David Mamet's guide to movie gags--

"All right, what about magnets? Cat, with magnet hidden (or, indeed, implanted) in its neck, is lured to stick its head into a funnel smeared with tuna fish. Funnel contains radio-controlled electromagnet. Two prop guys hold monofilament lines, one to ootz cat and funnel over the ledge, second to ootz it back. Electromagnet is turned off, and grateful cat removes head from funnel. In this scenario, I would shoot the cat sequence first. That is, before "establishing" the cat.

Or: set up four or five ledges, four or five different cats. Whichever cat-and-team first got the shot in the can, that cat would be the Hero Cat, and play in the rest of the film. This version, of course, would require many, many cats standing by. " 

"ornicopytheobibliopsychocrystarroscioaero-genethliometeoroaustrohieroanthropoichthyopyrosideroch-pnomyoalectryoophiobotanopegobydrorhab-docrithoaleuroalphitohalomolybdoclerobeloax-inocoscinodactyliogeolithopessopsephocatop-trotephraoneirochiroonychodactyloarithstichooxogeloscogastro-gyrocerobletonooenosapulinaniac."

The H.P. Lovecraft Archive

"If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings... It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence..."

(via Plep)  

a monkey that knows kung-fu (mpg)

thanks metafilter

Charles Pierce

"Here's what I'd like to see. The entire Democratic caucus of the House of Representatives simply refuses to go to work as long a Tom DeLay is Majority Leader. Deny a quorum. Get your best parliamentarian and tie the place in knots. Sell the hell out of the fact that the House Republicans just used the rules of the institution as a getaway car. Go to Texas and pose with Ronnie Earle. But, under no circumstance, do anything of substance until the Tiny Little Hammer is deposed. And, above all, do not listen to Bill Clinton who, I swear to God, still believes there are reasonable men among the Republicans."

Carpeted

a new e-book by Corina Copp 

10 year old Julia Mayhew's Eagle's Wing has a GEORGE W. BUSH acrostic--

Ghastly
Empty head
Obtuse and offensive
Rude rogue
Grotesque
Eliminate him!

Weapons of mass destruction not found!

Belligerant
Unjust war
Shudder to think about him!
Harmful to the entire world!

Burning Man's Piano Mover

"'And there is no one who can find me and there is no one who knows where I am,' he recalls. 'And there are 88 pianos dropped off in the desert and...a bunch of hippies who will beat them with sticks. I didn't think about my mom or my grandmother, just these 88 pianos." 

Horn Subwoofer Made in Bricks

(via Bifurcated Rivets) 

Plum Pudding

"Stone carefully one pound of the best raisins, wash and pick one pound of currants, chop very small one pound of fresh beef suet, blanch and chop small or pound two ounces of sweet almonds and one ounce of bitter ones; mix the whole well together, with one pound of sifted flour, and the same weight of crumb of bread soaked in milk, then squeezed dry and stirred with a spoon until reduced to a mash, before it is mixed with the flour. Cut in small pieces two ounces each of preserved citron, orange, and lemon-peel, and add a quarter of an ounce of mixed spice; quarter of a pound of moist sugar should be put into a basin, with eight eggs, and well beaten together with a three-pronged fork; stir this with the pudding, and make it of a proper consistence with milk. Remember that it must not be made too thin, or the fruit will sink to the bottom, but be made to the consistence of good thick batter. Two wineglassfuls of brandy should be poured over the fruit and spice, mixed together in a basin, and allowed to stand three or four hours before the pudding is made, stirring them occasionally. It must be tied in a cloth, and will take five hours of constant boiling. When done, turn it out on a dish, sift loaf-sugar over the top, and serve it with wine-sauce in a boat, and some poured round the pudding. The pudding will be of considerable size, but half the quantity of materials, used in the same proportion, will be equally good." 

Lard crisis: mince pies threatened as supplies dwindle

"There are fears of panic buying in the run-up to Christmas when it is traditionally an ingredient in mince pies and Christmas puddings." 

Bush's Guernica

"You don't liberate a country by sealing off cities and shooting at everything in sight. You don't liberate a country by killing a 100,000 citizens -- and climbing -- including men, women, children, the elderly and whole families at a time. You don't liberate a nation by looting it. You don't reduce the number of people battling you by killing more of the population as a whole, unless you plan on killing the entire country. (The question of what they are resisting is another one the media conveniently ignores. Let's try this on for size: many of them are resisting an occupying army.) " 

Niall Ferguson from September

"The lesson of British history is that a second Bush term could be more damaging to the Republicans and more beneficial to the Democrats than a Bush defeat. If he secures re-election, President Bush can be relied upon to press on with a foreign policy based on pre-emptive military force, to ignore the impending fiscal crisis (on the Cheney principle that 'deficits don't matter') and to pursue socially conservative objectives like the constitutional ban on gay marriage. Anyone who thinks this combination will serve to maintain Republican unity is dreaming; it will do the opposite. Meanwhile, the Dems will have another four years to figure out what the Labour Party finally figured out: It's the candidate, stupid. And when the 2008 Republican candidate goes head-to-head with the American Tony Blair, he will get wiped out."

We Won, You Just Don't Know It Yet

"If the Iraq adventure fails, or drags on interminably, he, and not Kerry, will suffer the ugly political fallout. And that is likely to come sooner rather than later. The Democrats will be around in 2008 to pick up the pieces. "

CNN.com - Beavers weave stolen cash into dam

" A bag of bills stolen from a casino was snapped up by beavers who wove thousands of dollars in soggy currency into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek in eastern Louisiana." 

Welcome to Canada!

"Don't point out, either, Canada's complicity in America's global reach. To harp on the fact that Canada depends on America to buy more of its exports than anyone else, or that America's massive military has, in unseemly ways, enforced global economic arrangements that benefit Canada is to really cast a pall over a salmon barbecue party."

Comet in Moominland never too soon to start in on the Moomin books again!! (thanks Chris for the painting link) 

Jonathan Franzen on the oddly underrated Alice Munro 

this vivid contemporary account of the 1913 Nanaimo coal strike (and more) in the Socialist History Project--

"The manner in which the accused miners were brought to and from the courthouse is aptly illustrated by the following excerpt from the News-Advertiser:

They were brought up in a body, under the escort of fifty special police, and a guard of soldiers with fixed bayonets.

Martial law had not been proclaimed, yet Russia was never more militarized than was Vancouver Island. Soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets searched the trains, looked under all the seats, (presumably for machine guns) and subjected all passengers to an inquisition as to their business, etc. All persons travelling to Nanaimo by boat, had to pass an examination at the hand of special police, reinforced by a file of soldiers. It was impossible to send telephone or telegraph messages out of the city without the military knowing the text of such messages. The following excerpt explains the origin of some of the stories which afterwards appeared in the press:

Special to the News-Advertiser.

Nanaimo, Aug. 20.—Indications point to the possibility of the extension of the power of the military authorities here over the telegraph and telephone lines leading out of Nanaimo and the strike-affected district..

Already the telephone headquarters here are under guard, and all messages, especially long distance ones, are overheard by a military representative.

The telegraph lines to a certain extent are supervised, military men being stationed at the railway station here to overlook all messages received or sent.

Now, so the rumor emanating from the military headquarters indicates, the next step will be the exercising of some measure of control over the messages sent out by the newspaper representatives.

Some members of the newspaper fraternity have had the suggestion made to them that they should first submit their press copy to headquarters, where it could be looked over before being sent.

In all, 179 miners were arrested and thrown into prison where they were held, bail being refused."

Liberal Groupthink

"The dangers of aligning liberalism with higher thought are obvious. When a Duke University philosophy professor implied last February that conservatives tend toward stupidity, he confirmed the public opinion of academics as a self-regarding elite -- regardless of whether or not he was joking, as he later said that he was. When laymen scan course syllabi or search the shelves of college bookstores and find only a few volumes of traditionalist argument amid the thickets of leftist critique, they wonder whether students ever enjoy a fruitful encounter with conservative thought. When a conference panel is convened or a collection is published on a controversial subject, and all the participants and contributors stand on one side of the issue, the tendentiousness is striking to everyone except those involved. The False Consensus does its work, but has an opposite effect. Instead of uniting academics with a broader public, it isolates them as a ritualized club."

happy birthday Jo Stafford--warmest and most lucid of singers 

Random Frog Generator

Ched Myers' powerfully argued Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus

[20] And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread.
[21] And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself.
[22] And the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils.
[23] And he called them unto him, and said unto them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan?
[24] And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
[25] And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.
[26] And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end.
[27] No man can enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house.

liberation theologian and activist Ched Myers reads Mel Gibson through the Gospel of Mark--

"Mark's social criticism, though necessarily historically specific, is addressed to every culture and political formation. To limit it to late Second-Temple Judaism is not only to miss his point badly; it is to perpetuate the murderous historical legacy of misunderstanding and oppression that has too often characterized the attitude of gentile Christians (and pseudo-Christians) toward the Jewish people. The opponents of Mark's Jesus were, to use apocalyptic semantics, "powers," a rubric that embraces not only members of the Roman and Judean ruling classes then, but also those in North American now."

I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
 

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet the heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

-- William Wordsworth
 

Cruel and Unusual--the end of the 8th amendment--

"The ghost of slavery is built into our legal language and holds our prison system in its grip. To the extent that slaves were allowed personalities before the law, they were regarded chiefly—almost solely—as potential criminals. During the second session of the 39th Congress (December 12, 1866-January 8, 1867) debates raged on the meaning of the exemption in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. It abolished slavery “except as punishment of crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” The parenthetical expression guaranteed enclosure, a bracketing of servitude that revived slavery under cover of removing it. Those who were once slaves were now criminals, and forced labor in the form of the convict lease system ensured continued degradation. As Charles Sumner warned, the locale for enslavement would move from the auction block to the courts of the United States. "

Helen Levitt's graffitti photos from the 30's 

"Spirit of the Beehive" director Victor Erice On the Uncertain Nature of Cinema

"A ghost always carries with it a specific and factual truth: the death or disappearance of someone or something. In the history of cinema, beyond its episodic deaths--real or symbolic: the death of classical cinema, Modernity - there exists a primordial mourning, practically forgotten nowadays: the mourning and sorrow caused by the disappearance of silent cinema in the moment of its maximum splendour, sacrificed for the sake of the spoken word. A premature death, without a doubt; a death of which Manoel de Oliveira is the only active filmmaker who can offer an embodied and heartfelt testimony, a death felt by him as an essential loss. A loss, above all, of a certain specificity of a cinema elaborated under the protection of montage theories, wherein the image worked in favour of an expression that substituted the word." 

Speegle--talking Google!

rounding up the numerous centennial A. J. Liebling re-issues--

"There are three kinds of writers of news in our generation. In inverse order of worldly consideration, they are:

1. The reporter, who writes what he sees.

2. The interpretive reporter, who writes what he sees and what he construes to be its meaning.

3. The expert, who writes what he construes to be the meaning of what he hasn't seen.

All is manifest to him, since his powers are not limited by his powers of observation. Logistics, to borrow a word from the military species of the genus, favor him, since it is possible to not see many things at the same time. For example, a correspondent cannot cover a front and the Pentagon simultaneously. An expert can, and from an office in New York, at that."  

Anodyne on Tim Lee and Kevin Schmidt

"Kevin Schmidt's "Fog", at Presentation House Gallery, is a two-piece installation. Facing you in the darkened gallery is an eight foot by eight foot slide projection of a West Coast forest interior at night. Huge gnarled trees are covered by beards of pale green moss and lichen. Evergreen boughs crisscross the image plane. Sword ferns' sharp points protrude from an opaque white mist that swirls across the foreground. The projected image's enormous size and crystalline clarity makes it seem like a doorway to the distant river valley where the photograph was taken. You feel that if you stepped forward, you would find your feet scuffling through the ferns, and kicking up clouds of mist."

("Kevin Schmidt's "Fog" is on display at North Vancouver's Presentation House Gallery from 6 November through 19 December 2004. Tim Lee's exhibition, "The Askance View", is on display at Vancouver's Tracey Lawrence Gallery from 28 October to 27 November 2004.) 

blogged elsewhere but don't miss alan sondheim on the election...

TAPPED: "Gallup's post-election poll seems to do some major damage to the rapidly emerging conventional wisdom about the 2004 election. According to Gallup, George W. Bush improved his share among suburban voters (51 percent in 2000, 54 percent in 2004) and among urban voters (35 percent in 2000, 44 percent in 2004) while doing worse among rural voters (60 percent in 2000, down to 54 percent in 2004). Similarly, while Bush gained among all categories of educational attainment, his biggest improvement was among those holding postgraduate degrees (47 percent, up from 43 percent) while his smallest gain was among those with high school or less (46 percent, up from 45 percent). "

Don't forget to vote, American readers! 

I'll be back after Guy Fawkes day!! 

Norman Mailer on The Gilmore Girls tonight--

"I've got to call Rory. She read "The Naked and the Dead" while she was still in footie pajamas."  

"In counting there is strength"

Thomas Nast 

"An Election Entertainment"

William Hogarth & 18th century print culture 

endlessly searchable Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online (1841-1902) 

an interesting-looking play about electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire was just on in the UK and its website has free Mp3's "responding" to her work--I wonder if they'll do a movie?

the mighty Sasha Frere-Jones on London Calling--

"On "London Calling," Strummer remakes his major points: the police are on the wrong side, wage labor will crush your soul, and sometimes people need to destroy property to be heard. His sense of righteousness is enhanced by the album's sequencing, which feels Biblically logical and begins with one of the best opening songs of any record ever, the title track. The song starts cold. Two guitar chords ring on the downbeats, locked in step with the drums, marching forward with no dynamic variation. A second guitar introduces difference, coming toward us like an ambulance Dopplering into range. The bass guitar, sounding like someone’s voice, heralds everybody over the hill and into the song. If you can listen to it without getting a chilly burst of immortality, there is a layer between you and the world. Joe Strummer simultaneously watches the riots and sloughs off his role as de-facto punk president: "London calling, now don't look to us / All that phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust / London calling, see we ain't got no swing / 'Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing." The chorus forms a keystone for the whole album: "A nuclear error, but I have no fear / London is drowning and I, I live by the river." The Clash are laughing at Margaret Thatcher and will be dancing long after the police have come and gone." 

extraordinary rendition

"The Torture Convention naturally bars parties from sending anyone to a country where “there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” But the House bill would lift this prohibition, enabling the United States to deport (or “render”) foreign nationals to countries long condemned by the U.S. State Department for widespread practices of torture and other gross abuse. A potential deportee could avoid this fate only by proving through “clear and convincing evidence that he or she would be tortured” upon return. Merely showing that torture is more likely than not would no longer be enough. "