Daily Archives: September 24, 2006

coolest movie trailer ever: 300

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Stumbled across this on Daily Kos, a site that I go to maybe once a year; at least I picked the right day to go. Check out this incredible trailer from the new film based on the Frank Miller graphic novel. Rimjob, the blogger who did this writeup, knows his military history as well as his Star Trek; the Spartan/Klingon parallels were in Gene Roddenberry‘s mind when he was writing the original, and have only grown stronger since then.

No points for guessing who the Romulans were based on.

I must say, there’s just something amusing about writing “That Rimjob really knows his Spartans.” And vice versa, no doubt. By all means, go read the whole entry.

I’ve always been fascinated by historic last stands against insurmountable odds. The defense of Wake Island in World War II is an amazing history to read about. I’ve always seen events like this as living proof that a small band of people can, by force of will & a little luck, stand up to anyone or anything.

The trailer for the film version of Frank Miller‘s “300” has just been released. The movie & graphic novel deal with the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, where a few thousand greeks (led by King Leonidas & his 300 Spartans) fought an army of invading Persians that numbered in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The trailer looks good, although they have the Spartan King Leonidas talking about “a new age of freedom”. Spartan society is probably the closest Humans have come to being like Klingons…

Well, he’s put his finger on it there. Persians are what they were called before they were called Iranians, and there’s no question the marketing people will be peeing themselves in spasmodic glee at how well the current international situation reflects the slant in this film.

Perhaps you’ll recall Michael Medved‘s attempt to claim that the Lord of the Rings films were about the terrorist threat against America, and perhaps you will recall as well the new asshole that Viggo Mortensen (cum laude B.A. in Government, St.Lawrence University) ripped him for that. Tolkien himself nearly rose from the grave at that apostasy.

In any case, it will be interesting to see how the Iranians/Persians are demonized, how the Spartans are Americanized (dare I cross my fingers for NOT?), and how the images are used as cheap emotional triggers by all the many squirming sides to this debate.

Until the users start using, we can simply enjoy the trailer itself. One last thing. I note with admiration that it contains the single most definitive ingredient to an awesome YouTube: a soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails.

Rock on.

Americans complain the open market is costing them a fortune!

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Fighting Terrorism since 1492 

They’d rather let their crops rot on the trees than respond to the market forces and increase their wages. There is no labour shortage in the US fruit picking labour market; there is a gap between the asking price for labour and the price the farmers are willing to pay.

It is much the same in Canada, although instead of Mexicans we have migrant Quebecois. They smoke almost as much pot, but they complain about the climate less, as you would, too, if you were from James Bay or some godforsaken spot.

In the Fraser Valley, just outside of Vancouver, there haveChe is watching been several convictions over the past decade for slavery, as well as numerous housing infractions (it is Canada; insulation and roofs are advisable and may be compulsory, imagine that!), assault (beating) charges, one murder that I can recall, as well as several cases of holding workers’ children or elderly parents captive until their work contract was up. Passports? Oh yeah, they keep the passports, too, which is one reason they’re not getting so many immigrants who want to work in this industry; the word has gone around India, and now the farmers are whining loudly about uppity brown people.

Which brings us back to the Americans:

“It’s a laborer’s market right now. My pickers all look at me and say, ‘How much are you going to pay?‘ ” he said. “They all have cell phones, and all they have to do is call up the road and see if anybody else is paying a little more.”

Farmers in that situation are left to decide whether it’s even worth picking the fruit, or just letting it rot, said Dan Fazio, director of employer services for the Washington state Farm Bureau.

“I can fill 10,000 jobs at $15 an hour right now,” he Norma Rae has your answer!said. “And we knew this was going to happen. We’ve been warning people for years.”

Farmers across the West for years have complained about a labor shortage to harvest their fruits, vegetables and other crops. Critics have always discounted those claims, saying farmers who pay higher wages have plenty of help.

“At some point, it’s like the boy who cried wolf,” said David Groves, spokesman for the Washington State Labor Council. “It’s just that, at different points in time, we’ve heard this, and we’ve seen evidence that there’s not a labor shortage. There’s just an unwillingness to pay decent wages.”

from the vault: my firstest-ever blog entry

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Terminal CityAnd I stand by it to this day!

Terminal City is a home for my observations from and about the Downtown EastSide of Vancouver. It is not affiliated with that zine [now deceased] or the snobby club downtown.All rights reserved, in fact, all rights revert to me including the right to own property. I’d like some, please. You can email it if you have a broadband connection, right?

You are welcome to read and to forward from the blog as long as you properly list me as the source. Forwarding or appropriating content from this blog without properly crediting the source indicates your acceptance of the fact that I will remove both your right AND left legs, slowly.

Have a happy!

Welcome to Carrall Street

Elmo scandal grows: A Two – Two, ah! ah! ah! – Two-Faced Snake

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From Scott Feschuk‘s book Searching for Michael Jackson’s Nose.

Does it say too much about me to mention that I spent 45 minutes searching for this on the internet before realizing the possibility that I’d come across it somewhere else? Like in a … what’s the word? Book, right? After all, I used to read stuff that existed in the physical as well as ethereal world. But that was many years ago…

Elmo needs an intervention

A Two – Two, Ah! Ah! Ah! – Two-Faced Snake

PRODUCER: Hey. Excuse me, you, with the feathers. Listen, we’re from A&E. We’re here to shoot some footage for a Biography special on Elmo. You know him?

BIG BIRD (sipping a latte): Sure, I know Elmo. Everyone on Sesame Street knows Elmo.

PRODUCER: Great. That’s great. Let us just get the camera set up here and we’ll ask you a few questions. Stories, anecdotes, fond memories – whatever you can come up with.

BIG BIRD: Oh, you don’t want to talk to me. Elmo and I used to be good pals, but he doesn’t hang out on the street much any more. I hardly ever see him these days.

PRODUCER: So talk about old times, when Elmo was first getting to be famous. [to camera operator] You ready? Okay, shoot.

BIG BIRD: All right. Well, that was when it all started to change, really. Elmo had always been a sweet little guy, even when he was starting to make it big. But then one year Bob McGrath took him to the Grammys, and Elmo was never the same.

PRODUCER: Got a bit of a big head, did he?

BIG BIRD: Well, not exactly. I think what happened is that at one of those after-parties, Bob introduced Elmo to P.Diddy, and they just hit it off. Dancing, laughing, partying. One minute Elmo‘s learning his alphabet and practicing his phonics, the next he’s chugging Cristal and calling Maria “bee-yatch.”

PRODUCER: Cut. That’s great, Bird, great. But we’re working more from the Elmo-is-adored-by-children-around-the-world angle.

BIG BIRD: Oh sure, he’s all tee-hee for the cameras. But yell “Cut!” these days and the kid’s got a voice like Harvey Fierstein and a temper like Sean Penn.

PRODUCER: Right. [Sees someone else is coming]Okay, thanks, Bird. Hey! Hey, blue guy. Over here. How about you? What do you make of Elmo‘s remarkable success?

COOKIE MONSTER: Me no want to talk about him.

PRODUCER: Come on, our viewers would appreciate it.

COOKIE MONSTER: Me say this. Me used to get all best cookies, real gourmet product. Now, budget all go to Elmo. Big trailer, masseuse, guest directors for his segments. Quentin Tarantino take forty-seven days to shoot balls-falling-out-of-closet gag. An then they make me do sketch with frickin’ Dutch windmill cookies. Dutch windmill cookies. [Pause] Dutch. Windmill. Cookies.

PRODUCER: Er, right… You two! Stop! What about you two fellows? What can you tell us about Elmo?

ERNIE: Well, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but he’s a good kid.

PRODUCER: Finally! Get the camera over here!

ERNIE: A lot of folks on Sesame Street are jealous, though. I mean, a guy like Grover has been paying his dues for decades – never bellyaching, not even when they stuffed him into a white disco suit for the cover of the Sesame Street Fever album – and he gets jack-all in the way of respect around here. But Elmo giggles and moults fof fifteen minutes every day and he’s got Emmys out the wazoo. It gets a little hard to take. Just yesterday, he shows up late for our rhyming-game segment. Eyes as red as his fur. And I’m not even going to tell you how he replied when I started the sketch by saying, “Pucker.”

BERT (nudging his way in): You know at the end of the show, there’s that bit where they say, “Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter F and the number five,” or something like that. Well, Elmo has a hissy fit one day – storms off the set! – when the producers won’t agree to change it to “Sesame Street is brought to you by Big Ol’ Hank’s Burger Hut and Tequila Bar.” They always comp Elmo down at Big Ol’ Hank’s. The rest of us can’t even run a friggin’ tab.

PRODUCER: CUt. [Sighs] Burn that tape.

ERNIE: I heard that’s why they gave him his own show a few years back – to keep him from bolting. Fox was after him to play the lead in a bawdy new sitcom opposite Tori Spelling and one of the California Raisins.

PRODUCER: Wel, um… thanks. Cripes. [Dejectedly] How about you, sir? Do you have a minute to tell our viewers what you think of Elmo?

COUNT VON COUNT: Yes, I have precisely one – one, ah! ah! ah! – one minute to spare. So let me tell you a story, Mr. Producer Man. I run a little sideline business on Sesame Street: a public service involving financial repercussions resulting from the outcomes of certain events of a sporting nature, if you catch my drift. [The producer stares ahead vacantly]  I’m a friggin’ bookie. Anyway, Elmo gets on the show, starts earning a little green. Next thing I know he’s knocking on my castle door. Kid got lucky at first, real lucky: he always bet that the baker guy with the cakes would wind up falling down those stairs. Clumsy oaf cost me a fortune! But then Elmo started wagering on hopscotch, on rock-paper-scissors – he was out of control, and his luck turned bad. Soon, the kid’s into me for five – five, ah! ah! ah! – for five large. But every time I go to collect, I get a face-full of fat furry enforcer, telling me to scram. You ask me, the kid’s a two – two, ah! ah! ah! – two-faced snake.

There is a pause.

PRODUCER: Screw this. Let’s hit the road. I say we try soemthing a little easier this afternoon, like getting Mia Farrow to say some nice things for the Woody Allen bio.

As the producer and his crew depart, they walk past the Sesame Street Four Seasons, where Elmo is in the hot tub shooting a segment for his show, Elmo’s World.

ELMO (wearing sunglasses and nursing a highball while bikinied Muppets peel grapes for him): Hi, kids! Elmo loves you! Today we’re going to learn all about “groupies.”

TWAT update: Bush wins on torture; the compromise that isn’t

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Coalition of the Willing...to Power 

From the Project for the Old American Century:

It is being called a “compromise,” but that seems to be in name only. The “rebellion” by key Senate Republicans against Bush’s wishes for constitutional right to torture, hold prisoners without charges or access to courts, approve military tribunals and the use of “secret” and hearsay evidence, has essentially survived intact.


The only compromise seems to be that it is being called one. It gives McCain, Warner, and Graham a nice political out, and casts a light of “reasonableness” for Bush. Beyond that it is a disaster – and it is likely to become law.

The “compromise” bills moved forward on September 22, 2006 are all titled the “Military Commissions Act of 2006″…

The proposed legislation pretty much gives the White House what they wanted in terms of “interrogation” issues, legality of detainee status, abridging the Geneva Conventions, utilizing coerced testimony and secret evidence, and placing all of this outside the bounds of review by the Supreme Court (see Sec. 3 Subchapter IV).

According to analysts, for example Adam Liptak in the NY Times:

“It would impose new legal standards that it forbids the courts to enforce.

It would guarantee terrorist masterminds charged with war crimes an array of procedural protections. But it would bar hundreds of minor figures and people who say they are innocent bystanders from access to the courts to challenge their potentially lifelong detentions.”

Caroline Fredrickson of the ACLU is quoted in a press release as stating:

“This is a compromise of America’s commitment to the rule of law. The proposal would make the core protections of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions irrelevant and unenforceable. It deliberately provides a ‘get out of jail free card’ to the administration’s top torture officials, and backdates that card nine years. These are tactics expected of repressive regimes, not the American government.

“Also under the proposal, the president would have the authority to declare what is – and what is not – a grave breach of the War Crimes Act, making the president his own judge and jury. This provision would give him unilateral authority to declare certain torture and abuse legal and sound. In a telling move, during a call with reporters today, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley would not even answer a question about whether waterboarding would be permitted under the agreement.

“The agreement would also violate time-honored American due process standards by permitting the use of evidence coerced through cruel and abusive treatment. We urge lawmakers to stand firm in their commitment to American values and reject this charade of a compromise.”

This proposed legislation, if allowed to move forward, does not make us safer. What it does do is to overrule the Supreme Court decisions which have gone against the Bush administration in regards to the rights of detainees, the legality of Military Tribunals (renamed “Military Commissions” under this legislation), and allowing the use of testimony gained through torture and evidence which no one is allowed to see. It also would give the President the right under U.S. law to determine what the Geneva Convention means, and the authority to ignore it if he (she) so wishes.

It is alarming that the ruling of the commissions is placed beyond the review of the Supreme Court, and that the fitness of Commission Judges is also beyond challenge. The only oversight that I see in this legislation is a once yearly report to the various armed services committee.

The proposed legislation is also retroactive (as far as I can tell) as it removes any starting date from consideration. Previous versions had specified August 1, 2005. In this regard, it protects the administration, CIA, contractors, and others, from investigation or prosecution for war crimes. As far as I can tell from the legislation and various analyses, it is a buffer both internationally and domestically.

Of further note, it is not constrained to “alien enemy combatants,” but expands to anyone who is suspected of aiding and abetting suspected “terrorists,” or enemy combatants.

With the capitulation of McCain, Warner, and Graham, it seems highly likely that this bill will breeze through despite any resistance from the Democrats. So it is a (huge) win for the administration, a win for the political aspirations of McCain, Warner and Graham, and a huge loss for the citizens of the United States, and the international laws to which we have been a party for almost 60 years.

More details available on the site.