Wait. What did he say about Dewey?

There are some directors out there whose films are consistently examined and interpreted to within an inch of their celluloid lives. And I bet more than a few of them look at all that's written and say to themselves, "No, I didn't mean all that, but you go ahead and knock yourself out".

I know how they feel:

I found the above clip linked at Roger Ebert's website, and was really fascinated by it. On the one hand, organizing a history of film strictly through numeric reference seems decidedly offbeat, kind of like only collecting books with blue covers, or only buying jazz records that have pictures of birds on the cover. On the other hand, its very ecccentricity gives it at least two advantages: 1) It avoids a more obvious chronological, generic, narrative or thematic organization, taking cinema away from analytical models that rely too much on literary antecdents, or what Steve Johnson calls "the morality play" of much popular culture critique. Instead, the countdown structure allows for a cutting across time, and across a variety of cinemas, only allowing us cinephiliac moments and glimpses, instead of lengthier scenes, which makes for fun juxtapositions; 2) In organizing in this way, the clip becomes a parody of the quantitative, of numeric systems like the Dewey Decimal System, and of any number of ways in which Hollywood uses numbers as a brander of quality (the blurb next to the clip on its original YouTube page suggests we read it as a parody of things like the AFI lists, but we might also see it poking fun at weekly obsessions with the box office, or all those movies which claim a kind of pseduo-scientific degree of knowledge by hammering their audience with statistics. It also seems notable that a lot of the clips center on questions of age or time--self-reflexive markers of history, hipness, and memory). By extension, then, the project asks us to (re) think the pattern of organization more broadly. Where might this kind of analysis-- one closer to Brecht's scrap collector than to more topdown forms of analysis-- take us next?

Please do not take this post as a criticism or rebuke of this guy's thoughts. I'm just still getting a kick out of it after all these many months.

"That's beauty, eh?"

Thanks to Need Coffee for letting me know about the big two-four anniversary for Bob and Doug.

I guess this YouTube clip will have to hold me over until the DVD is released beyond the borders of the Great White North.

Skippy of the Day: Mitt Romney

Just the other day, I was thinking that (a) I hadn't done a "Skippy" post in a while and (b) I hadn't used the word "asshat" in an even longer time. Mitt to the rescue!

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

As Think Progress points out in their article:

According to the CIA World Factbook (which uses 2002 numbers), Mormons comprise just 2 percent of the U.S. population, while Jews and Muslims comprise 1 percent each. Based on 2001 numbers, there were 2.8 million Mormons and 1.1 million Muslims in the United States. Surveys since that time indicate that the number of Muslims may have eclipsed the number of Mormons living in the U.S.

So Mitt, going by your logic, you won't mind at all if the American people don't vote for you to be President because, well, I cannot see that electing a Mormon would be justified.

Asshat.

"Warning, this is an emergency. I've chipped a nail"

Such a pity. A beloved British public servant has been given the sack for having a sense of humor.

Metafilter has links to the audio clips responsible.

"Defender of the Crown" minus torchlight

It's a moment of Geek Zen when somebody uses LEGO to recreate a scene from a classic Commodore 64 game.

You cannot, cannot make stuff like this up.

I'm posting the link to this Boing Boing post, but I also took a screenshot as well because this little tidbit (which serves as the Alpha and Omega of the modern Conservative movement) should be preserved for future generations. They should know what kind of pinheaded pricks held political sway in this nation for far too long.

Update: It appears from the comments on the Boing Boing entry that this might be a prank. Looking at the numbers again, I have to concede that that's likely. So it would appear, despite my post title, you can make stuff like this up (it doesn't prevent it from having a ring of truth, though).