"You're the disease... and I'm the cure. But wait,
are you chiggers? I don't want to mess with chiggers."

Criminally stupid:

A would-be thief proved himself lacking in key skills like reconnaissance and driving after he tried to pull a heist beside a police-dog training site and then got stuck in the snow trying to flee.

Police in Edmonton, Alberta, said officers were training with a dog at a business late Tuesday when they heard an alarm sound from the building next door.

When they went to investigate, a car smashed through a garage door and zoomed past an officer and his dog, Wizzard, Edmonton police spokeswoman Karen Carlson said.

"He didn't get very far because he got stuck in a snow bank," Carlson said. The car turned out to be stolen.

The suspect tried to make a break for it on foot, but was quickly forced to give himself up when Wizzard caught up with him.

"There was a marked police car parked outside and they were inside the building doing training, which is normal for us," Carlson said. "Then, sure enough, this goes on right next door to them."

A marked police car. Smart, tough. Whatever happens, I hope this solid citizen doesn't lose his voting rights. How could the Republic endure without his electoral input?

Actually it happened in Alberta, Canada, but whatever.

Thanks to yls.

Posted by: Ace at 10:54 AM | Comments (24)
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Captain Ed writes, "Rarely has bagman politics been played out so publicly. It's a measure of the Democratic Party that Hillary feels comfortable enough to think she will get away with it."

She may think that, but she won't. She's all done. Gone. Toast. There is no terribly good reason to not nominate Obama, and a lot of good reasons not to nominate Hillary!

Let's face it-- she was given a Senate seat by Clinton-loving Democrats basically as a thank-you for keeping quiet during Zippergate and thus keeping their boy in office. But that was a long time ago, and there have been plenty of newer, bigger partisan fights since then. There are new heroes in the Democratic pantheon, like Jim Webb, (God help us) Harry Reid, and of course the eventual Democratic nominee, Barack Obama.

I really don't think the Democratic Party, which never particularly liked Hillary! (as no one in the world particularly likes Hillary!), still feels enough gratitude for stuff that happened a decade ago to give her the nomination despite, you know, the fact that she's basically just a dick.

Man, must she be hating those leaked Jack Ryan divorce papers right about now.

Whoops! Captain Ed's update, linking to this Powerline entry, notes that Obama tried buying support too -- he just got outbid.

What a racket.

I've got to start a big black church and start gettin' me that crazy paid-endorsement money.

Posted by: Ace at 09:24 PM | Comments (72)
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Funny, when I claim that, the judge calls it "specious" and "just plain wacky," but when some brown people in Tanzania claim it, the BBC calls it "news."

Men in parts of Tanzania's main city, Dar es Salaam, are living in fear of a night-time sex attacker.

A BBC correspondent says the attacks are being blamed by some on a demon called "Popo Bawa" meaning winged bat.

Some men are staying awake or sleeping in groups outside their homes. Others are smearing themselves with pig's oil, believing this repels attacks.

My sophomore year in college all the other boys started calling my ass "The Crisper," because "that's where you put all da cucumbers."

I'm pretty damn sure bats were responsible for that.

Thanks to dri.

Speaking of kookiness...

Don't everyone click over on that site from here, because it will alert the crazy cat lady, but a few updates:

1) She got slapped with a cool million dollar proposed judgment against her. While it's only a proposed judgment, it will probably wind up being pretty damn high, because she just basically blows off court appearances and defaults on everything and enjoys provoking judges, so there's never a counterargument about damages nor a judge eager to help her out. Not that it matters -- she's pretty much judgment proof at this point, and for the rest of her life, and everyone knows that.*

2) The aggreived party has offered to set this judgment aside if she just agrees to stop talking about him and his family.

3) Her counteroffer, apparently, is that she herself should get a big check out of this, because, in her twisted version of how the world works, when you make a creepy threat against someone's child, well, someone owes you bigtime cash for that service.

4) She laughably puts up a pic of her sitemeter traffic for the whole year, under the title "estimation of damages." Here's what it shows: No traffic for a half year, suddenly 150,000 hits in the month she became notorious for being crazy, then around 80,000 hits, then droopping, of course, back down to no traffic. She seems to believe that this means she suffered "damages," because her blog was taking off and could have established her as a new media star or something. She fails to grasp no one was reading her before, and no one is reading her now, and people only read her for a couple of months because of her bad behavior and bus-collision lunacy.

It's pathetic. She really thought she would be welcomed on Stephen Colbert for the accomplishment of threatening someone's child on the internet. In her fantasies, she's still going to get rich and famous from her insane behavior.

The person she was stalking, of course, declined various invitations to appear in the media, preferring to make his name for, you know, actual accomplishments, not creepy run-ins with a stalker. But for her -- the stalking is her ticket to immortality, baby.

Such is the case with obsessed stalkers.

5) Lastly, she showed off her leet boxxen skillz by successfully identifying "Sinner," posting about her over at Teh Squeaky Wheel. This internet detective successfully determined that Sinner worked at The Zurich Company, and by harrassing his employers, got them to shut his site down, and perhaps even fire him.

That site is now shut down, alas, but you can try, if you like, reading about the whole sordid affair here. Previous posts detail the sad shut down of the site, all due to the Holmes-like sleuthing of the demented doc.

Now, the demented doc reads this site, so I'm avoiding using her name, or giving her her own post. Please avoid saying anything that might alert her to any of this.

* Correction: I wrote it was a judgment. It isn't. It's a proposed judgment. Thanks to Allah for straightening me out.

Posted by: Ace at 09:14 PM | Comments (65)
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I have a visceral hatred of "quirk as a subgenre." Not sure why. And I'm not sure why I like oddball, over-the-top, or simply buffoonish characters, and yet there's a special place in the hell of my heart for characters which are merely "quirky."

I've always hated this thing called quirkiness. Loved Twin Peaks, but everytime the "quirky" Log Lady came on the screen, I wanted to choke David Lynch with his own eraserhair. (And the thing about the pie? Pretended I thought it was cute and funny, along with everyone else, but really wanted Kyle MacLaughlin to shut his goddamned piehole about how much he liked pie.) There's something too cutesy and cloying about it, something that reads to me "anti-comedy," trying to do comedy while self-consciously preening about being being above conventional comic tropes.

Maybe that's what grates -- that it's comedy for those who look down scornfully on actual comedy, and what annoys me is the posturing as being above comedy grunts while, in fact, delivering fewer, and shallower, laughs than "regular" comics.

As Cartman observed, there's really no point in watching any indie movie, because they're all about "gay cowboys eating pudding." And they really all are. Quirky people acting kookie. Pretty much says it all.

The amateur leftist webzine Slate wonders why there's so much backlash against Little Miss Sunshine, and focuses on the public's -- even the indie-lovin', art-house-supportin' public's -- growing tedium with the increasingly formulaic and predictable variations of quirkiness. The article as a whole defends indie-quirk, and wonders where the hate is coming from.

He's responding to this hit on indie-quirk by Time's Richard Corliss:

The kind of indie film nurtured by Sundance has become the dominant non-Hollywood movie form for smart people. They're the ones who made Little Miss Sunshine a hit, and Ryan Gosling's turn in Half Nelson a must-see. The moguls have taken note too. In terms of product and talent, Sundance has become the crucial farm system for the major studios.

Problem is, indie movies are getting as predictable as Hollywood's. Sundance movies have devolved into a genre. The style is spare and naturalistic. The theme is relationships, beginning in angst and ending in reconciliation. The focus is often on a dysfunctional family (there are no functional ones in indie movies) that strives to reconnect. Within this genre are a few subspecies: the family breakup film (The Squid and the Whale), the finding-your-family-at-school movie (Half Nelson, Brick), the gay drama (Mysterious Skin). Way too frequently, the family goes on a trip.

That was the one thing I think was missing from Cartman's lament: the road movie thing. He should have said "gay cowboys eating pudding while driving to an oddly-named town in New Mexico," because that's present in 90% of these flicks.

Is there anything wrong with a road movie? Goodness no, or at least, no, nothing wrong with them per se. The trouble sort of comes because the road-movie structure basically involves meeting a lot of people who are even stranger than the gay cowboys eating pudding, and getting into all sorts of nutty and crazy adventures. It's a thin premise by which to string together a bunch of silly bits of episodic comedy.

And there's nothing wrong with it per se, but the indie-quirk genre has this air of smug condescension about it, and you sort of want to point out, "Wait, isn't this the same basic road movie as, say Dumb & Dumber, or Tommy Boy, or Road Trip?"

Well, so what?, I guess the obvious rebuttal to that is. And I guess my answer would have to be, "So: These movies feature a lot of crude humor and simplistic plotting which you art-house goons would despise were it to come from funny folks like the Farrelly Brothers. But you've got that quirky gay cowboy eating pudding in it, and somehow that changes this all to elevated, 'smart humor.'"

I guess I'm not so annoyed by the formulaic nature of these movies themselves, so much I'm annoyed this is a formula beloved by people who vociferously denounce the formulaic nature of more mainstream fare.

Another bit of annoyance comes from the predictable swooning of the critics, which simply can't be trusted. You know these movies will just hew to their own set of tired cliches, but critics will all but mau-mau you into "supporting" these "daring, bold" films just because this set of tired cliches is now considered fashionable among the art-house goons.

The predictability of recent Sundance films is a pity, because the fest used to discover original movie minds...

You don't find as much originality in Sundance films these days, and for a simple reason. In the beginning, the festival was a home for the homeless, for a rambunctious outlaw take on filmmaking. There was no need to be cautious, since indie films were rarely hits. But as Sundance became the showcase for a form of movie gaining marketplace pull, young directors naturally made films to fit the new mold. Sundance films weren't quirky; they did quirky. Quirky became another genre.

In fact, truly imaginative movies have always been anomalies at Sundance. The program is heavy with earnest studies of emotional accommodation. This isn't a supple form, and now it's become formula--creaky and calcified through endless repetition.

...

Sundance used to be a daring, occasionally dazzling alternative to Hollywood; now, it's just a different sort of same.

Pretty much I agree with that, even though I don't bother watching these movies (even when I was at Sundance, I can proudly say I saw no movies whatsoever, even the Squid and the Whale, which everyone was praising to Valhalla, and which I knew, in the back of my mind, would feature long, boring, mannered scenes of a teenaged boy talking to his female psychiatrist (whom, of course, he has sexual fantasies about).

Am I wrong? Maybe. But I could take three more guesses and two of them would be right.

One little nit: Corliss' claim that Brick is a finding-your-family-at-school movie is pure jackass, an attempt to shoehorn a recent indie rave into the template he's complaining about. It's a noir detective movie set in high school; full stop. If there's a goddamned thing about family in the movie, he'll have to explain to me where he sees it, and if he's claiming the law and stooges constitute a "surrogate family," well then The Maltese Falcon has apparently been a man-in-search-of-a-family movie for all these years without anyone noticing.

That bit of can't-let-any-contrary-evidence-impede-my-thesis jackassery aside, he gets it about right. No longer can I read critics without applying a deconstructivist analysis to their reviews; I can figure out if I'll like a movie or not from reviews, but not based upon critics' claims as to whether it's good or not. I kind of read them as if they're in code, separating the valid criticisms ("the film becomes so plot-heavy as to become incomprehsible, but, worse yet, immobile") from the kneejerk ones ("the film's idea of excitement seems to consist wholly of automatic weapons fire, karate kicks, and enormous naked breasts all over the place").

And I also know how to decode their positive reviews, too. "Quirky" is pretty much a guarantee of a bad movie, of course, and "smart" is becoming a pretty dangerous slam as well, given that most critics are borderline retarded think the fact that a movie features smart characters makes the movie itself smart.

PS: Little Miss Sunshine was okay. Greg Kinnear-- hey, can't go wrong with him. As Slate's writer says, he saved what would have been the typical white-suburban-dad-who-only-cares-about-careerism cliche and made the character sympathetic.

If there's hate for the movie, it's because it was so wildly oversold beyond its merits. The movie wouldn't have become a hit without the critics claiming it was the funniest movie in the history of the universe, but, when you make those sort of claims, you're going to find a lot of backlash from a public exiting the theater saying only, "Well, that was... cute."

Thrillers: How come Hollywood doesn't make thrillers or detective stories much anymore, if at all? (Well, they do, but only if they're based on some dumb John Grisham book. No book, no built-in audience = no movie.)

I guess the reason is that thrillers underperform or outright bomb at the box office.

So why doesn't the Sundance crowd produce more low-budget thrillers like independents (real independents) used to do, like when the Coen Brothers scored a big hit with the zero-budget Blood Simple?

The thriller is a fairly popular genre; I guess it's just not popular enough anymore to be a bankable genre at studio-level costs. Way too much money to spend on such movies.

So, given that independents have produced some really good thrillers/dic pics at very low budgets that managed to make big money, why not spend more creative effort reviving this former staple of Hollywood fare?

Gotta be more rewarding to breathe new life into a vital, entertaining genre rich in Hollywood history than cranking out yet another gay cowboys eating pudding movie.

PS: A pretty amusing independent comedy worth seeing is See This Movie, with Seth Meyers from SNL, the Asian guy from Harold and Kumar, and the British announcer from Best In Show. (Jim Piddock, I think.)

Basically, it's about a couple of guys who attend a three-day movie making class given by a hack British camaraman (Piddock) and decide to enter a bit Toronto Film Festival, but having not actually shot a movie at all. They don't even have a script, but Meyers is pretty sure all a movie needs is one sex scene, one gunfight, and one part where everyone cries, and then the rest of the script can just be written on the fly around that. Meyers is pretty funny as a guy who lacks anything close to talent but has the singleminded drive and infectious enthusiasm of a retard eyeing up a Fudgie the Whale ice cream cake.

Not super hilarious, but consistently amusing. And it's kind of cool to see a well-done movie made for, like, four dollars.

Posted by: Ace at 04:33 PM | Comments (96)
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Answer below the jump.

A hint, maybe, in that left cheek.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:08 PM | Comments (56)
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Those little shits.

Chimpanzees are capable of making spears to hunt other primates and have been seen using the weapons to apparently kill bushbabies for meat, scientists announced today.

The researchers based their findings on observations of omnivorous chimpanzees that dwell in savannahs similar to those from which humanity's ancestors are thought to have emerged.

"It is not adult males, but young chimpanzees, including adolescent females, who are exhibiting this behavior," Jill Pruetz, a primatologist at Iowa State University, told LiveScience.

"This has important implications for how we think about the evolution of tool use in our own species," Pruetz added. "We have tended to emphasize the role of adult males in hunting, and this research supports the assertion that we should not ignore females and other individuals."

I love that they have to get in a feminist message in in a story about friggin' monkeys.

As if we're all so misogyinistic we're sitting here saying, "Oh, sure, male feces-flingin' monkeys could use spears as weapons, of course. That I totally buy. But female friggin' monkeys? No way. Their brains are one third the size of male chimps'. That's science."

For God's sakes, we spend so much time hating the females of one species we don't have time to oppress the females of other species.

Earlier this month, scientists reported that chimpanzees used stone tools as early as 4,300 years ago, suggesting that they learned to make and use the tools on their own, rather than copying humans.

The scientists investigated the Fongoli community of savannah-dwelling chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in southeastern Senegal.

The researchers saw 10 different chimps fashioning spear-like tools to forcibly jab at nocturnal primates known as lesser bushbabies (Galago senegalensis), which sleep inside hollow branches or tree trunks during the day.

After their attacks, the chimps sniffed or licked their weapons, as if to see whether or not they shed blood.

"I was flabbergasted," Pruetz said.

Previously, researchers had spotted one chimpanzee using tools to flush out mammalian prey, specifically employing a branch to rouse a squirrel.

However, Pruetz and her colleague, Cambridge biological anthropologist Paco Bertolani, saw something far more complex.

The chimps routinely broke off branches, trimmed them of twigs, leaves and bark and sharpened the tips of their spears with their teeth.

There was just one successful attempt in 22 recorded instances of the chimpanzee hunts with their spears.

"Still, this involves significantly less energy than in chasing down monkeys, so it is not surprising that it evolved," Pruetz said.

Makes sense. Their DNA is 98.8% identical to ours, so they're close cousins. (The average DNA variation between humans is only 0.1%.)

Posted by: Ace at 03:00 PM | Comments (107)
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Liberal media outfits do loves them their unhinged-leftist hate-mail. Because they use it again and again as proof positive that they must be reporting straight down the middle to incur so much wrath from the left.

Although Allah points out the speciousness (and convenience) of that claim, let's also note that most of the liberal media's criticism on the right comes from mainstream Republicans representing the great mass of right-leaning thought, whereas those who think the WaPo is a part of the Vast Right Wing Noise Machine are unabashed, unhinged lefties, "undecided" voters only the sense they're undecided between Ralph Nader and Hugo Chavez.

Which means that the criticism of the paper comes from the hard left and center-right, which means, in turn, the paper is somewhere in between. And what is in between center-right and hard left? Ah yes: establishment liberal. Which is what everyone who's not batshit crazy understands the WaPo is, its support of the Iraq War notwithstanding, and its quite-praiseworthy attempts towards true political balance notwithstanding. Yes, the WaPo is less blatantly agenda-driven than the NYT, but it is still, on the whole, establishment liberal, and its reporting reflects that deep institutional bias.

Perhaps this WaPo editor should talk to NYT Editor in Chief Bill Keller, who was asked about such charges of "rightwing nutjobbery" running rampant at the New York Times (of all places). Even he couldn't straight-facedly offer such stupidity as proof of his newspaper's alleged "objectivity."

Bill Keller, top editor for the New York Times, was discussing media bias, and noted that a lot of liberals were now emulating conservatives in writing letters of complaint that the New York Times was now "too conservative."

Usually, when media people mention this, they claim it "proves" they're actually fair and balanced, as they're "catching heat from both sides."

Keller, to his credit, admitted his suspicion that most of these letters from liberals alleging conservative media bias were not in fact ingenuous, but an attempt to "mau-mau" (his words) the media more towards the left, or at least prevent the media from making conciliatory moves towards the center to appease conservatives.

That's me quoting my own "reportage" there, because I can't find the original quote on the net. But he said it, unless some government mindthug has dosed me with a concentrated beam of V2K.

Posted by: Ace at 02:50 PM | Comments (23)
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It's a pilot for an apparently shelved Jay Mohr pilot called Community Service. I like Mohr, so I'm not sure if I like it just because I like him. It's not bust-a-gut funny, but it's enjoyably amusing.

The other parts are here.

Eh. Just tossing it out there.

One interesting thing is that all these guys who wrote together on SNL -- Mohr, Spade, Sandler, even MacDonald -- hit a lot of the same subject matter and play with the same basic jokes in their later stuff. Not sure why that is. I've always wondered whether Spade copied the robot dance and other physical-comedy gags from Sandler or vice versa or both showed up at the same time doing the same thing.

A less-interesting thing: I think when you do a pilot you use whatever music you like, not worrying about getting the rights. After all, only a few dozen people are going to see it. This show seems to have an awful lot of kinda-expensive music in it for a TV show. And sometimes just a few expensive seconds of it, like starting off with Barroom Blitz for just enough time to have to pay money.

I guess they just put in their dream music in pilots as placeholders, and then, if the show actually gets to air, all of it is replaced by cheap covers by obscure bands or lame orignal music.

Posted by: Ace at 02:28 PM | Comments (19)
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As Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber says, "So you're telling me I have I chance...?!"

"Independent" Sen. Joe Liebeman receives a mini-profile titled "What Joe Wants," a key question since he is "the Senate's one-man tipping point." Republicans, the magazine says, are "courting him" and Lieberman "has been indulging in some fairly immodest political footsie."

Lieberman calls jumping to the Republican side, and tilting the Senate, "a remote possibility," which means there's at least a chance of that. Time seems to push Lieberman in this direction, as the article concludes: "Lieberman's GOP flirtation has its risks--and a time limit....The longer he waits to capitalize on his moment, the greater the danger that he'll be tagged as one of those politicians for whom having power is more important than using it."

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin claims that his side still "counts on him as a friend" even though it is "a little painful and awkward."

Could get a little more painful and awkward, Dickie.

Over at Hot Air, a quote from Politico suggesting that Lieberman might jump if Democrats attempt to defund the war.

Even though Murtha is attempting that sort of thing, it seems that most Democrats, especially those in the Senate, don't want to put 'em on the glass, so Lieberman's hand will never really be forced.

Posted by: Ace at 01:15 PM | Comments (47)
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He doesn't outright endorse the Truther Conspiracy Theory, but he's apparently very interested in receiving "evidence" about it, and of course even more interested in pandering to his base, the clinically insane.

Here's more:

Last time I came across Kucinich, I learned he was pandering to the pathetic schizophrenics of the "V2K Movement" (V2K stands for, "Voice to Skull," which really doesn't match the letters, but as these people are convinced the government is beaming signals into and out of their brains, I suppose getting the first two letters right is worthy of applause).

He actually introduced a bill which would forbid government use of such "psychotronic weapons" (a cooler way of saying "mind rays").

Is he simply crazy himself, or is such a vile slug he's willing to victimize the insane by pandering for political donations better used to buy anti-psychotic medication?

Thanks to JackStraw.

Posted by: Ace at 01:05 PM | Comments (56)
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