the beach and into the surf and a shortened ending (a.k.a. the US censorship ending) that ends with the beach house exploding, insinuating that Hammer and Velda died in the explosion.

The main theory as to why this ending exists is that it was a censorship measure, presumably imposed by a United Artists executive in hopes of earning the controversial film a run in conservative Southern areas.

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As explained above, the longer ending with scenes showing Hammer and Velda on the beach and in the surf is the original ending. This ending has been recovered for the restored film version available on DVD. Despite the shortened version being more well-known in the US (and thus considered the original by many viewers), it is definitely an ending edited after the completion of the film by his director and without the latter's approval. As Aldrich explained: "I have never seen a print without, repeat, without Hammer and Velda stumbling in the surf. That's the way it was shot, that's the way it was released; the idea being that Mike was left alive long enough to see what havoc he had caused, though certainly he and Velda were both seriously contaminated." (as quoted in: Edwin T. Arnold and Eugene L Miller, The Films and Career of Robert Aldrich, p. 246.)
IMDB FAQ

Odysee link to full film.



May 18, 1963: Navy reserve "volunteers" completed a fallout shelter occupancy test at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.



"...the smokers had no opportunity to bring a supply of tobacco... "a few bordered on belligerence." Excerpts from the fallout shelter test study report.

U.S. NAVY FALLOUT AND BLAST SHELTER, NATIONAL NAVAL MEDICAL CENTER SURVIVAL TRIAL STUDY (PDF, report July 7, 1965) or the Blog post summary

"Never trust the Navy" LOL




Short 42 sec Newsreel from a previous test (1962) at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, MD: (into your tomb you go)




May 18, 1974: India conducted its first nuclear test (informally referred to "Smiling Buddha") on the Pokhran Test Range in the Thar Desert in Rajasthan. The yield of the so-called peaceful nuclear explosive (a plutonium-fueled, implosion-type device) was 8-12 kilotons.

Two days later, on May 20, 1974, the US intelligence community’s President’s Daily Brief (PDB), prepared for President Richard Nixon, referred to the test as follows:


CIA sanitized copy, release July 19, 2016 (PDF)


In October 1997, Dr. Raja Ramanna—the Indian physicist who led the team that built this device, served as director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and, later, as the head of India’s Atomic Energy Commission—removed any pretense about the actual purpose of the test:

"The Pokhran test was a bomb, I can tell you now… An explosion is an explosion, a gun is a gun, whether you shoot at someone or shoot at the ground… I just want to make clear that the test was not all that peaceful."

The Smiling Buddha

India's nuclear test was front page news in the United States, although it competed for space with the deadly May 17 shootout in Compton, California, involving multiple members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, who had kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst three months earlier.




Today in 1980, at 8:32:11am PDT, God spoke and set off Mount St. Helens in southern Washington State, erupting with a force equal to 24 megatons of TNT, the deadliest (57 people were directly killed) and most economically devastating volcanic eruption in the history of the contiguous United States.




Shot of the nuclear football in Hiroshima, Japan:



Specifically, this is Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, where Air Force One landed mid-afternoon (local time) and from which Biden departed on Marine One after greeting troops stationed there. MCAS Iwakuni is about 25 miles southwest of the city of Hiroshima.

Faster, smarter, everywhere...


INTERPOL Key Dates



LOL, scorched-earth attempt. NY spin-it Times:


NYTimes archived

I think the Orlando/Kissimmee area has become a powerhouse for Bio-Tech, IT, Aerospace Manufacturers and Logistics companies. I’d say the decision to drop a $1B project had more to do with expenses rather than any influence from Gov. DeSantis.

• Disney net income/loss for the quarter ending March 31, 2023 was $2.849B, a 58.54% increase year-over-year.
  
• Disney net income/loss for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $11.062B, a 41.58% increase year-over-year.
  
• Disney annual net income/loss for 2022 was $3.553B, a 40.1% increase from 2021.
  
• Disney annual net income/loss for 2021 was $2.536B, a 203.85% decline from 2020.
  
• Disney annual net income/loss for 2020 was $-2.442B, a 122.41% decline from 2019.
  

Disney Net Income/Loss


AT least one Rogue in every family...


Not AI, but tis photoshopped.

Check out his awesome, very cute photoshopped works. Watch out for #22 and #35 had me rolling.