Author: swanksalot

Some additional reading September 15th from 22:12 to 23:52:

• Nosferatu (1922) – Free Movie Download – PublicDomainFlicks.com – Here is your chance to see Nosferatu, for free. 4 hours to download the highest resolution version, but then computers are happy to work when you are asleep…
  Or you could watch lower resolution versions.

  "An unauthorized production of Bram Stoker's work (The legal heirs didn't give their permission), so the names had to be changed. But this wasn't enough: The widow of Bram Stoker won two lawsuits (1924 and 1929) in which she demanded the destruction of all copies of the movie, however happily copies of it were already too widespread to destroy them all. Later, the Universal studios could break her resistance against this movie. Count Orlok's move to Wisburg (Obviously the real "Wismar") brings the plague traceable to his dealings with the Realtor Thomas Hutter, and the Count's obsession with Hutter's wife, Ellen the only one with the power to end the evil.'

• Charlie Brooker on scarves and pubic hair trimming | – " Just as in London you're famously never more than 4ft from a rat, so in 21st-century factual entertainment shows the presenter is never more than four minutes from a pointless TV stunt. Like trying on some frilly pants. Or getting a bikini wax."
• Daily Howler: Joe Klein is mad at Saint McCain–now! Back then, he invented the myth – KURTZ (9/15/08): No national candidate in modern history, not even Hillary Clinton, has ever been lambasted and lionized in quite the way Palin is [sic]. Why, for instance, do so many journalists feel compelled to mention her looks? Why are her family choices at the center of a noisy, cable-driven debate? …

  In a word, that highlighted statement is simply deranged—unless we’re hiding behind the word “candidate.” As we’ve long noted, by the summer of 1999, two cable “news” networks were staging long programs about the vast number of murders the deeply vile Hillary Clinton had staged along with her deeply vile husband. (Yes, that’s right—her murders!) In real time, Kurtz mentioned one of those programs, in passing—but he didn’t say a word about the program’s astonishing content. His statement today is simply deranged. Having married a Republican hit-woman consultant, Kurtz has at last lost his mind."

A few interesting links for September 14th through September 15th:

• rogerebert.com :: Answer Man – I love Roger Ebert.
  "Q. Yo dude, u missed out on "Disaster Movie," a hardcore laugh-ur-@zz-off movie! Y U not review this movie!? It was funny as #ell! Prolly the funniest movie of the summer! U never review these, wat up wit dat?

  S.J. Stanczak, Chicago

  A. Hey, bro, I wuz buzier than $#i+, @d they never shoed it b4 hand. I peeped in the IMDb and saw it zoomed to #1 as the low$ie$t flic of all time, wit @ lame-@zz UZer Rating of 1.3. U liked it? Wat up wit dat?"

• WSJ’s New Look Is Fresh But Still Not Free | Epicenter from Wired.com – This I didn't know:
  The subscriber-only articles, however, have always readable through a back door for free if you cut and paste the headline and view the story in Google News.
• "You give out too many stars" – Here's why, in my incredibly brief reviews, I hardly ever give a rating. Too difficult to be subjective over time. Really have boiled down my reviews to thumbs up or thumbs down, the binary option. Sometimes I don't include that either, and you have to glean my meaning.

Some additional reading September 14th from 12:15 to 18:31:

• Comparisons: Last Installment – "Continuing (and, mercifully, ending) the comparisons made in my last two posts: McCain's and Obama's co-sponsored legislation in the 109th Congress. Criteria, caveats, etc., are the same as before: no purely ceremonial legislation; no legislation that just calls for a report or expresses the sense of the Senate; no legislation that appropriates less than $40 million, and does nothing else; no legislation of purely local interest. The list is below the fold."
• Think Progress- John McCain’s 43 Flip-Flops – I actually think there are more, but these are pretty well documented. How did McCain ever get a reputation as a "Straight Talker" anyway? Wait, don't answer, because it makes me sick to my stomach thinking about the number of times between now and November that I'll hear about "Bullshit Walker, Straight Talker" McCain. My neighbor said with straight face that McCain voted with Bush only 5% of the time (not 95% of the time). So-called low information voters have been misled for so long, they think they have the facts when the facts are really quite different.

Some additional reading September 13th from 18:38 to 20:53:

• Saturday Night At The Movies Darkness, darkness: My obsession… – Excellent! Adding a bunch of new films to my Netflix queue, stat…
  "This week, I wanted to spotlight a pair of lesser-known, under appreciated and previously hard-to-find films noirs from the 1940s that have finally seen the light of day on DVD. Moontide and Road House are two of the latest reissues in the ongoing Fox Film Noir Series, and both happen to feature the woman of my darkest dreams, Ida Lupino.

  The British-born Lupino (who left us in 1995 at age 81) was a staple of the classic American noir cycle from the early 40s through the late 50s. Although it wasn’t the only movie genre she worked in during her long career, it’s the one she was born to inhabit. She had a sexy, slinky, waif-like appearance that was intriguingly contrapuntal to her husky voice and tough-as-nails countenance"

• McCain's Anti-Family, Anti-Marriage Healthcare Plan – Strollerderby – "McCain's "healthcare plan" appears designed to punish both marriage and childbearing. And no, I don't just mean because it won't actually provide universal coverage or address the market failures of privatized health insurance. I mean even if you do it the courtesy of taking it on its own terms."

Some additional reading September 12th from 16:10 to 22:50:

• The Mahablog » Ike – "Where is all the sincere Republican concern that was displayed over Gustav? Two weeks ago, as the Republican National Convention was about to begin, President Bush flew to Texas so he could be filmed strutting around in an emergency control center, pretending to be doing something.

  Today, Bush stuck to his fundraising schedule."

  In other words, Republican's concern is phony, phony, phony.

• "Media Matters" Privileging the lie – Why it matters if the media fact-checks candidates assertions…just remember Gore vs. Bush
• Experience 101 – Dick Cavett – Opinion – New York Times Blog – "So far I have not seen her confronted with some of the things about which she has been, to put it in that awful Diplomatically Correct phrase, “somewhat less than fully truthful.” (Typesetter: If space is scarce, use “lying.”) As in claiming “no thanks” to the bridge money while failing to disclose that she kept it."
• Blog-Sothoth: The Power of the Internet Tubes – Most excellent:
  "Within a bit under 30 hours of posting my Donors Choose library was fully funded. You guys are awesome. I felt ridiculous but I was crying on my way to Back to School night tonight because I was so happy. How often do we cry from happiness? Not nearly enough. I thought it would take weeks to raise $400. I know teachers who wait forever."
• The Washington Monthly – Palin and the Bush Doctrine – "For that reason, one of the most striking things about Palin's response, to me, was this: in answering Gibson's question, she seemed to think that she was accepting the Bush Doctrine, but what she actually said just restated the old doctrine of preemption. When, as Palin said, "there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people", the claim that we have the right to preempt that strike does not require the Bush Doctrine; it just requires the old, and much more widely accepted, doctrine of preemption. That is: in what Palin says here, she's not actually supporting the Bush Doctrine at all. She's just saying what generations of American Presidents and candidates have said: that when a country is actually about to attack us, we don't have to wait for them to actually land a blow before we can strike back."
• James Fallows – The Palin Interview – "What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the "Bush Doctrine" exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years."

A few interesting links for September 11th through September 12th:

• Media Matters – Inappropriate content? – "Wilson posted a very important clip about Sarah Palin's church and the often radical brand of faith it practices. The clip was picked up all over the blogosphere and as of Thursday had been seen more than 160,000 at YouTube. (Watch the video here.)

  But then the clip was yanked. When Wilson tried to find out why he was told by YouTube it was because of "inappropriate content," which strikes us as very odd"

• Giant ice penis – is climate change to blame? | Metro.co.uk – "If there was any doubt about the terrible threat that global warming poses to humanity, then it can now be dismissed – as this shocking photograph proves that climate change is turning icebergs into giant penises."
• Ebert confirms fellow critic hit him at Toronto Film Festival — chicagotribune.com – This guy must have had too much coffee.
  "Lumenick reportedly was annoyed by being tapped on the shoulder by whomever was sitting behind him, so he got up, turned around and took a swing. Only afterward did Lumenick apparently realize he had hit Ebert, who had simply been trying to silently request Lumenick shift in his seat so as to not to block his view.

  "[Lumenick] hit him so hard everybody could hear it," a source told the Daily News. "Everyone freaked out and turned around."
  …
  his wife, Chaz, who did not witness what happened, was taken aback when she learned of it.

  "Her reaction when she heard: 'I'll get a no-neck guy from the West Side to break his knees,'" he recalled. "Just rhetorical, I trust."

• The First ‘08 Presidential Debate – 1908 that is.
  "William Jennings Bryan and William Howard Taft, both agreed to record cylinders of their speeches for the Edison Talking Machine company. Bryan, Mr. “Cross of Gold” himself, could hardly be restrained from constantly speechifying, while Taft, the middle-brow heir apparent to a two-term president and heartily rustic Easterner (aka Teddy Roosevelt), was more circumspect about squaring off. Although neither specifically debated the other in their series of recordings, owners of phonograph parlors and arcades set up countless faux debates by airing them one after another.
  Now, all 22 cylinders recorded by Taft and Bryan are available"
• Electoral-vote.com: President, Senate, House Updated Daily – "While most of the media attention is focused on candidate misstatements and national polls, there is important stuff going on below the radar. In particular, voter registration. Both sides are doing it, but the Obama campaign is doing it on a scale no party has previously done. According to an article in Time, voter registration is up by over 400,000 in Florida, Michigan, and North Carolina, and up by over 100,000 in 10 other key states. Most of the people being registered are under 35, a key Obama demographic. These huge increases could determine the election in a number of swing states."
• EVStrength.com – "The chart at the left shows the distribution of electoral votes based on statewide polls. The colors represent the gap in the poll. The larger the gap, the darker the color. 270 Electoral votes are needed to win, out of a possible 538 electoral votes."

Some additional reading September 11th from 15:37 to 16:45:

• Download free HD episodes of 'Battlestar Galactica', '30 Rock', and more | The Cheapskate – CNET News – Best thing about the just-released iTunes 8? HD versions of TV shows. To help kick things off, Apple is offering one free HD episode from each of a dozen shows (some of which are actually worth watching!).
• Why aren't women furious about Sarah Palin? | Salon Life – " What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right. The throat she's so hot to cut is that of all American women.

  I don't want Sarah Palin being the representative leader and custodian of my rights, my Constitution and my country any more than I want polygamist compound leader Warren Jeffs baby-sitting for my preteen goddaughters."