Paging Bill Maher

This just in:

ABC announces Oprah-Obama Christmas special

Because that’s what the country needs right now.

 

[Hat tip: Drudge]

Warm happy fun time

The Road comes out in theaters this Thanksgiving.

Name that country

There’s only one place in the world where a man would get married to a video game character.

Women’s studies

Maybe I’ve been too hard on this whole Twilight craze:

“Twilight sequel New Moon is anti-feminist, claims professor”

Inappropriate jargon

Are words such as “inappropriate” and “unacceptable” politically correct?

Inappropriate and unacceptable began their modern careers in the 1980s as part of the jargon of political correctness. They have more or less replaced a number of older, more exact terms: coarse, tactless, vulgar, lewd. They encompass most of what would formerly have been called “improper” or “indecent.” An affair between a teacher and a pupil that was once improper is now inappropriate; a once indecent joke is now unacceptable.

I wonder how many other words or expressions came into common use in an effort to avoid moral judgment.

 

[Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily]

Barbarians on the web

Big Hollywood’s John Nolte, who once upon a time wrote insightful movie reviews at a dearly-missed blog called Dirty Harry’s Place, can be one of the best cultural commentators out there. He’s in top form again, this time exposing a Leftist website that recently told its readers to trash a conservative novel on Amazon.com — without ever reading it:

Last week Sadly, No! decided to target John J. Miller’s Big Hollywood article about his novel “The First Assassin.”  Violating their own mission statement, the attack wasn’t based on any “embarrassing” or “untrue” statements made by Miller. They just found it oh-so hilarious that the novel is self-published. As a snark attack, it’s Gawker-lite –- and Gawker isn’t all that impressive — but here’s what’s especially confusing…

Ridiculing a self-published novel are writers working for a … wait for it, wait for it …. self-published blog – a self-published blog with fewer daily visits than my local Home Depot. In their mission statement, Sadly, No! claims to be a “humor site,” but these self-published authors obviously missed the chapter on “Irony” in “Building a Poorly Trafficked Humor Website for Dummies.”

[Hat tip: Andrew Klavan]

Art without beauty

Pope Benedict is bringing back that strange, outdated notion that beauty and God are somehow linked:

The Pope told the gathering of hundreds of painters, sculptors, architects, poets and directors, held beneath the vaulted ceiling of the chapel painted by Michelangelo, that he wanted to “renew the Church’s friendship with the world of art.”

“Beauty … can become a path toward the transcendent, toward the ultimate Mystery, toward God,” Benedict said.

This reminds me of a recent article I read by the great Theodore Dalrymple on the French post-modern architect Le Corbusier, who, were he still alive, probably – and, for the sake of the world, hopefully — would have been invited to the Pope’s gathering. As Dalrymple explains:

Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform. In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy. Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me, everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.

Upon reading that, I wonder how many of this site’s readers have walked out of a new movie, heard a new song, or looked up at a new building and thought along with Benedict: 

“Too often … the beauty thrust upon us is illusory and deceitful … it imprisons man within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy,” he said.

Johnny

Tattoos = Old people?

Kyle Smith asks a good question that any young person considering getting a tattoo should consider.

Good stuff

True to his name, Cultural Offering offers us culture: 18th century Austrian culture, to be exact, in the form of Mozart. Beautiful.

Camp

2012, the new disaster flick from Roland Emmerich, who has a thing for destroying the world, is unintentionally hilarious, says Kyle Smith. The premise of the film, as I gather, is that the world ends just when the Mayan calendar said it would (see movie title). But many are arguing that the Mayan calendar never actually said that the world will end in 2012; it’s all a misinterpretation. Meanwhile, many more just don’t care what the Mayan calendar says, end-of-the-world interpretation or not. What I do find interesting, though, is that the President in the film is played by Hugo Chavez admirer Danny Glover. Coincidence, or Emmerich’s inspired choice?

Where in the world…?

Apologies for (yet another) recent lack of posts. I picked up a cold somewhere and have spent the past several days getting intimate with bottled water and sore throat lozenges. During my convalescence I’ve been kept company by Alan Furst’s latest book, The Spies of Warsaw, which, a third of the way in thus far, is quite good. I am much better now.

I made an interesting discovery: The song that you hear just before getting sick is the song that plays in a loop, over and over again,  in your head as you lie in the throes of feverish pain. For me this time it was something by a band called the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I’d complain, but the previous time I got sick the song that stuck was – I am not making this up – ”Sweet Dreams” by Marilyn Manson. (I was exposed to that song from a movie trailer I saw just before falling ill.) As you’ve probably guessed, the dreams were not sweet.

Another view

Joanna Krupa — bikini model, “Dancing with the Stars” participant, and very smart person — defending Playboy from its detractors:

“I think [feminists] suffer from lack of knowledge and tunnel vision. How many of those self-important, so-called ‘feminists’ have been on the set when a celebrity shot a Playboy spread? There you go. What is feminist about discriminating a photo shoot just because it involves female (partial) nudity that happens to give men pleasure? Pathetic,” Krupa told Tarts in an exclusive interview.

I know that there are manifold arguments to be made about how Hef’s enterprise contributed to, if not kickstarted, the deterioration of the moral and social fabric of the culture. Some of them I buy, others not so much. Instead, I’m more upset at the fact that the parents of the Baby Boom generation didn’t know how to articulate their values to their children, which could have avoided some if not most of the damage done by the Playboy free-wheeling, life’s-a-party philosophy.

That said, Ms. Krupa makes some good points, namely: 1)Many feminists hate it when women make men happy; 2)An actress can do an explicit, full-frontal-nudity sex scene for the sake of “art” and receive praise, yet be stigmatized for posing for a much-less-risque Playboy pictorial; and 3)Most of those artistic sex scenes aren’t even close to being artistic anyway. (But you already knew that last one.)

“Knight on a shining bicycle”*

Why European politics is interesting:

LONDON (Reuters Life!) – London Mayor Boris Johnson rescued a woman attacked by a group of girls wielding a metal bar after answering her plea for help during an evening bicycle ride, a spokeswoman for his office said Wednesday.

 

*Alas, I do not refer here to Ted Knight.

Again

We’re on a roll now: The latest addition of selective religion bashing comes from Roland Emmerich, the director of 2012:

The filmmaker is well known for decimating famed landmarks on movies including The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day. He stated that while he decided to destroy the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro because he is “against organised religion”, he was fearful of the Islamic religious decree for a sequence that was planned but not shot.

 

[HT: Big Hollywood]

Tolerance

While we wait for those new Muhammad films: Ian McKellen rips out pages of the Bible.

 

[HT: Big Hollywood]

Fitna it’s not

The Guardian is reporting that a producer of The Matrix is planning a film on the life of Muhammad:

Budgeted at around $150m (£91.5m), the film will chart Muhammad’s life and examine his teachings. [Producer Barrie] Osborne told Reuters that he envisages it as “an international epic production aimed at bridging cultures. The film will educate people about the true meaning of Islam“.

It sounds like a great idea. Except, of course, for the fact that it’s considered an insult by Muslims to show an image of the prophet Muhammad, as some folks in Denmark know. The film’s producers, none of whom are named Geert Wilders, have agreed that, “In accordance with Islamic law, the prophet will not actually be depicted on screen.” This is the second Muhammad-themed film being made: A remake of The Message is in the works as well.

[HT: Drudge]

Get Cameron

Sir Michael Caine, one of my favorite actors since childhood, has always seemed to have his feet in the real world while his fellow thespians live on Planet Rainbow. One sign of his real-worldism: He’s looking toward the Tories in the next parliamentary election:

“I’ll probably vote Conservative. I mean, we’re in a terrible state whichever way you look at it, socially, financially and politically, so just give the other guy a chance.

I’m not so enthusiastic about his belief in educating criminals (“troublemakers,” he calls them) instead of sending them to prison, but you can’t have everything.

 

[HT: Hilary]

Homo Patheticus

Are we the most pathetic men in history? Kyle Smith says there’s a very good chance of that:

Twenty thousand years is a long time, but the Aboriginal men were essentially the same species as today’s homo sapiens. Calculations indicate that one of them, “T8” — sounds like an action hero right there; Vin Diesel’s XXX wouldn’t stand a chance — reached 23 miles per hour while chasing prey. OK, Usain Bolt hits about 26 miles per hour on the 100-meter sprint — but T8 was just a random dude out of a population of 150,000, and he was running barefoot in a muddy lake edge. Give the guy a pair of sneakers and a little training, and Usain would be lucky to get a job as a middle-school gym teacher.

Even over shorter time periods, things look bleak. In the Victorian age, bridge builders spent all day working with 40-pound sledgehammers. Their counterparts today wield toothpick-sized 14-pounders. In the same era, young lads who worked as runners for British glassworks regularly ran 13 to 17 miles a day. They didn’t need some cocktail-party credential like “Oh, did I mention? I ran the Marathon” to prove their mettle.

The Green Zone

Damon. Greengrass. War on terror.

You know where this one’s going: