Cat and tiny face hugger are friends...

My cat Chip is suddenly obsessed with this little (maybe three inches long) plastic Alien face hugger.

I've had it for years and he never showed the slightest interest in it; it's been sitting on the back of a pottery armadillo I bought as a teenager since I don't know when.

And yet I just took it away from him for the second time today. I really don't think the little plastic face hugger has changed, so what gives?

That is, of course, a rhetorical question... everything cats do is a mystery.

How Paul Bartel taught me to make smoothies...

Yes, the Paul Bartel, who directed Private Parts (1972, no, not the Howard Stern movie), Death Race 2000 (1976) and many other slyly clever exploitation movies.

I was in Los Angeles in 1990, doing interviews for my book Filmmaking on the Fringe; I had interviewed Bartel before over the phone, but never in person. I was thrilled to be catching up with him, but I was also running late and hadn't had time to eat. I bought a couple of bananas to eat in the car, but I was a new driver and the freeways scared the hell out of me, so I didn't dare take my hands off the wheel.

Bartel was the gracious host personified, and when I asked whether he minded if I ate while we talked he said, "Let me make you something delicious — I learned how when I was at Centro Sperimentale in Italy." And then Paul Bartel beetled off to the kitchen and made me a banana smoothie, which was delicious as promised.

Bartel is gone, but his banana smoothies live on. I've modified the recipe (if bananas, milk and ice  constitute a recipe) by using coffee ice cubes instead of regular ones, but I don't think he'd mind. Coffee and bananas taste great together and that's what counts... I wish I could have shared a banana-coffee smoothie with him.

And now, a shoutout to the late, great Psychotronic Magazine

I'll spare you the convoluted but not especially interesting chain of associations that led me to visit the website of Michael Weldon's Psychotronic magazine, but I was immediately compelled to flip through the real, live issues — 41 in all — I accumulated between 1989 and 2004, when it ceased publication. They're a treasure trove of trash, which I mean in the best possible way: Reviews of obscure, overlooked and marginal movies of every stripe, along with interviews and sundry features aimed squarely at connoisseurs of the freaky and forgotten.

Yes, the web is full of specialized movie sites, some of them great. But when issue number one of Psychotronic came out, there was no web, just a jumble of irregularly published 'zines that you might just run across if you happened to be in the right book or record store on the right day at the right time.   Michael's 1983 Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film grew out of his own weekly 'zine, an "alternative TV Guide" that singled out the kind of movies that never got a TV Guide spotlight, was the bible of movie fans like me. Michael was a scholar and a connoisseur of trash culture before it was cool, and Psychotronic was where you could find things like this piece on Ron and June Ormond, regional filmmakers/distributors who made exploitation pictures like the astonishing Exotic Ones (1968, aka The Monster and the Stripper until they survived a plane crash, saw the light and switched to making Jesus movie. Great stuff.

So visit the website, check out the Facebook page and buy Michael's Psychotronic Video Guide (the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film is tough to find and scary expensive): If you're reading this, you won't be sorry.

Best junk email subject line ever

It's not everyday you get junk email that advises: "Don’t let anybody call you homunculus because of the length of your device."

Um, yeah, don't... you might develop neurasthenia or something. So just tell that son of a mandrake root to piss off, and don't even read the rest of the subject line, with its enticing assertion that "the easiest way to become a real dandy is to enlarge your device."

"Homunculus?" "Dandy?" Who in the name of Harry Potter and the Scarlet Pimpernel is writing copy for pizzle-plumping spam these days? And how did the word "device," with its vaguely orgasmatronic connotations, make its way into this riot of antiquated allusions?

And finally, though spam is by its nature a blunt tool (yes, Beavis and Butthead, I said "tool"), you'd think even a broad-sweep filter might recognize that an email address ending "@missflickchick.com" probably doesn't belong to a member (yes, I said "member," too) of the target market for this sort of product.

Hot off the presses: Zombie movies reflect cultural anxieties!

Not to be snotty, but anyone who watches a lot of horror movies has already noticed that a.) horror is cyclical — it never goes away, but there are peaks and valleys, b.) horror movies flourish in anxious times and c.) ever since George Romero liberated the zombie from its narrowly defined roots in Haitian folklore, they've become the go-to monster metaphors for fear of everything from the oppressed underclass to nature run wild, global pandemics, mindless fanaticism, archaic disaster response systems, sinister mind control programs and the fragility of social structures and the ties of friendship and family.

Which is not to say that this Freakonomics graph correlating social upheaval and zombie-movie production that just appeared on the New York Times website isn't cool. Just that it's a blinding glimpse of the obvious.