Jot!
So very tired... Lots more page pencils to finish up... groan. In the meantime, I'll take a moment to jot down a couple of very very random observations.
Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat, the nice young conservative you could take home and introduce to your parents, may just have identified a grand unified theory of John McCain's policy stands:
This has always, always been a problem for McCain: His strongest instinct, when confronted with any domestic-policy problem, is to find a black hat to pin the blame on and then punish them for it, rather than looking for the smartest possible solution.
-- Ross Douthat, The Limits of McCainism
Omigosh, that totally explains it! Soft money donations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, earmarks, mixed martial arts... I guess McCain's political career really has consisted of a series of fierce crusades against relatively trivial symbolic targets. Well, with any luck, one month from now nobody will have any reason to worry about his eccentric decision-making process.
Meanwhile, The Hook and I have been NetFlixing our way through movie history. We just switched over to all-horror mode for the month of October, and although we were unmoved by The Howling, we're thrilled to bits by Wolfen and think it fits very nicely into the historical gap in the "socially relevant urban horror" genre between Kolchak and The X-Files.
Before this, we were going through a phase of 1970s psychedelia and existentialist fantasy. I think we'd give a modest thumbs up to the youth-gone-amuck yarn Wild In The Streets, and The Gardener, AKA Seeds of Evil, is worth checking out just for the illuminating behind-the-scenes docs and commentary. The Roger Corman-produced Gas-s-s-s was kind of weird and random, but the costumes were great. A big raspberry to El Topo, hearty recommendations for Zachariah, and wild raves for Malcolm McDowell's surreal semi-autobiography O Lucky Man!.
Whew! Sorry, only have time for a brief laundry list. But if anyone feels like talking cult movies, I'll be right here in the comments.
Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat, the nice young conservative you could take home and introduce to your parents, may just have identified a grand unified theory of John McCain's policy stands:
This has always, always been a problem for McCain: His strongest instinct, when confronted with any domestic-policy problem, is to find a black hat to pin the blame on and then punish them for it, rather than looking for the smartest possible solution.
-- Ross Douthat, The Limits of McCainism
Omigosh, that totally explains it! Soft money donations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, earmarks, mixed martial arts... I guess McCain's political career really has consisted of a series of fierce crusades against relatively trivial symbolic targets. Well, with any luck, one month from now nobody will have any reason to worry about his eccentric decision-making process.
Meanwhile, The Hook and I have been NetFlixing our way through movie history. We just switched over to all-horror mode for the month of October, and although we were unmoved by The Howling, we're thrilled to bits by Wolfen and think it fits very nicely into the historical gap in the "socially relevant urban horror" genre between Kolchak and The X-Files.
Before this, we were going through a phase of 1970s psychedelia and existentialist fantasy. I think we'd give a modest thumbs up to the youth-gone-amuck yarn Wild In The Streets, and The Gardener, AKA Seeds of Evil, is worth checking out just for the illuminating behind-the-scenes docs and commentary. The Roger Corman-produced Gas-s-s-s was kind of weird and random, but the costumes were great. A big raspberry to El Topo, hearty recommendations for Zachariah, and wild raves for Malcolm McDowell's surreal semi-autobiography O Lucky Man!.
Whew! Sorry, only have time for a brief laundry list. But if anyone feels like talking cult movies, I'll be right here in the comments.