Two Geek tastes that taste great together

Star Trek and Monty Python.

Enjoy.

Skippy of the Day: Press Secretary Tony Snow

Here's Tony, reacting to a reporter's asking of why Bush would veto the stem cell research bill:

"The simple answer is he thinks murder is wrong."

Yes, Tony. Thank you for that. What a brave stance for the President to make. What is his next heroic pronouncement going to be? Kittens are cute?

Simple answers from a Simpleton.

Further down on the same Think Progress link above is this analysis:

An embryo is not a baby or even a fetus; it’s a cluster of about 150 cells, also known as a blastocyst, which forms a few days after the joining of a sperm and egg, and is no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. Stem cells are derived from the center of this cluster, and are like biological blank slates. They have the potential to become any of the 200 kinds of cells that make up the human body.

Or, for a related and more humorous description, refer to George Carlin:

See the really hard-core people will tell you that life begins at fertilization. Fertilization, when the sperm fertilizes the egg. Which is usually a few moments after the man says "Gee honey, I was going to pull out but the phone rang and it startled me." Fertilization. But even after the egg is fertilized, it's still 6 or 7 days before the egg reaches the uterus, and pregnancy begins, and not every egg makes it that far! 80% of a woman's fertilized eggs are rinsed and flushed out of her body once a month during those delightful few days she has. They wind up on sanitary napkins, and yet they are fertilized eggs! So basically what these anti-abortion people are telling us is that any woman who's had more than 1 period is a serial killer!

Skippy of the Day: George W. Bush

I'm Ba-ack!

I have some comments to make about my trip, but I'll get to those later in the week.

To briefly inaugurate my return to Acrentropy, I have an old fashioned "Skippy" post. Bush, once again, has managed to make an ass of himself in front of a live microphone, and Sky News has the transcript. Amongst all the stuff he says, profane or otherwise, I thought the most humorous was this one:

"I'm just going to make it up, right here - I'm not going to talk too damn long like the rest of them."

Yeah, George. People hate listening to some guy talk at length about something he knows a thing or two about. They much prefer some doofus talking off-the-cuff about a subject he barely knows the basics of.

Я буду назад

I'm off on vacation for the next week, folks. In the meantime, I'll leave you with a series of Scenes From Classic American Science Fiction Films In The Form Of Medieval Russian Illuminated Manuscripts (via Metafilter). Enjoy!

Finally, a solid connection between World War II and the War on Terror

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Understatement Of The Week (Via Blah3):

Ten years after Pentagon leaders toughened policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel -- a move that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing by decorated Gulf War combat veteran Timothy McVeigh and the murder of a black couple by members of a skinhead gang in the elite 82nd Airborne Division -- large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world's best-trained, best-equipped fighting force. Military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way.

Neo-Nazis "stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they're inside, and they are hard-core," Department of Defense gang detective Scott Barfield told the Intelligence Report. "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," he added. "That's a problem."

Most definitely in the running for The Understatement Of The Year.

Travis Bickle was better

As much as a movie fanatic as I am, there are some classics I really don't care for. One of these is The Searchers, so it's nice to see a bubble-bursting critique of this "classic" from Stephen Metcalf over at Slate:

Coming to The Searchers for the first time, I was surprised at how fidgeted-together this supposedly great film is, how weird its quilting is, of unregenerate violence with doltish comic set pieces, all pitched against Ford's signature backdrop, the buttes and spires of Monument Valley. Though visually magnificent, the movie is otherwise off-putting to the contemporary sensibility, what with its when men were men, and women were hysterics mythos and an acting style that often appears frozen in tintype. (Hank Worden's turn, as the lovable village idiot, is particularly gruesome in this respect.)

There's much more to be read on the other side of the link. Go have a read.

Incidentally, he neglects to mention the other source of "odious comic relief" (patent pending) in the film: John Wayne's sidekick, played by Jeffrey Hunter. Hunter is known to most people as Captain Pike, Commander of the U.S.S. Enterprise in the pilot episode of Star Trek before Shatner came along. When I first saw the pilot (before I saw The Searchers), I wondered how different the series might have been had Hunter remained on the show.

After I saw The Searchers, I could only marvel at the subtle restraint of Shatner's acting technique in comparison.