Those Bushes are just no fun. I mean, what’s an Easter egg hunt without an AK-47 and some armor-piercing bullets? Charlton Heston will be extremely disappointed.
Category: words mean things (Page 198 of 223)
Spring is here, so I’m looking to refresh my Favorites list. What’s your favorite weblog (no, not your own)? Let me know by clicking on “talk back.”
If it’s mine, I thank you, and I am flattered. But clearly you need help.
Timothy McVeigh’s execution will be on closed-circuit television for families of the bomb victims to watch. I believed for a long time that all executions should be public – because I thought, perhaps naively, that forcing people to see the consequences of their decisions (in this case, allowing the state to kill people for killing people) would make them reconsider whether the death penalty was something they really wanted to get behind. But now, with Survivor and especially Series 7, I’m not so sure. Would it just be another step down the road to pop culture hell?
There’s a great scene in “Dead Man Walking” where Susan Sarandon talks to the prison nurse who attends to the “patient” being executed. The nurse talks about how grateful she is they switched from the gas chamber to lethal injection, since the former was just too hard on her. Aren’t we trying to find more “humane” ways of executing people (not a really classic humane act) so we can disassociate from our own part in the execution?
Oh god. (by way of MetaFilter)
Phrase which must be expunged from the brains of everyone on the planet, so there is absolutely no chance it will never be uttered again: “My bad!”
Movie Quote of the Year:
“Fear is like a giant fog. It sits on your brain and blocks everything – real feelings, true happiness, real joy. They can’t get through that fog. But you lift it, and buddy, you’re in for the ride of your life.”
-Bob Diamond, Defending Your Life
A friend of mine who just completed her application for Survivor 3 has told me that the next series will be in Africa somewhere. While I’m sure that will be OK, it seems a little mundane for a third show. I was hoping that they would turn the screws a little more on the location and pick something really interesting. Antarctica, maybe (although that would make filming difficult, not to mention the virtual impossibility of showing off ratings-making bikinis and rippled chests). Or maybe high up in the trees like Ewoks. But my favorite prospect would be underwater, like the research facility in “Deep Blue Sea.”
“Damnit! Summer left the decompression chamber door open again!”
“The Ten Commandments” was on TV over the weekend. It’s always been one of my favorites, mostly for its amazing combination of camp and religion. This year, for some reason, the 18-hour running time just wore me out, and I only watched bits and pieces of it. But the best parts are classics, like when Moses’ Egyptian mother finds out he knows he’s Hebrew:
Bithiah: Gather my chariot! I shall ride to Goshen!
(quick cut to Moses’ Hebrew family)
Yochabel (looking up, startled): A chariot? Here in Goshen?
For some reason tonight I thought of one of my favorite stories about my mom, which is also a word story. So, at the risk of embarrassing her, here goes:
We were in Chicago over Christmas several years ago. We were all in the car together, and I was in the backseat reading the Chicago Reader. I came to the back of the paper, where the “adult services” ads are. I just had to tell the entire car how funny I thought it was that one of the “adult services” had a phone number that was listed as 382-DUCK.
“Duck? Why is that funny?” she said.
I prompted her that D, E, and F were all on the same telephone keypad button. She thought about that for a minute.
“E-U-C-K? Well, that doesn’t even spell anything!” she said.
I love my mom.
After my review of “Zardoz,” Mike suggested that I check out “Troll 2.” I finally did, and T2 (not to be confused with the other one) makes “Zardoz” look like “Citizen Kane.” First off is the script, if that word can even be used. Imagine if you took the scripts of every other Grade Z horror film, tossed them in a blender, fed the resulting mush to a goat, then let the goat type out the script with his hooves – you would have T2.
This thing has got evil messages on softballs, public urination, popcorn sex, rancid meat, chopped-off limbs, molotov cocktails from the afterlife, repressed homosexuality, an abundance of green goo, spear attacks, human potted plants, and so much more. Where’s Joe Bob Briggs when you need him? And best of all, there are no trolls in “Troll 2.” What more could you ask for? A true masterpiece of badness.