Friday blog fight

Steven Crowder's lastest video mentioned Charles Bronson and that got me thinking about grizzled movie badasses.

So, my question is: Keeping Chato's Land out of it, who wins in a fight, Charles Bronson or Jack Palance?

> Bronson wins handily in a Google Fight.
> But Palance was in Batman.
> But Palance was also in City Slickers.

The leak that would not end

We've been dealing with plumbing issues for some time. I've had to shut off water to one of our bathrooms because of a leak that we've only just recently narrowed down to the toilet in that room. Last night I replaced the wax ring on that particular throne thinking it was the end, but, alas, no. Either I did a poor job of it (which is ENTIRELY plausible) or it wasn't the issue. After a few hours (after I'd gone to bed), J-Mom checked on it and noticed the leak again. This morning after getting up, I checked on the bathroom and there was water on the floor also. I'm thinking I either goofed up installing the ring or something else is wrong.

Plumbing issues suck.

Bring on the rapture; this project will be the pinnacle of human achievement

Alan Moore is teaming up with Mike Patton.

From the article:

Alan Moore is to work with Faith No More's Mike Patton on a forthccoming recording project, a London record label has announced. The Watchmen writer plans to release a semi-autobiographical audiobook, with "key" soundtrack elements by Patton, rapper Doseone and others.

The first volume of the audiobook, provisionally titled Unearthling, will be published by London-based Lex Records in early 2010.

AI

The contestants keep getting better, but the show keeps getting more dull. Discuss.

Chuck renewed!

This is good news for good TV.

The bad news is that the season has been cut to 13 episodes (with an option for 9 more) and they've had to scale back on the number of appearances by some of the supporting cast. However, it seems to me that the season finale kind of made it easy for the show to do that. What with Chuck's new "super intersect" and with Morgan and Anna moving to Hawaii, I can see fewer Buy More characters popping up. I doubt we'll see any more Scott Bakula either. Well, change is good. I'm sure the creative team will come up with some more great shows.

iGoogle is killing me folks.

Killing me!

Did you know they have Connect 4? And Frogger!

How am I supposed to get anything done?

On the hardships of equality

Dr. Melissa Clouthier has a fantastic post up about how modern feminism tears down femininity and beauty.

The BLUF:

To be taken seriously, a liberal woman must be ugly or make herself ugly. To be accepted by God and/or the culture, a gay man should have been born a woman. These untenable positions make the trapped person very angry. So feminist women hate their ovaries and breasts and so do gay men.

The solution, then, is to shame and silence those who have what the jealous person cannot have. Feminists will participate in the destruction of Sarah Palin right along side Andrew Sullivan. Feminists will discuss a beauty pageant winner’s artificial breasts right along side Perez Hilton. They are consumed with jealous, impotent rage. It makes them hideously ugly.

This is a sad, but often true statement. Of course it is a generalization, but how many of us don't know people like this? People so consumed with bucking their idea of what society is telling them that they feel the need to lash out with hatred and vitriol? It ain't the exception any more, I fear.

Having two daughters has really changed my perceptions on some of these topics. I have certainly developed a clearer stance on the differences between celebrating beauty and objectification and what it means to promote equality between genders. It certainly doesn't involve tearing down masculinity to promote femininity. True equality involves embracing the differences, celebrating those differences but accepting that those differences don't pose limitations on what a person can do with their life.

Now, that's an easy thing to say: those differences don't pose limitations on what a person can do with their life. It's a much harder thing to actualize. I have a cousin who did a hitch in the Navy. She didn't do some desk jockey yeoman job, she was a gunner's mate. This was only a few years ago and she was still subjected to the "boy's club" mentality prevalent in many of these predominantly male jobs. Add the testosterone-fueled military-at-sea environment and you can guess the kinds of problems she had. And she decided to get out. I'm not sure if it was what was supposed to be or not, but she's happier now (at least she was last time I spoke with her).

I would add to that my own experience as a military journalist. I didn't see hardly any field time in comparison to the combat arms guys. I mostly worked 9-to-5 style jobs and had a pretty lax environment. So, any time I went out with more traditional Army types, I caught a lot of hell. The fact that I couldn't hang with them eventually led to me getting out of the Army. As it should have. The simple fact is that if you can't be a soldier, you shouldn't.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that just because someone tries something and fails, or quits, or decides that they would be better off doing something else, doesn't mean that there's not the opportunity for equality out there. I think it's far too easy for people to look at circumstances where someone fails and blame the environment.

Hardship is not unique to anyone. The degree may be more or less extreme, but just because someone hasn't experienced a particular brand of difficulty doesn't mean they haven't done their own time in their own private purgatory. And, like Dr. Clouthier implies, it's easy for one to get caught up in their own idea of personal persecution that they feel the need to lash out at anyone not like them. There are, of course, people who have earned hate and mistrust, but not everyone who isn't you.

I am not familiar with this particular Army form

Blackfive posted this, teh funniest form EVAR, a couple of weeks ago. A coworker has it hanging outside his cubicle. I swear, when I was active duty, I would have been tempted to actually use this thing a time or two.

So, suddenly Social Security is news

This pisses me off. I was listening to NPR during the ride home yesterday and almost had to pull over I was livid. So, Social Security running out of money is just now news? Republicans haven't spent the last, oh, 20 years or so telling everyone that this was going to happen?

Will Franklin at WILLisms.com has been talking about Social Security reform for a long time. Take the time to look through his archives and see that this current "crisis" isn't news to anyone who's been paying attention.

There once was a man from Nantucket

Happy Limerick Day!

This one I find funny, though no harm meant to any of my professorial friends:

There once was an old man from Esser,
Whose knowledge grew lesser and lesser.
It at last grew so small,
He knew nothing at all,
And now he's a college professor.

Wikihow's article on limericks.

Home again. So glad to be home again.

Not that anyone knew I was gone, but the family and I headed down to Biloxi to stay with my father-in-law for the Mother's Day weekend. It was a great trip! (Although a six-hour drive at 35 is much longer than it was at 25.)

J-Mom and I saw Star Trek Friday night (it was fantastic!); did a little shopping, ate a nice buffet lunch and spent the afternoon with some old friends on Saturday; and went to the beach to let the kids splash in the nasty water and unsuccessfully try to fly a kite on Sunday. My step mother-in-law also bought J-Mom a spa package so J-Mom spent the afternoon getting pampered. All in all, a very good weekend.

Video Friday: Bloodhound Gang

The only reason I post this song is because I really love the line I'm not black like Barry White, no I'm white like Frank Black is. Don't think I need to say it, but LANGUAGE ALERT.



It was either this or A Lapdance Is Better.

What's up, bra? (The post wherein I further demonstrate my hypocrisy)

This morning I pull into work as normal, at my normal time, in a normal mood. But what should confront me? 1985 apparently. I mean, I'm not usually one to pick on others for what they do to their cars. Fuzzy dice from the rearview? I get the irony or sense of nostalgia. Truck nuts? Why the hell not?

But the car bra, for some reason, has always bothered me. It bothers me even worse now, 20 years since I last saw a mullet-driven Datsun 200Z sputtering down the road.

I guess I should get over it, I mean, the bra, more than truck nuts certainly, serves some kind of useful purpose. It, at the very least, shows us who did not get over their 80s-era car fetishes.

RIP Dom DeLuise

Dom DeLuise passed away yesterday. He was 75.

Dinner party

So, I just did that Facebook thing - "5 dead people you'd like to have a dinner party with" or whatever the thing is called, and I got to tell you, I find the idea fascinating. Not in the, who I'd have for dinner, but more in the, "What would these people do in our time?" way of thinking. What would happen to the people you picked, plucked out of time and put here today? How would they adjust?

I picked some doosies: Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Paine and James Monroe. Can you imagine that dinner party? But I wonder how these folks would fair in today's clime.

First, I think Franklin would probably adapt easiest. In fact, he'd probably get a kick out of blogging. I can image that Fried Kite Ideas would be more popular than Instapundit or HuffPo. His only drawback is that his wit may be to sly for his own good.

While Hamilton and Monroe's copious writings helped establish our federal government, I fear that they'd face an audience today that doesn't care to read such detailed analyses. While they'd put out tons of high-quality work on their websites, their hits would be meager in comparison to the Franklin juggernaut. So, they'd eventually find their way onto TV and probably wind up on a Hannity and Colmes-style opinion-based talk show. And it'd rock.

I see Paine having problems adjusting to modern life. He'd probably be both frustrated and elated to see so many of his philosophies taken so far into the future. I'm not sure if he'd try to write further analysis based on observations he'd make now or drink himself into a coma over how we've perverted the original concepts.

Adams would fare best politically, I think. Can you imagine the kind of political action committee or lobbyist group he could put together? Of course, it would be best if he had Abby by his side.

So, who would you have for dinner and how'd they adjust?

Wolverine, Sabretooth, Blob, Gambit, Deadpool, Agent Zero: Origins

The BLUF: A great popcorn movie. Nothing earth-shattering is happening here, but it's just fun. As long as the fanboys can get over the differences between comic and movie and the continuity issues between X-Men movies and this one, get over the beginning of the movie being set in the Canadian Northern Territories in 1845 (at least 30 years before that could have happened), get over the use of M4 carbines in a Vietnam War-era sequence, get over the use of HMMWVs in the lase-70s/early-80s (before the fielding of such vehicles), and you've got a fun movie. It's a high-octane, full-frontal assault of action and snikting.

My only complaint, cause really, it was easy to get over all the things I mentioned above, is what they did to Deadpool. Such a good character wasted that way. Hurm. Anyway, if you like these kinds of movies, you'll like Wolverine: Origins. It's not the best comic-book-based movie, but it's far from being the worst.