Haunting the Web Since 1999
Honestly, this is pathetic. As I said here, it’s time to raise our expectations of what we can achieve in space, and fund manned exploration of the solar system accordingly. Particularly given how much we’re blowing on the Pentagon’s space toys at the moment, we could stand to spend a bit more on one of the most important collective human endeavors still before us.
A big one I missed the other day (found on Vanity Fair): The trailer for Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is now online, with Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits, Verne Troyer, Lily Cole, and, in his final performance, Heath Ledger (abetted by Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law.) Wow. Looks more Gilliamesque than anything Terry’s done in years.
“‘For 10 years, I was a laugh,’ he told CNN in an interview. ‘[But I] kept pounding at them and pounding at them saying hey, here’s where it’s at. Here’s where tomorrow, this is it. You can drown out anybody with it. And you can make all these different sounds that you can’t do with a regular guitar.’” Lester William Polfuss, a.k.a. Les Paul, 1915-2009. “In 1948, after being involved in a severe car accident, he asked the doctor to set his arm permanently in a guitar-playing position.“
“Eventually, the agency’s network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that was dubbed Strawberry Fields, officials said. (It was named after a Beatles song after C.I.A. officials joked that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, ‘forever.’)“
Charming. The NYT gets a window into the CIA’s top-secret “black sites” program courtesy of former #3 man Dusty Foggo, who — irony alert — is currently serving a three-year term in a Kentucky jail on fraud charges associated with Duke Cunningham. (I presume Kentucky’s finest have yet to break out the “enhanced interrogation techniques” on this joker. Speaking of which, “[n]othing exotic was required for the infamous waterboards — they were built on the spot from locally available materials…The cells were constructed with special features to prevent injury to the prisoners during interrogations: nonslip floors and flexible, plywood-covered walls to soften the impact of being slammed into the wall.“)
The woeful state of American political journalism, in a nutshell (and in two parts):
1. CNN and WP media poobah Howard Kurtz, on Twitter today: “Booking hell: All pundits are in the Hamptons or Vineyard. Intelligent discourse apparently ceasing.“
2. CNBC to Teabaggers today: Can you guys please stage us a really violent rally? “We have a media request for an event this week that will have lots of energy and lots of anger. This is for CNBC.“
So. Broken.
“This is not about zombies popping out of closets. This is a story about survival, and the dynamics of what happens when a group is forced to survive under these circumstances. The world (in ‘Walking Dead‘) is portrayed in a smart, sophisticated way.” Don Draper and Walt White, meet the Zombie Apocalypse: Apparently, AMC is close to contracting Frank Darabont to oversee, and Gale Ann Hurd to produce, a television series from Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. Clever, clever — I’d watch it. (And let’s hope they use the most recent mathematical modeling to keep things on the up-and-up.)
So…are political firings and lying to Congress still against the law these days, or is the plan to treat these particular criminal offenses like we do torture? In the meantime, I’d expect Rove is on the phone right this very moment, imploring his good friends at FreedomWorks and the like to dial up the crazies for the next few news cycles.
Update: More comes to light on Harriet Miers’ involvement as well.
“Much ink has been spilled on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. Of America’s seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes–to whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave…In fact none of these authors would write much that was any good beyond the age of 40, Faulkner’s prose seizing up with sclerosis, Hemingway sinking into unbudgeable mawkishness.“
By way of Dangerous Meta, The Economist‘s Tom Shone considers the artistic merits of novelists sobering up. “The radiance of late Carver is so marked as to make you wonder how much the imperturbable gloom of late Faulkner, or the unyielding nihilism of late Beckett — like the cramped black canvases with which Rothko ended his career — were dictated by their creators’ vision, and how much they were simply symptoms of late-stage alcoholism. This suspicion is open to the counter-charge: this contentment and bliss is all very well, but readers may simply prefer the earlier, messed-up work.“
Ben Barnes (a.k.a. Prince Caspian) goes more than a little Wilde in the bedrooms and backalleys of London in in the teaser for Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray, also with Colin Firth and Rebecca Hall. Looks a bit Red Shoe Diaries, to be honest, but Ms. Hall is always a draw. That being said, why already show Dorian’s doppelganger?
z'[W]ith Reagan, the prophecy appreciation part of his brain functioned quite independently of the part that started wars (there’s nothing in the Old Testament about Nicaragua or even Grenada). Bush seems to have taken the threat of Gog and Magog to Israel quite literally, and, if this story can be believed, to have launched a war to stop them.“
One rather frightening story from a few days ago: As if the recent “Onward Christian Soldiers” war reports in GQ weren’t Crusadery enough, it appears that Dubya explictly invoked the End of Days to convince Jacques Chirac to get involved in the Iraq War, making his appeal Christian-to-Christian about the unholy dangers of Gog & Magog. Uh, really? (Apparently, Chirac has confirmed it.)