The blaxploitation film “Jive Turkey” has a few things going for it — suits made from carpet remnants, a transvestite who kills with her high heels — and a very curious problem with time.

Even though the soundtrack is 1970s, and the mannerisms, and the costumes, characters keep saying “Hey — it’s 1956!”

And the cars are from the 50s. We know this not just from the tail fins, but the repeated shots of license plates that clearly read “1956.”

I don’t know why this is. No clue.

Without this strange disturbance in the time/space continuum, “Jive Turkey” is a lightweight tale of an Italian mob guy trying to take over the numbers from Pasha, the local black kingpin.

Many people die, and it is occasionally relevant to the story.

Many people wear extraordinarily bad clothes, even for 1974, or 1956, or whatever.

We’re talking opium den, killer transvestite, hair goop, and what has to be improvised dialogue.

And let us not forget the toe-tapping anthem “Nigger Rich,” which would cause the Internet to explode if it were released today. Hell, it still might.

My copy is grainy and fizzy and blurry, as befits one of those “50 Horrible Flicks for $15” box sets.

Not much to recommend here, except as a historical curiosity.

Two coils.

Yoko, as “Eva.” There is nothing else to say.

The more I see of his works, the more I realize that Jean Rollin is the worst director in the world, Zombie Lake notwithstanding.

Sidewalks of Bangkok popped up on the Netflix streaming service, so I watched it. Later I discovered it was streaming for free on Amazon Prime.

I wish I had watched it there. Free is better than the 38 cents or whatever I was charged.

In the flick, some French secret agent has a tube with a deadly chemical weapon in it. He gives it to an exotic dancer named Eva. Eva is played by a woman named Yoko. She is very fit and writhes around a lot.

Then some bad people show up and they want the tube too.

Then there are some scenes of ships and streets and airplanes and exotic dancers and people having cocktails.

Keeping the pulse throbbing throughout is some real toe-tappin 1980s lounge music.

This film is a real piece of crap — even for Rollin.

WHat amazes me is that anyone ever gave the man any money to make movies. He must have been quite the Svengali. Or maybe he was an extortionist.

Anyhoo, don’t waste your time on this turkey. It doesn’t even rate half a coil.

I loathe Comcast. Their service is expensive, chock full of crap no sentient human being could possibly endure for more than two minutes, and their politics odious. I think cable TV monopolies are ripe for some serious reform, and I confidently expect that absolutely nothing will happen on that front. Television as such is on the way out anyway, or so they tell me.

With that out of the way, I recently asked Comcast to send me a new cable box because the old one was ten years old and acting up. Also I saw my mother’s new one, and it was nice and small.

So I called and got a very nice lady who got it right away and said the new gizmo would arrive in a plain wrapper in three or four days. And it did.

I got it plugged in, and it didn’t work right. I logged into the website, which is confusing because the company can’t decide if it is Comcast or Xfinity or what. I tried a troubleshooting thing and that didn’t work either.

So I went fishing.

When I got back I dialed up the live chat, figuring that would be better than trying to talk on the phone while squinting at the box, trying to read the serial number.

The enthusiastic Kerwin was on the other end! He likes exclamation points!

He also got it sorted in about five minutes.

So although I will not concede a fraction of an iota of an inch on my disdain for Comcast, they do hire good service people.Crappy old box

Exciting and vibrant new box

When I lived in New Mexico I became addicted to chile with an “e” — not the jumped-up spaghetti sauce with beans in it that calls itself chili with an “i.”

Green chile and chicken is a particularly good combination. In Connecticut, there is no shortage of chicken, but green chile is a rare commodity. The stuff can be sent, frozen, from Albuquerque, at hideous expense. I have not been willing to incur this expense.

So that’s been that.

Until now. This line of “cooking sauces” recently appeared at LaBonne’s in Salisbury. I tried the barbeque one for ground beef, and the green chile for chicken.

The beef one produced Sloppy Joes that were perfectly edible. The chicken version, however, gets as close to being in the Land of Enchantment as possible.

It’s very simple to use. Rub spices on chicken, shove in slow cooker, add packet of cooking sauce, wait several hours. Shred chicken with fork, add packet of “finishing sauce,” wait some more.

I highly recommend it.

Of course, the depiction of “Stubbs” is racist and evil. The fact he is wearing a cowboy hat indicates he is, at best, the cook, and probably a slave. So if you want to try this you’d better hurry because my next move is to have this product banned.

Meanwhile, on the trout torturing front…whoops

Meanwhile, I cleverly broke the tip of my Orvis “Trout Bum” rod, a slow action, four piece seven foot four weight that is one of my favorites for creeping around small streams. I broke it by rolling the tip up in car window because I was lazy and and did not break the rod down and put it away properly.

Orvis has a 25 year warranty. If you break it, however stupidly, they will repair or replace it. They do nick you for $30 to cover shipping, however.

So I sent it off back in April. The first thing they did was offer me an upgrade to the super-super version, for a mere $375. I passed on that, and silence intervened until yesterday, when the UPS man — whoops

— when the UPS delivery person of indeterminate gender and sexual orientation (not that it matters anyway) delivered a brand spanking new version of the same rod. Why it took two months to figure out they couldn’t fix the old one I don’t know.

But I am not complaining. I just tested it out with a double taper line and it is just what the doctor ordered.

I would prefer the nylon-covered tube, because when you are backpacking to a high mountain lake in northern New Mexico you really don’t want a lightning rid strapped to your pack.

Milan, Italy, not Milan, N.Y.

Just wanted to make that clear.

Fortunately the dog-ass New York Times was on the scene, providing these photos for people like me to make fun of.

Some great looks here:

The Ritalin Look, The 12 More Shades of Grey Look

The Lost in the Sewer Look; the Tubeway Army Look

The Dubious Proposition Look; The “Do You Think They Know We’re Vampires?” Look

It never gets old.

This guy put on a nymphing clinic at the Elms area on the Housatonic one morning last week. Bam bam bam, one after another. None of the fish seemed particularly big, but I was on the other side of the river.

My contribution to the morning’s festivities was three of these rainbows, which I suspect are part of the stocking project run by Housatonic River Outfitters.

One of the rainbows took the larger of the two crayfish imitations shown here, next to an actual half-dead crayfish (missing a claw) for comparison. As the summer progresses and the Housatonic angler’s attention shifts over to smallmouth bass, these patterns become very useful.

Here is a guide boat setting out, same morning. The young man waving the rod around announced, “I’m gonna shpank da bank.” I don’t know what that means.

Meanwhile, back in Phoenicia, N.Y. and environs, the beavers are beginning work on an obstruction in Woodland Valley Creek, at the Roxmor Colony pool.

Beaver initiatives have also made it semi-difficult to get into the Esopus above the Portal at the DEC angler’s pull-off on Creekside Road. I am not complaning; strenuous exercise sharpens the senses and tonifies the blood. Just be wary if you try to pick your way along the edge of the beaver pool. It is slippery, being constructed of mud, offers no traction, being constructed of mud, and once you’re in it it’s hard to get out (being constructed of mud).

Mud, in a word. Better to scootch through the woods. Do not string up your rod until you get to the stream; if you try to go through the thick woods carrying what amounts to a long stick with string on it, you’ll be there forever.

Using my exciting method of grabbing the first rod that comes to hand, I set out with my father’s old 8 foot 6 weight Orvis graphite “Trout” model. (Today Orvis uses all sorts of clever marketing strategies with impressive-sounding names — the Helios rod line, the Zambesi jock strap. But back when they first started making graphite rods, they were called “Graphite” and then a descriptor of some kind, like “Trout.”)

The winning ticket turned out to be a three-fly rig with an Madame X Caddis on top and a succession of nymphs on the two droppers. The double bead Prince was the subsurface favorite. At one point I caught six smallish browns on twice as many casts. Silly fish.

As I made my way upstream, past a long flat, the stream narrows and there is a nice deep run that I always fish from the right bank looking upstream. On this day, however, I decided to be bold and innovative and creep up the vastly less hospitable left bank, where I discovered a nifty spider web that I did my best to photograph, with mixed results.

I also got into position to put my cunningly-constructed three-fly rig right over the giant brown trout I was sure lurked beneath a downed tree.

OK, so it wasn’t a giant brown trout. It was a medium brown trout. He was lurking, though, and it is unlikely he would have risen like a rocket from the depths had I been casting from my usual spot on the opposite bank.

As is often the case with my cunningly-constructed rigs, the fish ignored the tempting Prince nymph, and the delicious and appropriate green caddis larva. Instead it glommed on to the absurd Madame X, which is on the rig mostly as a convenience for me.

If you are concerned about the general welfare of fish, be assured that this one was on his way ten seconds after this photo was taken.

I recently spent a couple of days crawling around the Blackberry River, in some out of the way spots. I found streambred rainbows and brookies, hidden party spots, unexpected vistas and a fair number of beer cans.