The "Eye of the Needle" bit? Pitched.

Thank you, Metafilter, for alerting me to this story:

"Writing at Belief.net, Rod Dreher highlights a new initiative on the religious right: the Conservative Bible Project. The effort aims to rewrite the Bible to remove its notorious liberal bias and clarify the gospel basis of free-market economics."

I am fully in support of this effort. These folks have been saying that their party is the party of God for years now and that liberals are all godless. Well, now they're inadvertently fessing up that Christianity as currently drawn from the Bible is liberal. I guess they got tired of all the "forgiveness" and "giving to the poor" and "blessed are the meek" and all the rest of that pinko garbage. What do you want to bet they somehow shoehorn an eleventh commandment in there about homosexuality?

Incidentally, the comment thread at the Metafilter post is a great read.


UPDATE: This comment is in the running for my favorite:

"I'm perfectly happy with any distractions that keep these "conservatives" from their attempts to rigorously buttfuck the rest of us. Hell, I'm in for ten bucks towards a fresh pack of crayons, have at it jackasses."

Know your temporal rules.

Despite being totally removed from the current video gaming world, I tune in religiously to the weekly Zero Punctuation reviews, which are consistently hilarious. The latest one had a nice breakdown of time travel in film:

"When your dealing with time travel, its important to establish whose rules are in play. Is this 12 Monkeys rules where you cant change shit. Or Back to the Future rules where you can change shit but the time line is kind of easy going about it. Or Terminator rules where you can change shit but then maybe you can’t change shit and then you make a god awful TV series and Christian Bale yells at someone."

Honest wages? Foreign concept!

I just read this story over on Metafilter, and I have one message for Tim Langdell: Suck it!


And, of course, a side question for KKC: You ever hear about this yahoo before?

Random LEGO mecha post

Hadn't had one of those in a while, but after coming across this one recently, I had to post it:

The end of the world done wrong and done right.

Ever since I found out about the movie 2012, I've had conflicting feelings about it. Witness this movie clip from 2012 that was just released on YouTube:



This clip manages to upset me more than the trailer. The trailer showed this destruction and more, but in viewing it I was more just absorbing the violent and horrible end of all that we know. This clip isolates us into one city with the main characters as thousands upon thousands die around them and we are supposed to be having... fun?

Roland Emmerich's biggest hit, Independence Day, handled the destruction differently. CGI wasn't nearly as advanced, so most of the more notable destruction (such as the White House) was model work. The new technologies allow not only multiple skyscrapers falling over but also the level of detail that shows individual bodies and cars being tossed around. Also, the method of destruction in ID4 was by alien weaponry, which was pretty much instantaneous death. Cities get wiped from the map pretty quickly. Here, it is a loooonnnnnggg drawn out death that is rendered so vividly that you want to look away (or at least I did).

Then there is the manner of escape. To be sure, ID4 had escapes both plausible (the White House staff on the helicopter) and ridiculous (Vivica A. Fox and her immortal dog). Yet having Cusack and family perpetually inches away from collapsing earth seems too much. They also try to get too cutesy with the driving through a glass building and (heaven help me) that damn rolling doughnut. Add to all this their choice of a limo to escape in. A limo?!?! Not exactly the most spry of vehicles. I suppose that's part of where my anger comes from: It's OK for a movie to say that these specific people will survive out of millions because they are the main characters, but at least give them an escape that doesn't insult those poor schmucks in faster and more agile cars.

So what do you get when you have this level of technology but a far more somber treatment of the subject? You get Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds. I've already gushed at how incredible I thought that film was when I saw it in the theater. In a way, the beginning of that film very much mirrors this scene: The main character runs home after witnessing the beginning of the destruction, rounds up the family quickly and gets them all into a vehicle to get out of the city. Yet, Spielberg handled it with so much more depth and sensitivity that it's almost an insult to compare the two.

In the end, the escape from New Jersey in War of the Worlds was an exercise in terror and suspense. The scene in 2012 is a theme park ride with people being killed by the thousands all around you.

Steven, I find that I appreciate you more and more with each passing year.

Roscoe Lee Browne Quote of the Month: October 2009

The miniseries King follows the life of Martin Luther King from his first recruitment into the civil rights struggle all the way to his death at a motel in Memphis. Browne is only in one scene but, as always, he steals it. King's first trip to the White House is as part of a group of Civil Rights leaders, the most vocal of which is Philip Harrison (played by Browne). The end of the scene has Harrison and Robert F. Kennedy (Cliff De Young) going back and forth until Harrison finally challenges RFK to confront the one man that has all the information:

Philip Harrison: "I've been in this office many times, and I have talked with many men sitting in that chair. The best of them was Roosevelt, and I had to threaten him with a mass march on the Capitol before he would issue decrees prohibiting job discrimination in the war industries on the basis of color. Just so he would do –"

Robert F. Kennedy: "Yes, that's all very well, but you see, I am the Attorney General of the United States, and right now, at this very moment, there is a group of your freedom riders in a church in Montgomery, surrounded by a mob that wants to kill them! How am I going to get them out of there?!"

Philip Harrison: "Let them kill them." (pause as everyone looks at him) "Let them kill them!" (pause) "Churches have been bombed. A minister's been beaten to death because he wanted to give support to black people. Children have been on the verge of starvation. What do you give a damn about those people in that church for? Because some newspaper stories have been written about them?"

Robert F. Kennedy: "Well, why don't you get proof for me, and then we can prosecute. Because we can't prosecute without proof."

Philip Harrison: "The FBI gets proof every day of beatings, rapes, and, yes, murders! But those reports are suppressed- or destroyed. There hasn't been one single conviction! But you won't do anything about that, will you? And I'll tell you why. Because you don't want to have a confrontation with J. Edgar Hoover! Do you?!"