"Magic Is Fun... You're Dead!"

 Just learned recently that that creepy late 70s or early 80s ventriloquist doll movie* starred Anthony Hopkins (really, the doll.)  I never saw it, but oh, they ran those ads enough for it to stick in the craw... Creepy.

The other scary line you knew from the movie or show you didn't see?  "The calls... are coming... from INSIDE the house!!"   Sometimes in our country today, that warning seems apt, and it's a crazy sign of our times that half the country thinks it's cool one of our military guys called up... China, of all places, post pandemic even when it's clear they are developing biological weapons in addition to ramping up their firepower, to assure them he would pre-warn them of a military attack from our side...

Failsafe this is not.**

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* 1978.  I was 10, and coming up in the not-yet rusted Rust Belt, with the factories just startinug to close down...  the inflation, gas prices, but Iran hadn't taken the hostages yet.  Scary times, in retrospect.  God Bless America again, indeed.

** Got to watch that one on class time in high school.  A conservative, Reagan-loving male teacher who taught with the newspaper as well as the history books... Mr. Chapelle. Richard Chapelle. Dick.  Coast Guard due to bad hearing in an ear, but he was a Marine at heart... They need more like him in the classrooms today.  He knew and lived American history. A thinker, who wanted us to think, not to tell us which thoughts were better than others, like they seem to school you in on campus today... where everybody's an expert, but in reality, few of them know any real-life shit.