I Ain't Gellin'

One of my favorite songs of all time is from my childhood, entitled "I Can't Get Started," by Al Hirt. (Via my mom and grandma, I have a genetic love of all things that emanate from a coronet.) Consider "Can't Get Started" to be the theme of this schizophrenic post.

I have been grinding away on various posts for weeks now, and nothing's coming together. My phraser is broken. I have things I've been poking at for over a month now.

It's not exactly writer's block, but it certainly is creative block. I'll pound on a paragraph for half an hour (a long time for me), and re-read it and just sigh over the sheer suckitude I have birthed.

So, until the muse gets her ass back here, I'll just sprinkle some random shite on ya:

Some great albums I've been rocking out to:

- Mick Jagger, best of. Just due to the guy's history, this is a great rock album unto itself. Eclectic. Some of the gnarliest guitar work laid down. You'll whirl this one a bunch, I promise.
- Santogold. Another wild, eclectic disc. The duo behind this album (one of them being "Santogold" herself, has fused about every type of pop music thus far into the bones of the music. Little heavy on the 80s influences, but that's not really a complaint.
- Foxboro Hotubs. Greenday masquerading as a hot 60s rock band.
- Motherfuckers Be Trippin' by the Supersuckers. (Thanks for that one, Whisky.) Decent chops and hilarious lyrics. Lately I've edited some of the bluer songs that have come out so my daughter can hear them, but this set is unsalvageable. And that's a good thing.

(Update: It dawned on me later, this set is the perfect bride's collection: something old, something new, something borrowed (60s pop), something blue. In that order, even.)

Recent good movies:

- Iron Man - My favorite super-hero movie thus far. However, my second favorite is Daredevil. Seems I like my super-heroes to be flawed and mortal. Favorite laugh line: "Oh come on. You've caught me doing worse things." - to Iron Man's faithful secretary/personal assistant who catches him in the bashed-up suit that his robot helpers are trying to remove from his person.
- Indiana Jones and the Dimple of the Crystal Skull - Total time machine experience. It's just like being back in the 80s and watching the first one. I read somewhere the Spielberg even used some of the same lenses he did for the original. It only spliffs the ending, which you've seen in more than a few other movies. Still, you come for the popcorn, you stay for the whip (whatever the hell that means).

Good reads:

- Bonk by Mary Roach - I enjoyed her previous effort Stiff and couldn't get past the first chapter of Spook, but laughed my ass of throughout this one. Of course a book about sex research would have to tread lightly at times, and the euphemistic (or outright blunt) framings of various experiments and their footnotes (take THAT! David Foster Wallace) was just beyond at times. I, too, would like to see the clear penis-cam that Masters and Johnson devised to film, uh, "love canal" when things are glowing.
- U2 At the End of the World by Bill Flanagan - This is hands down, without a doubt, certain it will never be surpassed, the best rock biography I've ever had the intense pleasure to read. Flanagan was right there for most of the events and the majority of this is a first-hand account of the making of the classic Achtung Baby and the subsequent two tours and sequel album Zooropa. The best thing about it is Flanagan's breezy style. I intend to hunt down his fiction and see if he writes that nearly as well. Fun story: Bono and Adam (Clayton, the bassist) were hitchhiking in Tennessee during the Rattle and Hum thing, and this kid who didn't know who they were (at first) was blasting Def Leppard. Bono was amazed at how amazing it sounded on the hotrod's stereo. Then the kid realized who was in his car, and he put on a U2 tape, which didn't sound nearly as good. Since then, the band has made sure their stuff sounded as sonically full as possible. Can't be outdone by Def Leppard, donchaknow.

On the internets:

- Given the recent scary events in Russia, it's surreal that a lot of them still fantasize about this kind of stuff.

- The Boy Scouts are getting kicked out of a building they built because part of it sits on public land and their policy on adult gay troop leaders conflicts with local anti-discrimination laws. Y'know what? The militant gays have just got to leave the Boy Scouts alone. It's just a losing game. They are a private group, and they're mostly kids. My wife uses a phrase that's so true (paraphrased from School of Rock), "People do not have a sense of humor when it comes to their kids." It just goes into the same category as the fact that I don't get to be the sole chaperone on my daughter's Girl Scout outings because I'm a boy. I'm not supposed to wander into the ladies' locker room. Some airlines have a policy to not sit a child next to me just because I'm an adult male and the risk of me being a potential pedophile is too great (though they should add female school teachers to their no-seat-by-list, doncha think?). Just let this one go.

- Poor babies. I especially chuckled at all the marriages breaking up once they float below the million mark. Kinda makes you wonder if Roissy is just a bit more than just a "performance artist" like M.Blowhard maintains. (Btw, I love the double-meaning of "performance artist" for a guy who beds women for sport and then writes about it. You bet he has to perform.)

- David Foster Wallace comes up with the perfect description of the Bush administration - as is appropriate for a writer of his skills:

The truth—as I see it—is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate that it's very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.

(Via Kottke.)

- This quiz supposedly matches you up with the best news anchor. Well, check out selection #2 on liberal to conservative slider (but first make sure your answer for #1 selects Rush or Bill O). If you select "moderate", Rush and O'Reilly are still included! What a bunch of shite!

- The Gawker puts together a collection of the best "O face" of many newscasters. This is one of those times I caught between admiration for the sheer amount of effort it took to capture the freeze-frames of all these and fear for the human race that this much energy and (presumably) money (in wages) was spent that could've fed and clothed all the poor children in any major American city.

In my inbox

This came around in one of those chain emails, so you may have seen it already. But in case you hadn't:


President "'Tard" Bush and Congress allowed each one of us to get a tax rebate.

If we spend that money at Wal-Mart, most of the money will go to China. If we spend it on gasoline, it will all go to the Arabs. If we spend it on new computers, all the money will go to India or Pakistan for tech support and none will help the American economy.

The way I see it, we need to keep that money here in America; so the only way I can see to keep that money here at home is drink beer, gamble or spend it on prostitution as those are the only businesses still in the U.S.

_________
Update:
Got this hilarious response from someone on the email chain:

I wish we HAD gotten a tax rebate. Even though, as Althouse pointed out,
it's just like getting a present from one of your kids that you know used
your credit card to buy it.

Really Obscene Songs

My first encounter with a really dirty song was at church camp of all places. The song was kind of a bar-band bash-fest (not all that good, in other words), but the end of the chorus was, "So fuck you!" The guy who brought it set it out on the porch of his cabin and cranked it up. I think it played 3 times before the counselors leapt forward and silenced it.

Then there was the close call with Get The Funk Out Ma Face, but it doesn't really count.

Next was a tape of NWA's first album, found in a parking lot by my roommate. We had no idea who it was, and since it was on an unlabeled cassette, we just assumed it was a bunch of goofballs swearing as much as they could. I was shocked to found out it was a commercial release.

Then there's the song "Crazy Bitch" by Buck Cherry. I made an expurgated version of the song because my 11-year-old was dying to hear it after seeing my reaction and my wife's. It's even funnier, because it sounds like Monty Python's "I Bet You They Won't Play This Song On The Radio".

Then, I happened across the below - need I say NSFW - on the great, can't recommend it enough, online version of Cracked magazine (meaning I'm recommending the magazine, not this song necessarily):


I doubt this one can be topped. I hope it can't.

My reason for posting this? Nothing other than an unfortunate Beavis and Butthead-like motivation - in that it makes me giggle.

Necons in a Nutshell, by Ron Paul

A must see:



And it's always good to mix in a little comedy with your tragedy; keeps ya human.
Audio NSFW - put yer headphones on.
Bill O'Reilly flipout, the Dance Remix:

Btw, the backstory to this is O'Reilly was supposed to do a lead-out at the end of the show to a Sting video. Apparently the teleprompter was blank, and he didn't understand the term "lead-out". He was so mad he couldn't tape the scripted words, so he just used his own words and did it live. I think O'Reilly's a jerk, but in this case, I do think he was in a tough spot as the clock was ticking.

IMVHO, O'Reilly's a man who could benefit greatly about having a sense of humor about himself. If he laughed at his own gaffes rather than paddle down denial, he'd have a bit more credibility. Not that I want this guy having credibility.

"I'm Listing!"

I've always loved that category name on Whisky Prajer's site, so I'm borrowing it for today's post.

Apparently listing is a spring phenom, because there's certainly been a rash of it lately on the sites I hit. (See post below, too.)

Today's lists are the 1,001 (!!!) books and movies you should see.

There's a lot to disagree with on those lists, particularly the book list because it's weighted >Dr. Cox from Scrubs Emphasis<wuh-huh-haaay>/Dr. Cox from Scrubs Emphasis< too much towards the genre of literary fiction. (I'm using M. Blowhard's conceit that literary fiction is essentially just a genre, and not this lofty alternative to the popular fiction enjoyed by the great unwashed and unlettered.)

But, that aside, here are the source lists:

- 1,001 movies to see before you die, and changes to the list (thus I've included all additions). (via Kottke.org)
- 1,001 books to read before you go blind

I'm following Kottke's example and only listing those I've actually seen and read.
- Here's the movie list.
- Here's the book list.
(Thought I'd try to avoid a post 1,001 pages long.)

I calculated roughly how much time I've spend watching just the movies on the list (based on 1.75 hrs. avg. per movie), and it comes out to 770 hours, or 32 days (assuming non-stop viewing), or 96 8-hour work days.

SWAGing (Silly Wild Ass Guessing) at approx. 7 hours per book (assuming the shorties average out the doorstops), I've spent 581 hours reading the books, which is 24 days (non-stop), or 73 8-hour work days. And I've read a LOT more books than are on that list. Probably by a factor of 20 or more.

Out of those lists, here are the ones I would recommend:

Movies:

A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Airplane! (1980)
Alien (1979)
Aliens (1986)
All That Jazz (1979)
Amelie (2001)
American Beauty (1999)
American Graffiti (1973)
Annie Hall (1977)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Back to the Future (1985)
Blade Runner (1982)
Blowup (1966)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Body Heat (1981)
Brazil (1985)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Die Hard (1988)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Dr. Strangelove (1964)
E.T.: The Extra-Terestrial (1982)
Fargo (1996)
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
Fight Club (1999)
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Forrest Gump (1994)
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
Frankenstein (1931)
Groundhog Day (1993)
Harold and Maude (1971)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Koyaanisqatsi (1983) [Stoned - if possible]
Laura (1944)
Little Big Man (1970)
M*A*S*H (1970)
Manhattan (1979)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Moonstruck (1987)
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Poltergeist (1982)
Psycho (1960)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Raising Arizona (1987)
Rear Window (1954)
Salvador (1986)
Star Wars (1977)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Terms of Endearment (1983)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
The Big Chill (1983)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
The Birds (1963)
The Breakfast Club (1985)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
The Elephant Man (1980)
The Graduate (1967)
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
The Matrix (1999)
The Princess Bride (1987)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
The Sting (1973)
The Thing (1982)
The Thin Blue Line (1988)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
There's Something About Mary (1998)
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
Titanic (1997)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Up in Smoke (1978)
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Young Frankenstein (1974)

Books:

A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
Contact - Carl Sagan
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - Kurt Vonnegut
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Interview With the Vampire - Anne Rice
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
Neuromancer - William Gibson
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
Slaughterhouse-five - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Cider House Rules - John Irving
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Shining - Stephen King
The World According to Garp - John Irving
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

I'll take that meme and raise you

Syaffolee offered her list. Here's mine.

FWIW, It's silly that these aren't on the list:
- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series by Douglas Adams
- "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card
- "The Shining" by Stephen King
- "The Stand" by Stephen King
- The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
- The Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business/The Manticore/World of Wonders) by Robertson Davies

Legend:
Read
Started but never finished
Will Never Read
*Hated it.
**Loved it.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude**
Wuthering Heights**
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel**
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick**
Ulysses
Madame Bovary**
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies**
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West*
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum*
Middlemarch
Frankenstein**
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses*
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections**
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon**
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything**
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved*
Slaughterhouse-Five**
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon*
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita*/**
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Recent Viewings Abandonments 05.09.2008

These aren't really reviews as I have no right to review something I didn't finish. I try to strictly adhere to Alexander Pope's directive when criticizing to "Survey the Whole".

Carrier
Blurbs on the PBS documentary made it look PHAT (Pretty Hot and Tempting), so I fired up the ancient VCR that's hidden away from the fray of the house (it had to churn for a week undisturbed). This week ended up with scads of open TV time as MPC1 is in a school play, so wife and MPC1 are gone all night, leaving me and MPC2 to have fun.

Documentaries are one of the best things to watch whilst you play with little ones because they're mostly talky talky and don't depend on your eyes being latched to the screen. (It even conforms to the "playing with toddlers" advice from the great Dear Prudence.) The lone exception to this is The Thin Blue Line, which you must and will remain glued to.

For the record, I loves myself some documentary. To croon along with Julie Andrews, it's one of my favorite things, even though the multisyllabic word does not slide easily into the refrains of the tune.

Carrier is an unfocused mess. Unless you're good at recognizing faces, there is no narrative thread provided. There's also nothing particularly novel or surprising shown. They don't even walk you through the mechanics of the jets taking off and landing. The big piece of info about that particular central activity of the carrier is that ... wait for it ... it's LOUD. (Hell you say!). Yes, the sound doth ring throughout the ship, and they actually have some of the crewman's quarters directly beneath the landing pad.

But, how does the breaking cable work? How does the catapult work? What are the steps to launching a jet? Etc. None of this. Perhaps in this day and age it's considered a security risk to get too detailed on that stuff. But it does exist in other docs about carriers, so that's prolly not it. Nope. Methinks the documentary crew just didn't think to cover it.

So, after 4 chapters, I announced to my poppet, who was taking her stuffed kitties on walks (drags, actually) through the house at the end of toy puppy leash, that we were going to stop with the carrier stuff already. Never one to miss an opportunity, she asked if we could put Bugs Bunny on. Bless her.

Oh, one positive note is the music selection is pretty cool. I plan to use This list and hunt around Amazon for some MP3s.

---

Bee Movie
Feeling that we needed to meet halfway on viewing choices during this week of opportunity while half the family was off strutting and fretting their hour, I got some little-person fare from the library, and one of those was Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie (which I'm sure he thought was an oh-so-clever double-meaning on "B" movie, and, well, it kinda is).

Quasi-SPOILER stuff ....

Bee-leave it or not (see, I got those double-meaning thangs going too), the flick culminates in a court trial. Again: a cartoon that is aimed at kids ends up being a freakin' courtroom drama. You wonder how that went in the pitch meeting.

End SPOILER stuff.

It was nearly impossible to stay focused on the movie. And, btw, let me emphasis what a big deal this is in our case.

For some reason my wife and I haven't been able to get to the bottom of, our littlest one is terrified of bees. Last summer, when she was awake, all she wanted to do was go outside. This year it's like trying to get an agoraphobic to walk to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. If she's on a trike (Word spellcheck doesn't know the word "trike"! Or "spellcheck"!) or in some other moving toy, she's fine, but you put her on her feet and she dashes for the door crying.

So, I thought watching a movie about nice bees would help. She was initially fascinated because these were cartoon avatars of the thing she so fears, but after the novelty wore off it was as if the TV wasn't even on. Sometime during the ... spoiler event above ... I found my mind had drifted so many times, I wasn't sure what they were talking about at times. About 10 minutes after that, off it went.

---

I've noticed something (that seems rather obvious now) in that the entertainment value of an animated film is in direct proportion to how much of the story is told visually as opposed to exposition through dialogue.

Though adults kinds dug Ratatouille, I didn't really note that much excitement from the kids. Alvin and the Chipmunks went through my daughter's school like ebola. They even had show and tell sessions where kids dressed up like the chipmunks and performed the songs.

Ratatouille was almost all talk, and over half was total Food Channel fare. Yawn. (I still haven't seen the whole thing even though someone literally gave us a copy because they didn't like it.)

So, cartoon shops: tell the story through the visuals as much as possible. If a character opens their mouth, consider that a problem. Hey - just occurred to me. See the flick by The Fifth Element director (whose common theme seems to be that a great woman can save a guy's life) Luc Besson entitled Angel-A. Nearly all the dialogue in that film is inconsequential.

Another great example is our youngest's fav film right now: Bambi. Which, visually, is a glorious moving watercolor. It's also got a lot of kid politics in it, which I hadn't noticed until the recent rash of repeated viewings. (The little ones tend to latch on to a film and watch it incessantly for a while until they've completely absorbed it.) All the dialogue centers on the kid politics angle, while the story itself is told visually.

If this section of the post were a cartoon, it'd be me (well, my web avatar (floating on the left there)) pounding this point to China.

In Search of the Blues
by Marybeth Hamilton

Read a blurb somewhere on this tome that promised it had a different take on the origin of the blues than has been proffered so far, so had to check it out.

'Tis true. As with a lot of history, much of the story of the blues as we know it thus far is more about what the various historians want the blues to be rather than how they were received and consumed at the time. As I've aged, one of the biggest sources of amusement and dismay is how history has been distorted and shaped to fulfill someone's agenda. (For example, Ann Coulter's revisionistic take on McCarthyism. "No, really, the oppression and government terrorization of Americans who don't have the correct politics is a good thing! It's American!")

Here's the scoop: Black people really didn't like the blues (the one-guitar, one-singer type) nearly as much as they liked swing and jazz, back in the day. Yes, they bought those kinds of blues records, but lively, big-band stuff was more to their taste. It was white "historians" who put any importance on the single performer/folk sub-form, believing it to be more pure and authentic then a black jazz band, which they presumed (and were being racist by doing so) was merely mimicking of white musicians and groups.

More interesting (to moi, anyway), blacks were the first group to take to recorded music in droves.

Two excerpts:

The earliest that survives dates from August 1920, when OKeh Records released "Crazy Blues" by Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds. It was, by any measure, a landmark: the first commercial blues recording issued by an African American singer. Though sold in black areas almost exclusively and steeply priced at one dollar (by contrast, admission to the movies cost ten cents), "Crazy Blues" stunned virtually everyone by selling hundreds of thousands of copies, seventy-five thousand in its first month of release. Its success revealed the scale of a musical market that the recording industry had long refused to believe existed. That African Americans would buy phonograph records in disproportionate numbers became startlingly audible in those last weeks of summer: people said that you could hear Mamie Smith's recording playing in every black neighborhood in the United States.

- pp. 7-8.

And...

All the more startling, then, was the sheer zeal with which America's black population embraced those recordings. Their response made a sharp contrast to the reaction of the white middle class. Though by 1900 the phonograph had become a familiar object in the middle-class parlor, to most such consumers it was little more than a diverting novelty. Playing mass-produced recordings on a machine seemed a poor substitute for hearing music live in concert halls or for displaying one's virtuoso at home on the piano.

- pp. 14

The upshot is that a lot of the recordings of one-guy-and-a-guitar type blues was done by self-appointed anthropologists who went out into the field to record "pure" black music, such as field hollers, spirituals, and single-performer blues. Meanwhile, back at the farm/apt./house, the folks were rockin' out to the latest jazz band hits.

What a surprise, eh?


If, like me, you enjoy thick, steaming slabs of musical history for the sheer hell of it, by all means thumb through a copy of In Search of the Blues. If you are not so much into it, I've provided what are probably the most interesting factoids from the book as most of the book concerns itself with identifying the exact starting point of the single-performer blues, and thus have saved you that valuable time. You're welcome.



TLD: One limitation I've noticed of the written word is the facility to describe the feeling and affect of music on a person. By that I DO NOT mean the ability to review and/or criticize music, or talk about it in a scholarly or fan-boy fashion. No, I mean when someone in fiction (or the odd non-fiction) tries to evoke how a person feels while listing to a particular song. Even Stephen King's attempt at it in the latest Duma Key fell flat. (If Uncle Steve can't do it ...) It seems to be in the same sense-category of describing the taste of something. Could you convincingly describe the taste of, say, cranberries to someone so they'd have an idea what it tastes like? Well, a depiction of someone listening to a song is seemingly as unreachable. Prove me wrong.

Ephemera 5.2.200

Apologies for no posts for a bit, then just stuff like this. I hope to be back on the horse next week.

- Missing Man Found Dressed Like Doctor With Dead Deer In Stolen Ambulance
The headline sorta says it all.

- George Lucas told Harrison Ford that he wouldn't kill Han Solo because he didn't want to give up making Han Solo action figures. I speculate that George just knew a bit more about storytelling, and this was how he got Ford off of his leg. (Via Kottke.org)

- Oh, snap!


- When I see pics like this, I think, "Yeah, that sounds pretty sweet. Better than begging for bread in Egypt, like they are now."

windmill hill graffiti
Originally uploaded by pshab

- Then someone gets all bent out of shape over a font on American money, enough to buy a domain and make a web site dedicated to it. Where do these folks come from?


- Finally, I know there are some filthy songs out there. I have recently been enjoying "Crazy Bitch" by Buckcherry, for example. Makes me laugh, it's so out there. This one however made my jaw swing like Wile E. Coyote's does when the Roadrunner blasts off down the highway. I'm still caught between bemusement and disgust. Judge for yourself. VERY NSFW. (Via Cracked.com)

Recent viewings 05.02.2008

Summary: Miss'em all, save for maybe Gone Baby Gone.

Into the wild
Based on the heartbreaking chronicle by Jon Krakauer (haven't read a turkey from the man, yet) about an unfortunate boy who buys into the "return to the wild" bullshit that a lot of young college boys do. My persona - and not very generous - opinion (both when reading the book and watching the movie) is had the guy had some legitimate adversity in his life, he probably wouldn't have gone looking for it. (See post above for the "I am free" graffiti by someone who's clearly suffering with the same affliction of a lack of adversity.)

Anyway.

Gad I hate Sean Penn as a director. You can just smell his ego wafting from the screen, and it smells like Brut aftershave with a hint of musty penis, as in the Lynard Skynard song "That Smell." He labors under a particular form of maudlinism that he probably sees as realism.

And this movie didn't need to be over 2 hours. Meh.

Read the book.

---

Dan in Real Life
A surprisingly boring misfire that obviously was trying to be one of those charming ensemble movies, but really just ambles along until the obvious conclusion where he gets the girl (and if you think that's a spoiler, bless your heart and I'm sorry).

The mom character especially stuck out as a character of fiction. Every word that comes out of her mouth is either contrived, or mean, or both. See, Dan is a widower, and yet she sticks him in the laundry room by himself (instead of his kids) when the whole extended family gathers at the patriarchal/matriarchal homestead. No one, including the mother, says anything nice to him. They accuse him of being talentless, yet he's the only person in the family talent show who can do something. And all of their advice to him is bad.

If that's Dan's real life, I feel sorry for he poor bastard.

---

Gone Baby Gone
Now, Ben Affleck is going to be a good director if he keeps this up. Unlike Penn above, he keeps his dick away from the proceedings, tells the story, and tells it well. Kevin Smith has said that Affleck is one of the smartest guys in the business and that he could really do anything he wants to and succeed. I think I believe him.

The only misfire is hiring his brother as the lead. Casey just doesn't have the charisma to carry such a big role.

Any movie with a "child in peril plot" has to go a long way to win me back, btw, and this one barely did it. Folks like me who just don't enjoy that kind of a premise should just skip this one.

---

The Brave One
This is essentially Jodi Foster's crack at being Travis Bickel in Taxidriver. A very flat-footed and poorly thought out movie.

One especially cringe-inducing montage was in the beginning where Foster's fiance and she are attacked by thugs. They cut back and forth between the beating and the couple in bed making love. There is no clear reason ever given why this is done. It has no payoff later. And it just yanks you out the narrative to wonder, wtf?

Skip, skip, skip.

I Love the Whole World



Thanks Attu (some content NSFW), and the Discovery channel, of course.

Go Get These Free Songs, Dammit Anyway

First I've got a mash-up starring Regina Spektor. Haunting is the word that always comes to mind when I queue this one up. Listen to this one in the dark at least once.

Regina Spektor - Fidelity (Morgan Page Rmx) (Right-click to save for Windows, or do whatever you do on Macs to save.)
- From Morgan Page

It also accomplished what mashups should do (besides being a good song): it got me interested in her and I will now hunt down some of her songs to see if I like them.


Next is a mashup of the Foo Fighters and Led Zeppelin. When I first heard the Foo's "The Pretender", I thought "Gosh, this sounds like 'Stairway to Heaven'" (as I mention here), so this mashup was just an inevitability apparently.

Pretender To Heaven (Right-click to save for Windows, or do whatever you do on Macs to save.)
- From G3RSt


I first encountered both songs via Attu. (Warning: some Attu content NSFW)

Oh, and here's a candidate I can get behind.


Cheers!

Sticky Quotes

Sledded through The Rolling Stone Interviews - a book I impulse-shopped at the library. Every time I go to get a book I intend to read, I'll grab 3 or 4 that provoke any interest in case the main thing I'm getting sucks, or I need something handy for a bathroom jaunt (oversharing, I know).

Besides John Lennon's admission that he often felt like he was just a member of "Paul's band" throughout most of his time in the Beatles, particularly the latter part after Brian Epstein died, this Joni Mitchell quote keeps coming back to me:

By the time of my fourth album [Blue, 1971], I came to another point - that terrible opportunity that people are given in their lives. The day that they discover to the tips of their toes that they're assholes [solemn moment, than a gale of laughter]. And you have to work from there. And decide what your values are. Which parts of you are no longer really necessary. They belong to childhood's end.

Amen.

Quivering Fantods

Besides sparrow-sized, hairy moths with freaky radar antennae on their heads, the other bug phobia I have is these motorscooters.


We called them "locusts" where I grew up.

Though we had a few every year, about every 7 years they would emerge en masse, and their discarded shells would festoon the trees like spots on a Dalmatian - creepy alien-body spots.

The nights would pulse with their rasping choruses. It was oddly beautiful.

It would be so loud you couldn't hold a conversation close to a tree where they perched. If you screamed really loud - such as "shut the hell up!" - they would all fall silent at once and stay quiet for about 17 seconds. Then one would chirp, then a couple more, then the whole throng would join in again.

The ones we had would start out green and yellow, but then as their life cycle came to a close, they'd turn Halloween black and orange. Their thorax is about the size of a man's thumb, and their wingspan is about a pointer-finger and a half. They're big for a bug, in other words.

My phobia (as with the spawn of satan moths) stems from my picking one up once, thinking it was dead.

We'd had a hailstorm accompanied by several twisters that never touched down, but they stirred things up. Hundreds of their little black and orange corpses littered the mud in patches of the yard and the alley behind the house.

One was pasted on its back by the wings in the mud right off of my back stairs. I poked the mud around it with a stick at first and then moved its upended legs around a bit. Nothing happened so I thought it was dead. I reached down and grabbed one of its wings to pull it out of the mud, which caused it to do that unholy screeching chirp (which is even more amazingly loud a mere foot or so away) and twitch every leg and limb it had. Unfortunately, when I jumped I tugged it out of the mud, so there I was holding the thing as it gyrated and did Rockettes kicks. I was so freaked it took a few tortuous seconds to will my fingers to drop it.

And thus a new phobia was born.

Gad, I loved this stuff as a kid


(via ffffound!)

It must've either been cheap, or it was actually soap (you used it in the bath), because this was one thing my mom let me have whenever I asked for it. I'm sure the fluorocarbons from my crazy foam use alone contributed greatly to the depletion of the ozone layer.

The Omega Man's Gone

As you will no doubt be unable to avoid finding out, Charlton Heston has died.

I've always had the utmost respect for the guy, read his autobiography, was pissed when Michael Moore pulled one of his more brain-dead "shock interviews" by trying to blindside Heston, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer's, in Bowling for Columbine.

Heston just seemed to ooze integrity. I, for one, think the world is diminished a bit by his passing.

Here's a speech he gave at Harvard in 1999 about going against the cultural tide when it's trying to sweep us out to sea. It's a favorite piece of mine; glad I nabbed it and saved it at the time.

Recent Viewings, and for once, it's all good, 4/3/2008

Enchanted

Disney has finally gotten to the point where they are confident enough to make a little fun of themselves and the genre they have foisted upon the world.

Taking clues from The Princess Bride and the Shrek series, they have a stereotypical Disney cartoon princess transported to New York, New York as a means of getting her out of the evil queen's hair. Her prince and animal side-kick then follow to perform a daring rescue, and

Tone and not cheating on the premise are everything for a flick like this, and they get it spectacularly right. The actress who plays the princess utterly NAILS the perky, warbling Pollyanna groove, which is impressive since she's doing it live-action and not through voice-over. The guy who does the prince is as good, if not better, since he has the harder role of being handsome, but a bit daft and shallow without coming off as a schmuck. His reaction when a thrilled gay man opens the door during his door-to-door search for the princess is ... beyond a simple adjective other than "perfect."

This is one of those supposed kid's movies that even if you haven't tots around the house as an excuse to watch, bring yourself to watch it on the sly and lie to anyone who suspects that you've watched a Disney film on purpose.

Allow me to temp you. Here's the song where she uses animals to clean the apartment. Key on the lyrics especially.

Note the Cinderella soap-bubble homage. My wife particularly loves the ending of this song.

_____________
Update:
Well, dammit, they removed it. When are studios gonna clue in there is no better marketing than letting folks show what they want to see.

---

Angel-A

Cobbled together from pieces of It's a Wonderful Life, Wings of Desire, Before Sunrise, and Michael (the angel flick with John Travlota) and done entirely in French, this is a nice addition to the genre. With all the borrowing from other films, I think we have to grant it some grace and call all the references an "homage" to the other flicks rather then outright theft. Heck, it even has Forrest Gump's feather at the start.

Because of its pedigree, it's a bit predictable, but it's so charming, I think you'll find yourself forgiving the scripted walk through the stations.

I have to be in a pretty good mood to commit to reading a whole movie, but this movie is simple enough that you can almost absorb the subtitles subconsciously and just enjoy the flick.

Even though it's rated "R", I don't think the language and the almost sex scenes (which are tamer than a lot of stuff you see on TV anymore) should prevent anyone, say, 13 and over from seeing it. Maybe it'd be the perfect first subtitled and black-and-white film for the budding film aficionado.

Again, I feel I need to temp you. Here's the preview.

---

Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

For the most part, I hate musicals.

Thus far I've liked:
- Fiddler on the Roof
- Little Shop of Horrors, but only the stage version, and only if the do-wop girl Greek chorus is laced with good singers
- Hair, but only the film version by Milos Forman
- Wizard of Oz (which I don't tend to think of as a musical, more of a cultural milestone)
(I don't think of a lot if Disney full-length animated films as musicals, either.)

Other than that, they're a slog for me. Since I am the only guy in the house, not counting the cats (who are all really steers), I occasionally have to sit through The Sound of Music and other such tortures. Then I have to deal with being haunted by the songs for the next few days. The things I do for love.

Oh, I especially hate Operetta. My loathing for the form is uncontainable, so I just have to leave the room if the girls put something like that on.

So imagine my surprise when I was absolutely sucked in and enjoyed the hell out of Sweeney Todd. I even had one of those out-of-body experiences usually reserved for accidents that are going to result in a lot of personal pain; I kept getting that third-person feeling of "look at you, sitting there watching a musical - an operetta musical even."

One of my problems with operettas is so many words rush by, it's hard to follow unless you have someone who can enunciate, hit the cheap seats, and sing all at the same time. There just aren't that many Ethel Mermans in the world. When I had to endure Phantom of the Opera, I caught maybe 1/6th of the words, so by hour six, I was so bored I feared my soul would leave my body under the false assumption I had died.

Timothy Burton must've felt that way at one point too, because you can hear every single freakin' word sang or spoken. It is not slightly difficult to follow. Both Depp and Carter can really sing, so it's a pleasant experience, to boot.

I also usually cast a jaundiced eye towards the trend of skewing the color palette of a film most of the way to one hue, thereby getting a faux black-and-white feel. This is one of the few times that choice really serves the film. Though it's probably helped by the fact that all the blood (oh, and there's blood, dear Lord there's blood) is vivid red in direct contrast to the bluish hue.

I was actually somewhat surprised when the credits started to roll. Only once near the end of act two did I feel the film dragging a bit, but even then I was mesmerized. The ending came before the two-hour mark - odd for both this kind of film and for a Tim Burton film. It actually had a bit of a twist ending that was satisfying and (it takes a lot to get me to use this word honestly) poignant.

There are even some great belly-laughs.

If you were going to give this one a miss, give it a shot. You might have a nice surprise like I did.

Make sure you have the surrounds on, too, because it's one of the best uses of surround in a musical that I've encountered.


Technical note: Most DVD players come with some form of "Dynamic Range Control" that attempts to keep volume levels consistent when things sweep from quiet to loud throughout a flick. Nearly every one I've ever heard does the exact opposite by making the quiet stuff hard to hear while blasting the speakers so hard during loud portions that your animals streak about the house like the Cossacks are coming. Locate where it is in your player setup and turn the damn thing off. You'll notice the quality of the sound improve immediately.

---

Next

The always interesting Nicholas Cage stars as a guy who can see two minutes into the future.

This film is not a ground-breaking entry into the genre, but it's an entertaining one. It goes down like a popsicle on a hot summer night.

A fun twist is that there are many possible futures at any given moment, so when Cage sees one and then makes a plan to change the outcome, he then sees the results of THAT choice and so on. Several times during the movie you don't know if you are in a vision or in the actual events, and that's what makes it fun.

Worth a cheap rental or a slot on the Netflix queue.

---

College Road Trip

I have not seen this, but darling MPC1 and my lovely wife thought it was one of the funniest movies they've seen in a long time. On the face of it, that wouldn't seem like much of a statement, but this is from a woman who almost never laughs at comedies. She smiles, but only a few have made her laugh out loud, and this was one of them. Btw, in even stranger news, it's rated "G".

If you're looking for something to take the kids to, here it is.

Shortbus

Ahead lays a full-out body-slam on a movie that I wish I could expunge from my mind. Remember:

The content after the section break below will be graphic and whiney. Surf away if you want to save the next few precious minutes of your life for something better.

But first, a brief history of (some of) my encounters with porn.

There was one porno theater in the cities I attended college. One night during my freshman year, the whole male portion of the floor decided to take a field trip to the place because most of us had never seen a porno. This was before the big videotape boom, btw.

We went to see a double-feature of Debbie Does Dallas and Behind the Green Door. Needless to say, it was an uncomfortable event, because there we were, two rows of young, naïve college guys stunned into silence by the graphic sex on the screen, most concentrating on trying not to mess themselves as does the character of Joe Gideon (who was really Bob Fosse) in All That Jazz does when working in a strip joint as a blooming adolescent. I'm sure the cumulative blood pressure levels in the room could've propelled Apollo 13 to the moon's surface and back.

While it was enormously arousing to me, I was really uncomfortable at the same time. Something inside kept insisting that watching the act of others having sex was ... not a good thing to be doing.

Years later I worked at one of the first video rental stores. (Half their stock was Betamax to give you an idea of how long ago this was. And yes, betamax looked way better than VHS; it's taken till now with Bluray for Sony to win a format war.)

The owners said that if we had no moral or religious objections, to please watch a few of the pornos so we could recommend them to customers. One of their marketing thingys was the staff was well-versed in movies and could help you choose one. Again I discovered that while porno was arousing, I just couldn't get past feeling like I was doing something icky. I only viewed a few, and from there relied on the opinions of the others who kept up the practice.

(I can bet some guys reading this are thinking: dude, you had permission - nay, a directive - to watch porn for free and you didn't do it? Well, dudes, yes, I didn't. I guess there's just something wrong with me. For the record, I like perusing the occasional tasteful/artistic/funny nude on the web, but I still get bugged by raw boinky boiky.)

TLD: Quick side story. One of my co-workers at the vid store was this hot, young blonde who had a passing resemblance to Jessica Lange and who wore heart-shaped "Lolita" sunglasses.

It was just her and me at the store one day when a guy came in and b-lined for the porno section. After a few moments he called out, "Say, you got anything you can recommend?" I knew implicitly he was talking to me - guys (at least back then) did not consult women to assist them on their porn consumption.

Before I could get up, "Lolita" went back and started helping him out. She was oblivious to his discomfort, but I could practically see the "OMG!" waves shooting out of the doorway like in a cartoon. A sample of her patter was, "Well, my boyfriend and I liked this one. This one's OK. This one's gross; this guy [I don't recall what it was that she said] and I just don't like that kind of stuff. Oh, the girls in this one are pretty."

She didn't get very far. He stormed out of the porno section, practically slammed the tape on the counter, and shot me a look that screamed, "Why the hell weren't YOU the one helping me." His face was so red, I was sorta worried a vein would blow and spray me in the process.

"Lolita" emerged with kind of a puzzled look on her face and straightened shelves until he left. When he was gone, she said he'd rudely snatched the tape right out her hand! What was his problem?! she wondered.

I explained that he was probably uncomfortable with a girl, a cute one at that, helping him select jerkoff material. She asked (and I paraphrase): "Why? Isn't he fantasizing about fucking a girl when he does that anyway? I'm a girl. What's the problem?"

I really couldn't argue with that.

Suffice to say, I'm not what you'd call a fan of porn movies. Mind you, I don't really care/it's none of my business what other folks think and feel about porn. Grownups can do what they want, imo.

---

(Here we go.)

So, when I'd heard that the director of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (which I have not seen - I've seen enough movies in the genre that focuses on modern western-society gay lifestyle, and I'm not a fan of them either), John Cameron Mitchell, made a film called Shortbus that was supposedly about various couples and had some racy sex scenes, I was intrigued. How bad could it be?

I'd seen the French film Romance that had some graphic sex in it, but anything truly graphic was so brief that it really seemed like a hard "R". And it was boring. The story/theme was kinda silly, too. And I'd seen Angels and Insects, which contains a graphic (and funny) scene where we, the audience, and the hero discover that his wife is also having sex with her brother. He leaps off her, still at attention. Then there's the old classics Last Tango in Paris (couldn't eat butter for a week afterwards) and Little Big Man that had some blatant scenes. Only "Romance" had enough content that made it come close to being just a porno, but all of the blue content really did seem to have a connection to the story.

Then there's Shortbus.

Shortbus is just a porno.

Mitchell claims that it's not, that he and the cast who improvised most of the story together were really trying to make a film - an art film - that just happened to contain actual sex.

(Oh, and according to the "making of" (yes, I watched that, too; I wanted to see if the sick fuck ever blinked, if you get my drift) it just happened to contain actual orgasms of/by all cast members who are filmed in the act. Btw, Mitchell himself "performed" in the orgy scenes, something I'm sure he told the cast he did out of solidarity. I bet they believed him, too.)

What Mitchell has made is the exact kind of movie I never want to see again. It's on the short list with The Wife, the Cook, the Thief, and Her Lover and a couple others that I must've thankfully managed to repress as I can't recall their titles.

Now I know in this supposedly enlightened day and age we are supposed to be OK with openly gay characters expressing themselves sexually in film. Well, folks who really believe that apparently have no clue that people like what they like and don't what they don't. I will never be able to sit through a gay kiss or sex scene and think, "Isn't that nice/sweet?" No, I usually think "ew", and get past it. For those of you who think this is homophobia, so be it. I personally think homophobia is a hostile or fearful reaction to the same, and not (discreet) repulsion. For the record, I don't like watching extreme torture porn (a recent genre introduced by Saw and the like), because it repulses me, too. I know others get a bang out of it; I do not. Does that make me torture-porn-phobic? (My answer: hell no.)

Well, the main character arc of Shortbus is a gay couple who become a threesome and then a foursome. The other two "heterosexual" story arcs are mostly inconsequential. The first one, a sex therapist who can't orgasm, merely the bookends the movie, and the second, a dominatrix hooker who likes taking Polaroids of people at the exact moment it would piss them off the most, is more of an afterthought than a subplot. In short, this is the gayest film I've ever seen, with the gay esthetic essentially being the main element and theme of the movie.

Btw, in answer to my own question above, "How bad could it be?", I submit:
- One character manages to fellate himself (that supposed mythical fantasy of men everywhere) and we get to watch him ejaculate into his own mouth. And then cry about it. Couldn't decide which was worse.
- Not one, but two long scenes of three-way gay male sex, including one burying his face in the ass of another and singing a song.
- An orgy that is pretty much lifted from Behind the Green Door, but rendered entirely un-erotic.

And, after all, that's the biggest sin of this whole porno. Since it is a porno, it has no business being so aggressively un-arousing. So I can't even recommend this to people who LIKE porn.

That inspires me to employ a current internet meme about such things:


Now pardon me while I go shower. Again.

Some days it seems like this


(Click for larger image.)

In praise of April Wine and every other band like'em

Most of the CDs in my car are "mix tapes" of the songs I liked best at the time I made the CD. Thus, I have very few complete, original albums since there aren't many I want to listen to in transit and essentially interrupted. One of the very few I have is April Wine's Nature of the Beast, a favorite from my teen years.

For a while in my hipper late 20s and early 30s, it fell out of favor. It seemed too cheesy and retro, and I cringed internally if I put it on for fear someone would hear.

Now that I'm an old fart and have gotten past the years of being "hip", or "in", or whatever the hell it's called now, I couldn't give less of a flying fuck at a donut about being caught rocking out to it.

Last week I slid'er in and found that I've gained a new appreciation of the energy and musicianship (not to mention the production, which is stellar and was renowned at the time of its release - rumor has it they recorded it "live" with their concert setup at one end of the recording space, and the recording stuff at the other end to give it the thump and presence of a live set).

So, I decided to jump onto the MP3 store at amazon.com to see what else they might have out, and found another one of my favorite songs of theirs: "I Like to Rock". Beside being a great tune, at the end they play the classic riffs from "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" on the left channel and "Day Tripper" on the right, with the riff from the song itself joining in center channel. It's ... kinda cool.

Well, since I was there, I checked yet again to see if they'd put out "Memory Pain" from Johnny Winter, and by God they had! (Into the shopping cart it went.) Even if you don't like the other songs here, you should drive this on around the block a couple times. I don't think there's a better classic rock/classic blues song in existence. I simply don't.

Usually, Amazon's recommendation "if you like that you might like this" algorithms either make me laugh or just piss me off. Another happy surprise, the ones offered with the various albums above were relevant, and I'd been looking for songs from those guys, too.

So, here's some great old late 70s/early 80s rock chestnuts that are now provided for your pleasure:

- "Bad Motor Scooter" by Montrose

- "Highway Song" by Blackfoot

- "Flirtin' With Disaster" by Molly Hatchet


Oh, and even though I popped for the best of the ovure of Foghat long ago, and didn't need "Slow Ride" and other classics of theirs, I was amused to see this album. Back when I was young and thought I'd try to be a rock star, I swore I'd make an album with this cover. I didn't know until now it'd already been done.


It took me so long to put together this post (this baby's been on the stove for a week or so now), I've since found another couple great songs that aren't classic rock, but are gems just the same.

You can now finally get the theme song to National Lampoon's Vacation, "Holiday Road" by Lindsey Buckingham. This is a new live version, but it seems better than the studio version.

You've no doubt seen the commercial for the new ultra-super-slim Macbook that has the song "New Soul" by Yael Naïm. Click the link and that baby's yours for 89 cents. If you don't know the one I'm talking about, watch this:



Oh, and if you want the ethereal song "Creep" by Radiohead used in one of the clips in the post directly below, here it is.

Enjoy!

Just keeps bringing the laughs

I've always loved the various takes on this White House event.

"Conan's take"


"Creep"

Too Funny

Go here, type in your best bud's name in the first line, then type in yours in the second (skip the emails), and click "Visualizar."

And there you have it

The high priests, along with the religion scholars and leaders, were right there mixing it up with the rest of them, having a great time poking fun at him: "He saved others—he can't save himself! King of Israel, is he? Then let him get down from that cross. We'll all become believers then! He was so sure of God—well, let him rescue his 'Son' now—if he wants him! He did claim to be God's Son, didn't he?" Even the two criminals crucified next to him joined in the mockery.

From noon to three, the whole earth was dark. Around mid-afternoon Jesus groaned out of the depths, crying loudly, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"

Some bystanders who heard him said, "He's calling for Elijah." One of them ran and got a sponge soaked in sour wine and lifted it on a stick so he could drink. The others joked, "Don't be in such a hurry. Let's see if Elijah comes and saves him."

But Jesus, again crying out loudly, breathed his last.

At that moment, the Temple curtain was ripped in two, top to bottom. There was an earthquake, and rocks were split in pieces. What's more, tombs were opened up, and many bodies of believers asleep in their graves were raised. (After Jesus' resurrection, they left the tombs, entered the holy city, and appeared to many.)

The captain of the guard and those with him, when they saw the earthquake and everything else that was happening, were scared to death. They said, "This has to be the Son of God!"

---

After the Sabbath, as the first light of the new week dawned, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to keep vigil at the tomb. Suddenly the earth reeled and rocked under their feet as God's angel came down from heaven, came right up to where they were standing. He rolled back the stone and then sat on it. Shafts of lightning blazed from him. His garments shimmered snow-white. The guards at the tomb were scared to death. They were so frightened, they couldn't move.

The angel spoke to the women: "There is nothing to fear here. I know you're looking for Jesus, the One they nailed to the cross. He is not here. He was raised, just as he said. Come and look at the place where he was placed.

"Now, get on your way quickly and tell his disciples, 'He is risen from the dead. He is going on ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there.' That's the message."

The women, deep in wonder and full of joy, lost no time in leaving the tomb. They ran to tell the disciples. Then Jesus met them, stopping them in their tracks. "Good morning!" he said. They fell to their knees, embraced his feet, and worshiped him. Jesus said, "You're holding on to me for dear life! Don't be frightened like that. Go tell my brothers that they are to go to Galilee, and that I'll meet them there."

…

Meanwhile, the eleven disciples were on their way to Galilee, headed for the mountain Jesus had set for their reunion. The moment they saw him they worshiped him. Some, though, held back, not sure about worship, about risking themselves totally.

Jesus, undeterred, went right ahead and gave his charge: "God authorized and commanded me to commission you: Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life, marking them by baptism in the threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then instruct them in the practice of all I have commanded you. I'll be with you as you do this, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age."

Matthew 27: 41-54
Matthew 28: 1-10, 16-20

Some FAQs

Read More Blogs

I have had a rash of less-than-scintillating reads lately.

My point to this posting is at the end, so skip down to there if you don't want to waste precious time reading about books that suck.

---

Duma Key by Stephen King

As constant readers (a phrase I've borrowed from King) know, I'm Steve's bitch as a fan. And, dammit, this is his worst book to date. Dull dull dull. It's derivative of things he's already done himself, too. (Paintings causing events in reality, dead twin girl ghosts, for starters.)

I read over 700 pages, and the plot actually starts on page 670 hundred something. Even then, I just found it a slog.

Then I saw a site that has plot summaries of current books, the book spoiler, so went to see if it was worth continuing. (Sometimes knowing the end for me can propel me to it in order to see how it's executed.) Alas, it just gave good reason to bail.

The book spoiler summary is 11 paragraphs long, and the first 3 cover the first 700 pages of the novel, to give you an idea.

Sorry, Steve; this one's a dud. Of course, I'll read the next one, though.

---

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin

Surprisingly, for someone who was as popular and influential as a stand-up, there's just not a lot of there there (to paraphrase Gertrude).

Martin's an amazingly flat-footed writer, here, too.

Eventually I couldn't even keep up the energy to just skim to the good parts.

---

When You Need a Lift: But Don't Want to Eat Chocolate, Pay a Shrink, or Drink a Bottle of Gin by Joy Behar

Picked this up as a lark from the "just in" shelf at the library. In her defense, Behar didn't really write any of the book other than the intro. It's a collection of (mostly useless) advice for life from celebs and friends of Behar's.

The only good one was Carol Burnett's, but I lost the photocopy of the page, or else I'd share it with you.

---

Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me by Ben Karlin

Now I thought this one would be a can't-miss tome of great relationship blow-up stories, but they were all pretty lame. Not a laugh in the bunch. And, inexplicably save for political correctness, there's even an entry by a gay guy whose first real live glimpse of a vagina (or va-jay-jay as the current Oprah euphemism goes) convinced him he was gay. Gosh, thanks for the news flash, Bruce.

Not even worth the calories it would take to lift the book.

---

The realization I had was that any one of the blogs you see over there on the left in the "great blogs" list are written by superior stylists than I found in all those books (with the exception of King, of course). They certainly provide much better content on any given day than any of the books above.

The go-to lazy story most Journalists trot out at least once a year is a rumination about whether blogs are needed or any good.

After my recent voyage through all that published mediocrity, I was left with a pretty solid conclusion: HELL YEAH!

Factoid

Two of the most ground-breaking and important TV series were made possible by women.

Desilu, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's production company, gave us "Star Trek". MTM (Mary Tyler Moore) gave us "Hill Street Blues", which provided the template for every cop and hospital drama on the air since.

Interesting, no?

Xena the Grammarian

Irregardless of what you've been told, to really write well, there're some old grammar myths you should be aware of. However, new information has been offered that can dispel some of the silly things that cause us to write convoluted, corkscrew sentence just to avoid these non-foibles, e.g. answering "How are you?" with "I'm good."

It's all good.

Thank God Wingnuts are pro-gun; we're gonna need'em.
(The guns, for those of you in the cheap seats.)

Over the years I've wondered why the wingnuts want the middle class gone.

George Carlin spells it out:


It's just hubris, stupidity, greed, and shortsightedness. Guess that proves Occam's Razor yet again.

Even scarier is the fact that the Bush family was once involved in (another - ahem) plot to turn America into a fascist dictatorship, as mentioned here and detailed here.


On the lighter side of things, this particular bit is a favorite around the office right now:

Here it goes again

Really, not gonna make this a habit, but this was just too ... everything ... not to share.

NSFW: A music video that actually contains all the birds and the bees info of your average health class in a few short minutes. And it's funny, too.

(Lord, forgive me.)

Oh, via Attu.

Recent Viewings 2/29/2008

After writing up these reviews, I noticed the only one I liked was the TV series. So, I put that review first if you want to cut to the chase.

Dexter (Showtime Original Series)
The awesome premise of this show is Dexter is a sociopathic serial killer who was raised right (his adoptive dad realized what he was and helped guide his compulsions to "good" ends), who therefore murders other serial killers and miscellaneous criminals.

Even more brilliant, Dexter narrates the show, so we know his thoughts, which are the best part of the show. When one of the women wink at him in a suggestive matter, he sighs mentally and groans, "I wish she wouldn't do that. I have no idea what it means." Being

Also hilarious is the one cop who suspects Dexter is something other than what he seems, Sgt. Doakes. He's one of the characters/actors who can drop the f-bomb like it was poetry. I perk up every time he comes into a scene because he always makes it better.

Amazingly, they're airing it on CBS on Sunday nights, so you can tune in to see if you enjoy it too. Sadly, you'll miss Doakes' best lines, but it's still a hoot.

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Bug
Aside from Ashley Judd getting nekkid, Bug is to be avoided.

I thought it was going to be a creepy horror story about bugs that got under your skin. But it was really about how insanity can be contagious. Gosh, newsflash, huh? Uh, see any true explanation of Scientology (or if you want a more fun, useful example, see any version of The Manchurian Candidate) if you had any doubts about contagious nuttery.

When it was over, and I was past mourning that lost hour and a half of my life, I thought: This really reeks of having come from a stage play, and sure enough, it had. The writer of the piece is renowned in the theatre world for getting his actors nekkid. You'd think he'd come up with story a lot less transparent (har har) if his true motive is getting to skin.

Hell, just hit a shaker bar and get it over with, methinks.

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Heartbreak Kid
Didn't see the original so I can't provide any comparison, but this version is lame. The best (and perhaps only real) joke in the whole flick is when Ben Stiller's character gets stung by a jellyfish and his new bride comes to his rescue by peeing on it, and her exposed bush is a sight to behold (NSFW!!!). (This is the third outrageous bush gag I've seen in movies, the others being in Waiting and the first Scary Movie.)

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Superbad
This one was close but no cigar. I really enjoyed the first few scenes of dialogue because that is how teenage boys talk about sex and their frustrations at that age. But when they get to school, the movie begins the barrel roll as it goes tits up.

It eventually becomes so absurd, it's the only comedy in memory that so thoroughly cornholed my suspension of disbelief I recall thinking "aw, c'mon."

I have to admit I was amused by most of the "McLovin'" story arc, so if you're bored one night and you don't have to pay for it, it may be worth spin just for that.

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Jumper
I've was digging on Red Curtain Movies while they offered Divx movies, and one of the flicks I snagged was this one. It was from an (illegal, I'm sure) cam recording, meaning someone took their video camera to the movie and taped it off the screen. For about 1/5 of the film, the culprit's clothes are in the way, etc. It's a miserable way to view a movie. However, I really just wanted to get an idea if I liked it enough to hit the theatre and see it right.

I couldn't get past the first half hour it was so bad. I thought that in addition to being a bootleg from a cam, it might have been a working print, or the cam guy had only taped sections of the movie. I went out to the movie spoiler and read the plot summary, and by gum I had seen the actual theatrical release of the movie.

The narrative jumps are so drastic and unintelligible that I would mentally reel, trying to catch up as the next scene played. I was able to eventually bridge the narrative, but it made for annoying viewing.

And why did they think it was a good idea to make a movie about a guy with the same superhero power as the favorite character on the TV show "Hereos"? And then tell a story not nearly as good.

Picard says it best:

Music Notes 2/29/2008
U2, Supertramp, Noe Venable, and One from the Heart

Borrowed a copy of the remastered edition of The Joshua Tree by U2.

This is one of the few instances I've run across where remastering didn't really improve the sound all that much. It's a scootch louder, but not really any clearer or with any more dynamic range. (Bass response is usually the biggest winner in remastering, but here it sounds the same.) Merely turning up your volume makes the old sound identical to the new. I wonder if I'm missing something or if the commentors on Amazon who mention how good the remastering have compared it to the original.

I was especially disappointed (I will forever hear Kevin Kline saying that word in my head) in the sound of the song "One Tree Hill." It's a hidden jem on the set, and it's always sounded muddy. I was hoping a dust-off would clean it up, but alas, they must've recorded that one on crappy tapes or machines.

I've always had a love/hate thing with The Joshua Tree, because it's an achingly beautiful album. But it's aches just a bit too much for my tastes, and I've never been able to just slap it on the music machine and play it through. It's like watching Sophie's Choice after you've had kids - too much to endure, on purpose.

Still, I look forward to the deluxe set of Achtung Baby. Besides being their best album (no arguments folks - it just won't help), the extra songs and remixes they did at the time were as good as anything on the canonical set. They were really mining a rich vein at the time.

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Speaking of classic albums, I had the happy accident of slapping on Supertramp's Breakfast in America this last weekend, and was re-blown away by how good it really is. Every song on it is fantastic, and it has not only aged well, but has become even more relevant.

These lyrics from "The Logical Song" are more meaningful today then they were at the time:

Now watch what you say
Or they'll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh fanatical, criminal
Oh won't you sign up your name
We'd like to feel you're
Acceptable, respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable

If you've not heard it in a while, or have never heard it, go hunt down this slab of fab and get your jollies on.

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Memo to the fans.

I keep being amazed by what slowly creeps onto the list of available songs on Amazon's MP3 site.

I was thrilled to find, just today, "Tinkerbell" by Noe Venable - a lovely dark song where the fairy we all need to believe in finds hope after she "busts her brains bashing into window panes."

It wasn't there a week or so ago because I've been trying to get my hands on the tune since I heard it in my daughter's dance troup's recital of "Peter Pan." I knew via previews I wouldn't like the whole album, so was holding out for just this moment where I could snag the single.

If you've got those elusive songs you've been hunting for forever, make sure you swing past Amazon every couple weeks.

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While the movie was a magnificent failure, I really liked the music to One from the Heart. Also, now available in MP3s.

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I'm a few years behind the times on this, but jeebuz crispies, have you seen this?

Funnies

Loved this bon mot from Jezebel:

Kate Beckinsale got candid about her ladybits in this month's Allure: "I've only ever had about three boyfriends. Only a handful of people have seen into the Pharaoh's Tomb!" Note to Kate: you probably shouldn't compare your cooch to something cavernous that houses dead people. Even fancy dead people.

And I love M. Blowhard's bon mot on Jezebel itself:

The postmodern miaowing at the chickblog Jezebel can make me feel like I'm trapped in a TV showroom where all the sets have been tuned to "Sex in the City" and "Ally McBeel."

Oh, yes!:

(Click for full size)

It's that bad

Must see:


And here's that moment she talks about in the video, where if she opens a paper and sees people like her imprisoned or being harmed, she'll go dark, too.

Is this really happening?

Coincidence?

My kids got this through a recent McD's movie promotion.



Does it look like who I think it looks like?

Ephemera, 02-25-2008

Tiny Fey Owns Weekend Update.
(Ya gotta sit through a commercial. )

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Comedian on Fox calls it like it is.

Comic
by luvnews

(This one via Digg.com)

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The heir of the Johnson & Johnson fortune confirms that many of the uber-rich have a "let them eat cake" mentality.
- The Rich Man's Michael Moore By Robert Frank

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I've been thinking on this article for a week, because I found it disturbing but ultimately couldn't put my finger on what precisely bugs me about it. Figured I'd just put it up and let you read it without any of my filters.
- Marry Him! by Lori Gottlieb

In a bit of web synchronicity, I happed upon this quote on bash.org shortly after I read the article.
- #414593
DragonflyBlade21: A woman has a close male friend. This means that he is probably interested in her, which is why he hangs around so much. She sees him strictly as a friend. This always starts out with, you're a great guy, but I don't like you in that way. This is roughly the equivalent for the guy of going to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we're not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we're going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn't work out, we'll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.

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Just made me laugh.

Hey

Here's a blog where they provide full "mix tapes" of CDs, and scads of free MP3s. I've found some nice covers thus far.

Dave Matthews Greatest Songs and Some Hits

One of the niftiest aspects to our brave new digital music world is songs can be plucked from the vine to be decanted into the perfect personal vintage. (Add metaphors to blender, press "frappe", watch English profs twitch.)

Reading the most recent "Rolling Stone" I came across this hilarious smack-down in an album review (emphasis added):

Josh Kelley - Special Company - review by Rob Sheffield

[Regarding] Josh Kelley's new album, his first since becoming Mr. Katherine Heigl ... [snip] ... [H]e sure does hambone it up, never failing to let you know he's touching a special, special lady in the right, right way. Not since Dave Matthews urged you to pull up your skirt and show him your world has there been such egregious seductive vocalizing, though even Matthews could do better than "Cheers to you, honey, because you look so money."

After I pulled myself from the puddle of tears of laughter on the floor, I ran and showed this to my wife. I love Dave Matthews, but that song "Crash" has forever been on our "most mocked" list for the lyric quoted above. There are some concepts that you just can't rescue, no matter how much you try, and "show me your pussy" in a supposed love song is pretty close to the top of that list.

Dave does eventually get it right in the song "Hunger for the Great Light," which is an unapologetic bump and grind song about sex, as opposed to the tender chords of "Crash."

So that got me to thinking that there's a pretty good swath of tunage from Dave that would make a great compilation. "Crash" is not here, of course. And, sadly, the studio version of "Best of What's Around" is not available on the MP3 site. Still, if you're a sorta fan, or a big fan, this is nice set. (Of course, if you have additions or disagreements, the comments are open.)

1. What Would You Say
2.Dodo
3. So Damn Lucky
4. Ants Marching
5. Satellite
6. I Did It
7. Dreamgirl
8. American Baby
9. Louisiana Bayou
10. You Might Die Trying
11. Hunger for the Great Light
12. Best of What's Around

Funny

I hope my constant readers will forgive me. First, I'm posting pron, then I'm posting spam humor.

Oh well. This was just too good not to put up.


U.S. Navy releases Al Qaeda Terrorist -

The US Navy today, January 16, 2008, announced that it has released a senior Al Qaeda terrorist after questioning him extensively for 27 days while being held prisoner aboard a US aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea.

In a humanitarian gesture, the terrorist was given $50 US and a white 1962 Ford Fairlane automobile upon being released from custody.

The attached photo shows the terrorist on his way home just after being released by the Navy.



GO NAVY!

Cannot stress it enough - NSFW

I usually don't post stuff like this because I figure all we grownups can find our own internet pron when and if we want to. Besides Michael B has cornered the market on the most interesting blue material, so he's your go-to guy.

However, I just had to share these two with you.

This first one is a news report from Carnival in Brazil about the woman who is the queen of the parade for the year. Apparently you can't go entirely nude, but if someone has ever wanted to find the exact thin pink line between nude and not nude, this woman has found it. And I know every guy viewing this will think, "I want that guy's job."

This other one is in such poor taste that it goes completely full circle and becomes almost … well, adjectives elude me at the moment. The girl who filmed this offers it in the spirit therapeutic approaches to relieve stress. (No kidding, keep watching.) Her momma must be so proud.

(Forgot to give Attu his props.)

Baker Street

Dudes and dudettes,

I write you today to tell you of a thing of beauty, a thing of joy.

The Foo Fighters - one of my favorite groups - are now available on Amazon's MP3 store. But that's not the really good news.

The really good news is that one of the best covers ever is now available - The Foo Fighter's cover of Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street".

(Here's an edited Gerry's version on Youtube, if you wanna snag it using the method I describe in the post below. Here's the full version, but the rip is kinda quiet. Here's the Foo Fighter's on Youtube as well, if you don't mind a little lesser fidelity. The video is better on this version, though.)

Btw, Rafferty has explained that it's a song about making your living being a street-corner musician, which he did for a while.

"Winding your way down Baker Street..."

Blowed Up Real Good

Here's a fun post about the best starship destructions on film, complete with video.