’cause my arm hurts, and I don’t wanna type anything…
Grand, Erie or vicinity
[view large on black www.b12partners.net/photoblog/index.php?showimage=17 ]
Author: swanksalot
Always good to have a second user look at things
links for 2008-06-09
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Disgusting use of taxpayer money. The concept of a bullet train from downtown to the airports is good, but not this way.
Netflixed Caligula
“Caligula (Three-Disc Imperial Edition)” (Analysis Film Releasing Corporation)
Shipped on 01/09/08.
Malcolm McDowell portrays the infamous emperor who wielded godlike power over ancient Rome while at the same time sleeping with his sister (Teresa Ann Savoy). Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud co-star in this film produced by Penthouse Magazine editor Bob Guccione and written by Gore Vidal. Warning: This unrated edition contains explicit sex, nudity and violence as well as disturbing imagery. [From Netflixed: Caligula]
Yikes. Easily the worst movie I’ve seen in years. Not even good porn, unless you like late 70’s Penthouse Magazine lesbian porn, or scenes of group (male) masturbation. I couldn’t make myself watch the whole thing, apparently there was even more over-the-top action to follow.
My two word review: cocaine-inspired megalomania. Apparently, Bob Guccione locked everyone except for sycophants out of the editing room, and cut and pasted footage so it is even more confusing. Gore Vidal sued to get the title changed from “Gore Vidal’s Caligula” to “Caligula”, though his name is still on the credits. Even as straight-out camp fun, this film wasn’t fun.
Roger Ebert’s review is classic:
“Caligula” is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length. That was on Saturday night, as a line of hundreds of people stretched down Lincoln Ave., waiting to pay $7.50 apiece to become eyewitnesses to shame.
I wanted to tell them … what did I want to tell them? What I’m telling you now. That this film is not only garbage on an artistic level, but that it is also garbage on the crude and base level where it no doubt hopes to find its audience. “Caligula” is not good art, It is not good cinema, and it is not good porn. [snip]
You have heard that this is a violent film. But who could have suspected how violent, and to what vile purpose, it really is? In this film, there are scenes depicting a man whose urinary tract is closed, and who has gallons of wine poured down his throat. His bursting stomach is punctured with a sword. There is a scene in which a man is emasculated, and his genitals thrown to dogs, who eagerly eat them on the screen. There are scenes of decapitation, evisceration, rape, bestiality, sadomasochism, necrophilia.
[snip]
“This movie,” said the lady in front of me at the drinking fountain, “is the worst piece of shit I have ever seen.”
Bill Moyers vs. Fox “News”
Fox News aka Faux News is journalism for those who despise journalism. I assume Bill O’Leilly will edit this footage to make it appear that Moyers won’t appear on Fox “News”.
I still wish Bill Moyers would run for President.
At the National Conference for Media Reform 2008. Fox personality Bill O’Reilly producer, Porter Barry ambushes PBS Bill Moyers to pepper him with questions regarding his political affiliations and his “refusal” to appear on O’Reily’s show. Moyers disputes Fox’s “facts.”
Uptake Political Correspondent Noah Kunin was nearby and obtained this raw video.
The refusal was actually that Bill Moyers said the condition would be that Bill O’Leilly would have to appear on Bill Moyers show first, for an one hour interview, and that somebody would have to ask Rupert Murdoch about the assertion that invading Iraq would lead to oil prices falling to $20/BBL.
BILL MOYERS: I want Bill O’Reilly to ask his boss [Rupert Murdoch] where is the $20 per barrel oil? … Rupert, you said one reason for going to war with Iraq was so we could get $20 per barrel oil. Oil is now $137 per barrel. It’s wrecking our economy… Is Rupert Murdoch responsible to the American People?
Vacant Thoughts
Can’t seem to focus today, have desultorily picked at the newspaper, have stopped and started my current book (The Great Influenza) half a dozen times. Getting a bit of cabin fever, healing. Almost able to walk normally, I think I have to jump on my trampoline or something. Can’t even focus on working on my screenplay, feel a bit like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, except that I cannot see anyone’s activity in the apartment buildings nearby (still under construction, or bad angle).
Even the cats are hiding from me…
links for 2008-06-08
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Whoo hooo! Number 58!
Junk journey highlights plastic soup of Pacific
One of these days we’ll have to do something about the sea of plastic polluting the ocean.
Sailing 4,000 miles on the Pacific Ocean made Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal sick. It wasn’t waves that turned their stomachs, but the amount of plastic garbage they encountered on a voyage with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation earlier this year.
The activists wanted more people to share their disgust about plastic litter that swirls, relatively unexplored, in continent-size patches of ocean.
To that end, they have built a motor-less craft from 15,000 recycled beverage bottles, fishing nets, and the cockpit of a Cessna, and are sailing it more than 2,000 miles from southern California to Hawaii. They left Long Beach, Calif., on Sunday.
[From Junk journey highlights ‘plastic soup’ of Pacific Ocean | Green Tech – CNET News.com]
We are all affected by global pollution, whether we realize it or not.
On the last Pacific voyage that ended in February, Eriksen and Paschal helped marine researcher Charles Moore assess the extent of pollution in the waters leading up to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic debris some estimate to be as large as the United States.
In early tests, a sample showed 48 parts of plastic to each part of plankton.
“They haven’t finished processing the samples, but there was an exponential increase in the plastic,” said Anna Cummins, who was also aboard and serves as Algalita’s education adviser. “What looked on the surface like clean water, when you pulled it up, it looked like plastic soup. It was disgusting.”
Algalita researchers said the floating, soupy landfill isn’t well understood because satellites can’t spot the translucent particles. And although efforts by scientists to explore plastic in five gyres around the world have been lacking, interest is expanding as the public learns more.
“No one really knows what’s out in the other gyres,” Cummins said. “In the north Pacific alone there’s Capt. Moore with his research boat. We are a small organization with five or six paid staff members.”
Eighty percent of the plastic comes not from ships but from land, where tossed consumer goods eventually travel from beaches and rivers into the ocean, according to Algalita.
Plastic concentrates poisons such as PCBs at levels a million times higher than found in the water, according to Japanese researchers.
I had only heard of one gyre, five is even worse. Maybe we should test putting Daniel Burd’s decomposition microorganism in one of the gyres.
J Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1 is now on sale at Lulu and Amazon
[The Rookery – 35mm, Illford film, Nikon 8008, scanned in Photoshop 3.5, or maybe 4.0]
Received my copy of this collection of essays, put together by Friend of B12 (FOB, as it were), Ginger Mayerson. Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it looks good. Damn good. The front and back cover are photos of mine, so if you are creating a library of my published works, go ahead and order a copy (the Lulu Press version is larger, and is only $7, or you can order a slightly smaller version at Amazon for $9).
The Journal of Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1, is a collection of the following blog essays: On Essays by Paul M. Rodriguez, Liberal Fascism: An Interesting Moral Question by Steve Gimbel, Paint Splatters & Pixie Dust by Dan Kelly, Ten Dates of Christmas? Ten Lords A Leaping: The Gallant Mariner by Deborah Teasdale, Vanity by Susan O’Doherty, The Pillory of Hillary by Becki Jayne Harrelson, Reparation… by TJ Bryan, Richer Than The Sum Of My Skirt by Birdie C. Jaworski, The Music’s Between Us by Kathy Moseley, How to Scare People With Statistics by Tom Good, Red Lipstick by Eva Lake, Barbarella: A Woman of her Time? by Patti Martinson, An Invert’s Manifesto by Chad Denton, Roadtripping by Molly Kiely. Enjoy!
[From The Wapshott Press » J Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1 is now on sale at Lulu and Amazon]
The Journal of Bloglandia is soliciting essays for a second volume, with more details here
Do Not Enter My Butt
click to embiggen
Wrong (way).
Totally stole this from Joe M500’s photo
www.flickr.com/photos/m500/2490405020/
but looks like a slightly different location.
Super Thick
even though drinking milkshakes like Daniel Day-Lewis might be a bit played out.
links for 2008-06-05
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mixed feelings.
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“race is only part of the social equation. Class is the important one and one you see reflected again and again.”
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fun info porn – a visual representation of what news topic is getting the most coverage
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cool. I’m a couple days into a Greek mythology refresher, but didn’t know there were other options.
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“What is it about Zhang Ke Jia that makes him the most exciting mainland Chinese filmmaker currently working”
links for 2008-06-04
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lots of good stuff here, especially Orchestra Baobab. I plan on listening, even if I don’t get tix.
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Sounds watchable. Seems to be out on DVD, so to the Netflix queue with ye
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I’ve been here a couple time, even tried whitefish, once. Stick with lox.
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A treatise/essay on notebooks, and journals. I am part of the tribe, for sure, even though most are in storage.
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“Um…Applebees doesn’t have salad bars. If you’re going to use this as a vehicle to test someone’s folksiness, at least know what the hell you’re talking about. Okay, bud?”
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What kind of headline is that? Come on, Yang has had his chain yanked enough.
City Hall Stairs
Fundraising: Obama vs McCain
Obama would seem to have an edge in fundraising, unless the economy tanks so much that the under $200-donation crowd can’t afford to contribute anymore.
Obama’s campaign spent significant resources on physical offices in battleground states. But those efforts often came to follow the informal infrastructure that his supporters built ahead of time by finding each other through my.barackobama.com and coordinating off-line to campaign for their candidate.
The most obvious area in which it led was online fund-raising. Just under half its record-level of $265 million raised so far came from donations of $200 or less, much of which flowed to the campaign through the internet. The Clinton campaign ended up tweaking its fund-raising approach after Obama’s initial successes and began asking supporters for smaller amounts of money in online fund-raising drives following each primary victory.
In contrast to Obama’s campaign, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has raised only $90.5 million during the same 2007 and 2008 period. Just over a third of his donations came from the $200-and-under crowd. Forty-two percent of it came through contributions at the maximum $2,000 level. For Obama, just under a quarter of his donations came from $2,000-level donations.
[From Obama, Propelled by the Net, Wins Democratic Nomination – Wired Blogs]
Hopefully, for all our sakes, that doesn’t happen.
McCain to spy on Americans Secretly
[There could be a hidden microphone in this light fixture if John McCain has his way]
McCain flip-flops on whether civil liberties are important. Now he’s against them, just like his mentor, George Bush.
If elected president, Senator John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president’s wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday.
McCain’s new tack towards the Bush administration’s theory of executive power comes some 10 days after a McCain surrogate stated, incorrectly it seems, that the senator wanted hearings into telecom companies’ cooperation with President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, before he’d support giving those companies retroactive legal immunity.
As first reported by Threat Level, Chuck Fish, a full-time lawyer for the McCain campaign, also said McCain wanted stricter rules on how the nation’s telecoms work with U.S. spy agencies, and expected those companies to apologize for any lawbreaking before winning amnesty.But Monday, McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, speaking for the campaign, disavowed those statements, and for the first time cast McCain’s views on warrantless wiretapping as identical to Bush’s.
[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. […]
We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.
The Article II citation is key, since it refers to President Bush’s longstanding arguments that the president has nearly unlimited powers during a time of war. The administration’s analysis went so far as to say the Fourth Amendment did not apply inside the United States in the fight against terrorism, in one legal opinion from 2001.
[From McCain: I’d Spy on Americans Secretly, Too | Threat Level from Wired.com]
Constitution, begone, says McCain, if it was good enough for Stalin, it’s good enough for Republicans.