Why was I thinking of Blood Beach earlier today? This movie isn't so special: people start disappearing around the beach, their bodies turn up mutiliated, cops investigate and find an underground monster, cops lure monster to a trap and blow it up. In typical creature-feature style, though, it's uncertain by the end whether the monster is truly dead. As I said, nothing special.

Still, the poster is unforgettable. That image grafted itself on my memory years ago when I first saw it. There's some kind of primal fear being portrayed there, something truly scary about being swallowed by the ground under your feet. Too bad that when that happens during the film there's no further payoff.

Blood Beach is currently out of circulation; there's no video tape or DVD in print and every chance that the original negatives haven't been correctly preserved and decayed horribly. (I don't know, really, but I'm guessing these cheesy films are not a high priority for the studios who own them.) But it'd be nice if they cleaned it up and put it out on a letterboxed DVD. If they decided to allocate the moneys, I bet they could even get its director (one Jeffrey Bloom) to do the usual commentary track. It's these kind of tacky films that scream "commentary track"; someone has to answer the great question: "Why? Why have this when we could have had nothing and wouln't have missed it?"

An East-West thing
By Jeffrey Toobin
November 25, 2002

After the veredict on the Winona Ryder case (guilty on two counts), Jeffrey Toobin takes a look at shoplifting in Manhattan and finds out Winona might have found a friendlier shoplifting scene going there.

...According to a spokeswoman for the district attorney, in an average month Manhattan prosecutors charge anywhere from five hundred and fifty to six hundred and fifty people with misdemeanors relating to criminal shoplifting. Shortly after their arrests, about sixty-five per cent of these defendants enter plea bargains. "The people who get more than thirty days of jail time tend to be the recidivists, people with ten or twenty convictions," said a veteran prosecutor from the Manhattan district attorney's office. For first offenders like Ryder, felony prosecutions are rare... The Los Angeles district attorney's office does not keep specific statistics for shoplifting cases, but in 2001 prosecutors there charged 4,954 people with felony grand theft, and fewer than ten per cent of those cases were plea-bargained down to misdemeanors. In other words, New York is a better place to shoplift.

If you're thinking on attempting the shoplifting stunt, just remember, they only go easy on first time offenders. Don't just steal a handbag or a coat: go for the big time.

The Gap Appears on Amazon, but Without Reviews
By Saul Hansell
November 18, 2002

Apparel companies that joined Amazon.com have been forced to allow public comment on products. Everyone, except the Gap.

Surf over to the Gap store at Amazon, take a look at some of the product pages and you'll see that, yeah, there's no option for providing your opinion on the merchandise. You can rate it (which is necessary for the all-important store recommendations), but you can't voice your love/hate for the rest of the Web to read. Other brands at Amazon's new apparel section, on the other hand, allow the Amazon customer to speak their ever-less-objective $0.02.

The Gap's management doesn't want to appear like they've chickened out, though.

The Gap has a policy of responding to complaints, but it has not yet figured out how to deal with criticism on Amazon's site. But [Michael D. Tucci, the Gap executive vice president who leads its online efforts] said that the Gap would ultimately allow customer reviews on Amazon.

Maybe with its falling Q rating, the Gap doesn't know to face the music played by its detractors. Yet (?).

Yesterday's "On Language" column by William Safire featured the word piñata.

When President Vicente Fox of Mexico recently hinted that he would not support the U.S. resolution threatening Iraq in the United Nations, The Wall Street Journal warned that it "will only convince more Republicans that our neighbors to the south are more useful as political piñatas than as partners."

According to Safire, this has turned piñata into "a metaphor for 'an object or person to be smashed,'" while it originally depicted "a gaily decorated pottery jar hung from the ceiling, containing candies and toys for children, to be opened by striking with a stick, while blindfolded, during Latin American festivities like birthday parties or Christmas celebrations."

But I'm somewhat confused by the way he traces the word's etymology:

The Spanish word for "pot" probably came from the Italian pignata, in turn from pignoli, "a pine cone," which apparently once resembled its shape. The trope is in transit: a childlike joy in breaking open the repository of goodies inside has, in recent years, been replaced by the fiendish glee of scandalmongers in striking down the object of their disaffection

Not to demean Safire, but the Spanish word for "pot" is olla, which bears no resemblance to the Italian words he mentions. And yet he isn't so far off: Piñata seems an extended form of piña, Spanish for "pineapple" and, also, "pine cone." With this, Safire narrowly scapes from becoming my own personal piñata this time.

Picture Pages
Web sites for people who hate to read
By David F. Gallagher
November 18, 2002

Here's a Slate article that talks about photologs, "also known as photoblogs, [which] are similar in format to Weblogs, but they are built around regular photo updates instead of commentary and links."

But let's put aside the whole photolog thingamabob. What caught my eye about this article is that it was an essay filed under Slate's "Other Websites" section. This is odd because, up till now, "Other Websites" had been a page with a few links to other websites, natch, with accompanying commentary. (Sounds familiar, no?)

Maybe the editors over at Slate plan on refurbishing "Other Websites" (which is described as "Opinion, gossip, and more from around the Web") to publish assesesments on emerging trends on the Web, in which case methinks they are suffering of a certain form of selective memory loss: Slate already had a section dedicated to websites, appropriately called "Web Sites" ("Critiques of various Web sites"). Perhaps this is what happens when a "magazine" creates new sections out of the blue; once they've gone unused for a while, when something comes along that would fit them to a T, no one remembers to dig them up.