Month: April 2006

Watch as some poor schlub attempts to swallow an entire spoonful of cinnamon.

And then wonder where you can file the proper forms to get your minute back.

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One of the persistent memes about the Iraq war that’s bothered me almost since the war’s first putative “ending” is the idea that the news media (or “MSM”) is persistently over-reporting the bad news, thus causing public opinion to shift against the Mighty War Effort. I’ve long thought there was something fishy about this idea, which has come in such goofy varieties as “Per capita, the number of deaths in Iraq this month doesn’t even equal the number of car traffic deaths per year in Casper, Wyoming!” Well, yeah; so?

I’ve read two highly interesting things the last two days pertaining to this very “Blame the media” idea. First is this post by “Armed Anonymous Liberal”, over at Glenn Greenwald’s blog, which specifically takes down an article by the unfathomably-popular Mark Steyn:

That sounds like something I might write. After all, this war has been “spun” from the very beginning. The American people were told that Saddam posed a grave and gathering threat; that he was in league with Al Qaeda and six months away from getting his hands on nuclear weapons. They were told the war would be quick and easy and would pay for itself. They’ve been treated to a string of premature declarations of victory and assured repeatedly that everything is going swimmingly when their own eyes tell them that it’s not. It’s no wonder they’re a little disillusioned at this point.

Sadly, however, Steyn wasn’t referring to any of these things I just mentioned. No, Steyn thinks the problem is that President Bush and Tony Blair have not made it sufficiently clear to the American and British people that this is really a war against Islam.

Oy.

What scares me about the analogy between “this war” and the Cold War is that with Communism, we weren’t opposing an ideology that really had a great chunk of the world devoted to it — not in the same sense that Islam does. Communism is a political ideology that was used to pave the road for totalitarians over several decades; Islam is a religion that has been a major player on the world stage for almost 1,400 years. The historical lessons from the Cold War that can be brought to bear on “this war” are, in my estimation, very limited.

I also read this article in the Washington Post:

Anyone taking potshots at the “mainstream media” should read the description of what it’s like to cover Baghdad that appears in the April/May issue of the American Journalism Review. The story opens with a description of NPR’s Deborah Amos, dressed in Arab clothes, anxiously scanning the street for bombers and kidnappers as she heads for an interview in the protected Green Zone. And that’s an easy assignment.

…

Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times showed what you learn out in the Red Zone in stories Sunday about the spread of gruesome revenge killings: “By conservative counts, nearly 200 civilian men have been executed in the past two weeks and dumped on Baghdad’s streets. Many have been hogtied. Some have had acid splashed on their faces. Others have been found without toes, fingers, eyes.” Gettleman, who had been away from Iraq for more than a year, wrote that something fundamental had changed: The violence had “turned inward” into sectarian warfare.

Lots of folks read something like that and say, “Why do they only report the bad stuff?” This always makes me want to scream.

Look at that bit again, about the sectarian violence: two hundred civilians executed, and their bodies mutilated, in two weeks, in Baghdad. And consider some perspective: According to this site, Baghdad’s population is about 7.4 million people. Now, imagine if one of the two American cities of similar population, New York and Los Angeles, had become so violent that in two weeks, two hundred men had been murdered and their corpses mutilated.

And then imagine our outrage if, while an American city saw two hundred violent murders and executions on its streets, if the news media focused instead on the painting of schools and the opening of clinics and who knows what else.

As someone with issues of my own with the media, it would be nice if they’d realize that no matter what they do, they’re going to get bashed by the Right. Every single network could become a mirror of FOX News, and they’d still get bashed by the Right as the “liberal MSM”.

EDIT: I misattributed the post at Glenn Greenwald’s blog.

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Lynn’s foggy sunrise.

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Time for a matching quiz! Below is a list of witticisms uttered by James Bond, followed by a list of villains to whom Bond uttered them. (In some cases, he’s uttering them at their dead bodies.) Match the Bond line to the villain!

1. “She’s had her kicks.”
2. “Oh, the old handgun in the back of peanuts. What will they think of next.”
3. “Oh, luck? Well, I shall have to use players’ privilege, and use your lucky dice.”
4. “I never miss.”
5. “Well, he certainly left with his tails between his legs.”
6. “How about an earthquake?”
7. “It’ll take more than cutting your earlobes off to make you a Count.”
8. “We have a saying too, [name omitted] — and you’re full of it.”
9. “Don’t you want to know why?”
10. “He had no head for heights.”

Villains:

a. Mr Kidd, Diamonds are Foverever
b. Electra, The World Is Not Enough
c. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
d. Rosa Klebb, From Russia With Love
e. Emil Locque, For Your Eyes Only
f. Francisco Scaramanga, The Man With the Golden Gun
g. Franz Sanchez, Licence to Kill
h. Gyorgi Koskov, The Living Daylights
i. Kamal Khan, Octopussy
j. Kananga, Live and Let Die

And for bonus credit, name the villain who utters the line that is the title of this post.

This is all occasioned by the Indestructible Mr. Jones, who provides a bit of info about Casino Royale, the upcoming Bond film that essentially restarts the franchise. Restarting a franchise like Bond is nothing new — look at Batman Begins, which did the trick with the Batman character. And, of course, the ultimate restarting of a franchise would have to be DC Comics’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, which restarted the entirety of the DC Comics universe. (Interestingly, at the time, Crisis seemed like just a DC version of Marvel’s Secret Wars, which had run a year or two previously — but now, Crisis is widely noted as the better and more important comics event.)

It’s probably time for Bond to be relaunched, anyway; it’s just no longer plausible to assume that it’s the same guy in each film having all those adventures, when the first film appeared in 1962. If there are going to be more Bond films, rebooting the character is really the only way to go. It’ll be interesting to see how much of the “traditional” Bond mythos sticks around — debonair stuff in tuxes, the wooing of ladies, the femme fatales, the nifty gadgets.

One thing that interests me is that the Bond character is often seen as a “relic of the Cold War”; in fact, in GoldenEye, Judi Dench as M uses exactly those words to describe Bond. Or, as Wayne and Garth put it on a Wayne’s World bit back in the day on Saturday Night Live, in citing “boring spy stuff” as one reason they were “bummed the Soviet Union fell”: “Who’s James Bond gonna spy on now? The Guatemalans?”

But when you look at the movies, there is surprisingly little Cold War vibe for most of the series. All of the Connery films involve SPECTRE as villains, and the only ones that reference the Cold War at all are From Russia With Love (when Bond at first thinks he’s up against the Russians, but turns out to be involved in a SPECTRE plot) and You Only Live Twice (in which SPECTRE’s plot involves capitalizing on Cold War nuclear trigger-happiness on the part of the Americans and Russians).

We don’t hear anything at all about the KGB in a Bond film after YOLT until The Spy Who Loved Me, in which Bond teams up with KBG agent Anya Amasova against a non-Cold War villain. It’s not until 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, the eleventh film in the series in nineteen years, that we saw Bond involved in genuine Cold War intrigue. The next film, Octopussy, also has a strong Cold War plot; but in 1985’s A View to a Kill, Bond-versus-KGB again became a mere background thing. The Living Daylights returned to Cold War stuff, but in a muted way, and that was it for the Cold War in the Bond films. Licence to Kill in 1989 involved Central American drug trade, and then the series stalled until 1995, when GoldenEye depicted a distinctly post Cold War Bond.

Anyway, bring on the new Bond — and I want to know who’s writing the score! I’d vote for Howard Shore or James Newton Howard. None of that boring Media Ventures, cookie-cutter stuff for Bond, please.

Oh, and for more opinionation on All Things Bond, check out my old “Bond Redux” series of posts. These are linked in the sidebar at left, and were the first things of mine to get linkage in Blogistan at large. Almost four years ago those articles caused my daily traffic to jump from 12 hits per day to over 30!

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Heave that sail to the starboard, for a battle for the ages is brewin’ on the high seas! Yes, two of the greatest Commanders to ever set sail on the high seas will set their cannon on one another’s ships, in me own kitchen! Behold!

Yarrrrr!

(My money’s on the Captain, because he’s got his cutlass at the ready. No leaving it in the scabbard for him! But that Admiral’s got a cannon at the ready. Hmmmmm. And yes, I’d probably eat Lutefisk if you sold it to me in a package with a pirate on it.)

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I finally addressed a long-standing hole in my “Buffalo Street Cred” resume this weekend by eating my first ever pirogi. Pirogi are filled dumplings that are a staple of Polish cuisine, which is big in these parts owing to Buffalo’s fairly large Polish population. And until yesterday, I’d never tried one.

But I’m not sure if I get credit yet, because while I didn’t like the pirogi, I’m not sure I did it right, either.

First, I used frozen pirogies, and I’m pretty sure I probably should have tried fresh. Second, I executed a rookie mistake and pan-fried them at too high a temperature, resulting in an almost blackened dumpling as opposed to a nicely crispy one.

The main thing that keeps me away from pirogies is that the fillings I almost always see available at The Store are potato and sauerkraut, neither of which thrill me much. The ones I tried yesterday were “garlic potato”, so I thought that might be yummy, but eating the thing, I kept returning to the fact that I love the garlic but not so much the potato, and the texture of the dumpling was too tough anyway owing to my failure to cook the damn things right.

So I’m thinking I’ll have to try some cheese pirogies next time, and I’ll have to bake them so I get some idea of the texture before I next attempt pan-frying.

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After last week’s bumper crop of Weirdness, followed by the fact that yesterday was April Fool’s Day and thus saw tons of Weirdness on the Web, I’m at a loss as to what to link today. Roxanne had a spoof of a popular right-wing blog; Alan rejiggered his masthead image a bit (you have to be up on your New York State politics to get the joke); and over at Making Light, there’s a big grab-bag of April Fool’s stuff from around the Interweb.

I did try something for April Fools myself, but it was something of a misfire: I concealed a link on the main page of the blog to a post that I stashed somewhere in my back archives, which in turn linked to a photo of me doing something unusual. (No, not that. This is a PG-13 blog, for Christ’s sake!) My idea was that the link would be an “Easter Egg”, like all the cool DVDs have nowadays — except that I obviously hid the thing too well, because to my knowledge nobody noticed it at all. Oops. I’ll file that idea away for next year, then.

Anyhow, since the Major League Baseball season starts tonight (sorry, Lance, but the game tonight counts in the standings, so it’s real), here’s an article about a possible new baseball pitch called the “Gyroball”. Problem is, nobody’s sure the “Gyroball” even exists. But if it did, it might start tilting the balance of power in the game back toward the pitchers after decades of advances in hitting. (Of course, one could argue that the steroid crackdown could accomplish the same thing.)

(As for my thoughts on baseball this year: the Pirates will stink again, so who cares; Barry Bonds — once my favorite player — can bite me; and…well, that’s about it. I used to absolutely adore baseball, and maybe one day I will again. For now, I only follow it very casually. A shame, really, because it’s such a beautiful game and it’s got so much amazing history behind it. I’m left feeling like the last really genuine moment I saw in baseball was Joe Carter’s home run that won the 1993 World Series for the Blue Jays. Next year came the strike, and after that, just one moment after another that seemed brilliant and wondrous at the time but later felt false.

I’d like real baseball back. The time between football seasons is long enough without it.)

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Via Warren Ellis I see that Jess Nevins’s book Fantastic Victoriana has been published (Amazon link). Assuming that the book contains much of the same content as Nevins’s long-standing website (which was reporting an exceeding of bandwidth when last I checked an hour or two ago), the book must be wonderful indeed. It’s been a long time since I checked out Fantastic Victoriana.

Nevins himself used to be a commenter on this blog, although he doesn’t seem to have been around much in a while. I hope that’s because he got too busy for blog reading, as opposed to other plausible explanations, like he found my content too repetitive and dull after a while, or that he finally got fed up with my mouth-foaming about the NFL team from New England (he’s a fan).

Anyhow, I hope that the book stays at that discounted price for a while, because I’d like to buy it next month maybe.

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If you all manage to put it all together this year, and win back the House and Senate — or just the House — please, oh please, do not let Cynthia McKinney anywhere near a position of leadership. We just don’t need that.

In the immortal words of Melvin Udall, “Go sell crazy somewhere else. We’re all stocked up here.”

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Aaron and Krista’s kid turned one year old last week. Geez, doesn’t seem that long. The kid’s getting cuter, which is nice to see. (Not to imply that Elsa wasn’t cute to begin with. But it’s just that her already-ample cuteness supply has increased.)

They also had a recent scare when Little Elsa clunked her head on the floor or some such thing. They think that Elsa is fine, but I would suggest withholding judgement: if, some years hence, Little Elsa expresses a liking for the clarinet, we’ll know what damage was done!

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