Our satellite TV provider just blessed us with a free week of HBO. What we sampled, movies and original programming, failed to entice us to sign up for this fine and dependable source of digital sludge.
(Well, okay, since ABC TV network pushed Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect" under a bus in late 2001, HBO picked him up, show has a new name, and it's still Bill Maher sticking his red-hot iron poker into the eyeballs and orafices of USA politics. That's not chopped liver. There's funnier and more incisive elsewhere on the electromagnetic spectrum, but he's pretty funny and he's pretty incisive.
But we missed this, which, apparently, we could have seen for FREE!
HBO has this very Hot & Now Thing called "Game of Thrones," which I gather is yer basic Fantasie -- the mutant baby that resulted when badly remembered medieval European history had sex with a very stale roulade of folklore and mythology.
Just guessing, but maybe the Major Characters resemble 20-something L.A. hunkolas and hotties with great musculature and (for the Caucasians) tans. Also through the crystal the eldritch mysts part briefly, and I see one role for a semi-famous award-winning Old Person, who plays the Merlin-Gandalf Wizard Guy or Grand Krigat. Don't fuck with him, he can sour your dairy cows or compel you to marry your high school algebra teacher.
I see violence. Medieval revenge perversion Elf Realm violence, violence like you (or your European ancestors) never saw, not even in Cossack and Ostrogoth places. In each episode, the creatures who inhabit this HBO Realm will do stuff to other Realm Denizens which will make you sorry you ever signed up for HBO, and for Christ's sake, who let the kids see this???
Apparently, if we'd been at the right motel with Free HBO, or we hadn't been watching "Bait Car" elsewhere on Basic Satellite, we could have seen the head of the previous President of the United States, George W. Bush, on a pike, or atop a pole a few times.
In olden days, the Winner would often put the Loser's severed head on a high pole in the public square or market for the month following his untimely demise. It was better than a mugshot or a statue or a coin or postage stamp of the Loser. It WAS the Loser (or the part of him from the neck up).
The populace was free to perceive any Official Government Message it chose to see in the Loser's Head on a Tall Pole for a Month. If the only message you got was: "Piss us off and this could be You" -- that interpretation was acceptable to the Government.
Here we have a rare antique Postalö Vleeptron stamp, one of the first stamps PV ever issued. It was part of Postalö Vleeptron's series "Vleeptronian Fantasies of Recent USA Presidents."
The other night during his monologue, David Letterman said -- with a choke of authentic sincerity in his throat -- how much he missed the former Idiot. Presidents you can tell those kind of jokes about night after night after night (because of what they just said and did day after day after day) come along rarely. Like the Transit of Venus. George W. Bush was a Once-in-a-Lifetime Idiot, and the world's comedians miss him deeply.
Postalö Vleeptron: Antique Stamp
"Geo W. Bush" (head on a pike)
Fantasies of Recent USA Presidents
issued circa 630000 D2E (Dwingeloo-2 Era)
denomination: 43 new vleepeezz
philatelic value (approximate): U$71,000
**********************
The Los Angeles Times
(daily broadsheet, California USA)
Thursday 14 June 2012
HBO apologizes for
fake George W. Bush
head on 'Game of Thrones'
by Patrick Kevin Day
LOS ANGELES -- The creators of HBO's "Game of Thrones" found themselves in a bit of hot water on Wednesday when word spun around the Internet that former President George W. Bush's likeness made a very unflattering cameo in the first season of the epic fantasy series.
More specifically: a prop severed head bearing the former president's likeness appeared mounted on a stick.
Though the head was given a wig of long hair, spattered in mud and turned mostly away from the camera, the distinctive upper lip was a giveaway. And the creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss pointed it out in the DVD commentary on the episode.
"George Bush's head appears in a couple of beheading scenes," the duo revealed in their commentary. "It's not a choice, it's not a political statement. We just had to use whatever heads we had lying around."
Though the DVD set has been on the market since early March, it wasn't until this week that the media discovered the bit of trivia buried in the commentary on the show's first season finale.
On Wednesday, HBO and Benioff and Weiss issued statements of apology.
Benioff and Weiss explained, "We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. We can't afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush.
"In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former president and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise."
HBO added, "We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production."
HBO's statement should be of particular note to super-fans, as the version of the "Game of Thrones" DVD set available looks to be a collector's item soon.
The commentary was first shared on the news site Reddit, where commenters quickly began wondering about why the production company would have a George W. Bush head lying around. As one commenter wrote, "I thought everyone just had Bush heads lying around. I keep trying to sell all of mine at garage sales."
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