OK, I’ve missed this feature the last two weeks. Sorry about that. We’ll get back into things with a bit of classic film music. Here is Ernest Gold’s theme to Exodus.
Embracing the Crazy
(A Political Rant with a bit of rude language)
Here in New York, we have a gubernatorial election coming up in which the Republicans have, as they’ve done in races for various offices all across the country, nominated a complete lunatic. But for some reason I’ve never been able to fathom, Americans seem to every so often get themselves into this weird kind of mood where they get so angry that they decide to embrace lunatics as an expression of their anger. I’m hearing a lot of this from supporters of Carl Paladino: “Sure he’s crazy, but crazy is what we need!”
DougJ at Balloon Juice perfectly captures the inherent dangers of this habit:
This kind of reasoning is nearly always stupid, e.g. “at least with Bush, you know where he stands”. People don’t talk this way about things other than politics. No one says “better a quack than all this medical kabuki” or “better Barry Switzer than all that West Coast offense mumbo jumbo”.
If you want to have good government, you do it by voting for sane candidates whose positions you agree with, not by supporting nuts in order to make some ridiculous point about an imperfect system.
I couldn’t agree more. “Carl’s angry and so are we! He expresses our anger!” But what do you want to do with that anger? “Drop a bomb on Albany!” Yeah…but what do you want him to accomplish? What do you want NY’s state government to look like when he’s done? “I dunno…but we’re angry and so’s Carl!” Lather, rinse, repeat. Every time I’ve asked a Paladino supporter what policy ideas of his they find appealing, they can’t cite a single one. They just like that he acts angry.
Along similar lines, a blogger I read recently wrote that President Obama has brought all of his woes upon himself, and that the Tea Party only exists because of his excesses. “The Tea Party wouldn’t exist without him,” this fellow wrote.
But…of course the Tea Party would exist without him. The Tea Party would have happened to any Democrat elected President in 2008, because for all the grass-roots mythology the Tea Parties like to indulge, the fact is very simple: the Tea Party is nothing more than the same pissed-off Republicans who crawl out of the woodwork en masse every time a Democrat is in office. President Hillary Clinton would have faced a Tea Party. So would President Joseph Biden, President John Kerry, President…anyone at all from the Democratic Party.
And one last thought: Every single US Senator who voted against allowing gays to serve in the military (Harry Reid excepted, who only voted no for procedural reasons) can go to hell — especially those who hide behind the excuse that “It wasn’t fair! You didn’t let us offer amendments!” There’s right and there’s wrong, and the fact that you (a) stood up to be counted with ‘wrong’ and (b) claimed as your excuse that Senate procedure is just so much more important than doing right marks every single one of these people as moral midgets of the highest order. Especially John McCain. What a bastard that guy is.
OK, I’m done.
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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
It’s all a bunch of gorram felgercarb!
Today at work, we were talking movies and whatnot as we often do, and we happened on the topic of teevee edits of movies — specifically, the editing of swear words. My friend and I share a favorite one, from The Breakfast Club. During Brian’s (Anthony Michael Hall) confession, Claire (Molly Ringwald) says something that she intends to be comforting but is really condescending and rude. And when she tries to defend herself, she says, “Brian, you just don’t understand the kind of people I’m friends with, the kind of pressure I’m under!” And Brian responds, “What? I don’t understand pressure? Well, f*** you! F*** YOU!“. But, in the version of the film which is often aired on TBS, this is changed to: “Well, flip you! FLIP YOU!”
So now, we like to invoke the phrase “Flip you!” at opportune moments.
In the course of today’s conversation, I related an experience I had a while back. I’ve always had a soft spot for the movie Smokey and the Bandit, the Burt Reynolds flick. I watched it with my parents years ago for the first time, and since then I’ve only ever seen it on teevee. So, as far as I’m concerned, Sheriff Buford T. Justice throughout the film keeps calling people “You scum-bum!”
But…it turns out that’s not what he says. A while back, we checked the movie out of the library on DVD for a family movie night. It was as fun a flick as ever, but I noticed that Sheriff Justice was not calling everyone a “scum-bum”. He was calling everyone a “sumbitch”.
I suppose that’s the authentic, canonical version and all…but years of watching this movie the other way has made “scum-bum” canonical for me.
“Now where are you, you scum-bum!”
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Rails to Trails
As much as I love living in the Buffalo Southtowns, one thing I’ve always missed about this particular part of our region is the general lack of bike paths. Most of the best bike paths in the Buffalo region are north or east of the city — the paths along the river, Ellicott Creek, and in other points therein, mostly. Down here, there really aren’t any good bike paths. (Not to say that there’s no good biking down here; it’s just not of the “path” variety.)
Well, via Brian Castner of WNYMedia.net, I’ve learned that there’s an effort underway to transform the very abandoned railroad I blogged about last winter into a bike path. This would be a wonderful development. That railway runs through some of this region’s most beautiful country. I hope this happens more than I hoped for Bass Pro. (Well, that’s probably setting the bar pretty low, but…yeah, I want the trail!)
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Sentential Links #221
Linkage….
:: We have a bad habit of remembering Presidents as if they were or ought to have been genies.
:: Star Wars, Muppets, and Disney: three things I’ve always known.
:: His name was Mr. Crothers, and we called him “The Crud”, or just “Crud”. We called him that to his face. It was a term of endearment, if you can believe it. We loved him. (This is a beautiful post. Go read it.)
:: “Rest in Peace” is the most common line I’ve ever seen on a headstone.
Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t a plea. (Go read this one too.)
Pretty good week out there in Blogistan! Let’s try to keep it going, folks. Don’t let me down!
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They like Neil Diamond.
I noticed this car’s license plate while sitting at a red light a couple of weeks ago. “Song sung blue, everybody knows one!”
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Yeesh
Packers 34, Bills 7. Another pie in the face for Bills fans, hooray!!
Wow, it’s fun being a Bills “fan”. It’s fun watching their fourth-year quarterback struggling to get to 100 yards passing; it’s fun seeing him get sacked six times; it’s fun seeing the defense play pretty well but ultimately wear down because they’re on the field forever; it’s fun seeing the line’s inability to block anyone; it’s fun seeing the receivers’ inability to get open or make plays.
Mostly, though, it’s fun when the game ends.
Yeesh, indeed. The Bills have been bad for the entire run of this blog (this is the ninth season during which I’ve been blogging), but right now? This is the worst they’ve been, that I can remember. They may even be worse right now than they were in 2001. I knew they were going to stink, but I had hoped for some small bright spot here and there. Not so much, though.
(But we can console ourselves by following the University of Washington’s football team, right? Because that’s where Jake Locker, the guy currently touted to be next year’s #1 pick in the Draft, plays? Sure…and then we see that yesterday, against Nebraska, Locker went 4 for 20, 71 yds, 1 TD, and 2 INTs. Hope springs eternal!)
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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Cats as Marvel characters. Great stuff! This one was my favorite:
:: I’ve never been one to favor the miniatures-and-models era of film visual effects on some kind of a priori basis, under the assumption that something made physically by hand is inherently superior to something made virtually on a powerful computer. That’s not to say that I don’t love great physical visual effects work, because I do. But I don’t share the “Computer effects, ewwww!” attitude that many geeks espouse. I do think that computers make it easier to do bad and unconvincing effects, but believe me, I’ve seen tons of bad and unconvincing effects from the miniatures-and-models era. (As big a James Bond fan as I am and have been for years, boy howdy are there some bad visual effects in the Bond films. The space sequence in Moonraker is laughable at times, and Atlantis rising from the sea in The Spy Who Loved Me just screams out “This is a tiny model!”)
I think that the reason CGI effects tend to be disparaged isn’t because they’re bad, but because they allow filmmakers to go for shots that, ultimately, are pretty ill-conceived. A shot that’s a bad idea would be a bad idea, whether the effect is physical or CGI. The ease of CGI, I think, greatly undermines the fact, underscored by hundreds of years of art history, that less is often more. Jaws is often lionized as a film where suspense is created by withholding its visual impact until the very end; you don’t see the shark in any kind of good, establishing way until the best possible moment (“You’re gonna need a bigger boat”). What’s forgotten is that the reason the film was made this way wasn’t because of any great “less is more” philosophy on the part of Steven Spielberg; the film was made this way by necessity because the physical shark model just wasn’t working. Had “Bruce the Shark” worked better, it’s almost certain that the film would have included a lot more shots of the shark, and probably earlier on.
So what’s the point here? Well, when you get a chance to pay some attention to “that man behind the curtain” on one of the great visual films of all time, well, how can you resist? So go check out Douglas Trumbull discussing the creation of the vast industrial cityscape of Blade Runner.
:: This fellow makes lightsabers. These are probably the best that are out there, aside from the real thing, if anyone ever manages to invent one.
More next week!
OH WAIT: I almost forgot!
Drink up me hearties, yo ho! ARRRRRRR!!!
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Racial Nastiness
This may offend some, actually, but it seems a valuable service to me: someone’s collecting instances of people using the ‘N’ word on Facebook, and blogging them. Racism is always depressing when I encounter it, but what’s really saddening here is how casual and open these folks are about it. I found this one particularly depressing, because of the guy’s profile pic — he’s a smiling daddy, holding his kid. I suppose he’s already raising the next generation of folks who hate. Or there’s this one, which nicely juxtaposes one woman’s nasty racism with her oh-so-devout Christianity.
I don’t know if I’m seeing it more, or if there’s more of it to see, but wow, am I seeing a lot of nasty hate out there. The other day I’m in a store (not The Store), and I see a guy pushing around a shopping card with his toddler daughter in the cart seat. And he’s being all happy and cute with his daughter. Kind of nice and heartwarming, right? Until he happened to turn around, and I saw his t-shirt: a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad, with the caption “The Prophet Muhammad eats diarrhea”.
(Oh, and since I’m on the topic, let me say this: Yes, I think that New York State’s Republican candidate for Governor, Carl Paladino, is likely racist. To my way of thinking, you don’t find the kinds of e-mails he was happily forwarding to everyone in his address book funny if you’re not racist. Any justifications based on some kind of convoluted logic that those kinds of things may be racist, but he‘s not racist because all he did was forward them, strike me as terribly unconvincing.)