headline of the day
20-Pound Aluminum Rubber-Band Gun Takes Things a Little Too Seriously
from the moderated comments
I read your article, and when stating Hayden “has not done anything worthy of praise” in his career, I guess those that nominated him for a golden globe award for Life as a House did not know what they were doing? You state you may have been unduly harse in your article, and indeed you were. You may not like his acting, that is fine, but your article had inaccurate information about his career. It sounds improperly researched, and like the school bully found a legitimate outlet to make fun of people. You are probably a better writer than this, but a long detailed article making fun of an actor does not make you look like one. The eighth plague? Come on, he may not be an Oscar performer, but he is not that bad. Who are you going to tear apart next? I bet you could find better things to write about, than tearing actors apart to this extent.
Shin Kinoshita does things on motorcycles that aren’t possible
The announcer dude is kind of a douche, but
Shin Kinoshita hails from Kobe, Japan. He does things on motorcycles that aren’t possible.
from the moderated comment spam
I’ve always thought Tom Cruise was hot ever since I first saw _Endless Love_ in February 1982! As for whether or not he ever gets back with Nicole, I think he’s going to be more likely this polygamist and he’ll be married to Katie Holmes, Nicole Kidman and me all at the same time!
from the moderated comments
For your information Jason Bourne would be cooler if he got some. You know put out. A suggestion of it would be enough. A little more Daniel Craig in the shower punching a fist against the wall with steam and stuff.
from the spam
Irritable Bowel Syndrome:
I dont know who you think you are, but youre just blowing smoke out your ears. Nothing youre saying makes sense and its all a bunch of immature ranting. If you want people to get behind your blog, you should at the very least learn a little something about what youre talking about!
That goat
is still a-goin’, y’all.
This is how Deron watches television.
climbing a 1768 foot broadcasting tower
Thoughts on Hayden Christensen
I wrote an article about Hayden Christensen and how he’s the worst. Some folks had some thoughts about my opinions. An excerpt:
Ice Giants Thaw
Unprecedented ice-thaws are uncovering artifacts at rates faster than archeologists worry they can be cataloged.
Patrick Hunt, of Stanford University in California who is trying to discover where Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Italy in 218 BC with an army and elephants, said there was an “alarming rate” of thaw in the Alps.
“This is the first summer since 1994 when we began our Alpine field excavations above 8,000 ft that we have not been inundated by even one day of rain, sleet and snow flurries,” he said.
“I expect we will see more ‘ice patch archaeology discoveries’,” he said. Hannibal found snow on the Alpine pass he crossed in autumn, according to ancient writers.
in lieu of flowers
via The Corner, where Jonah Goldberg titled this “Going Down Fighting”
‘do not buy this fish from us’
Whole Foods has started labeling the fish it sells with the recommendations from Seafood Watch.
hat tip @amateurgourmet
on the penny
An Open Letter to Canadian Friends,
especially those in and around Toronto.
If you have both the interest and an opportunity, would you please be so good as to check out either of Guy Maddin’s Hauntings installations at the Toronto International Film Festival and report?
Guy Maddin: Hauntings I and Hauntings II
TIFF Bell Lightbox will be haunted by a series of short film installations that are meant to invoke and appease the ghosts of cinema. Starting from the premise that every filmmaker has an unrealized project, a half-finished or abandoned film doomed to oblivion or left on the cutting-room floor, Maddin presents a series of shorts that explore the lost history of cinema.Hauntings I. TIFF Bell Lightbox. Main gallery. From September 12.
Hauntings II. Projection on north façade of TIFF Bell Lightbox. September 9 – 19, nightly, dusk till dawn.
Thanking you in advance for your consideration,
Civil Rights Photographer Unmasked as Informer
Ernest C. Withers in his Beale St. studio in Memphis. F.B.I. files indicate that Mr. Withers, who died in 2007, was an informant. (Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times.)
That photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation workers carrying “I Am a Man” signs in Memphis? His. He was the only photojournalist to document the entire trial in the murder of Emmett Till, and he was there in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, Dr. King’s room, on the night he was assassinated.
But now an unsettling asterisk must be added to the legacy of Ernest C. Withers, one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil rights era: He
was a paid F.B.I. informer“fits the profile of a closely supervised, paid informant, experts say”*.
*Clarification/update: Twenty-nine paragraphs into the Memphis Commercial Appeal report on Withers by Marc Perrusquia, we read:
Many political informants from the civil rights era were unwitting, unpaid dupes. Yet Withers, who was assigned a racial informant number and produced a large volume of confidential reports, fits the profile of a closely supervised, paid informant, experts say.
“It would be shocking to me that he wasn’t paid,” said [Athan] Theoharis, author of the books “Spying on Americans” and “The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition”.
Tacky lead, NYT.
How broken is Washington?
It’s a question I periodically ask myself. I’m certainly not as Jeremiad as Purdum’s article would lead some to be, but my current frustration with American Democracy requires I make more than a flash, blog-ish judgement on the subject:
The pace of the modern presidency—or, rather, the pace of modern life, as amplified by the media and by the impatience of the public for action of any kind—has the perverse effect of making the most measured of politicians seem out of sync, and the most visionary policies seem incremental and thus unsatisfying. By definition, it will take years for the result of changes in the nation’s health-care system, or its energy policies or education policies—or anything else of note—to be fully in place, much less fully understood, much less proven effective. Anyone who risks taking on the toughest problems automatically risks being seen as not having done enough about them to get any credit by the time the next news cycle, or election cycle, rolls around. It’s a conundrum that vexes any president: there’s no short-term gain for long-term wisdom.
I can hear it in my mind, and it is glorious
You know that song “Total Eclipse of the Heart”?
The Bonnie Tyler senior-prom-theme power ballad?Originally written for Meat Loaf.
Now go scrape the bits of your BLOWN MIND off the wall behind you.
Via Dan Wineman
Zuckerberg
The face behind the medium:
Zuckerberg––or Zuck, as he is known to nearly everyone of his acquaintance––is pale and of medium build, with short, curly brown hair and blue eyes. He’s only around five feet eight, but he seems taller, because he stands with his chest out and his back straight, as if held up by a string. His standard attire is a gray T-shirt, bluejeans, and sneakers. His affect can be distant and disorienting, a strange mixture of shy and cocky. When he’s not interested in what someone is talking about, he’ll just look away and say, “Yeah, yeah.” Sometimes he pauses so long before he answers it’s as if he were ignoring the question altogether. The typical complaint about Zuckerberg is that he’s “a robot.” One of his closest friends told me, “He’s been overprogrammed.” Indeed, he sometimes talks like an Instant Message—brusque, flat as a dial tone—and he can come off as flip and condescending, as if he always knew something that you didn’t. But face to face he is often charming, and he’s becoming more comfortable onstage. At the Computer History Museum, he was uncommonly energetic, thoughtful, and introspective—relaxed, even. He addressed concerns about Facebook’s privacy settings by relaying a personal anecdote of the sort that his answers generally lack. (“If I could choose to share my mobile-phone number only with everyone on Facebook, I wouldn’t do it. But because I can do it with only my friends I do it.”) He was self-deprecating, too. Asked if he’s the same person in front of a crowd as he is with friends, Zuckerberg responded, “Yeah, same awkward person.”
Incidentally, why I am still on facebook is beyond me.
Dude, you have no Koran
Only worth watching for a few seconds, starting around one minute.
Quote Out of Context
Religious leaders need to be held accountable for their ideas. In my state of Arizona, Sister Margaret McBride, a senior administrator at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, recently authorized a legal abortion to save the life of a 27-year-old mother of four who was 11 weeks pregnant and suffering from severe complications of pulmonary hypertension; she made that decision after consultation with the mother’s family, her doctors and the local ethics committee. Yet the bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olmsted, immediately excommunicated Sister Margaret, saying, “The mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s.” Ordinarily, a man who would callously let a woman die and orphan her children would be called a monster; this should not change just because he is a cleric.
eager seems like the wrong word
Authorities in southern Russia said on Monday they are limiting the sale of vodka in a region ravaged by forest fires in September, eager to keep people from drowning their sorrows in drink.
from someone else’s comments
Ira Glass is Mr. Rogers for adults in the 21st century.
quote out of context
As vampires go, these guys are a bunch of tampons. (via)
The Royal Road
A little bit scary and a little bit fun. Spiky but silly, kinda like me.
