Monthly Archives: March 2008

Foley Funnies

Posted on by LtL

Kids in the Hall are still one of my favorite comedy troupes. I recently started Netflixing the first season of their tv show and it stand up remarkably well, even all these years later. At least, it does for someone who came of age during the 80s – some of it may seem hopelessly dated to younger generations.

Somehow, the Kids have gone to middle age, which means I’m far to close to that vaguely unsettling and amorphous age myself.

Sigh

Dave Foley has a new internet talk show series that is pretty darn funny and very worth watching if you are fan of the Kids:

Continue reading →

Land of the Free . . . As Long as You Conform to Puritanical Ideals

Posted on by LtL

All of America should breath a collective sigh of relief to know that our diligent border officials are on the case:

LONDON, England (AP) — British writer and self-styled dandy Sebastian Horsley was denied entry to the United States after arriving to promote his memoir of sex, drugs and flamboyant fashion.

Horsley said he was questioned for eight hours Tuesday by border officials at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey before being denied entry on grounds of “moral turpitude.”

Because, you know, someone who did drugs and led a dissolute life should not be paraded in front of all those impressionable youngsters. Oh, wait, George W. Bush did what when he was young?

Link (via BoingBoing)


Hypocrisy

Posted on by LtL

Can you imagine the hue and cry, the cries of “foul,” the accusations of partisanship and un-American behavior if the Democrats engaged in such cynical, low-brow, desperate and disgusting behavior?

Limbaugh is relishing the Democratic battle. On primary day in Mississippi he told listeners: “I’m not going to tell Republicans to go over there and vote, because I don’t think I have to anymore. I think everybody understands here. But I want Obama to win this tonight. I want Obama to win Mississippi. I want Obama to win everything ’til we get to Pennsylvania. Then it’s a different ballgame. Then we start being ‘un-American’ again, to quote liberals,” Limbaugh said laughing. “Then we start to sabotage all over again. The key about that, though, is you’ve gotta be registered with the party you intend to vote in Pennsylvania by March 24th. That’s early. That’s almost a month before the election date, which is April 22nd. So be thinking about that, folks.”(Can GOP Voters Spoil the Dem Race? – TIME)

Democrats are going to have to fight hard this year to ensure that the most cynical and underhanded of the Republican party don’t sabotage democracy. For all their American flag pins, their empty rhetoric about patriotism, and their desire to “spread democracy” around the world, there is no doubt in my mind that people like Limbaugh, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney have no real stake in democracy and would rather forward an agenda based on fear, privilege, and inequality.

Triple Threat: Obama can think, write and speak well

Posted on by LtL

I didn’t know this, but Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech was entirely written by himself. I mean, on one hand you might say, so what, people write speeches all the time. Lars Thorwald underscores the importance of this information:

Now, if you are like me, and I pray for your soul you are not, you had the normal reaction to finding out this piece of information. You rushed right to the Library of Congress to determine exactly the last time that a President or a presidential candidate wrote a major speech alone, by himself or herself.

And, of course, what you discover is that other than the speeches Obama has written for himself, the last time a major speech was written without the aid of a speechwriter by a president or presidential candidate was Nixon’s “Great Silent Majority” speech delivered on October 13, 1969.

Now that was a good speech. Evil, no doubt, to its very core, and designed to proliferate the feelings that allowed the great Southern Strategy success, but a good speech nevertheless.

[From Daily Kos: State of the Nation]

You should click over and read the rest of Thorwald’s entry, because he makes a number of excellent points including the fact that if Obama becomes President, we would have a President who can actually think and write and speak – all at the same time. After eight years of a President who can’t do any of those particularly well (and go on, try to convince me that a President who comes across as dumb is in any possible way a good leader), I think we are due.

McCain Watch: Foreign Who? Foreign What? Foreign How?

Posted on by LtL

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Someone please explain to me just exactly what McCain’s foreign experience consists of? I mean, has he been an Ambassador? Has be brokered peace somewhere? Has he demonstrated in-depth knowledge of other peoples, places and cultures?

The media consensus that national security is some sort of great asset for McCain is completely baseless. Just go read McCain’s pre-invasion speeches and they are filled to the brim with the most extreme, gullible and false assertions about Iraq. This whole McCain Myth is predicated on the Beltway principle that anyone who supports war and cheers on war and wants to prolong the occupation of Iraq is inherently Serious when it comes to National Security, no matter how little they know and how unbroken a record of Wrongness they’ve compiled. And in McCain’s case, the fact that he was in Vietnam 40 years ago immunizes him from having his National Security expertise questioned (though it didn’t for John Kerry).

[From Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com]

Can someone please point to any significant achievement that McCain has made in terms of foreign policy or why he is, somehow, an expert on national security?

I don’t get it.

Why Obama is Not Just about Rhetoric

Posted on by LtL

I just finished watching Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech and can already imagine the media and conservative spin on it boiling down to the notion that he can sure talk pretty, but there’s no substance behind his words.

I think anyone who dismisses Obama as nothing but a good speaker is missing the point of his speech. The fact that he talked about race in a thoughtful, balanced manner, the fact that he addressed the real fears and angers that are within the poor white communities as well as those within the black communities, the fact that he did not play politics as usual with this issue and refused to separate himself from his church and his pastor while clearly demonstrating how and why he does not agree with Rev. Wright, and the fact that he spoke truth about the complexities and difficulties facing our country tells me that he is not simply a politician, but a leader.

Can you honestly see Clinton giving a speech about something as complex and charged as racism in America?

Can you honestly see McCain giving a speech that both speaks truth and offers a vision of hope and progress?

(And I’m not even going to go into the problems with McCain’s religious associations – associations which are certainly to being scrutinized to the same extent as Obama’s but which are just as, if not more, incendiary. You can find some good coverage of those issues here and here.)

Enough with claims that Obama supporters are cultish and fanatics and that the man doesn’t have enough experience to be an effective President. He has the experience that it takes to lead, to offer up a vision of hope and justice and he has the experience it takes to find the best and brightest people to advise him . . . something our current President was never very good at and, when he did (Colin Powell comes to mind) he simply ignored good and true advice to pursue his own messianic and vicious agendas. You want to talk about cultish? You want to talk about fanatic? Let’s talk about the people who still support Bush after he has wrecked the economy, sanctioned torture, created a more fertile ground for terrorism, lost us a city, lied to Congress and the American people, involved us in a disastrous war with no plan for peace, and stolen our constitutional rights. Those are the people who are drinking the kool-aid, not the Obama supporters.

Goodbye, Arthur C. Clarke

Posted on by LtL

While I haven’t read any of his work in years, Clarke’s novels had a major impact on my teenage imagination, from Childhood’s End to Rendezvous with Rama, he made the universe wonderful even if, at times, it might be challenging or even frightening to our fragile human minds and egos. Ars Technica has a fitting tribute to him:

One of the striking themes of Clarke’s work was the moment where we made contact with another intelligence, and what it might do to us. This lead to powerful scenes, but the thought behind it was almost plaintive. Technology is getting more powerful, and yet we’re still our normal, violent and hateful messes. Clarke seemed sometimes to be looking into the stars and wishing for help. What he may not have realized is that with his fierce intelligence and limitless imagination he was helping us, and in the work he left behind he will continue to help us. He knew that technology can make the world better, and that a rational mind was no less beautiful than any other. [From Childhood's end: Arthur C. Clarke passes away at age 90 ]

On a search for free Arthur C. Clarke audio, I found a site, HardSF.org, that links to a radio program from the late 70s to early 80s called Mind Web that has a number of Clarke’s stories, including “The Sentinel,” upon which 2001: A Space Odyssey was based. There are lots of other stories by some of the great science fiction writers, including Bradbury, Bloch, Vonnegut (check out the Pink Floyd music in the background of Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron” as well as Clarke’s “The Haunted Spacesuit”), Ellison and many others.

Link

Color Me Drabbled

Posted on by LtL

I recently found an excellent fiction podcast called The Drabblecast. Run by Norm Sherman, it focuses on flash fiction of up to 2000 words, but also precedes those stories with “drabble.”

A drabble is an extremely short work of fiction exactly one hundred words in length, although the term is often misused to indicate a short story of less than 1000 words. The purpose of the drabble is brevity and to test the author’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space. In drabble contests participants are given a theme and a certain amount of time to write. Drabble contests, and drabbles in general, are popular in science fiction fandom and in fan fiction. The concept is said to have originated in UK science fiction fandom in the 1980s; the 100-word format was established by the Birmingham University SF Society and popularized online at 100 Words. The particular language used may greatly affect the ease or difficulty of writing a drabble. For example, the Finnish two-word sentence “Heittäytyisinköhän seikkailuun?” translates English as “What if I should throw myself into an adventure?”, a sentence of nine words. This density of meaning makes Finnish a much easier language in which to write a drabble than English. Even easier languages would be those which exhibit extreme polysynthesis, such as Cherokee, where an entire English sentence can often be expressed in a single word. The term comes from Monty Python’s 1971 Big Red Book. In this book, “Drabble” was a word game where the first participant to write a novel wins. In order to make the game possible in the real world, it was agreed that 100 words would suffice.[From Drabble - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Last week, I submitted my first drabble to The Drabblecast and upon waking this morning, feeding the cat, resetting the Airport Extreme because it wasn’t connecting to the internet and finally checking my email . . . I found it has been accepted.

Yay me!

I don’t have a date for broadcast yet, but am really excited to hear Mr. Sherman’s presentation of the story because the production values, music, sound effects, soundscapes and readings on his podcast are quite good. You should give The Drabblecast a listen and keep an eye out for my story, “One of Our Kind.”

The Drabblecast Link

Movie Review: Resident Evil – Extinction

Posted on by LtL


Yes, I have a thing for Milla Jovovitch and will see pretty much anything that she is in because LtL lurves Milla. There is no denying, however, that her last several movies have been pretty bad. Ok, bad. Ok, really bad. Ultraviolet was a wreck of a movie, which I reviewed a while ago and while the first Resident Evil movie was pretty good for its genre, and the second Resident Evil was ok for its genre, this latest, Resident Evil: Extinction is just dumb: no character development, action sequences that have nothing at stake because we don’t care about any characters other than Alice, and no real point to make other than the bad scientist is bad and the evil Umbrella Corporation is evil.

Yawn.

After she joins up with a small, rag-tag convey of folks who are keeping on the run and barely eking out an existence, I couldn’t help but compare certain elements to Battlestar Galactica. Namely, the sense of exhaustion, of bodies being pushed to the limit, of the mental breakdowns due to living in extreme and sustained crisis situations. Nobody in the convoy looked hungry or tired, yet they would have been rationing supplies. There was no sense of urgency about water, yet they were traveling through the desert. There seemed to be no set plans on how to approach new and unknown buildings and potential dangerous situations. I can suspend my disbelief when it comes to zombies, to the destruction of the world because of an evil corporation releasing a virus, to a mutant superwoman who has serious kick-ass attitude and psychic powers . . . but I what can’t suspend my disbelief about is that the convoy could have lasted more than 1 week. Even in the most extreme, odd, unbelievable, far out, or bizarre situations if the characters act like people would act, then the audience can buy into anything. But the moment you have people who are survivers acting stupid, people who are military trained acting like idiots whose only training was a video game, then the suspension of disbelief stops suspending.

Lucky for Milla fans, her next two film projects look considerably more interesting. Slated to start shooting this summer is Azazel, based on a novel by Boris Akunin:

Plot intro (from NY Times): Erast Fandorin, a government clerk turned detective, makes for an unlikely but gifted sleuth in late nineteenth-century Russia. The action opens a few years before the assassination of Czar Alexander II which begins the dark slide to war and revolution. A rich young man has killed himself in Moscow’s Alexander Gardens, having spun a single cartridge in a revolver’s chamber, pulled the trigger and lost at a game said to have been thought up in the Klondike gold fields and therefore called American roulette. The suicide note ostensibly explains the young man’s motive: “Your world nauseates me, and that, truly, is quite reason enough.” He has left his fortune to Baroness Margaret Astair, a British educator famed for her world-wide organization of progressive orphanages, which will shift the action for a time to England.

Not much is available about her other film, The Palermo Shooting , other than she is playing herself and its being directed by Wim Wenders and is currently in post-production. By virtue of the director alone, it promises to be at least an interesting film.

If you lurve Milla as well, Resident Evil: Extinction is worth a rental. But if you don’t have a major, unreasoning, somewhat stupefying crush on Milla, don’t bother.