Sunday, August 06, 2006

I am the world’s laziest blogger (Via The Poor Man Institute.) 10:55:30 PM    comment []

Heart of Gold One more movie this weekend: Heart of Gold, a very affecting Neil Young performance at the Ryman Auditorium well captured by Jonathan Demme. Young's voice is crisp and clear, the performance true, with few traces of mannerism. It seems that like him or not, you can always trust Neil Young to be Neil Young. Wish I'd seen this one in the theatre. 10:49:56 PM    comment []

Night Time in the Big City At first, they felt like little noir cliches, but like everything about Bob Dylan's remarkable Theme Time Radio Hour, these opening lines, read perfectly by Patti Smith, really grow on you. Each is a little scene that you can see immediately, and concisely tells a story and paints a picture: It's night time in the big city An ambulance races through downtown An off-duty cop parks in front of his ex-wife's house It's Theme Time Radio Hour with your host Bob Dylan It's the reading, maybe, as much as, yes, the poetry, of the lines, that burn them into your brain. 10:46:02 PM    comment []

Apparently Christ Himself Predicted Planet X — It’s The True Cause of Global Warming This is a great and crazy theory. Your crackpot post of the week. (Via Dvorak Uncensored.) 10:41:53 PM    comment []

C Section "What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East." Condoleezza Rice Press Conference July 21, 2006 "The violence that we are all seeing every day on our screens has simply got to stop so that the Lebanese people have an opportunity to begin to return to a normal life." Condoleezza Rice ABC This Week August 6, 2006 Just wait until Condi gets a look at the afterbirth. Yecch. (Via Whiskey Bar.) 7:08:28 PM    comment []

Say Anything The only accurate thing about Say Anything is the name of the blog. These guys will, literally say anything, no matter how little sense it makes. In this post, they say we can't have a commission to look into war profiteering, a la the Truman Commission in WWII, is because the Democrats only want to use the war to get re-elected. Then he puts words in a dead man's mouth to make his point! Apparently, war profiteering is not the problem, the problem is Democrats who want to look into it! 5:55:43 PM    comment []

For The Record The former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, who divorced his wife when she lay in a hospital bed, shut down the government, and had his ass handed to him after he tried to remove President Clinton from office -- has now compared the Democratic Party to the Iraqi insurgency. But we're the crazy, wild and "unhinged" ones. These people have no shame. It's what they do, its how they operate. (Via Oliver Willis - Like Kryptonite To Stupid.) 5:54:55 PM    comment []

Why Liberals Love Pedophiles How often do you hear one or another variation of the message that liberals are bad and conservatives are good? And how often do you hear messages that counter that? Right. That is because one side is marketing a viewpoint, and the other is not. At the right-wing Townhall.com, Why liberals love pedophiles "Since modern liberalism's true goal is the actual eradication of God, moral values, and the ideas of absolute right vs. wrong, it should surprise no one that not a single leftist politician in America has denounced [pedohile no one has ever heard of]. Nor did they denounce [pedohile no one has ever heard of]. The truth is liberals seek sexual utopia where no rules apply. Restraint has in fact become a dirty word to them. Self control - a throughly foreign concept. ... For liberals to denounce pedophiles, ultimately they would have to denounce, lesbianism, homsexuality, and their particular favorite - adultery. And that's just no going to happen. At the end of the day there are such a thing as moral values, and liberals despise them - because as they see it - those moral values limit their sexual freedoms. And if this is "America" - isn't it all about the freedom to get your groove on? Liberals love pedophiles. Isn't it shameful? And don't we all wish - that they loved the well being of children more?" The guy tells a story about some pedophile no one has ever heard of, and turns it into a lesson about liberals being immoral. So let's learn from this. Let's look at how movement conservatives do it. They "always add the because". They tie every small story to a larger ideological lesson - a strategic narrative. But here's the thing. They have that strategic narrative in place to tie their stories to, even if they have to fall back on the old basic one - conservatives are good and liberals are bad. So they have a ready-to-go angle to use with any story that comes along. And they understand the basic marketing reasons to do this. Progressives don't. (Is that because progressives are bad and conservatives are good?) (Via Seeing the Forest.) 5:21:23 PM    comment []

Weekend Movies Cabeza de Vaca: Film telling part of the amazing story told in Brutal Journey. It's a good movie, capturing a lot of the utter strangeness of the story, but probably necessarily leaving out a lot of the story. Read the book, then see the movie. 200 Motels. I watched this one on a lark the other night; I saw the movie back when it first came out in 72, and had the soundtrack. I remembered most all the songs, along with many lines. It's pure Zappa in conception and execution, but not anywhere near as much fun as watching Zappa concert videos on YouTube. Scoop. Great comic rapport between Woody Allen and Scarlett Johansson, and some of Allen's best comic writing in year make up for story that gets kind of confusing and unclear towards the end. A nice turn by Ian McShane in a too-small role. Very enjoyable. They Drive By Night. Good acting all the way round from George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Humphrey Bogart and of course Ida Lupino. Great photography and scenery, and drama and characters feel real. 1:58:57 PM    comment []

The CakePHP Framework: Your First Bite CakePHP is a mature framework for PHP developers who want the structure and time-saving benefits of Ruby on Rails, without having to leave their comfort zone. As Fabio explains, CakePHP's scaffolding lets us build a prototype application quickly, using minimal code. Cake also offers many helper classes to extend and customize your application while retaining a sensible and easily maintainable architecture. (Via SitePoint.com.) 1:45:51 PM    comment []

Today five years ago August 6, 2001, is the day that George W. Bush received the Presidential Daily Brief headlined, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." The PDB stated that Al Qaeda maintained a support structure in the U.S. that could aid attacks, that one idea was to hijack U.S. airplanes, and that the FBI had detected "suspicious activity," including surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The memo also noted that the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates had received a warning that Al Qaeda was preparing an attack in the U.S. with explosives. On August 6, 2001, Bush was at his ranch in the middle of a 32-day vacation, at the time the longest presidential vacation since 1969. On August 6, 2001, Bush built a trail on his ranch and talked to Condi Rice about Macedonia. On September 11 2001, Bin Laden struck. Macedonia is - as yet - not a problem. I'm sure the trail is nice. Read the comments on this post... (Via Stranger Fruit.) 10:56:54 AM    comment []

What Mormon Theology Is Really All About A Christian group made this hilariously melodramatic short back in the 1970s to debunk the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Via DevilDucky.com.) 10:32:20 AM    comment []

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