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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
Live free or die!
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September 21, 2002
How to die right
On September 22, 1776 the British hung school teacher and American colonial patriot Nathan Hale as a spy. His famous stirring last words, "I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
posted by Al at 9/21/2002 06:04:00 PM
They report. I'll decide
Child abuse sucks. People ought to treat their children decent. However, this Fox News story runs WAY into stupidity, indeed turns into its own special brand of child abuse arguably much worse than a beating from mommy.
A department store surveillance video caught about a ten second clip of a mom in a parking lot in Mishawaka, Indiana slapping her four year old girl around as she put her in the car. It looks bad. It was obviously an unpleasant moment for the child.
Not nearly as unpleasant, however, as it will be for the child now that the media has gotten involved. They've taken a small unpleasant incident, and made it a nearly inescapable central trauma for the rest of the girl's life. After they have played and replayed the tape in real time then slow motion, then still screen grabs, then started over- this stupid little nothing incident has been hung like an albatross around this child's neck. Millions of people saw this tape- again and again- saw the names.
This little girl will never live it down. A mark of shame has been placed on her. Twenty years from now, some office co-worker will recognize her, and she'll be having to go through the story again. Then it'll be someone at her church, or her neighbor.
For what? Nothing but a few days bump that a couple of jacklegs at Fox News expect to get from people tuning back in to follow the story. Maybe it will give them a few thousand more viewers for a couple of days.
What the hell is wrong with people? Mom slapped the girl around some. OK, that's bad. But now they've just completely destroyed this young mother over these few seconds of video. Does she really deserve that? How will this effect her relationship with her daughter? Do they care?
First, Fox News Channel was airing the footage before they knew any names. It was an alert. If you know who this woman is, call the Indiana authorities right away at some and such number. Of course, they've posted the video on the Fox News website so you can watch it over and over again, taking superior indignance at the sight.
Out of thin air, they've conjured up a national crisis. There haven't been any nasty kidnappings in a few weeks, better gin up another kiddy scare to stoke the viewers.
So then for the Friday follow up, they brought in a psychiatrist Henry Paul, MD. He was deeply troubled, easily led to speculate on the great dangers the child faced for being slapped around in the back of the car. After again milking that few seconds of video by playing it in slow motion again and again, he speculated that the child needs medical attention right away. If mom hit her like that just right, why she could even die!
Shut the hell up the whole lot of you cheese eating pansies. She got slapped a few times as she got put in the back of the car. It's unfortunate, but that was not anything like life threatening. It's not like she was being branded with a cattle iron or something.
For whose benefit has this story been presented? Certainly not the child's benefit. Even half a second of thought should tell you that making a huge national media case out of this will not help the girl. They took an unpleasant moment, and magnified it 10,000 times. They turned an unfortunate incident in the parking lot into a huge media rape.
Dr Paul worried on some more about how horrible the incident was for the girl. If nothing else, she's surely going to suffer "emotional trauma." Well, yeah, after enough adults go into hysterics about it and go way out of their way to make sure she knows that she's traumatized. Did I mention the part where Fox News shows the clip hundreds of times?
But no, Fox has not finished exploiting this family yet. They have their reporter on the scene on 9-21 as the mother shows up to surrender at the police station. "It's like a precision CIA operation" their reporter breathlessly explains, describing the five vehicles there to do what, see if they can get their mugs in the tv shot as the woman walks in the door?
The reporter actually acts positively PROUD that this has been made into a national story. No, not just a national but an international news story, he points out. Saddam Hussein must be laughing his ass off to watch us spending thousands of man hours on some stupid crap like this while he's busy shifting his WMDs around.
Now no doubt there will be child welfare workers. Yeah, that'll really help. Maybe they will jerk the child (and her brothers) from mom and stick them in foster care. Oh, yeah, this child's life's getting better by the minute. They've severely impacted numerous lives.
Then all the other networks jump on the bandwagon. CNN and CBS and on and on.
But hey, it's all good. There's a little bump in the ratings, and Neil Cavuto and the Fox gang have proved that they CARE about The Children.
Running down the road's just his idea of having fun
Born September 21, 1912, Chuck Jones was the star director of classic era Warner Brothers cartoon shorts, including Bugs Bunny, and he created the Road Runner.
In so doing, Mr. Jones gave us some of the most joyous and iconic celebrations of the American spirit, and a moral and morale uplift when worrying about the World Situation. Wile E Coyote's a lot more clever than Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden. It'll take a lot more than the likes of them to get the Road Runner. If they're smart at all, neither one of these guys want a piece of Bugs Bunny.
Which brings us to perhaps the greatest tribute ever to that Chuck Jones style and spirit: the last act of South Park episode 509 "Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants" in which Cartman makes likes Bugs Bunny in the Afghan desert [readily available for downloading P2P].
posted by Al at 9/21/2002 03:46:00 AM
September 19, 2002
There are exactly 57 card carrying members of the Communist Party in the Department of Defense
Let us take a moment to note the passing and celebrate the work of James Gregory. He died this week at the age of 90.
The public probably knew him best as Inspector Frank Luger on The Barney Miller Show. He spent season after season grilling Barney, sure that Barney's men were engaging in the grossest corruptions his mind could conjure up.
His main imprint on the culture, however, came from his 1962 portrayal of Senator Johnny Iselin. This McCarthyite red-baiter turns out to be The Manchurian Candidate, being set up by the devious Chinese communists to become president of the United States. His communist controller/wife Angela Lansbury just rides over him. The play between his manly communist bashing image and his fearful, sniveling submission to the wife was absolutely priceless.
posted by Al at 9/19/2002 10:10:00 PM
Being There
How exactly are these Iraqi inspections supposed to actually work? James Lileks has a depressingly realistic conjectured scenario for about what would likely actually happen.
What are the odds that there would EVER under ANY circumstances be an Iraqi inspection regimine substantially better than Mr. Lilek's scenario? Not very likely, I'd wager.
This calls to mind recent testimony in front of the house Armed Services Committee in which Richard Spertzel, who led the UN's biological arms inspection team in Iraq from 1994 to 1998, stipulated just what would be required to have a truly meaningful inspection of Iraq at this point. He suggested that you would have to pretty much literally line inspectors up shoulder to shoulder all the way across one end of the country, and march them foot by foot across the whole country.
Even that doesn't seem sufficient to me. How much stuff would they walk right over, buried in crates in the ground?
posted by Al at 9/19/2002 09:58:00 PM
How to Stop Suicide Bombing
I have just posted a proposal suggesting how the Israelis might deal with suicide bombing.
It is fairly long, and perhaps a bit too heavy emotionally to share this page with the sometimes lighter tone of movie reviews and such. Therefore I am putting it on this separate page.
posted by Al at 9/19/2002 06:56:00 PM
Credit where credit is due: J-E-W-S
That's right, and don't you forget it buddy.
Shortly after Cynthia McKinney's primary election defeat, her father, long time Georgia state representative Billy McKinney went on the radio waves to spell out the reason for his daughter's loss of a congressional seat: "J-E-W-S." Last week, daddy lost his own legislative seat of decades.
Though somewhat less flamboyant and thus less noticed, another incumbent black congressman was just run out under similar circumstances. Earl Hilliard, Democrat from Alabama, was beaten by another black challenger in the primaries who was supported by American Jewish groups.
This seems to have been a topic of considerable consternation at a recent Congressional Black Caucus gathering. At a September CBC gathering "People were talking retaliation," said Ron Walters, the director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. "They were saying Sen. Joe Lieberman is dead in the water, and so on and so forth."
So what is the official black position, then? Is the position of CBC that any black elected representative should expect to be supported by Jewish Americans no matter what kind of wicked pro-Palestenian policies they support? Being black gives you license to anti-Semitism without democratic retaliation?
Jewish groups didn't just pick a couple of random negroes to roust. These folk were singled out for being pro-Palestenian, not because they were black. If there were white boys working against them as hard, they'd be getting yoinked too.
Did the "j-e-w-s" cause these congressmen to get beat? Well, you could say these two did it to themselves. Particularly McKinney, given her blood libel against President Bush. She was just begging for a slapdown.
However, let's give credit where credit is due. It might not be, uh, kosher for them to toot their own horn. That's fine. I'll do it for them: That's right, Ms. McKinney- some Jews helped beat you, and your daddy's dumb ass too. I strongly suspect that there's a similar fate waiting any American politician who plays footsie with groups that believe in killing Jews. Good.
So let us conclude with a chorus from Kinky Friedman:
"No, they ain't making Jews like Jesus anymore
We don't turn the other cheek the way we done before"
posted by Al at 9/19/2002 02:53:00 AM
Jam of the Year
The debut album for OK Go hit stores 9-17-2002. I don't have this bad boy yet. I've only heard but one song from this outfit.
However, "Get Over It" sounds like a sure nominee for Jam of the Year. Before you make out the words, the record will wallop your ass. It's the sweetest hard pop record in a while. Your classic power pop bands, early Who or Kinks or Clash would have any one been proud to have written this song. Hell, the Ramones would have killed for this good a melody. Hard and smooth, with just the right little seasoning of harsh distortion. Just right. Hard telling what it will do in the market, but all cool rockin' dudes MUST hear this.
The lyrics really top this off. Close examination reveals a bracingly fresh, harsh rebuke of every kind of weepy liberal whiny butt going.
Oh your wounds are full of salt.
Everything's a stress and what's more,
well it's all somebody's fault.
Hey! Get over it!
Makes you sick, makes you ill,
makes you cheat, slipping change from the till.
posted by Al at 9/19/2002 12:56:00 AM
September 16, 2002
Robin Williams makes a real movie
 One Hour Photo presents a beautiful example of film craft. Indeed, it seems nearly Kubrickian in the careful, quiet precision of every aspect- not least among them the screenplay. You wouldn't expect this kind of character development from a director mostly known for Madonna and Nine Inch Nails music videos, but here it is.
The tight restraint of Robin Williams performance winds the tension right up to the breaking point. Sy here is certainly at least as needy and vulnerable as any cute character he's ever played, but every bit of cuddly sentiment has been burned away. He's not evil or depraved, but neither is he any form of comedian doing "lovable" schtick. He does not make even one little joke in the whole course of the movie- at least not on purpose.
Williams chokes off every bit of his classic manic energy, which ends up channeling much meaning into every little bit of body language- while never devolving into obvious mannerisms. Even his crack-up comes out pretty buttoned-down. All that bottled up energy and angst comes out as a unique pallette of sadness, delusion, anger, depression, and a hundred subtle shades of emotion.
The movie uses beautiful economy. They don't need or indulge in huge emotional outbursts. They don't need or use a lot of fancy special effects. [Sometimes the limited budgets of art house films work to their advantage.]
The ending of the movie really tops it off. After the nominal action climax come one and two more good bits. Notice the pictures that Sy was so eager to see at the beginning of the movie, and particularly what they are NOT. Sy's explanation to the policeman seems to have drawn some criticism for being somehow too "pat." The film makers could apologize for having made a movie where the parts all add up, I suppose.
Beyond any ultimate meaning of the movie, or ideas about Robin Williams, this movie should be seen by anyone who has any interest in the art of movies. Outstanding craft.
Robin Williams One Hour Photo Gallery 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
posted by Al at 9/16/2002 06:06:00 PM
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