Sunday, September 14, 2008

Lipstick on a blog

Good God, is that man still around?
President Bush has agreed to a "general time horizon" for U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq. Do not confuse a “general time horizon” with a “timetable!” They are two entirely different things. A timetable is an unacceptable admission of failure. A time horizon is a proud admission of victory.

Family values.
It sure is interesting that conservatives now find virtue in teen pregnancy. Is that what they were getting at with the convention chant, “Drill, baby, drill?”

Co-opting liberal values.
Now that Republicans have found the value in calling critics “sexist,” I’m probably going out on a limb when I say that I don’t find much appealing about Sarah Palin. She looks like a guidance counselor at a junior college, or a concierge at a Holiday Inn, or an event coordinator for the convention center in Omaha, or runner-up for senior class president. Only with anger management issues.

Like shooting wolves from an airplane….
Shooting wolves from an airplane? You know, on a certain level that sounds kind of fun! If I were a younger man, and I could fly, and I had an airplane, and a high-powered rifle, and I lived in a place where there were huge clusters of slavering (perhaps even rabid!) wolves, threatening civilized areas where terrorized families huddled in their homes, sure, I would put on the special uniform (which my beautiful girlfriend had designed), swoop down in my special jet (designed by Q, by the way, from the James Bond movies? Hello?), and take the beasts out.

I suspect that this kind of activity, however, is pretty much limited to Alaska. Here in northern California, for example, we prefer activities like wine-tasting, and sneering at Wal Mart.

On the other hand, you never know when something will resonate with the ever-fickle American public. If McCain and Palin are elected, who knows, a few years from now, we might ask our gay spouses (if they’re not in the special reeducation camps) , “What do you want to do tonight, hon? Go see the revival of HAIRSPRAY, or go up in the Lear jet with the Glock and take out some lupine predators?”

Speaking of entertainment…
I happened to catch the first commercial with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, which was an advertisement for… something. Jerry and Bill shopped for shoes. The ad ended with Bill Gates wiggling his butt in a parking lot. What?

Crime in the 21st Century!
AP, out off Valentine, Nebraska:
“Beginning more than a year ago, some man has been skipping from one business to another at night, pressing his naked behind — sometimes his groin, sometimes both — on windows. Store owners, church workers and school janitors have had to wash lotion and petroleum jelly off the windows he selects.”


“The only clue is a blurry picture of him caught by a surveillance camera at the middle school last year. The man was 6-feet-tall or slightly taller, and slender. He had a dark complexion, and [police Chief] McBride said the man's dark hair was styled in a ‘1980s, feathered look.’”

Cherry County Attorney Eric Scott informed the media that “(t)his is not normal behavior for Valentine."

Crime in the 21st Century, part II!
Fresno Bee: “Authorities say they've arrested a man who broke into the home of two California farmworkers, stole money, rubbed one with spices and whacked the other with a sausage before fleeing.”

Final Palin news
Slate Magazine is asking for your Sarah Palin dreams:

“When I mentioned my Palin dreams to Slate colleagues, they volunteered their own. One Obama-supporting colleague dreamed she had urged her young son to kill Palin with a string bean. Another dreamed she was at a fashion show and Palin served her crème fraîche on little scooped corn chips. A third says, ‘In the Sarah Palin dream I keep having, she has superhuman powers but is not really a person at all. In fact, she is more like the weather with glasses and an up-do, pushing clouds around and pitching lightning bolts.’”

And one final tidbit from Slate.
A review of MAMA MIA!

“And anyone who's used a hairbrush as a microphone should get off on the showstopping ‘Dancing Queen’ number, in which an entire village of Greek women follows Streep and her cohort to the ocean Pied Piper-style, affirming their God-given ability to dance, jive, and have the time of their lives. The rest of you—well, you can always stay home and frown.”

Thanks, I will.

Local news
The wee bride has many plants. She noticed that a plant in one of her pots was bent and crooked. Looking to see what had caused the problem, she found there was a walnut in the pot, buried there by the red squirrel that inhabits our corner of the block. Bring the guns and planes, people! We’re gonna go squirrel huntin’!

Monday, September 01, 2008

Labor Day Blog

A rest from my labors.
Must be the hot weather, but not only have I been avoiding my blog, but have been leaving the house! The Cruel Spouse and I saw two movies in a week! And we hadn’t been to a movie in a theater since August, 2007.

We saw PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, which amused us perhaps too much. But then, we both are suckers for stoner humor.

Earlier, based on a reference from a review of PINEAPPLE EXPRESS in Slate, we Netflixed (Is that a verb? It probably shouldn’t be.) SMILEY FACE, with Anna Faris. I’d never seen her in anything before. Somehow I missed the SCARY MOVIE franchise altogether. SMILEY FACE was more odd than funny, but it was very odd, and even frightening in an inexplicable way. Kind of reminded me of bad trips I took in college, only watching the bummer happen to somebody else. For all that, it was quite entertaining, and Anna Faris deserves whatever fame comes her way, if HOUSE BUNNY doesn’t blow it for her.

And we saw HAMLET 2 on Saturday. Many are not, but Cruel Spouse and I are both big fans of Steve Coogan. I don't see how this movie could have worked with anybody else. Fatuousness, earnestness, self-delusion.... Nobody does it better.

And the play itself (HAMLET 2, that is) was believably dreadful. It actually seemed like something the Coogan character would have come up with. The face rape song had me gasping for breath, especially the stage picture at the end.

Also went to see Circus Vargas yesterday (C.S. got free passes from work). The circus members outnumbered the audience, which added to a kind of Fellini-esque charm.

High points: The clowns played "My Heart Will Go On" on outsized Michael Jackson gloves that had little harmonicas in them. I don't know why.

And there was this line from the ringmaster: "It's not a lion, it's a puppy!"

GOP Veep
Sarah Polley? Isn’t she Canadian?

GOP Veep
Just kidding! The media have been all over themselves debating whether the choice of Sarah Palin was stupid or really smart. She is a hunter, likes ice-fishing, rides snowmobiles, has her own marathon, and enjoys the occasional mooseburger. She also approves of shooting wolves from airplanes, an activity that I believe is largely confined to Alaska, is very pro-life, and doesn’t believe that global warming is man-made.

Well, she might come in handy if the White House is ever under a polar bear attack, but as for the hope that she might take some votes away from Obama, especially among disgruntled Hillary supporters, well, I don’t see it: “She’s just like Hillary, only she kills her own food!”

There is a rumor that Joe Biden has bought a rifle, and is scouring Delaware for stray moose. You heard it here first.

New extreme sport I thought up
Taser tag.

Neologism C.S. made up.
If you’re eating something, and some of it falls on your chest? Snacktation.

Democratic National Convention
Yeah, we watched the convention. Why are pundits so wrong? Remember? Obama was going to have to pry Hillary Clinton’s delegates from her cold dead fingers. Bill Clinton was going to go off on Obama, or something, ruining his chances forever. Obama was going to blow it with his big speech. Disunity and chaos would rein.

In a similar vein, the ever-angry Michelle Malkin wrote this:

“The hard-core Left vowed to turn out 50,000 protesters for the Democratic National Convention this week. They pledged to ‘Recreate ‘68’ and cause the kind of tear-gas-infused revolutionary havoc that marked the DNC in Chicago four decades ago. Police prepared for the worst riots. Media from around the world anticipated the best pictures.

“But when rhetorical push came to real-life shove, the nostalgic, Marx-adoring organizers of Recreate ‘68 seem to have mustered no more than, oh, 68 bodies. Their presence here is dwarfed by the massive show of police, press, and camera-toting looky-loos. You can’t take a picture without someone else taking pictures of everyone else taking pictures of not much else getting in your frame.”

The point of this, near as I can tell, is that … um… Gosh, I don’t know. She’s disappointed that Commies didn’t disrupt the Democratic National Convention? She’s happy that Commies didn’t disrupt the Democratic National Convention?

She seems to be sneering at the far left, but if there are only 68 far lefties to sneer at, isn’t the sarcasm kind of wasted? It’s like shouting in an empty room.