Month: October 2001 (Page 5 of 8)

I agree with Moira – I love Haidi too. Not just for creating the world’s best collaborative weblog, Top Ten Blog, and not just because she doesn’t like “The English Patient” or “The Piano” either. I love her because she can make this post to the topic “Top Ten Thoughts In Your Mind Right Now”:

4. My God, I’m sexy.

Go Haidi!

Crisis brings out the best and the worst in people, in all areas. As uncomfortable as I was with The Onion doing a whole issue about 9/11, I thought it was some of the most brilliant writing they’ve ever done. Biting, and laser-focused on the absurdities that came from this event. On the other hand, Saturday Night Live over the weekend opened with a painfully unfunny sketch of Dick Cheney opening his chest to show his bionic heart. Best and worst.

Most of the time when you poke a hornets’ nest with a stick, it turns out worse for you than it does for the hornets. Just a thought.

And I feel the need to repeat:
This. Is. Not. A. War.

A long overdue addition to the links page: Hideous Kinky. Monique is a compelling and entertaining writer. Go there now!

Pictures from the neighborhood

You know how sometimes you forget how much you love a movie until someone reminds you of it? That happened when Moira did a post about director Hal Hartley, and I remembered how much I love “Trust.” One of the more unusual love stories you’ll ever see, Martin Donovan’s misanthropic Matthew and Adrienne Shelly’s soulful Maria make quite a couple. Every frame is fascinating, and the dialogue is priceless. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

If Bush said “we’re going to smoke them out of their caves” one more time last night, I was going to reach through the television and bang his head against the lectern. What a triumph of dehumanizing propaganda. After all, who lives in caves? Animals and savages.

And while we’re on the subject of propaganda, does “The Office of Homeland Security” scare you as much as it scares me?

Words. mean. things.

Lurker alert
I love it when new people visit ‘words mean things.’ When you leave a comment, it makes my day. But if I could ask a favor, if you’re reading this and you’ve never left a comment, please do so after this post, by clicking on ‘talk back’. What do you think of this weblog? Good/bad/indifferent? How did you get here? How often do you visit? Stats just don’t impart the human factor, you know? Thanks for taking a minute to let me know how I’m doing.

And if you’re a regular visitor/commenter, thanks again. And feel free to add your comments/criticisms about the site in general. Are there things I could be doing differently? Do you have a favorite post I’ve made? Are you irritated at this transparent cry for attention? (That last one was rhetorical, folks.)

It’s interesting how the environment plays a larger and larger part in each Survivor series. In the first one, they lived on a placid beach; they didn’t have a lot of food, but they had plentiful clean water, and caught a fair amount of fish. In Australia, the climate was harsher, and a flood washed away a lot of their camp. And now in Kenya, they have to fortify fences to keep out wild predators, they will have to raise food by farming, and their only water sources are muddy, contaminated water holes. Yeow. What’s next – living in the mouth of an active volcano?

Two-word review of Survivor:Africa premiere: surprisingly entertaining.

They still have problems with continuing to pick “types” to fill slots, something I call “the ‘Real World’ problem.” But the environment is intriguing and brutal, and the people are already beginning to sort themselves out in my mind. I was ready to dismiss this third go-round as another rehash, nothing to be excited about. But what becomes fun is the anticipation of various scenarios and strategies that have become important in the other seasons of Survivor. Who will become the leaders, and will the leaders be vulnerable to attack from their followers? Which tribe will begin to dominate? It’s sociology funded by Reebok.