FILM aficionados will be familiar with 1980s classic Above the Law in which martial arts expert Steven Seagal plays, er… a martial arts expert who is also a former CIA agent and a Chicago police officer.
Showing a wide acting range from irate to angry to mildly irritated, Seagal fends off a gang of Salvadorian drug dealers with just street smarts and a large machete.
If you’re not already familiar with Seagal, Sleb Safari urges you to carry out a Google Image search immediately. Now styling his (suspiciously spray-on) hair in a manner best described as generic 1980s movie hitman meets Count Von Count, the top searches include images of Seagal holding a parrot and looking bewildered in an array of shiny Tang jackets.
Unfortunately Seagal has recently discovered he isn’t Above the Law himself and is now Under Siege from the US authorities for hiding details about a paid promotion he did for a crypto-coin investment start-up.
The Hollywood ninja-turned-friend-of-Vladimir-Putin was fined by the US Securities and Exchange Commission after he failed to disclose he had been paid $250,000 in cash and $750,000 in digital tokens from Bitcoiin2Gen before touting the firm’s cryptocurrency.
Sleb Safari doesn’t pretend to understand what bitcoin is, let alone a rival firm to bitcoin which spells coin with two iis. But what she does understand is an underdog being targeted by ‘the man’.
From the straight-to-video Born to Raise Hell (Seagal fighting a Russian drug kingpin) to the direct- to-DVD Urban Justice (Seagal fighting gangsters), the 67-year-old has proved time and time again he’s just an ordinary guy who happens to be a seventh-dan black belt in aikido.
The martial arts experts and ex-CIA operatives of this world haven’t got time to worry about whether they should disclose they're getting $1 million from some cryptocurrency firm.
They’re too busy battling drug lords of varying nationalities, depending on who Hollywood decides are the bad guys that particular year.
Except, Seagal should have already been aware he wasn’t above the law because for several years he was a real-life reserve deputy sheriff in the crime hotspot of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana.
Although he claimed to have been working “under most people’s radar” for two decades, he selflessly decided to put himself in the spotlight once more by taking part in reality TV series Steven Seagal: Lawman to showcase his unique abilities.
It seemed just bad luck on Seagal’s part that he was accused of sexual harassment as the series was being made. Just as it seemed terribly unfortunate that a string of women accused him of harassment or assault from 1996 to 2018 (he strongly denied all the allegations and the Los Angeles district attorney decided not to proceed with a case against him in 2018, saying too much time had elapsed).
Proving that white men of pensionable age rarely get cancelled in Hollywood, we can be sure that Seagal will dust himself down after this latest setback and fight for the right to take part in choreographed machete fights once more.
ALISON HAMMOND VERSUS AN ANCIENT OAK
BREAKING environmental news now: Sleb Safari was thrilled to see national treasure Alison Hammond interview a tree on This Morning last week.
The tree in question – a 1,000-year-old oak in Liverpool – has been nominated for European Tree of the Year.
But how does one interview a tree which began growing before the Norman conquest, the Renaissance and the births of Ant ’n’ Dec?
Enter ‘tree whisperer’ Holly Worton who helpfully interpreted the tree’s thoughts for our viewing pleasure.
The oak was apparently honoured to be recognised and urged people to vote for it. Sleb Safari had been hoping the tree would complain that it had been around much longer than The Beatles and should be more famous than Paul McCartney, or boast about all the saplings that had sprung from its acorns, but sadly the interview went in a different direction.
Like all of us as we get older, the tree was coy about its real age, declining to comment on whether it was actually 1,000 years old.
“The tree does not measure time so the tree does not have an exact answer,” Worton said.
Wait – does that mean that the tree isn’t aware it can tell its own age by the rings inside its trunk? Or did it just not want to talk about the cruel passage of time?
Sleb Safari *may* have spent too much time thinking about this and vows to ask the tree herself on her next visit to Liverpool.
NO IDLING FOR IDOL
THE award for best nominative determinism of the week goes to rocker Billy Idol (born William Michael Albert Broad) who’s finally managed to capitalise on the name he gave himself by fronting a New York City campaign against idling.
Urging New Yorkers to turn off their engines in traffic, the White Wedding singer headed up the new $1 million campaign by proclaiming “Billy never idles, so why should you?”
Sleb Safari sees that pun and praises Mr Idol for both playing the long game and getting away with the phrase "I mean, bol***ks, are you trying to choke us all?" on notoriously conservative US television.
SOCIAL MEDIA SMUT
