June 30, 2008
Oingo Boingo: Bim Bam Boom
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
Society for Creative Rock Anachronism
Picture the word "Flea" burned into the Moon with a death ray (hat tip to Quotulatiousness).
June 27, 2008
Miles Davis & John Coltrane: So what
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
The name of action
Victor Davis Hanson channels the ghost of Hamlet's father and the "can't do society".
June 26, 2008
Nicholas needs
1. Nicholas Needs YOU!
2. Nicholas Needs A Loving Family
3. Nicholas Needs Your Help
4. Nicholas needs lots of adult attention and may occasionally exhibit attention-seeking
5. Nicholas needs a predictable schedule and quiet atmosphere.
6. Nicholas needs to go to the doctor!!
7. Nicholas needs to see "Remake of the Jedi".
8. Nicholas needs to make it on his own
9. Nicholas needs money fast to provide for his mother and sister.
10. Nicholas needs her, too.
June 25, 2008
Doctor Horrible
Not only the trailer for Joss Whedon's web mini-movie but a harbinger of what is quite possibly the best film of all time (hat tip to the Sister of the Flea).
Who killed Lilly Kane?
This Amanda Seyfried layout in Italian Vogue - and the fact I have finally finished watching season three** - means this is a good time to mention Veronica Mars. If you have not seen the show, please consider doing so. The first season is some of the best television in any genre, ever.*** Think 90210 produced by David Lynch and directed by Joss Whedon.
Also, Kristen Bell.
* Courtesy of Agent Bedhead who also forwards this Pajiba review of Veronica Mars season one. I did not read the piece until I had watched all three seasons but I am funny that way.
** The Sister of the Flea told me to watch it several years ago. It took me a while to catch up.
*** Yes, including Deadwood, Rome and The Wire. I also think the Fantasy Island pilot kicks ass.
June 24, 2008
Letter to the Ephebians
Terry Pratchett creates gods all the time. He now suspects one might exist.
But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should. It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I'm not used to this.
I know the feeling.
Ernesto vs Bastian: Dark Side of the Moon
This right here is what we call high concept. Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
June 23, 2008
The Wizard of Northampton
Pádraig Ó Méalóid talks to Alan Moore (Part I and Part II). Worth the read for all the usual Alan Moore goodness and for the expression "over the radar". Also, the observation that as the world becomes more virtual, physical artifacts become all the more precious; a thought I had had myself. I am also delighted to learn of The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, a "clear and practical grimoire of the occult sciences that offers endless necromantic fun for all the family."
... there’s a Kaballah board game which we’re struggling with at the moment. It’s do-able but we’re just got to work out some layout problems. There’s the Tarot deck that I shall be commencing with José Villarubia…
Wonderful stuff, though to me the whole point of magick is "the pretentious, shadowy, gothy atmosphere". Consequently, I will approach this new work with a certain skepticism.
Minnie Driver: Invisible Girl
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
June 20, 2008
Notes on Religion
"Compulsion in religion is distinguished peculiarly from compulsion in every other thing. I may grow rich by art I am compelled to follow, I may recover health by medicines I am compelled to take against my own judgment, but I cannot be saved by a worship I disbelieve & abhor."
- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Religion (October, 1776)
David Bowie & Sonic Youth: I'm Afraid of Americans
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
June 19, 2008
Whiiped
A word of warning to Flea-readers thinking of purchasing a Wii Fit. Yes, their are incentives. But consider this: The device tracks your progress and keeps a log. All fun and games until your girlfriend decides to keep tabs on your diet.
Malice Mizer: Kioku to Sora
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
June 18, 2008
By all possible means
Cannot quite believe I am reading a critique of the Lisbon Treaty, Ireland's rejection of said treaty and Gordon Brown's illegal attempt to circumvent the democratically expressed will of the Irish people in the Telegraph. Remember: Ireland's four million voters may appear to represent only a tiny voice of extremists considering the half billion people effected by the result of their vote. But then they were the only Europeans who could express their opinion of this evil treaty as only Ireland asks its people to vote on the subject. This might just be the sound of a door being wedged open.
One cannot remain a member of a union that engages in putschs and scoffs at international treaty law, especially one that is about to create an EU supreme court (ECJ) with sweeping jurisdiction over all Union law - including justice - and that beyond appeal.
We may all have to tax out consciences very soon and decide whether to resist this Putsch by all possible means.
That last sentiment is gaining currency across what is left of the West.
Cabaret Voltaire: Just Fascination
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
Idea showers
The BBC compiles some helpful management speak that should come in handy to Flea-readers everywhere (hat tip to the Parental Units of the Flea).
June 17, 2008
Duran Duran: Secret Oktober
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
A career-threatening display of professional integrity
The Arjun battle tank acquires a growing fan club.
Minister of State for Defence Production, Rao Inderjeet Singh recounts: "I've spoken, off the record, to officers who have gone through the trials. Even the crews (from 43 Armoured Regiment)… who have been testing the tank… I forced them to choose between the Russian tanks and the Arjun.
I said, you've driven this tank and you've driven that tank (the T-90). Now mark them out of ten, which tank is better? And I've found that the Arjun tank was given more numbers than the T-90 tank."
June 16, 2008
Fisking revisionism
Victor David Hanson replies to backs a truck over Pat Buchanan.
Paris Hilton's secret shame
You have no idea the effect this has on me. I'm cereal.
(via Agent Bedhead)
June 14, 2008
Oceania has always been alllied with Eurasia
Is France America's new best friend? Umm. No. But good news from Ireland and a blow to the EUSSR.
Clinging to guns and religion and the blindingly obvious too, no doubt.
June 13, 2008
Why you should buy your girlfriend a Wii Fit
I was behind the curve on this one.
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission
So said Eleanor Roosevelt, a champion for universal human rights back in the day when the left still believed in the idea, believed such rights were innate, were morally superior to cruelty and ignorance and barbarism, were worth fighting and dying to preserve, protect and extend to every man, woman and child on earth. Today she is quoted by free people sneered at as racists for refusing to endorse the submission of women made evident in sexual-mutilation and child "marriage", refusing to accept apartheid law in place of common law, refusing to accept medieval sumptuary law in place of self-expression or blasphemy law for freedom of speech. Most grotesque of all, dismissed as racists by neo-Nazis and their allies and their apologists for the new crime of opposing genocidal anti-Semitism; this in living memory of the Holocaust.
With every concession to the forces of Dark Ages reaction we are conceding to the annihilation of what we are. Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary Jackson and Kathy Shaidle are right: Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission. We must not pander to the assumed superiority of those who would intimidate us. We must live as if the revolution has already happened.
I will not accept my opposition to an ideology dressed up as a religion is "racism". It is not. Accepting the submission of people far away about whom we know little is racism. I will not accept any excuse for the continuing mistreatment of hundreds of millions of people for their misfortune to have been born into political and spiritual bondage. I will not accept the rights my ancestors fought and died for - my close relatives fought and died for - can be ceded in favour of some cult's gibberish. My rights are granted by God and a firm resolve, not some Dark Ages fever dream. And I will not under any circumstances accept the authority of jumped up drumhead trials run by my moral and intellectual inferiors no matter the content or provenience of their particular lying holy scrolls.
Perhaps I am another American born in the wrong place becasue I quite literally take these truths to be self-evident:
The hell with their blasphemy laws dressed up as "human rights"; they have twisted those words into a great evil and Eleanor Roosevelt is turning in her grave. If they are going to charge me with something they should charge me with sedition.
The beclowning of io9
Lest anyone take it seriously, io9 beclowns itself with an absurd list of the top ten most realistic planets in science fiction. These people know nothing whatsoever about sf.
First of all, the Ringworld - while awesome - is not a planet. Second, exsqueeze me but where is Arrakis? Medea? Compared to the io9 list, Gor?
Finally, and most importantly... Naboo? I mean, they have included freaking Naboo? A planet whose core is made of water? At least Tatooine and Coruscant had the decency to be ripped off of interesting science fiction planets, even Kashyyyk is a more credibly rendered Lucas world (in the suppressed Christmas special version if not the heretical "prequels").
Related: The all too realistic clouds of Venus.
Saint Anthony, Patron Saint of Bacon
My co-workers at St. Elsewhere found this Saint Anthony figurine and proclaimed, "It's Nicholas!"
June 12, 2008
The chains of history always rust away
David Warren writes that while in the long run the pen may very well be mightier than the sword that in the short run power does indeed grow out of the barrel of the gun. Despite this dispiriting observation we must not despair, must remember "the chains of history always rust away."
My own political education was provided in part by several impressive Czech exiles from Communism, with whom I fell in as a young man. What I learned from them is that under an ideological regime, the best men live in jail, or are assigned to work in tanneries and collieries, where other good men may be found. The worst men live in luxury and power.
I have bad days like this too. And why not? For all the paper thin guarantees of the Charter, Canadians have no more rights before the law than Czech dissidents did forty years ago. This is not only the province of those few singled out for the extremity of their views or, increasingly, those singled out for their audacity to mock the Canadian Establishment. This is also about the systematic silencing of what used to be Canada across entire professions, academic disciplines, the federal and provincial civil service, the arts and the media. To merely hold as private opinion what was until recently the law of the land can now produce fines, imprisonment and - worst of all to my mind - public recantations.
There was a lot I did not like in what used to be Canada: A priggish, self-satisfied narrow-mindedness, the public imposition of private morality and a nose in every window. Much of which, I suspect, would not have bothered David Warren in the least, transparent as the imposition of his religious views on the rest of us might have been to him at the time. But it dawns on me now not a thing has changed; Canada's clothes are new but the sour expression remains.
Yet we must not despair. I share a conviction with David Warren if not the particulars of his faith. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierces me that in the end the Shadow is only a small and passing thing: there is light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
Related: Which element of the Periodic Table do you think should be taxed next?
Crush the fat bastards
I "detect" grounds for a human rights complaint as the obese of the world are attacked by the United Nations. Occam's Carbuncle, however, is in rare agreement with that august international body.
I'm thin and I eat like a pig! Yeah! They'll never catch me! Nevaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!
Joy Division: She's Lost Control
With a shout out to Agent Bedhead, whence the Eva Green pictorial. Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
June 11, 2008
Yes, it gets worse
Free Dominion has discovered the mediator assigned to their first Richard Warman defamation case just happens to be...
... ok, here is a brief interlude for Flea-readers south of the border. Think of Free Dominion as a publisher in a Kafka novel or possibly of a noiresque PKD plot-twist or better yet a particularly unrealistic Alan J. Pakula Sunday afternoon offering on TBS. Now think how this might apply to the actually existing legal system of the country just north of you. Seriously, Canadian Flea-readers should no longer be surprised but we can get popcorn while you think about it.
Doo dee doo dee doo.
Ready? To continue:
Free Dominion has discovered the mediator assigned to their first Richard Warman defamation case just happens to be... a co-worker of Richard Warman! Imagine the odds.
RTWT/AW
§ 111. enormity / enormousness
J.K. Rowling - who is a babe - delivered a commencement address to the ungrateful of Harvard. NPR reports.
Good news. Which brings me to my point: Enormousness? I gather NPR editors are a part of the stickler fifty-nine percent. But surely to deliver a speech requires no act of immensity and, given the audience, a sense of enormity is entirely appropriate. And screw Bartleby's committees besides, the big brains are still against them: Down with prescriptivism!
The Birthday Massacre: Looking Glass
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
South of Hambantota
The Chinese military builds a listening post on a Burmese island while the Chinese government builds a billion dollar port facility in Sri Lanka. India, meantime, has an airbase in Kazakhstan and has built a space monitoring post in Mongolia. The Great Game continues with new players and a new focus: Control of the shipping route south of Hambantota.
But just over the horizon runs one of the world's great trade arteries, the shipping lanes where thousands of vessels carry oil from the Middle East and raw materials to Asia, returning with television sets, toys and sneakers for European consumers. These tankers provide 80 percent of China's oil and 65 percent of India's — fuel desperately needed for the two countries' rapidly growing economies. Japan, too, is almost totally dependent on energy supplies shipped through the Indian Ocean.
The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) has concluded China is close to beginning the production of aircraft-carriers.
Too bad
Rosie DiManno introduces Malalai Kaker; wife, mother . . . and pistol-packing deputy police commander in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Shucking off the scarf impatiently, Kaker fires up a cigarette and inhales deeply. It's the first time I've ever seen an Afghan woman smoking. But Kaker is a woman of many firsts.
Via Damian at The Castle, citing Kaker: "For men, it is particularly insulting to be arrested by a female officer. Too bad."
June 10, 2008
I have never written science fiction
Describing himself as the heir to Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge-Luis Borges, Harlan Ellison is interviewed for the Studio 360 podcast. Look, I enjoy Ellison enormously and want to be like him when I grow up. But this is a bit much. Also, having finally seen Soldier and Demon With a Glass Hand, I think James Cameron has nothing to apologize for re. The Terminator.
Kerli: Walking On Air
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance (hat tip to an As Yet Unrecognized Creative Genius).
Related: An interview with Estonian pop princess, Kerli Kõiv. They had me at "Estonian".
Affected nonsense
Ace considers the affectations of Liberal Urban Professionals. His critique of Starbucks coffee - and Starbucks coffee drinkers - is exactly right; its consumption is purely symbolic. The people who claim to enjoy it prove they do not know what a real cup of coffee tastes like, thereby beclowning themselves.
And thus these idiotic cultural/tribal signifiers -- an otherwise inexplicable romance with rather overpriced and often-burned coffee sold in strip-malls and walking-malls by a vendor with some light European pretensions, a rage about this or that independent movie that all of the smart-set agrees is a must-see, which hot new vodka is currently the only one to drink, etc. -- occupy such a disproportionately large part of the Luppies' mindspace.
They're not just buying coffee at Starbucks, you see. They are, for just $3.99 per Venti, establishing or reinforcing, they think, that craved position in the social/cultural/cognitive elite that otherwise eludes them. Renting status at a steeply-discounted price, considering the various other ways -- either difficult or expensive or both -- to actually obtain it.
No surprises here
Find out Which Marvel Superhero Are You at LiquidGeneration.com!
Via Agent Bedhead, who is a DC girl.
June 09, 2008
Pink Floyd: Point me at the sky
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
June 07, 2008
An axe for the frozen sea inside us
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
- Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak (27 January 1904)
AC/DC: For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)
With a shout out to Ezra Levant who aims to misbehave. Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
This is what democracy looks like Update: What could Mark Steyn's punishment look like, if he's convicted by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal? It could look like this.
June 06, 2008
A nice knock-down argument for you
Jay Currie asks us to remember Alice as she stepped Through the Looking Glass - "as we have this week" - and met Humpty Dumpty.
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master— that’s all.”
Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one
Jon Schaff asks whether vampires have rights.*
Quick, paging Faiza Hirji to the human person's rights phone!
* This via Jonah Goldberg, who argues:
Carl Pham points out, I believe correctly, Goldberg is advancing a Manichaean and therefore heretical position.
Highland: O fortuna
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for
From an email: "I have some questions".
Why isn't the number 11 pronounced onety-one?If 4 out of 5 people SUFFER from diarrhea...does that mean that one out of five enjoys it?
Why do croutons come in airtight packages? Aren't they just stale bread to begin with?
If people from Poland are called Poles, then why aren't people from Holland called Holes?
If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?
Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist, but a person who drives a racecar is not called a racist?
If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?
If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, then doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed?
If Fed Ex and UPS were to merge, would they call it Fed UP?
Do Lipton Tea employees take 'coffee breaks?'
What hair color do they put on the driver's licenses of bald men?
I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks, so I wondered what do Chinese mothers use. Toothpicks?
Why do they put pictures of criminals up in the Post Office? What are we supposed to do, write to them? Why don't they just put their pictures on the postage stamps so the mailmen can look for them while they deliver the mail?
Is it true that you never really learn to swear until you learn to drive?
If a cow laughed, would milk come out of her nose?
Whatever happened to Preparations A through G?
As income tax time approaches, did you ever notice: When you put the two words 'The' and 'IRS' together, it spells 'THEIRS'?
June 05, 2008
The Viceroy and the Monarch
PrawfsBlawg considers academic obscurantism and the studied prose of Judith Butler (via Instapundit).
Related snark: Andrew Coyne covering the witch-trial in British Columbia, emphasis added. This one goes with a shout out to Cartoon U. grads everywhere.
Tangentially related: The "idiot bloggers" at the Western Standard. I have aired some of my disagreements with the Shotgun but somehow I find I am now proud to have been involved.
Nico: It has not taken long
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
It was all beginning to feel like a bad night in an opium den
The gothic revival of 1994 and a peculiar - to my mind, at least - refusal to describe oneself as goth.
All a bit strange to me. Once you have the outfit and the eyeliner, embarrassment is no longer a creditable indulgence. Something like horror writers describing themselves as "writers", "novelists" or, if pushed, as proponents of "dark fantasy". Fine, ok, but more interesting is to credit Nico with the first goth album, either The Marble Index or The End.
Murphy himself sensed something else, though. "Nico was gothic, but she was Mary Shelley gothic to everyone else's Hammer horror film gothic. They both did Frankenstein, but Nico's was real."
Related: The Bromley Contingent.
June 04, 2008
Be one of 18 million
American Flea-readers: You know what to do. Stand with Hillary.
Related: June 12 is Carbon Belch Day.
Timelords: Wow!
The Church of England considers Doctor Who as a teaching aid and, hopefully, a means to boost its popularity (hat tip to a Celtic Warrior Queen). I await word on the theological ramifications of hiding behind the sofa.
Yes, the Daleks. Because examples of metaphysical evil are in such short supply in today's England. A good idea nonetheless.
Related: Tissue of dead humans to be cloned. Soon Ghola Churchill will be back... and he will be pissed. Time to put some stick about.
Siouxsie and The Banshees: Face To Face
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
Bikinistar Galactica
I almost decided to borrow Ace's flaming skull for this one but I figure a picture is worth a thousand words. Or skulls and that.
June 03, 2008
Steyn Showtrial Day 2.2
Steyn Showtrial Day 2.2: Andrew Coyne calls it a day that will live in entropy.
To have her, please, just one day wake
Bear McCreary, conducting cue 4m21 of episode 10 of this season's "Battlestar Galactica" at Henson Recording Studios in Hollywood on a recent Monday afternoon.
...
'Galactica' offers some of the most innovative music on TV today. A glance at the score for 4m21 shows why: Chinese membrane flute, Indian bansuri flute, duduk (a soulful Armenian woodwind), erhu (Chinese violin), yialli tanbur (a Turkish lute), dumbek (Middle Eastern drum), Japanese taiko drums -- plus four brass players, those 30 strings and a 12-voice choir.
Related: McCreary interviewed at Galactica Live.
Also related: McGill grad, Alessandro Juliana performs Gaeta's Lament and thereby provides plot clues for viewers more attentive than I have been.
Posterity
L.E. Modesitt Jr. considers the posterity of todays SF&F writers: Will any of them outlive J.R.R. Tolkien, Edgar Allan Poe or Mary Shelley? Sales and popularity are poor indicators of potential influence.
June 02, 2008
Tolkien gots to get paid
Claiming the Tolkien family is owed £80m by New Line Cinema, Christopher Tolkien is engaged in "one last crusade" to stop The Hobbit film(s) from going ahead.
In an internet press conference last night, Jackson and del Toro answered questions about the new films, which will cost about £150m to make over the next three years.
The first will be rooted firmly in the original book The Hobbit, following the naive young Bilbo on a quest for dragon’s gold and showing how he obtained his all-powerful ring. The second will cover the 50 years between his return home and the events of The Lord of the Rings. That period is described in The Silmarillion, a collection of notes and tales assembled by Christopher Tolkien and published four years after his father’s death in 1973.
Aimee Mann: Wise Up
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.
June 01, 2008
Quickly! Back to the village!
How we carefully observe and protect the last uncontacted tribes.