T'Pau - Heart & Soul - Top of the Pops 1987

The Aristocrats meme

Useful link to one of the funniest memes on the 'net...
http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2005/07/the_aristocrats.asp

...Which was alluded to in a funny AP story about Wal-Mart:
http://blog.al.com/breaking/2009/12/shoplifting_scene_in_tennessee.html
("Shoplifting scene in Tennessee turns chaotic when officer and witness attacked, suspect stabbed... The Aristocrats!")...

...Which reminded me to share the People of Walmart website with you for great entertainment.
http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/

Film: The Limits of Control

Jim Jarmusch - I've seen his Ghost Dog, Coffee and Cigarettes (part of it), Mystery Train (pers. fave) and now The Limits of Control. I didn't "get" this one without help, but that's o.k. If I told you this movie was like "dark chocolate" and ran off without filling you in on that abstraction, maybe you'd be dismissive, maybe you'd wonder why. Hopefully, you'd provide your own explanation and anticipate that not everything will be laid bare in the telling. Our expectations for resolution in literature (nuance) and cinema (full exposition) vary to a large degree. If nothing else, you should love the sheer beauty of Spanish landscapes in this movie and the mythology of the protagonist, "Lone Man."

Mary Pols, Time Magazine:

As Lone Man makes his way from Madrid to Seville and then into the countryside toward his wealthy target, American, aka the Man (Bill Murray, who starred in Jarmusch's lovely Broken Flowers), he encounters a cast of characters who trade boxes of matches with him and pass on more tidbits of instruction along with commentary on art and culture. There's Guitar (John Hurt), Mexican (Gael Garcia Bernal) and the most helpful of all, Blonde (Tilda Swinton), who is a fan of Jarmusch-style cinema.

"The best films are like dreams you're never really

sure you've had," she tells him.

The rest of the review (and spoilers) are here: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1894879,00.html

Meanwhile, I'm thinking about Flamenco, castanets, and a dark bar.

- Thinking about the visceral and sparse "Passengers: Original Movie Soundtracks Vol. II" http://www.amazon.com/Passengers-Original-Soundtracks-Brian-Eno/dp/B000001E8

- Thinking about "Killer 7." http://www.gamespot.com/gamecube/action/killer7/review.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=gssummary&tag=summary;read-review

- Thinking about "El Mariachi" and people that make you wonder whether that guitar case holds an ametralladora ...

We were exposed to and savored Jarmusch's rich mise-en-scene in Mystery Train. Here, staring bleakly at Spanish landscapes, you begin to feel part of them. What better place for cool, dark-shades intrigue than the sepia desert and thrumming guitars of La Madre Tierra?

Interpretation of "Limits" can be challenging; a camera following Mr. Jarmusch, His manner of dress makes him look like somebody you might find at the side of a road in Nevada. In the bonus features as he shares some revealing points, clues.

"There are only a few stories, but limitless ways to tell them."

"I know many things about film history, art, etc. What fascinates me are not the things that are known, but the things that are unknown to me."

The Limits of Control is an extended metaphor for intrigue and the unknown - it invites the viewer's imagination. The landscapes are stunning and make me embrace Spain again. The elements of scene are built to a fever pitch, and when the mystery of our "Lone Wanderer" is revealed, it comes suddenly but is not an "Aha." You really need an attuned eye & ear to unite the abstract cues and draw out the meaning, and could return many times to find more.

Unfortunately, western audiences will not enjoy having to work to make their own interpretations. No matter the common criticism, there's no denying that Jim Jarmusch is highly talented and artistic. 6 or 7/10. I'm on the fence.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil trailer

Critically, Anvil! was - well received ('As' on Yahoo Movies) and took a completely unexpected direction. I picked it up thinking it was going to be a comic "rock-umentary" like This is Spinal Tap. The surprise that was ultimately so satisfying was that the story overflowed with human emotion and almost universal appeal.

Toby Keith 's ballad on the War on Christmas

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
A Colbert Christmas: Toby Keith Sings
http://www.colbertnation.com/
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor U.S. Speedskating

Medal of Honor recipient will continue to fly flag despite fracas

"Logic without wisdom can be employed by any sophist." - Unknown

A Marine gunnery sergeant once explained this to me, that, "Rules do not override good judgment and common sense." Not to imply that I seek ways to circumvent good order.

It took public outrage, two U.S. senators from Virginia, and the White House press secretary to bring an end to a stonewalling home-owners' association (HOA) that went to war against a Richmond Medal of Honor veteran of three wars who only wanted to raise a flag from his flagpole.

You can read about this in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local/article/FLAG09GAT_20091208-192802/310291/
I'll leave you with this comment I found which drives to the heart of the matter.
-----------------------------------------------
Posted by kriskraft on December 04, 2009

To all who are proposing to just hang a flag from a holder mounted on the house I appreciate your attempt at a solution but I respectfully submit that it is not the flag or the pole but rather the ritual associated with raising the flag every morning and lowering it every evening.
I am fortunate to have grown up with a WW II veteran father who raised the flag every morning. My brother and I learned from an early age that we were doing more than raising a flag. We understood by the reverence that our parents displayed that this was something special.
When we exercised the proper flag etiquette we were really showing respect for all that the flag represents including all of those who have gone before us to ensure our ability to raise that flag every morning.
I can only imagine that when he raised the flag my dad was thinking of his Army buddies who gave the ultimate sacrifice. My parents never preached any of this. We just “got it” by the seriousness and solemnity that they displayed.
My brother and I actually would try to beat each other to be the one to get to raise the flag but more often than not we ended up putting it up and taking it down together. Never letting it touch the ground and always folding it correctly.
The more I hear from all sides of this argument the more I have come to believe that if you did not have this strong and personal connection with the rituals of the American Flag from an early age or you have not belonged to an organization that teaches and exercises these rituals then you are probably not going to understand the deeply personal emotions that are evoked when someone who has actually put his life on the line fighting for what the flag represents raises the flag.
That doesn’t make you bad, unpatriotic or wrong. It just means you probably don’t understand how it feels, and what it means to this person.
My parents rest now in the veterans section of the cemetery on the hill at the foot of the huge flag pole and my flag is out every day to honor them, the country and my two boys who carry on in Army uniforms, defending everything that the flag represent.
When the West Point Cadets unfurl that huge flag in the Yankee Stadium outfield and the announcer talks about honoring fallen and injured soldiers many of us pause in a moment of reflection, maybe with a lump in our throat, and then it passes and we go about our day.
COL Barfoot honors those who have gone before him EVERY DAY, twice a day.
I hope that the HOA can find it in their rules or in their hearts to allow COL Barfoot to continue his solemn ritual not because he was awarded the Medal of Honor but because he is carrying on a tradition that is not only important to him but should carry more importance for all of us.
-----------------------------------------------
Fortunately, the HOA had enough wisdom to lay down their arms.

Photo of the month

(Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

A West Point cadet reads "Kill Bin Laden" while awaiting the President's speech on Afghanistan.

SEALs in P.C. peril

Today, December 7th, the anniversary of the most terrific attack on U.S. soil, I saw supporters of Navy SEALs protesting and honked a few times to cheers. A patchwork of veterans' veterans braved the cold, onlookers watched, a trucker blared on his horn. The protestors are standing up in defense of the elite warriors in a grave bureaucratic morass for supposedly punching a terrorist in the gut during a takedown, in a now notorious story.

Hopefully the story crescendos until the President himself puts in end to this madness. Standing there, I'm sure the crowd remembered the significance of the date, yet find no rest.

On December 7th, we remember veterans

The Medal of Honor rates a salute no matter what rank you are, even Commander-in-Chief. The medal is given to those who commit the most extraordinary valor in service to their nation. The casual reader should give pause while considering this idea.

Given the right treatment, this could probably be a the culmination of a grand short story. I once touched the Medal of Honor while setting up for an air show. It was "electric" for an almost complete lack of adjectives that would adequately describe it. The real thing - a moment unto itself. I felt like I was not seeing through my own eyes but watching myself through another's. Jaw dropped, cadet hands trembled.

Pacing and waiting for my guest at the hotel lobby, a WWII veteran tapped me on the shoulder and asked, "Have you ever seen one of these?"

"Obama's radical rogues gallery" by Phyllis Schlafly

November 20, 2009
by Phyllis Schlafly
Another kooky Barack Obama appointee became publicly known this month and quickly was thrown or voluntarily threw herself under the bus. Anita Dunn, the White House communications director (who led Obama's war on Fox News), said that Mao Tse-tung was one of her two favorite "political philosophers" whom "I turn to most" for answers to important questions. History identifies Mao as a ruthless savage, not as a philosopher. He probably holds the record for ordering the mass murder of more people (50 to 100 million) than anyone else in history. Dunn tried to claim that her statement was a joke, but anyone can look at her actual statement on YouTube and see that she spoke in deadly earnest. Dunn was part of Obama's inner circle and a senior media adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign. Dunn's husband,

Bob Bauer, an expert on campaign financing, fundraising, and voter mobilization, is Obama's personal lawyer. He has just been appointed White House Counsel where he will be in charge of vetting Obama's appointees. Obama's Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones, had to exit in disgrace after he admitted that "I was a Communist."

We can thank Glenn Beck for exposing him. Obama's Regulatory Czar,  Cass Sunstein, wrote a book in 2008 in which he declared that the government "owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions, and it can remove their organs without asking anyone's permission." So, after the death consultants authorized in Nancy Pelosi's health care bill convince you to reject life-saving procedures, the organ-transplant team can remove your body's organs immediately. Czar Sunstein also argues that animals are entitled to have lawyers to sue humans in court. Bow, wow; more business for trial lawyers. His wife, Samantha Power, is now on Obama's National Security Council. She is famous for writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about genocide, which she defined so narrowly that it excluded Stalin and Mao.

Obama's nominee for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Chai R. Feldblum, signed a 2006 manifesto endorsing polygamous households. This lengthy document, called "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage," argues that traditional marriage should not be "privileged above all others." Obama's education appointments, who came out of the Chicago political machine right along with Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, will have nearly $100 billion in new money to indoctrinate America's youth.

Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is notorious for trying to start a gay high school in Chicago. Obama's Safe Schools Czar, Kevin Jennings, founded the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a homosexual activist group that now has thousands of chapters at high schools across the nation. GLSEN chapters and materials have promoted sex between young teens and adults and sponsored "field trips" to gay pride parades. Jennings was the keynote speaker at a notorious GLSEN conference at Tufts University in 2000 at which HIV/AIDS coordinators discussed in detail, before an audience including area high school students, how to perform various homosexual acts.

Obama's Science Czar wrote in a college textbook that compulsory "green abortions" are an acceptable way to control population growth. We assume that what makes an abortion green is when the motive for the killing is population control to serve environmentalist dogma. Affirmative action is in vogue in Obama's administration: his Diversity Czar has spoken publicly of getting white media executives to "step down" in favor of minorities.

Obama's first appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court is a woman who said repeatedly that a "Latina woman" would make better judicial decisions than "a white male." (Sonia Sotomayor)

Obama's top lawyer at the State Department, Harold Hongju Koh, calls himself a transnationalist. That means wanting U.S. courts to "domesticate" foreign and international law, i.e., integrate it into U.S. domestic law binding on U.S. citizens. Koh is eager to put us under a global legal system that would diminish our "distinctive rights culture" such as due process, trial by jury, and our First Amendment "protections for speech and religion" that give "far greater emphasis and judicial protection in America than in Europe or Asia." Under global governance, the United States will be forbidden to allow more freedom and constitutional rights than other countries.

When Obama's appointee for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, David Hamilton, was a District Court judge, he prohibited the Indiana State Legislature from giving an invocation that mentioned Jesus, while mention of Allah was allowed. Hamilton worked for ACORN and the ACLU, and even the liberal American Bar Association rated him "not qualified."

And we thought the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was an embarrassment to Barack Obama when he was running for President! We never dreamed Obama would actually appoint such a collection of weirdos.

Article: "If I told you a year from now..."

Gut-wrenching, sordid, and scandalous - read and weep. The first one that I noticed didn't make it to the list was the White House communications director saying she admired Mao Tse-Tung, murderer of millions and father of communism in China.  I added brackets naming the "personalities" involved.

by Glenn Beck

If I told you a year ago, which I did, you won't recognize the country, you will not recognize America a year from now, I said that a year ago;

if I told you instead that there would be a 9/11 Truther, a guy who said the United States government blew up those buildings, a self‑avowed communist, a guy who, a guy who is speaking in prison anticop, who defended a guy who point blank shot a cop in the head, if I said he would be a high level advisor to the president of the United States, would you believe it?

[Van Jones]

If I said the president would come out in a speech and say I have absolutely no information but the cops acted stupidly because they caught a friend of the president appearing to break into his own home, the cops didn't act stupidly, they just did their job and the president would never apologize, instead he would invite them all for a beer summit and use it as a learning experience about diversity, would you believe it?

[BHO, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley]

If I would have told you instead of saying you won't recognize this country a year from now, if I instead told you I'm going to be on the cover of Time magazine, would you have believed it?

That I'm going to be one of the ten most fascinating people in 2009, you've got to ask yourself what the hell happened to this country. If I would have told you instead that the most frequent visitor of the White House, over the Secretary of State and everybody else, is a labor union president who has repeatedly said workers of the world unite; and we know we've got a lot of illegal members, illegal aliens in our membership, and who chief guy said, yeah, but we also represent American workers, end quote, that he would be the most frequent visitor at the White House, would you have believed it? 

[Service Employees International Union President Andrew Stern]

That the president of the EU would say that 2009 was the year of establishing a global government through the EU and that the climate change treaty would be the next step in one world government, that there would be a call for the end of the dollar as the world's reserve currency by several massive countries and that the leader of Russia would hold up a coin in front of the cameras and say here's a prototype of the new global currency, that in government‑structured bailouts, bondholders would lose their legal status and their investments in favor of labor union payoffs and the courts would say, "Hmmm, yeah, okay."

[Herman Von Rompuy]

That you could lose your home and property through eminent domain and eminent domain would expand in staggering ways. That California would decide to levy a 10% tax on its people and insist it's not a tax; it's just a forced loan. That they would issue IOUs instead of tax refunds.

That New York would say by the end of the year they would be broke. That New York would issue retroactive taxes, that a tax fund for the poorest of Americans would not really be a tax refund. Instead those poorest of Americans would find out many months later that they had to pay income tax on that tax refund.

If I told you that the symbol of capitalism, the Empire State building, would be lit in colors of communist China, would you have believed me?

That the hockey stick chart would be discredited as would its founder along with another leader of the global climate change movement who manipulated data, that they deleted e‑mails and information to avoid Freedom of Information Act, that these same scientists would do everything they could to discredit the peer review process to make sure it remained pure for their ideological purposes, and yet the media wouldn't report on it and we'd still be headed to Copenhagen with a president the who was going to present a 17% reduction in carbon.

For our country, that our science czar, John Holdren, our science czar would be someone who called for forced abortions and sterilization through the drinking water, who said that the redistribution of wealth would be necessary and it would happen through the environmental movement.

That the diversity czar at the FCC, if I just told you a year ago there would be a diversity czar at the FCC, would you have believed me? That the diversity czar at the FCC would say Americans have to decide soon which Americans would have to step down from their positions in order to give others a chance, that this same man said the revolution in Venezuela was incredible and that we should model our FCC and our programs after Venezuela and the revolution.

[Mark Lloyd]

That the U.S. would have a two‑day summit to discuss the role of government in journalism and be discussing a government takeover of journalism and that no journalist would actually report on that.

That they would hold a job summit and not invite the Chamber of Commerce, that two uninvited people could get into the White House state dinner, chat with the president, be near the prime minister of the largest democracy on the planet and that the response from the White House would be, yeah, we need to do a better job with security.

That a U.S. congressman would tell the American people that it's unreasonable to expect people in congress to read bills, and he would say that because our congress would pass two bills over 1,000 pages, that no one in congress had read. One of them was over 2,000 pages.

[Rep. John Conyers]
That a job creating stimulus bill would be written, not read by congress but not even written by Congress. It would be co‑written by the Apollo Alliance, a special interest group whose New York chief was a co‑founder of the Weather Underground and no one would care! That people in Congress would openly be praising Castro, Chavez, that the president would receive an ‑‑ if I said to you a year ago, "You know what's going to happen next year: The president is going to receive an anti‑American book and a photo op from Hugo Chavez and then he would have a one‑hour private meeting with Vladimir Putin where Vladimir Putin, quoting, would teach the president the history of the Cold War.

That our president would give an iPod of his speeches to the queen of England. That he would send the bust of Winston Churchill, which was a gift from the people of England; when the prime minister came over that our president would say to him, hey, by the way attention thanks, but you can take this back to him now and the prime minister would say to him, no, no, no, that was a gift from the people of England to you and you can keep it in one of your museums; we gave it to you on September 11th. No, no, that's okay, and box it up and ship it back!

If I told you that there would be hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in a true grassroots event in a National Mall in D.C. and the media would not only dismiss them but the government, the president and the media would deem them a danger to the United States, that healthcare would be at 36% approval rating, which is lower than Hillary Care but that those in congress and the White House would still be jamming it down your throats.

That the chief of the treasury who oversees the IRS cheated on his taxes as would almost everyone else in the cabinet.

[Timothy Geithner]

If I told you a year ago when gold was about $800 an ounce that it would be at $1200 an ounce, would you have believed it? That Dubai which a year ago was bailing out our banks would be on the edge of bankruptcy.

If I told you we're going to lose 4 million jobs and the media would report that the White House has created or saved a million jobs even though in their evidence you have to find their evidence on a $20 million redesigned website where it would show that a good portion of these jobs were in about 400 districts that don't even exist.

If I told you that, would you have believed it? Looking at that list, do you recognize the country that you live in? Is this the same country that you lived in a year ago today? I don't think so. I don't recognize it.

If I would have told you that there would be a Muslim terrorist and that he would shoot and killed soldiers at Fort Hood, would you have believed it?

If I told you then that, yes, the president will make a statement but he will spend two minutes prior to giving a shoutout and talking about the conference he had with the American Indian, would you have believed it?

If I then told you after that two minutes he would then say then, oh, and also there's been a shooting of our military but let's not jump to conclusions. And then his Homeland Security director would be over in the Middle East and she would say, don't worry, we're working on things to stop the violence against Muslims in America, would you have believed it?

I can be wrong on an awful lot of things and I have been wrong on an awful lot of things. But when will people in this country, when will the media at least say, gosh, it looks like the direction of our country and the one this guy keeps laying out, gee, some of those things seem to be happening. When will anyone in the media even notice how far we have come?