Reality Bites

“I would rather die with the warriors than weep with the widows. ”
Such fighting spirit. Bares repeating: Why isn’t this dumbass in Iraq?

As for most of the rest? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. The sad cries of Base of Base. If I were a praying man (and I’m not) I wouldn’t be praying for Palin/McCain, I’d be praying for economic salvation. Doesn’t matter who gets in, they’re inheriting a major shitstorm of problems.

“It’s a very weak religion or political movement that must silence all dissent in order to flourish.”

Alas, someone gets it. Is it you, Chris?

I met Treasoness in a bar once – man could she drink.

“german’s bombing pearl harbor” first laugh of the day. ding! ding! ding!

The Chris Buckley Spores got to me in 1987 when they opened for the Replacements.

@blogenfreude: I’m thinking of taking it for my dominatrix name.

I love how so many of these can be taken either way – for example, the one about praying for the right leader? Great lady, thanks! You’re only helping Obama get in. A weak political movement that must silence dissent? A great description of the current administration.

Keep it up, wingnuts, you’re only helping the other side.

Divine intervention in 2000? That’s a little dramatic. Her name is Sandra Day O’Connor, not God.

May God/Allah/G-d/FSM/Great Bird of the Galaxy have pity on their black, rotten hearts.

@baked: Really one of the great inspirational speeches of all time. Up there with “St. Crispin’s Day” from Henry V and the Gettysburg address.
“Forget it, he’s rolling.”

@Mistress Cynica: Don’t forget Bill Murray, from Meatballs; “It Just Doesn’t Matter.”

And even if we win, if we win, HAH! Even if we win! Even if we play so far above our heads that our noses bleed for a week to ten days; even if God in Heaven above comes down and points his hand at our side of the field; even if every man woman and child held hands together and prayed for us to win, it just wouldn’t matter because all the really good looking girls would still go out with the guys from Mohawk because they’ve got all the money! It just doesn’t matter if we win or we lose. IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER!
Rest of group: IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER…

Can’t stop with the Meatballs quotes:

But, the real excitement of course is going to come at the end of the summer, during Sexual Awareness week. We import two hundred hookers from around the world, and each camper, armed with only a thermos of coffee and two thousand dollars cash, tries to visit as many countries as he can. The winner of course is named King of Sexual Awareness week and is allowed to rape and pillage the neighboring towns until camp ends.

Breaking News: Just came out of a BART/Muni station and Cindy Sheehan was yelling “Free Doughnuts” and handing out doughnuts while a few others passed out Cindy Sheehan for Congress fliers. The only people taking doughnuts were the homeless guys.

@SanFranLefty: I am imagining a grand gladiatorial spectacle, a great free-for all deathmatch, the Cindytards vs the Paultards in a battle of the ridiculous, hold it in the superdome, it goes on till there’s only one left standing! The pay per view rights would bring in billions, maybe hundreds of billions.

@SanFranLefty: The U.S. Department of You’re Not Helping, Office of Ridiculous Bullshit, thanks you for your report. Please avoid your BART/Muni station as a team of eelyte troopers will be engaging in remedying the situation. It will involve a straitjacket and tear gas, and possibly the third rail.

@rptrcub: Meanwhile, the Republicans in California are proving that racist douchebaggery isn’t limited to any part of the country, despite however progressive the Governator might be.

@baked: Animal House reference, John Belushi (my hero) speech getting the Deltas fired up before wrecking the big parade. “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl harbor? NO!”

“The Germans?”
“Let it go. He’s on a roll.”

Christianity is not all about the End Times and divine justice. There are also the teachings on love, compassion, justice. “In my New Testament, it says that there’s three things we should do, ‘Love God, love each other, and take care of the least among us,'” Alabama Gov. Bob Riley once told Bill Moyers. Riley unsuccessfully took on the state’s regressive sales tax system, which he called “un-Christian” because of its burden on the poor and attempted to make it more based on property taxes, which would have affected huge industrial tree plantations and large farms.

@SanFranLefty: . . . whom ACORN registered to vote. Boxcar Willie even has an ID in that name.

Breaking sloooowly…..Jindal out of the gate for 2012.

@nabisco:
Jeeze PG’s political corpse isn’t even dead yet.

reds and cyn,
proudly waving geek flag with me.
some people see news, we see belushi quotes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3S_k1dRbXY

@SanFranLefty: Oh, my.

@ManchuCandidate: He’s been a corpse since 2000 when Bush attacked his family and he did not immediately fly to DC to rip Bush’s nuts off.

Breaking- Canadian pipeline bombed. Warning: Cheap Katie Holmes joke potential.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/10/16/bc-second-pipeline-explosion-dawson-creek.html

Nojo, if you decide to put out T-shirts, it would behoove you to make one saying Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

Photoblogging update…

Did some geek scouting last night, and it looks like you can email photos to Flickr — with captions. And Silent Creative Partner just found what looks like a great tool to “embed” a Flickr set in a web page, much like YouTube. All very elegant.

Need to test everything, but if it all works as it should, we’re go for Election Night Team Coverage. If you have a cameraphone — iPhone or Crackberry in particular — and you can email images, I’ll set up a special Flickr address where you can send them. Then they’ll show up automatically in a gallery as part of the open thread that night, complete with your caption.

I really like this idea, and if it works, I can think of a few other fun things to try with it. I’d love to do a “Day in the Life” post, where everyone sends in shots about what they’re doing that day — from across the U.S., from Canada, from the Caribbean, from Europe, from Australia.

Or if you’re heading to a newsy event, I could set up a special gallery so you can report live from the scene. (For that matter, it looks like a great way to display a bunch of after-the-fact photos, instead of spilling them down the page.)

Oops. Think I need to change my underwear.

@BRB: Well, if that’s an Animal House line, dunno — I’d prefer original lines. (And never mind that I hate Animal House, which was filmed on campus my freshman year.)

But we’re definitely on for t-shirts and such. Soon as I have a moment to set them up.

@nojo: This is precisely what I was hoping for. The revolution will be photoblogged.

@nojo: Maybe we should do the “Day in the Life” as a test run in the next couple weeks to flesh out any technical difficulties before 11/4.

@SanFranLefty: Good idea, but depends on how soon I can set it up. But I’m definitely planning a test run of my own, when Ped (maybe) and I visit Qualcomm to see all the Prop 8 ugliness the Saturday before the election. I’d much rather email live photo-reports than just send a series of comments throughout the day.

@nojo: @SanFranLefty: ,
i love the day in the life idea too. remember that coffee table photo book where all the pics were taken all over the world on the same day?
great idea. and i knew for a fact you were going with flkr. how?
i already know picassa.
nojo, hamster king

@nojo: I am such a doof, and have never seen Animal House. Nevermind.

@baked: I looked closely at Picasa, but the lack of captions with emailed photos is a dealbreaker.

And yes, Day in the Life is a direct ripoff of the AP book.

@BRB: I’m probably the only person from Eugene who doesn’t like Animal House. Certainly was the case in a packed opening-week downtown theater. That’s when I realized I was… different.

@nojo: Is it too much to hope that Flickr can do texts with image attachments? Or am I to be disenfranchised for not upgrading to iPhone/Crackberry?

@BRB: No worries, we were two when it came out!

@BRB: @nojo:
never saw/hated animal house.
isn’t that illegal?

@flippin eck: I don’t know whether Flickr does image-texting — I know the iPhone doesn’t. But I think there are ways you can text to an email address (or at least just text-only to me), and I don’t mind hand-managing stuff that doesn’t go through the Fancy Automated System. We’ll figure somethng out.

@baked: In Eugene, not seeing and liking Animal House is like not wearing Nikes or Birks. The tribe shuns you.

Caribou Barbie invokes, God, doesn’t watch the news so she won’t get depressed, loves visiting “pro-American” parts of the country.

Tha Eagle says don’t underestimate the capacity of the Dems to screw it up.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/17/to_avoid_being_depressed_palin.html

see politicalwire.com

@baked: I’m with you, Sister. Didn’t see all of or enjoy what I saw of Blues Bros. Now Sean of the Dead? That shit is funny!

Okay, fun story: The exterior of Animal House was a an old house on 11th, around the corner from where I was born. (The interior was a frat next door.) They only dressed the front, not the sides — you walk past, and there’s an old white house that suddenly turns into the movie poster.

Nobody paid attention to the house before the movie, and some years later, developers wanted to tear it down to build medical offices. Big uproar — now it’s historic, even though the movie crew removed all traces of their presence. Developers won, because hey, they’re developers.

Footnote: Belushi met Curtis Salgado in Eugene, a local blues musician who sported skinny ties and a soul patch. And now you know the rest of the story.

now that i’ll be leaving the beach soon, for less appealing sand, i’ve been trying for days to change my avatar. just.won’t.change. gravatar is VERY tempermental.
looking for free advice.
ianJ? you around?

@JNOV:
suppose they hated caddyshack? plank walk?

@baked: Nojo hates Caddyshack. Nojo’s Mom likes the gopher.

Shawn of the Dead? That’s entertainment.

@baked: I really resented all the early SNL movies. It wasn’t until Scrooged that they lived up to their promise.

@baked: I love Caddyshack! And the gopher! Yes, the plank for nojo (after the whole rose petal thing).

@nojo: The Muppets?

I only have one deal-breaker movie — I don’t really care what people like to watch. I mean, I have some love for crazy cartoons, so I’m not going to bash anyone considering that I occasionally watch Harvey Birdman.

BUT if a guy isn’t moved by the story and cinematography of Kundun, well, he has to go.

@nojo:
why is historic in italics?
i love you so, now, betrayed again.

btw, the T&C /israeli peace talks continue. he will be here in 50 days and according to plan, forevermore together, wherever that might be.
he doesn’t understand why he has to stop fucking this woman before the night before he leaves. he’s serious. and his collar is so tight and his leash so short (from 6,000 miles away!) that he can barely speak, let alone fuck. what a pair on that one! we’ve straightened that one out.
i married a self centered, arrogant prick. smart, yet brain dead… again.

@nojo:
scrooged? you are redeemed, my brother! amen and halleluya!

@nojo: Oh, you like Sean! Huzzah! It gave me the laughing aches like nothing has in a long time.

@nojo: “Did you fire your gun in the air and go “ahhhh?” – Hot Fuzz

@redmanlaw: I wanted to like Hot Fuzz…

On the other hand, Spaced is now available on DVD, but I’m fighting every other Netflix user to get it.

@nojo: Wait — we’re thinking about watching Hot Fuzz tonight. It’s no good? We’re also thinking about Sean of the Dead.

@JNOV: Worth a watch, but keep your expectations low for proper enjoyment. It’s not Shaun.

(Finally double-checked the spelling…)

@nojo: There seems to be a little bit of the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels/Snatch dynamic to it (i.e., you like the one you saw first the most and find the other lacking). I’ve only seen Hot Fuzz (and found it wildly hilarious), so perhaps Shaun of the Dead will disappoint me.

@baked: @JNOV: Men are enthralled by my ability to recite whole scenes from Animal House and Caddyshack. It’s sort of like being the girl who likes the Three Stooges (which I do).

ADD: Except nojo, of course.

@JNOV: Hot Fuzz is fucking awesome. Structurally, it’s a total homage/parody of American buddy/cop movies of the late 80s. It’s one of Son of RML’s three favorite movies, along with Holy Grail and Shaun of the Dead.

@baked: Is mr. baked Don Draper from Mad Men? There was a post on Jez a few days back on why women love the gorgeous arrogant pricks. I’ve been with several men like that — happily, mr cyn isn’t — I think.

@mellbell: Guy Ritchie is a little too precious for my taste. Same reason I’ve never appreciated (puts on riot gear) Douglas Adams.

@nojo: Yes, “Shaun” looks right. (Start plucking those petals.)

@mellbell: I love Lock Stock and Snatch equally. Did you play the “Pikey come again” subtitles?

@redmanlaw: Hot Fuzz it is!

@nojo: Okay, please explain what “too precious” means.

@Mistress Cynica: Yay Stoooges!

@JNOV: “I love Lock Stock and Snatch equally.” Stinquers pile on in 3, 2, 1 . . .

@mellbell: Watching Woody Allen fall off a cliff after Stardust Memories has been one of the enduring disappointments of my life.

@nojo: I don’t have any experience with Hitchhiker, so I’m not going to stone you.

(Not related) but I am about to delve into Lovecraft for the first time. I think I’m going to be scared witless, which isn’t a long trip.

Right now I’m reading Evolution for Everyone. Heh.

@redmanlaw: Uh oh.

@Mistress Cynica: I’ve sworn off gorgeous arrogant pricks. Give me the nice guy with a great sense of humor and lots of patience and compassion. Mmmmmmmm.

@JNOV: “Precious” here means too self-conscious of its own humor — oh, look how witty I am! Ritchie and later Tarantino want to be applauded for the fact of their clever use of film gimmicks, and not whether those gimmicks work.

Rodriguez is gimmicky as hell in Sin City and his half of Grindhouse, but he lets those gimmicks work for him. Rose McGowan’s gun gam is played out in the context of an exploitation movie, not celebrated for itself.

@nojo: (But to be fair, Tarantino’s chase scene is awesome, even if the rest of his half sucks.)

@nojo: I see. We watch films differently, but you’re behind the camera yourself, so you have a different perspective. People talk about directors, and I kind of go, “Hunh?” because I’m not tuned into direction like others are.

Maybe I do pay some attention to directors, because I hate Tarantino. And I think I confuse cinematography with direction. I suppose they overlap, but I pay a lot more attention to how a movie looks and feels. I think that’s why I love Kundun so much. The opening scene touches me.

@Mistress Cynica:
there is the problem in my marriage in a nutshell. i can quote same and am also fluent in airplane, and i’m guessing you are too.
while most fun men are enthralled, he is frightened by it i think.

@JNOV: Depends on the movie, depends on the director — not all directors are auteurs, indelibly stamping the production with their vision. Some just point and shoot.

And I am a sucker for gorgeous pictures, which in most cases is the cinematographer’s handiwork. Woody Allen made funny movies, and then he met Gordon Willis, and then he made great movies.

But my judgment has little or nothing to do with the equipment I own. I took a full-year Shakespeare class with an outstanding teacher, and everything changed forever.

@JNOV: and NOJO,
nononononono, say it ain’t so.
you hated pulp fiction, reservoir dogs and sin city? nonononono
i know, the violence, the degradation of women, the racism, but besides that, c’mon…brilliant diologue…bhah… great review..blah blah.. brilliant!!
(kill bill was an ode to the bad ass woman!)
i think quentin is generally an asshat, but i won’t take that out on his movies.
like woody allen. now there’s some weirdness and genius.
and i don’t imagine the coen bros. being very average to have next door.

@JNOV: Example of preciousness being skewered: Monty Python’s Oscar Wilde sketch, where the Great Wits of the day pronounce their aphorisms to uncomfortably long uproarious laughter, and ultimately descend into fart jokes.

@nojo: Met Haskell Wexler once. Totally nice guy.

@redmanlaw: Okay, had to look him up…

Virginia Woolf? Awesome.

@nojo: My best friend was an English major, and she told me all of the Shakespeare I was forced to read in school wasn’t the good stuff. I never took to him. And I’m too lazy to learn Shakespearean English. My experience is limited, sadly.

I took a class in Southern writers, and that’s how I fell in love with Faulkner. He writes like I think. There is something about The Sound and the Fury that I understand on some level I can’t explain. I wish I could turn Philly into my own Yoknapatawpha County. And my family could be the Snopes.

I also love Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. I’m an idiot when it comes to Shakespeare.

@nojo: Days of Heaven, dude. Those skies are burned into my mind forever.

@baked: I’m sorry, sister of mine. Pulp Fiction was okay, but Natural Born Killers turned me off.

ADD: I do love the Coens. No Country for Old Men, I don’t know how to express it, something about the dialogue touched me. Something about the main character’s relationship with his wife hit me in that certain spot. And Tommy Lee Jones was amazing. I liked the conversation he had with the other sheriff in the diner.

(I’m high as a kite right now — damned Gabapentin, but the anxiety is looong gone. So if I’m making less sense than usual, that’s why. I’m in a very touchy-feeling mood right now.)

@JNOV: Shakespeare proper never stuck with me, but that’s when I was forced to acknowledge — I resisted strongly — that there was more to writing than just words on the page, that you could get a lot of work done with themes and allusions.

But Faulkner was definitely the John the Baptist of my literary awakening. That was freshman year: “Red Wheelbarrow” totally stumped me (still does), but when we got to “The Bear,” the very muscle of his writing sucked me in.

I don’t know that Kesey read or was influenced by Faulkner, but “Sometimes a Great Notion” has similar qualities. “Cuckoo” gets the attention, but Notion rips you apart.

@redmanlaw: I looked him up, too. The Secret of Roan Inish!

@JNOV: No Country for Old Men was in part shot up I-25 in Mrs RML’s hometown of Las Vegas, NM, in Albuquerque and at a soundstage a few blocks from my house at the College of Santa Fe, Greer Garson Theater. Natural Born Killers – also shot partly in New Mexico. One of my state police buddies was there for some road closures due to filming.

@redmanlaw: No Country was an amazing movie, and I guess you can’t talk about No Country without mentioning There Will Be Blood. I think I wrote this before, but my son brothers and I started laughing when Daniel Day Lewis was beating the kid with a bowling pin. At first I was embarrassed that I found it amusing, but then the rest of the theater started laughing and I remembered I live in Philly. We’re kind of violent.

@nojo: If I were a writer, I’d want to be the urban Faulkner. I think it could be done.

@JNOV: I watched No Country with Silent Creative Partner, and while I certainly enjoyed it, as we walked out of the theater he had the ending nailed. Usually I’m the one with the Insightful Post-Game Analysis, but he totally ran circles around me — and just about all the reviewers I quickly read to see whether anyone picked up his angle.

(And of course, I forget the details now. But he immediately grasped that the ending wasn’t an accident.)

@JNOV: I ripped off channeled Steinbeck for a piece I did following a group of Indian street guys over several months in a reservation bordertown.

@JNOV:
natural born killers was oliver stone! not tarantino!
like him now?

@JNOV: Although I’m completely ignorant of David Foster Wallace, from what I’ve been hearing here it sounds like an interesting case could be made for him as the modern Faulkner. Not for any obvious reason, just something I’ve detected in how people appreciate him.

Kesey gave up writing after Notion and went on to create the Sixties. Although Mailer missed the news, the Great American Novel had died.

@baked: Tarantino did the original screenplay. He’s not entirely off the hook.

@baked: I think Tarantino wrote it. I didn’t like the story one bit.

@nojo: I’ve only read Infinite Jest, and I felt like I connected with him, too. Braak from Threat Quality Press said that DFW might have suffered from a condition that made him unable to deal with suffering in the world. There’s a name for it, which I’ve forgotten of course. But I guess my point is that DFW understood angst in a grunge sort of way. And he didn’t dismiss it as a stage people go through. And he understood our absurd obsession with projection and perception and entertainment. I’m about to read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, but I’m wondering if it’s going to affect my depression. Ugh.

@nojo: My best friend is cursed with the gift of seeing the ending in the first twenty minutes. She always knows how a movie is going to end. Luckily, she never tells me until it’s over.

@JNOV: I think people misunderstood There Will Be Blood insofar as they couldn’t tell if the ending was supposed to be funny or tragic, not really getting that it was both – the entire movie was an homage to biopic epics like Citizen Kane, but at the same time was an ironic undercutting of just that sort of nation/America-as-embodied-by-one-great-man mythmaking. It was both an epic and a disquisition on the emptiness of epics.

In other words, I think you had the “right” reaction [aka: the one the director wanted you to have].

@redmanlaw: I love him, too. And the kid and I used to stay in Salinas and drive to Monterey (Salinas has cheaper hotels, and the drive to Monterey is lovely). Sadly, there was talk about closing the Salinas public library because they didn’t have enough funding. I don’t know if it’s still open, but it broke my heart that his hometown would lose their library.

@BRB: Yes, it was amusingly tragic. Here’s this guy, drunk off his ass (and eating dinner!) in his private bowling alley schooling a lesser con artist on the reality of the con. I missed the allusion to/mocking (?) of epics, but I see that now that you’ve brought it up.

@JNOV: If you’re feeling depressed, step away from the David Foster Wallace and pick up a David Sedaris book.

I had a 5th form teacher who waxed rhapsodic over word choice, rhyme and tempo.

I never saw someone so impassioned over the words “Soft Yellow Buttery light” (or close to that) when we were reading Huxley’s “Brave New World”.

He made the scenes come alive by urging us to take the words and slowly build the scenes inside our heads based on the words. None of the senses seemed to be left out.

I suppose that’s why the closing pages affected me so much. I can still see the feet of the savage swinging and pointing to the compass points.

@baked: I knew I was leaving something out of the unholy trinity: “Excuse me, stewardess, I speak jive.”

@Mistress Cynica: Yes. I started reading The Depressed Person and I was like, “Get outta my head!” I think I’ll read my evolution book instead.

@BRB: Animal House is the key to the fratboy mind, its what they WANT to be (I use caps because I can’t maake italics work, don’t mind me) but they don’t get it at all, and do it all wrong.

On another level, if you like Harvard Lampoon hunor, which was the ultimate genesis of what for brevity, not that I think the term in its usual sense includes all we do here, but when I use it its shorthand for our worldview, finding solace, humor, and an outlet for frustration in cynical, over the top, scatological, often suggestive humor, snark, that movie is a mythologized memoir of the college experiences of the people who created the humor we all, I think, love, and they are not glorifying the stupidity, they are making fun of themselves, and also, always remember, that movie is a geek revenge fantasy, in which the geeks like us get revenge on the young republican shitheads. Its worth watching, and when you do hear someone quoting it, you can be sure that no matter what, they have some trace of self-deprecation in them and can’t be all bad.

@CheapBoy: That’s what I enjoy about books and movies — that feeling that you are there — you feel the warmth of the sun on your arms or you have the smell of blood in your nostrils.

@JNOV: I always know how a movie is going to end, too. Its not hard. Whats hard is keeping your mouth shut, I have learned. There are only a few dramatic plots in the world. Just minor variations, new scenarios in which the old dramas take place.

For example, here is a famous synopsis of the plot of every romantic comedy plot: Boy meets girl, girl gets boy in pickle (in the old sense of getting in a pickle, getting in some dramatic conflict, trouble), boy gets pickle in girl.

@Promnight: BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

I commented on your blog a couple of times. Did you see?

Wow, I almost feel sorry for Cindy McCain after reading this. The Rolling Stone article on PG that one of you pointed to was my reading material on the commute home – I was so mesmorized I almost missed my subway stop.

Speaking of Rolling Stone, here’s the article Prommie linked to this morning, and RedMan, interestingly enough, it opens in Mrs. RML’s home town. (Didn’t read past the first paragraph before posting this).

@SanFranLefty: This is the article I found questionable in its audio form on the Beeb due to its description of Vegas.

There was a woman in Borders tonight who was looking for this issue of RS, as well as the last one on the real John McCain. I’ll have to get back soon to finish reading the Metallica article in the expensive British import rock mag, and check out the article on Robert Trujillo in Bass Player or Bassist or what ever. The Backpacker survival issue looked good, too. The boy was loading up on manga and fantasy, while I never made it past the magazine rack.