Thanks to Trish not to mention about half of Blogistan for sending this one around.

Well, u– um, can we come up and have a look?

What Monty Python Character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

So I turn out to be Arthur, King of the Britons! That pleases me very much indeed. I miss Graham Chapman. *snif*

Call the next deaf end !

Posted: May 29th, 2004 under General.
Comments: none

I shamelessly gacked this from OotFP, whom I love dearly. This quiz is much better than your average estimator of geekery. My results–very accurate–are:

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Posted: May 28th, 2004 under General.
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…in the immortal words of Firesign Theatre…

Yep, we’re all doing a fair bit o’ soul-searching these days. Conservative? Liberal? Red? Blue? Lady? Tiger? Mayo? Miracle Whip? What does it mean to be an American in the year 2004? What kind of American are YOU?

Take THIS TEST and see where you fit in on the political spectrum. Thanks to Moi at bloggg for posting this perennial fave.

Then after you’ve plotted your position on the big ideology grid, have a go at pigeonholing yourself as one of FOUR CATEGORIES OF AMERICANS, as described by John at Iberian Notes.
I think there’s a category missing; what about the WELLSTONIANS?

And now back to Firesign Theatre, already in progress:

“Come on, take this guitar, put on this wide belt and workshirt and tell it like it was!”

“Here’s a song I learned back upstream in prison: ”

[everybody sing!]

This land is made of mountains
This land is made of mud
This land has lots of everything
For me and Elmer Fudd

This land has lots of trousers
This land has lots of mausers
And pussycats to eat them
When the sun… goes… down!

Coming next week! Another useful little quiz: Stooge You Like Best Key To Your Personality!

[apologies to SCTV -- btw, a box set comes out on DVD next month!]

Posted: May 27th, 2004 under General.
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Uh oh. My idle daydreams about what could happen next in this country turn out to be not so idle daydreams after all, according to tgirsch at Lean Left.

Let’s say they do get 50,000 people to pack up and move to those 3 states. That’s going to be just a blip in the demographics charts, but if it turns out to be just the first wave of a mass exodus of Christian fundamentalists to those and possibly other selected states, you do know what it means, right?

Welcome to the Balkanized Semi-Autonomous Fiefs of North America.

Posted: May 26th, 2004 under General.
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The Mighty Reason Man channels several righty blogs in order to “inoculate ourselves against dumbfuckery”. The Lileks bit is the funniest, imho:

I love my daughter.

I love my daughter, who is adorable.

I love Gnat, my daughter, because she is the sweetest, most lovable creature in the world.

It is impossible for me to properly describe how much I love my daughter.

The most wonderful thing in the world is my daughter, whom I love.

I have a funny story about the cherubic innocence of my daughter. The one that I love.

Hey, fuck you hippie. You and your America-hating compatriots are the reason this country is in mortal danger from insane Islamists who want to kill us all. You traitorous scum. You don’t even realize how damn good you have it, because you’ve spent all your time in college getting hammered and having group sex. You want group sex? How about the gangraping that Saddam would be doing right now if we hadn’t taken him out. But no, you’d rather have him in power, killing anyone he looks at and raping people. Fuck you. Fuck you. Universal peace? Fuck you. He was a psychotic madman who wanted to kill every single American. Swine like you don’t deserve to live here, enjoying the same freedoms I enjoy, breathing the air I breathe. You don’t deserve freedom. You deserve to be dropped naked in the Iraqi desert, forced to serve as a human shield for our courageous troops. A human shield, so bullets and shrapnel can rip through your flesh and tear apart your organs until your torso fills with bile and black blood until you drown, saving the life of a soldier. It would be the only patriotic thing you ever did in your life. But you know what? I’m not even angry at you. Instead, I feel sorry for you. Because thanks to your efforts to support those who hate freedom, someday a chemical weapon is going to be used in your hometown, and you’re going to catch a big whiff of sarin, or VX, or mustard gas. On that day, your flesh will bubble up and your skin will be covered in sores that will itch and burn and bleed, and your throat will close, and you will gasp for breath and only inhale feces, because your legs will have stopped working and deposited you on the ground face first in a puddle of your own voided bowels and then when your friends the Islamofascists who have been wearing gasmasks just so they could watch up close come over to laugh at your twitching form, they will rip out your eyeballs and skullfuck you and as their acidic demon seed eats its way through what is left of your cerebellum your last concious thought will be shame and regretatbeingagoddamndemocratvoting- peacelovingmotherfuckinghippieprickandyouwillbeg-
forgivenessfromagodwhonolongercaresbecauseyou-
opposedgeorgebushandwantedhimtolosethewar-
onterrorandyouwillburninhellforeverandever-
andeverfuckyoufuckyoufuckyoudiefuckyoufuck.

Today, Gnat learned that peanutbutter is not an effective substitute for videocassettes, at least not as far as VCRs are concerned. I really love her.

Wtf happened to Mr. Wee n Twee? Two things: 1)Fatherhood; and 2)9-11.
It’s a damn shame; I miss the old, funny, rational Lileks.

Posted: May 25th, 2004 under General.
Comments: none

One of my all-time favorite movies, DESK SET, finally came out on DVD on May 4th. For me this is a joyous occasion that warrants reprinting a little piece I wrote last winter:

Among the holiday films that show up this time of year, the one I’m really waiting to see again, for the umpteenth time, is DESK SET. It’s not available on DVD, and I refuse to buy even one more VHS tape, so I depend on one or more of the cable channels showing it at least once a year. Made in 1957. Stars Tracy and Hepburn. Set in the corporate offices of a fictional TV network called the Federal Broadcasting Corporation, or FBC. On the small chance you couldn’t figure it out for yourself, it’s NBC and NBC headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Center (“30 Rock” to quote Benjy Stone in MY FAVORITE YEAR, another film about a TV network in the ‘50s). The screenplay was written by Henry and Phoebe Ephron, 40 years before their daughters Nora and Delia would whip up another little cyber rom-com, YOU’VE GOT MAIL.

Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, head of the network’s Reference Department. Kate and co-workers Joan Blondell, Dina Merrill and Sue Randall [aka the Beav's teacher Miss Landers], toil merrily –or, in Dina’s case Merrilly–all day long, forming a gal-powered search engine which serves the network as a kind of ur-Google. “The girls” spend their daily 9 to 5 tracking down answers to questions such as:

What kind of car does the king of the Watusis drive?
And:
How much damage is caused annually to American forests by the sprucebud worm?

In short: these women have my dream job, and it’s *still* my dream job just as much now as it was way back when I first saw this movie, probably 30 years ago or more.

Kate and her staff, when not busy researching myriad fascinating topics, are forever going downstairs to the corporate lunch counter for a coffee break, or spending the noon hour drooling over fabulous outfits at Bonwit Teller, or dishing via the company grapevine, a secretarial backchannel that keeps everyone instantly updated on who’s been promoted and who’s getting the dreaded pink slip.

Kate/Bunny is a valued corporate commodity, compensated well enough to wear Adrian and St. Laurent duds and live in a swanky midtown apartment with a fireplace and vaulted ceilings. There she spends her off hours preparing the kind of desserts nobody makes in 2004, like “Floating Island”, whatever that is, and waiting for phone calls from her up-and-coming VP boyfriend who has a problem with commitment, as that kind of executive boyfriend always does. His looks are of the flippant, smarmy, Gig Young variety; possibly because he’s played by Gig Young. Kate fusses and sighs over him and pays him all the expected attentions, Gig being a real Catch and all, but it’s clear that she’s just going through the motions; doing her best 1950s career gal swoon while wondering if she will ever meet her intellectual equal… her soulmate… the man of her dreams.

Right on cue, Spencer Tracy comes shambling into the Reference department and wordlessly begins measuring the floor space, making cryptic entries on a little notepad, reading over the women’s shoulders, and generally being a giant pain in the patoot. Eventually he introduces himself as Richard Sumner, an efficiency expert hired by the head of the network. Tracy/Sumner is an absent-minded scientist type who wears mismatched socks and has no perceptible social skills. He’s a great admirer of Beauty With Brains, plus he’s cute as a Gund teddy bear himself, so it’s perfectly obvious what will happen next. Kate eyes him and simultaneously is drawn to a fellow egghead, is appalled by his proto-geekiness, and suspects that he’s the harbinger of corporate downsizing for her beloved troop of research gals. But even so, how can she resist? He IS played by Spencer Tracy, after all. Sh-boom! It’s love!

Being such a couple of whizkids, it’s no time at all before Kate deduces that Tracy is actually the developer of one of those newfangled “electronic brains”, and Tracy learns that Hepburn can solve logic problems and deconstruct palindromes while sitting outside in sub-zero temperatures eating a roast beef sandwich.
Falling hard, Tracy compares Kate to a rare tropical fish, an analogy that sends shivers through the besotted Hepburn even more than the Arctic blast raking across the rooftop the eccentric Tracy has chosen as the site for a late-November lunch date.

Kate guesses that Tracy is planning to install his invention, a livingroom-sized computer named EMERAC, in the reference department. She also surmises that EMERAC is meant to replace her and Joan and Dina and Sue. Oh! What will happen? What will happen??! (as the soon to be spoiled by success Rock Hunter was wont to say in that very same year of 1957).

And that’s the set up. The rest of the movie is all false assumptions, mistaken identities, witty ripostes, banter and silliness. Kate and Joan get plastered at the company Christmas party and keep calling the Lexington Avenue bus “the Mexican Avenue bus”, and for some reason they find this hilarious. Tracy gets soaked in a rainstorm and has to take refuge in Hepburn’s apartment, where he must doff his wet clothes and innocently don the gift bathrobe meant for Gig, who of course puts in a surprise appearance just in time to Assume the Worst. (Kate, you slut!) Then Tracy puts the finishing touch on his conquest of Hepburn’s heart by doing a comedic impression of a disheveled drunk guy, which reduces her to a snorking, guffawing puddle of mirth.

EMERAC arrives along with Miss Warriner, an operator-technician who is obviously a tight-sphinctered prig, which we of course know instantly because she wears a drab business suit, glasses, and her hair all neurotically clenched up in a bun. Hilariously, Miss W is also such a cultural illiterate that in the climactic scene she incorrectly inputs the name of the island Corfu as “Curfew”, which makes EMERAC go all haywire and inspires Kate to emote a few melodramatic verses of the Rose Hartwick Thorpe chestnut “Curfew Must Not Ring To-night!”.

It should be noted that EMERAC, one of the very few computers that can be fixed with a single bobbypin, is portrayed in this film by a 8′ by 12′ rectangle of synchronized flashing lights which went on to co-star in the movie and TV series “Voyage To the Bottom of the Sea” and a couple episodes of “Star Trek” a few years later.

Ultimately everything works out happily. Tracy and Hepburn end up in a clinch, and the credits roll…on perforated-paper computer printouts, of course.

I just love it. Always have. Everyone else seems to rank this movie way down with the lesser entries in the Tracy-Hepburn ouevre, like SEA OF GRASS and KEEPER OF THE FLAME. But for me, DESK SET sits squarely up on top of the heap. Even the classic ADAM’S RIB can’t exceed it in providing sheer, perfect enjoyment.

And finally, how could anyone resist a movie where Katharine Hepburn plays a character named Bunny? I rest my case.

Posted: May 21st, 2004 under General.
Comments: none

Gosh! These days you can go to Hibbing and start knock- knock- knocking on Bobby’s (former) door.

If anybody asked me, I would have called this festival “Scary Pruney Humunculus In Victoria’s Secret Commercials Days”.

..Not too much alliteration there, so probably not too good a deal for Hibbing, then. So, “Dylan Days” it is. Ehh.

Posted: May 21st, 2004 under General.
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This does it. My vote is definitely going to the Pinko Feminist Hellcat ticket. Finally! A platform that I can believe in!!!

Posted: May 21st, 2004 under General.
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Tony Randall died yesterday. He was 84. He had become a father for the first time at the age of …77? or 78? Somewhere around there. And not just one child, but another a year or two later. From all accounts, his wife Heather and his two children were the joy of his life.

This is one of those celebrity deaths that has an actual emotional impact on me. I just loved seeing him show up all the time on Letterman over the years. I hear Dave spoke a very moving tribute on his show last night, with a montage of clips of all the appearances Tony made on the show. Wish I’d seen that.

Randall was one celebrity that didn’t get crotchety and irrelevant or deteriorate into a desperate, whining caricature of his younger self as old age set in. He actually blossomed into an even wittier and more astute personality. What a blast of hope that gives the rest of us!!

I especially liked this item in the Yahoo News obit:

In September, during a speech to the National Funeral Directors Association, Randall joked about how he envisioned his own ceremony: President Bush and Vice President Cheney would show up to pay their respects, but they’d be turned away because his family knows he didn’t like them.

He said funerals should be planned as a celebration of life — and “a touch of humor doesn’t hurt a bit.”

I’ll miss you Dr. Lao… Rock Hunter… Felix Unger… and even all those smarmy guys you played in Rock Hudson/Doris Day movies…
RIP.

Posted: May 19th, 2004 under General.
Comments: none

Thank you, Trish Wilson.

Best laugh I’ve had in a week.

REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE CONVENTION SCHEDULE
New York, NY
August, 2004

6:00 PM Opening Prayer led by the Reverend Jerry Fallwell

6:30 PM Pledge of Allegiance

6:35 PM Burning of Bill of Rights (excluding 2nd amendment)

6:45 PM Salute to the Coalition of the Willing

6:46 PM Seminar #1 Getting your kid a military deferment

7:30 PM First Presidential Beer Bong

7:35 PM Serve Freedom Fries

7:40 PM EPA Address #1: Mercury, it’s what’s for dinner.

8:00 PM Vote on which country to invade next

8:10 PM Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh

8:15 PM John Ashcroft Lecture: The Homos are after your children

8:30 PM Round table discussion on reproductive rights (MEN only)

8:50 PM Seminar #2 Corporations: The government of the future

9:00 PM Condi Rice sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”

9:05 PM Second Presidential Beer Bong

9:10 PM EPA Address #2 Trees: The real cause of forest fires

9:30 PM Break for secret meetings

10:00 PM Second prayer led by Cal Thomas

10:15 PM Lecture by Carl Rove: Doublespeak made easy

10:30 PM Rumsfeld demonstration of how to squint and talk macho

10:35 PM Bush demonstration of trademark “deer in headlights” stare.

10:40 PM John Ashcroft demonstrates new mandatory kevlar chastity belt

10:45 PM Clarence Thomas reads list of black republicans

10:46 PM Third Presidential Beer Bong

10:50 PM Seminar #3 Education: a drain on our nation’s economy.

11:10 PM fun and exercise break with the Hillary Clinton Piñata

11:20 PM Second Lecture by John Ashcroft: Evolutionists: The dangerous new cult

11:30 PM Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh again

11:35 PM Blame Clinton

11:40 PM Laura serves milk and cookies

11:50 PM Closing Prayer led by Jesus Himself

12: 00PM Nomination

Posted: May 18th, 2004 under General.
Comments: none