Stephanie says: "Even though Ricky Bobby comports himself with a manly swagger, his eyes look perpetually perplexed." Now, who does that remind us of? Hmmm...could it be that Will Ferrell is the anti-Bush? The comical flipside that swaggers and talks nonsense but doesn't send soldiers to their deaths or corrupt the best hope for democracy in the world? Does laughing at WF mitigate the angst of living under the dumbest, most incompetently swaggering leadership in living memory? Let's hope so; there are still two years left to go.

She needs a TIVO that takes the word "fuck" out of "Deadwood." The show would then only be four and a half minutes long per episode and she could spend the time gained windsurfing or writing haikus.

My grandpappy was an ol' cowpoke and would have been embarrassed to use that word and its many derivatives even if he was off by himself where no one could hear him.

Deadwood is a total crock.

I'm all for artistic license, but license to what? Be a broken fucking record? It really isn't the profanity that fucking bothers me. It's the fucking repetition. If they were fucking saying "persimmon tree" or "Q-tip" as often as they fucking use the "f" word, it would be every fucking bit as tedious.

And where do you draw the line on the artistic license? Christmas Fucking Carol? King Fucking Arthur? The Passion of Jesus H. Fucking Christ?

Fuzz, I'm not taking you to task, you weren't particularly defending anyone (except your slam on Yosemite Sam did kinda fucking bother me). But ever since the Sopranos...I don't know, it's just another nail in the coffin of literature, of people taking the time and making the effort to create forceful dialogue without all the obvious shortcuts.

Sigh...

I've seen lots of Mamet plays. He tackles issues and present characters I'm interested in. That said, I still think the obsessive and repetive use of ANY word, but especially one that gives a cheap and easy extra jolt to any sentence, any line, is just that...cheap and easy. So, to me, as a dramatist, Mamet is like a friend, someone you like, who also drives a Hummer. You kind of have to make excuses for him.

Sixty percent of Americans oppose the Iraq war, in today's CNN poll. That means forty percent...support it? Where do they get these people? Are they human? Do they read anything???

Aaarrghhh!!

They did another very clever one, on Ben Bernanke. Maybe most have seen it, but for those who haven't:

http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/everybreath/

When the story first broke, it was the Brits and the Pakis who followed and caught these supposed baddies. (I say supposed because this could still turn out to be one of those wet firecrackers, some Muslims sitting around sucking on a hookah talking about all the shit they're gonna blow up, caught on tape by some supersleuthing anti-terror squad.)

Then the news morphed quickly into how the Americans were on top of these terriorists all along, been tracking 'em like forever.

I don't know, I suppose I've gotten cynical in the last five years, but I can just hear the secure phone calls, Bush begging Blair to let his people in on the collar.

The men had not bought plane tickets, the officials said, but they were in the process of perusing the Internet to find flights to various cities that had similar departure times.

A senior congressional source said it is believed the plotters planned to mix a British sports drink with a gel-like substance to make a potent explosive that could be ignited with an MP3 player or cell phone. "There are strong reasons to believe the materials in a beverage like that could have been part of the formula," the official said.

I feel the term "Filmmaker" is being tossed around a bit loosely. This instance is of a guy with a video camera, period. Having been involved for many years in the making of films, I feel misuse of this term cheapens and diminishes the meticulous effort, both in pre-production, production and post-production that it takes to actually "make" a "film," even a small, low-budget film of modest pretensions. To have every one-take video opportunist, however clever and watchable their clips may be, dubbed a "filmmaker" is like calling grafitti artists "epic poets."

As much as I love Video Dog, this interview deserves a wider discussion than it's likely to get here. This guy may turn out to be a very big factor in our lives over the next few years and yes, he is smart. I happen to think he's a more reasonable person than the idiots in Washington at the moment. For Americans who are arming Israel and blowing up Iraq to act shocked that he's sending missiles to Hezbollah is naive in the extreme. Anyway, like I said, that interview deserves more front-page treatment than it's getting here.

Okay, Vietnam was a long time ago, and that lesson of history obviously wasn't learned. Even further back is the lesson the bellicose Japanese militarists who dragged their country into a disastrous WWII. History is rife with examples of "the military solution" falling on its ass. But the Israelis have no further to look than the quagmire in Iraq for an object lesson in how powerless jet planes and night-vision goggles, smart bombs and bunker-busters can be against a committed insurgency. To hear that, to quote from the article, "Israelis were surprised by the visible inability of their military, considered the strongest and most sophisticated in the Middle East, to defeat a guerrilla army of a few thousand fighters," is truly depressing.