I'm so disgusted to be a Republican. There's just no reason to engage in this sort of nasty religious-baiting.

The media is going to destroy us over this gaffe. And rightly they should.

Oh, wait. It was Harold Ford, Jr., who said that about Republicans.

So, never mind. You'll never hear about this again. My bad. I thought this was a major story, but I didn't appreciate the "context" that journalistic Jedi Masters bring to their reportage (i.e., this is a story that could show a Democrat in a negative, even "hateful" light, and ergo is not a story at all).

Video of the Christianist hatred over at Hot Air.

Posted by: Ace at 04:21 PM | Comments (100)
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If you're not watching, you're missing a hell of a game. A seesaw battle with five, I think, lead changes in the fourth quarter. Denver's behind 31-28 but are in field goal range and can tie it, or who knows, go ahead with a touchdown. But Peyton will have two minutes and three time outs left.

I've got like eight or nine points riding on this.

Tied: with a 49 yard Elam field goal, 1:52 or so left. Then maybe OT.

Indy Wins: With field goal with 0:02 on the clock.

Posted by: Ace at 03:57 PM | Comments (38)
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That's the claim, probably just plain wrong, made in a new book. But Harry Houdini was such a frickin' cool guy I'll post it anyway.

Eighty years after his death, the name Harry Houdini remains synonymous with escape under the most dire circumstances. But Houdini, the immigrants' son whose death-defying career made him one of the world's biggest stars, was more than a mere entertainer.

A new biography of the legendary performer suggests that Houdini worked as a spy for Scotland Yard, monitored Russian anarchists and chased counterfeiters for the U.S. Secret Service - all before he was possibly murdered.

...

The biography lays out a scenario where Houdini, using his career as cover, managed to travel the United States and the world while collecting information for law enforcement. The authors made the link after reviewing a journal belonging to William Melville a British spy master who mentioned Houdini several times.

...

This silliness is based on police cooperation in allowing Houdini to escape from their prisons and demonstrate escape-artist skills and the like. "Must be a quid pro quo," the biography claims.

Yeah, or people just wantint to be nice to celebrities. Not like that happens very often.

No less a Houdini enthusiast than Teller - the mute half of Penn and Teller, and one of the legendary performer's spiritual descendants - felt the link between the escape artist and the authorities was no leap.

"Law enforcement is about bureaucracy and cronyism," Teller said. "So they're going to let some entertainer walk in and escape from their jail cells? That suggests to me that (the authors) are on the right track."

Of course he'd think that. Is there any magician who's actually a sorta badass, non-goofball hero like Houdini? Who else does Teller have to look up to?

...

The biography's other hook is the suggestion that Houdini's relentless debunking of the Spiritualist movement, whose proponents included "Sherlock Holmes" author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, led to his death. The group believed they could contact the dead; Houdini believed they were frauds.
...

The authors recount a pair of October 1926 incidents in which Houdini was viciously punched in the stomach, once by a college student in his dressing room and later by a stranger in a hotel lobby.

Houdini - the book suggests the Spiritualists may have arranged the attacks - died days later in Room 401 at Grace Hospital in Detroit. His aura of invincibility seemed over. But as the authors discovered, it still lives on today.

Eh. Almost certainly jackass. But good if you're running a Call of Cthulhu game.

The Houdini-Conan Doyle Feud: Via Wikipedia:

hese activities cost Houdini the friendship of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle, a firm believer in spiritualism during his later years, refused to believe any of Houdini's exposés. Doyle actually came to believe that Houdini was a powerful spiritualist medium, had performed many of his stunts by means of paranormal abilities, and was using these abilities to block those of other mediums that he was 'debunking' (see Doyle's The Edge of The Unknown, published in 1931 after Houdini's death). This disagreement led to the two men becoming public antagonists.

Odd, given that Holmes was always exposing the supernatural or mystical as mundane trickery.

Posted by: Ace at 03:24 PM | Comments (31)
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She has second and third degree burns all over, including on her face, and serious lung damage. She's breathing on a respirator.

Who are these malefactors? The AP's article gives us no clue, though it does note that they're "immigrants," or, rather, "French-born children" of such. It repeatedly offers the description "young people," but that hardly helps in finding the guilty.

n scattered violence Saturday, 46 people were taken into custody, most of them in the suburbs around Paris, and two police officers were slightly injured. The most serious violence was the bus attack in Marseille, which shocked France with its brutality.

Three or four young people burst onto the bus and tossed in a bottle of flammable liquid before fleeing, police said, citing witnesses' accounts. A fire started, seriously injuring a 26-year-old woman who suffered second- and third-degree burns on her arms, legs and face.

The woman was breathing Sunday with help from a respirator, the Marseille hospital system said. Doctors were deeply worried about lung damage from smoke. Three other people also were treated for smoke inhalation, police said. The bus was destroyed, and bus service was suspended in Marseille.

President Jacques Chirac telephoned the woman's family, ensuring them that France would "do everything to find the assailants and punish them with the greatest severity," his office said.

But how on earth can he find the assailants? No one seems to know anything more about them than that they were "teenagers" of the "marauding" sort. The "marauding" descriptor is useful, but only if you actually catch them in the act of "marauding." Given that "marauders" often exhibit non-maraudish behavior in the vicinity of police, it's going to be hard to find them.

Later in the story it mentions...

The three weeks of rioting last year were fueled by anger at France's failure to offer equal chances to many minorities — especially Arabs and blacks — and France's 5 million-strong Muslim population.

But it doesn't say who was responsible for those riots, just that the riots were "fueled" by France's failure to offer "equal chances" to Arabs and blacks. (Blacks? Haitians, perhaps? Arab Druze or Christians, I wonder?)

And it certainly doesn't say who's responsible for the lastest outrage.

It's just a mystery to the AP.

Who, what, when, where, why. By the innovaation of eliminating two of the five "W's," AP has freed up its journlistic resources to spend 40% more time and energy and media big-brain genius on the remaining three.

Bravo, AP. Bravo.

Posted by: Ace at 03:02 PM | Comments (127)
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Assuming, that is, they only pick up the ten leaners and the GOP GOTV efforts result in keeping all of the toss-ups.

Hey, it's something.

Posted by: Ace at 02:51 PM | Comments (17)
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Sorry, I've got nothing. All I know today is that Eli Manning can't pass in the swirling winds of Giants Stadium, which is a problem, because I hear their schedule includes a lot of games there.

Posted by: Ace at 02:49 PM | Comments (20)
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Three and a half stars.

This is a puzzle movie, a con movie, a movie about tricks and misdirection. It's a plot-heavy movie, but it avoids the pitfalls of lesser movies of that sort, e.g., contrived "characters" who don't seem human so much as pawns to be moved around as necessary on the scenarist's chessboard, an emptiness apart from the big reveal, etc.

It's a damn good movie, a gorgeous movie (London and Colorado Springs in 1899 look great), and the performances are uniformly excellent. The script is bit like Batman Begins, in being told backwards/forwards/sidewards all out of order, but it all flows seemlessly.

The basic plot, if you don't know, is that Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman play rival magicians in 1899 London. They begin as friends -- no, not friends; friendly coworkers mutually jealous of each other's talents -- as assistants/plants in a lame magician's act (that magician played, inevitably, by real magician and frequent David Mamet trouper Ricky Jay). A tragedy occurs, caused by the negligence of one, and from that point on they are engaged in career-long game of vengeance, sabotage, attempted murder, and dirty tricks against each other.

They're also both obsessed by learning each other's secrets, and both have enough of them to keep things moving quickly with that constant frisson of "Oh yeah... of course...!"

Pretty much everything every mentioned or shown on-screen is a set-up for a revelation later, except for one Big Fat Red Herring that you'll focus on as the key to it all when it really doesn't figure into things at all -- a bit of misdirection in a movie about misdirection.

David Ansen of Newsweek writes:

Magic acts are built, we're told, into three acts—the Pledge, the Turn and the Prestige—which the movie tries to duplicate with its complex, triple-time-scheme narrative. At the end of this dark entertainment three twists await: one you will certainly see coming, another you may have figured out just before it happens, and the final may be so tricky you won't quite piece it all together until after you've left the theater (the "explanation" whizzes by so fast it can be hard to catch.)

It's that first one -- the one you see coming -- that basically provides cover for the rest of the tricks/twists, because you get sucked into figuring out that one obvious twist thereby missing the import of the other clues and tells being presented to you.

An hour after the movie, I was still trying to figure bits of it out. Not the main parts of the plot -- those are comprehensible enough -- but the little details here and there. This morning I realized another thing that hadn't been obvious on first viewing. If a movie is to be judged on how long you spend thinking about it later, then The Prestige is a fine movie.

I actually don't buy that definition of how good a movie is, but if you liked going back over the clues in The Usual Suspects, for example, and debating exactly who was doing what when days after the movie, then The Prestige is your sort of movie. I had to check on-line to make sure I hadn't missed anything big. I hadn't, but I did miss some small things.

If I have a criticism, it would be (avoiding spoilers) that there was a conventional sort of way they could have gone with this basic set-up, and I think going that route would have resulted in a flawlessly crafty, if conventional, puzzle-movie. That's the way I expected it to go, and I think I still would have preferred it to have gone that way -- a bit conventionally.

Instead, the film introduces a What-the-Fuck element near the end of the movie. "Introduces" is a strong word; after all, they've been foreshadowing this the whole time, and even the commercial campaign promises, "The trick is that it's not a trick... it's real." Still, I was hoping that was all a con, yet another bit of misdirection. Instead of going that way, the introduce a bit of fantasy or "magical realism" as an eleventh hour plot device which, while adding a bit of wonder and strange implications (to be chewed over on the ride back home), still feels to me a little out of place. Maybe it's the mainstream-movie philistine in me-- they wanted to go art house and magical realism; I wanted them to do a more conventional con. Though I'd've preferred my own plot (I think), hey, it's their movie, and at least they did something different and unexpected, I guess.

That bit of strangeness comes via scientific genius and pioneer of electricity and magneticsm Nikola Tesla, a real-life wizard played well by... David Bowie. And not David Bowie playing David Bowie, all weird and crap (but basically David Bowie) like in Labyrinth. No, he's playing a genuine character who isn't David Bowie, but with an air of rock-star mystery that serves him well.

One last point of interest is that it's not clear who the "hero" is in this movie. Arguably, neither Bale or Jackman are "heroes" at all; but Jackman does seem to get more camera time, and feels more like the viewpoint character. Cerainly we know a lot more about him (although not as much as we at first think). People seem to be debating who the hero was -- who was "less bad," basically, though neither is truly evil and neither truly good -- and some say their sympathies changed during the movie from Bale to Jackman and back again. I was a Jackman guy all the way through, and maybe my bias towards the conventional -- i.e., one guy's the hero, the other's the villain, that simple -- put me off the movie a touch.

Those fairly minor disatisfactions aside, it's just a lot of fun, a movie that keeps you guessing almost all the way through, and even a little bit more the next day. Critics claim the characters are "one-dimensional" and not so much humans as mechanical contrivances of the plot, but I think that's unfair. Sure, in an intricately plot-heavy movie like this, characters exist to serve the plot, and certainly niether Bale or Jackman is deeply characterized, but their performances are strong enough that they feel flesh and blood. Bale less so, who always feels more like a cipher; but then, he's supposed to.

Terrific movie. Your mileage may differ depending on how much you buy the last act -- "The Prestige" of the film, as it were. I didn't quite buy it all myself, but still, I was more than satisfied I took the ride.

Minor Criticism: The problem with the two-smart-guys-outsmarting-each-other movie is that the smart guys in question aren't always really all that smart, and are (when the plot requires it) sometimes pretty damn stupid in failing to figure out the other's machinations.

Some of the twists here were fairly obvious to me, and certainly should have been transparently obvious to accomplished magicians who live and breathe this stuff. Both Bale and Jackman are, like Eric Cartman, selectively genuises and selectively morons.

Still, hey, you can't have all the characters figure everything out in the first ten minutes, now can you?

A Halloween Movie: The Presige isn't really a horror movie per se, but it certainly has most of the trappings of a horror movie -- dark doings, hangings. light maimings, secrets and mysteries, obsessions, vengeance, a shadowy and grimy London a few years after the Ripper retired, a hint of the truly mystical. There's no cussing, no actual sex, and not really any gore (though there is death, and neither character is above inflicting permanent physical debilitating injuries on the other), but it does have the feel of Victorian ghost story -- just without the ghosts. It's also got a touch of the Lovecraftian, as one character's obsession for real magic leads him to commit some monstrous and strange crimes. (I'd be more psyched about that angle if I bought the Big Weird Plot Device involved, but I really don't.)

For those looking for a bit of Halloween Trick or Treat but who resist the sequel to the surprisingly terrific Saw movies, this might be a solid alternative.

Posted by: Ace at 12:36 PM | Comments (75)
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Into politics? How about porn? If you're still here after almost three years, the answers are problably "Yes" and "Fuck yes."

Match the political figure to the dirty, silly soft-core sex passages in his or her book.

Thanks to CraigC., via Villainous Company.

Posted by: Ace at 11:33 AM | Comments (11)
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Don't do what I did and miss out on all the early games by forgetting to get your picks in until 2:00 tomorrow.

Leading the pack in the 200 point club are, in order, moflicky, wiserbud, B Moe, Puking Dog, chickpea, Rob A., Kate455, Chublogga, Dave In Texas, doctorswoop, SJR2, and Pupster.

Moflicky won week 6 with 44 points (B Moe placing with 40); last week, Mob took the honors with 35 points (owmyhead and mastour placing with 34).

In the Blogger Bowl, Dave From Garfield Ridge leads with 221 followed by Jim Geraghty.

I apologize for how few people are in that pool. I expected a lot more bloggers. Had I known only five or six were interested, I'd've just suggested they join the regular pool.

Like I said before, I set up a special bloggers-only pool because I expected a lot of big bloggers to join, and figured that if there weren't a restriction on bloggers only, a lot of their readers would join and we'd have an absurd pool of thousands of participants.

It didn't quite work out like that, so now we have a couple of people in the other pool who really probably should be in the main one.

I wonder if Tailgatepools will let me merge them. I'll write to find out.

Anyway, get those picks in. Ask AnalogKid how much it sucks only being able to choose from five late games.

Posted by: Ace at 11:26 AM | Comments (24)
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Splitting atoms... with his mind.

f Mr Ford, already a US congressman, wins his bid to become a more powerful senator, Australia had better watch out.

Because according to Mr Ford, Australia has an interest in nuclear weapons and is part of the broader nuclear threat to the US.

...

His skilled oration on domestic politics may be flawless, but his grip on foreign policy is error-prone. Yesterday he stumbled into gaffes on the North Korean nuclear tests and then mentioned Australia in the same breath as rogue nations wanting to go nuclear.

"Here we are in a world today where more countries have access to nuclear weapons than ever before," Mr Ford said, adding that when he left college in 1992 he thought the nuclear age had come to an end "and America would find ways to eliminate the number of chances that a rogue group or a rogue nation would get their hands on nuclear material".

"Today nine countries have it - more than ever before - and 40 are seeking it, including Argentina, Australia and South Africa," he said.

Uh-oh. South Park may have jeopardized our security by inflaming the Australians by depicting Steve Irwin (PBUH).

Posted by: Ace at 11:12 AM | Comments (27)
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