Monthly Archives: July 2007

Ship of Fools

Vivien Leigh - Ship of Fools
Ever wonder how the other half lives? Here’s your chance to find out. Just join Johann Hari as he slouches along with a marauding boatload of neo-cons for a farcical summer junket:

I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, ” Of course, we need to execute some of these people,” I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. “A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country,” she says. “Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.” She squints at the sun and smiles. ” Then things’ll change.”I am travelling on a bright white cruise ship with two restaurants, five bars, a casino – and 500 readers of the National Review. Here, the Iraq war has been “an amazing success”. Global warming is not happening. The solitary black person claims, “If the Ku Klux Klan supports equal rights, then God bless them.” And I have nowhere to run.
Ship of fools: Johann Hari sets sail with America’s swashbuckling neocons – Independent Online Edition > Americas

The Artist…

princepinup.jpg

Any headline involving Prince is worthy of our attention. Nothing generates hits like a bawdy photo of this lad.
Any headline involving the music industry further fucking themselves is worthy, too. This one especially.
Throw in some wit, and you have hit the Trifecta!

Prince has angered the music industry and stirred up trouble among British retailers by giving away his new album with a tabloid newspaper this weekend. “Planet Earth” will be packaged with the Mail on Sunday at a price of $2.80. The giveaway has been roundly criticized as a major blow for an industry already facing rapidly declining CD sales. It has led Sony BMG UK, Prince’s local label, to pull the plug on its own sales release of the CD in Britain.

International sales launch for “Planet Earth” is July 16; the U.S. launch is July 24.

“The Artist formerly known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores,” said Paul Quirk, co-chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association, referring to a period in the 1990s when the singer famously stopped using his name to protest a binding record deal.

Prince CD giveaway angers industry – CNN.com

Grass is Green and so is Money

money.jpg

ABC News fires off a rapier quip at the over-polished Romney campaign:

Former governor Mitt Romney’s camp is wasting no time in seeking to capitalize on McCain’s bad news. Politico’s Jonathan Martin gets a hold of an e-mail circulated among Romney’s Michigan supporters that reveals the behind-the-scenes poaching. “We are currently reaching out to our friends who are supporters of the Senator’s to see if sometime in the future they may wish to join our Grassroots team.” Good that “Grassroots” is capitalized — makes it sound really official.
The Note: Iraq Policy at Standstill Despite Unease

No surprise at all

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We all knew this was coming, didn’t we. Not more than a few days after a court decision clearing the release of the D.C. Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s, phone records, the first politician fesses up:

Sen. David Vitter, R-Louisiana, apologized Monday night for “a very serious sin in my past” after his telephone number appeared among those associated with an escort service operated by the so-called “D.C. Madam.”…
“Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling. Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the matter there — with God and them. But I certainly offer my deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way.”
Senator sorry after number appears on D.C. Madam’s list – CNN.com

how many more will follow?

UPDATE: Just found this on ABC News:

In 1999, after designated House Speaker Rep. Bill Livingston, R-La., abruptly resigned after disclosures of numerous affairs, Vitter successfully ran to succeed him representing suburban New Orleans.
Asked whether she could forgive her husband after an extramarital affair, as Livingston’s wife had done, Wendy Vitter told the Times-Picayune: “I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary [Clinton]. If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.”
ABCNews | Sen. Vitter Apologizes for His Link to ‘D.C. Madam’

It’s also worth noting that as the Rudy Giuliani campaign’s “Southern Regional Chair”, Vitter becomes the third high ranking official in Rudy’s campaign to fall afoul of the law …

Oh, This Is Horrible! Why Didn’t You Kill Me?

The slug, above, is just one example of the achingly bad dialogue from the movie “Tough Guys Don’t Dance“, written, adapted and directed by none other than Norman Mailer. He could have done us all a favour and left with just the writing credit. Pawn wasted a couple precious hours of his life last night watching this exemplar of bad acting, as Ryan O’Neal, Issabella Rossellini and Debra Sandlund cavort through a pathetic mystery involving several meaningless murders and several meaningless characters.

Debra SandlundIssabella Rossellini

A particularly humorous scene involves O’Neal and Rossellini’s characters, an apparently adventurous couple, deciding to go visit “The Big Stoop,” a babtist preacher who’s into wife swapping on the side, played by none other than Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame. That character’s name, by the way, derives from the fact that he’s sexually well endowed, but a little dim. Not enough of a man for Sundland, it seems.

John Bedford Lloyd turns in perhaps the most intelligent performance, made even more striking by the stilted and improbable dialog, such as “I am so wrong for this kind of imbroglio.” I’d swear that Kevin Spacey based his performance in “Midnight in the garden of good and evil” on Lloyd’s efforts.

A heady day of loud music and tips about loft insulation


Pawn
was mildly entertained by the Live Earth concert broadcast the other day, but feels special kinship to this reviewer, writing in The Independent Online:

And as proceedings kicked off with a heart-pumping drumming display featuring Queen’s Roger Taylor, Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Taylor Hawkins of Foo Fighters alongside a chorus of taiko drummers and beeping SOS signals as images of endangered species and crashing glaciers flashed up on the screens, it really felt as though this could be an important call to arms.

Unfortunately, though, that side of things never really worked. There was something fatally incongruous about watching Metallica rock out as tips about loft insulation scrolled above their heads. While many of the acts chose not to acknowledge the cause, it was the succession of mainly low-rent announcers who really let Al Gore down. Actor after actor eschewed learning their lines in favour of casting their eyes down to the autocue and muttering their message, with the result that there was a lack of fervour and unity of purpose all round.
Live Earth, Wembley Stadium, London – Independent Online Edition > Reviews

Let’s Come Together

Reuters is carrying a story about a dust-up at the EU, in Brussels, over a risqué “44-second clip of 18 couples achieving ecstasy in a variety of positions and venues”.

I guess that is to be expected. Here’s our favorite line from the article:

Some reporters also took a swipe at the title of the sequence, asking whether “Let’s Come Together” was acceptable innuendo — and if it was, whether the pun worked in the 27-member Union’s other official languages…
“Let us for once also have a good sense of humor and let us not start the old wars of the fifties about what is sex, what is pornography and what is simply normal to watch on television,” spokesman Martin Selmayr appealed Wednesday.
Orgasm clip spices up EU meeting – CNN.com

Fame: Star or Oddity?

Fergie at Wembly

I just watched The Concert for Diana on my Myth box last night. Well, to be perfectly honest I watched parts of it. I endured most of the opening number by Elton John, but could not stomach Duran Duran. I understand that they were there because they were Diana’s favorites; the princes told us as much. But, we are not asked to endure Geo. Washington’s favorite band on President’s day, are we??

And Fergie, what’s with Fergie? She wasn’t one of Diana’s faves, so why was she there. It surely isn’t because of talent. Given that I haver seen Greek columns with better fashion sense, it couldn’t be a fashion connection. So why was she there? I think it was to serve as an example to the young people of what can go wrong if you ignore your studies or something like that.

Lastly, the one part I did watch all the way through was the duet with Joss Stone and Tom Jones. The man is old enought to be her grandfather for heaven’s sake. And why was he dressed like John Travolta from 1976? Want proof?