MATTHEWS: And I think we have got to get serious about catching terrorists, not just catching weapons. I‘m waiting for the terrorist who knows kung fu or something that gets on an airplane without a weapon. God knows what that is going to be like.
Hey, Gerald, happy new year, even under this circumstance.
Also note the context: Matthews is urging us to "get serious" about counterterrorism, and in the next sentence, warning us of the potentially deadly consequences of terrorists who know "kung fu or something."
Oh man ...
Was Tweety hitting the punch a little early this evening?
But, on another note, Tweety's wing-in-mouth solved our New Year's Eve music choice.
There was much hub-bub on the World Wide Web last evening, with the news that the "Cheeseburger That Sweats"(h/t Barry Crimmins), aka Rush Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital, ironically, in Hawaii, after suffering chest pains.
Some of the Flying Monkeys, of the Right Wing Freak Show, were, already, last night, sending out shots-across-the-bow, dare anyone start making death jokes about one of our grandfathered Ignorant Dolts.
That he lives long, so that he can see the country bounce back, become great again, under Democrat Leadership.
That he lives long enough to see a woman, perhaps a black, gay woman, elected President.
So that he can see the people he cheerleaded - The Commander Guy, The Shawdow President, and all the dwarfs, finks, phonies and frauds of The Bush Grindhouse - take their Perp Walk, if not in this country, than in the World Court, to pay for their War Crimes.
So, get well, Rush Limbaugh. And get well quickly, because I want to make fun of you for vacationing in that "exotic" Barack Obama-producing state of Hawaii.
I hope Rush Limbaugh is saved by a black homosexual doctor with a questionable immigration status
Adrian Chen, over on Gawker, points out the Prayer Vigils taking place;
Our buddies over at the Free Republic know how to save Rush Limbaugh: Internet prayer vigil! There are like 150 prayers already! Do you realize what this means? Tonight could be the night we find out if God exists
There is a story sweeping across the media today on this incredible mystery, out in San Francisco, this headline greeting me upon firing up the computer this morning; San Francisco’s sea lion horde evacuates its Pier 39 home OMG!
Is it Climate Change, reaching down it's mighty fist, snatching up the slithery, yelping Sea Lions?
At San Francisco’s famed Pier 39, tourists are treated to a perfectly fascinating scene of California Sea Lions sunning themselves on floating wooden platforms, yelping ferociously and diving over one another. But not anymore, according to an AP story published yesterday that highlights a strange exodus of virtually all sea lions from the area. The Washington Post gave the story top billing on its website, as did the LA Times and over 400 other news sources. The Huffington Post was the most sensational, accentuating the alarming (and misleading) headline: San Francisco’s Famous Sea Lions Have VANISHED.
[snip]
Sea lion visitation to Pier 39 fluctuates with the season. Numbers during the summer – at one point as high as 1,700 – usually drop to about 60 to 100 in the winter months of December and January due to weather and food accessibility in the Bay. This year has been a little more extreme, but it hasn’t hit zero. About a dozen sea lions have stuck around to entertain Embarcadero tourists. And the numbers that did stick around when the weather got cold in November were slightly higher than normal this time of year.
The sea lions’ disappearance is as strange as their initial colonization of the pier about 20 years ago, in late 1989. They just started showing up one day and as their numbers increased, their traditional hang out, Seal Rocks, became less populated. There are all sorts of theories about why the pier became a favorite haul-out spot for the sea lions, but no one knows for sure why the animals’ behavior changed.
Stoudt averred that the officials at the Marine Mammal Center weren’t worried about the animals’ disappearance from their standard location. The sea lions are migratory animals, after all, and it’s natural for them to move around.
So, even though no one has found them, “there really isn’t a reason to be looking for them,” Stoudt said.
Just an enormously slow news day, in which an otherwise non-news-story would be totally overlooked, and dismissed, gets top billing with racing, forest-fire speed.
The Sea Lions' migratory habits, and follow-the-food-instincts not withstanding, there is a rather simple reason they all up, and left.
They had to be getting the message late, but someone, or something, hipped them that they were hanging out at one of the culturally foulest, crudest, greediest tourist traps in all the lands, Pier 39.
It is a rank armpit of a place.
And, that they built an "observation deck" to exploit the Sea Lions, to suck in more hapless tourists, well, it's poetic justice that the Sea Lions gave them a proverbial "Up Yours!" and got out of there.
Better said, we got "froze" out of gas, as it was a bitter, bitter cold a day around these parts, with single digit/low teens for temps, and below-zero windchills, thanks to 26+ MPH winds, gusting into the 40's.
Rest Of Tonight - Mostly clear and windy. Colder. Near steady temperature around 8 above. Northwest winds 20 to 30 mph. Gusts up to 45 mph...decreasing to 35 mph.
As Barry Crimmins would say, it was "colder than Dick Cheney's heart" out there today.
So, rather than grunt, and struggle, to come up with something, we set our minds to a better place, a much warmer place, with the help of the legendary Gil Evans ...
It was sheer laziness on our part, for not fitting her with the Ignorant Dolt Crown and Sceptre, for her bevy of outlandish displays of amazing doltness.
If we were ever to create a statue, a la The Oscar, to bestow upon our Ignorant Dolts, Matalin would, definitely, be up, high on the list, top two, or three, for its' likeness.
On CNN today, GOP strategist and former Dick Cheney adviser Mary Matalin argued that President Obama is speaking too much about the severe debt, deficits, and economic recession he inherited from the previous administration. Defending her former boss, Matalin charged that President Bush had in fact “inherited a recession” and the September 11th attacks from President Clinton:
MATALIN: I was there, we inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history. And President Bush dealt with it and within a year of his presidency within a comparable time, unemployment was at 5 percent.
Oh no, you didn't really say that, did you Mary?
After all the documentation on how The Bush Grindhouse blew off the Clinton Administrations terrorism work, naturally, because they were too busy planning on how they were going to attack Iraq.
It may be Mary, that you are such an Ignorant Dolt, they cut you out of the loop.
Rove, or Dan Bartlett, maybe even Andy Card, didn't send you the memo?
The memo that said, since The Bush Grindhouse was out of business, since WHIG was shuttered-up, you couldn't go around making up your own facts any longer.
This is really egregious.
Even he must cringe at having to look at such an Ignorant Dolt as yourself every day ...
It wouldn't surprise me if Gollum divorces you over this.
We hope you had a great Christmas Holiday, as we did on this end, busy few days, that it was.
In the event your Christmas didn't go very well, perhaps, a family member, or two, over-indulged, maybe things got a little rowdy, and you found yourself longing for a good, old-fashion Christmas celebration ...
Your drunken, loutish family members would be on-the-money, as the way to go.
So where does this leave the old-fashioned Christmas of yesteryear, untainted by commercialism or ideological dispute? The evidence from Boston suggests it was never there. When the Boston public embraced a more family-centered, domestic version of the holiday, it was already commercial at its very core
No snips, go read the entire piece ... It's hysterical.
I am surprised, that Liz and Dick Cheney weren't on the tube last night (Faux News, of course), perhaps still donning Christmas stocking caps, wagging fingers, saying "I told you so", over-and-over, as well as planting conspiracy seeds that President Obama, himself, planted a bomb on the plane ... Or that he was rushing to Detroit, to embrace the wanna-be terrorist, and give him a Cabinet post.
It shouldn't take too long, today, for the Flying Monkeys of the Right Wing Freak Show, to start connecting-the-dots, between loser terrorist in Detroit, and the woman who attacked the Pope(only knocking him down, damn it) and how that means we're all being fucked by Obama, and that the new Healthcare Reform Bill will be extended to cover terrorists (and, there'll be a new "Birth Certificate" controversy tucked in there, somewhere, since the hapless terrorist was from Nigeria, which is close to Kenya, or, you know, in Africa, thereby making it a slamdunk).
Josh Marshall, at TPM, shows a hint of that, reporting that "9:07 PM: In advance of being briefed, Rep. Hoekstra (R-MI) uses the Detroit incident to attack President Obama and tie it to the Fort Hood shooting."
Unlike the Congressman, Steve Benen was a bit more pragmatic;
We'll no doubt have a better sense of what transpired in the coming days, but at this point, plenty of key questions have gone unanswered. How did Abdulmutallab, whose name appears to be included in the government's records of terrorism suspects, get his materials on board? How dangerous were the materials? What, if any, ties did he have to larger terrorist networks?
No, this attack is not reason to panic. It’s reason to laugh long and hard at those who want to scare us, reason to invoke bad double entendres about this wannabe’s crotch fire, like the one in this sentence. And most of all, it’s reason to cheer the demise of al Qaeda, a truly terrible organization that now has been reduced to setting small fires. I just hope no terrorist decides to egg my house. That could be horrible.
Phil Leigh writes a great newsletter, and blog, 'Inside Digital Media', and, last week, he posted a piece, on being pro e-book, illustrating it with what has become a very popular holiday tale;
One February night in 1938 Philip Van Doren Stern had a dream. The 38 year-old published historian also had a deep interest in fantasy and the macabre. As with most dreams his morning recollections were vague and conflicting. It had something to do with a man who had never been born, or wished he had never been born.
Stern decided to write down his recollections. A narrative began to take shape and with later revisions became a short story he titled The Greatest Gift. It was a simple celebration of things taken for granted.
Regrettably he failed to interest a publisher over the next four years. Consequently, toward the end of 1943 Stern printed two hundred copies at his expense and enclosed one in each Christmas card envelope. One recipient was a Hollywood agent who asked if she might show it to some studios. Surprisingly, RKO bought the film rights for $10,000 in the spring of 1944. By December, Good Housekeeping finally published the story. Hollywood screenwriters set to work on the manuscript until the essence of Stern’s story shrank into the Third Act. Eventually it would pass through nine writers, including Dorothy Parker and Frank Capra after Capra purchased RKO’s rights for $50,000.
The movie was finally released in 1946 but fell modestly short of break-even on its first run. It rose to 26th place in 1947 box office receipts. Although nominated for five Oscars it failed to win any. Thereafter the rights passed through a series of owners ending-up at Viacom.
During the 1980s local TV stations began to run it during the Christmas season. They regarded it as opportune low cost programming for time slots not allocated to the network shows. In 1984 an aged Frank Capra commented that the rise in popularity “was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen”. He felt like “the parent of the kid who grows up to be President – but it’s the kid who did the work. (He) didn’t think of (the child) that way.”
By 1998 the American Film Institute ranked It’s a Wonderful Life as the 11th best movie of all time and rated George Bailey as the 9th most popular hero.
Over on Zoetrope's All Story site, ''The Great Gift' in it's entirety;
Here's the intro;
Unable to find a publisher for "The Greatest Gift," Philip Van Doren Stern printed two hundred copies of the story and used them as Christmas cards in 1943. From this humble beginning, a classic was born. Van Doren Stern's story captivated Frank Capra, who said he "had been looking for [it] all [his] life." Capra's beloved adaptation, It's a Wonderful Life, starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, and Lionel Barrymore, was released in 1946, and while the film, which received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director, didn't take home an Oscar, it has secured its place in the American holiday tradition.
And, remember, as Clarence Oddbody inscribed in the book (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) he left for George Bailey, that is solid, not just at Christmas, but all-year round; "No man is a failure who has friends."
Here's stocking stuffer, and, Oh Boy!, what a gift this is going to be.
We have, a few times (Here and Here), referenced the legendary comedy actor-writer-director Jacques Tati here on The Garlic.
If you love comedy, subtle (and at times, over-the-head), intelligent, ingenious, brilliant comedy, and you are not hip to Jacques Tati, then use one of the gift cards you'll be getting for Christmas, go out and pick up some of his films - you will be spending wisely and well-rewarded.
"The Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of the French screenwriter, director, and actor Jacques Tati (born Jacques Tatischeff, 1907–1982) features newly struck, gloriously restored 35mm prints of his six feature films," brags the Museum, and well they should: "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, Playtime, Mon Oncle, his long-dreamed-of colorized version of Jour de fête, the revelatory Traffic, and the little-seen Parade - along with three short sketch films." The series runs through January 2 and Jordan Hruska (T Magazine) notes that, architecturally, "MoMA is a perfect venue" for it, while Nicolas Rapold (Voice) notes that it follows "the huge Cinémathèque Française exhibition" and: "Besides a 1936 René Clément short with gangly Tati as a farm boy recruited for sparring (sports-based routines were initially his specialty), MoMA also shows the delightful Cours du soir (1966), shot during Playtime downtime, in which Tati presides at a night school for pratfalls and mime. It's quite an education, but then, Tati was always good at training us all as observational comedians."
[snip]
Updates, 12/22: Mr Hulot's Holiday "is likely the purest distillation of Tati's aesthetic," argues Brian Darr. "It's a film in tune with the elements: wind, water, sand, etc. The director gets great comic mileage out of the most seemingly insignificant things, like the sound a door makes when opening and closing, or a tennis swing, or the tide rolling onto the shore.
Duke Ellington kept his orchestra together for decades (no small feat), and his sax section was comparable to Murderer's Row, of the powerful New York Yankees - simply the best, anytime, anyplace.
Finally found a the Christmas tune we have been searching for (well, at least a 'Free" version of it), and it is one, even on the most downbeat jazz radio stations, doesn't always make the playlists.
It is the hippest, swingest Christmas tune - Evah!
Unfortunately, it can't be said that it was the inspiration for the movie 'Slapshot', as the incident took place two-years after the movie was made.
Perhaps, it was the movie that inspired the real players.
Dave Seminara, in today's NYT marks the 30th anniversary of when "the players went into the stands", a game between the Boston Bruins and New York Rangers, at Madison Square Garden. Over the Glass and Into Hockey Lore
Thirty years ago, on Dec. 23, 1979, Bruins defenseman Mike Milbury whacked John Kaptain, a Rangers fan from New Jersey, with a shoe during a bizarre altercation in which all but one Bruins player went over the glass and into the stands at Madison Square Garden. The incident, after a 4-3 Bruins victory, resulted in three players being suspended, lawsuits and the installation of higher glass in the arena. It remains one of the most memorable fan-athlete confrontations in sports.
[snip]
As a scrum of players exchanged words, Kaptain, who was 30 and owned an executive recruitment firm, reportedly reached over the low glass panel and hit Stan Jonathan, the Bruins’ enforcer, with a rolled-up program, drawing blood beneath Jonathan’s eyes. He then made off with Jonathan’s stick.
[snip]
O’Reilly insisted that he had entered the stands merely to “detain” Kaptain.
“There was no way he was going to strike one of my teammates and steal his stick, wield it like a weapon and then disappear into the crowd and go to a local bar with a souvenir and a great story,” O’Reilly said. “As soon as I got him into a bearhug, I felt like I was being pummeled by multiple people. All I could do was cover up.”
[snip]
Eighteen Bruins went into the stands. Milbury said, “If you watch the tape — and I can freely throw my teammates under the bus now after 30 years — people were throwing some serious shots down below us that were obscured by the fact that everybody was focusing on the idiot highest up in the stands hitting somebody with a shoe."
As they say on the Sports show, "Let's go to the tape!"(It is the original local, Boston-hometown broadcast, and, it is obvious, the film, or videotape, didn't remain in good health)
Well, if you miss that kind of "Old School Hockey', and have, exhaustively, poured over all the YouTube entries of the fisticuffs, and still want more, you can always rent 'Rollerball'.
So, today, we give you a tripleheader of some gems.
In the world of music, there's only been two human beings that can take any song, any genre, and make it their own. You, undoubtedly, no matter who did the original, how many stars covered it, always go back to this person's rendition.
Thanks to the wall-to-wall snowfall this weekend, it will be a White Christmas, for a whole bunch of folks, from North Carolina, to New Hampshire.
And, we did our part, shoveling, just about 12-inches of it yesterday.
And, they did something other than shoveling, down in the the Nation's capital, where there was a "Twitter Snowball Fight", complete with firearms (shoot, when we were kids, people just got out of their cars, empty-handed, and chased you a block, or two)
So, between the on-going recovery from that, and a somewhat jammin' day otherwise, on the Homefront, we will kick off getting into the season's spirit, on this first, official day of Winter.
I believe we posted this last year, but that doesn't matter ... It's The Bird, and a kick-ass tune Charlie Parker -White Christmas
I don't consider myself to be a dolt, when it comes to movies, cinema.
It's been a life-long passion, including, working my teens years at the legendary Brattle Theatre, exposing me to hundreds-and-hundreds of movies, from all over the world, that, had I gone the route of the most of the neighborhood, I would have been bagging groceries, and, thereby, less enlightened.
It shows some military, blue people, giant birds, unseen since the Flintstones were on the television, the tease of a love story, and some kind of war, or battle.
Which means, that it is a long movie about how cool certain white people are, for trying to help (in their white-of-white ways) people of color, or, at minimum, different then themselves.
Newitz starts off;
Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers
[snip]
This is a classic scenario you've seen in non-scifi epics from Dances With Wolves to The Last Samurai, where a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member. But it's also, as I indicated earlier, very similar in some ways to District 9. In that film, our (anti)hero Wikus is trying to relocate a shantytown of aliens to a region far outside Johannesburg. When he's accidentally squirted with fluid from an alien technology, he begins turning into one of the aliens against his will. Deformed and cast out of human society, Wikus reluctantly helps one of the aliens to launch their stalled ship and seek help from their home planet.
If we think of Avatar and its ilk as white fantasies about race, what kinds of patterns do we see emerging in these fantasies?
If you want to find the answer to that, go read Annalee Newitz, it's a great post.
In order for the audience to support the transformation of Jake Sully into Braveheart Smurf, it must accept the essentialist assumptions that make such a combination possible ... and those assumptions are racist. In football terms, this is a variation of the black quarterback "problem."
For decades, coaches and scouts wished they could find a black body with a white brain in it. ("If only someone could find a way to stuff Peyton Manning's brain into JaMarcus Russell's body!")
[snip]
*I'm analogizing race and species here because Cameron's space fable encourages me to do so with all the subtlety of a fry pan upside my head.
Several friends who dogged on Avatar have seen it recently. And every one of them tells me, "go see it." Of course, every one of them says, "it is like an alien version of 'Dances With Wolves' and is all about white, post-colonial guilt and race."
[snip]
The archetype is a common foundational myth, pops up in many national literatures and historical writing for a reason. It's been used by the Turks, the Mongols, the Mayans and others. It's not about colonialism, it's about the fluidity of tribes, a much older human grouping and one that is much more primal.
2. I spent almost no time at all thinking about the fact that most of my time was spent looking at computer animation. The Na’vi (I hope I got the apostrophe right, there) exist on the other side of the CGI uncanny valley; between the actors and their animators, these are real performances. Also, note to James Cameron: The extra time spent animating eyeballs paid off.
[snip]
I won’t get into the story except to say I found it serviceable, if predictable, and while I don’t really feel the same sort of moral outrage other people have about the “noble savage” stereotype as it applies to this film, it certainly does leave itself wide open for criticism along that line. But as you can tell from the pullout quote above, I go into Cameron films assuming I’ll need to compensate for storytelling anyway. That said, unlike, say, George Lucas, Cameron actually does attempt to tell a story and to give his actors something else to do except stand there. The story was serviceable, and serviceable, lest we forget, is actually a positive.
I don't know.
Blue people, running around, doing crazy things, on, or with, outlandish props?
