Hey, #iowahawkblog, I defy you to satirize this.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Camille Paglia
How the Democrats lost her (and presumably) Ann Althouse. I almost intersected with Camille yesterday. She was Glenn’s next interview, after lunch.
Lena Dunham’s Ad
Treacher thinks it’s just great, and wants to see a lot more like it.
And Probably Proud Of It
Barack Obama says he’s pretty lost when it comes to the math stuff.
Why am I not surprised?
[Update a while later]
More non-news: Biden and Obama are financially illiterate.
Well, duh.
The War On Women
…by ObamaCare.
Can The Dems Sink Any Lower?
Unfortunately, they can, and they undoubtedly will:
You would think that at some point, decent people would be ashamed to be associated with the Democratic Party. For all too many, that hasn’t happened yet. In the meantime, fasten your seat belt, because the Democrats are about to pull out every stop in their desperate greed to hang on to unearned wealth and political power.
Nope, they’re shameless. We saw that in the nineties.
We Can’t Predict Earthquakes
…and we shouldn’t scapegoat scientists.
Santa Claus
Shock horror! Guilty as charged! Santa Claus smokes! He also breaks and enters, travels without a passport, violates the terms of goodness knows how many countries’ airspace, and doesn’t pay taxes. He is overweight and he has little plan to do much about it. He’s a terrible drunk, at least in Britain and Australia, where he is left sherry; and in Ireland, where he is traditionally provided with beer. He fails on the diversity and equal-protection fronts, too. His name, “Santa Claus,” comes from the Christian tradition, and yet he presumes imperiously to shower gifts on all the world’s children. Well, actually not all of them. Being a dastardly Manichean sort, Santa divides children into “naughty” and “nice” categories and allocates their gifts accordingly. Moreover, his offerings are desperately unequal: Some children get more and nicer gifts than others. In some households, parents do not receive any at all.
Really, he should be locked up.
Heresy
Lileks goes to Universal:
And then. Oh. My. And then you are suspended in the largest open space you can possibly imagine, flying. Over a forest. Under a bridge. The wind is in your face and you cannot see yourself attached to anything and the disorientation is utter and complete. I thought: well, this is everything I hate, isn’t it? So enjoy.
It was nothing I would ever willingly do, and it was spectacular. My God – you crashed through roofs, were spat upon by spiders, blasted by a dragon, something big like the limbs of a tree reached for you, and the spectacles moved with such speed it was difficult to discern the real from the filmed. By the end I’d given myself over completely to the experience, and was flying over the water to the very castle I’d entered an hour before, and it was the most utterly exhilarating thing I’d never really done.
There’s more.
Captain Eo
It’s for kids, but I’m not sure kids enjoy it anymore. Francis Ford Coppola! George Lucas! Michael Jackson! Er. Hmm. The first was lost and coasting, the second had not yet been unmasked as something less than the Greatest Visual Genius of His Era, and Michael Jackson was still black and popular and charismatic, but you know how the story ends: with a snootful of rhino trank and a paralyzing fear of the outside world. From the beginning the Dismay you feel is enormous: it’s a two-headed chicken Muppet-thing running a spaceship with Comic Relief Alien Elephant and a cat with butterfly wings. Also a robot with a monocle. I repeat: a robot. With a monocle. They have to save a planet through dance; this is accomplished by shooting light beams at minions who turn into Fiercely Dressed professional prancers with 1985 hairstyles who make serious faces while executing certain steps. The evil queen, who is sort of a proto-Borg suspended by wires and tubes – the only thing in the piece that still holds up – is turned into Anjelica Huston, and then it’s over.
Oh, it’s 3-D and interactive; must have been quite novel back then, but at the end when the spaceship takes off into the vacuum and you feel wind on your face, well.
“That. Was. Bizarre,” said daughter.
“That was the 80s,” I said. I didn’t tell her that her mom once sported the ‘do the lead dancer had, a modified Sheena Easton, and it was hot.
Eighties hairstyles look very eighties now (think girlfriends in Back To The Future), but they didn’t seem so bad at the time.
Also, a bonus disquisition on how twelve is hard.