Another blog on the fire

This made me laugh.

James Wolcott, on his blog, referred to Meryl Streep as Dame Judi Brunch.

This made me go “Agh!”

Newsweek, for some reason, printed some tales out of school from Secret Service agents.

“President Richard Nixon (code name: Searchlight) ogled half-naked women while on vacation in St. Martin. ‘He’d wade out into the ocean and lurk with that nose just covered by the water,’ wrote agent turned author Marty Venker. ‘Like a crocodile.’”

Xmas

Well, there’s another skirmish in the war on Christmas, and I believe I fought it to the draw. Got the Dread Wife the present she wanted – a pink Daisy BB gun, the same model featured in CHRISTMAS STORY. It didn’t come with BB’s, however. They are difficult to find in the East Bay, and BB guns themselves are illegal to possess in San Francisco (that’s right – you can own an actual gun in San Francisco, but not a BB gun).

Fortunately, my excellent daughter’s excellent boyfriend had just purchased an air pistol (I’m not sure why, exactly; it had something to do with being freaked out after playing a RESIDENT EVIL marathon), and he brought over some BBs when the two came over for Christmas dinner. Hooray! The Feared Bride still has not test driven the BB gun yet, however.

She got me DVDs (bootlegs, I guess) of YANCY DERRINGER, one of my favorite television shows when I was nine years old. It holds up pretty well! Jock Mahoney is Yancy, a riverboat gambler and spy. He has derringers hidden everywhere! In his hat! Up his sleeve! Plus, he has a sword cane, can leap up on balconies with a single bound, and has a silent Pawnee companion, Pahoo, who carries a Bowie knife and a double-barreled shotgun, which he uses frequently to blast some bad guy across a room. He’s kind of a psychotic Tonto.

Jock Mahoney started out as a stuntman (doubling for Errol Flynn among others), after being a Marine pilot. He got “discovered” when he was given a bit in a Three Stooges movie, and wound up playing Range Rider (another one for all you Boomers out there), and eventually Yancy Derringer (which only lasted one season). He was also Tarzan in two movies (and the oldest Tarzan – he was in his mid-forties at the time) and was Sally Field’s stepfather. I imagine he made a better swashbuckler than a stepfather.

Best spam ever!

Email from Amber Mockbee:

“on stump. Of go door-step, marrying! No demand jagged.

As he originality middle. In villa At strange. Have gathered.”

Tales from Gitmo!

From The Weekly Standard:

“A while back, one detainee smashed a television set when he saw a woman's bare arms during a broadcast of a soccer match. In response, camp officials bolted down the televisions and put protective plastic casings around them. They have also gone out of their way to make sure that the detainees are not exposed to any other material they may find objectionable. For example, the nondescript faces of the foosball table's characters have been chipped off so that the detainees will not be offended by any hint of idolatry.”

What I don’t get is the strange fear that if these detainees are transferred to an American prison they could somehow infect us. There’s this notion that radical Islam is somehow contagious. Well, not contagious exactly, but kind of like vampirism. Once exposed to it (And it could happen to anybody! Like that army shrink!), we’ll be taking handguns to lunchrooms, or trying to make bombs out of duct tape, hydrogen peroxide, and half-baked ideologies.

From a press release:

“San Francisco Department of the Environment (SFE) and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) officials today announced new tap water partnerships as part of the City's efforts to promote ‘on the go’ access to San Francisco's great tasting Hetch Hetchy tap water while reducing waste from use of plastic bottled water. In 2007, Mayor Gavin Newsom barred the use of City tax dollars for the purchase of bottled water. The demand for bottled water puts a strain on our environment and resources and bottled water can cost as much as 1,000 times more than tap water.

“In Yerba Buena Gardens, SFE Director Jared Blumenfeld and others unveiled the pilot water refilling station from GlobalTap, an international provider of new and innovative clean drinking water refilling stations. Following the pilot installation, SFPUC and SFE officials hope to install additional stations throughout San Francisco in 2010.”

Water refilling stations, I believe, used to be called “water fountains.” I recommend replacing our current port-a-sans with “Carbon Footprint Reduction Centers.”

According to AlterNet: “The City also announced its partnership with TapIt, a New York-based organization that has assembled a network of cafes, restaurants and other businesses throughout San Francisco where people on-the-go can refill their water bottle. People can access the network of participating businesses through the use of TapIt's search and mapping features on their personal computers, Smartphones or by downloading the TapIt Water iPhone application from the Apple Store.”

Need a drink of water? Yeah, there’s a goddam app for that.

Credit

Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack on Northwest Flight 253.

Hm. Wouldbe crotch bomber sets himself on fire, and gets tackled by a Dutch tourist. Al Qaeda might want to leave that one off the resume.

By the way…

That photo that TMZ had, supposedly of John F. Kennedy on a boat with a lot of naked women? Hoax. The story of the hoax was broken by the Smoking Gun. According to the New York Times, “TMZ is owned by Warner Brothers, and The Smoking Gun is owned by Turner. Both are units of Time Warner.”

The picture in question was actually a snapshot from "Playboy's Charter Yacht Party: How to Have a Ball on the Briny with an Able-Bodied Complement of Ship's Belles." It appeared in the magazine in 1967. Kennedy was killed in 1963, so it probably wasn’t him on the boat. Playboy, as far as I know, is still not part of Time Warner. But one of them might own the Zapruder Tapes. I don’t know. I just. Don’t. Know.

But I know this...

If Kennedy ever did encounter naked women on the briny, he did not observe them with his nose half in the water, like a crocodile.

Jon Gosselin’s apartment…

… was apparently ransacked over Christmas. Many believe he ransacked it himself as a publicity stunt. Or maybe to see if Balloon Boy was hiding behind the couch. I’m really depressed now.

My sister...

... who teaches art to teens in San Antonio told me over Christmas that one of her students, a fifteen year old boy, looked at her and declared, "Nice shoes."

He was referring to her sensible, comfortable, and sturdy SAS footwear. My sister was baffled: "Why would he think his sarcasm meant anything to me?"

That's America in a nutshell! We keep wasting our sarcasm on those unaffected by it. I can make fun of Rush Limbaugh until I'm blue in the face, for instance. He can hole up in his mansion and count his money. The right doesn't care what the left thinks. Sometimes the right pretends it cares, but that's only to garner itself a soundbite.

Unfortunately, the reverse isn't true. Progressives get twisted out of shape whenever the right says anything even remotely offensive. Let it go. Just let it go. We're all owned by Time Warner anyway.

Over and out…

The Obstreperous Other apparently has found DVDs of THE CAT as well, which should be arriving in the mail tomorrow. Robert Loggia forever!

A just and limited blog

When Presidents Go To Norway

Poor President Obama had to accept his Peace Prize at the very same time he decided to escalate the war in Afghanistan. But he stood up to the plate, and gave a speech that achieved new heights of sophistry. I mean that in a good way.

Liberals have been criticizing his peacenik credentials, because he just moved to bring more troops to Afghanistan. Liberals view this as a betrayal, even though he said very clearly during his campaign that he liked that war a lot more than the one in Iraq.

Conservatives are thrilled, kind of, because he embraced American exceptionalism and the concept of just wars, instead of hating America, which as we all know he has done in the past. Oh, and he’s a narcissist, though less so in Norway, apparently, according to some conservatives.

Interesting footnote. I was reading Little Green Footballs, which approved of the speech, but quoted a comment on it from the LA Times: “…This incompetent unaccomplished bafoon is a joke and disgrace.” LGF deemed this racist, which led to various comments on the LGF site, as to whether it WAS racist. If it was a misspelling of “baboon,” then yes, went the consensus. If it was a misspelling of “buffoon,” then no.

As the world turned…

After 54 years on the air, the soap opera AS THE WORLD TURNS will be cancelled this September.

I feel mildly guilty for not feeling anything about this one way or another. I have never watched it. The only soap I ever watched in my life was two weeks’ worth of DARK SHADOWS back in high school, over one Christmas vacation. Nothing happened! Something was always threatening to happen, but never did. That’s what soaps are all about, so I understand.

If football went off the air tomorrow, I would feel about the same.

Climategate!

According to some newly released emails, certain pro global warming scientists don’t much care for global warming skeptics. Stop presses!

Frosty the snowman

Brent Bozell III on an online “mash-up” video of FROSTY THE SNOWMAN.

“Well-known scenes of the classic Frosty delighting children by coming to life are ruined by Frosty saying, ‘I have been with a lot of women. Blondes. Brunettes. Redheads. Big boobs. Small boobs. Medium boobs. (We see a clip of Santa Claus.) Some boobs that were big, but kind of in a bad way.’”

Bozell II disapproves. As for me, if this subversive activity assures that FROSTY THE SNOWMAN will never be aired on network television ever ever again, it would make me very happy.

From the Brits…

Came across this on Popbitch, a gossip site from England. I don’t know if it’s true, but I wish it were:

"If a Disney cruise ship ever needs to be evacuated at sea, the protocol is that the people who get the first lifeboat (before the women and children) are two Disney employees. These two employees are required to take one Mickey Mouse and one Donald Duck costume with them so that when/if the children arrive to safety they can be greeted by Mickey and Donald so that they don't get upset thinking that they have gone down with the ship."

What I learned about Tiger Woods.

He’s not very good in bed. He likes hookers. Alleged madam Michelle Braun told the SUN: "He liked girl-on-girl. He had sex with them together. He was tough to keep up with - days at a time on a booze and sex bender."

Speaking of progressives…

Slate: “…[T]he University of Toronto levels an even graver charge: that virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior. In their study (described in a paper now in press at Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat and steal.”

More from the Brits

“The red bottoms on baboons are not buttocks, but ischial callosities. They are in fact rather comfy, and allow the apes to sleep on branches.”

Who knew?

Nancy Pelosi…

… is resting her voice.

NYT movie critic Manohla Dargis, interviewed in JEZEBEL, some on line magazine or other, on why so many romantic comedies are so terrible:

One, the people making them have no fucking taste, two, they're morons, three they're insulting panderers who think they're making movies for the great unwashed and that's what they want.