Speaking of prize tables, I headed out with K and the folks to the Civitan Garage Sale this weekend. We were hunting for goods to bring back, as well as the thrill of finding hidden treasure. It’s the last garage sale of the 2007 season, and the chilly weather kept some of the vendors away, but the turnout was good. Lots of folks of all sorts hobnobbing and finagling over items of dubious value. Pretty keen! The usual food nexus was there, with hot dogs, pizza, doughnuts and soda for the famished and thirsty participants. Like a good little mule, I had my backpack and plenty of ones and fives for the hard-core bargain extravaganza.

Depending on how you look at it, I either bought the most junk or had the best luck. K found a nice soft sweatshirt and a wall hanging of “uses for herbs” to put in the kitchen. Pa came away with a measly lamp finial and a small metal bird. Ma managed to buy a nice crystal for the window, and learned some cool information about the origin of “indian beads” (sometimes information is a find in and of itself). Me, I got my hands on a number of cheap VHS tapes of Subway, The Speed Racer Movie, two episodes of Far Out Space Nuts (I said, “lunch”, not “launch!”), and Raiders of Wu-Tang. Picked up a cute Little Golden book about a firehouse cat named Sam who saves the day, and a number of Big Little books of Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Sylvester and Tweety, and The Invaders (of all things!). Oh yeah, my Christmas holster is gettin’ loaded with plenty of six shooters this season!

I picked up a birthday gift for my boss to get bonus points on. And finally I picked up a battered 1974 Fischer Price Castle to revisit a little childhood nostalgia before giving it away to Goodwill, so I’m covered from multiple angles. See the power of the prize table? Everyone else was grumbling, even though they found something, and it could be argued that I didn’t so much as score as wiped out on junk. Spirits went back up after we visited Mario’s Pizza for lunch. I still say you can’t beat that square pizza and those delicious steak and cheeses. It’s a total power up, to the max. Enabled us to get home and go over the loot. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to explore all the sellers. I got bogged down in the glasswares and VHS tapes. I even missed out on the hot dogs, which always taste excellent somehow – probably because of the atmosphere. That’s how it goes.

I watched Raiders of Wu-Tang, and unfortunately it was one of those Kung Fu movies that really stinks. That wasn’t enough punishment, so I watched The Return of Captain Invincible. I’d mentioned this earlier, and now I wish I’d not ventured too close to this one. Good, grief. This movie is a warning to all reckless fools in search of bad movies that are good. No one I know had ever heard of this movie and now I know why. It’s unredeemingly awful. The movie tries to be a superhero version of Rocky Horror and fails miserably. The only tolerable moments are when Christopher Lee is on screen, and even then it’s eye-gouging misery to watch grown men and women humiliate themselves for public consumption in this manner. I still don’t know what happened in the movie, and I watched it! I get jumbled images of the President singing to his staff, a battle with vacuum cleaners, a fire breathing Volkswagen Bug, and numerous scenes with magnetic powers causing women’s clothes to pop off. Words fail me.

Which means I was ready to strike out a third time, of course. I watched the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man starring Nicolas Cage and while it was no Captain Invincible, it was amazingly awful. I haven’t seen so many mainstream actors and actresses throw their careers into the gutter in a single movie like this since Dungeons and Dragons. Unlike Captain Invincible, there are numerous moments of unintentional humor, as this clip attests. My favorite is the “get off the bike now” scene, where Molly Parker’s fine work on Six feet Under and Deadwood evaporates in less than three lines, and Nicolas Cage goes from Moonstruck magic to Evil Dead minus the funny on a dime. Truly, there are moments of terrible movie making that defy all rules of logic and this movie is full of them. I’ll never look at a bear suit the same way again.

Luckily, K was there with a resuscitator kit to bring me out of shock and confusion. Third season of House and the tried and true formula of jerk doctor solves mystery illness with loads of wacky wit and irascible shenanigans! Okay, much better. I think somebody needs to pilot the Netflix Queue for a while. Watching the detritus to fertilize my brain and make it a happy medium for good ideas.

Tags: