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Jesus fucking CHRIST.

SHUT UP. SHUT UP.

Just SHUT THE FUCK UP, you horrible horrible HORRIBLE CREATURE!!!


Richard Dawkins Accuses Ahmed Mohamed of Committing Fraud


Somebody PLEASE tell me why the fucking fuckety FUCK someone awesome like Carl Sagan had to die young while a COPROCEPHALIC SCUMBAG like Dawkins gets to live on endlessly spewing his GODDAMN RACIST LOGORRHEA all over us???

How the HELL can anyone keep saying they admire this disgusting miscreant?


You know, it's been quite a while since we've had one, but I think it's just about time for another chorus.

Maestro Denis, if you please?

Asshole - Denis Leary


No, you racist coward, you're not some Expert On Global Terrorist Relations trying to warn the world of Its Grave Peril.

You're JUST. A FUCKING. ASSHOLE.


Just...just...

SHUT. THE FUCK. UP ALREADY.

GodDAMNit.

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darkness
    stars
        the water loud in my ears

  him diving
      plumbing the depths

and me swimming
          swimming in his mouth

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Why is it that every film about a male teacher is about how great he is, and how he rescues his students from ennui and cynicism, and transforms the lives of everyone around him even though he's too humble to know what he's doing, while every film about a female teacher is about how cutely mousy she is, and how she can't find love because she's just too into her books, until some generic Hot Guy from her past shows up to sweep her off her feet and take her away from her drab little life and her twenty cats? Films about male teachers are always dramas; films about female teachers are overwhelmingly rom-coms.

Does anyone else see this?

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Will the real Mitt Romney please stand up?


When will it EVER END???

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CBC is sponsoring a contest for writers: write an opening sentence that breaks as many of Elmore Leonard's rules for writers as possible. There are ten rules, all of them quite reasonable, which is what makes it so much fun to try and break them all.

I'm not sure, but I think I managed to hit all of them in my entry, which I am posting here for your amusement:

( Dark, weighty clouds burgeoning with cold and depressing rain... )


Heehee! I love writing these things. Nothing like an excuse to get really purple!

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Parents deliberately exposing their children to chicken pox because they refuse to get them vaccinated.


Not only are these loons abusing their kids by exposing them to potentially deadly diseases, they're actually sending the viruses through the mail.

Read that again. SENDING THE VIRUSES THROUGH THE MAIL.

So not only are they trying to infect their children, they're also potentially exposing any postal workers who handle their diseased envelopes, as well as other letters and packages which could infect completely unrelated citizens.

This is a level of insanity that I never thought I'd see in the U.S. This used to be a country that prided itself on the basic education of its citizens. But with the erosion of public trust in science and the destruction of school curricula, we've gotten to the point where actual adults - people entrusted with the LIVES OF CHILDREN - think it's somehow a good idea to send DEADLY DISEASES THROUGH THE MAIL.

This is beyond headdesk crazy. This gets to the level of actually killing yourself through noggin-bashing. We've reached the stage of apocalypse, kids. Soon we'll be barricading ourselves in our houses to avoid the staggering hordes of drooling know-nothings.

I hope if any of you even HEARS of anyone you know getting up to this crazy shit, you will call the authorities IMMEDIATELY. This is utterly and completely illegal. A person will do serious jail time for this, as WELL THEY SHOULD.


I...uh...ARGHGHJRRJG:SD:GJWEJ:SDNGWEU F{IHJPWE{VNEFPJW}{VN
"QWFE"MDSKF ":KLSDF "LKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH KILLKILLKILLSTABBITYSTABBITYSTABSTABSTAB

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Just popped in over at TORn, and I see all the same dim-witted arguments about what PJ is doing "wrong" are being dredged up again. Kili is too cute! Nori's hair is too weird! THORIN'S BEARD ISN'T LONG ENOUGH!!! (I shit you not, the ninnies over there really are arguing about that.) Like all of this hadn't been hashed over ad nauseam the last time.

It's just too fucking FUN.

From The New York Times:


I paused at what looked like an image of a double-bitted medieval hatchet. “That’s Smaug,” del Toro said. It was an overhead view: “See, he’s like a flying axe.” Del Toro thinks that monsters should appear transformed when viewed from a fresh angle, lest the audience lose a sense of awe. Defining silhouettes is the first step in good monster design, he said. “Then you start playing with movement. The next element of design is color. And then finally—finally—comes detail. A lot of people go the other way, and just pile up a lot of detail.”

I turned to a lateral image of the dragon. Smaug’s body, as del Toro had imagined it, was unusually long and thin. The bones of its wings were articulated on the dorsal side, giving the creature a slithery softness across its belly. “It’s a little bit more like a snake,” he said. I thought of his big Russian painting. Del Toro had written that the beast would alight “like a water bird.”

Smaug’s front legs looked disproportionately small, like those of a T. rex. This would allow the dragon to assume a different aspect in closeup: the camera could capture “hand” gestures and facial expressions in one tight frame, avoiding the quivery distractions of wings and tail. (Smaug is a voluble, manipulative dragon; Tolkien describes him as having “an overwhelming personality.”) Smaug’s eyes, del Toro added, were “going to be sculpturally very hidden.” This would create a sense of drama when the thieving Bilbo stirs the beast from slumber.

Del Toro wanted to be creative with the wing placement. “Dragon design can be broken into essentially two species,” he explained at one point. Most had wings attached to the forelimbs. “The only other variation is the anatomically incorrect variation of the six-appendage creature”—four legs, like a horse, with two additional winged arms. “But there’s no large creature on earth that has six appendages!” He had become frustrated while sketching dragons that followed these schemes. The journal had a discarded prototype. “Now, that’s a dragon you’ve seen before,” he said. “I just added these samurai legs. That doesn’t work for me.”

Del Toro’s production design for “The Hobbit” seemed similarly intent on avoiding things that viewers had seen before. Whereas Jackson’s compositions had been framed by the azure New Zealand sky, del Toro planned to employ digital “sky replacement,” for a more “painterly effect.” Sometimes, instead of shooting in an actual forest, he wanted to shoot amid artificial trees that mimicked the “drawings in Tolkien’s book.” In his journal, I spied many creatures with no precedent in Tolkien, such as an armor-plated troll that curls into a ball of metal plates. Del Toro said that it would be boring to make a slavish adaptation. “Hellboy,” he noted, was based on a popular comic-book series, but he had liberally changed the story line, and the demon had become an emotionally clumsy nerd. “I am Hellboy,” he said.

Even the major characters of “The Hobbit” bore del Toro’s watermark. In one sketch, the dwarf Thorin, depicted in battle, wore a surreal helmet that appeared to be sprouting antlers. “They’re thorns—his name is Thorin, after all,” he said. The flourish reminded me of a similar arboreal creature in “Hellboy II,” which was slightly worrying. That film is so overpopulated with monsters that it begins to feel like a Halloween party overrun by crashers. Midway through the film, del Toro stages a delightful but extraneous action sequence in a creature-clogged “troll market” hidden beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The scene comes across as del Toro’s bid to supplant the famous Cantina scene in “Star Wars.”


I am SO FUCKING GLAD this guy ISN'T going to be directing The Hobbit. Those descriptions are DISGUSTING. All we need is some anti-Tolkien asshole redesigning everything just because he thinks the books are BORING.

I really hated Pan's Labyrinth - yeah, I know everyone goes on about it being "genius" but I find it narcissistic and depressing - and it really upset me when I heard he was going to be involved with the new film. I rejoiced when he quit. I'm apprehensive because PJ talks about hanging onto this guy's ideas...I mean, painted skies? Pillbug trolls? WHAT THE FUCK.

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( Click for desktop-size image )

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Special Comment for August 15, 2010:

A comment on the inaccurately-described "Ground Zero Mosque"...


Damn, I love this man.

I'm constantly boggled by how easily Americans will roll over and do EXACTLY what the insane followers of Bin Laden and others like him want them to do. They work themselves up into a xenophobic lather, willing to shred the Constitution and turn this country into EXACTLY the kind of hateful, dictatorial, bigoted theocracy the terrorists accuse it of being. That any of them can so breezily complain that our standards aren't the same as SAUDI ARABIA? Just...ARGH STABSTABSTAB DIEDIEDIE...

One other thing: as a Spaniard-American, I feel very very sad that the builders of this cultural center felt the need to change the name of the place from "Cordoba House". Cordoba was one of the great cities of Muslim Spain, a beautiful place and a place where many faiths co-existed peacefully, learning from each other. I've been there. I've also been to Granada and seen the Alhambra, the glorious Muslim palace and grounds, filled with exquisite tilework and self-regulating water gardens that still function on their own a thousand years later. I would sooner live there than any tacky American McMansion ever made, no matter how big and swank.

Did you know that it was the Muslims who rescued the knowledge of ancient Greece - the writings of Aristotle and Plato, the geometry of Euclid, etc. - from obscurity? The Christians BURNED it. That the Muslims were the first to develop from it sophisticated forms of mathematics, architecture, and other sciences? That it wasn't until wandering monks sat down with the Muslims in Spain and worked on translating THEIR books (which they FREELY SHARED with everyone, by the way) that Christians even heard of weird concepts like, say, zero? Goddess' own truth - the Europeans had no concept of zero until they learned about it from the Arab sages. They were still using the Roman style of counting, which made their math extremely limited. This is why their architecture sucked so much. The Muslim learning revolutionized the very foundations of European culture. Our numbers - 1, 2, 3, 4...? There's a reason they're called Arabic numbers. Mathematics is littered with words straight from Arabic like algebra, azimuth, and the aforementioned zero, because they had no possible translation in any of the European languages, because the concepts didn't even exist up in the supposedly "godly" countries of Europe. The Muslims GAVE this knowledge to any who were interested. Think about that.

So you see why "Cordoba House" would have been a perfect name for a place dedicated to interfaith dialogue and peace. And the FUCKING IGNORANT YAHOOS that have the ear of the national media in this country managed to scare these folks into changing it.

I could not possibly put into words the utter disgust I feel these days at what passes for discourse in this country. We have no guts anymore. We allow our nation to be hijacked by stupid troglodytes who have no interest in learning or knowing the slightest thing about the real world we live in. They shame this country, they shame their religion, they shame the very human race.