Monthly Archives: September 2004

We Shouldn’t Be Here

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“We shouldn’t be here,” said one Marine infantryman bluntly. “There was no reason for invading this country in the first place. We just came here and [angered people] and killed a lot of innocent people,” said the marine, who has seen regular combat in Ramadi. “I don’t enjoy killing women and children, it’s not my thing.”

That’s what a small but more and more vocal minority in the US military are saying. Meanwhile, there’s a very, very large push on to get their absentee ballots properly postmarked and counted this time around. Either way they vote, O.K. by me, because in 2000 a lot of their votes didn’t get counted at all.

The story is originally from the Christian Science Monitor, which is a fine upstanding news source and unlikely to cause problems. The Smirking Chimp one might be a bit dicey for some people.

On the other hand, a true patriot site like the General’s is probably quite safe.

Son of Comments Wacky

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As my chum Bard Sinister points out, the comment feature is acting up again. It’ll time out after you click Post, and seemingly nothing happens. However, in actuality the tiny virtual hamsters that run this site are still running in their wheels, and the post gets updated with the new comment. So if you hit “Post” a second time, as I did earlier today, you get 2 posts for the price of one. Argh.

I’ll look into why that may be happening – might have been a temporary glitch. Also, due to a strange conversational convergence, comments were going up at the same time a full rebuild was happening.

It’s been a day and a half. As in “It’s been a hell of a day, and part of another hell of a day.”

Work: busy, yet strangely unproductive. In other words, typical Monday.
Workout: didn’t – forgot my crispy little black shorts.
Chiro: c-c-c-rrrrack! And massage too. I think it’s helping. Tonight I even got tips on how not to sit at the computer. And oh, looky, I was sitting all hunched and intent. Bad me. I’m supposed to set a timer now and remember to sit back.

Blogosphere: It’s a small world after all. 😉
Mindvirus: My gift to you.

And now I think I’d better see what’s going on over at Gus’s Whale-Killing Journal before I go to bed, because Bard tells me things are getting interesting. And yes, this is how I relax. And I could use some laughs.

Support our troops: You know, what a completely fatuous phrase. You see the signs and bumperstickers everywhere, but do those people actually DO anything supportive? Or should the phrase actually be “Don’t question authority!”
or “Shut up, it’s for your own good?”

It occured to me on my drive home that troops stationed in far-flung corners of the world are not just fighting for freedom and the American Way, but for the Emmy Fashion Police. How messed up is that?

Oops. Almost forgot. They’re also fighting for our right to screw around online writing bizarre collaborative fantasy-adventure stories, but that’s not as messed up as the concept of “fashion police.”

Bill Moyers: Journalism Under Fire

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I ran across this speech that Bill Moyers gave to the Society of Professional Journalists on Sept. 11th, 2004.

He covers a lot of ground. Get a cup of coffee and read it like your life depends on it.

A profound transformation is happening here. The framers of our nation never envisioned these huge media giants; never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing and big broadcasters ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s need for news second to their own interests — and to the ideology of free-market economics.

I was looking for something completely different when I stumbled on this; it’s stashed on a couple of different public affairs sites. Several of the examples of big, underreported stories will make the hairs go up on the back of your neck.

It’s worth emailing to a friend or two, too.

Darklight: A Perfectly Dreadful Movie

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Title: Darklight
Stars: Richard Burgi, John DeLancie, David Hewlitt, Sherri Appleby
Official Website: Sci Fi | Darklight

my husband David recorded this movie because John DeLancie was in it. We always, always enjoy his work, so I thought “How bad could it be?” and sat down to watch with him. There was some sort of incomprehensible pre-show sequence about a demon or woman that walks up out of a swampy place all nekkid and covered with goo, and some guys sitting around in a futuristic chapel being told that their sacrifice was for the good of mankind before they get sent off to their doom fighting the demon. I was microwaving pizza at the time, and couldn’t really hear how bad the dialogue and sound were.

David offered to re-start, but I figured I’d catch up quickly enough. Right.

Turns out the movie’s story, plot and characters were so screwed up, no amount of cribbing, notes, or pre-show exposition would have helped make sense of it.

It started out well enough – nice titles. David Hewlitt of Atlantis (he plays crabby, snide, brilliant Dr. McKay) was in it, and he’s a new favorite of mine, so I settled in with my pizza.

Oh, well. There was much scenery chewed. There was something about capturing a female demon and keeping her looking human with pellets of plant stuff that make her forget her demonity. Something else about purifying the demon DNA “strain” and injecting it into the eyes of a very pissed-off David Hewlitt, who played a scientist with a grudge against the corporation that done him wrong – now he’s some sort of independent contractor for a faith-based secret clandestine apocalyptic demon fighting club. Something else about the corporation going public with an immortality treatment. And then David Hewlitt made somebody shoot him to show he was immortal, went apeshit, and turned into one of the demon things (who apparently is wearing tiny crispy little black bike shorts). He runs off to kill people from his old company at press conferences, because he’s got a grudge that they based their so-called breakthrough on his secret work for the cult. Meanwhile, the secret society, which seemed to be based more on the Kabbala than anything else, didn’t realize that their #2 man, John DeLancie, had his own agenda and was the one egging David Hewlitt on and having the demon he turned into do his bidding. Turns out they’ve been extracting stuff from the demon and working on it. The demon romps around killing people and entire S.W.A.T teams (David and I started singing “Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-daaaa” to make them feel better about rushing in to their doom). And then there were the beginnings of a horrible plague, carried by the demon in his brain and delivered by the longest, scaliest tongue in the universe. The government haplessly failed to protect the top scientist for the corporation, but by then the amnesiac girl, that used to be a demon but doesn’t remember how, had been trained by Richard Burgi. There was some rock music and posing when she’d remember how to burn up like a phoenix, turn black and scaly, and pretty much look like a low-rent X-men ripoff. There was a break after a mid-movie battle scene where the good demon and the bad demon fight. Both are so very badly rendered in CGI it’s hard to tell which one is the real loser, but the good-girl demon slashes the bad-boy demon’s tummy, and off he runs howling and the scientist is saved. Suddenly, David Hewlitt’s human again, lying on a table in the lab at his old workplace and is very crabby and irritable about the big slash in his tummy, and makes a former cow-orker stitch up his guts. He needs another infusion of the girl demon’s power, which is called Dark Light. She comes by it naturally, so though she can hurt him, he can only hurt her so long as he doesn’t lose his mojo. But darn it, they’re fresh out of mojo at the lab, so he has to capture her and Burgi and there’s a long involved wrangle between them and DeLancie, while Hewlitt watches on a monitor and gets mighty steamed to hear that DeLancie’s using him as a pawn. This doesn’t stop him from wanting to turn back into a demon again and do his master’s bidding. Maybe it’s the little pants that he likes best about being a big flying scaly demon. And the instant crispy buffness.

One thing that struck me funny was that every time David Hewlitt (who I like, by the way) is on screen, his shirt’s open all the way – for no damn reason other than “Hey, Burgi won’t do it, let’s see if Hewlitt will run around with his shirt half open.”

I didn’t mind too much, but my husband David (my husband) thought that Hewlitt was pretty un-buff for all the screen time he had showing his chest, or with his shirt completely off. I will admit this, but he was un-buff in a very normal and rather endearingly vulnerable way. When he becomes the demon, he becomes uber-buff. Perhaps this is also part of his character’s motivation.

That reminds me: after his scenery-chewing transformation scene when he turns into the male demon, he turns human again, with the same clothes as before, and in fact with his shirt open all the way. Huh? Same with the girl – she doesn’t have the Hulk’s problem with wardrobe at all. Meanwhile, the horrible Red Plague, which is apparently much, much worse than the Black Plague, is turning people into crusty red and black mounds of goo. But first, they turn into festering zombies, who go around going “raaar! Raaaar!” and are used by DeLancie to kill enemies slowly enough that they can figure out how to escape and survive to the next reel. Kind of like sharks with frickin’ laser beams, see? So there were battles, people changed back and forth into demons, people got turned into goo, DeLancie has a few scary philosophical discussions about how he’s forcing the Creator’s hand, and so on. Oh, and there’s a kryptonite maneuver, too – some sort of plant or root from the Garden of Eden that is the only thing that can harm or render powerless the girl demon, who is identified as Lilith, who’s spent eternity living in a cave in British Columbia, eating warriors and their kids that happen by during a school field trip/demon hunting expedition. That’s how Burgi’s kid bought it in a flashback, which is why he hates the girl demon, but has to work with her to show her the ropes on how to be a demon again and defeat the boy demon.

Let’s recap, shall we? No, is too long. I sum up.

Girl demon gets all Buffy on the bad guy’s ass, and defeats boy demon by removing his head with the edge of a metal barrel lid that she’s lit up with her Darklight mojo. Brain is thus available for the scientists back at the corporate lab to isolate virus and create an antidote and cure in about 15 seconds’ worth of exposition. The world is saved! The girl demon becomes a winsome little girl waif again and may or may not keep working with Burgi’s shadowy faith-based secret society. She’s a lone wolfess, so she rides off all waifish reluctant-herolike on her motorcycle. The picture ends with a very Highlanderish voiceover, not neglecting the echo effect, stating her ambiguous feelings about being the new Buffy. David and I state our ambiguous feelings about the movie, which pretty much are “meh” and “failed pilot, thank God” respectively.

Neither of us could figure out why DeLancie was caught dead in this turkey, other than it was a decent paycheck. I figure some of Burgi’s money was in it, too – he may have been hoping for some more home-town work since The Sentinel has been gone for a while. I think Hewlitt was in it because it was near home and he’s kind of the go-to guy for low-budget SF movies lately – he’s good at playing irritable scientist types, good or evil.

SHOW TUNES 1, FUNDAMENTALISTS 0

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A creative and uniquely New York solution for dealing with annoying proselytizers on public transportation:

Me: “Excuse me, but do you mind keeping your voice down, I am trying to read.”

Preacher Lady: (screams) “I got to testify.”

Preacher lady hitches up her skirts and tells me that I am going to hell for interrupting you-know-who’s word. Two or three OTHER Christian ladies on the train start shouting at me and discussing my prospects as the Devil’s prison bitch. The last straw was a 50 something red faced man in a suit slamming his Bible towards my face.
There was only one thing I could do.

Me: “If you all don’t lower your voices and cease calling me Satan, I will have to sing show tunes.”

The other straphangers look at me with stony faces.
I begin to sing.
“It’s very clear, our love is here to stay. Not for a year, but forever and a day…”

I love this man. He showed the spirit of Aloha in New York, since it’s very clear that he’s from the islands.

via boing boing

Recap: Broken Oxy Morons

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You know how sometimes, you’re aware as soon as you hear a phrase that it’s going to live on in your vocabulary forever? Kind of like, “I’M PACKIN’ IT!”, only more so? Okay. That’s what happened this week with “My ox is broken!”

I don’t think I will ever love anything on television, in a sick and wrong kind of way, quite like I loved seeing Colin absolutely self-destruct, to the point where he wound up snarling angrily, “My ox is broken!”

Anyway, to provide some context, we start out in New Zealand, where the early Roadblock requires some careful circus performing, and where Colin and Christie are feeling their oats — and when I say “oats,” I’m talking about a very large quantity of oats. Anyway, they experience some flight problems that result in all the teams arriving in Manila at the same time. And right out of the gate, because Colin and Christie have been so very demonstrative about how tough and intense they are, everyone is looking to throw them the Yield. And they do. Chip and Kim, specifically, make Colin stand and stare at an hourglass while everybody else does their task. And then there’s a jeep thing and some other stuff, and then the BEST THING EVER happens.

Colin and Christie arrive in last place at a Detour where they’re supposed to lead an ox around with a plow in the mud, only they fail to figure out that one person is supposed to plow and one is supposed to lead, so Colin just winds up being dragged at random around this field, at which point he has a complete and absolute fucking meltdown, the likes of which you have never seen. In the middle of which he tells Christie that he hates her, and she acts just as obnoxious as he does, so you no longer have to wonder if you should feel sorry for her about putting up with his shit. You shouldn’t. Anyway, along about here, he becomes so frustrated that he barks, “My ox is broken!”

Broken. He has a broken ox.

So they come in last, but it’s an unexpected non-elimination round at this weird juncture, so they don’t get booted. Good Lord, they are a plague on all of us. Anyway, in other news, the Moms have a good leg, Kim really needs to go back to the part where she was trying to do her share of the work, and Brandon? Well, frankly, I love Brandon. He hollers! He loves the Lord! He plows! He does funk dances on boats in New Zealand! Brandon is the best. I like Nicole, too, but she didn’t dance.

Oh, my GOD that was a good episode, in an entire season of good episodes. My TAR feed search in Bloglines has increased tenfold – it seems everybody and their weird brother-in-law is talking about the show and the Broken Ox Incident. And downloading BitTorrents. And listing their picks for Win, Place, Show, and Total Loser.

One blog came up with a new nickname for their team after Christie’s performance – they’re now officially Colon and Crusty. Mean, yes, but I laughed, because she was covered in slimy black mud after her performance at the rice paddy. And, of course, her freak-out performance attempting to egg the jeepney driver into committing vehicular homicide. Oh, and my side still hurts from laughing at her standing on the sidelines telling Colin what he was doing wrong, rather than doing what she was supposed to do, which is lead the damn ox already.

Because why? Because it wasn’t a Roadbloack, Christie, it was a Detour. Two people perfom this type of task, unless your partner is Mirna, or you.

Yes, and that means getting in the mud. And then when she finally did step into the paddy to feel around with her feet for the rope, she took about 4 steps, stopped, looked down, and picked up the soggy, sodden rope. And with what royal hauteur and disdain she held it up for Colin to see. I believe she even said “Oh. Here it is.” or words to that effect.

Ah. And so sweet to see them gloating about how easy the first part of the leg was – Colin can be heard actually saying “cake” or “piece of cake” as he climbs that little bitty cable ladder to the undercarriage of the bridge. What? And of course he was perfectly graceful as he walked across the girders to the person with the clue. Also, Christie will probably regret her little “all the other teams… suck!” comment. Soon, I hope. It was not one of her best moments.

Perfect people are perfectly annoying. Also, they don’t make for very good reality TV unless the element of conflict is introduced by making them, say, the villains of the piece with a little judicious editing and a few juicy “frankenbites” that come back to haunt them.

It’s funny, I liked them well enough in the first 3 episodes, except that Colin even then seemed a bit insufferable. Over on the TWOP forum, their stock has been falling pretty fast – popularity is such a fickle thing, but being an ass is likely to get you on the Z-list at parties no matter how extreme and intense a Racer you are.

When it looked like they’d get eliminated, Christie’s eyes got absolutely huge and tragic… I swear to God, it was like the part in Shrek 2 where Puss in Boots got all Sad Eyed Kitty In the Rain. She was absolutely, heartbreakingly beautiful, even up to her elbows in dried mud.

I will say this for her; she’s totally emotionally invested in the Race. When Phil gave them the “good news” about non-elimination, she broke down completely.

I’m very happy with the rest of teams that remain – they’re flawed and they’ve all made dumb mistakes, so the outcome is still not totally predictable. Colin and Christie’s only mistakes have been minor, but their biggest handicap is… hubris. And a tendency to melt down like a thwarted two-year-old at naptime.

A couple of other observations from the Race RSS-feed: one blog likened Karen’s voice to that of a 10-year old boy on Christmas morning… ALL! THE! TIME! and there have been a number of very happy entries from people in the Philippines in a mixture of Tagalog and English.

Also, one irritation: I’ve been spoiled for part of the finale location because one blogger keeps updating his spoiler post, which includes eyewitness photos of Racers, over and over again to add details or make corrections. I managed to scroll past the spoiler information the first 3 times without seeing too much, but finally the repetition was too much for me to ignore completely, and I caught too much information. GRRRR! There’s this thing called the “excerpt” field… please use it if you’re going to spoil something.

And also because of the RSS-feed I got spoiled for the beginning of TAR6. Again with the GRR.

On the other hand, I won’t have to wait a year and a half for the next installment, so: PURRRR.

And I don’t think I will ever love anything on television quite like the sight of a handsome, exhausted young man absolutely covered in mud and oxenshit breaking down in tears and sobbing “I hate you!”

All I Ever Needed To Know About Alligator Wrasslin’

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When Broy and another officer reached the home Monday, they spotted the 5-foot-long, 80-pound American alligator in a wooden enclosure attached to a garage. Inside the enclosure was a hot tub sunk into the ground and filled with 4 feet of stagnant water, and in the water, littered with broken turtle shells, was the alligator.

They called the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and Royalton Police for a little help.

To get the alligator, Scott Ballard of the IDNR pulled on chest waders, stepped into the tub and grabbed the animal. Broy and two others then dragged Ballard and the alligator out to the ground and struggled to tape the alligator’s jaws shut.

“You can’t imagine that thing’s tail,” Broy said. “He was wanting me to turn him loose, so he’d pop me in the back — just laying it on me. Wham, wham, wham. My back is so sore.”

No, no, no… you grab the alligator by the tail and haul his fat bastard ass out of the tub onto a large flat surface, then you straddle his back and hold his jaws shut with both hands while your partner tapes them shut. In less than a minute. 😉

I know this from watching an ancient kid’s show called…Jungle Jim that frequently featured alligator wrasslin’, and got a refresher course this summer watching “Kevin and Drew Unleashed.”

Heh. Good times. That was a fun show, you guys, wish they’d had more episodes. I think you’d both have been able to show the hapless Illinois animal control guy a few moves.

Eyes Wide Open: 1000 And Counting

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One Boot, One Life

The multimedia exhibit sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee is ongoing. You can check the schedule and its progress here.

When this exhibit was unveiled by our Chicago office in January 2004, there were 504 pairs of boots symbolizing the lost lives of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. With each passing week, each stop in a href=”http://”>new city, more pairs of boots are added to represent the newly fallen. Alongside the boots stands a wall of remembrance with the names of the more than 11,000 Iraqi civilians who have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion.

The Nanny War

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ginmar grouses about wartime strictures on shopping for items a female soldier finds to be personal, essential, and almost unobtainable (not even accessible via the Web).

I can’t get to Victoria’s Secret any more. That means that Pat Robertson is, in fact, in charge of what we can see and read. And you know, I’m a girl, which means they’re censoring me from looking at halfway decent underwear! Jesus Fucking Christ, if I can be trusted with a fucking weapon, can’t I be trusted with a fucking thong? Because I’m really trying to see what kind of danger this could pose to anybody. I suppose I could make a slingshot out of the damned thing. That’ll terrify the insurgents! “Run, Ahmad! They’re using Rocket-Propelled Undies!”

Another Reoccur Rance

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Rance pops up after a long, no doubt busy silence to offer a little more in the “piss ‘n vinegar” line.

I’m pretty sure that whatever he’s doing in politics just now, it’s not just “diddling.” And yeah, if he was working for the other side I probably wouldn’t read him as much. It’s easier to hang out with people you mostly agree with than otherwise.

Never liked that word “diddling”, by the way. It has unpleasant assocations for me. But it’s nice that Rance took the time to vent, no matter the subject.

I’m starting to think there’s a conspiracy – Moveable Type won’t publish this entry for some reason. It’s probably quotation marks in just the wrong place again – I noticed it barfs on the Quick Links entries if there are quotes in the excerpt section.