it looks like I was way ahead of the game by watching "Rescue Me," anyway.

While I know you are not responsible for the captions under the photo of this plane, I have to say I had a bit of a WTF? moment when I read this:

HS-OMG (cn 49183/1129) Taken 2 weeks before accidented at Phuket Airport

"Accidented?"

would that be an African swallow or an European swallow?

Honestly, while I am torn over this, I will probably go see the flick.

I will also likely be going to see is with my adult son. He will probably alternate between joining me in MST3K'ing it and groaning over my pointing out of errors and deviations the original version. I think he is close to forgiving me for taking issue with the Latin in "The Passion of the Christ."

That said, for my money, the best cinematic treatment of Beowulf was the unfortunately maligned "The 13th Warrior."

I suppose we will see...

shannonr's little screed: The 2000 election finally euthanized the morbidly sickly notion American has anything at all to offer the world under the heading "democracy". is cute, but ultimately nonsense.

Just tonight, The History Channel's two hour program on Andrew Jackson shows that "stolen elections" are old hat in American politics, yet we survived.

That said, it is clear to anyone with even the most tenuous grasp of history that empires/super-powers/whatever you call them, eventually wane, for one reason or the other. In short, we Americans are not going to be the top dog forever. Hell, there is more than an even chance that we will not survive as a nation forever. However, it is equally wrong to fall into what seems to shannonr's knee-jerk, leftist pessimism that we are all doomed or damned for all eternity.

In short, we will get through this. Yes, we will, despite W and all the shit this Administration has brought us. Woe and despair will get us nowhere.

Edwards...[on]what he meant by his frequent claim that he knows how "to close" in Iowa."

Yeah, and I immediately flashed on Alex Baldwin's riff in "Glengarry Glen Ross":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-AXTx4PcKI

Plain, pure and simple, put the coffee down, John. Coffee is for closers. You came up short in 2004 and you are going to come up even shorter in 2008.

with a book, you can mark a spot you want to come back to, mark the end notes all without random scrolling that wastes more time than going to what you have marked already, in a real book.

A book is both a tactile and a visual experience. It is not ephemeral electrons jiggling on a screen so long as you have power. Part of what I love about a book it the ever so slightly raised printed text beneath my fingers. Sorry, I'll stay with real books.

Ted, Ted, Ted.

The "photoshoppiness" of the last panel is the whole point.

OK, "Dexter" was just as incredibly creepy cool as I had hoped.

I plan on recording this series, as it looks that good.

That said, let me add that I, too, am a big fan of "1776". I first saw it as an in flight movie, flying back from Italy in the summer of 1973. At that time of my life, I loathed musicals, but this started to change that attitude. However, and more importantly, it touched me on a deeply emotional level. The final, freeze-frame scene found me unexpectedly misting up. My college minor was in history, so I knew they were playing a bit fast and loose with the screenplay and that one, final scene, but I didn't care. Every nation needs its patriotic legends/images, be it Leonidas at Thermopylae, Horatio at the bridge, Nelson at Trafalgar and this. Yeah, they all happened, just not as neatly and noble as depicted.

We need the inspiring images to set into our souls, then get the understanding of what happened. That these were real, gritty, sweaty, mortal guys, troubled by much the same insecurities as us only makes us appreciate them all the more when we see that they rose up beyond all that and did the stuff that put them in our national pantheon.

and one all the more depressing is Len Deighton's "SS/GB" of some years ago.

Aside from the flawed reasoning for attacking Iraq under W (more on that below), this current administration has been not only cavalier in their attitude towards the looting, vide Rumsfeld on his crack about, "Just how many pots can there be?", but completely uncaring about the loss of history, art and culture, not to mention innocent lives.

One would have hoped we had gotten beyond that by now.

I can only hope that the auction houses and eBay refuse to list such questionable items. If not, it is up to us to at least attempt to shame them into that.

Now, on to the reasoning for the present administrations. Sure Saddam was a nasty SOB, but he was hardly reason for invading under the false pretenses this administration lied to us about. In short, Asher Steinberg's oh so pious reasoning is full of shit. Sure we got rid of Saddam, but we have also reaped a whirlwind of disaster that could have been avoided, both in terms of loss of artifacts and lives, lives of Iraqis and Americans. Shame on us for allowing it.