Newley Purnell

WFMY:

Jacksonville, FL — It didn’t take long for students in the 2nd period 7th grade science class at Lake Shore Middle School to realize something was wrong with their substitute teacher.

Now that’s what I call higher education. *Rimshot*

I saw “Syriana” last night, which is writer/director Stephen Gaghan’s attempt to do for geo-political oil-related power brokering and international espionage what his film “Traffic” did for America’s war on drugs: i.e. shed light on an unexamined world and explose it warts and all.

Clooney as a hard-bitten CIA spook steals the show. And without revealing any spoilers, I’ll just say the flick contains a vivid monologue defending corruption — “corruption is what keeps us from eating scraps of meat in the street,” says a smarmy lobbyist — that people will be quoting for years to come.

If you’ve seen the film and, like me, you need some help deciphering the complex storyline, the Wikipedia entry for the film is a decent resource.

Syriana

AP:

Richard Pryor, the caustic yet perceptive actor-comedian who lived dangerously close to the edge both on stage and off, has died, his ex-wife said Saturday. He was 65.

Pryor died of a heart attack at his home in the San Fernando Valley sometime late Friday or early Saturday, Flyn Pryor said. He had been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system.

Wow:

I have enclosed below a series of pictures to show how the US government starting around 1994 went back in time with remote sensing and holographic radiation longitudinal emf and sound wave holographic energy beams as shown in the movie time tunnel to place different computer generated holographic archetypes of different Nordic, Celtic, and Aryan faces and other attributes around my body as if I were a microcosm of the center of the universe…

(Via memepool.)

The WSJ’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg tells us that book publishers are now building buzz long before new titles are published, just as Hollywood studios aim to generate pre-release excitement so their movies “open big.”

There’s another parallel here that Trachtenberg neglects. Namely, that when it comes down to it, publishers — just like Hollywood studio honchos — never truly know which of their offerings will become runaway hits.

As William Goldman* explains in his fantastically entertaining film industry expose, “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” it’s all essentially a crap shoot. Seemingly sure-thing, can’t miss, big-budget, star-laden pictures sometimes bomb, and sleeper indie films are occasionally and inexplicably big hits — there is no universal recipe for mass success.

The book business works a lot like that, too. So I’m not surprised to see the New York publishing mandarins co-opting the techniques of their entertainment industry counterparts on the left coast.

*Goldman, incidentally, is one of my favorite writers ever. If you haven’t read him, get thee to a book merchant and make a purchase STAT.

Hilarious. (Thanks, Chad C.)

CPO Dan Gazanski:

After I graduated from high school, I was making good money painting houses, my girlfriend was cool with a rockin’ little bod, and I partied almost every night. But after a year or so, I started to wonder: “If someone wrote a book about my life, would anyone want to read it?”

I wanted discipline and training, but I didn’t want to give up my hard-rockin’ lifestyle. Where, I wondered, could that elusive combination of rigid authoritarian structure and unbridled monster power chords be found? Then I saw a commercial for the U.S. Navy. That’s when I knew what to do with my life.

And guess what? The U.S. Navy fucking kicks ass, dude. From the time we’re awoken at 06:00 by System Of A Down or Disturbed till we drift off to sleep to an instrumental guitar version of “Taps” performed by Zakk Wylde, it’s a nonstop rock block…

Dear Meatheads at My Gym:

Yes, I’m talkin’ to you, fellas: you guys who talk loudly and incessantly and enthusiastically about your fantasy football teams:

Please view this graphic and let me know if you have any questions.

Best,
Newley
P.S. Thanks for the inspiration and the image, Mr. Sun.

CNN:

Rosa Parks, who helped trigger the civil rights movement in the 1950s, died Monday, her longtime friends told CNN. She was 92.

Parks inspired the civil rights movement when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955.

WSJ:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — When an Arab satellite TV network, MBC, decided to introduce “The Simpsons” to the Middle East, they knew the family would have to make some fundamental lifestyle changes.

“Omar Shamshoon,” as he is called on the show, looks like the same Homer Simpson, but he has given up beer and bacon, which are both against Islam, and he no longer hangs out at “seedy bars with bums and lowlifes.” In Arabia, Homer’s beer is soda, and his hot dogs are barbequed Egyptian beef sausages. And the donut-shaped snacks he gobbles are the traditional Arab cookies called kahk.

An Arabized “Simpsons” — called “Al Shamshoon” — made its debut in the Arab world earlier this month, in time for Ramadan, a time of high TV viewership. It uses the original “Simpsons” animation, but the voices are dubbed into Arabic and the scripts have been adapted to make the show more accessible, and acceptable, to Arab audiences.

Simpsons

Click on the image and prepare to read the best caption in the history of journalism.

(From Functional Ambivalent via kentuckyshade.)

NYT: “The Mohawk Becomes, Well, Cute.”

My diary for the last five days looks like this. I had Thursday and Friday off of work so it was an extra-long weekend for me.

On Thursday, I took Wendy’s advice and went to see the Hirshhorn Museum’s Visual Music exhibition. Interesting stuff. I was only disappointed that they weren’t playing “Dark Side of the Rainbow.”

Here’s a pick I took of a some swirling lights projected onto a screen:

Then I strolled down to the National Museum of the American Indian. An absolute disappointment. A bunch of crap crammed into a funny-looking building. I couldn’t tell one exhibit from the next — it was as if the building were jammed with relics and dioramas and video displays, turned upside down and shaken about, and then set back down again for visitors to pick through. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

The weather was gorgeous on Friday, so I went out to hike the Billy Goat Trail in Great Falls, Maryland. Nice to get outside. I snapped this pic:

That night I went out with some friends to Local 16. Nice place. But very crowded.

On Saturday I had lunch with my grandmother in Falls Church, VA, and then went to meet my old pal Mike F. for lunch. You’ll recall that Mike has provided commentary on these pages regarding Ecuadorian politics; he and I taught English there, and he recently returned to the States. We hadn’t seen each other in nearly two years (for those of you who don’t know me, Mike’s on the left):

Then, that night, I had the pleasure of going to a neighbor’s BBQ and watching the exceptionally funny “Team America: World Police,” a film I’d been meaning to see for a while. Warning: steer clear of it if you’ve got a problem with graphic scenes depicting marionette sex.

I got to see another great movie — one of a much different ilk — on Sunday night: “Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids.” The director, a photographer, gave cameras to prostitutes’ children; the movie’s about the photos they take and their struggle to escape the slum. Worth checking out.

And finally, to cap off a fine weekend, I had the pleasure of dining yesterday at Five Guys, purveyors of the best damned cheeseburgers I’ve ever tasted. Here’s what my meal looked like (click the photo for notes):

Sigh. Now I need a vacation.

A new Truman Capote biopic is opening on September 30th. The film tells the story of Capote investigating and writing the classic “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood. The movie’s called “Capote,” and the trailer is promising. Philip Seymour Hoffman will play TC, and the movie also features the excellent Catherine Keener and Chris Cooper.

Capote is one of my favorite writers. He wrote stunning prose and he lived an out-sized life, once allegedly proclaiming “I am three things: An alcoholic, a homosexual, and a genius.”

His first novel, Other Voices Other Rooms, which he published at age 24, contains passages so eloquent that, if you have a single sensitive bone in your body, may well make you weep.

Such as:

The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hyprocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.

Capote

CNN:

Conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson has called for the United States to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, calling him “a terrific danger” bent on exporting Communism and Islamic extremism across the Americas.

“If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it,” Robertson told viewers on his “The 700 Club” show Monday. “It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.”

Robertson, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, called Chavez “a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us badly.”

Pat Robertson is a charlatan and a pseudo-intellectual. He claims to be a man of God and yet he advocates violence — not just to “save” a 1950s view of America that only ever existed in the minds of cultural conservatives, but because assassination is “cheaper” than war. He is an absolute fool. (And, sadly, such ridiculous statements only help the communist Chavez, who can say “look at this — I told you the Yanqui imperialists are trying to kill me!”*)

(*Besides, everyone knows covert CIA operatives are already propping up insurgent groups in Venezuela and agitating for Chavez’s ouster — no need to draw attention to the fact.)

Pat+Robertson, Robertson, Chavez, Venezuela