Pretty much since we passed the here-comes-the-airplane, open-the-hangar stage, I’ve been trying to get Arthur to stop gesturing with his utensils. Particularly loaded utensils.
So last night at the dinner table I said:
Don’t wave your pork at me.
Pork is a funny word.
Okay, here’s an interesting topic (for Wiccans anyway—the rest of you go read Tom).
Via Pagan Soujourner, I find that Essais wonders what’s up with using salt on the altar to represent Earth.
As a symbol of earth, it hasn’t got a lot going for it, other than just sort of generally being a mineral. Lots of other things do that. It’s a consumable, yes, and associated with hospitality, but the reason for that is also its rarity…
So it’s supposed to represent Earth. In that case, why not use…earth? Dirt’s free. It’s plentiful. And when you don’t need it anymore…there’s an obvious place to put it.
(Note: This is an original post I wrote for a guest gig at Pandagon. It never appeared here. I have some new thoughts on the topic that I’ll be getting to over the next few days, so I thought I’d start by posting this.)
Stan Lee and Gene Roddenberry. I should throw Jack Kirby in there too, since Lee took credit for a lot of Kirby’s work, so they say. What do they have in common?
Naked fantasy.
I first started sparking on this idea while reading the wonderful The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, a chronicle of many things—escape artistry, survivor guilt, the Golem, coming out—among which the birth of superhero comics figured prominently. And clearly these characters were fictionalized Kirbys and Lees, or, going back further, Siegels and Schusters and Kanes and Fingers. And there they were, these guys, these kids, really, a boys club of boy fantasies; hoping and dreaming and basically jerking off, unself-consciously, unanalytically writing and drawing their nerdy fantasies and sharing them with the world.
That’s what makes them so great. These are raw fantasies, innocent, really. Newer comics are self-conscious, post-Modern, post-Freudian, either studiously artistic or cynically pornographic. Either carefully feminist or sadistically anti-feminist. Not these guys. From the 1930s through the mid-1960s, these guys wrote their dorky little dreams and sold them en masse. “I wanna be a boy sidekick,” “I wanna fly,” “I wanna smash the bad guys and get the girl.” Simple, innocent, fiercely, magnificently false-to-reality and true-to-heart.
You’re a classic – powerful, athletic, and competitive. You’re all about winning the race and getting the job done. While you have a practical everyday side, you get wild when anyone pushes your pedal. You hate to lose, but you hardly ever do.
Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.
So this weekend I did two events at The Crystal Fox.
I drove from New Jersey to Annapolis on Friday night. It was a grueling trip. Only two hundred miles, but it took five and a half hours of miserable frickin traffic yuck.
But the hotel room was very nice.
I arrived at the Annapolis store rested and was warmly greeted by Spider and Dream. Everyone was friendly and the place was very nice. I taught The Structure of Spellcasting in the quick, one-hour version. It is HARD to squeeze that material into one hour. We ran over by about fifteen minutes and that still wasn’t enough. People were interested though, and it went well.
Then I strolled through the Annapolis mall, which was quite nice as malls go. I stared a lot at the many sailors in dress whites and thought “Fleet Week” until I realized I was not in New York but Annapolis, and there are always cadets in dress whites in Annapolis.
Sunday I arrived at the Laurel location for the next class. Same class, more people, bigger store. Really big store, actually, quite gorgeous and full of yummy Pagan goodies. Also nice air conditioning. After the class I did several readings and then drove home.
My back is killing me, but it was an excellent weekend. Sterling, Spider, Dream, and all the people I met were terrific.
I get between ten and fifty spam comments a day that feature long lists of linked urls.
WordPress, by default, moderates all comments with more than three linked urls.
By default. Like, I don’t have to know anything about blogging or spam for this to happen. It does it for me. I assume other blogging software does similar stuff. So these comments never get through. Never.
So if the spam never gets through, what’s the point? Who is it reaching? Who is the target audience?
Seriously, I have no idea.
But if you scroll past the list of moderated spam comments, it’s kind of funny. It all blurs together, so you end up seeing things about having anal sex with vicodin.
Two For the Money (2005) 7/10
Brandon Lang (Matthew McConaughey) was a college football star until he trashed his knee. Now he predicts football outcomes for a 900-line. There he’s discovered by Walter Abrams (Al Pacino), who owns the biggest sports tout operation around. Lang becomes Abrams’s protege, caught up in a whirlwind of high-end gambling, and in Abrams’s marriage to Toni (Rene Russo).
This is the kind of movie that never quite makes the radar of the casual movie-goer. It has a small but strong cast, an interesting premise that’s hard to describe (as the preceding paragraph illustrates) and lacks the kind of hook that fills theater seats. I would probably never have seen it if I wasn’t in a hotel room with nothing to do but browse HBO’s offerings.
For all the whir and buzz of high-stakes gambling and hard-sell phone banks, Two for the Money is fundamentally a character study. Brandon is lost without football, and allows Walter to make him into a new person; “John Anthony, the Million Dollar Man.” Walter is a gambling addict who likens himself to an alcoholic bartender; he serves but doesn’t drink. Yet with Brandon/John, he seems to be gambling again—on his protege’s career.
Most interesting is Renee Russo as Toni, doing devoted wife as if you’ve never seen one on-screen before. She is luminous in the role; solid in her commitment to her husband, honest about his many faults, frightened of the direction he’s taking. I can’t say the movie would be worth watching without her. She’s really something.
Pacino is terrific here. He’s over the top in that patented Pacino way, but he’s playing a character; he’s definitely Pacino playing Abrams and not Pacino playing Pacino which, let’s face it, gets old. McConaughey is more of a cipher, but he’s playing a character who doesn’t really know himself.
Two for the Money meanders, and isn’t quite sure of itself. It oversells certain points, and then backs away from other points that should have been solidly nailed. Unfinished business with Brandon’s father is alluded to, but just when you think we’re moving into some satisfying family drama, the script backs away, and leaves us with Brandon’s surrogate father (Abrams) instead. That felt like a gaping hole to me. This was one example of a dot not being connected; I felt writer Dan Gilroy didn’t know the difference between hanging back for subtlety, and avoiding the issue because you don’t know how to write it. Maybe the “based on a true story” aspect inhibited him.
Despite these dissatisfactions, Two for the Money delivers strong performances, intimate, complex relationships, and interesting characters.
Your results:
You are James T. Kirk (Captain)
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You are often exaggerated and over-the-top in your speech and expressions. You are a romantic at heart and a natural leader.  |
Click here to take the “Which Star Trek character am I?” quiz…
Back in 1998 I visited Australia for a month (Queensland to be precise). We visited a zoo, and this particular zoo had all the pervy animals in the country all gathered together.
I still don’t like to talk about the sexual assault by the emu. I mean, I know it’s just a big bird, but it was a big bird that made inappropriate advances upon my person.
Then there was the horny kangaroo, who did not assault me, but chased the rooey ladies about the enclosure, as a result of which “horse” is no longer the word I think of to complete the phrase “hung like a…” Golly.
But I know my audience. You all want to hear about the lesbian peahen.
» Read more..
I’ve been hearing about this Olbermann Countdown, and I’ve been trying to find a transcript, and thanks to Pandagon, here it is.
The gist of it is a fairly brilliant timeline showing the coincidence of political events unfavorable to the Republicans and terror alerts (generally two to four days later). This is a “top ten” that doesn’t even include last week’s little liquid crisis.
Here’s an excerpt, just to whet your appetite.
No. 9, July 29, 2004, at their party convention in Boston, the Democrats formally nominate John Kerry as their candidate for president. As in the wake of any convention the Democrats now dominate the media attention over the subsequent weekend.
August 1, 2004, Monday morning, three days later…
The department of Homeland Security raises the alert status for financial centers in New York, New Jersey, and Washington to orange. The evidence supporting the warning, reconnaissance data left in a home in Iraq. Later proves to be roughly four years old and largely out of date.
(Emphasis added.)
Read the whole thing. Seriously.
