Monday, October 29, 2007
Congrats, Red SocksThe Red Socks won another World Series, which means my sister will get another World Series ring. Those things are heavy!
Hopefully she’ll have it when I see her for Thanksgiving.
Anyway, congrats to the Sox!
Even Chomsky Disses the Truthers
Even Noam Chomsky, leftist Bush-hating MIT professor and Communist sympathizer, thinks 911 Truthers are wrong. What does that tell you. As he points out, the Truthers are running a business. It’s an industry. Kind of like Global Warming hysteria.
Paging Al Gore
Yes, it’s another calm year for Hurricanes.
Unless a dramatic and perhaps historical flurry of activity occurs in the next 9 weeks, 2007 will rank as a historically inactive TC year for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole. During the past 30 years, only 1977, 1981, and 1983 have had less activity to date (January-TODAY, Accumulated Cyclone Energy). However, the year is not over…
What was that about Global Warming again, Al?
Movies Worth Seeing
I managed to see a sneak of this film opening Friday. It stars Denzel Washington as Frank Lucas, a real drug kingpin in New York City in the early 70s. He cornered the heroin business there by going directly to Asian drug growers and using a relative in the Army to ship the drugs to the states in military coffins returning from Vietnam. Russell Crowe plays the honest cop who ran the task force who brings him down. And the arrest led to the indictment of nearly 2/3 of New York’s drug enforcement cops. The corruption in the city at that time was unbelievable. The film is directed with style by Ridley Scott, who brought us films like Gladiator, Blade Runner and Alien. It’s kind of like a black Scarface, only a lot more realistic and without all the swearing.
An excellent WWII movie about a Dutch Jewish woman hiding from the Nazis who ends up working for the resistance as a spy. She becomes the girlfriend of a Gestapo officer and things get really complicated when she falls in love with him. It’s a tremendous thriller with lots of twists and turns, directed surprisingly by Paul Verhoven, who brought us such films as Total Recall and Showgirls. Verhoven went back to his native Netherlands when his Hollywood career had fizzled out, and may have revived it with this epic film. Warning: It is subtitled. Parts of it are in English. And theres a lot more sex than you’re used to seeing in an American war film. But none of it is gratuitous.
In 1971 a writer names Clifford Irving claimed to have exclusive access to reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. He managed to hoax a lot of people and got a one million dollar advance, which was unheard of for the time. But eventually the whole scheme unraveled. Richard Gere plays Irving and Alfred Molina plays his nutty researcher. Like American Gangster, The Hoax does a great job of recreating the feel of the early 1970s and chronicles another crime that was going on in New York at the time. Man, that city was a mess back then. Gere and the rest of the cast do a stellar job. Molina is especially good.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
It’s That Time Again
Soldier Angels is having another fund raising drive and as an Air Force vet I am holding up my branches end of things. Here’s what they do. It’s a worthy cause.
Soldiers Angels has been supporting our nation’s military men and women since 2003. Our mission is to provide aid and comfort to the military and its families, provide immediate response to hard situations, and make sure no soldier feels unloved.We start with letters, care packages, and comfort items to our deployed. We also help their families here at home as requested.
Through special projects, dedicated teams and individuals supporting our troops we hope to make a difference in the lives of our soldiers. Find out how you can get involved!
Help us get that bar up!
87 Bad Predictions
One they missed: “Radar makes a sneak attack (on Pearl Harbor) impossible.” Navy Admiral in 1940
Stupidity Ahoy
Europe continues to amaze with their pedantic mentality. What did I say about tobacco hysteria being used to go after other things?
The advertising business has jumped on the environmental bandwagon, finding ways to give all sorts of industries a “green” tuneup and profiting in the process. But is it about to backfire?
The European Parliament proposed last Wednesday that car advertisements in the European Union carry tobacco-style labels, warning of the environmental impact they cause. Under the plan, 20 percent of the space or time of any auto ad would have to be set aside for information on a car’s fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, cited as a contributor to global climate change.
The process of going from people smoking on talk shows and in grocery stores to being forced to only be able to smoke in zoned areas (shades of the Warsaw ghetto!) was a slow process. But it started with warning labels in the early 60s. Then NO SMOKING signs started appearing more frequently.
Now, you might think they would never ban cars, but there are many people who would like to. They want everyone to ride mass transit. Of course, if someone comes up with a clean alternative to gas, they might force everyone at some point to convert. But greens have this psychotic tendency to demand people change to some technology like wind power, and then try to ban it because it kills birds.
Personally, I am sick of warning labels. They should only be on things like medicine or rat poison. Thanks to trial lawyers, they’re on almost everything now. Soon they will tattoo them on people. WARNING: PEOPLE ARE STUPID AND IRRATIONAL. HANDLE WITH CARE.
Wait, maybe they should tattoo that on bureaucrats and politicians.
The Difference…
The Other Child Predators
“Your child was sold into slavery in Japan.”
She really did once say that, in 1999. A six-year-old, Opal Jo Jennings, had a month earlier been snatched from her grandparents’ front yard in Texas while playing with her cousin. A man pulled up, grabbed her, threw her into his truck, hit her when she screamed and drove off. Her distraught grandmother went on Montel’s show and said, “This is too much for my family and me to handle. We want her back. I need to know where Opal is. I can’t stand this. I need your help, Sylvia. Where is Opal? Where is she?”
Sylvia said, “She’s not dead. But what bothers me - now I’ve never heard of this before - but she was taken and put into some kind of a slavery thing and taken into Japan. The place is Kukouro.”
“Kukouro?” Montel Williams asked, after a moment’s stunned silence.
“So she was taken and put on some kind of a boat or a plane and taken into white slavery,” Sylvia said.
Opal’s grandmother looked drained and confused. Opal’s body was eventually found buried in Fort Worth, Texas. She had, the pathologist concluded, been murdered the night she went missing. A local man - Richard Lee Franks - was convicted.
I wonder if Sylvia Browne went to Koo Koo Roo for lunch that day. Professional psychics are leeches who thrive on people’s pain, loneliness and insecurities. What’s horrible is television and the internet keeps these frauds going even though they have been exposed as fakes many times.
Uri Geller has a new TV show on NBC even though he was exposed by James Randi on national TV in the 1970s. Of course, the public forgets things, especially after such a long time has passed.
In fact, Harry Houdini, one of the most famous magicians of all time, exposed psychics and frauds in his day. Yet here, in the 21st century, people still cling to the hope that real psychics. It’s the triumph of hope over experience.
Magical thinking is still with us in force.
Afraid of the Dark
Late one recent night, Mr. Burroughs had gone out to check the mailbox when he saw two green, glittering eyes, triangular ears “and the general impression of height” in the shadows. When the creature began to walk toward him, Mr. Burroughs ran into the garage, fearing for his life. “Our skinny, gym-polished urban bodies are no match for anything that scratches its back on a tree,” he said. “Whatever it was, it was both curious and unafraid — two traits one does not admire in wildlife when one is alone in the dark.”
And it’s not just what lurks outside that sends imaginations running wild. Even the houses themselves can send chills up one’s spine. “You climb into bed, and suddenly you hear groans, creaks and low, deep thumping sounds, as though there are rabbits trapped inside the walls, or fingers gently teasing the exterior window frames,” Mr. Burroughs said. “Not a night goes by that I am not absolutely convinced somebody has entered the house and they do not have a conscience.”
Manhattanites and country living has been the inspiration for many a film. Usually, comedies.
I’ve known a few people who were longtime NYC residents who needed a tape of traffic sounds playing or a loud TV to fall asleep at night. It’s interesting how the environment you’re used to acclimatizes you so that a change to something more serene can seem threatening.
