Here we go
I feel sort of sick to my stomach. You?
Month: March 2003 (Page 4 of 8)
This week, I splurged and bought an IBM optical mouse. It has a swoopy shape that fits well in my hand, and the scroll wheel has a bright blue LED behind it, giving it a sort of otherworldly glow, like a spaceship in a 50s sci-fi movie. It’s funny how the smallest things can bring such pleasure.
Just a thought
Why is it wrong for Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks to speak her mind about the president, and OK for Charlton Heston to go to Littleton, CO soon after the Columbine massacre and raise his musket over his head, intoning, “From my COLD DEAD HAND!”? Either celebrities have the same rights to speak out on issues they care about as every other citizen, or they don’t.
It’s easy to defend freedom of speech when you agree with the speech. It’s not so easy when people spout words that, as Grandpa Simpson used to say, “angry up the blood.”
No, Natalie Maines wouldn’t have the same freedom to speak out if she lived in Iraq. That’s sort of the point.
On a roll with spam this week
SUBJECT: adam@lucky8ball.com Have sex tonight, guaranteed
Laughing and crying
In a comment on Mike’s weblog recently, I said it’s getting difficult to chronicle all the stupid, venal, ironic stuff going on these days – there’s just so much of it. Like how we’re now at “Orange Plus” threat level: “It’s a government warning! No, it’s a floor wax! Wait – it’s both!”
Or how Colin Powell “hinted” that if the Turks relented and let us get into Iraq from Turkey, he might be persuaded to give them $6 billion in “special economic assistance.” Memo to Colin: a bribe is a bribe is a bribe. No need to sugarcoat it now.
Or how Joe Lieberman, who in a land long ago and far away ran for vice president, has become one of Bush’s biggest cheerleaders on Iraq, saying, “if we do not disarm Saddam now, he will inevitably use his weapons against us or give them to terrorists who will.” Hey Joe, want this Bush yard sign?
Or how Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” sparked a rodeo brawl.
Or how Bush himself last night asked the Iraqi people, through a translation of his “let’s roll” speech, to just sit tight and wait for their liberators – and while you’re at it, people, please don’t set fire to any oil wells, or commit any other war crimes for which you will surely be prosecuted.
It’s funny because it’s true.
If only Colin Powell did the same. But his conversion is apparently complete. “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”
Eerily appropriate quote of the week
“Fiddle-dee-dee. War, war, war. This war talk is spoiling all the fun at every party this spring.”
-Scarlett O’Hara, “Gone With the Wind”
Haidi’s back
“One of my husband’s (university) students wore a t-shirt with an upside-down American flag and the word Propaganda across it to class on Friday. He then e-mailed my husband and apologized in case he had offended us (I’m American).
Canadians crack me up. They’re polite and apologetic even when they’re trying to make a statement. You need more than an upside-down American flag to offend me. Americans themselves do much worse to the flag ? once you’ve eaten it as a cake and seen it worn as a G-string bikini by countless horse-faced skanks, it’s hard to be offended by its simply being upside down.”
-the estimable Haidi Hartigan, on Commonplace Blog
I have a profound love/hate relationship with trash TV. It truly is trash, it’s piling up deeper and deeper every day, and much of it makes me think we should just bulldoze over the culture and start again.
But watching Anna Nicole Smith at an acting class, doing a scene from “Taming of the Shrew” with Danny Bonaduce as Petruchio? That’s gold, people. Say that’s not entertaining, and I say you have no soul.
The first night of the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Children of Dune” was similar to the network’s earlier “Dune” miniseries: competently acted, atmospheric, but with little emotional weight. They both remind me of well-produced, well-intentioned junior high school productions of “Romeo and Juliet.” Or well-acted soap operas, an impression “Children” fosters by falling into that trap of “let’s make everyone seem pretty much the same age, so they can all interact on the same level.”
For all its many soul-crushing problems, David Lynch’s “Dune” had the juice, the soul, the life (as weird as it was) that these productions lack.
I’m sort of dreading the “we didn’t want the twins to be 9, so we made them 18 and cast 25-year-olds to play them” coming in the next two nights. And don’t even get me started on pronouncing Chani “Chaney.” Ever time they said that, I saw the round, bald head of the vice president, and my concentration was broken.