Okay, I’m going to bed now… but not before I use my final post of Autumn 2003 to link to a political blogger for the first time in weeks! :) Andrew Sullivan’s critique of the New York Times’s shoddy treatment of the latest gay-marriage news is eye-opening, to say the least. (For the uninitiated, Sullivan is everybody’s favorite gay, HIV-positive, pro-Bush, conservative Republican ex-NYTimes columnist. Well… my favorite, anyway. :)

Return of the King has made $125 million since opening Wednesday, according to CNN. That’s considerably better than the five-day openings of Fellowship of the Ring ($75 million) and The Two Towers ($102 million).

Although it didn’t set any domestic records, Return of the King’s worldwide total of $246 million in five days is a new all-time record. ROTK could become the second movie ever to make more than $1 billion worldwide. Titanic is the record-holder, with $1.8 billion. (FOTR made $861 million worldwide; TTT made $921 million.)

I saw it again today, and absolutely loved it. Definitely the best of the three. I will post a full review when I have the time and energy to do so.

UPDATE: I’m not alone in loving it. IMDB voters have bumped Return of the King ahead of The Godfather, Part II into the #3 spot on the Top 250 list of all-time best movies. It now trails only The Shawshank Redemption and The Godfather, Part I.

ANOTHER UPDATE: “Candidate Dennis Kucinich said, ‘I told you Bush was false. I told you he was tricksy.’” Heh.

The winter solstice is 90 minutes away — it happens at 12:04 AM Arizona time.

Of course, as Mike will no doubt remind us, this is entirely meaningless as a seasonal milestone. :)

In a related story, tomorrow’s forecast high in Phoenix, AZ is 73 degrees. Heh. Heh heh.

No, I’m not getting ahead of myself with regard to the Rose Bowl here. Two less-heralded USC teams have earned national championships in the last couple of weeks: men’s water polo on Dec. 8, and women’s volleyball on Saturday.

Way to go, Trojans!!!

In case you missed it, the Homeland Security Department raised the national terror alert level today to orange, or “high,” because of “substantial increase” in the volume of intelligence pointing to “near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11,” according to Tom Ridge. (So says CNN.)

It’s easy and tempting to treat the whole color-coded terror-warning thing as a big joke, seeing as how we’ve been down this road before, and nothing has ever come of it, yet (thank God). I have a lot of friends who have precisely this attitude: oh, ha ha, the terror level is up to orange again, Bush must be trying to wag the dog again, Tom Ridge is being incompetent again, tee hee.

But it’s not a joke. I’m genuinely worried, and no cynical head-in-the-sand liberal who fails to acknowledge that 9/11 changed the world is going to convince me that I shouldn’t be genuinely worried. The Homeland Security Department may be a colossal failure thus far, but that doesn’t mean terrorism isn’t a real threat. Quite the opposite, in fact!

Hopefully nothing will happen.

While we’re on the subject of head-in-the-sand liberalism (which I don’t think we technically are, since I brought that up completely out of nowhere, but whatever), I was thinking about Howard Dean recently, and why I don’t think I like him, and whether I’m being fair to him. This thought process was spurred because Becky perused Dean’s website recently and found, to her surprise, that she likes a lot of his ideas (provisionally, at least). Which got me thinking: I don’t know anything about Howard Dean, except that he has a lot of supporters on the Angry Left. Do I know enough about him, really, to oppose him?

Here’s what I realized: I instinctively don’t like Howard Dean because I believe the bulk of his support base is the group of hard-core anti-war zealots who simply have not accepted that we really are at war with Islamic fundamentalists. Dean’s core supporters are the people whose thinking about foreign policy was not altered one iota by the events of September 11, 2001. And the idea of those people running the country terrifies me.

However, that’s not entirely fair. Because it could be argued that the core of George W. Bush’s constituency — or at least a key element of it — is the group of hard-core pro-war zealots who are just as ignorant and foolish as the hard-core anti-war zealots. Call ‘em the Angry Right: the people whose support for the war on terror is tinged with latent anti-Arab racism, the people who believe that Saddam was directly involved in 9/11 no matter what the facts say, the people who feel that the Dixie Chicks are a bigger threat to American values than any assault on civil liberties that the government has made, or could ever make. Whereas Dean’s supporters believe Bush can do no right, these folks believes Bush can do no wrong, as long as he’s doing it under the banner of “fighting for freedom.” And I don’t want them running the country, either.

Where am I going with this rant? Well, my point is, guilt by association is a real thing in politics, but it is not the be-all and end-all. Barry Goldwater got a lot of votes from Southern racists, but he was not himself a racist. George W. Bush is supported by the Angry Right, but I do not believe that his policies succumb (for the most part) to their worst tendencies. Howard Dean has been raised to the status of front-runner by the Angry Left… but what does that say about him? Where does he stand?

The fact is, I don’t know. For someone who calls himself a political junkie, I really know pathetically little about the candidates’ real stands on the issues. I have a lot of research still to do before election day.

But I know this: it would be wrong for me to exclude the possibility of voting for Dean just because I don’t like what a lot of his supporters stand for. If that were my criteria, I wouldn’t be able to vote for anybody, ever. All candidates have some sketchy supporters. The question you have to ask is, how would they govern?

If Howard Dean is going to win my vote, he has to convince me that he recognizes that 9/11 changed the world. He must prove to me that he understands and acknowledges that we are in the midst of a war against fanatical terrorists who cannot be appeased. He must show me that he has a strategy to fight and win that war, a strategy that is not built upon the idea that we can make the fanatics like us by being nicer to them.

If Dean can convince me of these things, and if he can show me that he has a strategy that’s different than — and indeed better than — Bush’s, I am more than willing to listen, because frankly, I’m not sure whether Bush’s strategy is actually working so well at the moment. So if Dean has something better to offer, I’m all ears.

But Dean must first convince me that he can rise above the empty rhetoric and imbecilic knee-jerk anti-Americanism of his “base.” If he is unable to do this, he will never get my vote (and, if he is nominated, I will probably be voting for a minor-party candidate on Nov. 2).

Okay, that’s all I have to say about that for now. I await the onslaught of comments from all sides. :)

Now this is just funny. An archaeologist-blogger named Andis Kaulins, who runs a site called ArchaeoPundit, seems to think that Hugh Manatee is an ancient carved rock.

I have responded in comments, explaining that Hugh Manatee is, in fact, a stuffed manatee, not a manatee-shaped rock. Heh.

(Perhaps Mr. Kaulins is referring to the rock formation next to Hugh, suggesting that it looks like a manatee and believing that I took the picture for this reason. But as it happens, I was paying no attention to the rocks when I took the picture, and frankly, I don’t see a resemblance. Thoughts, anyone?)

I am also somewhat confused by Mr. Kaulins’s statement that “Hugh Manatee” is a “popular modern figure.” As far as I know, Hugh Manatee is just my stuffed animal, so named because my dad said “Oh, the humanity!” when he first saw him on Christmas morning 2001. If there is some broader pop-culture significance beyond the realms of Adollya and the SHA girls, I was unaware of it.

Hugh himself could not be immediately reached for comment on any of this, but several of his admirers were heard to proclaim, “Hugh rocks!”

UPDATE: Let’s see now. “Hugh Manatee” is the mascot of Milwaukee’s Tippecanoe School for the Arts and Humanities, the subject of a story by Paul H. Egan, a participant in a Canadian “stuffie exchange program,” and — here we go! — the webmaster of www.hughmanatee.org! :) Still, I’m not sure any of that adds up to a “popular modern figure”…