Well, really an actual blackout. No power, no internet connection for the past three hours or so. Lost the whole ending of my V review, which I reconstructed, but some of my old points I left out. The review is long enough as it is.

Anyway, sorry for the away time. Couldn't be helped.

Posted by: Ace at 12:51 PM | Comments (5)
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The actual suite requirements, as found in his rider, dug up by the Smoking gun.

The double-secret Cheney hotel suite requirement rider, revealed by Point Five.

Someone said I'm "mailing it in lately," and someone else said I haven't been that funny since I've moved to Boston. Can't argue. It's not that I'm mailing it in so much as I'm in deep blog-funk and I'm just not finding the funny. Cheney's suite requirements? Damnit, I should have been all over that one, but I wasn't. It just didn't occur to me.

Not sure how to fix this. I've been in these funks before and eventually come out. I'm trying to think of funny stuff; it's just not flowing.

Thanks to MacStansbury for the tip.

Although Point Five tipped me too, earlier. It's just a sign of how not-funny I am that I wrote that tip off as having little comedic potential.

Posted by: Ace at 08:57 AM | Comments (66)
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Goofy.

He claims the project was misrepresented as a small independent art-house film with no prospect of making any money at all, so he was induced to work for scale-level rates.

Nonsense.

If Quaid fell for this crap, hey, he deserves what he got. How obvious was it that an Ang Lee/Heath Ledger/Jake Gyllenhaalenhyllenhaal gay cowboy movie was going to be promoted to the point where it had to make some dough? An true art house movie might make, at most, a million or two dollars, barely covering production costs. With all that A list talent involved -- well, okay, with all that B and B+ list talent involved -- and with the critic-bait premise and all of Hollywood and the media united in promoting it, it had to be pretty damn predictable this wasn't going to be the normal sort of art house movie making a paltry couple of million dollars. Twenty or thirty million dollars was the minimum.

He agreed to work for cheap in a movie that made a lot of money. That's his problem.

The cast of Star Wars has more of a right to complain. No one that that low-budget goofball space opera would make dime one.

Posted by: Ace at 08:27 AM | Comments (34)
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They all started off as whiny little bitches, for crying out loud.

This obviously isn't a very representative study. Is it possible the "whiniest" children were the ones who had previously been raised mostly by their mothers -- in the old, repressive conservative fashion -- while the ones who weren't so whiny were quite accustomed to having perfect strangers care for them during the day, as upwardly-mobile career-driven (liberal!) women are wont to do with their kids?

I don't know. The whole study is obviously jackass. It's just amazing how jackass it actually is.

A tipster informs Michelle:

[O]n a more informal, anecdotal level: I have personally witnessed what goes on at the Child Study Center (or what went on there several years ago - I'm sure it's the same today, as its mission has not changed):

Toddlers and young children (generally aged between 2 and 5) frolic around and do activities as in any day care/nursery school/kindergarten setting. But the difference is there are adult researchers (some even with the proverbial clipboards) hovering around at all times, monitoring the kids, "observing" their behavior, writing down little notes and filling out charts about the kids' personalities and activities and so on.

And here's the key, from my personal observation: the researchers get it all wrong! They often have some esoteric psychological/behavioral academic fad they're trying to prove, so they ascribe the most bizarre and ludicrous motivations for the kids' actions, scribbling notes about "ego resilience" and "crypto-sexual manifestations" and blah blah blah. It would be comical if if wasn't taken so seriously. I can assure you that whatever data they gathered in the '60s or '70s about how "whiny" these kids were was totally bogus and off-the-mark.

"Ego resilience"? "Crypto-sexual manifestations"? Well, I guess no one gets their psychological studies published by reporting stuff like "Bobby wanted a crayon from Marcy, and so he grabbed it from her, and she cried and 'told on him,' and then later, to get revenge, he pointedly built his building-blocks in such a way as to block her from his view, which made her cry again. She is still debating whether to 'tell' a second time."

Thanks to Dale.

Posted by: Ace at 08:17 AM | Comments (35)
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You can raise taxes, fees, licenses, costs, and union requirements all you like. But eventually people will vote with their feet. Or even their webshooters.

Posted by: Ace at 08:01 AM | Comments (15)
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Yes, "more diplomacy" really could have gotten the Russians on board, right?

Posted by: Ace at 05:22 PM | Comments (66)
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Haven't they heard it's a fictitious war?

A member of a British al-Qaeda cell was involved in a plot to buy a nuclear bomb, a court heard yesterday.

Salahuddin Amin, 31, had information passed to him about a "radio- isotope bomb" while he was in Pakistan, it was claimed.

The plan was to buy the device from the Russian mafia in Belgium, the Old Bailey was told.

The gang of seven British Muslims – six trained in Pakistani camps – also planned an attack on a shopping complex in Kent, said prosecutor David Waters QC.

Thanks to Allah.

Posted by: Ace at 02:30 PM | Comments (45)
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The answers aren't as obvious as they may first seem.

Via Petitedov.

Posted by: Ace at 01:19 PM | Comments (87)
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It looks like a two-man race, and that's among registered Republicans.

I'm tellin' ya -- yeah, divorce, yeah abortion rights, yeah gay rights. The guy was the mayor of the second or third most liberal burg in America-- what position could he take on social issues?

He will walk back the cat to a position closer to Bush's (and note Bush says the country isn't ready to outlaw abortion, too).

Give the man a hearing. Just a hearing. If only as a palatable alternative to the front-running John McCain, a Republican who isn't ashamed to say he's a Republican.

Thanks to Allah.

Posted by: Ace at 12:41 PM | Comments (140)
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Hollywood is planning a sequel to Brokeback Mountain, in which two friends, both ashamed of their lack of a sex drive or attraction to either sex, take yearly "fishing expeditions" together in which they, well, fish.

Sort of interesting:

Keith Walker of Texas was married for four years, but said he had sex only a handful of times. "I really had no real interest or desire for sex. It was certainly nothing that I would ever think to do."

Nancy Mulligan, a divorcee from Washington state, said her seven-year marriage was never consummated. "We did other things. We'd watch out for each other. We were affectionate with each other," she said.

Victoria Glancy and Karl Hodgetts are preparing for that sort of marriage with their summer wedding. They're prepared to live happily but sexlessly ever after.

"I don't really see any difference between our relationship and other people's relationships, except you know, we don't have sex," Glancy said.

Who are these people? From different ages and walks of life, they share one thing in common — not low libido — no libido. They call themselves "asexual" and they proclaim that they are not attracted to men or women.

David Jay said his lack of libido is nothing new. He said he's never experienced attraction — to either sex. "I realized that I was asexual because when I was young, all of my friends started being attracted to people, and I had no idea what they were talking about," he said.

Do what I did -- pretend. Get with the program, dude.

It was the same way for Nancy Mulligan, who felt isolated for years. "I thought I was the only one in the world. I had just kind of settled into the rut that I was different and decided to do the best I could with it," she said.

But now asexuals are building a community through a Web site — asexuality.org. It has chat rooms, sells T-shirts and claims it has 6,000-plus members worldwide.

I actually condemn these people on moral grounds. If they don't have a sex drive, none of them has any damn excuse for not being a multimillionaire. What the hell are they doing with their free time, for crying out loud?

Think about it: How much wealthier would you be with all that extra free time -- without thinking about sex, doing things likely to help you get sex (going to the gym, keeping up with fashion, bathing, washing your junk), and engaging in sex-substitutes like nightly porno hunts?

I don't condemn these people for not having sex drives. I condemn them for being slothful.

Thanks to Allah.

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (91)
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