You have a Picture Mail from 8608335833Woohoo! My new (old) Power Mac is here! :)

Why do we pay any attention at all to movie critics? Time after time I hear critics analyzing films and all they talk aobut is how deep it is, or its meaning, etc. Why is that a bad thing? Because they seem to treat all films as if they fit into one genre. As if they are all supposed to be ground breaking, mind bending, etc. Well guess what, some moveis are just supposed to be FUN.

Take for example the recent box office success National Treasure. Critics lampooned it for being implausible, or a rip off of the ideas in the Da Vinci (yes they actually said that). So why was it so darn succesful? Because it didn’t try to be anything but what it was, a fun, clever, adventure story with a unique idea. If I was looking for something plausible i’d be reading a how-to book or something. Instead I wanted to be entertained.

Critics, in most cases, seem far too full of themselves and their own self worth, and the public is partly to blame for buying into what they say. I think we would be better off finding people who like movies that we do and asking them their opinion of a movie, most often this involves our friends.

I think that in the end thought I really just feel sad for movie critics. They are robbing themselves of a truly enjoyable experience of just kicking back and having some fun. Oh well, their loss.

Well, I for one am glad we focused our efforts in finding WMD on Iraq. Cause it’s not like any other country out there with nuclear weapons might potentially have missles that can reach the U.S.

I can now confirm that, yes indeed, BrendanLoy.com was featured on CNN’s Inside Politics this afternoon. From the transcript:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Some performance reviews for the president and the first lady, as we go “Inside the Blogs” now. We check in with CNN political producer Abbi Tatton and Jacki Schechner, our blog reporter. Hi, Jacki.

JACKI SCHECHNER: Hi, Judy. It’s a Monday all around. So President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush both getting reviewed on the blogs today, he for his performance in the first 100 days of his second term, she in her performance at the White House correspondents dinner on Saturday night. …

ABBI TATTON: Some of these blogs offering commentary like that, some of them offering news, some of them offering satire. Here’s one of them. Swiftreport.blogs.com. It has a satirical take on Laura Bush’s speech. “Conservative Christians not laughing at First Lady’s Comedy Act,” citing a fictional group, a conservative group that’s upset, saying that, “A pastor from the group warns that the first lady’s performance comes at a time when Mr. Bush’s manliness is already under attack.” I might add, again, a satirical post, but one that some people fell for.

JACKI SCHECHNER: They did. A lot of the bloggers on the right fell for it. The Drudge Report, not a blogger, but a lot of people know Matt Drudge and his news site — he fell for it, took the post down. James Joyner over at Outside the Beltway, Andrew Sullivan, among some of them. And Joyner…what he says is, “Sadly, differentiating satire from reality becomes more difficult every day.” Again, when you read the blogs, be careful that you know what you’re reading. …

And before we go over to the next story — real quickly, I think I forgot to mention, it’s BrendanLoy.com, the Irish Trojan blog. He’s the guy who found a lot of the right-wing blogs who had mistaken the Swift Report for a true story.

(Hat tip: Nug. Incidentally, I took the liberty of fixing a few spelling mistakes and such. It’s a “rush” transcript, so there were some.)

Since the segment aired, I’ve gotten at least 17 hits from search-engine queries for “Irish Trojan” or “Irish Trojan’s blog.” Not exactly an Instalanche, but still, very cool!

So, now I’ve been on CNN and Fox News! :)

According to Michael Rosenkrantz (NHS Class of ‘00), my blog was featured on CNN this afternoon between 3:00 and 3:30 EST (4:00-4:30 EDT). Apparently they were discussing my post about Drudge’s folly and the Swift Report’s faux right-wing outrage.

Assuming Mike is telling the truth and not kidding around (and I have no reason to doubt him), that’s way totally cool! :)

I didn’t see the segment, obviously, since I was taking an exam at the time. But the timimg would put it during Inside Politics with Judy Woodruff, which makes sense given the topic. I’ll be watching for the transcript.

P.S. I’m not getting a perceptible traffic boost; I actually got slightly fewer hits last hour than in the hours preceding (chart). But that’s not surprising — people are far more likely to click a link from another website (like, say, InstaPundit’s) than they are to type in the URL of a website that they see discussed on TV.

With apologies to Bellia’s ConLaw class…

WE’RE ALMOST DONE!!!

School’s out for the summer in 48 hours and 33 minutes… not that I’m counting or anything…

Contracts exam, here I come!

(Get it? Breach?)

Working makes me wish
I could impale myself
with my office pen

My messy house
could make my mother cry
and then, disown me

My anemone
died yesterday and released
poison in my tank

My puppy likes to
sniff my feet with his cold
slimy nose at night

If I had a shot-
gun and a license to kill
Barney would get it

Virtual voyeur
keeps looking at me and I
think it needs a life

Sleeping kittens will
claw the crap out of your leg
if you startle them

A few minutes ago, the Drudge Report briefly linked to an article from The Swift Report entitled, “Conservative Christians Not Laughing at First Lady’s Comedy Act.” Excerpt:

According to an official statement released over the weekend by the Coalition for Traditional Values…Mrs. Bush’s jokes at her husband’s expense amounted to a public emasculation of the President. Pastor Roy DeLong, the statement’s author and chair of the group, warns that the First Lady’s performance comes at a time when the Mr. Bush’s “manliness is already under attack.”

“As a believer, President Bush is no doubt familiar with the passage from Ephesians that says ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord,’” says Mr. DeLong. … “One of the Proverbs says that ‘a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband, but she that maketh him ashamed is as rottenness in his bones,” [he adds]. “I bet President Bush is feeling pretty rotten today.”

Upon reading that, I immediately suspected that something was amiss, so I did a few easy Google searches and quickly discovered that the “Coalition for Traditional Values” does not exist, and “Roy DeLong” is actually just a recurring (presumably fictional) character in the Swift Report’s satires of the Religious Right, including such articles as “Bush Blasts Homosexual Energy Agenda” and “SpongeBob Denies Reports that He’s Gay.”

Drudge has since taken the link down, but Andrew Sullivan is still linking to it. He writes:

[T]he virulent homophobia of the religious right sometimes turns comic. The notion that hybrid cars are somehow ‘gay’ is hilarious.

Um, it’s a joke, Sully.

The sad thing is, he’s not alone. The same Google searches that expose the satire also reveal that there are an awful lot of people out there who don’t get the joke: they take Swift Report’s various parodies as true, and condemn them appropriately. Some people, it seems, have so little respect for the intellectual integrity of the Right that they can’t spot completely obvious satire when it smacks them in the face. Memo to the Left (and everyone, really): If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Of course, there is a fair amount of absurdity on the Right. But not this absurd. C’mon, people.

And Drudge? He took down the link almost immediately. He probably hadn’t even read the whole thing when he posted it, but just saw what looked at a glance like a good sensational story/right-wing outrage vehicle of the day, and ran with it. Heh. That’s Drudge for you.

With his new CD out “Devils and Dust” my former favorite artist is in the news again.

His last CD “The Rising” sold over 580 thousand copies in it’s first week. “Devils and Dust” sold 200 thousand copies in it’s first week… it looks like Bruce offended over half of is fan base.

I for one will not purchase the CD. The title track about a soldier in Iraq is an insult to every American soldier past and present.
Bruce manages to twist every possible meaning of a patriotic heart into a heap of (Expletive)!

(more…)

I don’t know if any of you have caught moveon.org’s 30 second spot attacking the Presidents judicial nominees, but if you haven’t, go check it out. It’s kind of Monty Python-esque graphically, but there’s just something cute about elephants knocking stuff down. It amused me.

There’s a series of other fun ads here, if you’re bored enough or feel the need to procrastinate.

The Backer says things aren’t what they seem:

Here is a long story short from someone who knows the situation better than I.

There was a Fisher Hall get together, right before the Regatta. The photo of Monk was part of a slide show presentation. What he is doing REALLY IS the Fisher F, and that’s the reason it was included. The two gentleman who photographed Monk are innocent.

Now, their fellow Fisher Hall mates are not so innocent. They uploaded the images to their webspaces, and then it began to circulate quicker than One Night in Paris. But when the buzz grew on the South Bend campus, as well as the virtual Irish campus (including myself), it became apparent people thought Monk was flashing the Shocker.

The two students who took the photo are all but banned from participating in the graduation ceremonies. There is a chance both may be excused since their intentions were opposite of the outcome. It was the Fisher F to them, not the Monk Shocker it became. I hope both are given a break by the admin.

We report, you decide.

P.S. The timeline checks out. The Regatta was on April 16; the photo, according to its EXIF information, was taken on April 12, four days earlier. That allows plenty of time for it to be put in the alleged slideshow… and, if practicaly no one knew about the photo until it was publicly shown on the 16th, that would help explain why it didn’t hit the Internet until the following week.

Also, if you recall, the original Kelly Green post that started this whole firestorm said (I’m paraphrasing/quoting from memory, because the post is no longer online) that “apparently some Fisher boys convinced Monk this is their new logo.” Making allowances for the “telephone” effect as the story got told and re-told and re-told again, that’s quite close to what is now being claimed.

P.P.S. On the other hand, if the boys at Fisher think that hand gesture looks like an F, they might need to take a remedial alphabet course.

I think in this instance, going back to the less advanced, super-loud bullhorn would be a better way to warn the masses of impending doom.

You have a Picture Mail from 8608335833Arrrgh… why am I still awake? I hate Contracts so much right now…