Antidisingenuousmentarianism

Kevin Butler just said the third quarter of that game made him throw up turkey that he ate two days ago. I'm not sure I'll hear a better description than that.

Labels: football

I don't know if Dr. Octagon was successful. It was just different and new, but I've done more things. It's like Stephen King. He wrote "Children Of The Corn" and he wrote the clown [the novel It], but he's still Stephen King. I like some of his other movies. He did the car, the trucks, running by themselves. [Maximum Overdrive.] They made a bunch of Halloweens, but I'm not just going to fall in love with Halloween number one. Just like Saw. The guy made different parts. He made other movies. Some with the puppets waking up out of the box. You just got to adapt to them.

More here, but nothing else quite that great.

Labels: Kool Keith

There is a huge problem with Calvin Trillin's article on Texas bbq, and that problem is that it is way, way too short. I expected at least two more full pages on the matter before being brought to a screeching halt at a mere five. What about the other Texas bbq joints slighted by the naming of Snow's as numero uno? Don't they have their own traditions? What does Trillin really think of the cue? He seems to like it but be unenthusiastic.

I had warned the Texas Monthly crowd that if they were looking for confirmation of their ranking by an objective outlander, someone from Kansas City was not likely to provide it. A jazz fan taken to a rock concert might admire the musical technique, but he probably wouldn’t make an ecstatic rush to the stage. As we sat down at one of the outside tables, under a galvanized-tin covering, I told them that they could expect the sort of response that a proud young father I know has received during the past year or so whenever he e-mails me pictures of his firstborn: “A perfectly adequate child.” Still, what Burka had ordered was good enough to make me forget that we were eating a huge meal of barbecue at a time on Saturday morning when most people were starting to wonder what they might rustle up for breakfast once they bestirred themselves. I particularly liked the brisket, although I couldn’t attest that it was as soft and sweet as cookie dough. In Kansas City, it is not customary to eat cookie dough.

Did Trillin have something else to do? Did he feel the story was played out already? Damn it. I want more.

Also, Prince is perhaps creepier than expected.

When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion—Prince tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”

Labels: New Yorker

Corey Johnson is against prison sex-y pants. Or needs a hobby.

Another part of Georgia's sex offender law takes a hit, as it should. You can't make it incredibly difficult for people to find a place to live and then stick them in prison forever because of the restrictions you've enacted on that.

I believe the point is that teenagers don't vote. The only solution here is robot cars, y'all. Let's get on it.

Labels: ABH, opining

Arrests: On Nov. 16, deputy Robert Elder was on patrol about 1:50 a.m. and conducting a security check at Kohl's off Epps Bridge Parkway. He saw some headlights moving along a large wall behind the store, but when he rounded the corner he did not see a vehicle. Elder then saw a small car racing behind the store and it went in the direction of Wal-Mart. Elder pursued and saw the car enter Epps Bridge Parkway and drive off at a high rate of speed. When Elder caught up to the car, it pulled off the highway into McDonald's and stopped. Elder asked the pair what they were doing this late at night behind the store and the driver said they were throwing a football, which went down a drain. When he asked them why they were leaving in such a hurry, they had no answers. Both men were chewing gum, but Elder could smell alcohol on them. The driver, [Joseph Gribble], 18, of St. Ives Lane, Athens, had a Class D license and was not supposed to drive after midnight. He admitted drinking two beers. The passenger, [Bobby Hill], 17, of Winterberry Drive, Athens, denied drinking, but refused to take a test. [Gribble] was charged with underage consumption of alcohol and loitering. [Hill] also was charged with the violation, along with possession of marijuana after deputies found marijuana in his shoe at the jail.

Why didn't Carl Jordan ever say that large, well-lit parking lots attract underage drinkers?

Harassment: On Nov. 12, deputy Danny Bennett met with a 23-year-old Danielsville woman who said she wanted a 26-year-old Athens man to stop calling her. She showed the deputy a text message where the man wrote "if u ever inter fear with my life ever again u or any 1 else, I will make u pay."

He's Prince's cousin.

Oconee. Madison.

Labels: police blotter

Okay, so when Tim Gunn's Guide to Style was running a marathon, we DVRed a bunch of it, so I have now seen more by which to judge it as a show, and I definitely like it better than I did at first (although I still think it encourages ladies to spend too much money, which is not the direction we should be applying pressure, as a society). But. There is one thing that is absolutely nuts about his list of ten essential items.

1. Basic Black Dress
2. Trench Coat
3. Dress Pants
4. Classic Shirt
5. Jeans
6. Any Occasion Top
7. Skirt
8. Day Dress
9. Jacket
10. Sweatsuit Alternative

Bonus: One Indulgent Trendy Item

Y'all, unless someone convinces me otherwise, I'm going to assume Tim Gunn is in bed with the trench coat industry.

Labels: TV

Because I have very little else to blog, here is a list.

--Collard greens (not nerve-wracking; I have done these a kabillion times)
--Green bean casserole (mostly from scratch although I did buy the French's onions, due to fear over burning the ones you toast in the oven and being stuck with no onions)
--Creamed corn
--Lemon chess pie (a new thing, due to my anti-pumpkin bias)
--Rolls (not exciting)
--Mashed potatoes

Woo.

Labels: food

I appreciate the sentiment about participatory democracy and an engaged citizenship, but is a crowd of angry gun owners fueled by wild rumors really what you want showing up to your commission meetings, Madison County?

Pointing out that this law isn't necessarily a deterrent isn't necessarily a deterrent itself to getting it passed. I'm sure the state would gladly take the money from those tickets. Until there's a signal sent out by your car when it's being driven that interferes with cell phone use, people ain't gonna quit.

It's true that Obama's platform consisted partially of the notion that he wasn't a Clinton, and the point made at the end of this editorial (who else is he gonna choose for these positions?) should have been emphasized. I guess the overall point--be careful to keep your campaign promises--holds true, but it's a little silly a) to make it already, when the dude ain't even inaugurated, and b) to suggest he appoint Republicans to those positions as a way of making changes. Um, Republicans are in those positions now. Not having them there is a change.

No fucking communist sharing on Thanksgiving! If you touch my turkey, I will fight you because you're interfering with my motivation to produce it.

Labels: ABH, opining

1) The Fury: So perhaps The Black Dahlia is not Brian De Palma's most incoherent movie. That said, I still much prefer this, despite its chopped up feeling, as though it had been edited for TV, but by a channel that opposed plot and structure rather than sex and violence. It's got some astonishing scenes and images: Robin whirling his captor around the room, spraying blood like a Paint N' Swirl; a huge indoor carnival in Chicago, with Middle Eastern sheiks roaming about and cheerfully occupying the haunted castle; Kirk Douglas crouching atop parts of the city in his boxer shorts, before swinging off like a monkey. Oh, and it kind of amps up Scanners. But compared to something like Carrie, its predecessor, it makes little to no sense. Why is any of this happening and what in the hell does it mean? It's not some kind of meditation on female coming of age and repressed sexuality. If anything, the lesson is: don't fuck with psychics; they might explode ya brain. Still, interesting enough to watch and with a long slo-mo scene that is, like, textbook De Palma.

2) Interview: Two assholes converse. I suppose I am glad Steve Buscemi continues to direct. He usually serves up interesting stuff. And this movie did manage to suck me in, but my god why doesn't one of them just leave the apartment? Oh, and it has a twist ending, but really that ending just shows one of the characters to be a psycho. At least the other one has a motive for his/her actions. I think it's supposed to show Sienna Miller's character as having unexpected depths, but really it shows her to be a loon or a sociopath or something like that, which isn't so much a positive thing. Nonetheless, it works out sort of like a play, and they do have some not boring conversations. And it's short!

3) Magic: It's a little bit slow-developing, but this movie, which really is a portrait of mental illness, unlike all the other ones I make jokes about, ends up pretty marvelous, and it contains a wonderful, committed performance by a very young Anthony Hopkins. It's not so much creepy, although the ventriloquist's dummy is still unpleasant to look at--that is, it doesn't feel as though he's going to get us--but it is atmospheric and tense. Plus it's got that great 1970s look that is all shades of brown and orange, like The Deer Hunter. Highly recommended, despite a bit too much thrashing around in pitch-black dark.

Labels: movies

David Grann's piece "The Fall," subtitled "John McCain's Choices," is mostly worth reading for the gloating, but it's a little sad too:

During the 2004 race, McCain campaigned tirelessly—“worked his tail off,” in the words of Bush’s press secretary—for the President. The following year, he assured conservatives that he would support Bush’s tax cuts. More shocking, in the spring of 2006 he announced that he planned to give the commencement speech at Liberty University, which was run by Jerry Falwell—one of the so-called “agents of intolerance” and “forces of evil.” Several weeks before the address, McCain appeared on “The Daily Show.” Jon Stewart, who has said that he would have voted for McCain in 2000 had he won the Republican nomination, expressed consternation that McCain was paying tribute to the religious right. “It strikes me as something you wouldn’t ordinarily do,” Stewart said. When McCain insisted that he would speak at any university, Stewart asked, “Are you going into crazy base world?” McCain hesitated, then said, “I’m afraid so.”

Yes, it's a joke, but McCain does sometimes tell more truth through his jokes than other methods of communication, as with the "reverse maverick" bit on SNL.

Packer's piece on "The New Liberalism" is pretty good too, and it does have this little bit on "deliberative democracy," which sounds almost like heaven:

Instead, Sunstein suggested as the governing philosophy of an Obama Presidency the idea of “deliberative democracy.” The phrase appears in “The Audacity of Hope,” where it denotes a conversation among adults who listen to one another, who attempt to persuade one another by means of argument and evidence, and who remain open to the possibility that they could be wrong. Sunstein pointed out that “deliberative democracy” has certain “preconditions”: “It requires an educated citizenry, a virtuous and engaged citizenry that has sufficient resources—and Madison sometimes spoke in these terms—that they could actually be citizens, rather than subjects.” Obama links the concept with Lincoln, who was as consequential a President as Roosevelt but in ways that were less obviously partisan and ideological. In his first inaugural, just five weeks before Southern militiamen fired on Fort Sumter, Lincoln urged his countrymen, “Think calmly and well, upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste, to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.”

Joan Acocella manages to look humorously and sharply at the debate on overparenting, providing plenty of horrifying examples of pushy, germophobic, nutball parents afraid to let their children have a molecule of unmediated, unstructured experience, while also questioning, at the end of her piece, how big a problem this really is, in the grand scheme of things.

To get some perspective, look at “Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood” (2004), by Steven Mintz, a professor of history at Columbia. Mintz’s story begins with the beginning of the United States, and therefore he describes children with troubles greater than overparenting: boys dispatched to coal mines, and girls to textile mills, at age nine or ten. As for the current outbreak of worry over the young, Mintz reminds us that America has seen such panics before—for example, in the nineteen-fifties, with the outcry over hot rods, teen sex, and rock and roll. The fifties even had its own campaign against overparenting, or overmothering—Momism, as it was called. This was thought to turn boys into homosexuals. For the past three decades, Mintz writes, discussions of child-rearing in the United States have been dominated by a “discourse of crisis,” and yet America’s youth are now, on average, “bigger, richer, better educated, and healthier than at any other time in history.” There have been some losses. Middle-class white boys from the suburbs have fallen behind their predecessors, but middle-class girls and minority children are far better off. Mintz thinks that we worry too much, or about the wrong things. Despite general prosperity—at least until recently—the percentage of poor children in America is greater today than it was thirty years ago. One in six children lives below the poverty line. If you want an emergency, Mintz says, there’s one.

Labels: New Yorker

Remember how I alleged that people were drilling wells because they wanted to use more water and everyone was all "no way!" "uh uh" "you are being unfair"? Well, I think Don Nelson kind of makes the same point in his Sunday column, albeit while making the case for not pursuing restrictions on well owners' water use.

Landscaping companies, plant nurseries and other ventures that depend on outdoor watering really have been hit very hard by the drought, as have businesses like car washes. Hit by a double whammy, many of those ventures not only suffered revenue losses from watering restrictions, but also faced rising expenses from increasing water rates. Adding to the frustrations of the drought, we found out that by conserving our water and using less, the county wasn't getting as much revenue as before, so they upped the rates on us. To help offset the financial dilemma, some small-business owners, as well as schools, hospitals and other organizations, invested in drilling wells. That approach should cover their investment in the well and in their landscaping and other needs in the long run.

Drilling a well was a way to get around having to follow the belt-tightening of water restrictions due to a seriously effing severe drought. Yes, it sucks sucks sucks for water-based businesses. But, you know, I'm sure the winter coat industry is suffering due to global warming. I'm not saying that the county has necessarily gone about implementing its restrictions in the best way, but it is a difficult thing to do and the big goal is the same. Are we not in a drought anymore? When we ain't, then people can complain more. On an individual scale, I feel really bad for businesses in trouble because of this. It was a hard thing to see coming. All jobs are important. But you can't really consider the individual level against the environmental one or there end up being so many exceptions that the goal is lost.

Labels: ABH, opining

Comment on nonfiction will come later, perhaps over the weekend, but you should probably go read Jonathan Lethem's short fiction, "Lostronaut," from this issue of the New Yorker. It's rather like what Danny Boyle's movie Sunshine should have been, if it hadn't gone off the rails and into Event Horizon territory. This is just melancholy and interesting and good, and it makes me think of earlier Lethem (not that I've read all that much).

Labels: New Yorker

1) 27 Dresses: On the one hand an indictment of the entire mass of consumerist disease that is the wedding industry, and on the other hand a cynical little piece of pastry that is designed to sell us exactly what it seems to be denigrating. I actually kind of enjoyed this movie, but I came up with a lot of alternate scenarios and directions for it during the watching. For example: Katherine Heigl's character ends up murdering her sister in a fit of rage, then spending the rest of the movie trying to conceal the body effectively. Or my idea that it was, in fact, the sad sad story of a mentally ill woman who bravely struggles through her crippling combination of obsessive-compulsive disorder and mild mental retardation. There is, nonetheless, something very watchable about this movie, even though it is a steaming pile of bullshit nonsense with plot twists and obligatory scenes falling just where they should: montage, loud sing-along, discovery of deception and anger, mistaken identity, etc. It also, luckily, has Heigl screaming the word "motherfucker" about as loud as she possibly can, although most of it is blotted out. That's the thing. I think I like old cranky bitchface "I don't really want your Emmy." I find her oddly charming, if utterly unconvincing as a plain Jane, and I'm sorry she has to skwunch down even next to James Marsden, rather than show off her lovely height. I suspect that someday she may become our next Uma Thurman, if she plays her cards right, which means she will eventually find a director so in love with her that he writes her the best part ever. Anyway: the movie = not very good, but there are some good character turns in it, as by Judy Greer, who is always entertaining, and some decent fighting.

2) Wide Awake: So I think documentary filmmaker Alan Berliner is possibly literally crazy, but this is the second film of his I've seen, and I've really really enjoyed both of them. The first one was The Sweetest Sound, which was about names and featured him inviting as many other Alan (and Alain, Allen, Allan, etc.) Berliners as he could find to a dinner party at his house in New York. This is about insomnia. Both are of the Ross McElwee, drive-your-family-nuts-with-a-camera school, which is a school I like, especially when there's plenty of self-exposure on the part of the director, which there is. I guess picture McElwee crossed with Woody Allen and you've got Berliner, who narrates, or really more just spins out words and words on various themes related to insomnia and sleep. But he also shows you himself doing multiple takes. A-ha. It's a nice device, a way to continue to seem amateurish and unrehearsed while pulling back the curtain. The most interesting thing in the movie, though, to me and Jared, was when Berliner has a speaking engagement and screening, during which he films the audience in the dark to show some of them falling asleep. He happens to be doing so at the Student Learning Center at UGA. And we're pretty sure a friend of ours is panned over (she's awake), although she hasn't yet confirmed it's her. That is a mighty strange experience, to have this shock of recognition, unprepared for and unintended by the filmmaker. Anyway, you should make an effort to see this, whether or not you've ever had any sleep problems yourself.

Labels: movies

Rachael Ray was just making pumpkin empanadas.

I expect this stuff to die down by January. Perhaps sooner. It better.

Labels: pumpkin

Damage: On Nov. 5, deputy David Burchett met with the superintendent of Creekside Country Club on Barnett Shoals Road. The superintendent said about 2:15 p.m. that day, three young men came to the golf course and signed out a golf cart but later came back and requested another cart because the first one had a flat tire. Employees later saw the young men had left, apparently in a hurry, and left the cart sitting where their car was parked. After searching the course, employees found the 16th and 17th holes were damaged from a cart being driven onto the green. The club estimated $1,500 in damage was done to the green, $50 to a flag and $200 to the cart tire. The superintendent found the two young men on Facebook and obtained their photos.

Oh snap. Facebook can be used by the forces of authority in more ways than after your job interview.

Arrest: On Nov. 10, deputy Scott Underwood was patrolling at Wal-Mart on Epps Bridge Parkway when an employee flagged him down and said a man had just shoplifted a cart-load of merchandise. Underwood continued driving and quickly saw someone who matched the description the employee gave. The suspect took off running when Underwood got out of his car. Underwood chased the suspect, yelling at him to stop and saying he would use his Taser on the man if he didn't stop. The man still didn't stop, so Underwood deployed his Taser and one dart hit the man, who began to comply. Another deputy arrived and handcuffed the man and the witness later identified him as the alleged shoplifter. The man, [Uriah Heep], 48, of Epps Bridge Parkway, Athens, was arrested and taken to the Oconee County Jail. Deputies recovered the merchandise, which included a number of power tools.

Being electrocuted = complying.

Arrest: On Nov. 6, deputy Douglas Martin was dispatched to a woman's house on Crabapple Road, Hull, where she said her neighbor fired a gun that hit her house. She said the bullet went through the wall and into her living room. Martin looked inside and saw where the projectile also had pierced a picture on the wall. Martin spoke with the neighbor, who said he got his .410-gauge shotgun and went to his chicken coop. He said a rooster startled him and he fired his shotgun at the rooster, but missed. The projectile ricocheted off the ground and hit his neighbor's house. The woman said the man had shot at her house once before. [Squire Western], 60, was arrested for reckless conduct.

I suppose this could be an argument against urban chickens just as well as against shotguns.

Oconee. Madison.

Labels: police blotter

Please note: if Bob Smith's on board with this Brain Train thing, we might really be able to get something done about it. Hasn't he noticed gas prices falling?

It's not just Jim Martin in the runoff.

So, Georgia state and local taxes are too high. Is that what you're saying, Jim, in the conclusion to this editorial? H.R. 1 makes some sense. I know. I'm saying something not entirely negative about a measure to restrict tax increases. It's a banner day. It's true that, in Athens especially, increasing property values is a way to get around having to raise the millage rate. But I don't really like the idea of restricting the amount by which valuers can increase valuations. Rather, it should perhaps be less difficult to raise millage rates if needed. At least that's transparent and more flexible. McGinty also has a good point. What do you do with something like, say, Atlantic Station, which was a wasteland and is now a desirable place to live (for some people)?

Labels: ABH, opining

Grub Notes is weirded out by both Shiskabobby's and MJ's Fish Shack.

Labels: food, writing

I shared this in my Google Reader, but that's not nearly widespread enough, so here you go, five or six other people who need some new vocab.

Labels: words

You sort of hate to bring this up, but facts are facts, and Hitler's not the numero uno murderer of all time, at least as far as numbers are concerned. I mean, he's got some serious competition in Mao and Stalin at very least. Still, I suppose the final point stands as a good guideline.

Labels: ABH, opining

Steve Oedekerk must be splitting his time between films and commercials now. I'm sorry I can't show you this ad, and yet I'm not sorry I can't show you this ad. Question: is it made worse by the fact that these thumb faces come in identical pairs?

Labels: advertising

By this logic, couldn't I dump a bunch of toxic chemicals into my own well, then wait for them to pollute the groundwater in the area, then shrug and say "what are you gonna do about it? It's my property"? It's one thing if the county were to say "you can't have private wells" or swoop in and let the water company take over the management of all of them. All this is is sensible restrictions.

Labels: ABH, opining

Exciting debut-ish fiction in the New Yorker is such a great thing to come across. Wells Tower's story "Leopard" is worth your time. I'm not sure I've read a successful second-person-narrated story, but this one is, plus quick and interesting.

Also: discussion of the postmodernization of the financial markets, which is maybe what led to this fucking mess. The idea of the article is better than the article itself, which is sort of confused about what is modernism and what is postmodernism. It should really have been longer and better worked out.

Labels: New Yorker

Charlie Wilson's War: A very well-made movie (mostly), but it still made me extremely uncomfortable. In fact, the only person who could distract me from the knots of political origins in my stomach was Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is pretty profanely delightful. But so, you know, even if it's a Democrat promoting the funding, how you gonna be in favor of covert wars? Even if they're better at preventing American loss of life and widespread destruction than overt wars. The glee taken in the hidden budget on which Congress votes to fund this stuff is disturbing, ever more so as the total shoots upward. So, yes, the Soviets also should not have invaded Afghanistan, and there is a scene near the end of the movie, once the war is over, that features Charlie Wilson pleading for school funding in the area, so as not to leave the job unfinished, but if the idea of black ops intervention in a country that serves as a mere pawn for a bigger fight doesn't creep you out, I'm not sure we get along super well. Oil is mentioned precisely once, and it's not in the movie itself, but in the special features, in which it is quickly explained why the USSR was probably there in the first place (although not, of course, why we were, or why a bunch of people from Texas were particularly interested in the outcome). If you pretend the film is fictional and disapproving, it could be better, but I'm not sure Mike Nichols has the subtlest grasp of politics other than interpersonal ones.

Labels: movies

I also ended up with Pink's Funhouse, which I was surprised to discover I mostly liked.

Labels: music, writing

Well, it's not really up online unless you're a new Digital Edition subscriber, but Ian Parker's New Yorker profile of Tom Friedman (blurbed here) is no more positive than Parker's usual job. He's the guy who keeps on handing his subjects rope, and it usually works. Friedman wants to present himself as a simple optimist, but he comes off more as just simple, a man who puts forth his ideas first and then figures out what he's saying, which is fine if you're not influencing millions of people. He seems obsessed with 9/11 and American exceptionalism, often linking the two: "America has a problem. . . . I think we've lost our groove since 9/11." Not, um, before that? When we were also failing to do anything about global warming yadda yadda? The thing is, I'm not sure you can write a major book about the importance of the environment to the United States' economic future and then spend all that time golfing. It's not exactly the greenest game. Yes, sure, there is something to be said for couching your argument in a way that people who hate Al Gore will listen to you, but there's also a point where you tip over into telling people what they want to hear.

Labels: New Yorker

Look, dummies, the point is that we're interested in not running out of water, and it's not as though city water and well water come from different places, other than the particular pipes they flow through. The only problem with this plan is that it would only restrict business use of wells and creeks, and not private use. Isn't groundwater harder to replace than reservoir water? And, if so, shouldn't well users face tougher standards, if anything?

Eric Johnson thinks cats are voting. For Democrats, no doubt...

I guess Iraq doesn't count as "our interests abroad."

Labels: ABH, opining

Okay, enough already about Mr. President-Elect being half-white. Maybe he would have worked in the house instead of the fields if this were a different time, but other than that, it's not like he would have been handed the right to vote any earlier. It's not like having dual citizenship. I'm sure it means his own worldview is broader, but as far as the advantages it confers, I'm pretty sure they're not big.

Labels: politics

Someone hasn't read their Infinite Jest. (Scroll down a little ways here.)

Labels: techmologie

Guys, don't you remember that brief period when Obama's slogan was "Change! (or we will make you with our new national civilian security force)"? I suppose I would prefer a Republican congressman who is irrelevant to one who is getting things done, for the most part, though.

Labels: ABH, opining

1) Forgetting Sarah Marshall: Wow. Thank god we didn't opt for the extended non-theatrical release. Nearly two hours of Jason Segel crying and occasional comedic-ish riffing is plenty long enough. Yes, okay, it's sad that Linda Cardellini broke up with him, but making a movie about it in which Kristen Bell does a Linda Cardellini impression and, you know, gets hers is not, perhaps, the healthiest way to deal with it, even if she is awful pretty. Basically, I like the dude as an actor, and if he's going to write movies, he needs someone with a much firmer hand to edit him. Or maybe he should make the Dracula puppet musical, which is much more entertaining than most of the rest of the movie. I mean, yes, the character turns on the sidelines are occasionally amusing, but they're probably too low-key, or maybe it's that they're not two hours' worth of amusing. I still like Jonah Hill, and he does as well as possible with what he's given. It all sort of feels like these dudes wanted an expense-paid trip to Hawaii. Oh, and Mila Kunis is good, despite being not particularly recognizable.

2) Summer Heights High: This Chris Lilley guy is very impressive. Not, like, belly laughs but pretty good laughs.

3) Top Chef, the new season: "Your technique of overcooking the lamb was a mistake."

4) Supernatural, the beginning of season 1: Hey! This show, unlike Charmed, is actually genuinely entertaining. Although I do keep wanting to call Jared Padalecki Dean instead of Jensen Ackles. Keep the same name between TV shows, dude.

Labels: movies, TV

Q-Tip has a new album, finally. But if you have his old solo album, you kind of already have it, only better.

Labels: music, writing

1) Dan in Real Life: Dudes, really, this is some heartwarming shit. I know you see that Dane Cook is in it, and you want to stay far, far away, not to mention you are rightfully suspicious of Steve Carell after some missteps like Evan Almighty and, most likely, Get Smart, but you should persevere, especially if you enjoyed a movie like Safe Passage, which is one of Team Brown's favorite guilty pleasures. They're kind of the same thing in that there's a large and loving family, bathed in autumn colors, and while emotions are at the forefront, there's nothing so sappy that it takes you out of the insane amount of coziness that one experiences rarely and fleetingly with one's own family. There's always someone handing you a sandwich in this movie. Or getting in your way in an endearing fashion. Or helping you do the crossword. Plus, it's got a Pete Townshend song at a crucial point in the movie, and I am nothing if not a complete MFing sucker for that particular brand of sincere and pretty corn. Also, everyone is really darn good, including and actually most of all Carell. This movie makes me want to have three beautiful daughters who will drive me nuts.

2) The Savages: This movie, on the other hand, fills me with both dread and hope, in equal parts. It's a little blunter than the preceding, but it needs to be. Really, it makes me think about my dad and his brother and sister, who have had to deal with my aging (and now deceased) grandparents over the past few years, and how hard it is even when your parents plan ahead for their own senility and disability. Let alone when they don't. Thank god the movie doesn't just provide horribleness. It also has many many moments of recognition of our own laziness as creatures and the way we do not work perfectly. Not just the lying and painting oneself in the best possible light, but also things like our inability to clean properly. Where do we put the cereal bowl? We pick it up and then we put it back down, in a very slightly different spot. Also, Hoffman and Linney act up a hurricane. They're great in it. I wish Tamara Jenkins would make movies more often than every ten years or so.

Labels: movies

Note new redactedness. I've had a couple of people email me after the fact and ask me to remove these posts when they've had charges dismissed so from now on, if any potential employer could google someone and yadda yadda, I'll just put a ___ for their name. Yes, I know it's still in the paper. It doesn't hurt for me to be polite and accommodating and understand that people make mistakes. Like affray in the IHOP parking lot...

Fight: On Nov. 2, Sgt. Scott Underwood, along with deputies Guy Brown and Michael Taylor, were having dinner at the IHOP on Parkway Place, when an employee told them there was a fight happening in the parking lot. The deputies went outside the restaurant and saw two men engaged in a fist fight. All three officers pulled out their Tasers and advanced on the fighting men. With their Tasers ready, the officers told the men to stop and the two men, ___ and ___, complied and laid on the ground. Both men were handcuffed and asked about the fight. However, their account of the circumstances conflicted and both men maintained they were each fighting in self defense. The deputies also learned that Flores' wife, ___, had thrown a rock at Patterson. ___, 32, and his wife, both of Kirkland Drive, Statham, and ___, 45, of Cherokee Ridge, Athens, were all arrested for affray.

Just about like getting into a fight outside a doughnut shop.

Arrest: On Oct. 28, deputy Matthew Pilkington was dispatched to Fred's in Colbert, where a store employee had detained ___, 21, of Woodale Street, Hull, for shoplifting two DVDs, "Little Man" and "Boyz n the Hood." ___ set off an alarm when he tried to leave with the DVDs.

It's a bad taste alarm in case anyone, even legal purchasers, tries to leave the store with a copy of Little Man.

Dispute: On Oct. 29, deputy Scott Pulliam and Lt. Donald Carr responded to a disturbance at a home in Danielsville, where a woman threatened to throw an object at her husband. When Pulliam stopped her, the woman, who is in her mid 80s, punched him in the jaw and ripped off his sunglasses. She was not charged due to a medical condition.

I don't know the Latin for "Hulk Hogan's momma."

Oconee. Madison.

Labels: police blotter

Here, again, two attempts at the same record, a two-disc best-of by the Danielson Family and surrounding efforts. Here's the Artist Direct one. And here's the one for Flagpole.

Also, bleepy-bloopy, I kinda like the self-titled from Adventure.

Labels: music, writing

Yes, Paul Broun, it may indeed sound a little crazy and off-base... Hey, remember when people recommended voting for this guy in the special election some years ago because he's from Athens? How happy are we to claim him as a native son now?

Labels: ABH, opining

The New Yorker has a very fine profile of Chuck Hagel, who's pissed off his fellow Republicans to no end. Where he comes from, why he does things the way he does, and why he didn't endorse McCain are the foci, but hovering in the background is the specter a) of a cabinet position (despite the fact that the election hadn't been held yet as of this issue) or, unmentioned, b) 2012. I hate to think that there remains a kind of Republican who could win, but one who is socially conservative but believes in a rational foreign policy based on talks and logic rather than growling and ill-considered threats actually might have a chance.

“This Administration has viewed Congress as an appendage, a nuisance,” Hagel told me. “Clinton was just the opposite. Reagan was the opposite. Bush’s father was the opposite. They understood the value of making Congress their ally.” He said that Vice-President Cheney nearly always attended the weekly lunch held by the Senate Republican Caucus, at which major issues—including the war in Iraq—are discussed. Often, someone asked Cheney whether he’d like to say something. “Almost always, he’d say, ‘No, no,’ ” Hagel said. “It always said to me, by his very lack of engagement or even giving us the courtesy of saying something, that they could care less about us. Except when he wanted us to do something: ‘Vote this way.’ ”

Hagel has a respect for institutions that balances his ability to look at them critically, as we also see here:

For Hagel, almost as disturbing as Palin’s lack of experience is her willingness—in disparaging remarks about Joe Biden’s long Senate career, for example—to belittle the notion that experience is important. “There’s no question, she knows her market,” Hagel said. “She knows her audience, and she’s going right after them. And I’ll tell you why that’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because you don’t want to define down the standards in any institution, ever, in life. You want to always strive to define standards up. If you start defining standards down—‘Well, I don’t have a big education, I don’t have experience’—yes, there’s a point to be made that not all the smartest people come out of Yale or Harvard. But to intentionally define down in some kind of wild populism, that those things don’t count in a complicated, dangerous world—that’s dangerous in itself.

“There was a political party in this country called the Know-Nothings,” he continued. “And we’re getting on the fringe of that, with these one-issue voters—pro-choice or pro-life. Important issue, I know that. But, my goodness. The world is blowing up everywhere, and I just don’t think that is a responsible way to see the world, on that one issue. And, interestingly enough, that is one issue that stopped John McCain from picking one of the people he really wanted, Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge”—the Independent senator from Connecticut and the Republican former governor of Pennsylvania. (Both men are pro-choice.)

You can't just be all mavericky because it means tearing the whole system down. Chuck Hagel believes in parts of the system, and he doesn't believe in wrecking the whole thing because he's unhappy with it not working perfectly (e.g., the UN).

Right after this piece comes Margaret Talbot's "Red Sex, Blue Sex," an article investigating reasons teen pregnancy is so high among evangelicals. The short short answer is a difficulty doing cost-benefit analysis. Or perhaps it's a lack of hope to fuel that analysis.

In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it. Regnerus writes, “They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.” These are the kids who tend to score high on measures of “strategic orientation”—how analytical, methodical, and fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage—just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining “technical virgins” but because they assess it as a safer option. “Solidly middle- or upper-middle-class adolescents have considerable socioeconomic and educational expectations, courtesy of their parents and their communities’ lifestyles,” Regnerus writes. “They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious, tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about expressing their nascent sexuality.” They might have loved Ellen Page in “Juno,” but in real life they’d see having a baby at the wrong time as a tragic derailment of their life plans. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become “a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It’s not just unwise anymore; it’s wrong.”

Finally, I'd like to point you to Tom Bissell's piece on video game designing, which is perhaps the best written article in the issue. Bissell does a beautiful job focusing on the (interesting) subject at hand but veering off the path a little here and there to theorize briefly. e.g.,

Bleszinski took the name and fashioned a tougher persona around it, but, after spending a little time with him, one has the sensation of watching someone observing himself. Video games are founded upon such complicated transference. Gamers are allowed, for a time, all manner of ontological assumptions. They can also terminate their assumed personalities whenever they wish, and, lately, Bleszinski has been asking game-industry journalists if they might not “sit on” the CliffyB moniker “for a while.”

He also does a good job throwing in descriptions just hip enough:

His current haircut is short and cowlicked, his bangs twirled up into a tiny moussed horn. He was wearing what in my high school would have been called “exchange-student jeans”—obviously expensive but slightly the wrong color and of a somehow non-American cut. Beneath a tight, fashionably out-of-style black nylon jacket was a T-shirt that read “TECHNOLOGY!” His sunglasses were of the oversized, county-sheriff variety, and each of his earlobes held a small, bright diamond earring. He could have been either a boyish Dolce & Gabbana model or a small-town weed dealer.

Plus, as mentioned, the subject is intriguing, even if you, like me, are not so much a video game player (as far as hobbies go, it's expensive and very time-consuming).

Labels: New Yorker

Look, I know it doesn't require a response, Gene Baldwin's letter, but what the heck. Here, to me, is what this election was about: one candidate who believed in the transformative power of government, who believed that it wasn't a separate entity from us but was us, who believed that the job of the government is to get some shit done, and one candidate who was hanging out with Bush right after Hurricane Katrina, right? If that is imposing a Marxist state, then so be it.

Labels: ABH, opining

1) Alice, Sweet Alice: Finding a movie like this is a mixed blessing, almost as sad as it is delightful. The thing is, Alice, Sweet Alice is an awesome movie, but nearly no one involved with it ever went on to do anything else. It's like the How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying curse. Okay, Brooke Shields is an exception, but she's not in the movie all that much. The biggest thing is that director/writer Alfred Sole only made four movies total before quitting that gig to do production design, and none of the other three is anything comparable to this one, which takes its cue from Don't Look Now. Genuinely scary at times but always extremely weird and beautifully shot, it's the kind of movie that makes you gasp repeatedly at what, exactly, you are seeing onscreen, whether it's Alice's obscenely obese and slovenly neighbor Mr. Alphonso, who spends the entire movie in the same urine-stained pair of pants, petting his kitty-cats and listening to opera, or someone getting stabbed in the foot with a butcher knife. It's sort of like John Waters meets Dario Argento, and I kind of can't recommend it highly enough, especially if you like this kind of thing to begin with. We liked it enough to put the only other film available by Sole from Netflix in our queue (a soft-core-ish movie about a supermodel who falls in love with an ape on a desert island).

2) The Foot Fist Way: Gosh, well, the general critical position on the movie is going to be that it's amusing but falls apart and doesn't actually really have a plot, while the general dude opinion is going to be that fuck you it's awesome and if you don't like it, you clearly don't know from funny. I'm pretty much going to go with the former. It's not that I don't love Danny McBride. I'm not sure I would have kept watching All the Real Girls if not for him. And he's a great improviser. But I tend to prefer things that have been given some shape other than a time limit, and The Foot Fist Way has very little of that. It's a 90-minute bag of spun-out scenes in which, mostly, McBride runs on at the mouth, and while I found it amusing enough to keep watching, it's not really so much a "movie," strictly speaking. Okay okay. Fuck me. I don't know from funny. Or am too picky. I'd still watch it again, especially if it started running on TV a good bit, which is unlikely.

Labels: movies

Bridge to Terabithia: I was fairly nervous about this adaptation of a book I loved to pieces growing up. The trailers made it look like non-stop CGI, as though the fantasy elements had really taken over the story, but that was just marketing to get asses in seats. It's a pretty good adaptation, actually, with plenty of non-CGI, non-fantasy stuff, and a story that hews quite closely to the book. Yeah, there's some corn, but the message about using your imagination, being strong, and loving your friends isn't exactly wrong, nor is it unbearably hammered home. It's a little long even at 95 minutes, or maybe it's just that I was hungry and the time for my soup to be ready seemed to tick by at half-speed. Still, not bad.

Labels: movies

Here's a counter-proposal to the school board's removal of school choice, which would do it in a phased way. I'm really not sure that this is any better, as it could result in kids from the same family going to different elementary schools at the same time, which divides parents' attention and continues to waste resources. How do we want to take the band-aid off? I favor yanking.

"The people at (public hearings) and other people I've talked to - a majority of these people are not against community zones, they just want to take their kids out of school and transfer them to a different school," Wheeler said. "We're not disingenuous. We want our kids to stay in the schools that we're in. We worked hard to get them in there, and we want them to stay."

You can take any quote out of context, but man this sounds an awful lot like, "We're not against community zones. We're just against them for us."

Also, while David Hunter appears to know one piece of history (a quote from Bismarck), he might want to brush up on a little bit more of it. Like Lincoln's political resume.

Labels: ABH, opining

Yes, it's a bit late on my part in the posting, but you should still read the New Yorker's profile of Bob Barr, which attempts to explain why the heck he's a Libertarian now. The answer, which makes a lot of sense, is that all parties need compromise and revision to their platforms from time to time, and although you may never have met a moderate Libertarian and there's yet question as to whether or not they exist (other than Bob Barr), they at least want to present that image and maybe win some votes. If they really wanted votes, they should have presented this Bob Barr, the rebellious, alligator-shooting one:

The family’s experience in Iraq established a pattern. As an expatriate, Barr enjoyed unusual personal freedom, but often against a backdrop of tyranny or political upheaval. He was detached from American society as well as from the culture around him. In Panama, where his father briefly took a job, the family one night attempted to have dinner in the American-controlled Canal Zone, but were turned away because their car had a Panama license plate. (“Even though we were U.S. citizens, and this was considered U.S. territory, we were second-class citizens,” Barr told me.) Before Panama, Barr’s family lived in Peru, where, as a teen-ager, he learned Spanish. He went to parties, drank, and smoked. A friend of his recalled, “Really, there were no rules, and we didn’t like rules, and the few rules that there were we really didn’t follow.” On expeditions into the Amazon, Barr fished for piranhas, and hunted alligators at night. “You would take a .22 rifle and creep along the riverbank with a flashlight,” he told me. “The light would catch their eyes, and you would see these two glowing points of red, and you would shoot for that.” Barr learned to adapt. “You make friends quickly,” he told me. “But you don’t become too attached, because you know you’re not going to be with them for that long.” His hobby was astronomy—the single geographic constant in his life at the time was the sky.

You should also check out Peter Schjeldahl's review of two books on noted art forger Han van Meegeren, which is full of riveting detail and a concluding paragraph that is quite lovely and sincere in its address of the elitism associated with art and how art lovers must leave themselves open to charges of the sort:

Art forgery is among the least despised of crimes, except by its victims—the identity of those victims being more than exculpatory, for many people. Art is unique among universally esteemed creative fields in its aloofness from a public audience. Its economic base is a club of the wealthy, who share power to impose or repress value with professional and academic élites. Lopez’s muckraking of van Meegeren scants a fact that Dolnick merrily exploits: the forger gratifies class resentment precisely because he is a pariah. Unlike the subversive gestures of a Marcel Duchamp, say, his outrages will not become educational boilerplate in museums and universities. They are impeccably destructive, tarring not only pretensions to taste but the credibility of taste in general. The spectre of forgery chills the receptiveness—the will to believe—without which the experience of art cannot occur. Faith in authorship matters. We read the qualities of a work as the forthright decisions of a particular mind, wanting to let it commandeer our own minds, and we are disappointed when it doesn’t. If we are disappointed enough, when the named artist is familiar, we get suspicious. But we can never be certain in every case that someone—a veiled mind—isn’t playing us for suckers. Art lovers are people who brave that possible chagrin.

Labels: New Yorker

1) Futurama: Bender's Game: The problem with these movies is that they're too long. It's not that I don't enjoy watching them, but they don't quite have the rhythms of a theatrical or otherwise non-commercial-broken art form down. Plus, tons of Lord of the Rings, and no Ender's Game. Don't promise me one kind of nerdage and then deliver another.

2) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: I wish I'd been taping the collective rant that took place last night upon the conclusion of this movie. The short version is that it is both fundamentally conservative (old people rule! young people drool!) and also fundamentally lazy, which means we end up, almost, with the movie version of Fletcher Hanks, minus the insaneo kind of genius. I mean, I don't care about realism in movies. Really, it's very low on my list of priorities, so I can either scoff in delight (usually the reaction) or scoff in annoyance, and this movie led to plenty of the latter. Will someone please shoot George Lucas into space without any return fuel so that he can stop fucking up beloved franchises? I know I could blame it on Stevie Spielberg, but I'm a fan of his, so I'm going to cast him in the role of the good man who stood by and did nothing, which may be damning enough. So: the CG is bad enough to notice, mostly because the action sequences are so snoozy that they never manage to distract you from it; the exposition is a nightmare; the viewer is allowed to solve precisely one puzzle on his/her own, which is that Indy's wandered into a nuclear test facility; the nods to the past are stupid (all he could find was a fucking snake to pull them out of the quicksand? despite being surrounded by vines?); the dialogue is rotten; and Harrison Ford is now a hundred and fifty, but without the grace to become the Sean Connery of this film. Instead, the camera has to track him as he huffs and puffs his way over mountains of boxes, giving the viewer time to check his/her watch. Also also: Erich von Daniken? That's the source for your movie? Give me a god damn break. And you couldn't spend maybe five minutes on the plot? The end is the biggest pile of nonsense I have seen in years. The movie gets a 2-star rating on Netflix instead of a 1-star rating merely because it looks kind of good. That is: good cameras, nice and bright, everything's in focus, etc. That should demonstrate how bad you have to fuck up to get a 1.

Labels: movies

Please note, though, that one of the reasons Chase Street Elementary appears to have vaulted into the list of top elementary schools is precisely because of neighborhood investment in the school. That is: exactly the sort of thing the BOE aims to achieve (as well as saving a buck and, kinda, the environment). It's possible the decision seems rushed, but it is a worthwhile decision.

Labels: ABH, opining

Grub Notes is a catch-all, covering the westside Transmetropolitan, the existence of empanadas and tamales at La Estrella, and the expanded breakfast hours and new menu offerings at Mama's Boy.

Also, one review of Crystal Stilts's record and two different reviews of the debut by Japanese Motors, both positive, but one for Flagpole and one for Artist Direct. It's copycatty, the album is, but it's also quite good.

Labels: food, music, writing

There's nothing like falling asleep to the sweet, sonorous rhythms of an Obama victory speech. My stomach can now unknot itself. And life will proceed as normal, just a little better grade of normal than previously.

Locally, Edwards won, but maybe with enough of a scare that he'll start communicating with the public a little better. Robinson won too, which was surprising to me but welcome. Petrovs can spend that time on OneAthens anyway. Other than that, it was mostly business as usual. It would have been nice to see Georgia a little more purple, but it was purpler than it's been in a long time.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Labels: politics

I'm okay with Georgia losing to Florida. I'm okay with losing quite a lot in fantasy football. I'm okay with losing pretty much everything else. This is nice. It's not exactly a marker demonstrating how far we've come with race relations that it took this kind of massive fucking up of the country to make us vote for an African American Democrat (and a Muslim Communist to boot), but, you know, the results are good. And I won't have to wake up with a hangover tomorrow.

Labels: politics

Please don't forget about local elections, especially if you live in district 6. I know a lot of people (McGinty, the ABH, James Garland) are supporting Red Petrovs. I always feel a little odd weighing in when it's not my district and I don't have an actual voice in the process, but I favor Ed Robinson, unsurprisingly. I'm sure that, if you swing that way, Petrovs's business-oriented approach is attractive, but I do not. Yes, we need to redevelop big-box stores that have been emptied. I'm sure Ed would agree with that idea. Other than that, I kind of believe we should go for the one with the better environmental credentials and ignore how well each of their campaigns has been respectively run. But please feel free to make your own decision, sixers. Just remember that this will have, no doubt, a greater impact on your lives than many bigger races.

Labels: local politics

The other thing that's good for distracting yourself from election stress is movies, of which we watched a lot over the weekend:

1) The Strangers: The first hour is pretty genuinely scary, before it degenerates into the typical run and hide and behave like an idiot kind of thing. The acting's good enough to make it all feel real. The tension builds slowly. If you are, in general, a sort of paranoid person about either your house being invaded or being isolated-ish out in the country, it will prey on exactly the right fears. Plus, it seems to have a second layer going on about family, sort of a reverse Goldilocks tale in a way, and, while I don't mind more graphic murders onscreen, I suppose it is rather classy that the filmmakers didn't resort to yanking out intestines or anything. But the problem is that, from the beginning, we know where it's going, so how do you end this thing? It just sort of peters out, and as your brain is less occupied with fear, it starts to notice things and wonder stuff like "Why does a 1970s ranch house have a barn in its backyard full of antique farming implements?"

2) Recount: Um, if you want not to think about politics, maybe this is really not what you should be watching, but it is quite well done. Unlike the above film, in which you know how things turn out and that lessens the tension, this one also has a known ending, but it's not any less tense for that. In fact, eight years on, it's probably heightened. I'd read that the movie was fairly even-handed, and perhaps it's just my godless liberal communist sensibility, but, um, I'm pretty sure it contends that James Baker is the devil. As long as people are running around, yelling, and being generally active about trying to win their side, things aren't so bad, but it does leave one wound up in quite a state of worry.

3) The Astronaut Farmer: A weird-ass pile of kitsch. First of all, you know he's a rancher, not a farmer. His last name is Farmer. Hence the title. There is something lovely about the horizons in this film, but mostly it's got a severe disability in its sense of pacing. The guy launches the rocket (for the first time, and failing) with an hour left to go in the movie. Things move very very quickly and then very very slowly. And the whole premise is insanity. No. We should not support the dreams of people who want to build and launch a rocket in their backyards and sink their family into horrific amounts of debt in the process. Dreams are awesome, right, but not screwing over your near and dear for absolutely no point is better.

4) Waitress: Genuinely charming, just like most people said, but not ingratiating, which makes it even more so. It's an interestingly feminist film, with, in the end, very little need for menfolk (it creates a little female utopia), but this is not a point that's dramatically driven home. It's just sort of there to counter the usual rescued princess nonsense. Cheryl Hines is especially great in it, but really everyone is good. Made me want pie. And miss Adrienne Shelley.

5) Michael Clayton: Also quite good and understated, although Tom Wilkinson's performance is a little showy at times. Tilda Swinton, on the other hand, while she gapes like a fish in horror and desperation, is awesome, conveying so much more than she needs to in the part, huddling in sweaty fear in the ladies room, overburdened with her brand-new position but not wanting to show any weakness. I think the movie's missing something, but it's not that it lacks for heroism. To include more of that would be to make it into something that it's not.

6) The Messengers: Meh. Lame-ass ghost crap mixed with classic "my parents don't understand me" hoo-ha.

Labels: movies

You know, with that election and shit today, it could get kind of stressful, so if you want to relive or vicariously live Halloween in downtown Athens (and prior to that at Chase Street Elementary--pictures of tiny Batmen!), you can check out the whole Flickr set or peruse the selection below.

Labels: holidays, photos