Just watched Easy Rider for probably the 30th time, and it sure is sad seeing young Dennis Hopper knowing he is now dead. But this scene will always be priceless:
INDIANS!
by John Cole| 20 Comments
This post is in: Movies, Open Threads
Just watched Easy Rider for probably the 30th time, and it sure is sad seeing young Dennis Hopper knowing he is now dead. But this scene will always be priceless:
INDIANS!
by Sarah, Proud and Tall| 19 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Open Threads, Pink Himalayan Salt
I see that Megan has some flying monkeys in from the Cato Institute to run her blog while she is off on her broomstick on a salt-mining expedition in Nepal or hunting down the elusive gold Thermomix in the wilds of Manhattan.
I daren’t look too closely. Are the walls over there even more shit smeared than usual?
Open Thread: Yes – let the joyous news be spread!Post + Comments (19)
by John Cole| 20 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Sports
Just got back from a charity basketball game pitting various members of Bethany College sports teams, fraternities and sororities, and faculty up against the Pittsburgh Steelers charity basketball team. Lots of WVU boys showed up to represent the Steelers- Corey Ivy, Ryan Mundy, and the newly acquired Wes Lyons (and I am thrilled about that), as well as Ramon Foster, John Clay, and the one I couldn’t believe, LOUIS LIPPS! The tip-off was funny, pitting 6’8″ Wes Lyons against a 5′ NOTHING Bethany sorority girl:
Here’s a pic of the rest of the Steelers:
The Steelers weren’t even trying, just passing the ball over everyone’s heads and shooting three’s, and generally not taking it seriously at all, but every now and then one of them would forget this was a charity event and you would get a glimpse of how very fast and athletic they are as they would race down the court, then sort of remember this wasn’t serious, and just hold up and shoot a three.
And Ramon Foster is really funny, hamming it up with the crowd and just generally being amusing.
by John Cole| 69 Comments
This post is in: Because of wow., The War On Women, Clown Shoes
That Gov. Nikki Haley (R- Appalachian Trail) says you don’t care about contraceptives or birth control. So you can scratch that off your list of concerns.
This post is in: Books, Open Threads, Popular Culture, Readership Capture, Television
I know that some Balloon Juicers are extremely enthusiastic about HBO’s Game of Thrones, but I don’t know how many of you read Laura Miller’s pre-first-season New Yorker report on “A fantasy writer and his impatient fans“:
The writer George R. R. Martin left Hollywood in 1994, determined to do what he wanted for a change. He’d had some success in television, working on a new version of “The Twilight Zone” and on the fantasy series “Beauty and the Beast.” But the pilot for “Doorways,” a series he’d developed, hadn’t been picked up, and he was tired of the medium’s limitations. “Everything I did was too big and too expensive in the first draft,” he told me recently. He wanted castles and vistas and armies, and producers always made him cut that stuff. A line producer for “The Twilight Zone” once explained to him, “You can have horses or you can have Stonehenge. But you can’t have horses and Stonehenge.”
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On the printed page, however, he could have it all. He recalls telling himself, “I’m going to write a fantasy and it’s going to be huge. I’m going to have all the characters I want and all the battles I want.” In 1996, he published a novel of seven hundred pages, “A Game of Thrones,” the first volume of a projected trilogy called “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The series chronicles the struggle for power among several aristocratic families in the Seven Kingdoms, an imaginary medieval nation. In a genre crowded with stale variations on what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey,” with plots distilled from ancient legends, Martin took his inspiration from history instead of from mythology; he based his tale, loosely, on the Wars of the Roses, the bloody dynastic struggles in medieval England. Compared with most epic fantasy fiction, Martin’s story contained relatively little magic, and it felt dangerous, lusty, and real…
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The days when nobody showed up for a Martin signing are long gone. In January, at a hastily scheduled appearance at Vroman’s Bookstore, in Pasadena, hundreds of fans waited in a line that coiled around the store. They presented Martin with volumes from “A Song of Ice and Fire” and works from his early years as a science-fiction writer, as well as with calendars, posters, e-readers, yellowing pulp magazines, and replica swords. Three young women wore handmade T-shirts emblazoned with the coats of arms of their favorite clans from the series. Martin was unflaggingly attentive to his supplicants, including the couple who asked him to pose for a photograph with their infant daughter, who was named Daenerys, for one of his heroines…
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A typical post-Tolkien epic fantasy is the best-selling “Wheel of Time” series, by Robert Jordan. David McCaman, a marketing executive and one of the founding members of the Brotherhood Without Banners, dismissively summarizes the genre this way: “The young kid on the farm discovers he has powers, and no one dies, and they find the magic to rule the world.” He calls it “Nerf fantasy,” meaning that “it’s really safe.” By contrast, “A Song of Ice and Fire” doesn’t truck with “orcs and goblins and dark lords and bad and good. It revolves around people, really gritty people, and real situations, things that you don’t see in fantasy—sex and language and betrayal.” Benioff once told New York that “Game of Thrones” was “ ‘The Sopranos’ in Middle-earth,” and although he now winces at the formulation, it remains sound; the book’s intricate, racy narrative practically feels custom-built for HBO. The series especially resembles “Rome” and “Deadwood,” although, unlike them, it’s free from even the most perfunctory obligation to be historically accurate…
Miller’s story mostly covers the fandom that grew up around the “Song of Ice & Fire” books, which developed (like Martin himself) out of an established sf fandom / community. I haven’t yet read the books, nor watched the HBO series, but I was part of another corner of that larger fannish community from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. So were some of the early, daring progressive political bloggers — people like Avedon Carol and Gary Farber and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. It sometimes fascinates me how much the current political-blogging subculture seems to be recapitulating the post-Star Trek, pre-millenial fannish era, as an influx of newbies attracted by big new shiny popcult “fads” threatens to overwhelm the original self-sufficient (if somewhat inbred) community…
Late Night Open Thread: Games of GRRMartinPost + Comments (61)
This post is in: Election 2012, Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Because it’s never a bad time to point out what a horrible idea Americans Elect is, here’s Gail Collins on “the worst new trend of the political season“:
…Perhaps you have not yet focused on Americans Elect. It’s a new-generation political movement that aims to rise above the petty forces of partisan bickering and choose a presidential candidate, along with a running mate from a different party, at an online convention in June. As a reward, the winning team will receive a presidential ballot line in every state, along with some very cool online technology with which to run their campaign. It’s similar to “Project Runway” except for the most-powerful-job-on-the-globe part…
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[T]he whole Americans Elect concept is delusional, in a deeply flattering way: We the people are good and pure, and if only we were allowed to just pick the best person, everything else would fall into place. And, of course, the best person cannot be the choice of one of the parties, since the parties are … the problem.
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Getting a presidential ballot line in 50 states is really, really difficult. To do so, Americans Elect has already collected nearly 2.5 million signatures around the country, using the deeply American tactic of paying people to do it.
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The source of the money is a little murky. Some names have been made public. Some haven’t. Byrd says that’s not a problem because “the candidates don’t know who the donors are and the donors don’t know who the candidate is going to be.”
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If the Americans Elect candidate does make a big splash in November, we will have discovered yet another part of the presidential elections process that loopy billionaires could purchase out of their petty cash. Tired of financing right-wing contenders for the Republican nomination? Buy your own ballot line…
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The thing that makes our current politics particularly awful isn’t procedural. It’s that the Republican Party has become over-the-top extreme. You can try to fix that by working from within to groom a more sensible pack of future candidates, or from without by voting against the Republicans’ nominees until they agree to shape up.
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Otherwise, no Web site in the world will cure what ails us.
Apart from the political shenanigans of people with more money than sense, what’s on this evening’s agenda?
Monday Evening Open Thread: American SelectPost + Comments (54)
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads
A pic from our usual weekend morning hike. Max got in a footrace with another herd of deer this week. He lost, of course. Being a doberman he disappeared into the trees, screeched to a halt and sprinted back to make sure I was ok. Love this dog.
God knows what he would do if he ever caught one. A couple of times he cornered a baby squirrel or a very young sparrow, and both times he just bumped noses and waited for the terrified little thing to smooch him back. Not much of a killer my Max.
Chat about whatever.