From Juan Cole: The Plame Affair For Dummies.
Also: Bush just outlined a plan to sell off 300,000 acres of public lands in order to pay for his tax cut to the rich. I guess he needs to get this deal through before his impeachment.
On the up-side, now might be a good time to give a shitload of money to organizations like The Nature Conservancy, which buys up land for conservation.
My housemate had rented ‘Bewitched,’ the TV sitcom vehicle with Nicole Kidman and Will Farrel. She watches movies while she works. Tonight she was making clamshell boxes for storing books.
So I’d watch this insipid movie for a while, and then watch her crease the cloth, and then trim it, and then I’d watch the movie for a little while, and then watch her glue the cloth to the cardboard…. And so on.
As mind candy goes, there’s very little to criticize about ‘Bewitched,’ as long as the audience is full of adults who happen to also be three-year-olds. Or perhaps stoned. I won’t go over the plot, because I’ve forgotten most of it, and I don’t really care, and you don’t either.
But there is one phenomenon I want to discuss, and that is what I call the Komedy Koan. I spell it with a ‘K’ because it’s komedy. My theory of comedy is that there are two kinds of things that make you laugh:
1) Situations. Situational comedy, like a sitcom, for instance. I actually include observational comedy and joke-telling in this category, because they’re all based in real-life situations. It’s the comedy that comes from people’s foibles, wacky situations, something funny that happened on the subway. That kind of thing. Situational comedy requires storytelling. The guy has to slip on the banana peel *after* the construction worker drops it there. The punch-line comes at the *end* of the story, after the set-up.
2) Mindfuck. This is the Komedy Koan. Some things short-circuit your brain. They seem to come from another plane of existence. It’s like a science fiction story where some aliens have a zap gun that makes you laugh at something that shouldn’t be funny. They point it at you and ZAP, you’re laughing at something and you don’t know what the joke really was, or if you do, you don’t know why it should be that funny. There’s no story, no punchline, no set-up. Just ZAP! You’re laughing!
And I bring up this distinction because most of ‘Bewitched’ is a situation comedy. In fact, it’s a situation comedy about a TV situation comedy. And on this level, it fails miserably by pretty much any metric, although I have to say I wasn’t stoned at the time, so maybe that’s what it really needs. But there is one moment of Komedy Koan within this movie, and it comes from Will Farrel, and it has to be an improv. I refer, of course, to, “SHERPA!”
So “SHERPA!” saved this movie as far as I’m concerned. It’s OK that this movie full of empty calories was produced, because it has that one moment. If I were to watch it again, it wouldn’t be funny. If you rent it to see what I’m talking about, I’ll have ruined it; you’ll be thinking too much. Don’t even try.
I mean, seriously. Don’t try. Don’t rent it.
The problem (if you want to call it that) with spending time looking at detailed maps of desert areas is that you end up becoming fascinated with places like the Owyhee River watershed at the intersection of Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada.
The name comes from a misspelling of ‘Hawaii.’ Seriously. Some Hawaiians settled the area back during the trapper days. One doubts they were very successful.
The place itself is huge and untrammeled (for the most part), and is, essentially, Hell’s Canyon South. The map is strewn with very faint dotted lines with names like Lucky Seven Cow Camp Road.
I’m going to have to integrate it into my travel plans… 
Sen. Fiengold addresses AG Gonzalez’ testimony about the illegal spying program at the NSA. The pullquote:
This administration reacts to anyone who questions this illegal program by saying that those of us who demand the truth and stand up for our rights and freedoms somehow has a pre-9/11 world view. In fact, the President has a pre-1776 world view. Our government has three branches, not one. And no one, not even the President, is above the law.
Last night, I was in a motel room near Little Rock, AR. I’m traveling with my parents to Tennessee, yet again. About the time I got well enough to travel (I had another otitis media mob-scene start up just after Xmas) my dad offered me the car, so I went and took a few pictures of far-flung Texas.
I got back, and spent a little time trying to figure out when, exactly, to quit spending time with my parents and go back to WA. Then we got news that a relative had passed on in Nashville, so here I am in another hotel.
But anyway.
Last night I was flipping through the channels and found Fox News, and they were spending a whole bunch of time trying to figure out if Tom Toles had ‘gone too far’ by scoring political points using an injured soldier. Here’s the cartoon, depicting a quadraplegic soldier in a hospital bed, with Donald Rumsfeld giving him a diagnosis of ‘battle hardened.’ After much hemming and hawing, they decided that Toles was teetering on the edge with his satire.
Today, it’s a very different story. Fox (and other news agencies) are covering protests in the Islamic world. These protests surround a cartoon of all things. And this cartoon is from a comic book, and it depicts the Islamic prophet Mohammed. Depicting Mohammed is forbidden in Islam, much the way the name of G-d is not allowed to be written in some Jewish sects.
And what are the newscasters saying? Well, over on Fox they were trying to spin the events as demonstrating how strange and militant those Ay-rabs really are. Yah, those intolerant Muslims, getting all worked up over a little comic book. Whatta buncha weirdos, eh?
