Chief of Army, Lieutenant General David Morrison, AO, to the Australian Army


...meanwhile, in the US, generals whine about how fighting sexism "endangers national security".

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From Amazon.com:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who has purchased or rated "The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition)" or other films in the ( M ) > McKellen, Ian category, you might like to know that "Acting Shakespeare" will be released on January 12, 2010. You can pre-order yours at a savings of $6.99 by following the link below.

Acting Shakespeare

Ian McKellen

List Price: $29.98
Price: $22.99
You Save: $6.99
(23%)

Release Date: January 12, 2010

To learn more about Acting Shakespeare, please visit the following page at Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002SF9YMU/ref=snp_dp


OMG, how cool is this?? I got to see that show back in 1984, and again in 1986, when McKellen brought it to the U.S. on tour. It was at the Geffen Playhouse, a wonderful little theater-in-the-round in Westwood. He was not a very well-known actor in the States back then, but I'd seen him in a couple of BBC productions, and it was in the middle of my Renaissance Faire days when I was steeped in learning about Elizabethan culture and Shakespeare, so I was WAAAAYYYY jazzed to get tix to this show.

It was SO FABULOUS. An entire evening of hearing him teach about Shakespeare. I learned so much from that show - about the history, the speeches, the language. About creating a character from Shakespeare's words, and how to take apart the lines and mine them for emotional information.

Here's how the show started. (Keep in mind that the first time I saw it, I had front row seats in this little 300-seat theater, so I was about eight feet away from him.) He's sitting in a beautiful old armchair, kind of lolling with one leg propped up on the arm, very casual/disdainful/sexy. He looks slowly around the theater, and begins to do Richard III:

Ay, Edward will use women honourably.
Would he were wasted, marrow, bones and all,
That from his loins no hopeful branch may spring,
To cross me from the golden time I look for!

Beautiful. He swung his foot idly as he did this, with a little half-smile on his face, and you almost got the feeling that he'd had a bit to drink and was having fun murmuring to himself. It was fascinating hearing him roll the words around, how much he obviously loved the language. And then he got to this bit:

Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard;
What other pleasure can the world afford?
I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap,

And right there, on that line, he turned his head and looked STRAIGHT AT ME. And yowza, lemme tell you I damn near MELTED in the seat cushion. It was quite direct, his gaze very piercing. Of course I knew what he was doing, picking a random audience member to play with and acting the hell out of the moment. But it was certainly a ton of fun to get that gaze and give it BACK full measure with a nice lascivious smile. This is the absolute irreplaceable brilliance of theater, something that films cannot possible ever achieve - a moment of connection with a character, with an actor, with another human being.

And then came an even more amazing thing. As he continued on with the speech, he pulled his leg down off the arm of the chair, and slowly got up. And we saw that what we'd taken for a languid, sensual pose was actually the deformity of his spine, so as he rose his body stayed in the same bent, hunched posture. It was an exquisite transformation, the more so because it only happened in the audience's mind. He'd been twisted and crippled all along, we just didn't know it. His character had such force and intensity that we'd never questioned what we saw. So amazing. I'll never forget it.

There were other wonderful things about that night. So many fantastic anecdotes from his career (which at the time was almost all stage work), including the one about John Gielgud that still makes me laugh. In one section, he presented Macbeth's speech about his wife, "She would have died hereafter...", first in the manner and cadence of an actual Elizabethan actor such as Richard Burbage, and then he took some time to take the speech apart, line by line and word by word, telling us how he and his fellow thespians approach the beautiful language, and all the complexities that exist in it, and how the colors and shades and intricacies inform a performance. And then he did the speech again, but this time as he himself would perform it, and the contrast was truly extraordinary. I learned so much about the evolution of theater from that one section of the evening alone.

And then the finale! He asked how many people in the audience would like to come up onstage and act with him. O'course my hand flew up along with a bunch of others. He picked out about 12 of us, and invited us up. Then we went into a huddle and he explained what he wanted us to do, which was to place ourselves randomly on the stage and stand quietly until he signalled with his hand behind his back, at which point we were to drop like a sack of potatoes and lie dead on the floor. He introduced an anecdote to the audience about what happened to an actor friend of his who had to play a scene (I think it was from Henry V) where he was supposedly standing on a field of battle and would read a long list of the names of the dead, but when he opened the scroll found it blank, so he had to improvise the names. He then signalled, we dropped, and then came the hard part - trying like hell not to laugh as he re-enacted his friend's utter consternation and bumbling attempts to come up with a long list of plausible names. I cannot tell you what a fun and fitting ending that was to such a great, great evening.


So yeah, you better believe I'm gonna be buying this DVD. *runs to pre-order*

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This has not been a great week for Glenn Beck. Stop giggling, please.

First, he's rushed to the hospital with appendicitis. (Insert joke about useless organ here.) Poor baby! Imagine the tears.

As always, Jon Stewart has a little something to say on the matter:

The 11/3 Project - Jon Explains It All - Beck Style!

I'm just a concerned American citizen like you, questioning
what's going on inside Glenn Beck...



Want more? The Onion also has a Very Important Story involving our favorite Wingnut Loonyman:

Breaking News - Victim of Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck

A grisly death only TV host Glenn Beck could deserve...


It's so sad! Why was this lovely young girl pinned to a retaining wall to burn to death - and not Glenn Beck? WHERE IS THE JUSTICE???

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Barney Frank hits another one out of the park...

Rachel Maddow Show: Barney Frank on compromise

This notion of bipartisanship runs contrary to democracy...


How do I love Barney Frank? Let me count the ways.

Check out his point about bipartisanship. He is absolutely right. We had an election, and the right LOST by an overwhelming majority. It is against the spirit of democracy for them to cry now and demand that we do what they say. NO SIR. The people of America voted the right wing OUT. That means they don't get to run things anymore. They were certainly fine with having things their own way when they were in the seat of power. Now they should shut the fuck up and accept that they screwed up and were DEFEATED. That's what democracy is supposed to be - the voice of the people, not the voice of the poobahs terrified that they fucked themselves up and might be forced to change with the times.


I wish we could clone Barney Frank and send the copies out to every pundit show and "news" program on TV. This man argues the issues better than anyone I've seen in a LOT of years. He knows the facts, knows the counterarguments, is nimble and quick, and doesn't take shit from ANYONE. THIS is the guy we need.

Think there's any chance of him running for President someday?

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Now if this isn't a satisfying image, I don't know what is.

Buzz Aldrin lays a sharp one on a moon-landing denier


I don't know about you, but these idiots make me want to throw a punch, too. I mean, can you imagine confronting one of our astronauts, a national hero, and spewing this kind of ill-mannered garbage? If nothing else, he deserved that jab for being so FUCKING RUDE.

Mr. Aldrin, please, do rock on.

Okay all, I made another Karl picspam over at ontd_startrek. Reproducing it here for my f-list.


Not every one of Karl's films has been artistically amazing, or at least well-budgeted. Some of them only have one really stellar component - KARL URBAN.





Yep, it's that Down Under Crack!Fic masterpiece, The (Irrefutable) Truth about Demons. I found a copy and sat down to watch this sucker. Oh, I was warned against it, believe you me. But in my new-found passion for Teh Karl, I decided I could take anything. Girding my loins, I commenced.

And you know what? I LOVED IT. It is brilliantly deranged, and yet still silly as hell. It really does unspool just like a good round of crack!fic tig, getting more and more ridiculous, dark and LOLarious as it goes along.

As for Karl, OH PLEASE YES. He spends around 90% of the movie either sweating, half-naked, bleeding or terrified, often two or more of those together. As well as half-naked. His pouty lips and his thunderous eyebrows get a full work-out, and he does some fantastic shrieking and struggling. He gives great snark (loved the crack about Aleister Crowley), has his nipples tweaked, and looks slavishly edible in a dog collar. Also, he cries beautifully. When he weeps, I'm minded of Louis de Lioncourt - "his tears became him like jewels".

Did I mention he spends a lot of this movie half-naked? Because he does.


( That's what you get when you fuck around with that X-files shit! )

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I just posted this over at ontd_startrek, and realized I never did tell any of you on my friends list about this. So here it is:


Last year, Leonard Nimoy, he of the pointy ears and ROCKIN' Vulcan lute stylings, released a book of photographs titled The Full Body Project, in which were presented a collection of really beautiful black-and-white portraits of women who are, shall we say, NOT shaped like bicycles. This really appealed to me, as I've not only never been thin, but have been friends and lovers with more than one lovely zaftig lady.


"The average American woman," Nimoy writes, "weighs 25 percent more than the models selling the clothes. There is a huge industry built up around selling women ways to get their bodies closer to the fantasy ideal. Pills, diets, surgery, workout programs. . . . The message is 'You don't look right. If you buy our product, you can get there.'"


So when I heard he was doing a gallery show and signing, ( I just had to go... )

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OMG I LOVE YOU STEPHEN!!!!

*flails hysterically*

Truth From the Gut

Stephen goes after Glenn Beck


There's no way I can even begin to quote from this. Just trust me: go and worship at the Altar of Colbert.