mighty forces

I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Pat Buchanan. But I’m listening to him comment on MSNBC about the Democratic Convention so far, and he said something to the effect that all the speeches have sounded like “technocratic speeches written by a computer.” And that’s true.

Where’s Bush? Where’s Cheney? Where’s torture, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, the housing crisis, gas prices, wiretapping, and on and on? Where’s the anger? Where’s the determination to fix this shit pile we’ve (willingly) stepped in? Politics ain’t beanbag, and they better get going, or they are going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory yet again. And that pisses me off. Step up, goddamnit!

A friend of mine was with her young daughter in the grocery store this week, when they passed the People magazine at the checkout with photos of Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi’s wedding.

“What if I decided that I wanted to marry another girl?” my friend’s daughter said with that amazing directness children have.

“Well, if you were in love, and wanted to get married and spend the rest of your life with someone, that would be wonderful, whether it was a girl or a boy,” said my friend.

It’s with those sorts of off-the-cuff, informal, seemingly insignificant conversations that everything changes. Those tiny moments move the world.

Word of the day: onomastics.

“I can only read ‘haggard old hole’ so many times before it starts to hurt.”

-Kathy Griffin riffs on her online celebrity coverage

One of the weird things I think about: what do the people on Battlestar Galactica do with all the triangles of paper they cut from the corners of their pages? Use them for insulation? Decoupage? Thousands of paper footballs?

I used to make fun of people who watched “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” I mean, how stupid, right? But then after “Firefly,” which was brilliant and died way too soon, I thought I should give it a try. I’m glad I did. I haven’t watched the whole series, but I started at the beginning and was continually surprised and impressed. Even the musical episodes were good, even though I generally hate musicals. (I often remember the line from the old ‘Ellen’ show - “I just don’t understand opera. Why do they have to sing everything? Why don’t they just say it?”)

So when I heard that Joss Whedon had been spending his strike-related downtime creating a web series, I knew that I had to check it out.

“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” is some of the most entertaining web content I’ve ever seen. All three episodes are online now, but after tomorrow (Sunday) they’ll be gone. I liked it so much that I not only bought the episodes on iTunes, but I’m sure I’ll buy the promised extras-packed DVD.

Neil Patrick Harris (the eponymous Dr.) has left his Doogie days far behind, and it doesn’t hurt that I have a huge crush on Nathan Fillion, who plays Dr. Horrible’s nemesis “Captain Hammer.”

Check this out. Seriously.

I’ve been surprisingly touched by the death of “the world’s oldest blogger,” Olive Riley, over the weekend at the age of 108. I mean, look at that face.

As her friend, who did the typing for her and videotaped her for YouTube, put it:

Her example says: if a woman who left school in 1914 can embrace the internet in her 106th year, what is there you can’t do, friend?

Yes, they can.

This cartoon is the illustration equivalent of Pauline Kael’s “I don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon” remark.

Once Dubya is finally safely tucked away in Crawford next January, can we please scrub the word “Homeland” from our national vocabulary? Please? It’s creepy and exemplifies everything that’s wrong with the current administration. It’s fascist, xenophobic, authoritarian, jingoistic and anti-intellectual all at the same time - quite a feat, really.

Get rid of it.

If you want an object lesson on how crazy Obama makes right-wing crapweasels, give this FreeRepublic comment thread a read. They are crazy and frankly, evil, which isn’t a good combination.

Here’s a taste:

“Will they be breaking windows out of Jewish owned businesses afterwards?”

“No, they’re saving their hatred for whites. They’ll be attacking white homes and confiscating white owned bank accounts and businesses. Then they’ll kick whites out of school and seize the children of white Republicans and people who have voted conservative in the past. Then blacks will be released from prison to make room for future dissidents.”