Dialectic

These drawings are freakin’ hilarious. Or incredibly sad. In these times, you can take your pick.

Mini iPods

I was excited about the prospect of a mini iPod from Apple, especially because I’ve become such a fan of iTunes for Windows. I love the iPod, but they’re way too expensive for the amount of use I would give such a device. So when I heard the new minis would be flash-memory-based and start around $100, I was stoked.

Sadly, Apple decided to pull the rug out from under me (and I’m sure a lot of other people) by announcing their iPod mini at $249, only $50 less than the lowest-priced traditional iPod. That’s just not enough of a price difference to make it attractive.

If they had come out with something more similar to the flash-memory MP3 players from other manufacturers, with, say, 1.5 GB of storage for $150, I would have been all over it. But $250 for 4 GB of hard drive storage, when 15 GB is only $50 more? I think they missed the boat on this one.

Plus, the colors are sorta girly. But that’s just me.

21 Grams

“21 Grams” uses the now-trendy technique of jockeying with the timeline, bringing us scenes from the end of the story at the beginning, and generally mixing things up. As with most uses of this technique, I didn’t see how it added much to the story or the experience of watching it. So it became a distraction, something that kept me at arm’s length from an already cold and numbing tale of death and loss.

Onw wonderful surprise was Sean Penn. After I slammed his “Acting! Thank You!” performance in “Mystic River,” here he was about the only thing that kept the proceedings on a human level. His sad, lonely Paul Rivers, waiting for a heart transplant, seemed like the only truly human character in the story. I especially liked his flashes of wistful humor.

I’m on the fence about recommending this one. It’s certainly better and more interesting than 90 percent of what’s out there. For example, I enjoyed this much more than the “In America” weep-fest. But it’s just too cold to give a hearty recommendation to. Try it at your own risk.

Doctor, it hurts when I go *like this*

Fitting in with my “right wing idiocy” theme today, Rosemary Esmay has a startling revelation: Howard Dean is short! True proof that he is a poisonous demagogue out to destroy everything we hold dear in this country. How dare he!

The thing is, if that’s the best they’ve got, then bring it on, baby.

Pompous pathetic gasbag

Bill O’Reilly’s latest tactic, evidenced by yesterday’s broadcast, is calling people on the left “American Jihadists.” This has got to be some of the most despicable rhetoric ever from O’Reilly, and that’s saying a lot.

I can’t wait to see what my friend Henry Quinn over at Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O’Reilly will have to say about this. He cuts through O’Reilly’s crap with a verve I can only hope to emulate.

UPDATE: Henry hits it out of the park. Take a look.

Civility

Jack Cluth of People’s Republic of Seabrook sent a mass e-mail out this morning crowing about his latest post, where he equates one of the ads in the MoveOn.org contest (out of 1,500 submitted), along with a couple Fark-esque Photoshop projects, to a campaign of liberal hate speech. He even titled his e-mail “A Plea for Civility.”

What a tool.

Why are liberals so willing to internalize the muck that gets slung at them from the right? Why should we listen to cries of “Civility!” from the right, while they go ahead and demonize us and our causes? We’ve got to stop that if we ever hope to come out from under the shadow of the right.

UPDATE: Check out the finalists in the “Bush in 30 Seconds” MoveOn.org ad contest. In my opinion, the two best, by far, are the first two, “Child’s Pay” and “In My Country.” I remain unconvinced that you can make an effective ad about the Iraq war.

Word of the Day

dialectic

Listening to…

“After All,” Dar Williams

So go ahead, push your luck
Say what it is you’ve got to say to me
We will push on into that mystery
And it’ll push right back
And there are worse things than that

‘Cause when you live in a world
Well it gets in to who you thought you’d be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me
I think life chose me after all

Thanks again to David, who gives me the song titles to his mixes when I ask him.

Here comes the bride

Further proof that the late non-lamented Mrs. du Toit doesn’t need gay people to desecrate the holy sacrament that is heterosexual marriage.

How many times do I have to say it: you can’t make this stuff up, people.

In America

My heartstrings were extremely sore after being plucked so viciously for the two-hour running time of “In America.” I have nothing against tragedy, emotion or even sentimentality in movies; but I think they have to earn it.

You have to get to know characters first, to understand how and why these bad things are happening to them, before you can care enough not to feel manipulated. “In America” starts right in with the down-on-their-luck Irish family whose young son had fallen down the stairs and died, and goes hurtling along from there. You can’t catch your breath between dewy shots of the (admittedly incredibly cute) young daughters, the long-suffering mother, and the tortured father. Throw in the strange-yet-cuddly giant black neighbor, a preemie birth, ridicule over homemade Halloween costumes, and an ice cream parlor full of transvestites, and you have a recipe for weepy disaster, as far as I’m concerned.

If this movie had just dialed back the tears several notches, the expressive acting and story possibilities might have come forward. As it was, not so much.