A Tale of Two Big Hollywoods

One:

Down the page, two:

Office Life

Visitors to the office are rare and somewhat camera-shy.

Division

Jeff Jacoby:

At every milestone in Obama’s journey to the White House — from the keynote address in Boston that put him on the national radar screen to his inaugural address in 2009 — he held himself out as a healer. Skeptics might note that partisanship and rancor were as old as American democracy itself, but Obama insisted that would change when he was president. The toxic style of politics wasn’t inescapable. Give me the highest office in the land, he assured a rapturous crowd in Ohio two days before the 2008 election, and “we can end it once and for all.”

Millions of voters believed him. They took to heart his vow to transfigure American public life. They looked forward to the uplifting leadership he promised. What they got instead was the most polarizing and divisive presidency in modern times.

Hmm...divisiveness... That reminds me of something, but I can't - Oh wait, it reminds me of this:



On with the argument:

The civility and goodwill that were to be Obama’s touchstone? “I haven’t fully accomplished that,” he concedes. “Haven’t even come close.”

As the 2012 campaign heads into the home stretch, a story in Politico notes that “Obama and his top campaign aides have engaged far more frequently in character attacks and personal insults than the Romney campaign.” The man who won the presidency by decrying “partisanship and pettiness and immaturity” now seeks reelection by deploying slurs and aspersions with abandon: A key aide suggests that Mitt Romney’s financial filings may amount to a felony. The vice president claims that Republicans want to put voters “back in chains.” An Obama campaign video likens Romney to “ a vampire.”

Ha ha! Good one! Yes he is very much like a vampire as he is so very bloodless. But as we are patting Jeff on the back for spreading valuable and fitting slurs from the Obama campaign, notice this:



Mathemagically speaking accusing all Romney supporters of common buttchuggery MUST BE LESS DIVISIVE than Romney's campaign by um, [serious calculation involving full-tongue extension and substraction from forty-seven] a BILLION.

Almost-People Skills

There once was a stuffed suit called Romney, a
Guy who'd emote like a zombie,* a
Big piece of wood, a
Stiff but up-stood, a
Contemptible cure for insomnia.

Via Pupienus Maximus:



*Yes yes, go on.

Girl Group Dolly

Going through the library for the unheard stuff...and here we are in D and E:



There's an iffy production decision in the backups in the chorus - I mean yikes - but in an alternate reality Dolly got signed by Motown.

PLUS:

Maladroit

Prairie Fire

Here is an interesting URL. None of the content mentions "prairie fire" so I assume someone consulted the weathermen to see which way the wind was blowing just before/immediately after pushing the "publish" button.

Anyway:

Parents are shipping them to their kids in college. People are dragging their “undecided” friends to theaters on weekend nights by the thousands to watch… documentaries. There hasn’t been anything like this in movie theaters since "An Inconvenient Truth" or "Fahrenheit 9/11"—though these two new movies are outselling those two liberal chestnuts. In fact, they are breaking box-office records, too.

[...] The two top-selling documentary DVDs in America are both conservative exposes of radical leftist ideology on the march: "2016: Obama’s America" and "Occupy Unmasked."

That’s right: In an election season when the mainstream media is already writing up news accounts of President Obama’s acceptance speech, the liveliest action in theaters and online media purchasing is taking place on the right.

And I'll be damned, it's correct. In fact the Amazon list is somewhat loopy:

1.Occupy Unmasked

4.4 out of 5 stars   (16)

Release Date: September 25, 2012

Price: $14.99

2.2016: Obama's America

3.9 out of 5 stars   (25)

Release Date: October 16, 2012

Price: $17.98

3.Dreams From My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception

4.0 out of 5 stars   (128)

Price: $12.68

5.Monumental: In Search of America's National Treasure

4.7 out of 5 stars   (69)

Price: $15.30

7.The Isaiah 9:10 Judgment: Is There an Ancient Mystery that Foretells America's Future?

4.7 out of 5 stars   (59)

Price: $25.95

10.Catholicism DVD Box Set

4.8 out of 5 stars   (129)

List Price: $149.95

22 used & new from $63.89

Screenshot from the Breitbart DVD page:



It serves as well for the D'Souza page but the Real Father bit breaks the trend:



So... I can think of all kinds of insulting reasons for such things, so why not be insulting:

1. Conservative book-club type thingie.
2. Kooks and shut-ins buy DVDs while everyone else is streaming them.
3. Scientology-style cult pumping figures (Catholicism box set at number ten?).
4. People just aren't buying DVDs so 2 & 3 operate with few purchases necessary.

That, though, doesn't really explain the Box Office Mojo chart for 2016.



Mind you the Netflix popular picks don't reflect that lunacy, but there's probably less of a frightened-senior-citizen component going on.

Documentaries That Document the Wrong Thing

The Weird World of Blowfly was hard to watch. I've never understood why Blowfly might be funny so I thought I'd give it a shot, and it turned out that the film didn't have much history but instead followed the now-fairly-infirm Clarence Reid around as a hipster white guy tried to make a buck off Blowfly by being a terrible manager/drummer in a new Blowfly band. And let me put it in a sentence: Tom Bowker is a leaden and uninspiring drummer. Off-stage Bowker comes off like Philip Seymour Hoffman trying to be unfunny and pathetic, which Philip Seymour Hoffman is quite good at but looks very sad in a real person. I don't know what the financial arrangements actually are - maybe Reid comes out ahead (there's a scene in which Bowker complains of his debt and Reid doesn't seem like the kind of guy who wants to incur more of that).

This was somewhat amusing because the excerpt in the film stuck with the part that sounded like straight soul except for the words, so the chorus, uh, came as a surprise:



Later on the song becomes just way too obvious.

Apart from such brief surprises - which isn't actually a surprise in context - he's about as unfunny as Frank Zappa.

Like Zappa, though, Clarence Reid had musical talent:



It's also a reminder that I don't know much about TK Records beyond KC and Anita Ward, and I should do some listening.

Slumming in Time

Best of Craigslist:

Time Travel

---

Date: 2010-09-24, 10:09AM MDT

---

I have a functioning time machine (i know it sounds unbelievable, but I assure you it works) that I need a 2nd person to operate with me.
I'm looking for someone who is adventurous and reliable. Preferable a male; or a female that can do heavy lifting.
I am leaving on September 30th, 2010, in the morning and plan to return October 2nd, 2010. I am going to June 1983 to handle some business.
If you are serious about time travel and are reliable, then please contact me. You do not have to pay anything, but you would have to provide someone to watch my cat for the time we are gone. The only qualifications needed are that you are reliable and that the circumferance of your head is no more than 64cm.

We will be leaving from Bozeman, MT. Let me know if you want to go with me.

Bozeman?

The Art of Criticism

The first sentence of a review:

Well, here's an album I certainly did not expect to like so much.

You guessed it: it's a review of another Iron Bonehead production, this time a hot new platter from Bestial Holocaust called Into the Goat Vulva.

The Marketplace

Competing blogs do not offer bidirectionality without muttering barely audible excuses regarding youthful experimentation and instead try to redirect the customer to cheap pulp novels whilst ordering their lab monkeys beaten once more.

NOT SO HERE.*

...And of course...

*In fact beatings at Substance Labs™ have dropped a full 18% and do not often involve lab monkeys.

Feel the Darkness

There is apparently demand for a darker Mitt, so darken to taste and add personality.

BWOF!

Hmm, don't think the divs work for that, so drag and drop it is.

Distraction and Blegging

Work is very distracting.

Anyone know a cheap and easy database that's good at automatically gathering information, can contain both text and files, and can serve them up safely on a website? All I can think of at the moment is Filemaker.

A WHAT Looser?

Jay Nordlinger, in an aside in an entire career of asides:

P.S. Why is there a “Hispanic Heritage Month”? Can’t we be Americans and be done with this malarkey? (I hope readers appreciate the way I class up my language for the Corner. In my column, Impromptus, it’s often a speck looser.)

Get this man a Romney campaign position ASAP!

Lazypost

All hail our snaky saviours:

"Virgin birth" among animals may not be a rare, last-resort, save-the-species stopgap after all.

For the first time, animal mothers, specifically pit vipers, have been discovered spawning fatherless offspring in the wild. More to the point, the snakes did so even when perfectly good males were around.

Native GIMP on OS X. There's a zipped collection of plugins here. More over here.

Women are soulless whores until I dress them properly.

Nickelback have their own meme.

The bee was gonna retire by the weekend!

The parasite could be controlling the honeybees and making them abandon their hives—or perhaps the infected bees are "committing altruistic suicide" to protect their hive mates, said entomologist John Hafernik of San Francisco State University.

The looped sheep goes well with this:



Many clever GIFs to steal. I was trying to get at this sort of partially animated still with the bit from The Trip but my patience needs work and I should have made the middle post of the washing machine stay still on the Y axis.

Dreams of Orbital Death Platforms

Bloodthirsty monster Mark Krikorian demonstrates Poe's Law:

Tempting Advice from 1972
By Mark Krikorian
September 14, 2012 4:44 P.M.

Satire though it was, Randy Newman’s “Political Science” has lyrics relevant to recent events:

We give them money
But are they grateful?
No they’re spiteful
And they’re hateful.
They don’t respect us so let’s surprise them;
We’ll drop the big one and pulverize them.

Any objections?

That is the whole of the post.

To go all kooky for a moment, if I was some crazy war-loving Muslim fundamentalist I'd be doing my damndest to fuck things up before the election to boost the Mittster, who's more likely to go bananas and invade Syria and Libya and Iran and Egypt.

Living in Hell

Over here is a list of aphorisms submitted by a whole bunch of people who have nothing better to do. It's in the nature of such a page that kooks "improve" upon whatever folk nonsense they've heard, mangling it and adding ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! as they see fit, or simply coming up with their own hopeful motivational-poster wisdom. Then of course there are other people who begin never-ending projects using those brain-droppings and those people are Noble and their projects are Uniformly WONDERFUL!!!

He who is not a sugar substitute to himself doesn't know himself.
He who is not a freak to himself doesn't know himself.
Nobody can make you feel abnormal without your queen.
The bean is out there.
No president can make you feel x-rated without your shot.
Nobody can make you feel egocentric without your thing.
It's not what we prick that shows us up, it's what we don't prick.
It's not what we offend that shows us up, it's what we don't offend.
It's not what we rub that shows us up, it's what we don't rub.
The great-aunt is out there.
It's not what we terminate that shows us up, it's what we don't terminate.
The spider is out there.
Harry Truman can make you feel wasteful without your metaphor.
Congresses are signs of God's work.
Nobody can make you feel ugly without your mink.
Nobody can make you feel ecstatic without your moron.
Ray Charles can make you feel bashful without your specialist.
It's not what we whip that shows us up, it's what we don't whip.
Nobody can make you feel guilty without your terrorist.
The rabbi is out there.

Current JanusNode is 3.14.

The American Exception

Mitt-blower Kevin D. Williamson:

How to respond to the attacks on U.S. diplomatic interests in the Muslim world? One especially appropriate tool we have at hand involves the State Department itself: the issuance of visas. If the Egyptians cannot bring themselves to behave like civilized human beings, then there is no reason to extend to them the benefits of international norms that they have no intention of respecting.

[...]

To my mind, the best thing about using visas as a sanction tool is that doing so hits the ruling elites in a very sensitive area. They want to send their children to Stanford, attend conferences at Harvard, do business in Houston, and send their mistresses shopping on Fifth Avenue, just like members of any other ruling elite in the world. We should categorically cut them off. Let Egypt’s best and brightest spend their days in their dreary and backward homeland; perhaps that would provide them with an appropriate incentive for improving the place.

Oh yeah, everyone wants to do business in Houston. I guess this would work because there are no other countries or schools or business districts or shopping opportunities in the world that are attractive to rich people.

Testing Patients

Oh sure, running juice through a squid is fine if you're some kid in a lab coat dicking around, but the grown-up scientists know and remember that the Goal of Science is to run electricity through people. To this end we at Substance Labs™ have procured a tiny slice of Ann Althouse and let the experiment run its course.



Okay, the eye got stuck and the orb filter was obviously on the blink but I think what we have here is a genuine Science Smackdown. You may send grant money via registered mail only.