big mess, i mean a really big mess, a big big mess, he was all mixed up and a big mess! he was a big mess!

Ok, back to feeling bad for Tennessee. Why?

Because that disaster is now being called almost 50 times worse than the Exxon Valdez.

And balance has been restored to the universe

Remember yesterday when I posted oddly sympathetic thoughts (for me) about some residents of Tennessee? You knew that wasn't going to sit right for long.

Sure enough, this morning I come across this video of a college student missing the very first question on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?



No points if you guessed from which state this idiot dumbass hails.

"Marley & Me" set a Christmas Day record with an opening-day gross of $13.9 million

As one or two of you probably know, I dreamed about Jennifer Aniston recently. Clearly, showing up in my dreams is good luck* because

her latest film, "Marley & Me," beat out ex Brad Pitt's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" at the box office.

Brad's film is more critically acclaimed than Jen's and will certainly be a big hit, but we're betting that Jen is highly unlikely to care much about that on her way to the bank.

Personally, I have no plans to see either, but "Marley" might get a look-in when it plays cable. Acclaimed or not, "Button" has "We really, really, really want Oscars" written all over it to me.

*I thought of trying to put some kind of joke together here, about how Jennifer found it was good luck to push this Benjamin's button...maybe even working in some sort of ungentlemanly aside about her tail (get it, huh, because her movie's about a dog).

I think fortunately for all of us, I decided against it.

Oh, bloody hell

...as I read this item, I found myself reminded of Nik Kershaw's song "Roses"...the post maybe best read listening to it:



Even I don't think that Tennessee deserves this:

It looks like the surface of the moon. The black sludge that poured out of a Tennessee coal burning plant now covers entire neighborhoods.

"It's just scary," said Chris Copeland, a resident of Harriman, Tenn. "I have two young girls, and I'm afraid for their health."

This stuff is a witch's brew of toxic heavy metals that needs to be contained and controlled," said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

But have no fear, the TVA is here!

we've just come from a meeting
and we're sure you'd like to know
there'll be deep blue skies and clear blue waters
everywhere you go

"The water is safe," said Amanda Ray of the Tennessee Valley Authority. "The environment is safe. And we're going to clean this up."

(BTW...is it just me, or if the water and enviroment was safe--meaning Free from foreign matter or pollution; unadulterated--would they not need to clean it up?)

The Copeland family doesn't know who to believe.

"People tell you all the time things are safe, and later down the road you find out that they aren't," Copeland said.

but it's an awful price we pay
believing everything they say
here tomorrow gone today

Pop Goes The World

Bubble (wrap) Calendar

!

You'll never guess who sent me this image of Santa on a train

Somewhat puzzlingly, I've ended up on the newsletter mailing list for Amy Ephron's One For the Table site and now I've gotten a Christmas E-Card from her. It's even "signed" XOX Amy.

This is strange because in my sole E-Mail exchange with Ephron, she hardly left me feeling bathed in her warm embrace. Actually she threatened to sue me for libel.

Still...nice, innit?

the fun has just begun; So don't you mess around with me, you won't know what to do, 'Cause I'll put on my cha cha heels and walk all over you!

Eartha Kitt died. So here's a little three-part tribute.

First, this is a teaser trailer from The Emperor's New Groove, a film I'm a big fan of; in which she was the voice of Yzma.



This is some interviews with Kitt and Bronski Beat about their 1989 collaborative single "Cha Cha Heels," followed by the video.



And this is a great montage that a YouTuber called privatedancer74 put together to Kitt singing Stephen Sondheim's "I'm Still Here." If you watch only one of these, this is the one to watch.

Ah, the Star Wars Holiday Special. It was pretty bad.

It will never receive a proper DVD release, and I think (even) if I showed it to my nephew, who loves Star Wars, he would burn his Star Wars Lego video game.

But it's a strange memory in the minds of those of us who grew up in the '70s playing with the old Kenner Star Wars figures that are now worth a lot of money.

It's generally reckoned to be the most ill-conceived Star Wars product ever made. Worse than the (not-so) "special editions," worse than the dialogue in Episode III...well, no...Nothing is worse than the dialogue in Episode III :

[After the massacre at the Jedi temple]
Obi-Wan Kenobi: Not even the younglings survived!

But it was so bad, in fact, that many of us have oft-times wondered...just how did it get so bad?

Vanity Fair wondered that too.

Excerpts:

Although Lucas has subsequently had the special disappeared from American television—it has never again been officially aired or released in any video format—Star Wars geeks have not let the world forget that, even more than Jar Jar Binks, this is the one true embarrassment attached to the mostly superlative Star Wars universe.

While flipping through a book of production stills, [writer Bruce] Vilanch says, the Star Wars creator came across a particularly provocative-looking creature. “Lucas, who had been pretty stolid the whole time, turned to me and said: ‘Oh yes, we call him Cuntface.’ And that’s what it looked like, actually. I noticed in a later movie”—Return of the Jedi—“that Lucas had, like, a huge vagina in the desert that sucked things in. So, I think this is one of his leitmotifs.”

Twenty-eight years later, [writer Lenny] Ripps says he still hears from fans and fanzines that want to know about the special. “I think in a bigger sense, it’s nice to know that Star Wars does have feet of clay,” he says. “Ultimately, when all is said and done, it’s an outer-space movie. It’s not sacred. And what has amused me the most is that somehow people think the special discredits the image of this sacred text.”

Thanks hâi jor nôk dtam-raa yiw, Corey Klemow.

A Pause To Remember

Harold Pinter, dead at 78.

All Bing Crosby samples and cash-register sounds

“Eye Of A Needle,” The Art Of Noise.

This is a live version. The original is a rather obviously “satiric” look at the commercialization of Christmas, but so well arranged that I like it both because and in spite of that.



If there is such a thing as rockin' genially, this is it.

"This guy's walking down the street when he falls in a hole."

Speaking of The West Wing, here's the penultimate scene from the season two Christmas episode, Noël, one of the best of the series. If you don't know the episode, here's the backstory. And here's the scene.



Brad Whitford won his Emmy for this episode.

"Abigail! Your breasts are magnificent!"*

Stockard Channing is a former star of The West Wing, for which she won an Emmy, and an Academy Award-nominated actress who's been in such films as Twilight, Smoke, Six Degrees of Separation, Staying Together, Grease and The Hospital. As if that weren't enough, she also won the 1985 Tony Award for a revival of Peter Nichols' A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.

I mean, she knows what she's doing up there. So you might like to see what she has to say about it in this Q& A piece.

Best part (IMO):

What’s the best piece of professional advice you ever got?
It’s [from] John [Guare], and it’s in the text of Six Degrees. I’m paraphrasing, but the character Flan asks why paintings in the second grade are clear and beautiful, and then by third grade they all look like mud and camouflage. And the teacher says, “I know when to take their paintings away from them in the second grade.” John and I went out to dinner one night and he equated those lines to acting, where you have to know when to stop. There has to be a point where you say, “The painting is done.” There’s a real temptation in acting to always fiddle with it, and sometimes you ruin the color balance when you do that.

* British Ambassador Lord John Marbury, "Dead Irish Writers," The West Wing.

Songs of the season

This is "Little Bit Of Snow" by Howard Jones. All I want to say about this acoustic (basically just Howard singing and playing piano) song is that it saved my life.

And this is “The Christmas Waltz,” by Frank Sinatra. Maybe not the most inspired lyric ever written, but a nice holiday song. And I liked the classic Capitol visual on this.

Why do we only ever hear from these dykes when they're sticking up for gay-bashers?

Say...who remembers Tammy Lynn Michaels? She's the partner of Melissa Etheridge. Michaels (and Etheridge) are now defending Rick Warren.

Remember her now? Uh-huh. She's the one who also stuck up for Isaiah Washington. No bad poetry this time, but she's still just as unmusical.

I'd ask how any musician (let alone a gay one) can stand to be partnered to such a woman. But all Etheridge's songs sound alike to me anyway.

Further on the subject of Mr. Warren...looks like somebody forgot the commandment against lying.

I have to say, I've come around to really enjoying this controversy. Because it's putting the civil-rights-for-me, but-not-for-thee homophobic positions of this bigot into a national spotlight and forcing him to have to defend them.

This of course, cannot be done, unless you’re an idiot.

Further to the story that made me tear...

I wonder where those men would've gotten the idea that being a lesbian made this woman less than human?

Oh wait. Now that I think of it, no I don't, really.

Avy Skolnik, of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, told the AP that "anytime there is an anti-LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] initiative" -- like the recent anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives -- "we tend to see spikes both in the numbers and the severity of attacks." He added: "People feel this extra entitlement to act out their prejudice."

Ok, so I'm sort of ashamed of myself for this joke

Alec Baldwin Posted in Huffpo:
The Inauguration Cannot Come Quickly Enough

And somewhere, Kim Basinger is saying "And if anyone knows about coming quickly..."

Oh, god.

I've got nothing else to say except that this brings tears to my eyes.

A woman in the San Francisco Bay area was jumped by four men, taunted for being a lesbian, repeatedly raped and left naked outside an abandoned apartment building, authorities said Monday.

Detectives say the 28-year-old victim was attacked Dec. 13 after she got out of her car, which bore a rainbow gay pride sticker. The men, who ranged from their late teens to their 30s, made comments indicating they knew her sexual orientation, said Richmond police Lt. Mark Gagan.

"It just pushes it beyond fathomable," he said. "The level of trauma — physical and emotional — this victim has suffered is extreme."

Yeah, that's great, Joe.

Via TPM Election Central, Joe Biden defends the selection of Rick Warren:

Barack Obama said you've got to reach out. You've got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.
We can't continue to be a red and blue country. We can't be divided like we have been.

Uh-huh.

Say, Joe...you know what would be a really great way to promote inclusion?

Showcasing a progressive person of faith with a message of inclusion.

As opposed to, say, Rick Warren.

Just a thought.

Wow.

"If the president does it, it's not illegal.”

Richard Nixon to David Frost, 1977?

Neh-eh.

Dick Cheney, to Fox's Chris Wallace.

Today.

Michael, I can't blame you for not believing in evolution, but as for the rest of us...

Mike Huckabee says it's ridiculous for people to be upset at Rick Warren.

Oh, there you go.

Being called ridiculous by Mike Huckabee.

Mike "Evolution? What evolution?" and "The bible, not the Constitution" Huckabee.

Right.

That's like being called mentally ill by Michael Jackson.

It's like being called short by Mickey Rooney...

Coming soon to a theater near you...

Eva Amurri is Iggy Pop!