Pharoahs (Taken with Instagram at Beerland)
“ Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.”
thatfrenchman asked: But have you seen Hugo? Can you really say The Artist is better than everything when you haven't seen everything?
Yes, I can. It’s my right as an American, and if I’m anything it’s a patriot. A patriot who is blindly supporting a silent French film to win arbitrary American awards.
“ We bought that son of a bitch and then he didn’t stay bought.”
Midnight in Paris - Really?
The following should be noted before continuing: I love Woody Allen. I love that he made a movie in Paris. I liked all the cameos in the movie. I wanted to like it so much, I saw it in the theater twice.
Watching Midnight in Paris the second time through was painful. All of the cameo scenes are fun to watch (Adrian Brody was incredible!), but I thought the two main characters were some of the worst characters ever. Rachel McAdams obviously dislikes Owen Wilson from the first second they are on screen together, their relationship is completely unbelievable. All of the scenes with them together are completely flat. The movie gave us no reason to believe that at some point they ever even liked each other, let alone continuing the relationship to the point that they’re engaged.
Even the scenes where Owen Wilson is in a different era, I found him boring. The other people on screen were always the one’s shinning and you could almost forget you were watching a movie about this really boring writer. And then I would be dragged back to a present day scene and want to rip my hair out at how unbelievable that part of the movie was. At no point in the movie did I believe that Owen Wilson’s character was capable of saying anything interesting, let alone writing an entire book someone would want to read.
In conclusion I can’t believe that this movie was nominated for an Oscar. (And Beginners wasn’t!! A crime, I say!)
This. Thank you Jenny. I thought the same things about their relationship when I saw the movie. Though I do think that Wilson was a decent stand in for a character that should have been played by a younger Woody Allen.
I think even if they were still limited to five Best Picture nominations that Midnight In Paris still would have received a nomination because it is a very enjoyable film that focuses as much on Paris as anything else.
But! None of this matters because The Artist is going to win everything and all with be right with the world.
On Elites…
“Newt Gingrich, whose campaign was twice left for dead and came back to win a landslide victory in South Carolina, used his victory speech Saturday night before a raucous crowd of hundreds to attack the “elites in New York and Washington,” whom he identified as President Obama and the news media.”
-Gingrich Has Kind Words for Rivals and Venom for ‘Elites’, Nate Silver- NY Times
If he is defining an elite as anyone who holds a position of power how could Gingrich himself not be considered an elite? The House of Representative has had sixty-one speakers in its history or which Gingrich is one.
I’m sorry, but anyway you look at it Gingrich has been an elite in Washington and would like to be again.
(I’m) Psychotic - Berlin Brats
Dig on that tough riff. Got this record as a gift. You should all be so lucky.
“Perhaps during the blackout, Internet users can look elsewhere for an accurate definition of online piracy.” - U.S Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio
Thanks to the state of Texas’ wonderful congressional districting this is my representative. I have called his office to voice my opinion and let them know the Representative could not rely on my vote due to his continued support of this bill.
I am so galled that I am to the point that I will probably volunteer for whoever his opponent is in the general election and do everything I can to ensure that he is not reelected.
So, if you live in the 21st Congressional District of Texas and would like to be represented by someone who does not understand the implications of his own bills then, by all means, vote for Representative Smith.
golden echos: In an Elaborate Spoof, Nabokov Takes Us to the Never-Never Land of Zembla By GEORGE CLOYNE Sunday, May 27, 1962
PALE FIRE. By Vladimir Nabokov.
Vladimir Nabokov is an obsessive. He arrived in the United States some twenty-two years ago, bringing with him intellectual baggage as firmly limited in weight as the forty pounds of the air traveler’s suitcase. There is nothing the matter with that. To be…
Pale Fire is one of the most creative books I’ve ever read. Nabokov’s command of the English language should shame us all.
