When you surf at night during a red tide, agitate the algae, which produces luminescent wake.
Category: Video
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
The power of wishful thinking
Representative Louise Slaughter has suggested during an interview on Olbermann and she suggested that, because of Clarence Thomas’s repeated violation of conflict of interest statutes that his votes might be subject to retroactive recusal.
Rep. Slughter’s suggestion as a remedy is just wishful thinking.
There is a remedy, and it’s called impeachment, and the idea that Chief Justice Roberts as head of the judicial ethics commission would refer this to the Department of Justice is ludicrous.
Now I’ve Seen Everything
This is just too weird.
H/t Americablog.
Drive Recklessly
Not every pedestrian is a good person.
H/t Jet Boy at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Don’t Let the Door Hit Your Ass On the Way Out
Golf clap on your way out!
Bill O’Reilly is mad about potential tax increases, and he’s threatening to go Gault, and quit his job at Fox News.
Hell if higher taxes can make him shut the f%$# up, raise my taxes too.
It’s money well spent.
A Really Bad Day at the Office
Click for full size
Picture taken at time of impact in Reno
The video
West Virginia
MI-24 crash
It’s been a busy past few days for air crashes.
Yesterday, we had the crash at the Reno air show, and today, we had one at a West Virginia air show, and I have no clue as to when the Hind crashed.
Bummer, But the Movies are a Business
A movie based on HP Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness, has been canceled:
The film-world was thrown into a frenzy yesterday regarding Universal’s cancellation of Guillermo del Toro’s personal passion project, a $150 million, R-rated adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. We live in an era where even the once-brave Warner Bros. has gone from the sort of studio that would roll the dice on The Matrix to the kind of studio that will likely reboot/remake The Matrix, where Pixar seems content to become a sequel factory (Cars 2, Monsters Inc 2), where studios are so terrified of big-budget originality that they seem to merely be parading an never-ending stream of unwanted sequels (Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief: The Sea Monsters), needless remakes (Total Recall), and inexplicable ‘reboots’ (Tomb Raider), the news was the film-news equivalent of us lefties hearing that President Obama had caved into GOP budget demands… again. There are plenty of reasons why executives are reluctant to spend blockbuster-dollars on original ideas. But the (temporary?) death of At the Mountain of Madness isn’t quite representative of the end of original thought in Hollywood. But it is a good time to stop and ask why every major studio genre picture needs to cost to bloody much?
Film Blogger Scott Mendelson is right. When one considers the fact that this film would have to be almost exclusively CGI, and a decent Linux based server farm for the rendering would cost well under $50,000.00, the idea that you need spend $150M to make it is ludicrous.
After all, the 6 minute long CGI extravaganza short subject The Raven cost under $5000.00.
Simply put, this film would not make money unless it shattered box office records for the R-Rated horror genre:
The highest-grossing R-rated film of all-time is The Matrix Reloaded, at $742 million worldwide. After that, you get The Passion of the Christ ($611 million), Terminator 2: Judgment Day ($519 million), Troy ($497 million), Saving Private Ryan ($481 million), The Hangover ($467 million), The Matrix and Pretty Woman ( both $463 million), Gladiator ($457 million), The Last Samurai and 300 ( both $456 million), The Exorcist ($441 million), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machine ($433 million), The Matrix Revolutions ($427 million), Sex and the City ($411 million), and The Bodyguard ($410 million – which is arguably why that one is getting remade). That’s just sixteen films in all of modern-motion picture history that have grossed $400 million or more worldwide with an R-rating. The second-highest-grossing R-rated horror film (after The Exorcist) remains Hannibal, with $351 million. I can’t even think of an insanely successful R-rated supernatural horror picture off the top of my head… can you? Point being, even with the once-surefire Tom Cruise allegedly at the helm, an R-rated $150 million supernatural horror film would basically have to become the most successful supernatural R-rated horror film of all-time just to break even.
(Emphasis mine.)
Could someone out in Hollywood explain to me why every film seems to have to cost something north of $100 million?
Even with PR and distribution costs, it seems to me that this could be a $50 million movie, and given the relative cheapness of modern CGI this is very doable, and at that cost, you might clear a profit on the initial theatrical release.
H/t (unsurprisingly) Cthulhu at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Pimping My Brother’s Blog
That’s the Chicago Way
My older (and even hairier, as unbelievable as it seems) brother segues off my report of the Republican party in Gabrielle Giffords district raffling off the same sort of gun that she was shot with to observe that this behavior will get worse unless their opposition goes after the for this:
What I found interesting was one section of a quote here that Miller made about the reactionary bloc, who he described as being:
“…’my way or the highway’ wing of the GOP who don’t pay much thought to the political fallout [emphasis added] from their actions…”
This is a “curious incident of the dog in the night-time” (The Silver Blaze).
There is no fallout.
There is no a concerted campaign to broadcast and hammer this sort of actions, despite the fact this tactic has been so successful for the reactionary bloc.
Where are the adds from the DNC, MoveOn, and rest of the ‘progressive’ community calling this out, pointing out that this sort of behavior is the core of the political right.
It is the same point that Sean Connery makes in The Untouchables.
I share his pessimism that, “this idea doesn’t seem to percolate through the skulls of people who think community organizing, or triangulation, or patronage is the peak of politics. So we drift on unarmed.”
Until we find people who understand the idea that all negotiations stem from perceived power, and Barack Obama is not one of these people, we will continue to have the “Adults in the room” held hostage by the terrorists.
Your Moment of Monty Python
None Shall Pass!
When this was described to me, my reaction was, “How can you find this funny?”
When I saw it, I understood.
Obama has lost Ed Shultz??
Not what I expect from Ed
Ed Schultz uses the standard cop out that Obama is “Getting bad advice”, but he’s asking “Where’s Barry?”
He notes, accurately IMNSHO, that if Obama had been involved at any level, then at least three Senators would have been unseated, not just two.
John Nichols comes on toward the end, and notes that not only was Obama AWOL on Wisconsin, but he was a regular visitor until the entire conflict developed, and then he avoided the state.
Ed Schultz is an Obama fanboi, and it’s a huge part of his brand as a broadcaster, and even he feels compelled to say, “If only the Czar knew.”
Eddie, here’s a hint: the Czar knows, and this is what he wants.
Obama’s self image, and reelection strategy, is all about his PPUS (Post Partisan Unity Schtick), because he (probably wrongly) believes that the voters will perceive his cowardice as strength, and because he is fundamentally unwilling to take any risks, or take any hits, even to the smallest degree, to support his allies.
This, by the way, is why the Democrats will lose the Senate, and not take back the House, inn 2012. Barack Obama’s intention is to strip mine the base and the party apparatus, and to hell with the party.
Not a Big Fan of Apple Products…
But I have to give props to some of the people who makes cases for the iPhone.
Here we have:
- A bottle opener.
- A severed hand.
- An Etch-a-Sketch Case. (this link applies to the rest)
- A cassette tape.
- A 1980s cell phone
- A wooden camera.
Among others.
It’s amusing, but the iPhone is still an over-priced, over-restricted product of a control freak who wants to tell its user community just how they are supposed to use their own phones.
Because of the uniformity of the product, Android phones come in all shapes and sizes, it’s something that you will find the variety of accessories of this type in a phone ecosystem that is freer.
What Bill Maher Says…
Now You Don’t Have to See the Harry Potter Movies
Blah, blah, blah!
Because here it is, in one minute, as told by cats.
The Debt Ceiling Showdown is Blazing Saddles
One Move, and the N***** Gets It
Yves Smith’s interview on The Real News Network, is a cogent description of what is wring here, and makes reference to that classic scenes from Mel Brooks’ masterpiece, Blazing Saddles.
It’s 8 minutes and 27 seconds well spent.
Her thesis, and it is one that I support, is that the “Debt Ceiling Crisis” is largely an artifact of the Obama administration’s desire to gut cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
It’s screw granny theater.
Friday Cat Blogging
Not Even 5 Years Old
Heh.
But I think that my cat is more of the Uma Thurman with a Samurai sword type.
Yiddish It’s Not for Blithering Idiots…
So not a Yid!
It is pronounced “Hoot” (same vowel sound as book) “Spah”.
It’s not pronounced chute-spa!
I don’t expect her to get the guttural “h”, she is, after all a gentile, a Minnesotan, and a Lutheran,* so she has at best limited experience in that consonant, but seriously, don’t speak Yiddish unless you understand Yiddish.
I’d call her a schmuck, but a schmuck has a head.
*Specifically, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), which is arguably the most antisemitic and anti-Catholic Lutheran sect in the united states.
Not a Good Day for Murdoch
A Bit of Fry and Laurie have Murdoch pegged
First, he and his son try to blow off a summons to testify before Parliament, only to back down when threatened with jail time:
A threat of imprisonment by parliament forced Rupert Murdoch and his son James to perform a volte face and agree to give evidence next week to a Commons committee investigating why News International executives provided false information to MPs.
Hours after the parliamentary authorities delivered a summons by hand to the two Murdochs, News International announced that father and son would accept an invitation to appear before the Commons culture select committee next Tuesday.
Additionally, the FBI has initiated an investigation of potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act as possibly hacking the phones of 911 victim’s families.
It couldn’t be happening to a more deserving group of people.
And the Wisconsin Supreme Court Gets Weirder and Weirder………
This is technically assault
Now it appears that Republicans on the court wanted to proceed with an official photograph session before reporting anything to the capitol police:
In the wake of a physical altercation between two state Supreme Court justices, several of the judges discussed whether a planned photo session for the court should take priority over a meeting with the Capitol police chief.
The email exchange among all the justices came late in the afternoon on June 14, one day after the incident between Justices Ann Walsh Bradley and David Prosser. The emails were released to the Journal Sentinel first by Prosser and then by Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson after a request was made to each justice under the open records law.The response to the request for Abrahamson’s emails also suggests that she had considered putting out a public statement in response to the incident but did not release it.Bradley told the Journal Sentinel that in the June 13 incident Prosser put his hands around her neck in what she called a “chokehold.” Prosser has said other accounts quoting anonymous sources would be proved false, but he has not directly responded to Bradley’s description of the incident.
So, one side says that Prosser put her in a choke hold, and the other says that she attacked his hands with her throat. (Which one sounds more credible to you, particularly since Prosser called the Chief Justice a “bitch” whom he would “destroy”)
It gets weirder, because Prosser assaulted a reporter asking him about the matter, by grabbing a microphone out of his hands (yes, it is assault). (See vid)
Prosser is not presenting the image of a person who is in control of his behavior.
And Now, a Public Service Announcement
Now if only they could pivot to the banksters
It’s an advertisement for Wikileaks.
I wholeheartedly support and approve this message.
Unfortunately, you cannot use your credit, but there are other options listed on their support page.
I would offer a caveat about Bitcoin, which is that the virtual currency has experienced wild price swings, as a result of someone counterfeiting the digital currency, and I would anticipate this sort of thing to increase, because it has some real world value, which attracts criminals, and it is not traceable by the standard three letter acronym (TLA) organizations, which might lead them to attempt to debase the currency or exchanges in some manner.
I would suggest buying an international money order with cash, and mailing it to:
WikiLeaks (or any suitable name likely to avoid interception in your country)
BOX 4080
Australia Post Office – University of Melbourne Branch
Victoria 3052
Australia
Not only do I support, rhetorically at least, Wikileaks, but I would like to see the US Constitution mirror that of the Swedish Constitution, and enshrine the concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness) into our governmental structures.
I believe that the classification of documents in our society should require a strong and affirmative showing that doing so is essential.
Secrecy is most often used to protect those in power from those whom they ostensibly serve, not for protecting the public safety.
Un-Dirtyword Believable!
So, Michelle Bachmann, everyone’s favorite dose of batsh%$ insane, went to her home town of Waterloo Iowa, and invoked fellow Waterloo resident, John Wayne.
Well what I want them to know is just like, John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too.
The problem is that the John Wayne that we all know from his film oeuvre, Marion Robert Morrison, was born in Winterset, Iowa, hours away from Waterloo.
The only famous John Wayne from Waterloo, was John Wayne Gacy, who began his history of abuse and violence in Waterloo before moving to Chicago and expanding to mass murder.
There is a part of me that is beginning to think that Bachmann does things like this because she so loves to play the victimhood card.
Say something mind-bogglingly stupid or deranged, and when people notice, complain that the media is out to get you, and your supporters get even more riled up.
Of course, Occam’s razor would indicate that it’s just stupidity and lunacy,