Restarts Tomorrow Night

And Season 3 is a go.

The Counsil For Secular Humanism's Free Expression Cartoon Contest Winner

Philip Pullman Has A New Book

And its title alone is making some people very upset.


Pullman addresses the controversy well:

Don't Go Here

The Warner Archives are a treasure trove/money sink of what we all thought was lost.

I. Must. Have:

Bad Ronald ...BAD FUCKING RONALD!!!

And that only leads me to more sickness...

Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark

What other 70's/80's movies of the week do you long to hesitantly revisit? Or schlock drive-ins that you can just barely recall?

Bye bye, hard-earned money...

I Disagree, Hatefully

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa won the Pritzker Prize this year. I posted my issues with their newest building earlier, and I'm not a fan of their other works.

Overworked, charmless, stereotypical bad modernism; the kind that turns the average ignoramus against progressive architecture

Their buildings all seem to me as weird for the sake of it, not modern for the sake of progress or enlightenment. Their architecture does not conform to the natural surroundings nor challenge and/or respect the neighboring structures. They could be worse and admittedly are not all bad; but they are not worthy of any high recognition.

A Requiem For Art Deco Redux

I love art deco. Here are three examples of modern improvements of art deco, all from Chicago:

NBC Tower; Skidmore, Owings, and Merril (of the Sears and John Hancock towers fame); 1989

Citigroup Tower (formerly the Chicago And Northwestern Terminal Building), Helmut Jahn, 1987--note the tiered, arched entryway on the bottom right

United Terminal at O'Hare Airport, Helmut Jahn, 1987

Where did this pro-humanist aesthetic--with all of its attention to detail, craftsmanship, and ingenuity---go?

While I'm Picking On Them...

...why stop with the child rapes? Catholics are weird:

Dawkins On The Vatican

Getting atheists to agree is like herding cats. But point out a wounded gazelle and the pride all pounces at once. From The Washington Post:

No, Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice - the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution - while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.

Hitchens And Maher On The Vatican

Predators

Case in point:

A Question Of Format

Am I the only one who has to look at our blog with 2/3's of the screen wasted by dark blue space? Does any format exist by which we can expand the lateral boundaries of our insignificant pontifications and communications? At least to the width that HD videos are fully watchable?

I would explore this quandary and fix it, but I'm busy and tired. And frankly, I don't give a shit beyond this post.

The Ten Commandments Are A Poor Substitute For A Moral Code

Whenever I hear Christians, even the more reasonable ones I work with, extol the virtues of the Ten Commandments, I end up having a rather heated and strange argument with otherwise sensible folk who ignorantly maintain that morality--and our democratic republican government--is based on them.

My arguments are not received well by these people. To quote Ayn Rand, "Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. " And any reasonable person can determine that virtually all of the first amendment to the constitution defies many of the Bible's top ten proscriptions.

Christopher Hitchens very deftly dissects the ten rules that will, in the end, purportedly determine whether any human is sent to an eternal torture chamber that makes Nazi concentration camps a comparative Disneyland. What is included, and what is left out, is telling of its origin. And nobody, and no court, and no governing body, needs them now.



Why has it never occurred to the religious that no society has made their Ten Commandments the law of the land and thrived or even survived?

I'm Enthralled And Addicted

After recently purchasing Bioshock for my Bill Gates Anti-productivity Devise Mk 2, I had to go out and buy Bioshock 2. I love it just as much, if not better.

Here's the opening of Bioshock, in all of its (anti-)Randian, art deco, dystopian glory (note: it doesn't give anything of significance away):

I Think We All Called This One

We predicted that Tim Tebow's saccharine, garish religiosity would be seen as irksome and puerile by the NFL. And it's already started:

At the Scouting Combine, the Wonderlic exam is administered to players in groups. The 12-minute test is preceded by some brief instructions and comments from the person administering the test.

Per a league source, after the person administering the test to Tebow's group had finished, Tebow made a request that the players bow their heads in prayer before taking the 50-question exam.

Said one of the other players in response: "Shut the f--k up." Others players in the room then laughed.

Those were, I insist, the appropriate responses. By all means, let Tim murmer to whatever magical being he fancies. But to assume that everyone else in the room wanted to join him--and were sheepishly waiting for a righteous, brave Christian like Tebow to take the spiritual lead in the cosmically significant event of taking a standardized test--is as ostentatious as it is presumptuous and ridiculous.

And, as Christopher Hitchens says, rightly are the simple so called: Tebow scored a below-average 22 on the Wonderlic test. Seriously, that's pathetic. It's a test I could have aced in middle school.

A skeptic comes out at 81

James Randi comes out as gay at For Good Reason.

Finally!

One of my stories, "Service", was published online tuesday at
Everyday Weirdness
 

Twin Peaks, Mk 2

Justified is bizarre, insane, and beautiful.

I am an official fan.
-----------------------
"...honestly, you are the angriest man I've ever known."

Pants that actually fit?

We're going to have to try this out. MakeYourOwnJeans.com. If i can get pants that fit, i will be a very happy man.

Coen Bros. + Irish Mob for St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day

At 3:30pm on Wednesday.

Star Wars, Coen-Style

Cast List Link

The Future Soon

When the things that me make weak and strange get engineered away.

Redstone Science Fiction

Our science fiction website, Redstone Science Fiction started taking short story submissions on March 15th.

No matter what they've done to us in the intervening years: This.

"How?"
"I don't know. I'm making this up as I go along."

A Fine List

Types of Bitches

Finish the book, George.

HBO Greenlights 'Game of Thrones' TV series

My new glasses.

RayBans Wayfarer Frames
   
Just saying.

Stuck in my head earlier this month.

Lord of the Rings, Indy & Han Solo

I showed the freshmen I was babysitting during state testing:
The Lord of the Rings, Raiders, and Star Wars.


They are all still wonderful.

Pushups

I've been following this One Hundred Pushups plan.
I was up to 36 by 3/16.

Grain Fed Beef

Just down the road:
Goose Pond Farm and a review. We ordered some chickens.

Catching up March for the facebook agnostics

So hang on.

Justified, If Only By Its Leading Actor's Coolness

I have recorded, but not yet watched, FX's pilot for Justified. The hero is a federal marshal who returns to his home town after a questionable kill in a fight, and the hero takes up defending the town from the lawlessness that has consumed it. The hero is played by Deadwood and The Crazies veteran Timothy Olyphant.

I have the premier saved, but I must urge all reading to give the show a try for the following reason:

Timothy Olyphant is one of the coolest, shot-out-of-a-cannon weirdo actors ever. He agreed to be a guest on Sirius XM OutQ's Frank DeCarro show, and he was--hands down--one of the sweetest, weirdest, obscene heterosexuals ever to be on the show and get it. Near the end of his stint, Frank asked if he would stay on until the end of the hour:

"I've got nothing else better to do, let's go!"

Olyphant is as cool as Bullock, but in contrast he is crazed and educated and honest, like Tarantino...

And us, so we aspire...

Zombie Roommate, Demon Girlfriend, Wizard Co-worker, And Oppressed Squids

Comedy Central has a new cartoon series that can only be described as lurid, intellectual sickness. Behold the enlightened debase glory of Ugly Americans:

Ugly Americans	Weds 10:30pm / 9:30c
Sneak Peek
www.comedycentral.com
Joke of the Day Stand-Up Comedy Free Online Games

I laughed until it hurt, and that felt good...

We Love You Gamera

From Godzilla Haiku:

Son of Precious

Exquisite Trash: Mo'Nique and Divine

I had little interest in seeing Precious until I read this critique:

What director Lee Daniels has done (quite deliberately, it appears) is take Dawn Davenport, the larger-than-life delinquent played by Divine, as a source of inspiration for Precious's tantrum-throwing, cha-cha heels-wearing mama Mary (Mo'Nique). Then he tosses in a beautiful light-skinned lipstick lesbian fairy godmother (Ms. Rain, played by Paula Patton), some cheesy escapist glamour-fantasy sequences (featuring a handsome boyfriend character the credits identify as "Tom Cruise"), and a comical all-girl chorus of wise-cracking GED English students who are assigned to write fairy tales. (Correction: One of the girls is a transsexual/transvestite, but it was unclear to me which direction she's going at this particular moment in her life.) Daniels' directorial sensibility is more garish and flamboyant than Waters' (this isn't kitchen-sink melodrama; it's everything plus the kitchen sink melodrama), but he displays a similar affection for his oversized female characters. Whatever its other ostensible subjects, this is a movie about drag queens acting out.

And then I saw this from John Waters:



Hell, if someone had told me it was a raunchy violent comedy and not some affected tear generator for Oprah's cult of mediocrity, I would have gone to see it twice.

And John Waters is America's most treasured sicko.

The Milky Way over Hawaii

The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.

Read It And Weep

Virginia's newly elected governor actually sent this outrageous tripe to that great commonwealth's internationally recognized universities. This sickness from the state that gave us Jefferson should make any enlightened human give pause.

I must remind you that this grotesque was ceremoniously knighted by the Republican Party to respond to Obama's State of the Union address. He is not a marginal, hysterical yokel or some slack-jawed charismatic populist of the boondocks; instead, he's one of the Republican's touted up-and-comers who is now governor of one of our republic's most important states.

One party cowardly drags its feet concerning my rights (while cynically and cautiously extoling them). The other celebrates, relishes, and promotes my second-class citizenry and would remorselessly vote it down to no-rights status if they thought they could get away with it.

How cold is Montreal? Learning French and riding trains sounds really, really good right now.

The New Acropolis Museum

I want to go to Athens, as the New Acropolis Museum (go to that link to gasp) is near completion.





Just to stand in this room might complete my life.

Learn Through Rolex

Switzerland's Rolex Learning Center is now open. What a beautiful place to learn...







But how practical is this? I understand curving the outside , but shouldn't the inside be tiered? And as stunning as masterly poured concrete roofs are, shouldn't this one be partially covered with greenery to accentuate--rather than contrast--the courtyards?

Frank DeCaro Oscar Special

Before the Academy Awards this Sunday, tune into Frank DeCaro's touted "deranged" Oscar special featuring a strange diversity of guests: from Barbara Walters to Bruce Vilanch to Faction's great Jason Ellis (whose afternoon radio program is equally debase and brilliant).

6 pm CST on OutQ Sirius 109, XM 93