Sunday, June 6, 2010

Sunday Funnies and Arts

As always, click to enlarge...












TWIT OF THE YEAR: "Extreme Greenies:see now why we push"drill,baby,drill"of known reserves&promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?"

I think we all know who composed this masterpiece. Where to begin? With the utter offensiveness and tastelessness of issuing a taunt while the coastline of her so-called Real America submits to a drilling catastrophe? Or maybe the outright lie that DBD signifies a cautious, "known" approach to drilling? Or the weird only-on-the-right logic that one environmental disaster means that the safe thing to do is to invite another? And John McCain wanted this twit to be a heartbeat away from a 72-year old's presidency?...

Bringing It All Back Home: The spill is now big enough to cover the south of England or the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area...

JUST A SONG: Before there was Springsteen, there was Mitchum...

The Gulf Coast in song...

Australia: Home of the kangaroo, the wombat, the wallaby, and the ultimate femme fatale...

PHOTO ALBUM
New Orleans carriage ride...

Ready for a disaster?...

Digression
...

Just your friendly neighborhood boneyard...

I gave you diamonds, you gave me disease...

Cambridge, Idaho, town water tower...

The audacity of coloration...

Purple martins on Lake Erie...

Reet petite feet...

Record of a sneeze (scroll down; thanks, Gimcrack!)...

It turns out that there is a such thing as a stupid question: "To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?" I would have to ask the question, why would you have to ask that question unless you were a racist slug? Whenever someone begins a statement with "I am not a racist," you know that a Deepwater Horizon-sized load of bigoted drivel is about to follow. Images from the offending mural here. I admit that I can see why it might anger a crawfish...

16 comments:

Scrumpy said...

That woman continues to enlighten, doesn't she?

Foxessa said...

Lately I've been watching the episodes of the 1983 miniseries made from Wouk's Winds of War. The joy of this miniseries is -- Robert Mitchum! :) Coincidence?

But to balance the joy of Mitchum onscreen, out-machoing everyone without doing a thing, is the horror that is Ali McGraw, as actress -- she isn't one! -- and as the character she plays. What a screwed up twit, the most unlikely femme fatale ever conceived. I hate her so much I want to slap her every time she comes on-screen, as character, and as actress.

Well, now you know how I really feel.

Treme comes back tonight. I've heard some things about what happens in these last three eps but I ain't gonna talk. Sigh.

If God's Willing and the Creek Don't Rise we'll be spending some time in NO in July. This is the longest we've gone without being there since 2004. The last trip was in February, for me, and March for El V.

Love, C.

K. said...

Scrumpy: Well, that's one way of looking at it! It astounds me that anyone thinks what she says is profound.

Foxessa; Renting WOW about 17-18 years ago got me on the Mitchum kick. Ali McGraw is simply execrable. You'll be glad to know that the much more credible Jane Seymour replaced Ali in the sequel War and Remembrance. Jane may not be Meryl Streep, but she's at least a pro.

There's a general upgrading of the cast in WAR: John Gielgud replaces John Houseman (the physical demands on the part increased greatly); Hart Bochner for Jan-Michel Vincent (less presence, but a better actor and more age appropriate for Briny); Robert Morley gives the part of Talky Tudsbury greater dimension without losing the humor; a then unknown Sharon Stone takes the expanded role of Warren Henry's wife; and Barry Bostwick becomes Briny's CO, also a greatly expanded part. Mitchum, Polly Bergen, and Jeremy Kemp are luckily retained; unfortunately, so is Victoria Tennant. I watched both series every year for quite a while; they actually hold up better than the novels.

How did we last a week without Treme? What will we do when it's over?

K. said...

P.S. Mitchum has a great scene in the last part, listening to the Army-Navy game on a lawn in Manila. The family man in him wars with the career officer, leading him to request a favor. It's actually quite tender.

Unknown said...

Please god, don't ever let S Palin hold government office again....

Funny, I never was much of a V Morrison fan, but I've always liked that song--nice clip!

Roy said...

Why is that woman still getting press?

TheToles cartoon with the adverse reaction to President Obama doing the Little Dutch Boy is classic. He's right, they'll never, ever give him any slack.

The story out of Prescott, Arizona about the brouhaha over the mural convinces me that we don't need a wall across the border, we need oune around Arizona!

Good old Van; always good to hear him again!

Roy said...

PS: About The Winds of War and War and Remembrance - I watched both and then watched them again decades later on DVD, and I have to agree that the latter was better, mostly due to the casting changes. Although I do like Victoria Tennant as Pamela. And for me, the books hold up better, but that's only because I'm a history geek and love the excerpts from Von Roon's book.

K. said...

John: You're hurting me, bad! Check out the Moondance album.

Roy: Now there's a thought! Can you imagine getting bent out of shape over that? tnlib and I agreed that, while growing in the south, we lost track of the number of sentences we heard that began with "I'm not prejudiced, but..."

Foxessa said...

So the Natalie-McGraw character doesn't perish as I'm praying she will? Gol-darn it!

Wouldn't it have been lovely if WWII was actually conducted by such morally superior characters as they are in Winds of War? This series is quite a propaganda machine ....

Also, all the characters are bloody well off, and part of some kind of power elite. Who knew that the world was so well off despite the global Depression.

Love, C.

Foxessa said...

I've never read the Wouk novels these series are based on.

So the two of you here who did read them like them?

Love, C.

Tao Dao Man said...

Roy: There are a few sane people left in Arizona. Me and Coyoteprime both live here. We are more than disgusted of what has transpired here.

http://realityzone-realityzone.blogspot.com/2010/06/erasing-arizona-dark-skinned-mural.html

K: Thanks for the nice cartoons.

Unknown said...

Sorry K! Will do.

nursemyra said...

Robert Mitchum and Van Morrison - it doesn't get much better than that!

and John, check out Astral Weeks - best Van Morrison album ever...

K. said...

If Winds, Remembrance, and The Caine Mutiny are an indication, Herman Wouk admired the Gentile officer corps of WW2. Which strikes me as odd, as I suspect that it accepted Jews only marginally more than it accepted blacks.

In the novels, Pug Henry was a middle class Californian from the Russian River area who married into money. Everyone else is an elite.

I read the books soon after Remembrance came out. They were good page turners; you have to remember that historical fiction of the 70s did not aspire to literature. So, you have two-dimensional heroes and villains with the emphasis on narrative and readability. I picked up Winds a couple of years ago and found the prose style rather dated, except for the excerpts from Von Roon's book.

Topol and David Duke also survive into Remembrance. Winds is essentially a prologue to Remembrance, which is twice the length and greatly superior.

What I wondered about Briny is how he could get so hung up on someone who invariably made the stupidest possible decision. Another example of a guy thinking with the wrong part of his body...

K. said...

I second NM on Astral Weeks.

Tao Dao Man said...

TOO LONG IN EXILE