Amidst the mainly good news from the election on Tuesday was this heartbreaker: Proposition 8, California’s measure to eliminate gay marriage rights, passed. Not by a huge amount: the latest numbers are 52.5% to 47.5%, a difference of 500000 votes.
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The In Twin Peaks blog is a collection of photos taken of the show’s iconic locations. Very simple, very well done, and something about it brings me right back to when the show was on in the early 90s, when I used to watch it with my family, and when it seemed like everyone in my school watched it that night as well.
I’ve never been to Oklahoma, but I have to say that this article by Tulsa-area media, about a child’s doll allegedly spouting Islamic or Satanic slogans, doesn’t make me want to visit…
It’s so obviously people reading way too much into indistinct sounds, and the article does nothing but feed paranoia and sensationalism while applying no critical thinking whatsoever to the reporting. I know none of that is shocking, but still, this is ridiculous.
I don’t agree with a lot of the criticisms of Sarah Palin, particularly those focused on her gender, the fact that she has a family, the fact that her daughter is pregnant, or the fact that she “lacks foreign policy experience” (that last one is basically code for “is a committed raving imperialist”). Of course, I can’t stand her policies at all,and her religiosity is disturbing.
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Over the weekend I was in York for the absolutely wonderful and joyous occasion of Helen and Mary’s civil partnership ceremony. I’d never been to York, or indeed the north of England, before. England is a place I haven’t been to much at all—one three-day weekend in London about a decade ago, plus lots of trips through Heathrow, and that’s more or less it. Being there this time brought a certain amount of cultural disorientation with it.
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I just can’t resist linking to Glenn Beck lauding The Dark Knight as a film vindicating Bush’s policies. Somehow I missed Andrew Klavan doing the same in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago… and reading it now simply makes my head hurt.
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I haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet. I intend to see it, although my feeling about Batman Begins was that the first half was excellent and the second half execrable. I hope the second movie doesn’t continue the downward trend. I also have my doubts about the presence of Harvey Dent—I’ve never found that character compelling or believable, even in The Dark Knight Returns.
“I don’t believe in Harvey Dent” is a pretty good critique/rant about the recent superhero movies, including The Dark Knight, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man. John Pistelli also covers The Dark Knight, and Hellboy II (which I also intend to see).
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Four years later, an appeals court has thrown out the FCC’s ridiculous fine for Janet Jackson’s infamous Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction”.
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Why have there been so few good ones? I noticed this a while back, and having discussed the matter with some friends, it appears to be the case that the first decade of this millennium is really bad for cinematic science fiction.
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This was on BoingBoing, but I wanted to post a link to it anyway, partly because it’s definitely worth listening to the audio of Joe Frank’s original monologue, which was plagiarized for the beginning of Scorcese’s After Hours.
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For a long time, it’s really bugged me that certain copyright owners do all they can to keep their creations from ever entering the public domain while not acknowledging how much they owe to all the things that were floating around free in the culture before them.
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I’m still conflicted about this meme, but this particular reworking is too funny not to highlight—Hitler responding to news that he’s become an Internet meme…
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Following on from a BoingBoing post about a 52-second David Lynch film, I found a number of other interesting Lynch-related video online.
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I’m deeply conflicted about this little piece of video reworking. Partly because it’s unbelievably inappropriate on a bunch of levels—comparing the Democratic nomination struggle to World War II and comparing Hillary Clinton to Hitler, for example. Partly because it relies upon the audience not understanding German, which disturbs me for other reasons (and since I understand German to an extent, it’s also jarring). But the fact remains that, despite its being just wrong, it’s still funny—at least it is today. It’s extremely context-dependent, and months from now I suspect this piece will be regarded as something of an embarrassment. (The other context that makes it more acceptable somehow is that apparently the piece in question has been re-subtitled many times already for other things, and already constitutes a meme that is here being reapplied.)
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I found this essay on the relationship between Fight Club and Calvin and Hobbes to be completely hilarious:
“Fight Club: The Return of Hobbes”.
I came across this video via a BoingBoing comment today, and like it rather a lot.
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I just read this article about women cyclists at risk in London, having come across it on a friend’s LiveJournal. The basic gist is that women are more likely to be accident victims because they’re less assertive on the road, and in particular because they don’t run reds and are thus more likely to be in the blind spot of large trucks about to turn at an intersection.
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Is the success of English as a global language going to effectively kill English as we know it? That’s one of the fates suggested by this New Scientist article. Despite recently reading a friend’s criticism of New Scientist articles, I think that this one is still interesting (even though I’m not sure the article is “science” per se, just interesting speculation).
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Since I generally side with the “snakes” in that particular conflict, I’m not a huge fan of St. Patrick’s Day… but the following rendition of “Danny Boy” is just too good not to post (even though it was on BoingBoing earlier).
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Apparently this is a well-known internet meme at this point, but I had somehow missed the fact that William Shatner covered Pulp’s “Common People”.
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Okay, so it’s not quite “thinking”, but it’s $150K/year to accumulate ‘interesting people’ and summaries of the zeitgeist for Hollywood producer Brian Grazer.
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When I went to see Michael Mann’s 1981 directorial debut, Thief, this evening, I was struck by the two trailers accompanying it, the original trailers for Robocop and The Terminator. (There will be spoilers for those movies in what follows, so if you somehow haven’t seen those movies yet, you probably shouldn’t read on.)
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It’s probably not surprising that I’ve never been sympathetic to displays of “patriotism”, particularly flag-waving (or lapel pins, etc.), and that I regard with suspicion any sacred cows, yes, even including the Stars and Stripes.
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