Better than dying as a Geico Caveman

He was the first Lancelot in Camelot and a great singer besides, but Robert Goulet (1933-2007) will possibly be remembered by the younger generation for this commercial:



It doesn't feature any of his singing, but at least people know the man had a great sense of humor. RIP

"Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western"

This appeared on the Florida Times-Union website today:

Gee, I must have missed that Punk & Ska themed Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair they had a year ago.

Leading by example

Headline on Yahoo! News right now:

Turkey: U.S. objections will not stop Iraq invasion

Of all people, you'd think Bush would have learned that when a country is dead set to invade Iraq, they don't give a flying fig what the rest of the world thinks.

I Am Legend

Once again, in lieu of actual content, I'm putting up a purty picture. Let us hope, as always, that this remake will not suck.





Stay tuned next week for Acrentropy's very first book review!

Can Ebert be far behind?

It seems the latest person to discover my "100 Movies" clipshow is none other that Peter Bradshaw, film critic for The Guardian:



And it would also seem that his praise is high indeed, given that Bradshaw has been a self-proclaimed YouTube addict for the past year or so. At any rate, thank you from the bottom of my heart, Mr. Bradshaw. You made my day.

Speaking of Corn...

Mrs. Mosley is a big fan of the long departed Lois & Clark TV series. She's funneled this fandom into a fairly regular watching of Smallville these days, but has regrettably missed the last couple of episodes.

Fortunately, there's always the recaps over at Television Without Pity, where they describe last week's episode with the following sentence:

A trio of weather-controlling vixens violates the sanctity

of the Miss Sweet Corn pageant.

Oooooh boy. Methinks that Smallville is edging away from their trademark WB teen angst and into the goofiness of it's 1990's counterpart. All the more appropriate, then, that Dean Cain is guest starring in the next episode.

Meet the new boss

Well, I don't actually look like Michael Scott, and with any luck I sure as hell won't act like him, either.

But the simple news is that I am now, in fact, boss. Over my own branch.

Weird concept.

And though I have made previous statements on how my blogging will decrease in frequency due to work concerns, It looks like that this time it will in fact be true.

Don't wait up.

Now if only we lived in Canada...

It's my birthday today! And, according to IMDb's front page, I share my birthday with three famous names: Kirk Cameron (feh!), Luciano Pavarotti (hooray!), and Hugh Jackman (snikt!).

IMDb actually lists a lot more than just these three names. Most of the faces were unfamiliar to me, but one guy named Jonathan Crombie stood out. When I checked out his resume, I discovered that he played Gilbert, the handsome soulmate of Anne Shirley in all three of the Anne of Green Gables movies.



Since Mrs. Mosley is such a big fan of the books and the films, It's a neat little piece of kismet that her hubby shares the birthday of the guy who for many is Gilbert Blythe. Anyway, Happy Birthday, Jonathan!

Bud Ekins: R.I.P.

Just as I'm sure there are some fans of Titanic who watch and hope that maybe this time they'll steer clear of the iceberg, I'll always watch the end of The Great Escape and hope that maybe this time Hilts will make it over that final fence.

Bud Ekins (Stuntman) 1930-2007

Another bad day for the local glass-and-steel megachurch.

I feel sorry for the members of this church:

A Jacksonville man is behind bars and waiting extradition on 16 counts of indecent liberties with a child.

According to the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Anthony Philip Denton was picked up on a fugitive warrant out of North Carolina.

He is charged with sexual assault, 16 counts of felony indecent liberties with a child.

The charges relate to alleged child molestation in North Carolina decades ago.

A victim's advocate close to the case tells First Coast News that the 46-year-old Denton served as a youth pastor and a music director in Fayetteville.

Denton could be taken back to North Carolina for trial.

Several church members at Trinity Baptist here in Jacksonville told First Coast News that Denton was on the counseling staff at the church.

Ed Trent, the attorney for Trinity Baptist said he had no comment but he understood that Denton was not employed by trinity any longer but, "at one point had some association with the church besides membership."

Denton is behind bars without bond and has a court date set for November 2nd.

November is also the time former Pastor Bob Gray from Trinity is scheduled for trial.

Gray is charged with sexually molesting several girls and a boy.

(snicker)

The NYT knows it's history. John McCain does not.

Food for thought, torn whole cloth from the New York Times (via Daily Kos):

JOHN McCAIN was not on the campus of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University last year for very long — the senator, who once referred to Mr. Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance," was there to receive an honorary degree — but he seems to have picked up some theology along with his academic hood. In an interview with Beliefnet.com last weekend, Mr. McCain repeated what is an article of faith among many American evangelicals: "the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation."

According to Scripture, however, believers are to be wary of all mortal powers. Their home is the kingdom of God, which transcends all earthly things, not any particular nation-state. The Psalmist advises believers to "put not your trust in princes." The author of Job says that the Lord "shows no partiality to princes nor regards the rich above the poor, for they are all the work of his hands." Before Pilate, Jesus says, "My kingdom is not of this world." And if, as Paul writes in Galatians, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus," then it is difficult to see how there could be a distinction in God's eyes between, say, an American and an Australian. In fact, there is no distinction if you believe Peter’s words in the Acts of the Apostles: "I most certainly believe now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears him and does what is right is welcome to him."

The kingdom Jesus preached was radical. Not only are nations irrelevant, but families are, too: he instructs those who would be his disciples to give up all they have and all those they know to follow him.

The only acknowledgment of religion in the original Constitution is a utilitarian one: the document is dated "in the year of our Lord 1787." Even the religion clause of the First Amendment is framed dryly and without reference to any particular faith. The Connecticut ratifying convention debated rewriting the preamble to take note of God’s authority, but the effort failed.

A pseudonymous opponent of the Connecticut proposal had some fun with the notion of a deity who would, in a sense, be checking the index for his name: "A low mind may imagine that God, like a foolish old man, will think himself slighted and dishonored if he is not complimented with a seat or a prologue of recognition in the Constitution." Instead, the framers, the opponent wrote in The American Mercury, "come to us in the plain language of common sense and propose to our understanding a system of government as the invention of mere human wisdom; no deity comes down to dictate it, not a God appears in a dream to propose any part of it."

While many states maintained established churches and religious tests for office — Massachusetts was the last to disestablish, in 1833 — the federal framers, in their refusal to link civil rights to religious observance or adherence, helped create a culture of religious liberty that ultimately carried the day.

Thomas Jefferson said that his bill for religious liberty in Virginia was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu, and infidel of every denomination." When George Washington was inaugurated in New York in April 1789, Gershom Seixas, the hazan of Shearith Israel, was listed among the city’s clergymen (there were 14 in New York at the time) — a sign of acceptance and respect. The next year, Washington wrote the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., saying, "happily the government of the United States ... gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. ... Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

Andrew Jackson resisted bids in the 1820s to form a "Christian party in politics." Abraham Lincoln buried a proposed "Christian amendment" to the Constitution to declare the nation's fealty to Jesus. Theodore Roosevelt defended William Howard Taft, a Unitarian, from religious attacks by supporters of William Jennings Bryan.

The founders were not anti-religion. Many of them were faithful in their personal lives, and in their public language they evoked God. They grounded the founding principle of the nation — that all men are created equal — in the divine. But they wanted faith to be one thread in the country's tapestry, not the whole tapestry.

In the 1790s, in the waters off Tripoli, pirates were making sport of American shipping near the Barbary Coast. Toward the end of his second term, Washington sent Joel Barlow, the diplomat-poet, to Tripoli to settle matters, and the resulting treaty, finished after Washington left office, bought a few years of peace. Article 11 of this long-ago document says that "as the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion," there should be no cause for conflict over differences of "religious opinion" between countries.

The treaty passed the Senate unanimously. Mr. McCain is not the only American who would find it useful reading.

Did I mention my birthday is on Friday?

I finally saw this in Target last night after catching glimpses of it on the net all week.

Introducing the (cough) "TIE Crawler":



Yes, it does look ridiculous, but I'd still looooooove to have one of these treaded monstrosities.

"Cut the chatter, Red Two."

The latest news concerning the whacked-out, soldier-of-fortune outfit Blackwater is this nice little anecdote: Back in 2004, a plane piloted by a couple of Blackwater employees crashed and killed everyone on board (including three U.S. soldiers).

"I swear to God, they wouldn't pay me if they knew how much fun this was," the doomed plane's cockpit voice recorder captured the pilot saying shortly before the November 27, 2004, crash.

The account of the crash emerged during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Blackwater's performance in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In its November 2006 report on the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that Blackwater provided insufficient oversight and guidance of the pilots involved in the 2004 crash. Dispatchers failed to ensure that pilots followed their flight plan and did not adequately track flights in the air.

The NTSB said the military "did not provide adequate oversight of the contract carrier's operations in Afghanistan."

The company's chairman, Erik Prince, appeared before the committee to defend the firm Tuesday.

The twin-engine CASA C-212, a light cargo plane operated by Blackwater sister company Presidential Airways, crashed in a box canyon well off its planned route from Bagram Air Base to the western Afghan town of Shindand.

"You're an X-wing fighter Star Wars man," an NTSB report quoted the plane's co-pilot, Loren Hammer, saying during the flight -- a reference to the dizzying battle in the 1977 film.

"You're [expletive] right. This is fun," the pilot, Noel English, responded.

About eight minutes later, the plane slammed into the wall of the canyon, which was flanked by ridgelines that rose nearly a mile above surrounding terrain.

To all those Star Wars fans who are also thinking of joining some outfit like this, do us a favor:

Get yourself an Xbox and stay the f&ck home!

To fill the vaccuum

Nope. I still have nothing original to post, so allow me to offer this instead.

It's only one LEGO picture, but ooooohhh it's a sweet one!

Delroy Lindo Quote of the Month: October 2007

It's been busy lately, so I'm not doing much setup this time 'round.

The Core. Remember that one? Big dumb movie about scientists drilling to the center of the earth. It was actually somewhat entertaining, but that was mainly from the character interaction and not the plot or action scenes. One humorous aspect is the ongoing feud between Zimsky, played to the egotistical hilt by Stanley Tucci, and Braz, played by Lindo. Here is one of the best (albeit brief) exchanges:

Cmdr. Robert Iverson: "What do you make of this?"

Dr. Conrad Zimsky: "The mantle is a chemical hodgepodge of... a variety of elements..."

Dr. Ed 'Braz' Brazzleton: "Say it with me: 'I don't know'."