Puff Or Curl?

Possumblog answers an important question: Do you prefer your toated-corn cheese snack puffed or curled? The only correct answer, of course, is curled. All you puffs are, well...poufs.

Start Deleting Those Files Now

Those of you who are TimeWarner Cable customers might want to read this:

Time Warner Cable is the first cable company to begin trying to adhere to the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, the source said. Cable companies are not yet required to comply with the 1994 wiretap law, but they see the writing on the wall.

Vernon Irvin, executive vice president at security vendor VeriSign, said during a recent interview that his company had signed a deal with a "major cable operator" in the United States to help it follow CALEA. He did not identify the provider, but the source tagged Time Warner as the company. A Time Warner representative did not have an immediate comment.

Irvin, however, did assert that other cable companies are sure to follow. That's because the FBI has made public a far-reaching proposal to require all broadband Internet providers--including cable modem and digital subscriber line (DSL) companies--to restructure their networks to support easy wiretapping by police.

"The cable guys aren’t waiting," Irvin said.

Consider yourself warned.

Wi-Fi Woohoo

Found this webpage which lists nine wi-fi hotspots in Memphis. Two are coffee houses, of course. The surprise was that the Malco Paradiso is one, and the TJ Mulligan's out on Quince is another! All free, too.

Just nine, though? That's all? Well, make good use of 'em anyway.

Today's Lesson

Today's lesson comes from Doctor Seuss. It's from the 1930's and it's about "guts". Enjoy.

The Amazing Invisible Candidate

Remember a few weeks ago when Ralph Nader quit his Hamletian dithering and announced his independent candidacy for President? A one-day wonder in the press that launched a firestorm of anger on the Left and in Democratic circles. Dems especially saw him as a Kerry spoiler who would cost them again.

They quickly moved from speaking ill to just pretending he didn't exist. Trouble is, he does exist and he's making impressive inroads even with his new-found press invisibility.

There have been about four polls now, taken over a multi-week period, and all produce the same result: Nader is drawing a steady six percent of the vote against Bush and Kerry! The anti-spin began in articles like this one from the Columbia Journalism Review that tried to spin away his numbers in that poll. But Quinnipiac University ran their own poll and found the exact same number. Then, came an MSNBC/Newsweek poll, just released, that confirms it.

Heck, ABC even found correlation with kids!

Nader is hoping to use this as leverage against the nets to get him into this year's Presidential debates. Good luck. Perot was a fluke, not a precedent. He'll be battling them every step of the way to get in. Kerry's people don't want him in, as it'll make the debates look like nothing more than Bush-bashing, damaging Kerry's already wobbly image.

As it is, Nader will have enough problems just getting media attention. I'd watch for Dean and his new action group to get more attention than he does. It reinforces the Dems' chances and Dean works better in the "maverick outsider" template for them. Even though Nader has more supporters, Dean's are "internet organised," which, again, is the preferred template. Plus, let's be honest, Nader hurts Kerry's chances; media bias will tell.

Still, I remind readers that I was predicting Nader at this level several months ago. I bet you thought I was goofy then, but I had a real sense of both Democratic dissatisfaction with the front-runners in the primaries and a very real far-Left voter rebellion simmering out here in the heartland. You may all bow before my amazing prognosticating abilities!

Fanfare!

I haven't gotten around to this yet, but changes have happened in the Fanfare section of the Sunday Commercial Appeal that I really am glad to see. The stultifying, oppressive hand of Frederic Koeppel has been lifted and new things are happening. Koeppel has long dominated the "arts" side of the paper with his elitist literary tastes. He prefers to review books that might sell a dozen or so copies here in Memphis than cater to the unwashed masses and their mass-market tastes. That's changing.

The first sign was the appearance of Jon W. Sparks' reviews of audio tapes of books. I'm guessing he fills his driving time with 'em and thought "why not review 'em too?" Just seeing this was good news. I imagine Koeppel groaned.

There are fewer books being featured likely to be read by no one, seemingly put in there to either uplift the dreary, non-art-inspired masses or to cater to a narrow slice of the Commercial Appeal's readership. That's good, but we still see too many books reviewed because the author is in town or because Corey Messler read them. It also seems that two pages were taken out, reducing Fanfare from eight pages to six. Put them back!

If it were me, I'd love to see the paper try reviewing some non-fiction books on the popular science front. There are plenty of books that explain the world around us in an entertaining but informative way, and it would be nice to see them highlighted once in a while for education-deprived folks in Memphis to check out. More genre fiction, too.

Now we also have a "Page Turners" feature. The folks in the CA research department are writing short reviews of a number of mysteries and crime thrillers. It's not my taste, but obviously lots of Memphians read them. So far, I've found Shirley Sykes to be their best reviewer. I hope she does more.

Some of the syndicated columns have disappeared, but that's no problem except for the magazine roundup.

Hmmm. A pretty rambling ramble here. Let's sum up: Koeppel back-seated? Hooray! Fewer pages? Boo. New reviewers? More yay!

In Case You Were Wondering

Remember when ABC/WPTY 24 dumped their entire anchor crew and replaced them with the Happy Fun Couple last year? Bill Lund and Renee Malone got snapped up by NBC/WMC 5. Good for them. I just discovered today that Ken Houston is going to Baltimore, to be an evening anchor. (Scroll down the right-hand side, under "Latest industry moves.") Good for him.

It was a shabby thing to do. And while WPTY can still do hard news better than the rest -- witness their spectacular job with the Dyersburg hostage situation -- they also have a distressing tendency to surround it with silliness like Jeni DiPrizio chasing car drivers. Then there's the whole issue of the Happy Fun Couple presiding over the news show.

I'd still like to know what became of Michelle Robinson. You'll recall that she started at CBS/WREG 3 as the morning on-location reporter. She and another on-air personality -- along with some other NewsChannel 3 employees -- were hired as extras for a Hollywood movie filming locally. Turned into an ugly mess for them, as the management had issues. She was let go, though Todd Demers kept his job, ending up as an anchor at WPTY! Good for her. I thought she really blossomed there, so it was doubly distressing to see her fall into the trap door as she did. Anyone know what became of her? I hope it's good.

Madison Avenue Folly

The new Madison Avenue trolley began operations this week, and to see the media hoopla you'd think it was a Great Thing. Bah. A taxpayer boondoggle, a wet dream for social planners and a windfall for road builders. The editors over at the Memphis Flyer say it best:

The new trolley link between downtown and what may some day actually be a revived "medical center" is a questionable expense of public funds. It is justified by the generosity of the federal government, which used to pay 80 percent of the cost of mass-transit projects. Or in the case of Memphis, federal funds diverted from the aborted Interstate 40 project through Overton Park were used to help build the first stage of the downtown trolley system....

But the proposed new light-rail line from downtown to the airport is another matter. Supposedly, it would cost $400 million, but any estimate about a public construction project targeted for completion in 2010 is a guess, at best. What we do know is that under new rules the federal government would pay at most $200 million, or half of the cost. State and local governments would pay the rest, plus operating subsidies.

We cannot imagine a state government that often looks askance at Memphis anyway rallying behind a $100 million appropriation. And we cannot imagine city and county governments that recently declined to spend $5 million over several years on the hometown University of Memphis rallying behind a $100 million investment in light rail.

Exactly.

The Commercial Appeal headlined it as "A trolley for residents," but considering that it stops long before it reaches many clusters of apartment complexes further east, it seems false. I live one block off Madison, but as it stands I have to catch the 2 bus to the closest trolley terminal at Cleveland and then transfer. Yeah, right. I'll just stay on my bus, thank you. Though the trolley runs "every ten mintues" I still have to wait a while for the number 2. Why can't regular busses run "every ten minutes?" Wouldn't that be even better than a trolley?

Obviously, this was a case of "use it or lose it." And the losers are the Midtowners. Though the Commercial Appeal glosses it, several businesses went under during construction. Many more suffered financial setbacks that will hurt them for years to come. Not only that, but there's an ugly showdown already happening over the proposed extension. The city would love to continue the trolley down Madison to Overton Square, then shoot south along Cooper to the Cooper-Young hub. Nearly everyone involved along that route opposes it, especially the folks in C-Y who will lose a lot of their charm to make room for the tracks, widened roads, lost parking and sidewalks, and overhead spaghetti the trolley entails. Business leaders haven't been in the least mollified by assurances from the builders that they learned their lesson with the original line.

The proposed Lamar extension has actual advocates, who would like to have traffic brought to their business corridor, but the city would prefer that tourists see the "funky" parts of Midtown, not the rundown parts, and so that route is deprecated.

Make no mistake, it will be mostly tourists who use this contraption. No matter what the Commercial Appeal tries to make you believe in their multi-page worship of the trolley, it is simply too slow for most commuters. City busses travel faster; nearly traffic flow speed most of the time. Trolleys creep along.

It was all a big pot of money dressed up in city pride by folks who want to sell you the Emperor's New Clothes. Social engineers will lament its non-use and dream of new ways to spend taxpayer money to make you use it, so they can be proven right. Imagine if all that money could somehow have been diverted into MATA's coffers? We'd have more frequent busses, more routes and later times, longer routes. We might afford smaller busses for those routes and times that don't require the standard long bus, saving money, fuel, wear and pollution! It would visibly and effective improve the quality of public transportation, which currently sucks.

One MATA example. I used to travel out to the Hickory Ridge Mall area, back in the Nineties before the whole area fell into disrepair and abandon. I could catch a bus along Union and make only one transfer. Not so bad. Total trip time, though? Close to an hour. And God forbid I'm a minute or so late being at the stop, as I'd have to wait 45 minutes for the next one, which might not hook up with the bus I needed to transfer to in order to get home!

For some reason, no doubt influenced by the same "Manhattan on the Mississippi" crowd that is sucking up tax dollars at a furious pace for dubious worth, the central bus terminal is all the way over to the west of the city, near the Pyramid, rather than near the middle. So, rather than a lot of short spokes leading from a centrally-located hub, hatched with cross-connectors near the edges to save some longer trips, we have huge rambling worms tracing all over the place. It often means having to travel from one end of town to the downtown just to connect to a bus taking you back out to the edge again, so you can move geographically north or south! Heck, they could even place a small number of "sub-hubs" in the places with the highest concentration of bus travellers and connect them, like the airlines do. But no, we have the same plodders at the helm stuck to the same old ideas, serving the same old masters.

The whole purpose of the trolley is being sold to us as a "light rail" alternative to car travel. Now, when you think of "light rail" most folks picture the commuters of the Northeast corridor going to work every morning from the bedroom communities, reading their papers and working on their computers, travelling into the Big City. Ours is nothing like that; it's a trolley, no matter what proponents say. Loud, bumpy, jangly. Think San Francisco, not Connecticut or Chicago. Supposedly, these things will be faster and better than bus routes from the airport area to the downtown. Not likely, as trolleys are slower than busses. And the routes being chosen are both the two sides of a triangle rather than the one, shorter side. As others have noted, we'd be better off with a $3 or $4 charter bus arrangement from an airport-neighborhood bus hub to the downtown terminal. Faster and more direct.

[BTW, did you know a cab ride from the airport to the Midtown area can cost nearly thirty dollars? If I were an enterprising guy, I'd start one of those gypsy bus lines, like they have in Boston and New York, ferrying people in vans from the airport to the Bus Terminal downtown. You'd make a mint.]

But don't look for things like that. Too smart, too obvious. And not connected to those big, big pots of money waiting for someone to spend.

He Said It! Part One

The current Jackson Baker column is a look at Representative Harold Ford, Jr. Wipe away the usual Dem-worship slobber from the page and there are a few interesting things. One is this Ford quote on the War in Iraq:

Bill Clinton said the same thing. I'm not here to defend George Bush. I want to win. But Bill Clinton had the same policy -- to disarm Iraq and change the regime. George Bush just took it to another level.

"Another level." Gotta love that one.

Baker also reports this Great Ford Idea:

Notable was his concept of "stakeholder" accounts, whereby newborn American citizens would receive a $1,000 "stake" at birth and receive various add-ons later -- upon reaching the sixth-grade level and upon graduation, for example.

Real smart, as they say. Government bribes to do right. The first "early withdrawal" exemption will be for medical emergencies and you'll see families all across the poor spectrum raiding these accounts like cookie jars.

Allowing "stakeholder" accounts for Social Security is wrong. It takes money from the government. But taking more money from taxpayers for personal "stakeholder" accounts? That's fine.

New paint job, same old Democratic thinking.

He Said It! Part Two

During the hiatus I was listening to the Mike Phlegming radio show when he had County Mayor AC Wharton on. As is his style, Mr. Wharton was speaking somewhat slowly and deliberately, trying to choose and phrase answers carefully. Of course, Mr. Fleming hasn't got the time. He is forever hustling folks along, cutting them off or finishing their comments for them, to get to the commercial break.

In one particular segment discussing term limits locally, Fleming was starting to speak for and over Mayor Wharton while Wharton was trying to complete one thought and respond to Fleming. During the short hurly-burly, Fleming burst out with "I don't trust the voters!" It was clear, in context, that his mouth was moving faster than his concious control and he was expressing a core belief.

Yep. Mike Fleming -- elitist. Remember that next time you call in.

This Didn't Appear From Nowhere

I'm always bothered when a story seems to just "discover" some item of interest. Take, for example, this story, an AP report printed on the front page of the Commercial Appeal about a newly "married" gay couple in Chattanooga. If you skim the article, it seems like this couple were just living their lives, not drawing any attention. Somehow, the difficulties they faced got discovered by the reporter and became a story. There seems some effort to make them poster children for the gay marriage movement in Tennessee.

How did Bill Poovey find these guys? Did he know them? Did they come to him? Did they do something, not reported in the story, that brought notice? I suspect the latter, as a close reading of the article leads to this passage:

The gay couple said they have encountered no ugly reactions to their Feb. 23 marriage or the publicity that followed, including interviews with Chattanooga news outlets."

Ahhhh...publicity. What kind and of what nature? Why did some news outlets interview them?

See, more going on than we are led to believe. Something else is afoot. Always read closely and ask the questions.

I Do My Part

Just a reminder that I have been a busy guy for John Kerry, and have a page of campaign posters for him. There are two posters up now! I hope y'all appreciate my hard work. Feel free to distribute the images all you want, just please give me credit. And don't steal my bandwidth, either. Download the images to your own server.

Look here.

Question Of The Day

When the French got all uppity and sniffy about America's desire to whomp the shit out of Iraq, they quickly earned the sobriquet "cheese-eating surrender monkeys."

So why is it, when the Spanish Socialists got the upper hand and steered Spain back into the Hidey-hole of Don't Hurt Us Please Sir, they didn't get called "salsa-eating surrender monkeys?"

Seems so obvious to me, but I haven't seen it around. Que?

Two Thoughts And A Quote

A couple of Thoughts For The Day and a quote I really like:

When you're 20 you don't know.
When you're 30 you know you don't know.
When you're 40 you know, but you don't know you know.
When you're 50 you know and you know you know.

and

Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.

Thanks to Fark for both of those. And from Jemima Periera comes this 1798 quote from John Adams:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Mr. Mike's Link Party!

As I noted below, I'm woefully behind in my bookmarks. I've got tons of stuff I meant to blog on that sat fallow while I've been in The Grey Lands. Most of it was time sensitive, where if you don't blog on it right then everyone else already has and you're old news that no one cares about any more. I still haven't found a way to reconcile wanting to blog on the topics of the day and being laid low on a regular basis by depression. I may have to accept it, I guess, and blog on anyway.

Anyway, instead of a whole lot of short posts, I'm just going to do this Insta-style.

* The New York Post (Link works today; you may have to backtrack after that.) has an item, for some reason buried in the Gossip section, on a Details magazine story about "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS." Fascinating stuff, and controversial. Folks who can remember that far back recall the hysteria the media promoted about how AIDS was going to devastate the "straight" community, not just gays and drug users. Never happened. Unfortunately, the Details story isn't online, but I found another site that quotes more from it. Go read.

No surprise to learn that it was all a bunch of hype by folks looking to promote an agenda or get government money. I never believed that the hetero population was as sexually active as the gay male community. Very few het men have the same number of partners that most sexually active gays do. And, as the article points out, het sex just doesn't involve as much potentially porous tissue and unprotected areas as anal sex. I remember an article somewhere that showed few women allowed anal sex, so that plays a part as well. It was all about getting "breeders" to care by scaring them into believing it could happen to them as well. Turns out you're more likely to get hit by lightning, by an order of magnitude, then to catch AIDS. Go read both posts.

* All the gay marriages happening in San Francisco have brought a celebrity couple out of the closet. Very logical.

* Just stumbling arund the Web, I came across this essay, entitled "If Jesus Had Never Been Born." It's a look at the kinds of changes we might have seen in history in a Christianity-free world. Turns out, not so different, unless you jump off from the essay and think about some of his extrapolations. While there, take a gander at some of the other essays by John J. Reilly. Chewy stuff.

* We're already hearing piffle about how this is a "negative" campaign and how it's going to be down and dirty. Pooh. Our modern elections have nothing on 19th century politics. Try reading about the 1884 campaign. It started with a Presidential assassination, reached its zenith with revelations that the main candidate had a bastard child, and featured secret meetings, party defections and multiple conventions. Now that's politics!

* Motion-induced blindness! Whee! Try this test to see. All three yellow dots are always there, but your eye and mind lose them every once in a while.

* Fans of Homestar Runner have been waiting for Strong Bad's 100th email. It wasn't here, like most folks thought, but was secretly moved here. Was it worth the wait? Holy crap! YOU BET!

Note to newbies: Like all Homestar Runner Flash animation, wave your cursor around the screen to find the Easter eggs. Lots of them on the last screen, including a special message from Limozeen!

* I hope to post more about the Madrid bombing and the resulting election of the Socialists later, but for now, Oliver Kamm, a disaffected member of the English Liberal Democratic Party says it more eloquently than I. Go and read, especially the comments. Sample quote:

In the circumstances, it is a bizarre misalignment ? more like a category mistake - to suppose that Islamist terror is designed to influence the policy complexion of western states. The restoration of the Caliphate and the destruction of the Jews are not aims of the same type as that of getting 1300 Spanish peacekeepers withdrawn from Iraq. Bin Laden ? supposing he is alive, as I doubt ? doesn?t care whether those troops are in Iraq or elsewhere: he just wants them, and us, dead.

I labour this because some of the commentary today from those like Andrew who supported war in Iraq elides the distinction between these incommensurable goals. That?s a significant error on two grounds. The lesser ground is that those who wish for the defeat of world leaders favourable to President Bush?s strategy thereby have a perfect opportunity to affect umbrage at the notion that to be anti-terror requires one to vote in a particular way, and I?d like to deny them the pleasure of righteous indignation. The more substantial reason is that it implicitly concedes a case to the anti-war campaigners that ought to be withheld. If policies carried out by western governments can be predicted to provoke the murder of our citizens, then there is a seductive and utterly wrongheaded argument that those policies ought to be calibrated so as to minimise such provocation.

* I'm not sure how many of you are Spalding Gray fans, but he was a monologist and actor I enjoyed. His movie Swimming to Cambodia was all about his experiences making the movie The Killing Fields. Swimming was nothing more than Spalding, a table with a glass of water, and a chair, on a stage for ninety minutes, but it was competely enthralling. He painted such pictures with his words that you were transported. Sadly, back in January, he went missing. Suicide was feared. You can read this interview to learn a whole lot about the guy, including some battles with demons. It's worth your time for the view into neurosis and mental illness. Then came the news that his body was found. He will be missed.

* Last one! Got dreams of being a rock and roll star? Think again. Musician and record producer Steve Albini lays out the reality for you. It's not pretty. Basicallly, the record company makes out like a bandit and you get the bill.

Janeane Garofalo Crush

Don't hit me, but yeah, I have a crush on Janeane Garofalo. Her politics are despicable, but she's cute and funny and cute. Her stand up comedy is so-so, but her stints on Larry Sanders and The Ben Stiller Show are great, as have been many of her movie appearances.

I really think she could be the next Eve Arden (pic here) if she wanted; she plays the cynical, smart-mouthed best friend like few others. She's attrative enough to pull it off, but not so good looking as to detract from the star. Look at her chemistry with Uma Thurman in The Truth About Cats And Dogs for an idea of what it would be like.

But Garofalo doesn't particularly care for acting, as she finds the phoniness of the industry off-putting. Whatever. You can read about that in this interview. But, in the couse of the interview, she mentions that her favorite movie of what she's done is The Matchmaker. So, I rented it to see how it was.

Wow. I really wish she'd rethink her attitudes to movies. I won't do a full review, but if you're looking for a "date night" movie to get all mushy over, this is the one. Pure piffle, with a plot you can guess from the first ten minutes, but well-handled and pretty funny. It only drags, amazingly enough, when Garofalo is off screen!

Garofalo shines, too, especially dressed in regular adult clothes. She reins in her caustic side and ramps up the megawatt smiles to wonderful effect. She plays a fish out of water stuck in a small Irish village during the annual Matchmaker Festival. Of course, she "meets cute" with the local handsome lad and the rest of the movie is all bumbling to love. Nothing you haven't seen, but I can see why Garofalo is proud. She looks great and holds up the film with aplomb.

[Side note: A word on cameos. Actor Robert Mandan makes a two-minute cameo at the end of the movie as a character's father. He played Chester Tate on "Soap" and was a staple of Eighties television. But in his short cameo here, he makes the most of his time and fully realises his character. It's a model of acting and great to watch. He was pretty close to his death by then, but he has polish and charisma to spare. Marvelous work.

My favorite cameo still is John Mahoney in Betrayed, where he plays the white supremacist father of a murdered son. In a ten minute scene with Debra Winger, sitting around a campfire, he takes what had been a cardboard spear-carrier part and breathes full life into it. By the end of the scene, he's become a living person, with emotions, history, family and motivation. You find yourself sympathising with a white supremacist. All in ten minutes. It's still a wonder to behold.

End digression!]

Where was I? Oh yeah, Janeane Garofalo, crushcrushcrush. It's a shame she's backing away from movies. The "Eve Arden character" is an important role in movies and no one is currently filling it. Elizabeth McCormick and Elizabeth Perkins were in the running for a while, but have faded. Arden was famous as the older, wise-cracking, skeptical, world-weary best friend of the movie's lead. She could be counted on to give bad, jaded advice that kept the two leads apart and would then reliably fall for the male lead's best friend at the end, slightly less cynical than before. Arden made a career of playing those roles and was perfectly cast.

C'mon Janeane!

DVD Review: Seven Samurai

Most of you have seen this movie, believe it or not. It was remade in America as The Magnificent Seven. Great movie.

So why should you see The Seven Samurai, the Japanese original? It's over three hours long, in black and white, set in feudal Japan and has subtitles. Is it that good? The short answer is: YES! This movie is an epic adventure about the struggle between good, less-good and evil. It's about how society depends on cops/soldiers, but holds them apart.

A group of bandits are overheard making plans to raid a village when the harvest comes in. The villagers relunctantly decide to hire some samurai (think of them as roaming, authorised, cops for hire) to defend themselves. The rest of the film follows the characters as they approach the climactic battle -- touching on themes of love, respect, deception, community, honor and duty.

Frankly, it's only the subtitle issue that should stop you. Yeah, the movie has some talky parts and the titles fly by thick and fast. Nothing I can do there, sad to say. But the cinematography is spectacular, making use of deep-focus to give tremendous depth to the image and allowing for several planes of action to be on the screen at a time. Akira Kurosawa's direction is always sure, keeping the movie steadily moving along. For such a long movie, I never got bored! One event unfolds into another, and then at the halfway point some deceptions are revealed which re-energises things. By the time the big showdown comes, you realise that you've been expertly wound up with anticipation.

That battle doesn't disappoint. Like all battles fought with swords, sticks and fists, it takes time, ebbing and flowing with the exhaustion and determination of the combatants. Horses run back and forth, villagers run back and forth; the camera sweeps along with them. Not only that, but a massive rainstorm turns the final push into a mudfest, actors running knee-deep sometimes in the water and muck.

Several characters stand out, starting with the dejected, humliated villagers seeking help, only to show how devious and dismissive they can be when things look up. They first hire the magisterial, silent Kambei, who is never less than a well-respected, canny warrior. Throughout the movie, he is the center of the samurai. There's the cold and ruthless samurai, precise and minimal in all he does, even to his emotions. There's the young samurai, eager, well-bred, but still the kid; his journey is that of becoming a man. There are a lot of people to keep track of, and sometimes it's not easy, but by the hour mark, they are all individuals.

I want to focus on the volcanic Toshiro Mifune as the rogue samurai Kikuchiyo. We first meet him and he's a capering, rude, pushy buffoon. Mifune plays him broadly and for comic effect; he is, in fact, much of the movie's comic relief from the building tension. His face is like pliable rubber, his body a puppet he flings around, his physical movements as fluid as a monkey's. Being a bumpkin, he's also coarse and insulting. But he has a canniness and depth that surprise people time and time again. Mifune is a wonder to watch: think of a cross between John Belushi and Jim Carrey. His character's journey lets him play nearly every emotion, and he's superb.

So go, rent. If you can handle the subtitles, you will not be disappointed. Engaging characters, great set-ups and situations, beautiful historic detail, and a narrative that drives you inexorably to its end. Highly recommended!

My Contribution To The Kerry Campaign

Ol' John Kerry is out there asking folks to "Bring it on," so I did. You can go here to see the Kerry campaign poster I designed! Feel free to pass it on, but make sure to give credit where it's due, OK? It took me all of a half-hour to make that! That's a lot of work.

BTW, I pulled the "Welcome to Kerrymerica" link, as I think it still needs work. I keep wanting to pull it more in the direction of Monty Python animations for some reason....

BTWBTW: Why hasn't "Kerrymerica" caught on yet? I think it's so instantly intuitive, it rolls so trippingly off the tongue, that it should be all over. Spread the meme, y'all.

Fun With Photodeluxe

I'm not dead yet, as the man once said. Been playing with some graphics lately and set up a page on the hollihan.net site to share them with y'all. If you like 'em, please feel free to use 'em, just be nice enough to give me credit. Don't "hot link," as I'm on the most basic hosting plan and you'll hose my bandwidth! Go to this page.

Speaking of hosting, what's up with Hosting Matters? I sent them money a month ago, wanting to upgrade to a plan that will let me set up an SQL database so I can move to a MovableType blog over at my domain. I wanted to start at the beginning of this month, even though it meant paying for a few weeks I wouldn't use, but they seem intent on waiting until the actual renewal date or the first of next month to make the change! Hey, I'm ready now. I got the spare time (I quit my job this week. Anyone hiring fat, bald guys?), I think I can handle the MT setup (har, har, har, he says not knowing) and wanted to just GET IT DONE. Instead I'm cooling my heels. Sigh....

Been on the edge of coming back. I've got so many things bookmarked that it takes a while for the bookmarks to load when I click the button. I've got the time, for the time being. I want Jon to mention my blog in the Commercial Appeal, so I need some content. But, I'm still not quite there. Maybe soon, though.

Being me sucks bad sometimes. So, how y'all been doing?

Hiatus

Life sucks too much right now. I'm on hiatus. I'll be back one day.