Edinburgh Castle
Dec. 18th, 2017 09:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tracker7I'm not sure where or how to start with this. I guess geographically is about as good a way as any.
Bullitt County borders Jefferson to the south. It's notable, from my POV, mostly for being home to a number of bourbon distilleries and the Bernheim Forest, for Pet Shop Comics being there and #1C living there for a few years, and for being the site of a hell of a lot of personal misery in summer 2014. In November 2016, the voters of Bullitt County, by a narrow margin, elected a man named Dan Johnson to the Kentucky House of Representatives for the 49th District.
Johnson ... well, this fucking guy. He made a lot of interesting claims - that he operated a morgue at the WTC site, he was the White House chaplain to three administrations, even cured disease and resurrected a dead woman. He was pretty awfully racist, too.
Johnson ran a church on Bardstown Road, over around Fern Creek - the Heart of Fire church. He called himself the Bishop of Bullitt County and the Pope of Kentucky. He had something called a "Gun Choir" at his church - check 'em out singing here. Johnson's the guy in the middle of the back row wearing a cap with "Pope" embroidered on it and holding a goddamn AK-47.
The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting ran a lengthy investigation on Johnson, The Pope's Long Con. The audio segments of the report began running on Monday the 18th; the entirety of the report was released online on the same day. Johnson denied everything, until Wednesday night.
When he killed himself.
This is a heck of a story. Johnson's widow, Rebecca, is going to try to take her husband's seat in the upcoming special election; she's already made the claim that Johnson's death was a "high-tech lynching." The young woman who accused Johnson of assaulting her has gone into hiding.
In other news, I saw The Last Jedi yesterday morning, and I'm going to talk about it in the comments, and heck yes there are going to be spoilers.
Bullitt County borders Jefferson to the south. It's notable, from my POV, mostly for being home to a number of bourbon distilleries and the Bernheim Forest, for Pet Shop Comics being there and #1C living there for a few years, and for being the site of a hell of a lot of personal misery in summer 2014. In November 2016, the voters of Bullitt County, by a narrow margin, elected a man named Dan Johnson to the Kentucky House of Representatives for the 49th District.
Johnson ... well, this fucking guy. He made a lot of interesting claims - that he operated a morgue at the WTC site, he was the White House chaplain to three administrations, even cured disease and resurrected a dead woman. He was pretty awfully racist, too.
Johnson ran a church on Bardstown Road, over around Fern Creek - the Heart of Fire church. He called himself the Bishop of Bullitt County and the Pope of Kentucky. He had something called a "Gun Choir" at his church - check 'em out singing here. Johnson's the guy in the middle of the back row wearing a cap with "Pope" embroidered on it and holding a goddamn AK-47.
The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting ran a lengthy investigation on Johnson, The Pope's Long Con. The audio segments of the report began running on Monday the 18th; the entirety of the report was released online on the same day. Johnson denied everything, until Wednesday night.
When he killed himself.
This is a heck of a story. Johnson's widow, Rebecca, is going to try to take her husband's seat in the upcoming special election; she's already made the claim that Johnson's death was a "high-tech lynching." The young woman who accused Johnson of assaulting her has gone into hiding.
In other news, I saw The Last Jedi yesterday morning, and I'm going to talk about it in the comments, and heck yes there are going to be spoilers.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-12-18 04:28 pm (UTC)Otherwise, I hated this movie.
There's no tension to the great starship chase, which is predicated on creating a problem out of whole cloth. The side quest to the casino planet is pure filler. I nearly left the theater twice - Space Angel Leia and Force Ghost Yoda just threw me out of the experience. A battering ram cannon (oh, FFS) that has to be lugged into place like some damned trebuchet. In a deeper look, sacrifices are shown to mean nothing, except for the very end when a literal handful of heroes escape.
This is the first Star Wars movie I don't want to see again. It's derailed, years in advance, my excitement for the conclusion of the saga and Johnson's announced trilogy.
A friend-of-a-friend is positively virulent in his rejection of the new canon. I've disagreed with him, and we've had some good discussions; TLJ has done a lot to push me towards his camp.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-12-21 03:47 am (UTC)I did appreciate Luke's rant on why the Jedi fell. It's something you and I have discussed before: they were ingrown with hubris and slavish obedience to tradition without understanding the reasons for that tradition. Camille and I were discussing it on the way home and I brought up the point that, in the Expanded Universe, there have been scads of non-Jedi Force-sensitive traditions that didn't reject emotion and yet didn't fall to the Dark Side. I think Luke's speech brushed up against that... you can't be the conduit for the energy that binds the universe together while simultaneously rejecting connections to other beings.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-12-21 04:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-12-22 11:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-12-20 09:23 pm (UTC)Holy shit, honestly.
Re: your comment on the recent Star War.
Yeah, I haven't seen it yet, but I've heard a lot of the same stuff. My expectations for this kind of thing don't tend to be especially high, but at 2.5 hours, it might be a slog anyhow. I feel like it's the kind of thing that's culturally significant that I should check it out regardless of my actual interest, though, but I think that it's probably disappointing that the budget is fundamentally unlimited and they can still make what sound like a lot of very basic mistakes - especially centered around pacing and scene relevance.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-12-21 04:17 pm (UTC)I mean, close to home, a couple of years ago, when the Rowan County Clerk was being awful and getting all kinds of attention for it, another county clerk was making the same noise. The clerk of my home county. Who I shared a set of grandparents with - and that phrasing is deliberate.
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Gods, that runtime. Blade Runner 2049 clocked in at a similar number, but it kept a good pace, and was coherent. TLJ could have been cut to a hair over 2 hours, not lost a thing.