A film starring Robbie the Robot* proves that people should not have big ideas about how to make things better.Ah, damn you teabaggers! God damn you teabaggers all to hell!
Smart guys are dumb as proven by this science fiction movie I am smart enough to appreciate.Video here contains three minutes and thirty seconds of Forbidden Planet plot description because Bill Whittle is five years old and has just seen his first movie.
D'OH.
Saw The Devil’s Advocate for the third time the other night.Okay, a little purple...
No one in film has so dissected and anatomized diabolical corpi with more dedication and precision than Al Pacino.
Not even the combined forces of Martin Scorcese and the chilling characters he created with Robert DeNiro can come up with the living, breathing reality of what Pacino only began to discover with his Michael Corleone of The Godfather.
Prophetically and, I imagine, presciently, I initially spelled Godfather as Todfather.Okay, typos are a casting of the I Ching as iPhones let you know...
Yes. The Deathfather!
That rather says it all.
The great excitement in the film [Insomnia] is that [Pacino] is paired with another, specifically comic genius, Robin Williams, who is equally given to a Shakespearean range of theater games.*NOW THAT IS JUST BEYOND THE PALE. ROBIN WILLIAMS IS JUST NOT ON THE SAME PLANE AS ANYBODY GOOD AND MORIARTY HAS FINALLY LOST HIS—
Both of these volcanoes play the most divinely impressive game of who can out-underplay the other. With explosive possibilities rumbling within the Pacino/Williams Showdown, what we’re invited to watch are two extraordinary artists laying out the mysteries of two seemingly normal but tragically flawed men.
I danced to such slaughter until I met Janet Reno in the backroom of a Washington D.C. hotel. The sulfur rising from our chicken dinners was prophetically tyrannical. It was a preview of the enlightened despotism to be found in the Progressively Marxist New World Order of the Obama Nation. Such sulfur literally pores out of Joe Bidon’s pro-abortion Catholicism as his high-speed train pummels us more firmly into debt.There we go, back to normal.
There follows the usual article complaining that teachers get what they negotiated. After:Oh, To Be a Teacher in Wisconsin
How can fringe benefits cost nearly as much as a worker's salary? Answer: collective bargaining.
Mr. Costrell is professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas.Guy, I dunno what your job pays, but you know what to do if your elitist professor job doesn't pay for shit.
A lot of the silly comics panels I post are by Jack Kirby and however kooky they are there's always something lurid and arresting and resonant about Kirby's comics. Also! I! Like! Exclamation points!!!My friends at Hilobrow are running a really fun series of posts about comic book legend Jack Kirby. It's called Kirb Your Enthusiasm, and each essay is by a different person analyzing a panel from a Kirby title. Posts so far include Douglas Rushkoff on The Eternals, John Hilgart on Black Magic, Gary Panter on Demon, Dan Nadel on OMAC, and Deb Chachra on Captain America.
I lucked out and got to write about Kamandi.
And Tarkovskij knew what he wanted. He had a scene he had dreamt about doing for a long long time, for ten years, he claimed. It was to be the final scene of The Sacrifice. The main character's house burns down to the ground before his very eyes, he apparently goes insane and is taken away in an ambulance. The entire scene was supposed to be done in one single take while the camera moves along a hundred meter long rail. We had special-effects people brought in from England as there was a requirement in place that the house burn down in eight minutes and ten seconds sharp. Otherwise the film cartridge would run out.
For an entire week this scene was meticulously rehearsed. We had decided to not shoot the scene under sunlit conditions, and so we were forced to get up at two o'clock in the morning, do a few test runs, and then to commence shooting the scene at a carefully selected moment just prior to sunrise.
Approximately half-way through the take, my assistant yells out, "Sven - the camera is losing speed! We got twenty..., now we're at sixteen frames per second! What shall we do?"
Just to be on the safe side, in case problems should arise, I had deployed another camera approximately midway along the rail, so I said, "Swap the cameras!"
Within thirty seconds he had changed the camera and we continued filming. Tarkovskij had not noticed that we had changed camera, nor had the majority of the others. They were all watching the fire, and when it was over and the ambulance had made its exit everybody cheered over the fact that everything had turned out so well.
Then I got to tell about what had happened. Tarkovskij almost cried. The film was immediately developed to see if we in spite of everything could use some of the existing material. But, there was no way. Whatever the case, it was definitely not the sequence Tarkovskij had dreamt about for all these years - and it was even supposed to be the climactic sequence of the movie.
We really didn't have the funds to re-build the house and to do a second take. Long discussions ensued, where even Erland and I were involved in our roles as co-producers. The actors were fortunately still under contract for another while. We received some additional funding through our Japanese co-producer, and in the end we all decided to give it another shot. Nothing is impossible, as Ingmar Bergman was fond of saying. It was his gang behind the camera here. The house was re-built!
This time, however, I requested of Andrej that he agree that we build two sets of rails, and that the shoot should, just to be safe, be be shot simultaneously by the two cameras mounted at slightly different elevations. For an entire day we rehearsed with both cameras to ensure that they both moved in identical manner. We shot the scene one morning when everything seemed just right, but at the same moment Andrej was about to yell "Camera!" the sun appeared.
Tarkovskij shouted, "What shall I do?"
I said, "Look, there's nothing you can do,...! The sun is coming out, the house is already on fire - and we're on our second house!"
Fortunately, it turned out just fantastic. As the smoke billowed forth from the house the sun shone right through it and generated some truly great shading on the ground. It was a lucky strike indeed that the sun appeared - entirely to our advantage, and Tarkovskij was exceedingly pleased when he saw the end result.
As Scarlett would say: “Tomorrow is another day.”Here's where we stretch things out before the punchline. You know, I actually and really and for true dreamed last night that I had a guest spot on Bill O'Reilly's show. I was supposed to talk about some piece of scandalous art and Phyllis Schlafly was supposed to be on too. I was there in a hotel room, got a limo to the studio, rode the elevator with all the employees, and somehow then managed to miss my time slot. So I wandered around the office looking for someone to apologize to - don't wanna get off that gravy train - and eventually I found Bill's office. His door was open and I was about to go in and folks were making signs not to. He was asleep in a ridiculous position, curled up in his chair almost sliding off his desk and snoring like a congested elephant. So I went to a lounge to wait for him to wake up and where a bunch of Foxy girls flirted with me or made fun and then when one started inspecting my body I woke up. I am ready to be the new Alan Colmes.
Tomorrow is when Americans that lose fair and square elections accept the will of their fellow citizens and wait for the next election to try and change matters to their liking. Americans don’t take to the streets en masse like the subjects of the latest Thugocracy in Venezuela.
At least most of us don’t.
“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson
Let me take a crack at writing that same fucking DDT column that everyone else already wrote. It's important!ObDeltoid.
Thousands gathered outside of the state capitol this afternoon to support Gov. Scott Walker. Teachers and firefighters circled the tea party as it rallied. Gadsden flags clashed with union banners in the cold Wisconsin air. It was a beautiful sight — loud, raucous, animated, and sweaty. Andrew Breitbart, Herman Cain, Brad Thor, Tim Phillips, and Joe the Plumber have addressed the crowd.It is nice to see Wisconsin's finest leaders addressing the citizenry.
Some signs spotted at the rally:
– “Stop leeching, start teaching!”
– “Walker 2012″
– “Obama: Worry about your own deficit”
– “I went to work yesterday”
It appears I am going to have to sample his speeches and chop them up to make him heard.
If you could somehow put it to a some phat booty beats, that would be great, too.
In a world filled with states, officeholders and officials should view themselves as having political responsibility as analyzed by Weber, which is much like [David] Miller’s remedial responsibility. They wield power that is not morally legitimated by its origins; the power exists because of morally neutral historical and social accidents. What remains is moral responsibility for what is done with the power.
State officials then confront a world in which their authority gives them unusual power over outcomes. In a world full of drowning children, they are unusually likely to have access to life preservers.
Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.Gee, I'll bet all the dead people are grateful for his courage. He probably has flowers thrown at him when he's out on the streets of Baghdad, right?
"Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right," he said. "They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."
In a series of meetings with the Guardian in Germany where he has been granted asylum, he said he had told a German official, who he identified as Dr Paul, about mobile bioweapons trucks throughout 2000.Aww.
A small piece of evidence to counter my pessimism about Egypt came right after Mubarak’s departure, when ordinary Egyptians organized themselves to clean up the mess in Tahrir Square[.]That was indeed a nice picture of folks coming together to make things better.
This all may sound charming but unimportant, but it’s not. Anyone who’s been to the third world has seen trash strewn everywhere. This isn’t because less-developed countries produce more trash; in fact, they produce less. And it’s also not just because of lack of money for a proper waste-disposal infrastructure. Rather, it’s the product of a lack of civic consciousness and responsibility, without which ordered liberty is impossible....
I'm at a fake-marriage market, where Chinese lesbians and gay men meet to find a potential husband or wife. In China, the pressure to form a heterosexual marriage is so acute that 80 percent of China's gay population marries straight people, according to sexologist Li Yinhe, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. To avoid such unions, six months ago, Shanghai's biggest gay Web site, inlemon.cn, started to hold marriage markets once a month.Shampagne all around.
This sounds like a staff meeting in hell.The editors counsel caution — not euphoria — over the Egyptian protests.
Charles Krauthammer outlines a new foreign-policy manual for the U.S.: the Freedom Doctrine.
RiShawn Biddle suggests that the U.S. overturn “reverse” seniority rules for teachers.
Henry Payne observes that the Internet has spread to rural areas — without government’s help.
Lou Dolinar chides President Obama for supporting the high-speed-rail boondoggle.
Robert VerBruggen warns against an effort to unionize airline-security workers.
Mona Charen coaches baby boomers to age gracefully.
Michelle Malkin demands that Congress defund Planned Parenthood.
The "war on terror" prison at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is "one of the finest prison systems in the world," former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.Perhaps a certain president could show this somehow-not-yet-beaten-to-death-in-prison asshole what an asshole he really is, and perhaps my ass poops ice-cream.
Reacting to David Cameron’s Luton Munich speech, one prominent Canadian community leader said Cameron was “spot on” when he insisted British multiculturalism has failed, adding that Canada’s multi-culti experiment was no better off.Foster is one of the smarter Cornerites - which elevates him to stupidity I suppose - so he saves the punchline until the end:
“The Canadian multicultural model has failed, as the British model has,” the leader said. “When first generation (Muslims) are more loyal to Canada than the second generation, then we have sufficient evidence to say that multiculturalism has failed.”
The link goes to the Toronto Sun, a paper nobody needs to read ever, and the few other Canadian papers covering it seem to mostly be those interested in arguments against multiculturalism. Should you choose to follow the link, you'll find that the arguments against multiculturalism are that Mulsims aren't loyal to Canada, and also that 18 guys got arrested for concocting a plot to blow stuff up.So who’s the leader? Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress.
More here.
Brousseau also says that he helped customize a Ford Excursion S.U.V. that Cruise owned, installing features such as handmade eucalyptus panelling. The customization job was presented to Tom Cruise as a gift from David Miscavige, he said. “I was getting paid fifty dollars a week,” he recalls. “And I’m supposed to be working for the betterment of mankind.” Several years ago, Brousseau says, he worked on the renovation of an airport hangar that Cruise maintains in Burbank. Sea Org members installed faux scaffolding, giant banners bearing the emblems of aircraft manufacturers, and a luxurious office that was fabricated at church facilities, then reassembled inside the hangar. Brousseau showed me dozens of photographs documenting his work for Cruise.Rich people love free stuff.
Both Cruise’s attorney and the church deny Brousseau’s account. Cruise’s attorney says that “the Church of Scientology has never expended any funds to the personal benefit of Mr. Cruise or provided him with free services.” Tommy Davis says that these projects were done by contractors, and that Brousseau acted merely as an adviser. He also says, “None of the Church staff involved were coerced in any way to assist Mr. Cruise. Church staff, and indeed Church members, hold Mr. Cruise in very high regard and are honored to assist him. Whatever small economic benefit Mr. Cruise may have received from the assistance of Church staff pales in comparison to the benefits the Church has received from Mr. Cruise’s many years of volunteer efforts for the Church.” Yet this assistance may have involved many hours of unpaid labor on the part of Sea Org members.
I’ve probably never done this before, but I’m going to leap to the defense of Jimmy Carter. This legal action against him is the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit. If plaintiffs had to pay costs when they lost lawsuits, we wouldn’t see nonsense like this.Quite right, the suit's bullshit and woe betide Regnery if such suits gain traction. Or, you know, The National Review. And The Corner!
By the way, Carter hasn’t been “officially charged with fraud.” He has merely been accused of it. Big difference.Who's he talking to? Oh right, the bit's titled "re: President Carter’s ‘Fraud’" so there must be an item further down. And there is:
A provocative case — Unterberg et al. v. Jimmy Carter et al. — is under way against former president Carter for his analysis (if that is the right word) of the Israel-Palestine crisis, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. The Washington Post reports that five dissatisfied customers, to put it mildly, have filed a class-action lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against Carter and his publisher, Simon & Schuster, alleging that the 2006 book ought to have been classified as a work of fiction.Provocative! Thanks to Miller the piece has been updated:
Correction: This post originally carried the title “President Carter Officially Charged with Fraud.” The mistake has since been changed. The fault is my own.Here is the new title:
President Carter Officially Sued for FraudAll better.
Would you eat meat that was grown in a lab?Hmm, meat that hadn't been attached to a live animal which was walking around in its own shit and periodically shocked or burned or otherwise beaten and confined in a small space to suffer...
