In case you were curious, here’s the denouement of the Something Positive comic series on the closing of Avenue Victor Hugo books.
In case you missed the comic series, I point it in this entry.
Categories
"Killian!"
As long as they’ve got Arnie hashing out lines from his old action flicks, let’s remember The Running Man,
one of my favourites. Richard Dawson played an especially memorable
villian because he played it by doing what he does best: being a smarmy
game show host.
(For those of you who are too young to remember, Dawson was the original host of the American TV game show Family Feud.)
“Who loves you…and who do you love?! It’s time to start…running!”
What you may not remember is that Dawson’s character’s name in The Running Man
is “Killian”. “Killian” also happens to be the name of President Bush’s
commanding officer back in the early 1970s — the one who purportedly
wrote the memos that are now believed to be possible forgeries.
Another interesting coincidence: Like the running men Bush and Kerry,
the veracity of reports on Running Man Arnie’s character’s military
service is called into question. The official story is that Arnie’s
character is “The Butcher of Bakersfield”, a US Army helicopter pilot
who shot at innocent civilians. In reality, he defied orders to shoot
at a food riot in progress, saying that they were just innocent people
trying to eat.
Surely some speechwriter is going over The Running Man right now,
looking for the appropriate Arnie one-liners for the governator to use.
Perhaps Arnie’s worst one-liner, “Killian! Here is Sub-Zero. Now just
plain zero!”, might be a good starting point.
Other interesting tidbits about The Running Man:
- With Arnie now in office, this movie now features two future governors: Arnie and Jesse “The Body” Ventura, who would go on to become the governor of Minnesota.
- The movie was eerily prescient, predicting “extreme” game shows such as American Gladiators.
- In the movie, a good chunk of the government’s work involves
keeping the population misinformed and entertained. I loved Dawson’s
line as he gets on the phone: “Get me the Justice Department…
Entertainment Division”.
Categories
Congrats, Graig and Emma…
…on your engagement!
Graig’s entries:
- Somewhat cryptic
- I think she said “yes”…or words to that effect
- The detailed story
- The ring owes a little to DC’s “Green Lantern”
Emma’s entry: Engaged
(Yes, it’s been known nearly a week, but I seem to be falling behind on my GTABloggers gossip.)
Categories
Cooking for Engineers
What separates the blog Cooking for Engineers from any other collection of
recipes I’ve ever seen is the unique way in which the recipes are
presented. Consider this basic recipe for one of my favourite desserts, tiramisu. You get the standard “do this, then do this” instructions, but you also get this chart:
Back in April, I wrote about Avenue Victor Hugo books, which I stumbled into while walking along Boston’s Newbury Street with The Redhead. In that article, I republished The Crepuscule, a document which describes itself as “Twelve reasons for the death of small and independent book stores”.
In Wednesday’s and yesterday’s editions of his webcomic, Something Positive, Randy Mulholland shows the main character “Davan” in a bookstore that bears a striking resemblance to Avenue Victor Hugo…
Update (Friday, Sept 10 13:26 EDT): Added a couple of links to Colby Cosh and Ace of Spades HQ.
A question that’s been bouncing around the more political areas of the
blogosphere is “were those memos that 60 Minutes showed about Bush
receiving special treatment during his service faked or not?”.
It seems that the proportional spacing of the type (in which skinnier
letters like “i” get let space than wide letters like “m” or “w”,
common in the era of today’s computers and printers, but rare in the
days of the typewriter) and the superscripted “th” in the word “187th”
suggest that the memos weren’t typed on a typewriter in 1973, but in
Microsoft Word in 2004 and then photocopied repeatedly to produce the
effect of age.
Here’s a graphic that morphs the purported 1973 memo and a version created in Word. It is eerily similar.
As much as I disagree with the Bush Camp in general, I disagree with
cheesy tactics like this (if these memos turn out to be forgeries) even
more. There’s enough truth to nail the Bush administration without
having to resort to “noble lies” in the Straussian (Leo, not Gideon) tradition. Even my rather-quite-to-the-right-of-me friend David Janes, a Bushie, will
readily admit that he considers Bush a dud on most issues; he only agrees with the war footing.
It’s interesting to note that this is a “We Media” moment
coming from the right-wing side of the blogosphere. Most of the “blogs
as journalism” reports tend to come from the left-leaning sectors.
More on this “man bites dog” stuff at Ace of Spades HQ.
David points to this funny comic on the whole forgery kerfuffle:
Lesson #2: The Ten Incredibly Valuable Things I learned from my good buddy George Scriban while at Crazy Go Nuts University
10. How not to behave at a women’s residence party.
9. How to apologize to an entire wing at a women’s residence the next day.
8. A number of good essay-writing techniques.
7. How to get a cube van to “take air”.
6. The fine art of telling politicos to “eat the corn from my shit”.
5. That brevity is the soul of wit.
4. That once in a while, you must do something you know you’ll regret later, because you’ll regret it more if you don’t.
3. That about half the time, the right-wing option is the correct one and the left-wing one is dead wrong, and vice versa.
2. How to think critically.
1. That in the hands of an expert, the esophagus can be one helluva projectile launcher.