Just the thing

...for those neighbors you love!

We love Great Leader! 5

Well, kind of.

Oscars 1

A lot to like: Sideways winning for Best Adapted Screenplay and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for Best Original, Hilary Swank in a category where any of the nominees would have been fine by me, Morgan Freeman finally winning an Academy Award, ditto Cate Blanchett (even if it wasn't for one of her best performances), Mike Leigh and Imelda Staunton and Don Cheadle and Alexander Payne on the list of nominees. And though a month and a half into Bush Jong-Il's second reign a win for Vera Drake was too much to hope for, at least this year's Best Picture has the Christers in a lather about Hollywood Babylon already--thanks, DirtyHarry!

Favorite middle finger to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences: Jorge Drexler singing "Al otro lado del rio" while accepting the award for the song he'd written and sung in the film but that had been given to Carlos Santana and Antonio Banderas to sing during the awards show.

Favorite line: crazy English (Australian?) lady saying, "We have an expression in England: this is the dog's bollocks."

Mark and Barb and Robin Go to the Movies

The Merchant of Venice (dir. Michael Radford) It's beautiful (pretty hard to make Venice look anything other than glorious and grody at the same time--like San Francisco gone to seed for 650 years with canals instead of streetcars) , and, to the director's credit, this version doesn't try to pretty up the really ugly anti-Semitism that's always spoiled my enjoyment of this play. But there's no getting around it: back in Shakespeare's time, this play was about why Christianity's emphasis on mercy (delivered by Jesus from God him/herself) was superior to Judaism's sternly legalistic approach to right living. (Which doesn't prevent the "young doctor" who gives Shylock the smackdown in the Duke's court from using exactly the same nitpicking, legalistic logic to win. Or or me from thinking that only someone like Shylock, who's right at the edge of society, where laws can be changed in a minute to put you in someone's crosshairs, would be that insistent on getting justice, however mean-assed.) I thought Al Pacino was a splendid Shylock--I always like him when he's exercising restraint. (And sometimes, like in The Devil's Advocate, when he's not!) But Lynn Collins didn't have quite the comic spark that great Shakespearean comediennes need, though she's very beautiful, and I'm getting annoyed with Joseph Fiennes' cutesy Renaissance Grunge Heartthrob schtick. And a bunch of the youngsters here demonstrate why American Method Acting-derived mumbling isn't the ideal way to deliver Shakespeare (sounds like they're speaking Norwegian). Mark's rating: **½ (docked ½ for being a nasty and anti-Semitic play)

My heart belongs to Daddy 1

In the grand traidition of Jessica Simpson's Man of God, we have this specimen.

Ladies, welcome to the future

Another argument in my continuing series: why any non-Christer woman who voted Republican should have her head examined (aka "Whose body do you think it is, anyway?").

Misleading headline of the day!

When I first read the link for this story, I thought the good Doctor was having his first good laugh in the afterlife...

Rainwater Blog

My friend Wayne is now publishing a blog. I really got into the post that listed dozens of random things to do in Paris!

How can I resist...

Giving away valuable demographic information for free when the harvesting site includes questions such as this one?

Random Question:
Why do you think honeydew is the money melon?

Mark Goes to the Movies

Constantine (dir. Francis Lawrence) Well, The Matrix it ain't, though Keanu gives his trademark Perpetually Puzzled Performance, the special f/x are pretty good, and the location scout looked hard to find the scuzziest block in L.A.'s skid row for the setting. Face it, this one is based on a comic book, not Thomas Aquinas, so the theology operates at the level of The Exorcist. But in the Matrix tradition, it does feature a colorful African-diasporan character (there Gloria Foster as The Oracle, here Djimon Hounsou as a quasi-Jamaican Earth-plane/Hell-plane mediator), plus Tilda Swinton as an angel-then-a-devil-then-an-angel (nice wings on those angels!) and Gavin Rossdale as an evil but very dapper half-human/half-demon. And I'll 'fess up: any movie with this many close-ups of Rachel Weisz is a-okay by me. Mark's rating (stupid points): ???

Homophobia and Jamaican Culture

I think Tanya Stephens has it right in this article: guys whose whole careers depend on "slackness" are moral arbiters of sexual behavior? Right, Jamaicans of African ancestry (like a lot of slave descendents, native Africans, and indigenous Americans) have been oppressed eight ways to Sunday for the past 400+ years. Right, the institution of slavery left a horrible imprint on generations whose families were ripped apart when they first arrived in the New World--an imprint that (along with the poverty born of deliberate dispossession of everything: education, property rights, civil rights, and the right to life) won't be washed away in two generations just 'cause Martin Luther King jr. has a holiday. And I'm all for cultural identity--right up to the point that it runs into the kind of universal human rights that our President so eloquently celebrates in the same speeches he uses to propose a Constitutional amendment to deny those rights. Unfairly or not, I believe that homophobia among the Jamaican underclass (and also among certain segments of African Americans) is kind of like the racism of poor Southern whites: no matter how low on the social and economic totem pole you are, there's always someone you can look down on, whether it's black people or gay people. And for people who've suffered as much as people in the African diaspora have, you'd think they'd have some sense of solidarity with people who have been equally oppressed, in different but equally appalling ways--for the "crime against God" of violating the Mosaic laws that don't have to do with diet or the wearing of multifabric clothing.

Happy Valentine's Day 3

Calling out to all you desert Romeos (and Juliets)!

Happy Valentine's Day! 2

Uh, never mind!

Happy Valentine's Day

It must be love. Or something.

Feeling Safer? 6

Gobble gobble gobble.

The Death of Bloodlust?

Hey, what the hell happened to the desire for good old-fashioned revenge? What's the country coming to???

We love Great Leader! 4

What, didn't you read the poll???

Bye bye Terry McAuliffe

The "remarkable progress our party has made"?? Thanks for bupkis, dude!

We love Great Leader! 3

What, didn't you read the poll???

Who'd ever have guessed?

Given the Britster's firm commitment to (and success at) the sacrament of Holy Matrimony Between One Man and One Woman, this has gotta come as a shock. Woof!

Can't argue with logic like that

Why we need to kill Social Security in order to save it--straight from Great Leader's powerful brain to his crystal-clear speech!

Tsunamis Here in the NW

Those geologists and geophysicists love to scare the hell out of us!

Love the Fetus! 3

And the embryo, too!

Rethugs: Muzzle the Trial Lawyers!!

Um...never mind!

You think Beck is weird?????

Check out his moms! Bet you won't see her hanging out with no L Ron zombies...

Thanks for your votes!

Great Leader tells farmers to go fuck themselves. There's a war on, don't you know.

Political laugh of the day

Great Leader denounces "scare tactics"!

One step closer

To letting these whiners taste a little of their own 2000 medicine/

My meme is spreading 2

I thought of it first, but it's great for Jack Shafer to use it because he's famous and I'm not.

Political laugh of the day

Yeah, right, "budget discipline." Bush Jong-Il proclaiming this is like his North Korean namesake proclaiming the importance of democracy. The money quote:

Joshua Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, also told Reuters in an interview that Bush’s plan to add private retirement accounts to Social Security would result in bigger deficits than the White House initially forecast, though he said this does not count as new spending.

Can you believe that any self-respecting wire service is actually stupid enough to print bullshit like this with a straight face? No, wait--I can believe it completely.

That Iraqi lady at the SOTU

Just guess.

Give me a f&%@*#g break! 2

Social Security is in crisis! We must privatize it to save it! Um...never mind!

Bingo: What my party needs to do...

Useful information from the most recent Democracy Corps poll, quoted on Ruy Texeira's site. The sentence that jumped out at me:

But it should give Democrats pause that the GOP's top associational advantage is not any of these but rather "know what they stand for" (+28).

Read the rest here.

And I'm the Sultan of Brunei!

Rethuglicans, friends of oppressed minorities everywhere (especially of white Christer males)!

Hello? Hello?

Sorry--I own a cell phone, and I use it in the car. But I pull over to the side of the road first. And whenever I observe some dumb-ass traffic maneuver, nine times out of ten some pinhead is babbling on a cell phone while making it. This study reinforces my belief that a ban on cellphone use while driving is no more an impingement on personal freedom than a ban on driving while drunk.

Horny Teens

Go figure!