Month: July 2003 (Page 5 of 8)

Tumbleweeds

My brain is almost totally consumed with politics these days. Summer is a slow time for pop culture anyway, and there haven’t been a lot of interesting movies or such things to write about. (Although I did enjoy seeing Angelina Jolie on The Daily Show. Something about her makes me smile. I was one of the few people who actually liked the first “Tomb Raider” movie, and I’m looking forward to the sequel.)

I’ve been slacking off writing about all the political stuff I’m thinking about, because when I’ve made a political post in the last few months, there’s rarely any comment on it. But I don’t know if that means people aren’t interested, or they just don’t have comments about it.

Other political-themed sites I read (like the excellent Daily Kos) are burning up with talk these days, much of it wishful thinking that the current mess over the President’s State of the Union speech will bring down the whole lot of ’em. But here, I can almost hear the tumbleweeds blowing by when I talk about Bush and Co.

So what I want to know is, should I just leave the political posts to Kos and lies.com and Smirking Chimp and stick with Angelina?

Word of the day

Japery (courtesy of lies.com)

Due to tremendous popular demand (well, two of you), I’ve designed a ‘words mean things’ shirt on pixeltees.com. Feel free to buy them and make me famous.

I was fully prepared to dislike Bravo’s new “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” series, where five gay men do a makeover on a straight man. That’s all the world needs, I thought – more “Jack from ‘Will & Grace'” characters on TV. Ugh.

But after watching the first two episodes last night, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed myself. The five guys were so positive and upbeat, and seemed genuinely interested in helping out the “subject.” They cooed like proud parents while watching former mountain man artist Butch impress the crowd at his first art opening, and helped the unibrow-sporting Adam throw an impressive surprise birthday party for his wife.

Plus, the makeover subjects seem so genuinely pleased with the results, it’s hard not to be positive about this show.

Compared to the havoc that Hildy, Frank and (especially) the odious Doug wreak on unsuspecting living rooms on “Trading Spaces,” I’ll take the “Queer Eye” guys’ makeovers anytime.

Yesterday my mother was bugging me that I hadn’t written my grandmother in a long time. I agreed. So this morning, I wrote her a note on my Alexander Calder note cards, enclosed a printout of a photo I took recently, and put it out for the mailman.

Just now, I got a spam message that SpamNet didn’t catch. The FROM line was “Nana Polly.” My grandmother’s name is Polly, and we call her Nana. (Plus, the SUBJECT line was “Buy That New TV You Wanted.” Just a couple of days ago I was in Best Buy drooling over Sony 16×9 TVs.)

Freaky, huh?

As if we needed another reason why Jon Stewart kicks ass

“You may have noticed that there’s something of a scandal brewing over the role of intelligence in the U.S. government, specifically about Iraq. Did the President mislead us? Did the intelligence community mislead us? Is there even a place called “Iraq”? Because frankly, a Q without a U, at the end of a word? That seems fake right there.”

-on the Daily Show tonight

Best “positive attitude” spam subject line of the week

Fucktastic!

Amazingly, the “Grant’s Tomb” theme from yesterday continues here at words mean things, with Michael Kinsley’s darkly funny intro to his entry in a gathering storm of “Bush lied” stories.

“Linguists note that the question, ‘Who lied in George Bush’s State of the Union speech’ bears a certain resemblance to the famous conundrum, ‘Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?'”

Isn’t it funny how the same people who said of Clinton, “It’s not what he did, it’s that he lied about it,” are now trying every linguistic and political trick in the book to absolve GWB of responsibility for his own speech. And I must admit, it’s satisfying seeing Capt. Bush of the ship Personal Responsibility being hoisted by his own petard.

Weirdest pop culture story of the week.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

The production design was glorious in this graphic novel-turned-movie, especially the grand Nautilus submarine: on the outside a gleaming scimitar, on the inside a fantastic Victorian drawing room.

Everything else: the script, the acting, the directing? Not so much.

The script was especially irritating, because in the beginning we had to hear stupid exposition for people who didn’t know the basic literary references of the characters (“We fought an evil known as DRACULA!”), and had to suffer through an endless “turn it up to 11!” fight sequence at the end. I think they missed an opportunity by not dropping the exposition and just giving each character an origin scene – that could have been fun.

This glorious-looking mess reminded me of a routine (thanks, Lisa) Paula Poundstone used to do about Darryl Hannah:

“She’s so beautiful, you can understand why they hire her to do movies. But really, they should just put a picture of her in the corner of the screen and be done with it. Because it’s the walking and talking that are the problem.”