"Smokey, the Bandit and That Damned Dog."

I was watching Smokey and the Bandit for reasons unclear to all. I'd put myself through Kobayashi's Human Condition trilogy –– nine hours of unrelenting hilarity –– just before. This was me relaxing a bit. That is, I thought: "I suppose I better fucking watch it. I bought it two years ago in Amoeba." It seems I like to punish myself with bad films. I'm now steeling myself to watch Tod Browning's Freaks –– a film that everybody feels they ought to watch, but nobody does. Tod Browning's Freaks is like champagne –– everybody claims to like it but nobody wants to actually have any. I've had it for probably close to ten years, sitting there accusingly, defying me to watch it.

This is why I end up binge-watching whole seasons of Million Dollar Listing New York instead of watching serious world cinema.

I was watching Smokey and the Bandit, which features Jackie Gleason as Buford T. Justice, the racist Southron cop who pursues Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed across numerous Trumps States without any clear reason. It has something to do with Sally Field... I think...?

When Jackie Gleason's credit came on, I went, "Jackie Gleason, wasn't he... uh..."
"Yup," goes my wife. "The kid in the Charlie Chaplin film."
"Wow," I went. I was silent for a moment.
Then I said, "That was Jackie Coogan."
My wife was irritated in a very specific way but she couldn't fight the facts, even in this "post-truth" age. Trump may be in the White House, but Jackie Gleason and Jackie Coogan are still not the same person.

However, Duane Chapman and Jackie Gleason might be the same person.
Say if you pinned Dog down and strapped him to a gurney and then proceeded to cut off his fucking yellow hair against his will in a sort of bathetic burlesque of the story of Samson in the Bible -- if you cut off his hair and then mollified him by dressing him up as a cop (the one thing he has always wanted to be but never can!), you'd have Jackie Gleason in the celebrated role of Buford T. Justice.

Look:––

It's like Dog and Leland I swear. Although these guys are obviously superior at the art of criminology.

(It's true –– Burt Reynolds drives flat-out like a nutcase in his Pontiac Trans-Am and these two manage to keep up at every turn in a police car with the roof shaved off, doors missing  and no fucking engine, propelling it along with their feet like Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.)

Also you would have to somehow force Dog to avoid the tanning bed –– perhaps by keeping him strapped to the gurney for several weeks so that he gradually fades to his "natural" colour –– whatever that is. Dog seems to have a similar model sunbed to "The President", but Dog cranks it up even higher so he emerges from it no not orange but bright fucking red.

One last thing. I mentioned to M.K. Price that I was watching this film and he said, "I prefer Cannonball Run."
I said, "You can like both. It's allowed."

"A New Bride for Dog Chapman."

Poor old Beth is dead and gone. I do not say "ding dong".

I honestly didn't say "ding dong". 
I didn't I didn't I didn't. 

On those occasions in society when people ask me my opinion on the sad subject, and as a sort of expert on Dog Chapman it happens a lot, I remark that if Dog had given up his ten packs a day habit she might still be among us. I don't say this to grind the metaphorical cigarette into an open wound for Duane Chapman Senior. I say it more as a cautionary tale for smokers everywhere.

It's gonna gitcha. It always does. 

Let us instead think of positive, better energies, as Dog has done. I read that he was back on the "hunt" soon enough after Beth's passing, nothing daunted, and that he was blundering about with honorable second son, Leland, when Leland tried a move he probably shouldn't have, a move he maybe hadn't made since the original show was dropped. Leland slipped a disc in multiple locations and was put "out of commission" for doing something he wouldn't have thought twice about in his kung-fu younger days of the Oughties.

It's gonna gitcha. It always does. 

Let me try this again. To matters more positive. To energies eternal! Let us find a new bride for Dog. He isn't apt to do well as a widower. It ain't his way. He must have a woman to his side and his hearth. He must have somebody close at hand to inhale all his second-hand smoke. He needs a woman to serve the role of a sort of hoover, which is funny since he was formerly a vacuum cleaner salesman. He didn't sell Hoovers, of course, he sold Kirbys.

The other day I was listening by chance to an old Fall track and I sheepishly recalled my crush on Brix Smith. A crush may I point out that is a recent revisionist alteration of my original attitude –– a silly, late-blooming crush, and all the worst for it. But dude she's hot in the "Hit the North" video, you ever see that?

Let us say aloud what everybody used to say in the late 1980s: "How'd Mark E. Smith do it?" It's like Laetitia Sadier and Tim Gane. English rock musicians getting away with brazen mass murder. There must be some mysterious hypnotism that is pulled off by the touring English indie band abroad.

In a moment of awful moral weakness I googled pictures of Brix Smith and boy was I surprised when pictures came up that seemed to be of Beth Chapman.

Is it Beth?

Someone should gently and generously forward this image to Dog Chapman and say, "Behold, Dog, regard it: Beth lives!" 

It'd be good for Brix too because Mark E. Smith is now dead as well. I am aware that she actually divorced Mark E. Smith a long time ago, but she subsequently knocked about with one of the most universally-agreed-upon-proponents-of-assholery and damtomfoolery in the English-speaking world, I won't stoop so low as to utter his name, so she presumably hasn't been doing so well since Mark E. and she split. She'd be knocked out by ex-vacuum salesman Dog Chapman.

Both Dog and the late Mark E. had a certain knackered cadaverous quality. Mark E. was after all turning into a cross between Alex Higgins and Stephen "Hawkins" Hawking, while Dog has the corpse of a goose atop his bright-red pate. Also, Mark E. used to work on the docks and I think I mentioned that Dog used to sell vacuum cleaners. Kirbys. They both worked with their hands. 

I feel like Cupid or one of those matchmakers. Can this thing be done? And if it can, might I possibly receive a commission, some remuneration shall we say, for initiating it? 

GIZZA A JOB [sic].