Gregory Hines died this weekend from cancer at 57. Strangely, this week I ordered from Amazon the newly-released DVD of one of my favorite guilty pleasure movies, “Eve of Destruction.” Hines starred in the robot-clone-killing-machine-with-nuclear-bomb-inside funfest as the officer dedicated to stopping the robot (campily played by Renée Soutendijk). For that role by itself, I thank him.
Category: words mean things (Page 47 of 223)
Melissa wrote an absolutely beautiful post on gay marriage. Damn – that girl can *write*.
The four best-known candidates for Governor of California in the upcoming recall election are Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arianna Huffington, Larry Flynt, and Gary “What You Talkin’ About, Willis?” Coleman. Will they be selling elephant ears and corn dogs at the polling place?
It concerns me greatly the number of people who will vote for Schwarzenegger simply because he’s famous. He has absolutely no qualifications, and the state is in shambles. But hey – he played a robot! A sample of his campaign rhetoric:
“I’m running for governor and I promise you that I will be the people’s governor,” Schwarzenegger said after emerging from the recorder’s office. “I will be there for everybody, young and old, men and women alike, it doesn’t make any difference.”
From Daily Kos, the most obvious and yet best bumper sticker idea for Arnold:
VOTE FOR ME IF YOU WANT TO LIVE!
Advertising is an inexact science
Sign on the tap for Minute Maid Lemonade at Noodles today:
Minute Maid Lemonade
0% Juice
Gigli
Simply put, this is a movie struggling to exist. Without Ben and Jen to attempt to hold it down, it would have evaporated from the film stock like a Kleenex in a hurricane.
Even more tragically for those actually sitting through it, the movie’s not even bad enough to be entertaining (although Affleck’s preening in a wife-beater before the bathroom mirror, his painted-on tattoos rippling, comes close). It’s just two long hours of indistinct *stuff*. I barely remember it, and I walked out of the theater a half hour ago.
Just after the movie started, a middle-aged woman came in alone and sat a few seats over from me and my friend Amanda. When the woman got up and left at about the half hour point, Amanda bet me $2 that the woman was walking out for good; I bet she was just going to the bathroom.
I owe Amanda $2.
“Oh My Freakin’ God” Award of the Day
“U.S. President and Naval Aviator” Action Figure
-via Daily Kos
Here at words mean things, the OMFG Award used to be monthly (or weekly, when things were really crazy). But these days, that’s just not enough to keep up.
Threat and comfort
Well, Mrs. du Toit has closed the comments on her gay marriage thread, so that’s the end of that. I feel relief in some ways. It’s wrenching to be told, basically, “We let you exist, even though you’re an aberration. What makes you think you deserve to get married? Pretty soon we’ll figure out what went wrong with you and your kind and we’ll be rid of you.” So it’s nice to have that over, although the hatred stays with me.
But worst of all, she closed the thread right after an emotional account of the deaths of her brother and his longtime partner to AIDS, in which she predicted that her brother, too, would be against gay marriage. Her dead gay brother would be against being allowed to marry his partner because
“There is no evidence yet to suggest that homosexual couples can offer society, through marriage, what heterosexual marriages have proven to offer. That is not to say that there is evidence that homosexual unions are not as good, or there is no potential for equal benefit, but the data is not there yet.”
and this…
“If they want society to change then they must prove that they are of value and present a compelling argument that they are worthy because they have demonstrated that they are, not because they covet what others have.”
There’s more…a lot more. But you get the idea. She eulogized her brother by saying he would have agreed with her that his relationship was intrinsically less than hers (and by extension, that *he* was less). That’s sick and wrong. And that’s what will stay with me, long after the particulars of this debate fade.
I did take comfort in comments snuck in by another poster while she was writing this awful stuff – comments directed toward MDT and her minions that ended up being the capper to the thread.
“Face it folks, despite the lively and somewhat frightening debate we’ve been having here, you’ve already lost.
And that’s the best part.”
Family fun
THE SCENE: Your basic Wisconsin supper club. My brother Matt decided he wanted to celebrate his birthday, which is in November, now while he’s in town visiting. So me, my mother, Matt, and my somewhat hard-of-hearing stepfather Orville are sitting having birthday cake after a nice meal.
Matt: Maybe the waitress will give me a lap dance for my birthday!
Orville: Lap what?
Mom: A LAP DANCE.
Orville: Lap dance? What’s a lap dance?
Mom (to Matt): You tell him.
[PAUSE]
Matt: A STRIPPER MAKES YOU EJACULATE IN YOUR PANTS.
Simultaneously, all the forks held by the dozen diners at the next table clatter to the tablecloth.
Wondering
The exchange of my mortgage company’s 800 number is 666. The office is at 6661 University Ave. Should I be concerned?
Quote of the Day (Mrs. du Toit Special Edition)
“Immoral lives – it’s Australian for ‘queer.'”
-Jon Stewart, making fun of an Australian Episcopal bishop who decried electing the church’s first openly gay bishop as promoting “immoral lives”