It’s hot.

It’s a normal Houston summer day, but I’m in Seattle and there’s no A/C. The little thermometer I have in my room says 89. I would go down into the basement, but there’s literally no place to sit; my landlord has covered the futon in the reading room with printing supplies which I dare not touch.

I sat at the bottom of the stairs to read for a while, but the dog kept thinking I was about to go out, and so got all excited and wouldn’t quiet down.

She’s a yellow lab. She has an undercoat and thick fur. She’s really hot, but not smart enough to realize she should be in the basement. She comes up stairs when I do. I’m thinking about shutting her in one of the rooms down there, but then she’ll be even more miserable, cut off from the only person around.

She has two motivations: 1) Get me to go outside and play catch with her, and 2) Get me to give her a dog biscuit. If going downstairs to be cool fits one of those motivations, then she’ll do it. Otherwise it’s a lost cause. She’s panting, and still she gets the ball to try to lure me outside.

I’m drinking lemonade and waiting for the UPS truck. W00t.

Via mefi: A list of secret underground bases.

I have half a mind to go to these sites and write a book about my travels, thus ensuring that I spend the rest of my life surrounded by conspiracy freaks (with disposable income).

I remember being a kid and designing secret underground bases. You had to have all kinds of luxury items, a whole wing dedicated to video games (I was 12), and, of course, some nuclear missiles so you could be a Bond villain. Maybe what I need to go is go to engineering school, get a security clearance, and start making secret bases for the government.

My business card: “HomerTheBrave: Designer of secret underground bases.”

Read Billmon.

Think of the best heist movie you can. For me it’s the original version of ‘The Italian Job,’ just because it reminds me of Saturday afternoons watching movies on broadcast TV as a kid. The idea of driving Minis through the sewer system had great appeal, as did driving them up on the roof of some weird sports stadium.

I also like ‘The Thomas Crowne Affair,’ both the old one and the new one with Pierce Brosnan. It’s all about sexy and clever and dangerous, but never deadly.

‘Dead Heat On A Merry-Go-Round’ is the other end of the spectrum. It’s the lamest script, the most uninspired direction, and flattest acting I’ve seen in a heist movie. I’m a big fan of James Coburn, and of course Severn Darden (you knew I’d mention him), but I’m kind of secretly glad this movie is now out of print. Or maybe not so secretly now.

I’ve watched a lot of bad movies (on purpose, because they were bad), but I’ve never had the experience where movie ends, and I feel as though I’d been watching it for ten years. Hey! I grew a beard! I need to trim my nails! Call me Howard Hughes.

The plot is that some guys are going to rob a bank that’s located in the middle of Los Angeles International Airport. Their cover is that the Russian premier is visiting the US, and all the security will be tied up with him. But, for some reason, the first half of the movie has nothing to do with this crime… Coburn’s character swindles a few people, I suppose just so we can know he’s a thief.

The heist itself goes off 100% according to plan. Imagine a heist movie where nothing goes wrong! All the characters are interchangeable; they all have the same personality. I bet if you were to meet the screenwriter after watching this film, you’d recognize him immediately.

Darden plays the gadget man, who can read the circuit diagram and jam the alarm at the bank, and his comedic timing is totally wasted.

It’s just a sad movie. Thumbs way down.

And tell me your favorite heist movie.

In my last entry here, I made up an entity: The Xanga Film School. So I wondered if there was already a blogring with that kind of focus.

So I searched for ‘film school’ in the blogrings, and got a bunch of blogrings having to do with graduates of individual film schools, or one-member blogrings having nothing to do with anything at all, really.

So I thought I might browse the blogrings categorized under ‘movies,’ to find something interesting. But if you click through you’ll discover what I discovered: The first few pages are stupid blogrings with titles designed to sort well alphabetically. The first blogring listed has about a million foreign characters in its name, then ‘E.T’. The description? “Join here if you are a fan of E.T. Everyone is welcome to join here. {Bigbrothersam (Philosophy_me) was here.}”

Why do people who do these kinds of things think they’ll look like anything but an idiot? Do movie studios start these things for individual movies and add bullshit foreign characters to the title to give ‘cyber-street-cred’ or something? So far I’ve counted about a dozen ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ blogrings, all started by someone who thinks they’re clever.

Blogrings don’t work. Or, more accurately, they only work as well as your ability to find them. And since people don’t think about that when they make them, the system falls apart. And to make matters worse, Xanga doesn’t give you a page-numbered index (as in, click on the ’5′ to go to page 5 of the results), which means clicking ‘next’ until the foreign characters stop and the ‘A’s begin.

Ok, so a break from the van updates.

The Xanga Film School Severn Darden Retrospective commences.

Last night was ‘Vanishing Point,’ which is a very cool expression of an existential urge to just start driving really fast and outrun any cop that tries to catch you, no matter where you’ll end up.

Our pal Severn plays J. Hovah, a preacher out in the desert. He has maybe a minute of screen time, but he has a certain charisma, even with this non-role.

The movie itself is a pure American thing. It takes place in the vastness of the American west, between Denver and San Fransisco. The star of the movie is a white 1971 Dodge Challenger, and there’s this guy driving it called Kowalski who’s a Vietnam Vet, an ex-cop, and now a cross-country auto delivery driver and speed freak.

We also meet another major character: Radio DJ Super Soul. Super Soul’s broadcast magically covers the entire western half of North America, and he’s guiding Kowalski, telling him where the cops are and offering moral support on the journey. The communication between them takes on an ESP quality, and the director’s commentary confirms this idea.

The plights of these two rebels begin to parallel each other… The blind, black Super Soul struggles through the bigotry of the tiny white town where his broadcast originates, and Kowalski just wants to get home and these cops keep trying to stop him.

This movie came out in 1971, and ultimately, it tries to signal the end of the ’60s optimism. The cops don’t get Kowalski, but self-destruction does, and all the Super Souls are left without a hero. Kowalski never quite makes it to his shining dream of counter-cultural home.

And Severn Darden is in it. And there’s a remake from 1995 with Viggo Mortensen as Kowalski. I’ll have to pick that up for an A/B comparison.

Last night was ‘Vanishing Point,’ tonight was ‘Goldstein,’ a very strange tale told with occasional brilliance.

Darden plays The Doctor, an abortion doc traveling from city to city, summoned by rich people with a problem to solve.

I can’t even remember why the woman had the abortion, and I just watched the movie. I think she hated her husband, the sculptor, who one evening saves the life of an old man who just happens to look exactly like his father, and then accidentally kills the guy who was trying to kill the old man. The old man runs off, and the sculptor ends up obsessed with him, trying to find him again.

I think this movie is supposed to be about the emptiness of all motivations (he never finds the old man, and is a fool for trying), but it’s also a platform to help start up the careers of members of Second City. (The film is shot in Chicago.) A lot is obviously improvised, and it’s very uneven and poorly edited. But there are moments… Overall, however, unless you’re a serious student of film, you can pass this one up.

But Severn Darden is in it. He’s pretty funny in a dour sort of way, riffing with his assistant, debating art history while performing an abortion. An on-screen abortion procedure in a film from 1965, by the way. Edgy stuff.

I’m keeping this as a log of the work I’ve done on the van. If you don’t like reading it, then just ignore posts titled ‘Van Update.’

I had two van-oriented tasks today: 1) Figure out the part number for the broken coolant tower distribution thingamajig. After much peering with a flashlight and wiping crap off the part number area, I determined that the part number is: 251.121.438B. The ‘B’ is very important. It means it fits on a 2WD manual transmission 2.1l wasserboxer.

While I was poking around the back of the van, and since I was trying to come up with stuff I needed to order, I did the wiggle test. You take off the engine compartment lid, start the engine, and then start wiggling air intake and vacuum hoses to see if the idle changes. If it does, then you check for leaks in that hose.

And boy was there ever a change when I wiggled the air intake boot! I could hear it sucking in air around the… But wait! That sound’s not coming from the boot, it’s coming from the throttle! Wiggle again, and the throttle assembly is completely loose. It could come off on a big bump. The relative rigidity of the intake boot is all that’s holding it on… It was missing one of the bolts. And it doesn’t bolt down flat, or else one would be adequate; it’s a sort of floating design that can slip off. It’s actually kind of amazing that I’ve been able to drive this thing.

So now I have the dubious task of driving the van to the parts place, taking off the boot (and sundry other items in order to get to it), unscrewing the remaining throttle bolt, going inside to find a duplicate, and then putting it all together to drive away. All of which I’ll do tomorrow.

I doubt the van will get stolen while I’m in there.

New accelerator linkage cable.

Note: If you’re ever replacing the accelerator cable in a Volkswagen Vanagon, you don’t need to remove the plastic tube fore of the firewall. The cable itself goes into this tube, which attaches to the bolt-on bracket with some 8mm hose, as for fuel line.

Not that it’s any tragedy if the tube gets removed… It just takes an extra few steps to put it back.

While I was down there I noticed that I had damaged the coolant distribution unit when I was repairing the leaking coolant hose back in Houston. A tiny seep is finding its way out. Time to drain the coolant *yet again.* This time, however, I can do a better job of repairing the hose, since the distribution unit won’t be in the way until I replace it.

Earlier tonight, while I was doing some other menial tasks, I did something I often do: Put in the LaserDisc of ‘The President’s Analyst.’ It’s one of my favorite movies, especially of those that spoof Cold War paranoia. The plot is basically that James Coburn is recruited to be the President’s analyst, and when the job is too much for him, he runs off and is chased by secret agents who want to kill him.

Only the Russian and US CIA agents want to keep him alive. It turns out these two agents are old buddies. They work together to get the shrink back to DC alive. There are other wacky plot twists, but that’s the basic idea.

But the point here is that the Russian agent is played by an actor called Severn Darden. If you click through that link, you’ll find that he’s been a supporting actor in a million B-movies and TV shows (he was in both parts of the bigfoot two-parter cross-over for ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ and ‘The Bionic Woman,’ to give an indication).

I’ve decided to take it upon myself to explore the filmography of this character actor. Usually he plays a Russian, or a college professor, or a Russian college professor.

But immediately after ‘The President’s Analyst,’ he was in a film he co-wrote and starred in, called ‘The Virgin President.’ The premise of ‘The Virgin President’ is that the President dies and is replaced by his son, who bombs Manhattan, and blames it on China in order to help the stock market. I really, really want to see this movie for obvious ironic reasons. Unfortunately it’s out of print.

Scouring the ‘net, trying to find some reference to someone who has a bootleg or something, I found a rather interesting index of films about Presidents, fictional or otherwise. It includes ‘In Like Flint,’ ‘The Virgin President,’ and ‘Putney Swope,’ so you know it’s complete.

Other Darden movies to revisit: ‘Vanishing Point’ (where Darden plays J. Hovah), ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ (an actual good movie), ‘Werewolves on Wheels’ (for the title alone), ‘Dead Heat On A Merry-Go-Round’ (more James Coburn, this time in a heist pic), ‘Fearless Frank’ and ‘ Golstein’ (both feature-length experimentation from 1965).

Hopefully most of these are still in print.

Yesterday: New brake pads and caliper guide pin relube, complete with new boots.

The driver’s side was easy, but the passenger side had one guide pin that was basically stuck with old deteriorated lube. It took some Liquid Wrench and extra bonus torque to get it out. Now it glides like it was on ice skates.

Also: The van has been banished from my usual parking space in the front driveway because the landlord noticed it has an oil leak. I negotiated the use of the space to work on it if I put down a catch pan. I’m not bitter or anything… It’s her rule to make, even if it seems somewhat arbitrary to me.