Hillary Clinton claims that snipers fired on her when she visited Bosnia, and videos clearly show that she was greeted by a little girl who read her a poem about peace.

It's an obvious mistake. There are few things worse than the poetry of little girls, especially about peace. 

Hillary, jet lagged and weak, might just have felt that she was subjected to sniper fire, or simply wish that she had been ...

Tom Waits, A Megaphone, & A Song

Chocolate Jesus

Yeah, but it's cool...

DOOMSDAY It's pretty much scene quotes from Escape from New York and The Road Warrior and bits and pieces of other 80's exploitation movies. But. It's stylish and tense and Neil Marshall (director of scariest movie in years -- despite being another quote festival -- The Descent) seems to know exactly where the camera should go. And then there's lead actor Rhona Mitri. You could make a movie that's 90 minutes of just having the camera filming her walking around. And she's stylin' in the Snake Pliskin Eyepatch. I'd say it's actually a better movie than EFNY (an overated movie that's mostly about Kurt Russell's sneer), but not quite up to the mythic brutal beauty of the Road Warrior. There's a clever fairy tale built into Doomsday -- a princess returns to reclaim her kingdom -- its' a badass princess and a kingdom of cannibals, but that's sort of cool too...

Waiting for the Magic (MACgic?)

My new Mac Mini arrived two days ago.

 

It's smaller than a cigar box, and looks like something you'd store plutonium slugs in.

It worked very nicely, right out of the box.   It runs Adobe Creative Suite 3 without a hitch.  It's nifty.

 

But nothing else seems to be happening.

 

My life has not changed.

 

There has been no dancing.  The view from my window is still the same.

I haven't had any epiphanies, breakthroughs or gnosis.  

My muse is still spending most of her time watching the Cartoon Network while eating Pirate's Booty.

I haven't made any new friends. 

 

I still have hopes.  It's a MAC after all.  Something magical will happen any time now…

Why Saki Rocks

"'What are we to do?' asked Constance.  

"'What a person you are for questions,' I said.  

"'Well, we can't stay here all night with a hyaena,' she retorted.  

"'I don't know what your ideas of comfort are,' I said; 'but I shouldn't think of staying here all night even without a hyaena. My home may be an unhappy one, but at least it has hot and cold water laid on, and domestic service, and other conveniences which we shouldn't find here.'"  

from "Esme"  

Arlington Stringham made a joke in the House of Commons. It was a thin House, and a very thin joke; something about the Anglo-Saxon race having a great many angles. It is possible that it was unintentional, but a fellow-member, who did not wish it to be supposed that he was asleep because his eyes were shut, laughed. One or two of the papers noted "a laugh" in brackets, and another, which was notorious for the carelessness of its political news, mentioned "laughter." Things often begin in that way.  

"Arlington made a joke in the House last night," said Eleanor Stringham to her mother; "in all the years we've been married neither of us has made jokes, and I don't like it now. I'm afraid it's the beginning of the rift in the lute."  

"What lute?" said her mother.  

"It's a quotation," said Eleanor. To say that anything was a quotation was an excellent method, in Eleanor's eyes, for withdrawing it from discussion, just as you could always defend indifferent lamb late in the season by saying "It's mutton." 

****** 

Lady Isobel was seen everywhere with a fawn coloured collie at a time when every one else kept nothing but Pekinese, and she had once eaten four green apples at an afternoon tea in the Botanical Gardens, so she was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit. The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.  

****** 

Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own.  

 

From "The Jesting of Arlington Stringham."  

"You are not really dying, are you?" asked Amanda.  

"I have the doctor's permission to live till Tuesday," said Laura.  

"But to-day is Saturday; this is serious!" gasped Amanda.  

"I don't know about it being serious; it is certainly Saturday," said Laura.  

From "Laura"  

"Do you mean to tell me that you are meditating violence against a man like Sir Leon Birberry," stammered Huddle; "he's one of the most respected men in the country."  

"He's down on our list," said Clovis carelessly; "after all, we've got men we can trust to do our job, so we shan't have to rely on local assistance. And we've got some Boy-scouts helping us as auxiliaries."  

"Boy-scouts!"  

"Yes; when they understood there was real killing to be done they were even keener than the men."  

From "The Unrest Cure"  

"I expect you don't know me with my moustache," said the new- comer; "I've only grown it during the last two months." 

"On the contrary," said Clovis, "the moustache is the only thing about you that seemed familiar to me. I felt certain that I had met it somewhere before."  

"My name is Tarrington," resumed the candidate for recognition. 

"A very useful kind of name," said Clovis; "with a name of that sort no one would blame you if you did nothing in particular heroic or remarkable, would they? And yet if you were to raise a troop of light horse in a moment of national emergency, 'Tarrington's Light Horse' would sound quite appropriate and pulse-quickening; whereas if you were called Spoopin, for instance, the thing would be out of the question. No one, even in a moment of national emergency, could possibly belong to Spoopin's Horse."  

The new-comer smiled weakly, as one who is not to be put off by mere flippancy, and began again with patient persistence: 

"I think you ought to remember my name--"  

"I shall," said Clovis, with an air of immense sincerity. "My aunt was asking me only this morning to suggest names for four young owls she's just had sent her as pets. I shall call them all Tarrington; then if one or two of them die or fly away, or leave us in any of the ways that pet owls are prone to, there will be always one or two left to carry on your name."  

From "The Talking-Out of Tarrington"

God and Monsters and The CGI Blues

I Am Legend has a moody, highly creepy beginning, and one wonderful avoid-monsters-in- the-dark scene.  And then it goes to hell, and not in the good way you'd expect from a horror movie.  There are two distinct reasons.  The CGI zombie/vampires look like, well, CGI zombie/vampires.  They're not remotely scary because they look like pixelated Play-Doh.  George Romero got more terror out of shambling actors in face-paint than this movie does out of sinewy digital demons.  

The other issue is, yet again, the screenplay.  I Am Legend the film is the third adaptation of I Am Legend the novella by Richard Matheson.  The first film was the Vincent Price vehicle, The Last Man On Earth, which would qualify as a good try; low budget and occasionally moody.  The second had Charleton Heston doing his low-key overacting thing in the interesting but unfocused The Omega Man.  The problem with all the adaptations is an unwillingness to trust Matheson, one of the great horror writers of the century, and an excellent screen writer in his own right.  (Look him up on IMDB -- quite a long list of screen work, including some classic Twilight Zones, as well as a bunch of adapted stories and novels.)  

The Matheson story has the last man alive trying to survive in a world that is infested with VAMPIRES (not mutants or zombies or whatever they make them in the film) who are infected with a virus that turns them into bloodsucking monsters.   The main character is immune.  He spends the day breaking into houses and staking the vampires, the nights playing classical music at 11 volume to drown out the cries of the creatures who used to be his neighbors, who want him to come outside ...  There is a twist at the end like a Möbius loop -- which deals with the idea of what exactly makes a monster.

There's not a writer of vampire stories since the fifties that doesn't owe a debt to Matheson, from King to Rice.  And somehow Hollywood just doesn't get it.  Part of this is an unwillingness to take the risk of having the leading man turn out to be an unsympathetic killer.  Part may be a director or screenwriter's need to try to top Matheson's cleverness.  Or maybe they shoot Matheson's ending and it just doesn't test well in previews...

There's another problem with I Am Legend as an adaptation, which is more worrisome, but not surprising.  Will Smith, doing his best to play the lead in this mess, asks another survivor how she is sure that there is a colony of uninfected humans in Vermont.  She replies, "God told me."  She turns out to be right.

Matheson's story is of a Godless universe.  His anti-hero is trying to survive and find a cure in a horrific landscape devoid of divine influence or help.  There's no God in the novella, and that's part of the point of the tale.  Keep God out of a classic vampire story hollywood twits -- he doesn't belong there.

Back to the CGI issue.  I've often thought that Hollywood is out of touch with TV.  If filmmakers actually saw how CGI was used so cheesily on TV, they'd find more creative ways to do things.  Every Saturday, the Sci-Fi channel runs a bad monster movie with computer SFX monsters.  So when I see something, like The Mist, or Cloverfield, the effects are often better, but there are moments that don't look any different than the Sci-Fi movie or a Discovery channel dinosaur special.  Spielberg showed in Jurassic Park that the best mix was puppetry, models, CGI, and shadows, as well as some creativity. 

As a final note -- notice the resemblance between the big monster in Cloverfield and the one that does a walk through cameo in The Mist?   And the spider things of the same species in both?  Maybe it's not CGI.  Maybe there's a Screen Monsters Guild we don't know about ...

 

Medieval superstition desperately tries to be relevant:

Vatican lists new sins, including pollution