Tuesday, July 02, 2002

Really must-see TV: Tonight at 7:00 and for the next 24 hours (every hour and 45 minutes), Cartoon Network is presenting marathon showings of The Iron Giant (1999), director Brad Bird's (The Simpsons) utterly cool, heartwarmingly American retelling of Ted Hughes's book, the finest kids' movie and one of the four or five greatest movies, period, of the past five years.  It sank at the box office, partly because of all-time criminally incompetent marketing by Warner Brothers and partly because until Shrek Americans simply refused to see animated films not cranked out by Disney (if nothing else, Warners should have advertised Jennifer Aniston, who gives a lovely voice performance as the boy Hogarth's mother). And tomorrow, of course, Cartoon Network rides even higher with the premiere of The Powerpuff Girls Movie!  Mojo Jojo rules!  When ruling is done it is done by Mojo Jojo because ruling is what he does!  The one who rules is he, Mojo Jojo!! 8:57:33 AM    commentplace ()

Is it July already?  Today's New York Times Op-Ed page could get you irate to the point of indigestion over breakfast: Paul Krugman's column dryly notes how President Bush's public anger at WorldCom, Enron ("Kenny Boy who?  Mr. Lay?  I vaguely remember meeting him; he was a supporter of Ann Richards"), and other out-of-control corporate sleaze deals doesn't extend to his own abundant history of being given jobs by friends of his father's, including driving one company into the ground only to have it bought by another failing firm in a phony transaction that let Dubya cash in with a profit "about four times bigger than the sale that has Martha Stewart in hot water. "Oddly enough, though the law requires prompt disclosure of insider sales, he neglected to inform the SEC about this transaction until 34 weeks had passed.  An internal SEC memorandum concluded that he had broken the law, but no charges were filed.  This, everyone insists, had nothing to do with the fact that his father was president." On the other side of the page, you can read Nicholas D. Kristof's slightly coy but compelling suggestions that the FBI's investigation of last year's terrorist anthrax mailings is going exactly as you probably suspected: the overwhelmingly obvious suspect isn't one of John Ashcroft's thugs in turbans, but an American with close ties to the CIA, Defense Department's biowarfare squad, and two white-racist regimes in Africa, who's had a grudge against the government since his security clearance was lifted a month before the attacks — and the FBI is tiptoeing and dilly-dallying. 8:45:13 AM    commentplace ()