HAPPY NEW YEAR

I had to cut the page a hair short today. Had lots more, but budgeted my time poorly and, well, I had to publish sooner or later! Still a pretty interesting page!

Charlie Wilson's War

Good-Time Charlie Wilson was a good ol' Texas boy who spent 24 years in the United States House of Representatives drinkin', fornicatin' and havin' fun unapologetically. He dated beautiful women, hung around with showgirls, hired exceptional beauties ("Charlie's Angels") to work in his office, and maintained an Austin Powers bachelor pad complete with hot tub and omnipresent mirrors. He didn't give a fig for political correctness and had a wicked sense of humor, so he would call serious women "babycakes" and "jailbait" just to get a reaction. On the other hand, he took his responsibilities on the Hill seriously and was well read on most issues. Charlie was the old-fashioned model of a successful American: work hard, play harder. I knew plenty of Charlie Wilsons in my 15 years with a large Texas corporation. The old smooth-talkin' Southern boys believed that their personal entertainment habits were irrelevant to their job performance, except to the extent that small-minded people chose to declare the two matters correlated. In general, that was right. There is no reason why a guy can't get drunk and laid and also succeed in a career. In fact, the two may be positively correlated. The single most important element which defines success in business and politics is one's ability to get results out of other people, and the Charlie Wilsons of the world are extremely adroit at getting along with people of both sexes. That's what gets them elected. That's what allows them to trade favors so smoothly. That's what gets them laid. Those same skills are universally useful. If Charlie had been in our corporate office, he would have fit right in, and his nickname would have been "Slick."

The CIA's Gust Avrakotos was just as colorful in his own way. A very different way. While Charlie was polished, Gust was direct and coarse. The son of a Greek immigrant who became a successful soft drink bottler, Gust was an outsider in the CIA's Ivy League culture who poisoned his own career several times with ragged insults to top-ranking officials. But Gust had something very important going for him. He actually knew what the fuck he was doing. He had been the valedictorian of his high school class and had graduated from college summa cum laude. He made it a point to know what he was talking about and when he lacked answers he found someone who had them. Unlike the many people in every profession who come to work with an eye on the next job, Gust came to work with an eye on doing his current job as well as it could be done. When he met Congressman Charlie Wilson his job was Afghanistan. He was trying to figure out what the United States could do to help the Afghan freedom fighters, a poorly-armed, untrained collection of warriors who were trying to win a war against the unlimited resources of the high-tech Red Army. They were being slaughtered. A million Afghanis were killed in the war. Five million were forced to take refuge across the border. The population of Afghanistan's second largest city, Kandahar, had been reduced from 200,000 before the war to no more than 25,000 inhabitants, following a months-long campaign of carpet bombing and bulldozing by the Soviets in 1987

Gust's budget to help the Afghani freedom fighters was a princely $5 million.

Many people felt compassion for the Afghanis who were killed, maimed, raped, and forced to flee into refugee camps, but Gust and Charlie were two of the very few men who seemed to realize that that the Afghanis might actually have a chance to win if anyone lent them a hand. The fierce warriors were willing to defend their land, but their big problem was that they were riding horses or standing on the ground with AK-47s while the Russians were attacking them with airpower and tanks. Mounting a campaign to acquire anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry, Charlie and Gust managed to raise the regional budget from a few million dollars per year to six hundred million, and they got the Gulf States to match that amount dollar for dollar. They also managed to overcome a major political problem. They could not just give the Afghanis a billion dollars worth of American weapons, because that would escalate the Cold War into a real war. In order to maintain America's deniability, the Russians had to be defeated with Russian weapons. This dilemma required Charlie and Gust to forge an alliance between Israelis (to provide the weapons) and Pakistanis (to deliver them into Afghanistan).

Between the two of them, Gust and Charlie managed to pull of an anti-Soviet miracle far greater than the one on ice. The mighty Soviets eventually lost 118 aircraft, 333 helicopters and 147 tanks. The war became so costly, financially and psychologically, that the Soviet Union eventually pulled out entirely.

The film oversimplifies the situation. It has to in order to tell a good story. It does not tell you that the Soviets had decided to leave long before the events pictured in the film. It does not tell you how the Soviets really lost personnel in Afghanistan. Over the course of the long war, they suffered about a half million casualties:

• 14,000 killed
• 50,000 wounded
• 400,000 ill

Yes, "ill." In many ways, it was the country of Afghanistan itself, not its citizens, which really won the war. (Ironically, that is essentially the same way that Russia defeated its own greatest enemy, Napoleon.) The country's greatest weakness - a total lack of modern sanitation - proved to be its greatest strength in defeating the Russians. Altogether 620,000 Soviets served in Afghanistan, and 415,000 of them came back with a serious disease, mostly hepatitis and typhus. Add that fact to the fact that there didn't seem to be anything gained by being in Afghanistan in the first place, and that Gorbachev himself hated the war even before he took power, and you will see what completely sapped the will of the Soviet people to pursue the war.

Good-Time Charlie Wilson and coarse Gust Avrakotos didn't cause the collapse of the Soviet Union virtually unassisted, as the movie might lead you to believe, but they did way more than their share, so much more that their story needed to be told. And it's a great yarn. Tom Hanks showed a tremendous amount of savvy in acquiring the rights to this book, because it will be a long time before there will be another real-life story this good, with an equal balance of entertainment, edification and emotional inspiration. Colorful characters like Charlie and Gust are increasingly becoming relics of America's rough-hewn past, and the Soviet Union is gone, and with it the last great symbol of monolithic evil. Charlie Wilson's War is an astounding story, and it is told with great wit and relative accuracy. It's so funny and so interesting and so stirring that it seems to fly by in five minutes and you won't even realize you have been educated.

Here is an interesting article on Charlie Wilson

and here is the Washington Post's obit for Gust Avrakotos.

 

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And best of all, here are some titties:

Here is a clip of Cyia Batten and Hilary Angelo hot-tubbing it with Tom Hanks

Batten:
Angelo:
Both:

 

 

 

No Country for Old Men

No nudity.

It's a ridiculously long review, so if you are interested, read it here.

 

 

 

Excalibur

After a long and laborious process, I finally figured out how to take screen caps from high definition discs. Unlike DVD capture, which is fully automated by Power DVD and/or VLC Media Player, this process requires many, many steps. Here's my first batch, from Excalibur. (For all that work, I should have chosen a film with brighter lighting!)

Katrine Boorman:
Cherie Lunghi:
Helen Mirren:

 

A Very Happy New Year To All.

 

Feast of Love

 

A couple of weeks ago we did Radha Mitchell but we wanted to try again with a little better source material. Delicious full frontal.

 

 

The House on Carroll Street

Kelly McGillis topless in the bathtub from "The House On Carroll Street".

 

 

Carnal Knowledge

 

Old favorite Ann-Margret with a little "T" and lots of "A"