Weirdo turned pro.
I’ve seen the other ‘Twilight’ movies and will gleefully pinch the loaf and watch the final one when released.
This preview makes me forget the 7-8 hours of my life already given over to the films chock full of dull talking. Now I only recall a constant loop of vampires of dogs running at each other in the same field over and over.
Get More: 2012 VMA, Artists.MTV, Music
Five! Five wondervul movies! Ah ah ah!
Made this image macro, bewildered, like many across the nation, by Clint Eastwood co-opting a Bob Newhart routine where Newhart would pretend to carry on one half of a conversation with an invisible party.
Eastwood’s performance could have been MUCH tighter. A good premise, but way too drawn out. Rehearsal was sorely needed.
Pretending Obama is a hothead is bizarre. Vice President Dick Cheney was a TOTAL hothead, who shot a man in the face. Could you imagine a photo of Obama wielding a gun? Significant portions of the country would turn brown from people shitting themselves.
Driving with the kids for about two hours today, we listened to Lady Gaga and Adele. Putting them on means the kids keep the headphones off. We shifted to ‘West Side Story’ in the last 20 minutes.
“Paparazzi” came on, and I visualized (while still driving safely) the three moments in the video I like the most.
1.) Malady-afflicted celebrity bravely and stylishly taking to the red (okay, lavender) carpet on crutches (2:54 mark):
2.) The Mickey Mouse ensemble with plastic/wax lips she has when poisoning her attempted murderer (5:45 mark):
3.) Dishevelled sass when getting her mugshots at the police station (7:16 mark):
The full video for your convenience (all about saving you the keystrokes in a search engine):
A fast entry because I’m tired of a squirrel carcass being the toppamost post. Here’s a photo of Marilyn Monroe reading ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce. One may snort derisively. Remember Monroe was married to esteemed playwright Arthur Miller. She likely enjoyed the book. Also this photo is adorable and brainy and hot.
After 6th grade I went to a summer camp on the University of Oregon campus where we stayed in dorms for two weeks. Outside our dorm was a squirrel who checked on us, even on the 2nd floor. We named him Fred. For all I know, more than 30 years on Fred is doing fine. Not so this fellow. Alas.
On a lark, I looked up the word “text” in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here’s what that Good Book gives as the origin:
“Etymology: < French texte, also Old Northern French tixte, tiste (12th cent. in Godefroy), the Scriptures, etc., < medieval Latin textus the Gospel, written character (Du Cange), Latin textus (u-stem) style, tissue of a literary work (Quintilian), lit. that which is woven, web, texture, < text-, participial stem of tex-ĕre to weave."
I had never thought of text as a tissue or something that is woven into a tissue. It always seemed a linear train of words flopped one over the other, then stacked sheet over sheet. Or typed up and pasted in. A product to be stored. Had never considered it as a planned fabric both lateral and longitudinal. I like that very much.
I’ll miss this guy. He was sometimes full of horseshit, but when others claimed he was full of horseshit often they were proven to be wrong. So allowance must be given.
He tended to bring out the worst in people who weren’t confident in themselves. Interviewers/journalists suffering from what Harold Bloom would call the anxiety of influence got con-testy with Vidal, which he would detect and throw back. The best interviewers were fine in their own skin and ended up in decent conversations or giving him good setups for his lapidary phrases and tales.
He loved his country, his republic, with a deep love that meant always wanting better, and wanting to ward off its perceived decline by calling out when it had more pomp than substance. No, that’s way too buttery. He saw our country as a Miss Havisham, and described her past charms and decay in great and savage detail. If he had a magic wand to restore her vitality he would, but he knew woefully no such wand was available.
Feeling sore about both Vidal and Christopher Hitchens dying within a year of one another. I doubt I’ll be as deeply eager what any other public figure, or eager to be suprised by what any other public figure thinks.
Chronically elegiac with a zest lit from a core of hope.
If you CHOOSE to eat chicken, do it in private. But stop putting your chicken-eating in my face all the time. And don’t, in any way, try to lure MY CHILDREN into your lifestyle.
Anytime there’s a restaurant scene on t.v. or in the movies, I have to shield my children’s eyes. Didn’t have to worry about that only a few years ago. Now HOLLYWOOD makes it seem like choosing to eat chicken is an entirely natural thing that doesn’t bring the wrath of vengeance upon us all. It totally does! Did Hurricane Katrina happen in a non-chicken-eating country? Case closed.
Nothing angers me more than when a leader I voted for or gave money to for his moral stance on not letting chicken-eaters marry or teach ends up getting caught eating turducken. Happens too often to count.
Our nation’s morals and marriages are in the toilet. Stop eating chicken. Stop trying to get my kids to eat chicken. Back off. Eat more cows. They have got it coming. Book of Angus 4:21 “Consume not the flesh of fowl, for it is effeminancy and an abomination.”
And enough with the chicken pride parades. Do that stuff at home (at the peril of your immortal soul) but get your plumage and clucking off MY streets that MY tax dollars pay for.
The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then procees in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality.
— Simon Schama
Sofonisba Anguissola was a famous female Renaissance painter. I hardly know anything about anything, and had never heard of her (or didn’t recall her). A book I’m reading about art and design went into a little detail about her life, and mentioned this portrait she did of herself as if painted by her mentor Bernadino Campi. I looked it up online. Though taking a painting in via computer monitor (actually, a smartphone) is awful with often terrible renditions of the colors and textures, this image made me laugh while eating in a restaurant. Then I felt really won over by the personality and wit of making us regard the painting as if we are Anguissola ourselves.
Self-Portrait with Bernadino Campi, by Sofonisba Anguissola
Sometimes when apprehending a work of art, it goes SPLAT on your consciousness and you can detect at that moment its effect will stay around with you. This was one of those moments.
Several months ago, I felt a need to dea with a portrait by John Singer Sargent by trying to write out a scenario that was part of a dream I had. During a hasty four-hour museum drive-by in the Art Institute of Chicago (airport layover) the painting held me in place in aesthetic arrest. Museum visits usually go way too quickly – wanting to witness everything in a compressed span of time. Taking mental (or camera) snapshots, but not having time to let the art in to be apprehended.
Good art is sticky.
Meditation (or time for calm concentration) is a Very Fine Thing. This message on the back of a van was confusing. It makes prayer like when a Pokemon charges up its power, or when one of the X-Men needs a second or two to do his/her thing. Prayer shouldn’t be like getting a bonus on a Dungeons and Dragons die roll, should it?
That noticeable smudge is bird poop on my windshield. All other smirches are on the van.