Watched “River of No Return” (1954) for free on YouTube, starring Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum. I love Westerns but hadn’t heard of this one before. It was one of the first films to use a blood squib to simulate a gunshot wound.
Marilyn Monroe, who nearly drowned during filming, claimed River of No Return was her worst movie, but I thought she was great in it. She even did her own singing.
Filmed in Canada on a budget of $2.2 million, it was considered a box office hit by taking in $3.8 million. Wow, how times have changed.
~ J.L. Hilton
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Posted inMovies|TaggedWestern, westerns|Comments Off on Movie Night: RIVER OF NO RETURN
Hey, looky what I found! It’s a souvenir coin from the Winchester Mystery House, one of the inspirations for Grandchester Mystery Mansion in the Fallout 4 Nuka World DLC.
I visited the place back in the 1990s. That’s when I bought the coin. I was in my 20s at the time, and I’d wanted to visit ever since I’d first learned about the place in 4th grade, because of it’s association with the Old West, ghosts and Victorian Era seances.
To be honest, it was kind of a drag. I’m glad I went, it was an interesting place, but I felt sorry for Sarah Winchester. She’d lost a baby in 1866, never had any more children, and then lost her mother and husband in 1880-1881. A lock of her baby’s hair was found in her safe, after she died.
The overall vibe of the house was much less “haunted mansion” and much more “sad old woman being scammed out of her fortune.”
The story goes that Sarah Winchester, widow of firearms magnate William Winchester, believed the angry spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles were haunting her. The constant ongoing renovations and strange architecture of her home were intended to confuse the spirits.
This is also the basic plot of the 2018 supernatural horror film Winchester starring Helen Mirren.
Rumors and urban legends included tales of nightly seances, an obsession with the number 13, and the belief that she would die if renovations were ever completed. The San Jose Evening News dismissed such rumors as “foolish superstition” in 1897, and none of her former employees, servants or relatives ever claimed she was mad or superstitious.
But those stories were later played up when the place was turned into a tourist attraction, shortly after her death in 1922. Later renovations and the installation of a Winchester rifle museum in the 1970s and 1980s also took advantage of the rumors to attract visitors.
Like me. Maybe I was actually the one scammed out of money?
~ J.L. Hilton
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Here’s the thing. I just wanted rotisserie chicken. It’s been a long, long goddamn week. There are so many things I can’t eat anymore because of celiac, so many things I can’t do because of age and health problems. My garage door & the world are broken, too. I just wanted one rotisserie chicken, Harris Teeter. Fuck.
I bought a chicken. It was under the hot lights and I was careful to keep it separate from everything else in the cart, because I didn’t want it to melt the ice cream or spoil the milk and I didn’t want it to get cold. But when I opened it at home, it was raw inside.
I took the half-baked chicken back to the store because it was an $8 chicken because everything is getting so expensive because greed rules the world and I got my $8 back but I’d rather just be eating rotisserie chicken right now and pretending everything is okay.
~ J.L. Hilton
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Posted inNews & misc, Poetry|Comments Off on So much depends upon a rotisserie chicken
While livestreaming on Twitch yesterday, IceStella joked about a Fallout version of the popular game Wordle. I can’t program a game like that but I love word games so I created this free FALLOUT 4 crossword puzzle to download and print.
Here’s a crazy thought… What if that circular “artifact” thing in #Starfield turns out to be one of those orbs like the Eye of Magnus in Skyrim? What if, at some point, it connects us to Elder Scrolls 6?
Just watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) because it inspired the Dead Money add-on for Fallout: New Vegas.
The movie’s about some drifters who go prospecting for gold and encounter a host of trouble, leading up to the loss of their hard-earned fortune. The Fallout expansion takes place in a (mostly) abandoned Sierra Madre Casino full of secrets, gold and peril. It was designed to prevent the player from getting out alive with a massive fortune in gold bricks, but I managed to escape with the treasure back when I played the game on PS3 without console commands or mods.
And I discovered that Sierra Madre is where the “we don’t need no badges” line comes from! I know it’s been referenced a lot but I didn’t know where it orginated.
~ J.L. Hilton
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In FALLOUT 3, I keep forgetting I’m just a 19-year-old! I’m sashaying around the rubble all “hey grandpa, you give mustache rides?” to hot scavengers and picking off raiders with the accuracy and indifference of a hardcore mercenary.
