At last! They legalized it!

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Appellate Court Rules Media Can Legally Lie. – SierraTimes.Com

This is what happened:
“On February 14, a Florida Appeals court ruled there is absolutely nothing illegal about lying, concealing or distorting information by a major press organization. The court reversed the $425,000 jury verdict in favor of journalist Jane Akre who charged she was pressured by Fox Television management and lawyers to air what she knew and documented to be false information. ”

This is yet another reason why I mistrust all the things on the news right now.

Thanks for this story, Tantek.

_Swingers_

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I finally watched the whole movie last night.

It’s funny, I can read a book for hours, but it’s really hard for me to sit through a movie.

Anyway, it is so real. It could practically be a home movie of the dorky guys around here. all those actor wanna-bees. It was amazing to see MY NEIGHBORHOOD all over the screen. Holy crap! The dude was even wearing an In’N’Out shirt.
Man…If I’d seen it when i lived in alaska, I wouldn’t have believed any of it. But now that i’m HERE, every line is true. Who could ever believe that people could act like such idiots? You have to see it to believe it.

The whole thing was that the guys just needed to let go of their desperate clench on self-importance.

The guy couldn’t get over his girlfriend, but that wasn’t the main issue. He just had to get over himself. Him and the rest of the guys.

Mr. Deeds goes to Town

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Since It’s A Wonderful Life was adopted by people born in the earlier half of the 20th century as THE movie to watch at Christmas, movies directed by Frank Capra have taken on the same old-people smell we associate with grandma.

IWAL certainly seems to have that depression era “Just be glad you are as well off as you are!” feeling, making those of us who did not live through those hard times feel like rolling our eyes.

Most of his movies have a kind of preachy, American propaganda feel to them.

HOWEVER, on a little closer examination, his movies are not all advocating that we sit back in a rocking chair with our hands folded, our job of being American handily completed upon birth.

I wanted to see Mr. Deeds Goes To Town and get some more impressions about Capra’s style and message. I’m interested in American propaganda, and I wanted to see how well he fit into the genre.

Now that I’ve seen it, I’m not so sure Capra falls under that category. I’m seeing a message of “enjoy the real blessings in your life.” It’s hard to distinguish that message sometimes, because the iconic symbols of American kitsch (Kundera-style) get so wrapped up in it.

Those icons, like Apple-pie, ideal womanhood as a June Cleaver clone, men in suits and hats, people who know their neighbors, little houses all in a row, tree-lined streets with perfect tidiness…I don’t know what else. These get in the way of me seeing the story as real or credible. I just see a doll house.

Mr. Deeds is a sweet man, and the movie is really funny in parts. The Tuba cracks me up, and so do the Pixelated old ladies. I think that there is a lot that’s real behind the dolls…I could see someone I know, someone who really exists behaving the way that Mr. Deeds does. Heck, if you play a tuba, you wouldn’t stop just because you inherited a ton of money.

In a lot of ways, Mr. Deeds was going against expectation, not behaving the way the other little dolls did. He held on to common sense and didn’t lose track of what was important. He had compassion and humanity.

And naturally, Gary Cooper is great.

Dave Matthews’ “Crash into me”

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I’ve had this Dave Matthews’ album forever ( Crash ). I had seen him in concert at the H.O.R.D.E festival before I bought the album. I like him live, and I eventually bought the CD.

I hadn’t listened to it in a while, so when I saw it in my collection I grabbed it. I remember I liked it, but it was a vague memory.

The whole album is good, really. I love the fact that he uses horns! More horns, we don’t hear enough horns anymore.

But after hitting track three, I remember why I have a fuzzy memory about the album.

That song…”Crash into me”…Oh man…I LOVE that song…wow…SO much. It’s like chocolate.

Like really good chocolate
your favorite kind
Left in a bowl on the coffee table
Full

I can’t help but go back and back.
I try to get through the album and then I just go back to hear that song. It has this melt-me effect. It sort of turns me into a loose slithery heavy-lidded person.

WHICH I REALLY SHOULDN’T BE WHILE I’M AT WORK.
but that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, I thought I would share that.

Maybe I’ll do another review later of other chocolate-type songs. I know I have a few of them.

There nothing like a little competition

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I’ve been posting almost everything I put on here on Blogcritics lately. Eric Olsen, the founder and nagger of blogcritics has this list of the side bar of top posters. To my surprise, I was on it. I was on the top 20! I had no idea.

WELL, I am not one to lose ground. I started making a huge point of posting on that site. I’m now number 7.

I am very inspired by things like that, measures of how I’m doing.

It’s been fun, just making myself post.

I decided that I should stop worrying about being perfect, and just kick out reviews. I think it’s actually improved my writing. Imagine!

I have also been spending a lot of time reading other people’s entries, and commenting on things.

People comment on my stuff there, too. I get very few comments here, mostly because I get very few visitors here.

What can I say?

But there, I got TOTALLY flamed for my Catch 22 review. Imagine! People can be rude.

And we’ve been having a big ole discussion about the top 100 novels list.

Makes me want to publish more lists.

But it also makes me feel like I have to be careful. I don’t like being flamed. But that’s the risk you take when you put your stuff out there. Not everyone is going to like you.

I still like doing it. It’s worth it to me.

War Protestors–What are they good for?

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I am a huge fan of peace. Destruction, oppression of peoples, killing, people getting hurt or going hungry are usually part of war. I don’t want any of those things to happen to me, and I don’t want any of those things to happen to ANYBODY.

However:

Those sorts of things happen outside of war, too. And war can be necessary.

Not everyone agrees with me. I have been friends with Mennonites who believed that it was never ever right to take another human being’s life.

“That’s is God’s right alone,” they said.

“But what if a criminal were holding a gun to your wife’s head, and you could step in and kill him before he killed her?”

“I would have to let God take care of that. It’s wrong to take a life.”

I’ve lived with Quakers who had similar beliefs. I think that is a beautiful thing. I have tremendous respect for their determination to live by their values. I’m sure the world is a better place because they are in it.

I myself would blast the living crap out of anyone that threatened my loved ones. I would be so angry that someone was trying to hurt them.

This is so much of what I hear from peace protestors, too.

ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY

whoa.
Back it up, people. What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

I like peace. I WANT to be on your side. My heart says, Don’t hurt people!
But the wiser grown-up part of me also knows that it takes hard measures to set things right after they have gone wrong.

And something has gone wrong. Saddam did stuff he shouldn’t do.

So did America.

So did the U.N.

And what do we do now? We can’t go back in time and make a better choice. We are now, we are here, living with the consequences of everything that went before.

What type of consequences do we want to live with in the future? The consequences of war? Or the consequences of not-war?

I say not-war, because I am not sure that the state of things in Iraq were what I could call peace.

Or the state of things in America.

I am not sure about it. I don’t know. I wish I understood. I wish that I had been reading things all along and learning about the situation before it had come to this.

Now, it’s come to this. And what am I to think? War is not a good thing. What can we do to not have war?

How can I know what is the most important?

I can’t devote my whole day to studying it out. Most people in America cannot do this.

BUT!

We have thought of that. This smart for-the-people-by-the-people place I get to live in, we came up with freedom of speech, and then later came up with University systems. We, taxpayers, pay to have people sit around and study important things out so they can get back to us and tell us.

Sometimes, it is in the form of a classroom, this telling us. But when something is so broadly important, I think that these people that I pay to study things should get the information out to more people.

I’m not saying tell me what to think, but laying out the options might be nice.

I feel very let down by the people who are supposed to be our intellectuals.

I think they are not doing their jobs.

Tenure was set up to give professors the security to be daring in their thoughts, to reach farther than others might with safety. I think its a good idea.

But all those people are not putting it out there.

Give me a break! If I can get 4 spams of Michael Moore’s stuff, why can’t someone whose opinion is vastly more informed give me an email that makes some logical sense?

This was first made clear to me with the “Not is our Name” petition that went around the ‘net after September 11.

The statement is one of great weight. I want to resist the bad things they talk about.

But I was not given one shred of evidence of the things they accused the government of doing.

If it is happening, why don’t they point to it?

We are only told to “resist.”

Oh, wait. We are also told to post little globes everywhere.

I feel betrayed. Many of the people who signed that list are people I admire.

Why haven’t they given us a better argument?

Truth shouldn’t be difficult to prove. The fact that no evidence is given makes me wonder if it’s true.

Citizen 13660

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13660 was the number given to the author family as they were inducted into the japanese internment camps.

This book is unusual, different from any other book I’d read because it was highly illustrated. Mine Okubo wrote the book about her experience in a Japanese internment camp. She is a talented artist, and naturally, she didn’t stop being a talented artist in the internment camp.

What’s with camps? Concentration camps, gulags, internment camps…It seems like the WWII era was all about camps. Everybody had to have one.

Okubo made drawings of the things that happened in the camps. She starts the book before the camps, a really dramatic place to start. She lived in the San Francisco area and was just about her business. It was hard for her to believe that the camps would be happening.

But they did.

She drew herself into almost all the drawings. The pictures are very cartoon-like, and have the same sort of impact as a comic book. THe expression on her face (it’s hard to draw the right expression!) tells so much about the story. Her writing is very factual, Since the story is so dramatic on it’s own, she doesn’t need to get on a soapbox about how she felt or how it was wrong or what should have happened.

It’s a great book. It’s probably a really great book to give to Jr. High students or high school students to learn about history. Because the book is presented plainly, and with a lot of respect for the reader. You are definitely allowed to make up your own mind.

I am far more interested in history when I can associate a story with it. This book does that very well.

The Professor and the Madman

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This book is mostly about the Oxford English Dictionary. The title is talking about the relationship between one of the main editors and one of the main contributors who happened to be in an insane asylum.

Honestly, I’m not sure that I would have been excited to read a whole book about those topics separately, but together I think it really worked.

I didn’t know about the history of dictionaries before I read this book. I knew that the OED was the biggest dictionary, but I didn’t really understand why.

Now I know. THey set out the catalog and define every single word in the language. Oh my god! And without computers!

So it took a lot of volunteers to do it. That’s where the madman comes in. W.C. Minor had killed someone in a delusionary state, and ended up in an asylum for the criminally insane.

But he was a highly educated man, and wanted to help out this dictionary project. He had a lot of free time.

For me, one of the most poignant things about this work is the practical story of how to live productively under the constraints of mental illness.

I hate it when I’m sick. I have all these things I wish I could do. But my body is too weak for me to run around and do them. I feel like my body has let me down.

I can not imagine how frustrating it would be to not be able to rely on your mind. I have to be honest, it scares me. Maybe that’s part of the stigma of being insane. People are afraid it might happen to them.

But it’s not fair to the people who suffer under this difficulty. We, the rest of the community should be compassionate and help the people who have this problem.

The Hours, especially the movie, kind of deals with mental illness too.Virginia Woolfe talks about her struggles to find fulfillment and balance in her life and yet protect herself from her own mind’s machinations.

Minor found this incredibly great outlet, working on the dictionary. He was a great asset to the work, and left behind a marvelous legacy. It would be wonderful if other mentally ill people were able to do the same.

The book was a really quick read, and very informative about dictionaries. The story of the madman Minor made it really more personal too.

You are so money!

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My super cool and smart girlfriends came over to visit for the weekend.

One of them had to visit her brother. She was going to surprise him by showing up at his party unannounced.

But my other friend had never been to Hollywood. We had to go all over and see the walk, and browse the hooker shoe stores and vintage clothing shops.

We kept seeing places that were in the movie Swingers. It turns out that my favorite club The Derby is in it.

So, now I have to rent Swingers.

For the times…

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The Theory’s method of signing out made me think of this.

I do hope for peace.

This is my favorite
MIR-
The russian (and generally slavic) word for peace. If you write it like this:
MUP
It looks closer to the cyrillic letters.

I like it because the same exact word, same exact spelling, same exact pronunciation means
WORLD

So,
MIRA MIR

or
MUPA MUP

means “peace for the world”

mirnyy
or
MUPHUU

means
“peaceful”

this is the name of the town in Yakutia, Russia that I lived in for a year.
It was peaceful, and I am grateful that it was peaceful when I was there, in 1992.

Moscow had just been less peaceful.

That is my personal favorite word for peace.

Mir, mira mir, dla vcex

peace, world peace, for all.