Horribly Depressing Crap

I urge Moon Sash's loyal readers to visit this website and urge their representatives and senators to ban the export of American horses to Mexico and Canada for slaughter. Search for your zipcode at the main page and it will set you up with an automatic email form to send to your representatives. The form urges them to support an act which will ban this horrible abuse. The details of this practice are pretty harrowing and awful. I'm sure that if this bill passes some novel form of cruelty will spring up to replace the current one, but it's still worth supporting.

Life Imitates Bart

See this link for the major GOP candidates as Buffy villains. Thanks to Betsy Smith, who linked to this on Facebook.

My Incredibly Famous Life

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Internet, once again I come before you to shill for Beeswax magazine, in whose latest issue you can find my multiple page-spanning short story "Some Events of the Spring of 1999, Bordeaux, France." At $4 the issue is a bargain, even if you tear out my story and discard the rest of the magazine like the lifeless shell of a denuded cannolli. The story features several real stores from the Rue Ste. Catherine in real Bordeaux, where I once bought a perfectly good H&M suit for $12.00.

The Madness of King Internet

Fans of my column at Smyles and Fish may rejoice; the new one is up. It continues my sexy adventures with Doctor-Professor Lothar de Groot, the man who has elevated cruelty to fruit to its current, lofty height.

Reviews That Made the News

JUNO
What is this, Napoleon Dynamite for smart people? No, it isn’t, and it invites only superficial comparisons to that catchphrase-laden abortion of a film. Juno, played by Ellen Page (who turned in a comatose performance as “Kitty Pride” in the last X-Men film), is a sixteen year old girl who has sexual intercourse with George Michael from Arrested Development and gets pregnant. Hilarity ensues, aided immeasurably by the movie’s fine cast (Allison Janey, the guy who played Vern Schillinger on Oz, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman). Juno cracks wise with about 97% of her lines, which sounds a little forced but may or may not be perfectly natural for a teenager deeply invested in seeming like a badass. Garner and Bateman provide a nuanced, reserved performance as a disintegrating couple interested in adopting Juno’s baby. The movie’s generally cheerful atmosphere and likeable characters sometimes push the central conflict into the background, but it’s ultimately pleasing even though nothing really awful happens. Highy recommended.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS
This review comes in on the late boat from lateness junction, but the film is still in theaters so I think it meets the strict relevancy requirements of this blog that no one ever reads. Many other critics have bemoaned the fact that the movie version misses Phillip Pullman’s stately pace, glossing over concepts that Pullman explores in depth. These critics are nitwits; Pullman’s tendentious, portentous work desperately needs this big screen enema. Lyra’s adventures come off as adventures in the movie, not painful lessons in multiculturalism or skepticism. The action moves swiftly from scene to scene without bogging down in Pullman’s unbearably tedious explanations of dust and daemons. If Pullman’s original novel had made daemons into anything other than an on-the-nose, inconsistent representation of the human soul the movie would have done him disservice. As it is, they still seem important enough that the trauma of being separated from one’s daemon seems appropriately traumatic. The film avoids the mega-downer ending of the novel by lopping it off entirely, which may very well make for an extremely depressing sequel. Look out for Ian McShane in a surprise role as evil bear king Norsely Scandinavian.

Synthetic Biology and the New Fruit: Reflections on Modern Equipment

Ol' Smyles and Fish has my new column up, and I think you will all enjoy the heck out of it.

Neu Columne

A typical scene from my dissertation fieldwork

Tune, if you will, your internet browsers to Smyles and Fish, where you will find my new column, which reviews the evil Druids of New Hampshire.

Abdominate your Abs with the Abreactor!

Read, if you will, this excellent New York Times Book Review essay on conservative conversion narratives. In it Stephen Metcalf dissects a collection of essays that describe how their authors became conservatives. Metcalf precisely likens their conservativism to obsessional neurosis - it is rooted in a primal trauma (caused, in these accounts, by liberal academics or feminists or both) which the conservative constantly re-experiences. This always fresh trauma lends to their political arguments the raw personal heat that speaks so persuasively to ordinary American people (despite the fact that their authors are invariably extremely privileged elites). Basically, Metcalf claims that conservatives are a bunch effete nerds who never got laid in college, an argument which I myself have championed on this very blog.

My Original Carnivàle Novella [NOT Fanfiction!]

Ben Hawkins was feeling depressed. He was so sad that he could barely get up from under the truck in the morning and pull on one of his collection of grimy undershirts. He sat in the chow tent toying with his tin dish of carny beans. "Hmmm," he said to himself, "I sure hope I get some kind of artistically filmed horrifying vision soon, otherwise I'll never find my grimy weirdo father Henry 'Hack' Scudder or my lady friend Sofie with whom I had sexual intercourse in a truck."

Meanwhile, Lila said or did something disgusting.

Ben Hawkins was having an eerie vision of Scudder's Navy days; Scudder had been an ensign aboard the U.S.S. Casual Elegance during World War I. Scudder was grooming a bear which had been smuggled aboard in a false torpedo by Dr. Lodz. The bear's hair began sticking to Scudder's shedding comb, coming out in nasty clumps. It revealed that the bear had a mystical tattoo: a muscular male centaur with a busty barbarian maiden riding him, each hand holding aloft a sanguinary battle axe. "Every prophet in his house!" said the bear, facing directly into the camera. Ben Hawkins, back in the chow tent, got a nosebleed and was asked to leave because of health code strictures. He staggered over to the Management trailer to meet with Samson.
"What's the good word, kid?" Samson asked him. "I think I know where Scudder is," Hawkins replied, taking a seat in the cluttered trailer.

Meanwhile, Samson was a dwarf.

Ben Hawkins stepped out of the truck, shading his eyes against the descending sun. Atop a nearby hill crouched a scabrous shack, its front door gaping open on its leather hinges. Hawkins climbed the hill. A wizard emerged from the shack.
"I foresaw your coming, Ben Hawkins," he boomed, stroking his long white beard. "I am Lord Fluffheart, tenth level animagus and Wizard of the Faerie Grove. I can also turn into a busty anthropomorphic female fox."
"It looks like my erotic adventures are only beginning!" said Ben Hawkins.

Wingardium Leviosa!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Spoilers!

• In the final scene, Voldemort seals Harry in an envelope of Impolex-G and launches him on an uncertain trajectory in a V-2 rocket...or DOES he?
• Sirius Black re-appears and explains to Harry that he was "just resting" during book 6; Bellatrix Lestrange kills him AGAIN by tricking him into eating a tack.
• Harry transfers to Simon's Rock College of Bard and gets his own radio show "Untitled Monday Rock Arriba."
• Hermione's cat Crookshanks revealed to be a Death Eater/animagus/furry named Lord Fluffheart.
• [MAJOR SPOILER] In at least one scene, the characters will eat wacky-sounding food.

Spine-tingling!

A non-funny and distinctly unhappy post

Many of you may have read or heard about Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, who apparently was running a dog-fighting ring out of a home he owned in Virginia (he has yet to be convicted, but the evidence looks very strong). I urge all my readers to visit the American Humane Society webpage and send a letter to the NFL commissioner through their form. The letter urges the NFL to suspend Vick. I will not repeat the details of the investigation here, but they are readily available (through the New York Times for instance), and you should probably learn them before sending the letter.

Whine Dining

Gentle reader, my new column over at Smyles and Fish contains reviews of several Newport, RI restaurants. I do not in the least exaggerate when I write that these reviews could save your life.

Movie Time means Time for the Movies Time

Oh, hello there! I didn't see you come in! I know I've been neglecting the ol' blog recently, but that's because I've been suffering from

MOVIE FEVER!

which is a condition in the same family as being boy-crazy or reet petite.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Salty Brine Chest Tropical Island
Well, we all knew what we were getting with this one. The entire cast of the previous two movies returns for another overlong, sumptuous swashbuckling adventure. The plot starts off incomprehensible (does anyone actually remember what happened to Johnny Depp at the end of the last film? And who exactly is the East India Company rep who has snatched Davy Jones' heart?) and gradually fades into obscurity as the films debarks into a series of silly set-pieces. The best scene is doubtless the pirate's council on Murderous Blood Island (or wherever), in which a large group of racial caricatures brawl over the arcana of the pirate's code. Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom gamely recite their incredibly stupid Hallmark-card dialogue, and Geoffrey Rush pulls out ALL the stops and delivers a scenery-chewing but extremely entertaining performance as Famous Pirate #3. Fun drivel.

28 Weeks Later
The first ten minutes of this movie are the most harrowing, frightening images ever set to film. The rest of it lags on a little long and delivers some rather heavy-handed digs at the United States Army; ultimately, it fails to live up to the lonely, Heart of Darkness style psychological terror of its predecessor, but it's certainly frightening and entertaining. Robert Carlyle gets to reveal his inner Begbie and the child stars are capable and not annoying.

Fracture
"I killed my wife untraceably with some fava beans and a nice Chianti! FLPLPLPFLLLLFLPPPPLFFFFPPPPPP!" Ryan Gosling is great, and this movie has the World's Fastest Relationship ("Hi I'm your boss call me later can we not do this at dinner I don't think it's working out"). The central puzzle is very interesting until about an hour out from the end, when it's possible to figure it out and get hella bored. Probably worth seeing.

New Column at Smyles and Fish

Gentle reader, tune your internet browser to the columns section of Smyles and Fish and there imbibe the delight of a review which makes sarcastic and polemical reference to that titan of bathos Megatokyo.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Nerd Edition

Oh Internet, they have restored Starbuck to us, and in ten short months we'll get to thrill again to her wacky adventures with her fellow pilots Corndog, Scooter and Jumblo!

ALSO Rome has ended without any poisoned figs or amphitheaters filled with wine. A bittersweet finale, made especially poignant by the scene in which Pullo slays a cockatrice while Vorenus takes pictures on his camera phone.