Thomas Walkom of The Star wonders if we should indict Bush on war crimes when he pops up for a visit next week. It won’t happen of course, but it raises an interesting question. It also makes it pretty clear why the US didn’t want to join the International Criminal Court.
from Matthew Good’s blog
One down, a dozen or so to go. I got back from the intensive portion of my first MBA course on Friday, after 6 days just north of the city at our training facility. The work (kind of like a cross between finance and economics) wasn’t too bad, it’s just being trapped in there for 6 days, taking in piles of information, bland food and recycled air, takes a toll on you. But I know more about yield curves and derivatives now than I did a week ago, and I got to know many of my classmates. All in all, a good first trip…the first of many. I go back again in January.
Since I’ve gotten back I’ve done my best to relax…ordered food and basically justacted like a zombie Friday night, went out with G&C last night for steaks and beer. Today’s been chore day, and involved me stupidly getting on the subway at the same time that all the parents & kids heading to/from the Santa Claus Parade. Bad, bad idea. I’m never willingly having children.
We watched Man On Fire (imdb | rotten tomatoes) last night, and I was prepared for it to be pretty bad — a co-worker said it was awful, and the reviews haven’t been stellar — but I actually quite liked it. I liked the style most of the time, it wasn’t overly predictable, and Dakota Fanning is too good an actor to only be 10 years old…it was rather alarming. And am I the only person who doesn’t mind when Denzel Washingtonn does something other than chew the screen with an Oscar-worthy performance? I like seeing him play the semi-everyman in dumb-ish action movies like Crimson Tide or Fallen.
I always find the vengeance movies a bit hard to swallow, but this one seemed to keep the avenging-angel heroics under control. It was terribly long (2.5 hours!), but not a bad movie at all for a lazy weekend.
I’m off for a week to attend the intensive part of my first MBA course. I likely won’t be able to post while I’m up there (it’s just north of the city, but we stay there for the whole week), so I’ll talk to you in a week.
Be good.
I’ll be off the air for a little while. I’m away for a week and, while I’ll likely have access to a connection, I probably won’t have time to post (nor anything to post about anyway).
Rawk.
Though I didn’t really want to see it, I suggested yesterday that we go see Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason (imdb | rotten tomatoes). Why? Because my wife loved the first one, and really wanted to see the second one. Also, she’d worked all day while I took the day off to study, so she needed a treat.
We should’ve stayed home. I can tolerate the first one when she watches it at home, but this one was just painful. My wife pointed out afterward that they’d just taken the first movie, scene for scene, and wrapped it slightly (but not much) different scenarios. If you played them on two screens next to each other, they’d probably pretty much match up at each crucial kissing/rescuing/sad scene. And yet, a whole slew of women in the audience cooed and swooned every time Colin Firth did something predictable.
Making it worse was the two guys sitting next to us; both talked loudly throughout the movie, and one guy would sing along with the soundtrack. My wife was giving them dirty looks long before I got annoyed with them, but when he started singing for the third time I leaned over and told them to shut up. I don’t think they heard me over the chorus of “Everlasting Love”.
Anyway, all around, a shite movie; I’m not really the target audience, but even my wife didn’t like it, and she’s most definitely the target audience. This movie is only useful for straight guys looking to build up bad-movie capital which they can then use to drag their wives/girlfriends to an equally bad movie. Like, oh, say, this one.
Leave it to The Onion to be brilliant & brutal.
“What’s so bad about this? Could some Democrat explain it to me in under an hour, without starting to scream or cry?”
Almost forgot…we watched Bad Santa (imdb | rotten tomatoes) on the weekend. Not bad, but I couldn’t recommend it to many people. It was funny, but uncomfortable funny. And no one who adores the Gilmore Girls should ever watch this movie. My girlfriend plays a slightly different character than the nice mom on TV.
Colin’s blog had a copy of a NY Times story today, which he calls a “…brilliantly simple clarification on why Bush won the election. He got more votes – its that simple. Its nothing to do with religion, or any other dark movement within the US.” I agree that it’s not a “dark movement”, and I agree with the author, David Brooks, that the liberal reaction to the election is akin to the “rage of the drowning man”. I also agree that the exit poll question that has everyone up in arms about “moral values” was worded in such a way that the results might be misleading.
However, I don’t believe for one second that it had nothing to do with religion. Brooks tries to refute this by claiming that no more evangelicals voted for Bush this time than in 2000, but that just means they’ve voted for him both times and in no way relates to whether or not their votes were influenced by religion. A week before the election, before we heard anything about this morality question on CNN, I mentioned a conversation I had with a friend about how Americans vote based on things like religion and gun control. This isn’t a new phenomenon. This wasn’t a sudden uptick in religious fervour. This is the status quo in America right now. The news media were expecting the issues to be war or terrorism or the economy, and it seems they weren’t. Now the media need to explain themselves, so there’s an epidemic of conservatism gripping the US, right?
Ask yourself this, and be honest: would George W. Bush ever have become president if a) his father hadn’t been president, and b) he wasn’t an evangelical? Of course not. I think the former got him to the primary. I think the latter got him to the Oval Office.
I offer up two examples from the last few days of how this election — and this presidency — most certainly have something to do with religion:
