Pulling a late-night shift in your Agenda 21 black helicopter? Make a cup of coffee and enjoy some links.
The Onion: Ground Emerges As Tim Tebow’s Favorite Target
FILM CRITIC HULK SMASH! talks about Prometheus and Damon Lindelhof. Not breaking news, but a good distillation of why I am still grumpy about that one.
Krugman vs. Paul Ryan.
Max goofing around with a seven month old labrador pup.
Chat about whatever.
Corner Stone
Fucking authoritarians.
That is all.
gussie
That critic guy is talking about a movie?
Mark S.
I don’t even remember Prometheus coming out. Was in theaters for only a week?
Dr. Squid
It’s almost football season, which means it’s almost time for tbogg’s weekly series about St. Timothy of the Red Zone Interception.
Yutsano
MAXPUPPEH!!
@Dr. Squid: Since I’m pretty much agnostic on the Jets, I say welcome to the life that is Seahackitude.
Hill Dweller
Krugman’s evisceration of Niall Ferguson(and Newsweek) was also good.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Here’s something weird, directory Tony Scott commits suicide in LA.
Mark S.
I love that Krugman hates Ryan even more than I do. It’s galling to see such a stone cold idiot be lauded as some serious intellectual. I swear, Ryan really isn’t much smarter than Palin, Gohmert, or Bachmann.
Corner Stone
@The prophet Nostradumbass: God. He left a Prius behind.
Really sad for him and his family.
Redshift
We were over at a friend’s house, and his friend who is one of those Heinlein libertarians but amazingly enough, quite pleasant in general, had given him a copy of Atlas Shrugged, Part I. I don’t know what possessed us, but we watched it, and actually made it all the way through. Without alcohol.
I had heard a lot about it, of course, and he had actually already watched it (assuming, probably, that no one would want to watch it with him), so he warned us that there would be numerous points where we would want to yell at the screen “Why are you doing that? No sane person would decide to do that!” But we went ahead anyway.
It is indeed quite dreadful, in that it manages to hit near the bottom of the “bad” curve, without getting anywhere near “so bad it’s good.” And unusually for bad movies, not a lot of the badness is in the technical aspects (at least on the small screen.) The aspects that are monumentally bad are the wooden acting, the dreadful dialogue, and of course, the completely insane Ayn Rand world.
It actually reminded me of Left Behind (or at least what I’ve read of it) with Rand’s twisted ideology taking the place of Revelations. What the text dictates is paramount, and even if it means the characters have to do ridiculous things that no real person would do, that’s what they must do.
Mark S.
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Geez.
daveNYC
Trinity on the UES. Best bar ever. Been going there through at least six bartenders and it still maintains the same vibe. Plus they have good buy backs.
? Martin
@Redshift:
So it’s just like the Republican party.
Seen it already.
Spaghetti Lee
I tried reading that movie column, but I can’t do the all-caps thing. I get that it’s his shtick or whatever, but I might as well be looking at hieroglyphs.
But, as long as we’re complaining about pretentious movie critics, I present Zach Baron: http://www.grantland.com/search/_/query/zach-baron
His latest gem: a self-consciously old-school action film that doubles as an argument for the continuing existence of self-consciously old-school action films — i.e., the type of film that would never in one thousand bloody years come packaged with a meta-textual plea for its basic right to exist.
He’s talking about The Expendables 2, by the way.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Is it just me, or does Julian Assange, with his haircut, look kind of like Glenn Beck?
pseudonymous in nc
@Hill Dweller:
Krugman really fucking dislikes Ferguson, because Ferguson is a bandwagon-jumping poseur and lickspittle who decided that academia bored him and that pontificating about things he knows very little about pays a lot better.
Yutsano
@The prophet Nostradumbass: I saw what you did there. :)
Bobby Thomson
@Mark S.: I don’t remember him oming out either. I thought he stole fire for a woman.
MikeJ
Just got back from dinner at Place Pigalle. French is the same as the UN, right?
Had rabbit two ways, a burgundy, and a rainier cherry-pecan torte.
Corner Stone
@MikeJ:
Disturbing.
Redshift
@? Martin:
Pretty much. If reality doesn’t match ideology, reality must be wrong. But it’s funnier when the result is a bad movie rather than real people suffering unnecessarily.
MikeJ
@Corner Stone: It was good, but not that kind of good. Braised leg meat and saddle of rabbit stuffed with duck sausage. The sausage made it. Spicy and delicious.
Yutsano
@MikeJ: I’m quite fond of rabbit, despite the cuteness factor. I’ll have to find a butcher that carries it.
Jewish Steel
Midnight walk with basenji Cisco. Something startles him and makes him snort and jump. Which startles me and makes me jerk his leash. Which startles him further making him lunge. And this is why no one ever asks us to go on important secret missions.
Gian
Hank Williams Jr made a Hank WIlliams Jr of himself…
Following the song “We Don’t Apologize for America,” a chant of “USA, USA” broke out among the crowd. Williams smiled, telling the crowd that he was their mouthpiece and adding:
“We’ve got a Muslim president who hates farming, hates the military, hates the U.S., and we hate him!”
The cheers that followed were loud and enthusiastic.
http://www.freep.com/article/20120819/ENT07/120819009/Hank-Williams-Jr-bashes-Obama-at-Iowa-State-Fair?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE
Mark S.
Has anyone else seen that weird ad for “Become a Social Worker” with some weird baby?
Mnemosyne
@Redshift:
I’m almost tempted to watch it for the train trip through the vast deserts of Wisconsin.
Villago Delenda Est
@Redshift:
“You can write this shit, George, but you can’t say it.” — Harrison Ford
PurpleGirl
@Bobby Thomson: The movie is a prequel to the Aliens series.
ETA: I don’t remember when it came out but I think my dentist mentioned seeing it. (We both like SF movies.)
RadioOne
I thought the Tebow trade to the Jets was inevitable, after Peyton Manning was dealt to the Broncos.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Gian: He’s probably trying to pull a Ted Nugent.
PurpleGirl
@Redshift: Have you ever visited Slacktivist? Fred Clark has been doing a deconstruction of the Left Behind series for a few years now. Currently he is critiquing the third book. He usually posts those pieces on Friday. He has also done posts of the movies made from Left Behind. Good stuff. (Slacktivist is on JC’s blog roll.)
Pavonis
Famous pseudohistorian Niall Ferguson just wrote a long article for Newsweek, “Why Barack Obama Needs To Go”.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/19/niall-ferguson-on-why-barack-obama-needs-to-go.html
Ironically, every graph he includes can be interpreted as proving Obama’s policies are working.
1) Unemployment is decreasing. But Niall’s upset because the original predictions were too rosy. And why is going back to Bush’s policies going to help?
2) Oh no! China’s GDP is going to overtake America’s! But look closely… America’s GDP is growing quite a bit faster than Europe’s. And China has 4X the population of the USA. If you think any US president could stay ahead GDP-wise without pretty much nuking China back to the stone age, you are delusional.
3) Niall’s “Epic Budget Fail” graph is the third. It looks like Obama has significantly decreased the deficit. The original predictions were too rosy again but does anybody care about that?
Yutsano
@Pavonis: Oh Gawd. I stopped reading when it became obvious he was just spouting talking points. Go back to Britain and suck Cameron’s dick Niall.
Redshift
@PurpleGirl: Yeah, that’s where most of my knowledge of Left Behind comes from. I haven’t kept up with it, though. I should read some more.
Narcissus
I would join a conspiracy if they gave me a black helicopter.
Is it like Kitt? Does it have an erudite computer I can verbally spar with I mean
Also I go both ways so if anybody belongs to the homosexual agenda I can do double agent work
Brachiator
“Prometheus” turned out to be one of the least interesting movies of the summer. Nobody much cares about it anymore, or reactions to it. Hulk Smash wastes time in beating up on Lindeholf; the sadder thing is that Ridley Scott could not steer the movie away from incoherency.
@Redshift:
Atlas Shrugged isn’t much of a novel, but I doubt that her acolytes care. They see it more like the parable of the cave in Plato’s Republic.
I saw some stuff about the Hank Williams diatribe. This dovetails with the last minutes of a talk radio show I caught on the way home on Saturday. The callers kept talking about how they just couldn’t trust Obama, and how he just wasn’t right for the country. One caller actually believes that Paul Ryan is trying to save Medicare.
The fomenters of hate among conservatives should pat themselves on the back. They have thoroughly convinced a segment of the electorate to vote against their own interests.
PurpleGirl
@Redshift: Me too. I would not read the books if paid to do so.
Pavonis
@Brachiator
I liked some parts of “The Republic”. For example, there is the scene in the “Tale of Er” where souls draw lots on whom they get (re)incarnated as. Whether you’re born rich or poor, smart or dumb, male or female, etc. is completely out of your control. Almost all the determinants of where you are and who you are in the world are just due to luck (quite the opposite message from Atlas Shrugged). I would have stopped there and said that for this reason we should give everybody a chance to live a good and happy life. But Plato continues and has the souls exchange lots with the point being that sometimes a life of wealth and power is not a life of virtue and exchanging your lot for one lower down on the ladder could make you a better person (again the opposite of Atlas Shrugged).
andy
Got the week off, so I started out taking a walk around the neighborhood, then made some stuffed tomatoes as a side for pork chops. Not quite as sturdy as peppers, they have a tendency to split if you hollow them out too far. Still tasty though.
Brachiator
Shit. I heard a news story earlier today about a man who jumped off the Vincent Thomas Bridge. This is pretty unusual.
Very sad to learn that the man who jumped was Tony Scott, director of “Top Gun” and other movies, and brother of Ridley Scott.
Also just heard that Scott MKenzie died. He sang the 1967 hippie anthem, “San Francisco.”
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.
ChrisB
A writer at the New York Times noted the following about the Jets, who much to my enjoyment may be terrible this year:
Go to the article for details:
http://fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/jets-offense-supplies-the-comedy/?ref=sports
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Some directors can take a weak script, work with the screenwriter (or find someone else to revise the script), and salvage the film.
Ridley Scott is not one of those directors. He can do a great job with a script that’s already strong, but he’s no good at shoring up a weak script.
Rex Everything
Every time I turn around, someone is bashing Prometheus for not being the movie they would have made or whatever.
Meanwhile nobody EVER bashes fitfully-decent-but-mostly-crap TV fare, e.g. Mad Men or Breaking Bad, which are rife with shitty writing, shallow themes that collapse under scrutiny, tin-eared dialogue, Norwegian Americans who are Catholic not Lutheran, drug dealers who make Eminem look like a viable tough guy, etc.
My prediction: Within 10 years Prometheus, like 2001 and Bladerunner before it, will begin to overcome its undeserved bad rap and be seen as the classic it is, and all this “great” television will have mercifully faded from the common memory as insubstantial ephemera tends to do.
Ben Franklin
Australian Broadcasting Company has a video of the Assange Sex Charges, hosted by Craig Murray.
Start at 20 min in.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/08/assange-sex-charges-detail/
Julia Grey
My brother.
It looked like it was going to be interesting, so I plunged in and kept going as long as I could, but my eyes started to cross about 4 paragraphs in…so.
Hmmm. I just thought of something. I’m going to take a Select All, paste it to Text Edit, and then use a set of conversion “Services” that I have from a forgotten provenance for “Upper Case at beginning of Sentences” or something like that. (I was afraid that I had lost all my services when I upgraded to OSX 10.6.8, but thankfully not. Probably would if I went to Lion, though.)
Julia Grey
That worked. All the other formatting (like italics, bold etc.) was stripped out in its trip through the Clipboard, but it is far more readable in mostly lowercase.
And it IS pretty good.