40-Year-Old Virgin

I rented a few movies I've been wanting to see for the weekend...

You know, the thing about this one is that cast, directed or written wrong it could have been so mean, but it isn't, it's genuinely funny and "adult" without being "raunchy" in bad way. Actually it is raunchy, but in a good way.

This one is for the Doctor Who fans

John Nathan-Turner is alive and well and doing costume and set design for Mariah Carey.

Rad, trad, and dangerous to know

Glenn Greenwald has a post about the latest attempt to paint a vulgar picture of the liberal blogsphere, of which Dictionopolis in Digitopolis is a small and not very influential part. I recommend reading it in full, but the short version is that once again, someone dug down deep to find the most fringy and cringe-worthy comments from the left. Then labeled them representative, without noticing that the big boys on the right-people who actually are influential and representative- say worse every day, and have for years.

The Right's best-selling author calls liberals traitors and urges that they be beaten with baseball bats and attacked with bombs. Its most popular radio talk show host -- with his 20 million daily followers -- has spent the last 20 years urging that liberals be deported and praising the kidnappings of his political opponents, while other favorites on Right-wing radio routinely call for the imprisonment of leading Democrats. Similarly, some of the Right's favorite commentators have urged that those who espouse liberalism be tried for sedition, or worse.

And how fondly I recall these sentiments from Sen. Jesse Helms during the Clinton years:

In an effort to dampen the furor over his Commander-in-Chief remarks, on November 22 Helms told a newspaper reporter from his home state of North Carolina that the President should be careful about visiting military bases in that state. "Mr. Clinton better watch out of he comes down here," Helms said. "He better have a bodyguard."

Can one even contemplate the reaction if a Democratic Senator today warned George Bush to avoid military bases becasue he would likely be physically attacked by a military that hated him? Granted, those threats against the President were merely from a leading Republican Senator, not from an anonymous commenter on a blog, but...

Mystery homophobic (but pro-sexual abuse) irrelevant religious figurine theatre 3000

Pope Benedict XVI had some things to say during Good Friday observances in Rome recently. He said:

"Lord, we have lost our sense of sin,"

How true. The deadliest sins are said to include avarice or greed, sines "we" clearly have no sense of whatsoever. Then there's envy and lust, which I'm guessing for this pope's followers equals this. And of course sloth-I think you know that we here in the United States dislike sloth, and would never go so far as to make a sloth a movie star or anything.
His holiness also remarked:

"Today a slick campaign of propaganda is spreading an inane apologia of evil

But enough about the conservative republican blogs.

a senseless cult of Satan, a mindless desire for transgression, a dishonest and frivolous freedom, exalting impulsiveness, immorality and selfishness as if they were new heights of sophistication.”

You don't win anything for guessing who I'm sure the pontiff was thinking of. Some poor misguided souls are putting it about that he meant his comments as an attack on gay families, but that can't be right. Why would the symbol of doing good works on earth so that you might be rewarded in heaven so needlessly and wrongfully hurt people on these, his most holiest of days?

I mean, if he were the sort of person who'd do that, he'd be a miserable maggot-ridden scumsucker who deserves to die immidately and burn in hell's fire for the rest of eternity.

But of course, he's the pope, so he's not.

Happy Easter, everybody.

ETA-If I were a credulous, superstitious fool, this sort of thing might worry me: Literally moments after I first posted the above, it began to hail like a mofo here in Seattle.

Fortunately, I'm not.

There's everything in this show, everything that fits, from "The Bright Side Of Life" to girls with great big...

Courtesy of our man Mark Evanier, a little more than one minute of Monty Python's Spamalot, complete with one or two quick shots of Hank Azaria in outfits that ought to keep "Huff" in therapy for years...

And on the flip side of the Reverend coin

Contrasting with the scarred, tails side representing the likes of the Reverend Wildmon below, we have an interview with the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, recently deceased, representing the shiny, heads side.

It's on NPR from 1985 and is well worth listening to.

One of these days I'm going to write "The Penis Arias"

And when I do, I'll bet the Rev. Donald Wildmon will be able to speak the title aloud with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. Which isn't the case with The Vagina Monologues, which title the Reverend's AgapePress can't even bring themselves to type.

Seriously. Via Pam's House Blend, in an AgapePress report about protests of the play being performed on the Notre Dame campus, it is referred to throughout as The V Monologues. Because vagina is a bad word.

Of course, should this prove to be a production in which the lead roles are taken by Jane Badler, Faye Grant, Jennifer Cooke and June Chadwick, that would be entirely different.

(Come on...I know Bill Sherman gets it, anybody else?)

Every day, it's-a-gettin' closer

So there's a fella named Richard Ben-Veniste. He was the Commissioner of the 9/11 Commission. NewsMax and Powerline-type Republican conservatives don't like him because he acted like he actually wanted the truth.

See, he's the fella who elicited this response from Condoleeza Rice:

RICE: I remember very well that the president was aware that there were issues inside the United States. He talked to people about this. But I don't remember the al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about.

BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6th PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

RICE: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."

No, they really don't like him at all. Yesterday, he appeared on Hardball and said that in his opinion, the Bush administration should now be treated as Ronald Reagan always said (ad nauseum) he wanted to treat the Russians: Trust, but verify.

And he further went on to say (quote via Crooks and Liars):

On important, critical matters-ahh the President is now been shown not to be accurate and now hypocritical in terms of this leak investigation-the political fallout is huge in my view.

Soooooo close, Richard.

I'm telling you folks, the day people start going on television and just saying the plain and simple truth that anyone with a whole brain can see: The President is a liar-is the day we tear the roof off the place, and the walls come tumbling down.

Words are very important, and "now been shown not to be accurate" still leaves too much wriggle-room. The President of the United States is a liar. Repeat. Again. Again. Again.

My question is...

Ok, so there's a small to-do going on about the fact that Laura Bush has made it clear that gay families will be welcome to participate in the annual White House Easter Egg Roll. Yay. Egalia of the TGW feels this is proof that "the wrong gender is in charge of the country."

Yes, because Laura Bush is, automatically, much better than the man she married, because she has eggs. The fact that she's just standing by her man like a good little housewife should while a drunk drives his country off a cliff doesn't matter at all.

But hey, women goooooooood. Men baaaaaaaaad.

My broader question is, if you're a gay family, why the fuck would you want to go to George W. Bush's White House? (Other than to toss a few eggs in some well-directed places, perhaps)

I'm just trying to imagine what any self-respecting gay family could possibly be thinking...

"What's that, Mr. President? You say you want to make it unconstitutional for us to get married? You say you think we're a threat to marriage? You won't hesitate to "out" a gay reporter if he reports information that makes you look bad, you say? You say you actually pay anti-gay commentators? You say you refuse to formally recognize Gay Pride Month?

Oh, but if we wear ties and nice dresses we can still be used as political tools, you say? Oh, well, ok then! Dum de dum de dum de dumb..."

I say, let fools, whoops, excuse me I mean gay Republicans like Andrew Sullivan who've already twisted into pretzels trying to convince themselves Bush thinks they're human beings go. Let Matt Drudge and "Jeff Gannon" go, they're used to being used as Republican tools. And clearly intellectual honesty is not a problem for them, they don't have any.

Other than that, I can't think of one good reason why any gay family with a lick of pride would.

Still more words to live by

From Mastering Fiction Writing, by Kit Reed:

Being true to what you have to say, you will find your own level. If you're not true to it, you may not find any audience at all.

So long, Rev

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, an inspiration for the Rev. Scott Sloan in Doonesbury, has died. Among other things, Rev. Coffin said this (via Daily Kos):

I think that hope reflects the state of our soul rather than the circumstances that surround our lives. So hope is not the equivalent of optimism. Its opposite is not pessimism but despair. So I'm always hopeful. Hope is about keeping the faith despite the evidence so that the evidence has a chance of changing.

Elsewhere, at Hullabaloo, tristero finds what he believes, and he makes a reasonably convincing case, is a lie repeatedly told about Dr. Coffin by none other than George W. Bush.

Reality and the right

And never the 'twain shall meet.

Give me a happy ending every time

Who Wants To Be A Super Hero, a new reality series hosted by Stan Lee.

Yes, really.

The eerily apt coincidence has just struck me

At the beginning of this season of "Veronica Mars," a bus full of Veronica's classmates took a dive off a cliff. It has now become unavoidable and undeniable that this is what the once "little series that could" has done as well.

Tonight's episode was a desperate attempt to make sense of several episodes worth of throwing everything they could at the wall in hopes that something would stick. You could almost hear the writers, stinking of desperation, crying, "See, see? It does all make sense, it does!"

Last season, it did. This season, not so much. And this episode had a couple of the weaknesses we've noted before as well-the insistence on introducing new characters we don't care about, and what is now clearly an obsession with cum jokes.

There are little flashes here and there of the show's former glory-putting Logan and Wallace together is inspired-but I gotta say I wouldn't be too disappointed if the forthcoming new CW network decided not to carry "Veronica" over after all.

I know most men undress women with their eyes

But in the case of Paris Hilton, I'll make an exception.

Yes, I should be paying more attention to Pink

Via Egalia, here are the lyrics to her new song, Dear Mr. President, and a link so you can listen to it.

Excerpts:

Dear Mr. President
Come take a walk with me
Let's pretend we're just two people and
You're not better than me
I'd like to ask you some questions if we can speak honestly

What kind of father would take his own daughter's rights away
And what kind of father might hate his own daughter if she were gay
I can only imagine what the first lady has to say
You've come a long way from whiskey and cocaine

How do you sleep while the rest of us cry
How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye
How do you walk with your head held high
Can you even look me in the eye

Now-I don't like 98% or so of all political songs, on a purely asthetic basis. For me, they sacrifice emotion for stridency.

This one works.

Pink is not my favorite singer, the odd single aside.

This one works.

The song is just human voices and a guitar, not Pink's usual dancefloor fare, which I probably would have preferred-I'm a Pet Shop Boys fan, you know.

This one works.

Backing vocals are by The Indigo Girls, a duo whose appeal I've never really understood (though they are the basis for one of my favorite jokes in My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, so I suppose I owe them something.)

This one works.

Anyway, go, read, hear.

Republicans: This is the world's smallest violin. And it's playing just for you.

Via AmericaBlog, another Republican crybaby comes out whining about how yeah, he voted for Bush (twice) and gave money to his campaign, but please don't confuse that with actually liking him.

In fact, gosh darn it, he doesn't consider himself a Republican any longer, so corrupt, incompetent and inept-he has suddenly realized-is the party today! Well, great timing. If you'd figured out that shit even two years ago, you could have saved this country untold billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

John at AmericaBlog sees the incredible disenchantment of the Republicans as a blessing fo the Democrats, a chance to woo the disgruntled over to "our" side. I'm sure that's quite the sensible, sane attitude to take and if I had traffic like AmericaBlogs, I might feel compelled to take it too.

But since, compartively speaking, no one is reading this, it gratifies me to be able to say: If you ever voted for Bush in your life (but especially if you voted for him twice): Fuck you. And if you know anyone who did, do something for all of us: Hit them.

I miss Tony

A kind of delayed reaction hit me watching tonight's 24...it finally sunk in that they really killed the character and he's never coming back. I think that may prove to have been a mistake. Probably not a show-killing, "shark-jumping" mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.

All I can say is, they'd better have a death in mind for Peter Weller's character that makes the torture he underwent as Murphy in Robocop look like a day at the fucking beach. He killed David Palmer. He killed Michelle. He killed Tony.

I want him deader than dead. I want him to suffer.

I'm also not sure I'm loving the relaunch they're doing of President Logan...it'll be interesting to re-view the season next year on DVD, to see if it fits together as well as previous seasons have. At the moment, I'm thinking not.

Billy Crystal did a funny routine about the series on The Tonight Show the other night, talking about the fact that basically, Chloe is god. He's right, of course.

I miss Tony.

Go, West young men (and women)

New York Times article on the final days of The West Wing. Interesting trivia: The writers had apparently intended to have the Democrat played by Jimmy Smits lose the election they've been running all year.

In the end, he won. The reason: They felt it would be too depressing following the death of the great John Spencer, whose character was Smits' running mate.

Some nice quotes from the actors who have been with the series right out of the gate:

Bradley Whitford, who portrays Josh Lyman, most recently
manager of the Santos campaign...

"This show is probably the first line in my obituary," Mr. Whitford said. "Everyone knows they got lucky with this one."

As the saying goes: The harder they worked, the luckier they got.

Mr. Sheen was offered an opportunity to see how his character's appeal would play in a real-life campaign. Not long ago,he said, he was approached by Democratic Party representatives from his native state, Ohio, to see if he would be interested in running for the United States Senate after he left the show. Though he would have had little trouble drafting a campaign platform — he is a fierce opponent of nuclear power and the war in Iraq, and a champion of human rights — he turned them down.

"I'm just not qualified," he said. "You're mistaking celebrity for credibility."

Martin Sheen: The flip side of Alec Baldwin and Richard "I'm speaking for the whole world" Gere, and one of the only exceptions to my general rule that actors shouldn't talk.

"In order to sometimes get a different perspective on what's going down in the world, to reach back to your humanity, you read novels," Mr. Sheen said. "We're like the reading of a novel."

And what will Mr. Sheen be doing now that the series is over?

At 65, he has decided to make good on a promise he made to himself long ago: to enroll, for the first time, in college. A graduate, though just barely, of Chaminade High School in Dayton, Ohio, nearly five decades ago, he will began taking classes next fall — in English literature, philosophy and, he hopes, oceanography — at National University of Ireland in Galway, in the country where his mother was born.

How can you not like such a man? I mean really, how cool is that?

From "One Sunday Morning," by Amy Ephron

Mary wondered, at the time, if Betsy hadn't commented on it or hadn't commented on it in quite the way she did, if it wouldn't have just passed, subsided, receded, if you will, into a faint glancing moment, one of the things you see and then forget about, rather than something as piercing as a shard of glass that becomes forever imbedded in one's memory, so that every time any one of them would see Lizzie Carswell after that, they would remember that morning when they saw her coming out of the Gramercy Park Hotel.

This is a sentence that got away from somebody.