I’m hereby boycotting you until you stop marring my Sunday Nights on Sci Fi with that stupid giggling woman who wants more meat. Her voice is annoying enough, but that bordering on insanity giggle? Look, she’s creepier than the Burger King.
I do prefer your sammiches to Subway’s, but I’m serious, lose the bimbo.
Red Haired Girl competed in the regional Scripps Spelling Bee this week – a victory there would have taken her to Washington for the national competition. She’s a very good speller, but these things tend to be luck-of-the-draw (I never heard of a cruller, or for that matter, a muumuu). She did well until the second from the last (p-e-n-u-l-t-i-m-a-t-e) round when she got the word fuselage. When asked to repeat the word, the pronouncer – consistent with her performance the entire evening – gave it a somewhat British flavor. RHG, who reads a lot but not the things that boys read, spelled it the way it was pronounced that night – fusilage. Another girl was eliminated for spelling angst as ongst, and yet another for spelling chronology as chrinology – in both cases they spelled it as it was pronounced to them.
I have always considered my time in the USAF in the early seventies to be a defining point in my life, and have an on-going fascination with airplanes, so this particular defeat was somewhat crushing. RHG took it in stride though, looking forward to next year. On the way home we went through some words that she might encounter in the future, like empennage.
(More e-mail fun, for St. Patrick’s Day)
Generic-looking green van parked across the street with Notre Dame bumper sticker.
Every time you turn around the pitter-pattering stops and that green fire hydrant seems to have gotten a little closer.
Green lipstick marks on the butt of your Dockers.
You’re being followed by a large woman with a sultry voice and a dying career. (Oops! That’s a sign you’re being stalked by Chaka Khan.)
You don’t recall owning an anatomically correct lawn gnome.
Card delivered with the bouquet of 4-leaf clovers reads, “I bet you’re magically delicious!”
When you come home from work, the potatoes are missing from the cupboard and your parrot is singing “Danny Boy.”
Prank caller has a really corny Irish accent, and Richard Gere has an airtight alibi.
Those tiny green hairs on your toilet seat.
Sultry voice from shower soap dish asks, “Is that your shillelagh, or are you just happy to see me?”
Pink hearts, yellow moons, blue diamonds scratched on your car at knee-level, and Ross Perot is nowhere to be found.
Them little green pellets in the litter box ain’t M&M’s, Chester.
Every day this week you’ve noticed the same buckle shoes dangling just above the floor in the stall next to you.
I am not one of those given to assume that just because a lot of people like something, then it must be good; after all, Debbie Boone’s warbling of “You Light Up My Life” was on top of American Top Forty for what seemed like most of the decade in the late 70s, although that damned song sucked with sufficient force to draw in small planets. Everyone that I knew ran gagging and heaving when it came on the radio, but obviously a lot of people somewhere liked it enough to keep it there, week after week after week. A lot of people read “The DaVinci Code”, deriving amusement and satisfaction thereby, and some take pleasure in Adam Sandler movies or Barbara Cartland romances… no, popularity of something does not guarantee quality, and I often have the feeling that the tastemakers of popular culture are often quite miffed — contemptuous, even — when they pronounce an unfavorable judgment upon an item of mass entertainment which turns out to be wildly, wildly popular anyway.
“300” looks to be one of those wildly popular things, for which the intellectual great and good have no explanation. This amuses me very much, because I think I do. As I wrote last week “the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae is one of those stories which has kept a grip on us in the West for nearly three thousand years… Courage, honor, duty, clear-eyed self-sacrifice in a cause, for the lives of those you hold dear, for your city or your country… those are values that hold, that define who we are and what we stand for.”
It’s all about stories, and our human need for stories; stories about other people, stories that explain, that make things clear for us, that inspire us to great deeds, to set an example or spell out a warning. We need stories nearly as much as we need oxygen. And we will have them, bright and sparkling and new, or worn to paper thinness in the re-telling. We will have stories that have grown, and been embellished by many narrators, with heroes and minor heroes and splendid set-piece scenes, and side-narratives, like one of those sea-creatures that collects ornaments to stick onto its’ shell any which way, or a bower-bird collecting many brilliant scraps and laying them out in intricate patterns. A longing to hear such stories must be as innate in us, as it is to those creatures, for our earliest epic, that of Gilgamesh may be traced back to the beginnings of agriculture, and towns, and the taming of animals, and the making of a written language. It may go back even farther yet, but there is really no way to know for sure what those stories were, although I am sure the anthropologists are giving it the good old college try.
Our values are transmitted in the stories that we go back to, over and over. A long time ago, I read this book, which recommended, rather in the manner of the old Victorians, that children be given improving books to read, that their minds be exercised by good examples. I was initially rather amused… and then I went over the reading list in the back. I realized just then how many of those books the author cited I had read myself… and how many quiet demonstrations of honesty, courage, ethical behavior, loyalty to family, friends and community, of doing the hard right as opposed to the easy wrong had been tidily incorporated into such books as the Little House books, or Caddie Woodlawn, or “All of a Kind Family”, or Johnny Tremain. We imbibe all these values from stories… and lest we think that these sorts of moral lessons are obscure and tangled things, best suited for a long theoretical discussion of the life-boat dilemma in some touchy-feely ethics seminar, the author (or someone that he quoted – it’s been a long time since I re-read the book) brought up the old black and white movie “A Night to Remember”… the movie account of the sinking of the Titanic. The whole story of the unsinkable ship is laid out, based on research, and with the aid (at the time it was filmed) with many still-living survivors; running full-tilt into an ice-field, hitting an iceberg…loading the relatively few lifeboats while the band plays, and the ships engineers keep the lights and power going, of husbands putting their wives and children into the boats and stepping back to leave more room, knowing that the ship is doomed… of steerage passengers taking matters into their own hands and finding their way up to the boat deck, and deck-hands trying to launch the very last boat as the seawater rises to their knees. Twice a hundred stories, and at the end of it one has a pretty good idea of who has behaved well and honorably… and who has not.
Stories. We need them, and we’ll keep coming back to them. And to the best ones, we will come back again and again.
Go read this article over at NewsBusters.
Can anyone explain to me how anyone could give Khalid Sheik Mohammed the benifit of the doubt while assuming that your own country tortured the man into confessing?
How much self-loathing does that take?
And if it’s not self-loathing, then what the hell is it?
Seriously, I’m asking, because I simply don’t understand it.
(From one of those e-mail lists going the rounds)
A programmer is someone who solves a problem you didn’t know you had in a way you don’t understand.
A consultant is someone who takes the watch off your wrist and tells you the time.
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain. (Mark Twain)
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he
predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.
A statistician is someone who is good with numbers but lacks the
personality to be an accountant.
An actuary is someone who brings a fake bomb on a plane, because that
decreases the chances that there will be another bomb on the plane.
(Laurence J. Peter)
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat
which isn’t there.(Charles R. Darwin)
A topologist is a man who doesn’t know the difference between a coffee cup and a doughnut.
A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000 word document and calls it a
“brief.”
A psychologist is a man who watches everyone else when a beautiful girl enters the room.
A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.
A schoolteacher is a disillusioned woman who used to think she liked
children.
A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip.
Overheard on the First Sergeant’s radio:
“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to every evil on earth today EXCEPT the sinking of the Titanic, he claims Osama handled that one himself.”
My take? You know that guy who’s like 25 years old and has a “life experience story” for everything that comes up and if you take the time to add it up, he should be about 75? Yeah, Khalid is like that. I bet if you asked him he’d say he was at CBGBs when The Clash first came over.
He wants to die that badly? I say we accomodate him. I think drowning him in a vat of bacon grease would be right…but we’ve already agreed that it’s a good thing I’m not in charge.
Apparently I work with a group of people who are infected with something known as “March Madness.” There seems to be an almost universal hatred towards an entity known as “Duke.” The fact that said “Duke” seems to have nothing to do with jazz music or Hunter S. Thompson has me completely confused.
Update: Basketball? All this excitement is about BASKETBALL? Tall dudes we made fun of in high school running up and down the gym playing bouncey-bouncey-throw?
Eeegads! The Commander is infected with this thing also.
We live in a strange ass country.
People either love or hate the Geico Cavemen.
If you’re one of the former, check out their crib.
Is it just me or does the Mahone character on Prison Break look like Alan Colmes?
I spent a couple of hours this afternoon trying to reactivate Windows XP on Red Haired Girl’s Mac. It ran fine when I installed it, but because it is on a differant machine than what it was originally installed on, it went dark after a period of time. Because I did not set it up with capability to access the Internet, a phone installation was required – just as well because I knew that explanations would be required about the entirely different hardware footprint. According to Microsoft, the purpose of requiring activation is to prevent “casual copying”, and that the minor inconvenience will actually save consumers money through the prevention of piracy.
Well, the truth is a bit more complicated. According to the customer service rep and his supervisor (Bill Gates was unable to come to the phone), their policy is not to activate preinstalled versions of Windows, regardless of the circumstances. I asked him what would happen if I had fried a motherboard (which requires activation), to which he replied that it would be a warranty issue with Gateway. I asked what if the warranty is expired, he told me that, in that scenario, the license dies with the computer.
The issue is supposed to come down to one license, one computer. I can live with that. All they needed to do was give me a 45 digit number (really – 45 digits) and RHG would be playing Nancy friggin’ Drew and I would be happy, but nooooo. They want a war, and that’s what they are going to get. The first thing I am going to do is carve up the computer that the software was originally installed on and send it to Bill Gates with a signed affadavit attesting to the fact that it is no longer in service. Any other ideas would be appreciated.
To all men living on this Earth, death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than by facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the Temples of his Gods?”
— Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome
So Blondie and I were intrigued by several different premises – intrigued enough to actually go and see the movie 300 on opening weekend; she because it starred Gerard Butler and several acres of well-oiled, well-built male hunkiness, and me because – well, it sounded interestingly unlike the usual Hollywood bucket o’krep poured out for the plebeians. For a start, no car chases, or machine gun fire, and most definitely not a remake of a TV show which wasn’t that good to start with, or a movie which should have been left alone. Neither one of us had ever read the wildly popular “graphic novel” it was based on. (Do I have to call them graphic novels? I always slip and call them comic books, it’s the same way I call “mobile home developments” “trailer parks” and it’s a movie, dammit, not a film.) Blondie hated the movie version of Sin City BTW, and I would like to serve notice right here and now that I would usually avoid movies which incorporate buckets of splattered gore, and collections of human grotesqueries – but the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae is one of those stories which has kept a grip on us in the West for nearly three thousand years. Every forlorn last stand, against overwhelming odds has harked back to the King of Sparta and his picked band, standing in a narrow pass. And that many of those so choosing would have known of it— like Travis at the Alamo— testifies to the enduring power of their story.
Through the rise and fall of Greece itself, and the Romes that followed it, into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and into this century, the story of Leonidas and his stalwart few resonates – as much as the righteous and politically correct would have it not so. (like this reviewer. Note to Mr. Smith; Bite me. Sincerely, Sgt. Mom). Courage, honor, duty, clear-eyed self-sacrifice in a cause, for the lives of those you hold dear, for your city or your country – those are values that hold, that define who we are and what we stand for. To have them set out unapologetically in a movie like this is as jolting as a triple-latte with a shot of brandy, after a diet of nothing but mineral water. Some years ago, I lamented that Hollywood just couldn’t bring themselves to make a movie about the war we are in. (here) Perhaps this may be the closest that they can bring themselves to do it, without running the risk of having the gentlemen from CAIR parked in the outer office.
This is not one of those movies where you go for authenticity about Greece, Sparta and the Persian empire. I can just imagine scholars of the classical world hyperventilating and gibbering incoherently for the next decade on that topic. Ancient Sparta was not anything like a democracy as we know it, Spartan women probably wore a few more clothes and took no part in public life, Greek warriors in battle wore little more than a leather Speedo and a flowing cloak, I very much doubt that anyone has ever been able to use a rhinoceros as a war-beast – and Xerxes probably wasn’t a 7-foot tall mulatto with a lot of body piercings. Some of the dialog clunks a bit, though. I can tell, because I was mentally re-writing it. All that is beside the point.
Because it is not just the story by itself; there was the look of it, the whole visual spectacle. The word that kept coming up in my mind, over and over was “painterly”. That the story of 300 was created by some who is an artist was obvious in the very first frame. Every scene was set up as if it were a painting or a classical frieze, a vase-painting; all of it harking back to something that an artistically literate person would recognize. The flow of a cloak, the jut of a bearded chin, the fall of golden sunset on a craggy mountain pass, the way a man holds a spear and shield – all of it evocative and visually rich in a way that doesn’t happen much in movies. Without having read the book, I can’t say if the movie version was true to Frank Miller vision , but it definitely made for an arresting look. We did notice some little grace notes that seem to be quotes from other movies; the fields of wheat from Gladiator, Xerxes’ monumental throne looked the one from the Elizabeth Taylor vehicle in Cleopatra and the assorted war-beasts from Lord of the Rings. (Also Blondie was bugged throughout the movie as to where she had seen the actor who played Dilius – he was in Lord of the Rings, also. She could have asked me, of course!)
All in all… ticket price and time well-spent, especially for Frank Miller fan. There are also some bonuses for the straight women and gay male demographic as well. It seems to be going over very well in flyover country, too.