It’s the end of a Bleat era. Lileks reviews the concluding episode.
[Update a couple minutes later]
In which he has a brief conversation with a building that’s going to be demolished.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Woody Allen Versus The Coens
Lileks describes:
Woody Allen has put more wood in the mouth of his characters than the guy who invented the disposable tongue depressor. Perhaps it’s this: Allen is a nihilist whose characters search for meaning; the Coen Brothers are romantics whose characters confront reality. The former example is grounded in the futility of it all; the latter is a caution against finding too much meaning in the swells and peaks and troughs of life. Not to say you shouldn’t look: that’s what art is for, as “Finding” clearly suggests. Something makes him sing like that. But in the end it’s not art that redeems him. The idea seems ridiculous, a sophomoric conceit.
RTWT.
Michael Totten’s New Book
It’s a zombie novel
How Americans Party
Foreigners explain.
Elysium
A brief review of the stupid movie by Lileks:
I made two attempts this weekend to watch “Elysium,” but was hampered by the fact that it was stupid.
There’s actually a little more, but that’s the bottom line.
Respect
Your husband doesn’t have to earn it, ladies.
Sadly, this will come as a shock to a lot of modern American women.
The Thigh Gap
…is a big loser at the Olympics. I’m not a big Olympic fan, but I do enjoy seeing healthy women who look like women.
Too bad it continues to win other places. I really don’t understand why women allow gay men to dictate what they look like, in either attire or body type. Surely they don’t imagine that straight men find the camp-survivor look very attractive.
A Modeling First
According to a Zero-G press release, Kate Upton did a weightless photo shoot in a Zero-G flight for the fiftieth Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.
[Update a few minutes later]
From the release:
The shoot took place on March 18, 2013; Upton and ZERO-G flew out of Space Coast Regional Airport in Titusville, Florida. A specially modified Boeing-727, known as G-FORCE ONE®, performed a series of 17 parabolas – 13 zero gravity and four replicating lunar gravity – as Upton bounced and soared through the plane for the cameras. Upton’s weightless experience was not simulated; ZERO-G is the first and only FAA-approved provider of commercial weightless airline flights for the public.
“The ZERO-G experience was really exhilarating for everyone involved,” said MJ Day, editor of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. “We have been almost everywhere in the past 50 years with SI Swimsuit, but we have never done anything like this. It was certainly the most out-of-the-box shoot. Once again, Kate surprised us all with how she handled modeling in weightlessness.”
Hard to really capture it in stills. I assume they shot video as well. I wonder if we’ll see it.
[Late morning update]
OK, due to unpopular demand, I’m moving the pics under the fold to make it Safe for Married Men @Home.
The Big Bang Theory
The unaired pilot.
You can see why it was unaired.
One thing I’ve never understood. Why would an financially struggling waitress and aspiring actress live in a high-rent area that’s a longer commute like Pasadena? It would make a lot more sense for her to be in Burbank, or at least Glendale.
From Russia, With Euphemisms
@JonahNRO on the historical ignorance of the Olympics coverage:
In America, we constantly, almost obsessively, wrestle with the “legacy of slavery.” That speaks well of us. But what does it say that so few care that the Soviet Union was built — literally — on the legacy of slavery? The founding fathers of the Russian Revolution — Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky — started “small,” merely throwing hundreds of thousands of people into kontslagerya (concentration camps).
By the time Western intellectuals and youthful folksingers like Pete Seeger were lavishing praise on the Soviet Union as the greatest experiment in the world, Joseph Stalin was corralling millions of his own people into slavery. Not metaphorical slavery, but real slavery complete with systematized torture, rape, and starvation. Watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, you’d have no idea that from the Moscow metro system to, literally, the roads to Sochi, the Soviet Union — the supposed epitome of modernity and “scientific socialism” — was built on a mountain of broken lives and unremembered corpses.
As he points out, imagine the outrage if similar language were used to describe the Nazi regime, complete with Swastikas. In a sane world, the hammer and sickle would draw just as much, if not more opprobrium.