Oh my, now there's one of those Whitehouse petition thingies demanding prosecution of Gregory for waving around an illegal (in D.C.) 30 round Ar mag.

Unleash the Kraken of public "outrage". No "journalist" should be above "the law", even if it is a retarded law, right? Ignorance is no excuse, right?

Other petitions you may be interested in:
Piers Morgan deportation
NRA school shield program
Create "gun free" politicians zones
Revoke tax exempt status of Westboro and designate as hate group
Bag Anna Wintour as possible ambassador choice
Declassify Nicola Tesla's papers and make them public
Stop paying Congress and President until "fiscal cliff" is avoided

Posted by: Open Blogger at 11:16 PM | Comments (97)
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Merry Christmas all!  Hope all your Christmas wishes came true.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:18 PM | Comments (456)
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What did you get? What did you give?

This is pretty funny.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:38 PM | Comments (187)
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Merry Christmas!

Posted by: Ace at 08:46 AM | Comments (389)
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The HQ wishes a merry Christmas to all the members of our armed services and their families today, and especially to those who can't celebrate together because of a deployment.

God bless you all.

And here are some helpful links for anyone who wants to recycle any cash Christmas gifts they may have received:

Fisher House

Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund

Toys for Tots

Posted by: andy at 06:16 AM | Comments (118)
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• Oh Hey Look, A Journal News Reporter Owns A Gun
  
• Charles Durning Dies
  
• Half The Facts You Know Are Wrong
  
• Red Letter Media Review Of The Hobbit
  
• Is Assad Using Chem Weapons
  
• I Saw The TSA Pat Down Santa Clause
  
• Jacob Sullum On The Rioters Veto
  
• Why Cuomo's Nutty Gun Confiscation Plan Will Never Work
  
• New Jersey Town Arms Their School Security
  
• Corey Booker: Criminals Are Killing People, Not Law-Abiding Gun Owners
  
• Higher Ed Bubble
  
• List Of Tax Hikes And Fees Coming Next Year As A Result Of Obamamcare
  
• Video Released From Knife Rampage At Chinese Primary School That Left 23 Wounded On The Same Day As The Sandy Hook Massacre
  
• Did Prince Harry Kill A Taliban Chief?
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:24 AM | Comments (93)
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Good morning. I hope you're unwrapping many presents today and that you're enjoying time with your family. Be safe, have fun.

Open Thread.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:07 AM | Comments (141)
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Woo Hoo - Yet Another Major Blog Award!

From the 2012 Fabulous 50 Blog Award Winners.

And a Merry Christmas to All!

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:28 PM | Comments (737)
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Very disappointing. Not recommended. I suggest you wait for the DVD.

Fanboy Bias: I should have mentioned this -- I'm a big fan of the book, The Hobbit. I like it more than LotR. And I tend to dislike movies based on properties I like. I have too strong an idea of what the thing should be to enjoy the movies.

The RedLetterMedia guy (the other one) summed it up well by calling this a "conflicted" movie. On one hand, the source material itself is a very fun, very light adventure story written for children. I think we'd mostly agree that, while pleasing to children, it actually works pretty wonderfully for adults, too. I just began rereading it; it's actually pretty funny, in that droll British way.

So that's one aspect of the movie's tone. The other aspect, however, is that the movie is made to be very similar in tone to the Lord of the Rings films. But the tone and feel of The Hobbit book was a bit different than the tone and feel of the Lord of the Rings books. The latter is self-consciously epic; the Hobbit -- the book I mean -- had the feel of a lark. The Lord of the Rings was about the fate of the planet, and whether it would fall into "Shadow;" the Hobbit was actually sort of a heist book. The dwarves intended to steal (well, steal back) a mint, largely for their own pecuniary benefit. Sure, they also want their homes back and vengeance against Smaug, but the roguish, picaresque nature of the plot is summed up by the contract they offer Bilbo for his services as a burglar -- "not exceeding one-fourteenth share of the proceeds," etc.

The Godfather films were operatic and grand; the fun heist picture The Italian Job was not. They're both solid movies, but they're completely different. The tone would be out of place in the other.

And so it is with The Hobbit. We have what should be (and which was, in literary form) a heist story, almost a sword & sorcery romp, but the filmmakers have laid over this an attempt to embiggify the story, to puff it up really, into something like the Lord of the Rings.

It doesn't work. The stakes just aren't the same.

A whole bunch of choices made in this movie seem unwise. And many of these choices seem designed to make the first Hobbit movie almost a beat-for-beat match with the first Lord of the Rings movie. For example, they've inserted a completely made-up character, an orc named Azog the Defiler, to play the same role as the Black Riders from LotR, a scary pursuer who shows up whenever the stopwatch indicates it's time for an action sequence. (Yes, I know Azog is mentioned in The Hobbit as the orc who killed Thorin's grandfather at Moria, but he isn't pursuing Thorin throughout the book.)

Azog is especially objectionable because he's an all-CGI creation, for reasons I don't understand-- the orcs in the LotR films were just people wearing fright-masks. Why they had to make a distractingly-fake CGI character, I don't know. I should also note that the orcs in this movie look nothing at all like the orcs in the LotR, and are much larger, much more muscular, and much more ferocious and bestial... rather almost exactly like the Uruk-Hai, except pale white. And also, fake-looking.

Then, at Rivendell, they make the stop there very similar to the stop featured in Fellowship of the Ring by adding in a meeting of some sort of Grand Council consisting of Elrond, Galadriel (who wasn't in the Hobbit at all), Gandalf, and Saruman (who wasn't in the Hobbit at all). This counsel talks about The Enemy and The Shadow, ideas that were only peripheral and hinted at in The Hobbit. Thus the stay at Rivendell in The Hobbit, which was quite different from the stay in Rivendell in the LotR, comes off as a copycat in the film version.

Oh: They actually add in an Artifact of Evil here, too! Radagast, you see, has discovered the Black Sword of the Witch-King of Angmar, and this means... something or other. They just substituted the Sword of Power for the Ring of Power from the last one. What the hell? The "Moghul Sword" (no idea if that's the right spelling)? What's this doing in The Hobbit?

In another painfully close swipe from Fellowship of the Ring, the film ends with Bilbo and Company looking off into the distance to see the Lonely Mountain standing alone on the horizon... precisely as Frodo and Samwise looked into the distance to see Mount Doom standing alone on the horizon in Fellowship.

Haven't I seen this all before, only better?

Other annoyances abound. I wondered if they'd include Galdalf's ventriloquism trick with the trolls. As a kid, I hadn't liked that part, as I found it all a little silly and "for kids," being, as it was, largely a comedic solution to what had been sold as a seriously dramatic threat.

Well, they take that out. But strangely, they replace Gandalf's silly comedic solution with an even sillier, more comedic solution involving Bilbo. If they were going to keep the silly comedic solution, they should have kept it as Gandalf's ventriloquism -- at least that was magic (or perhaps magically assisted), and so therefore explains a little bit how such a solution could have worked. In the movie version, it's just Bilbo doing some strained playing for time.

Peter Jackson also allows his CGI to run even more wild than he did in the LotR. The goblin sequence is ruined simply by virtue of it being so cartoonish, in both conception and actual execution (it's all CGI, all of it).

People falling 60 feet is scary, because we sense the reality of it and fear for their safety. People falling 300 feet, and surviving, is not scary. It's just silly. Peter Jackson just doesn't seem to grasp this, that more is frequently not better. Go too far and the physics fall apart and it all just seems absurd. Just because you can do it on a computer doesn't mean it will play on the screen.

The stone giant sequence -- which was pretty neat in the book -- is just ridiculous here. The book had the dwarves hiding from stone giants lobbing rocks at each other, possibly as some kind of game. Here, they're... actually clinging to rock ledges which turn out to be creases in the knees of truly immense stone giants, and it's just absurd that they could possibly hang on as the giant is jumping and running and getting knocked back on his feet.

We'll make it biggerer. That will make it even more awesomer!

Well, no.

One place they definitely don't go biggerer is on sets and outdoor locations. For a big budget movie, they seem to be on small indoor sets (with CGI background) an awful lot. They're only actually outside, in the real world, in a few shots of the Shire and some "Trek" shots (as they walk along the spine of a high hill ridge, something we've seen in LotR a lot, too).

Finally, for a movie called The Hobbit, the actual Hobbit of the title is curiously a secondary player. The book was entirely from the point of view of Bilbo, which made you identify strongly with him, as you saw the world from his eyes. This movie is constantly cutting away to Gandalf's story (Bilbo absent), to Azog, to Radagast the Brown. In the book, things happened to Bilbo (and Bilbo happened to other things, as Gollum could tell you); in the movie, things merely happen nearby him.

I just did not like this movie, at all. The action was unconvincing, everything was turned up to 11 (or, more accurately, turned up to 19), and all the charm and liveliness and fun and spirit of the book was drained out and replaced with CGI roller-coaster hijinks. Ninety minutes in and I was just waiting for it to be over. And I had an hour and a half to go.

One and half stars.

Good Things: Here are some good things: the opening stuff with Bilbo and the dwarves was pretty funny. Most of the humor ends when they leave the Shire, unfortunately, though there is some moderately funny stuff later on.

I sort of liked Radagast the Brown. Everyone else seems to not like him. I thought he had a Tom Bombadil sort of quality I liked, a powerful, and somewhat addled, nature spirit.

What I don't like about him is that he wasn't actually in The Hobbit, and it's quite strange he was jammed into this movie, which has so many other introductions, rather than the next movie, if they were determined to have him at all. Radagast's Big Thing here is simply to tell Bilbo and Company that the Greenwood has become The Mirkwood (almost overnight-- I had the sense in the books this process took years and maybe decades).

Since the Mirkwood will be in the next movie, wouldn't it have made more sense to introduce him there, when he could recall the Shadow falling over his forest soon before they enter it?

As it stands, in this movie, Radagast warns us about how dreadful Mirkwood is now... and then of course we don't make it to Mirkwood, or even hear of it again.

It's another example of making this not The Hobbit's story but the story of a whole gang of people, with The Hobbit from time to time showing up.

Posted by: Ace at 01:50 PM | Comments (184)
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The White Plains newspaper The Journal-News has decided to produce an interactive map of every licensed pistol permit holder in three New York counties.

The map indicates the addresses of all pistol permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties. Each dot represents an individual permit holder licensed to own a handgun — a pistol or revolver. The data does not include owners of long guns — rifles or shotguns — which can be purchased without a permit. Being included in this map does not mean the individual at a specific location owns a weapon, just that they are licensed to do so.

The information is public, however there is no legitimate reason for them to consolidate it and put it on an interactive map. Well, no other reason than intimidation. The newspaper doesn't offer an explanation for why they created this interactive map.

This is bitter, spiteful and dangerous. This puts the gun owners in great danger. Do you live in New York? Do you want a gun? Well rob these homes to get one. When that eventually happens or someone is killed as a result of this stunt, the newspaper won't be held to account. The editorial staff and reporters won't care at all.

Fortunately, a blogger at For What Its Worth, decided that two can play that game. He found the publisher's address, pictures of the inside of her home on Zillow, and her personal likes and dislikes culled from her credit card records.

It should be noted that all of that information is public. It will be hard not to laugh when she accuses bloggers and gun nuts of intimidation.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:39 PM | Comments (177)
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