Month: April 2003 (Page 5 of 7)

Can you keep a secret?

Have you put Miss Anthropy on your must-read list yet? Her recent posts on Cher and “Dude, Where’s My Car?” are worth the price of admission alone. And don’t tell anyone I told you this, but Miss Anthropy is actually Haidi of Top Ten Blog! and Haidi.org, two gone but lamented web resources. Miss Anthropy is her secret alter ego. Sort of like Batman. But not exactly. Go there now!

Jon Stewart had a great line last night when talking about “bunker-buster” bombs dropped on a Baghdad restaurant where Saddam was rumored to be meeting with his sons, “leaving what coalition forces called a ‘freedom hole.'”

‘Through the Looking Glass’ Quote of the Week (Day?)

“US officials say that the thrust towards Baghdad and the overthrow of the regime have taken priority over the need to find the proof which might justify the war.”

–Financial Times online

I have an intense dislike for retail store greeters. Best Buy, Blockbuster, Wal-Mart – and many others I’ve most likely blocked out – have me in a bad mood immediately when forced to deal with a painfully fake greeting. I can’t believe I never realized it before, but this MetaFilter thread taught me that stores don’t do this to impart some sort of homey friendliness to their giant mass-produced consumerism – they do it to combat shoplifting. Apparently studies have shown that if you greet people at the door, they feel more like the employees are keeping an eye on their activities, and are less likely to attempt stealing.

As if I needed another reason to avoid Wal-Mart.

People talk a lot about heroes. Dr. Carlo Urbani was one. (New York Times online, free registration required)

In the annals of cringe-inducing pop culture, few can reach the dizzying heights of Anna Nicole Smith. Last weekend’s episode of “The Anna Nicole Show” on E! (gotta love a network that includes an exclamation point in its name) was one of the most potent “Oh god I can’t look away” moments ever.

The producers cooked up having Anna and her neighbor do a sort of bastardized version of “Trading Spaces.” The neighbor would redo Anna’s office, and Anna would take over a spare room in the neighbor’s house. The neighbor, after spending a lot of time with a Feng Shui consultant lighting incense and ringing bells, simply slapped some paint on the walls and called it a day.

“What I didn’t tell my neighbor,” Anna said in voiceover, “was that my designer was a dominatrix.”

Anna and the gang painted the neighbor’s walls flat black, purchased armloads of sex toys and a sling, and turned the room into a sort of Kmart sex dungeon, complete with giant dildo (unconvincingly blurred out for TV) mounted on the wall, sticking straight into the room at approximately eye level. It was unspeakably horrible, but I couldn’t look away.

Now *that’s* good TV.

Phone Booth

This little psychological experiment has some of the flavor of Joel Schumacher’s somewhat similar, if much superior, urban drama “Falling Down.” It’s a simple story of a stalker/sniper making life miserable for slimy publicist Colin Farrell, engagingly filmed and well-acted enough to entertain during its brisk 80-minute running time. Farrell and Kiefer Sutherland, as the voice of the sniper, manage to keep an 80-minute telephone conversation interesting and involving. While I know this is damning with faint praise, there are a lot worse ways you could spend 90 minutes in the theater right now.

Farrell told a great story while on The Daily Show last week about how Michael “Armageddon” Bay was once attached to direct the film. In his first story meeting, Bay said, “How soon can we get the guy out of the booth?”

Department of Redundancy Department

Much of the world is getting scared of SARS, which stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. The only problem is that “severe” and “acute” are so much the same word, they are used as synonyms for each other in the dictionary. I know it makes a better acronym to include a vowel, but still.

Yes, I think about this stuff.

Welcome to April in Wisconsin

Thought for the week

Must. watch. more. Fawlty Towers.