A fine volley of words, gentlemen, and quickly shot off.

Via Ace of Spades (who got it from Michele), the Peter Schmies' word classification test. My score: a vocab-nerdly 172.

O'Reilly.

I watched the coverage on Fox, and didn't change the channel. Leading rant: Chirac is insulting the US by refusing to attend Reagan's funeral.

Frankly, I don't mind if he doesn't. His presence would add nothing.

Funeral notes.

Cheney's eulogy:
He got me. Good, graceful speech.

"America the Beautiful":
Well-sung, but I have an unreasoning dislike of that song.

Benediction:
"Totalitarian towers tumbled"--that's a bit precious, isn't it? I like alliteration in its place, but that just sounded like showing off. Also, third "shining city on a hill" reference by my count. It's a great quote, but not if everybody uses it. Still better than the opener.

Nancy:
Looks unnaturally good, frankly. I almost wish she'd worn red.

Also.

Interjecting "ah" for emphasis midstream in your feelgood "Good News for Modern Man" prayer sounds bizarrely archaic, pretentious, and completely false. He should have dealt with the fact that he's neither Tennyson nor Wordsworth and crossed it out of the text. All things considered, I'd rather have heard Jesse Jackson; at least he knows how to make a prayer sound like more like a prayer than a seminar on getting in touch with your feelings.

Call me an unremitting bitch...

...but "empower us" is not a phrase I care to hear in the opening prayer for Reagan's funeral. Fuck that newspeak gibberish.

Public service announcement.

Because Paula called it to my attention that the Blogger comment system wants--nay, nearly demands that you register, I've re-enabled the old backBlog comments. I hate registering and I'm all about the communications. Feel the love, people.

Pots and kettles.

Angela just forwarded the following AJC article to me (requires registration):

Rabbi calls Madonna 'slut'

This is, of course, on a par with "Pope declares water wet"--but there's an added dollop of irony:

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the former friend and adviser to Michael Jackson, has attacked the Material Mom, calling her a "slut" and a "vulgarian."

The cherry on the cake, the reaction of Madonna's "people":

"I find Rabbi Boteach's comments regarding Madonna frightening," said Liz Rosenberg. "His vile attacks on her character and as an artist are staggering for someone who professes to be a religious person. ... I suggest this man take a look at his own character and what problems he may have that would make him feel that he should make statements about a truly beautiful human being that he does not know in the slightest."

"Frightening"? Really? How is calling her a slut and a vulgarian "frightening"? And, by the way, we all "know" Madonna; she's been very insistent about foisting herself on the public at all given opportunities. As Bernadine always used to say, you can't yell "Free Cookies!" at the top of your lungs and then get mad when someone tries to take one.

Black Walnut Ice Cream

Puree in a food processor (about 2 min.):
1/2 cup black walnuts
2 Tbsp. white corn syrup

Scald in a heavy saucepan over medium heat:
1 cup half and half

Stir into hot half and half until dissolved:
1/2 cup sugar

With the food processor running, pour hot half and half mixture into nut puree and process until completely smooth. Pour through a seive into a clean bowl and allow to cool slightly, then stir in:
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. black walnut extract
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup heavy cream

Refrigerate until very cold (about 4 hours) or overnight. Freeze according to your ice cream maker's directions, adding 2 Tbsp. of black walnut meats in the last 5 minutes of freezing (or to taste).

You're welcome.

Roland Emmerich can stuff it.

Guilty pleasure: I love disaster porn, the more spectacularly ridiculous the better. As I was telling Angela last night, who doesn't want to see LA ripped apart by giant tornadoes? Who doesn't want to see the Statue of Liberty up to her armpits in water? Not in real life, of course, but I'm talking about the kind of giggly frisson you got the first time you saw the Statue of Liberty's head on the beach in Planet of the Apes and realized Charlton Heston was on Earth. I was actually set to pay matinee price to watch The Day After Tomorrow, despite the fact that I know in advance the "science" it's based on is absolute horseshit.

And then I read this translation of a German interview with Emmerich in Tim Blair's comments [Note: Today's Bleat does a better job dissecting the interview than I have. Feel free to skip all the following and go read that.]

Q: Will the anti-Bush mood outside of America be conducive to the success of the film?

A: I had no idea that Bush would get up to all the things he did eventually. During the last election campaign I was already writing the script. I hope America comes to its senses. They have been so lied to by the government. For us Europeans this is crystal clear, but also for a few Americans. However there are still 50% of Americans who want to vote for Bush – this is absolutely inconceivable for me.

Q: Don´t you get into all kinds of trouble when you as a German take such a stand?

Hold it right there. What a stupid fucking question. No one in the US gives two shits what some German filmmaker thinks about our system of government. No one in the government, no one in the private sector--no one.

A: As I already told my mother, they probably won´t let me back in. (laughs)

If only.

Q: But you are not the only one fulminating against Bush. Many filmmakers think the same way.

A: That is indeed new and it is good. I admire colleagues who are commited to political awareness and engage in a critical discourse with people.

No, it is neither, but neither is it terribly surprising. "New"? We've had all the usual suspects spouting the same tired lefty crap about Bush being Hitler (now, there's critical discourse for you) since he got elected--er, stole the election. It's like you ninnies are all singing from the same hymnal, if you'll pardon the Christian metaphor.

[Skipping his laughable recap of the last presidential election.]

Q: Are these things really communicated in the open?

A: Yes, for the first time there are now open discussions.

I love this. This is my favorite quote. Like the US has been behind an Iron Curtain and is just now emerging into the glorious light of liberty for the first time. You know, like when the wall finally came down in East Berlin. In Germany. [polite cough]

Q: Whereas the infamous Patriot Act has even succeeded in muzzling media.

Sadly, the Patriot Act hasn't even dampened their ardor.

A: That is a giant problem. As soon as you criticize something, you are no longer a patriot. What about that?

1) Roland--you're not an American. You aren't a patriot, at least in regards to the US, and never were. 2) Regarding those of your acquaintance who are US citizens and feel aggrieved because some of their fellow citizens have expressed displeasure with their opinions--tough. It amuses the hell out of me that leftists always bleat about wanting debate and reasoned discourse, and they're the first ones to shout down a conservative speaker at a rally or a campus lecture, and the first ones to cry that their feelings are hurt when a contrary view is expressed. And you know what? When you actively work against the interests of your own country, you're not a patriot.

America is the oldest democracy in the world. Since then they have totally developed beckwards. Euope was most of the time under monarchic influence [sic], but is today three or four times as democratic as America. I hope this will soon change. I think that will work out.

I think what we have here is a confusion in terms. Europe isn't a democracy; the individual countries that comprise Europe may have, to varying degrees, elected governments, but the top EU posts in Brussels are not elected. If Emmerich is happy with that situation, good for him, but that doesn't make it a democracy.

There's more, and it would be hilarious if it wasn't so annoying. The upshot is that I'm not spending a single cent to see any movie Emmerich makes from here on out. It's the least I can do as a patriot.

Casting disasters.

Gwyneth Paltrow as Marlene Dietrich. Let me think about it.

Ok, that's enough: No. It's like casting Ben Affleck as Cary Grant.

Great news.

The first volume of The Complete Peanuts is out. (But buy it here, it's cheaper.) Excellent review in the American Spectator.

[Found via the Western Standard.]

Troy.

I'm astonished at the level of vitriol being dumped on this movie. Yes, we all know it's more fun to write a negative review, but while Troy is hardly a perfect film, it certainly doesn't deserve the scorn being heaped upon it by people who should know better (I'm looking at you, Ebert.) In fact, if I were to damn the enterprise with faint praise, the least I could say for it is that it beats the hell out of Gladiator, which travesty of history was greeted with swooning delight by critics and the public at large. Still, the audience will judge a work as they see fit. But there are a few points I'd like to make in defense of the film:

The film isn't called The Iliad for a reason, and that reason is that it's not a direct adaptation of The Iliad. Homer didn't originate the story of the Trojan war. He wrote the best-known versions of two parts of the saga in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but these are not the only source materials. The choice of Paris (i.e., the selection of the most beautiful among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite and subsequent awarding of Helen) does not appear in the Iliad. Neither does the abduction of Helen. Neither does the Trojan horse. Neither do the deaths of Achilles, nor Paris, nor Agamemnon. Criticisms based on a supposed lack of fidelity to the Iliad would seem to miss the point in this regard.

For those waxing wroth over the fact that Troy compresses the timeline and doesn't present the story as a ten-year seige: I'm absolutely agog to hear suggestions as to how to keep the narrative on point and cover ten years in a three hour movie. Hell, it took Peter Jackson THREE MOVIES and something like TWELVE HOURS to adequately cover the events of a single year in the Lord of the Rings saga, and even with that much space to spread out in he completely hosed up the pacing in the third film so that it appears to be a 15-minute ride to the Morannon from Minas Tirith, despite the fact that the same journey took Frodo half the length of the film. (Granted, he was walking/staggering.) The narrowing of the scope of the film seems an entirely sensible compromise.

For those further waxing wroth over the absence of the gods: you've got to be joking. Has it really been so long since Clash of the Titans that you're actually prepared to swear you'd treat the movie seriously if you'd seen Paris being wafted away in the middle of his fight with Menelaus on Aphrodite's cloud? Because that's precisely how he escapes being butchered in the text, and I frankly can't imagine not snickering. The film isn't being presented as mythology; it's being presented as a quasi-historical version of events--much as King Arthur is purported to be (the critical drubbing being extended to Troy doesn't bode well for this film. I can already hear the weeping over the abandonment of Mallory's text. Gad.) Besides, apart from the issue of believability, the movie already has a large cast; adding the gods to the script would only further diffuse the focus of the story.

Having seen it twice I find some of the casting criticisms bizarre, but I won't argue with subjective opinion. I think Brad Pitt is just fine as Achilles. Eric Bana is as steady and somber as Hector ought to be. Orlando Bloom is perfectly-cast as Paris (the worst character in Western literature); he's a doe-eyed prettyboy--which is kinda the point--if a bit too much of a thickie as written. As a bonus, he and Bana also actually looked quite a bit like brothers on-screen. Brian Cox is gloriously hammy as Agamemnon; Brendan Gleeson is good as Menelaus (my personal favorite scene in the film is the ass-kicking he gives Paris. He just looks completely nuts from the helmet-cam perspective. Sure, it's cheesy. But it adds an indefinable something.) I'm pleased to say Peter O'Toole brought his screen presence with him, and as an added bonus you get Nigel Terry as his spiritual advisor. All the women are fine in their parts, under-written as they are; even Helen doesn't get a lot of dialog, but the film never purported to be an exploration of her tormented soul, and I'm good with that.

In all, it's not the greatest film I've ever seen and it didn't force me to reevaluate my entire existence, but I don't generally require that of a film. It's just an engrossing story competently written, shot, acted, and directed. I wouldn't think to ask for more.

Addendum: Bill McCabe may never forgive me if I don't point out that the legendary Sean Bean is excellent as Odysseus.

That was a hell of a thing.

I just watched Randy Johnson throw a perfect game against the Braves. Just when I finally get fed up enough to shun the game of games, something like this happens.

Out of their gourds in Cannes.

Like that's news to anyone.

First item: Fifty Million Frenchmen and Fat Fuck Michael Moore can, in fact, be wrong.

Second item: Sean Penn thinks there aren't nearly enough political films. The money quote:

Penn saw his Oscar win as a sign of hope.

"I think what it says is that while it's absolutely a real concern that the venue for debate is being diminished, that the tolerance for it is still in the will of the American people, still in the will of the business I work in and evidently in the will of the audience," he said.

Is it even remotely possible he thinks audiences vote for the Oscars? Moreover, I don't see how pushing a leftist agenda constitutes "debate". Michael Moore's bullshit documentaries, worshipful biopics of undertalented Stalin-lovin' painter Frida Kahlo, and Ollie Stone mash notes to jackbooted thug Fidel Castro seem to be the only political "art" mainstream Hollywood finds itself capable of producing--and that's not debate. That's propaganda. That is the will of the business Penn works in, and the will of the people be damned.

Links via Drudge.

Quick Van Helsing review.

Cartoonish CGI, assaultive score, bad script, some bad accents. Kevin J. O'Connor is wasted under a makeup job so cheesy ST:TNG would have rejected it, his few soft-spoken wisecracks obscured by the blaring soundtrack and sabotaged by the editing. Hugh Jackman spends his time trying to look sensitive and serious in a role that would have benefitted from some over-the-top swagger. (C'mon, guy, you've got a gas-powered machinegun-action crossbow. Rambo it up a little.) Kate Beckinsale labors to deliver turgid lines in a wavering Bela Lugosi accent. Richard Roxburgh has borne the brunt of the acting criticism for a hammy performance, but when contrasted against the rest of the performances, he was at least moderately entertaining.

Look, it's a popcorn movie. Don't pay full price. Hit the matinee, take some cotton for your ears, sit back and let it wash over you, and don't ask too many questions.

No, I don't know either.

Neither why it's taking for fargin' ever to load this stupid page, nor why the links are hosed. As God is my witness, I typed the anchor tags in the previous post out manually; how Blogger managed to mangle the second and third ones is beyond my ken. It probably has something to do with the fact that I get an error every time I try to publish, although the page publishes anyway. Nice relaunch, guys. The playpretties are no good if they don't actually work.

Update: Ok, now the links are fixed, though I'm not quite sure how I did it. Publishing is still a mess, at least on my end.

Like school, you keep me young.

All the cool kids are doing it, so I thought I might as well join in and flaunt that oh-so valuable English degree (and possibly reveal the parochial nature of my literary tastes.) Titles in bold have been sucessfully completed; titles in italics have been attempted and abandoned either temporarily or out of varying degrees of exasperation.

Beowulf – Verse and prose translations.
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot – Hell no.
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans – I liked it. I don’t care what Twain says.
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays – “To be great is to be misunderstood.” Whatever you say, Ralph.
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll’s House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior – The one interesting book in that damned ChickLit course.
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain – the big thing was Death in Venice when I was in college.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick – I liked the technical whaling info. It was Billy Budd that made me want to kill.
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni – Beloved - Also The Bluest Eye. Agh.
O’Connor, Flannery - “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar – Good God, no.
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales – I’ve read them all.
Proust, Marcel - Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair – The wittier version of War and Peace.
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

There’s a strong whiff of multiculturalist revisionism coming off this list (not to mention a dearth of Roman authors); putting Alice Walker on the same level as Jane Austen is a crime against literature. Personal additions (by no means exhaustive):

The Arabian Nights
Aristophanes – Birds, Clouds, Frogs. Take your pick.
Bunyan, John - Pilgrim's Progress
Gilgamesh
Gogol, Nikolai - The Nose, The Inspector General
Graves, Robert - I, Claudius
Grimm, The Brothers - Grimm's Fairy Tales
Machiavelli, Niccolo - The Prince
Milton, John - Paradise Lost
Mitchell, Margaret - Gone With the Wind
Scott, Sir Walter - Ivanhoe
Shakespeare - Julius Caesar and King Lear
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Tacitus - The Annals and The Histories
Vergil - The Aeneid


Poets: Auden, Dickinson, Donne, Frost, Nash, Pope, Pushkin, Tennyson, Wordsworth.

Feh.

Typically shitty Blogger implementation.

Update: The big kink seems to be the publishing feature, which keeps hanging up. Just like it used to. I wish they wouldn't break the parts that work.

Blogger changes.

Looks like Blogger has changed its interface yet again and added comment ability. Likely to be some confusion around here till I get this straightened out; old comments are likely to be snuffed out at some point.

Baseball is dead to me.

MLB strikes a sweetheart deal with unrighteous Mammon:

In the latest example of a sponsor's stamp on the sports world, ads for the movie "Spider-Man 2" will be placed atop bases at 15 major league ballparks during games from June 11-13.

According to an article Paula sent me yesterday, they originally wanted to spiderweb the foul nets behind the plate, but it was conjectured that that might interfere with play, for some reason.

The promotion, announced Wednesday, is part of baseball's pitch to appeal to younger fans - and make money along the way.

You know what? Screw the younger fans. 1) they can't see the bases from the stands anyway, and 2) chances are they're too busy playing grabass and flicking boogers on each other to care.

"This was a unique chance to combine what is a sort of a universally popular character and our broad fan base, including the youth market we're trying to reach out to," said Bob DuPuy, baseball's chief operating officer. "It doesn't impact the play or performance of the game."

No, it doesn't impact the play (I hate using impact as a verb, btw.) It does remove whatever tattered shreds of dignity remained to the game and exposes everyone involved as the whores they are, though.

[...] The ads, about 4-by-4-inches with a red background and yellow webbing, won't appear on home plate.

Again, no one's going to be able to see them, except via camera.

[...] "We need to reach out to a younger demographic to bring them to the ballpark," Parkes said. "They are looking for nontraditional breakthrough ways to convey 'Spider-Man' messaging. ... It's the future of how we generate excitement inside the stadium and about the game itself."

What about my demographic--you know, people who work and have disposable income? How the fuck is a 4" square ad going to generate excitement for anybody?

Baseball will receive about $3.6 million in a deal negotiated by Major League Baseball Properties with Marvel Studios and Columbia Pictures, a division of Sony Inc., a high-ranking baseball executive said on condition of anonymity.

The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox will get more than $100,000 each, one team executive said, also on condition of anonymity. Most of the other 13 teams playing at home that weekend will get about $50,000 apiece, the team executive said.

Of course the Yankees get extra. It wouldn't be baseball if the distribution was equitable.

[...] Ralph Nader, a presidential candidate and consumer advocate, criticized the deal. He wrote Tuesday to baseball commissioner Bud Selig, denouncing the decision to have ads on uniforms during the season-opening series in March between the Yankees and Tampa Bay Devil Rays in Tokyo.

"It's gotten beyond grotesque," Nader said. "The fans have to revolt here. Otherwise, they'll be looking at advertisements between advertisements."

Ten thousand devils plague Bud Selig and his minions for this: they have forced me to agree with Ralph Nader on something.

[...] In separate promotions, the bases also will feature pink ribbons Sunday as part of a Mother's Day promotion to raise breast-cancer awareness, and they will have blue ribbons on Father's Day, June 20, to raise prostate-cancer awareness.

Brief side rant: ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING RIBBONS. I'M FUCKING AWARE. THE RIBBONS HAVE LONG SINCE STOPPED REMINDING ME OF ANYTHING BUT THE WEARER'S PRETENSIONS TO MORAL SUPERIORITY.

And now the best part of this whole thing:

John Hirschbeck, head of the World Umpires Association, said the ads won't make it harder for umpires to make calls at the bases. And it wouldn't bother him if umpires' uniforms had ads - as long as they share the profit.

"We've got it on jockeys' pants. Why not?" he said.

If you don't know, Hirschbeck, you ignorant slut, I guess there's no point in talking about it. All my baseball shit goes in the dumpster tonight.