Eerily appropriate quote of the week

“Fiddle-dee-dee. War, war, war. This war talk is spoiling all the fun at every party this spring.”

-Scarlett O’Hara, “Gone With the Wind”

Haidi’s back

“One of my husband’s (university) students wore a t-shirt with an upside-down American flag and the word Propaganda across it to class on Friday. He then e-mailed my husband and apologized in case he had offended us (I’m American).

Canadians crack me up. They’re polite and apologetic even when they’re trying to make a statement. You need more than an upside-down American flag to offend me. Americans themselves do much worse to the flag ? once you’ve eaten it as a cake and seen it worn as a G-string bikini by countless horse-faced skanks, it’s hard to be offended by its simply being upside down.”

-the estimable Haidi Hartigan, on Commonplace Blog

I have a profound love/hate relationship with trash TV. It truly is trash, it’s piling up deeper and deeper every day, and much of it makes me think we should just bulldoze over the culture and start again.

But watching Anna Nicole Smith at an acting class, doing a scene from “Taming of the Shrew” with Danny Bonaduce as Petruchio? That’s gold, people. Say that’s not entertaining, and I say you have no soul.

The first night of the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Children of Dune” was similar to the network’s earlier “Dune” miniseries: competently acted, atmospheric, but with little emotional weight. They both remind me of well-produced, well-intentioned junior high school productions of “Romeo and Juliet.” Or well-acted soap operas, an impression “Children” fosters by falling into that trap of “let’s make everyone seem pretty much the same age, so they can all interact on the same level.”

For all its many soul-crushing problems, David Lynch’s “Dune” had the juice, the soul, the life (as weird as it was) that these productions lack.

I’m sort of dreading the “we didn’t want the twins to be 9, so we made them 18 and cast 25-year-olds to play them” coming in the next two nights. And don’t even get me started on pronouncing Chani “Chaney.” Ever time they said that, I saw the round, bald head of the vice president, and my concentration was broken.

Spam subject line of the week

SUBJ: adam, I’m so lonely, I’ll do anything that you say

I’m not satisfied. But for a media-immersed pop culture geek like me, there are certain things you know you’re going to watch, no matter how flawed they may be. The extreme example of this? The Star Wars sequel/prequels.

Watched David Cronenberg’s “Scanners” for the first time last night with John and Matt. Quite entertaining for its Mystery Science Theater 3000 potential (“I want a non-gay explanation for this, and I want it now!”), but otherwise it doesn’t hold up well. Leaden acting, slow-as-molasses pacing, and too much eye makeup on Jennifer O’Neill all conspire to make for a substandard horror experience. I think even if I had seen it at 15 when it first came out, I would have been disappointed, for one thing, that only one head actually explodes in the entire movie. Still, it’s hard to underestimate the entertainment value of casting Patrick McGoohan from “The Prisoner” as a Freud-like psychologist named “Dr. Ruth.”

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American Public.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

Best Onion headline this week

“Ari Fleischer replaced by Toby Keith“

Great idea, although I bet they could get Darryl Worley cheaper.

One of the many things that troubles me about the next few months is the real possibility of some Fight Club/Twelve Monkeys-style domestic terrorism. I can easily see some crazy-ass war protestor blowing up some military or governmental installation in the name of world peace. What fresh hell that would unleash is almost beyond my comprehension.

I have no solutions, no witty banter to plaster over this. I’m just scared.