Speaking Truth To Power

Fast forward 3.5 minutes to get past Senators Akaka and Pryor.

The Vow

In an effort to strengthen relations with the staff I went out to the movies with them. I heard that The Vow was a chick flick but I never imagined it was pablum for the Baby Sitters Club.
CP and I haven't gone to an evening movie in years. When I get to the ticket booth the girl asks me if it's two adults. I say, yes, two adults - wondering what she's talking about? Did she think I wanted to pay for the forty people behind me in line? I guess she was wondering if I wanted the senior discount. I never want a senior discount. Forty years ago when all this senior crap started I thought it was ridiculous. It was the start of the national slide into our entitlement psychosis.

When we entered the auditorium I thought I was at a high school girls varsity basketball game. There were about three hundred fourteen year old girls already seated. There weren't more than two seats together, let alone half a row for our group. It was like the youth group from Biltmore Baptist descended on the theater.

The movie was based on a true story about a woman who has a head injury and loses the memory of her husband. Usually, the same effect can be achieved with three beers. There was actually a good story here, but Hollywood went for the cheap shot and made it a teen throb and went for the bucks. There is a rather good French version of the amnesiac spouse movie out
there.

Channing Tatum's acting consists of a two hour long stupid look. His performance reached its zenith when he got up from the couch and bared his ass. This split second of man-ass sent the teeny boppers to moaning, sighing, squealing and muted applause. I had to refrain myself from mooning those in the twenty rows behind me. Rachel McAdams could have played a sumo wrestler more convincingly than she played the aspiring sculptor. The stupid look on her face was an insult to amnesics everywhere. She couldn't even compete with Tatum in the bare-ass department. Of course her little trip through the windshield didn't even leave a scar on her, let alone a tic or gimpy arm. Jessica Lang played the mother in law and looked like a freeze-dried copy of her former self. Sam Neill gave just enough effort to receive his paycheck.

This movie was so dumb that it was enjoyable to sit there and mock it. The three hundred teeny -boppers talked constantly as if they were at a pajama party; all the while texting and cooing. Thankfully, the audience made up for the lack of reality on the wide-screen. It also allowed me to socialize with the staff and hopefully let them see I'm not as big of an S.O.B. as they think I am.

Rating:
The Vow- Two Stars
The Audience- Five Stars

500 Days Of Romney

500 Days Of Summer is about a loser who thinks he can make his girlfriend love him. He's a super nice guy and his girlfriend is a player. She likes him enough for now, but she lets him know he's not the one. He takes this as a starting point and wastes 500 days trying to change her mind.

This is Mitt Romney. Mitt feels that with enough money, attack ads and photo-ops, conservative America will come around. However, there is nothing he can do to make us love him. It's not that we don't know him; it's that we do know him and we don't like him. Mitt thinks he can become President by the force of his will, a half billion dollars and the PR department of the LDS church. Like Summer in the movie, the public will party with Mitt, sleep with Mitt and spent 500 days being courted by Mitt, but in the end they're going to marry someone else. It's like your Mom setting you up with the sweet neighbor girl. Who are you going to go out with? I bet you're going to bring home the Goth-Girl with the bolt in her head.


It's all about arrogance. Mitt is saying I'm so handsome, so moral, such a family man, a man of Gods, such an entrepreneur that I make 20 million a year in my bathrobe; how can you not love me? How can you love that chubby old man with three wives? How can you love that home-schooling youth pastor wannabee? How can you love that senile old codger who wants to close the Federal Reserve?



It's easy to understand, Mitt; the other guys aren't YOU!

Is She The Best We Have?

Madonna is doing the Super Bowl half-time show; I can't wait to see this has-been. She was the first MTV synthesized star. She can't sing, but she can jump around in her underwear. With the aid of pyrotechnics and computer enhanced vocals she manages to raise her talent level to that of the drunk aunt at the wedding.

The last thirty years haven't been too good to the old gal. At her botox-best she looks like a centerfold from Meth-Lab Monthly. I remember seeing Keith Richards doing a stage dive in Detroit in 2006; he had to help himself up with both hands. Can't we have someone who has had a hit in the last twenty years?

Maybe they are catering to their audience, those people getting their AARP applications this week. Hopefully Boniva will keep her from breaking a hip.

Why don't they just have the Armed Forces Bands perform? I would settle for the Royal Dragoons doing Scotland The Brave on bagpipes.







Why not some new talent, like Siobhan Magnus; someone born after the Korean War, someone who can actually sing.

I'm hoping that when I leave my Super Bowl party at halftime and drive home Madonna will be done wowing the nation. I'm also hoping the children will be spared a wardrobe-malfunction that will give them nightmares.

The Forgotten Man

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes a picture is worth two million jobs, 500,000 foreclosures, 10,000 suicides and a dead Border Patrol Agent. And you haven't seen nothing yet.

"The finest opportunity ever given the world was thrown away because the passion for equality made vain the hope for freedom."

Lord Acton

Solyndra Gone Wild

It seems that our energy efficient buildings are turning on us and our eco-friendly cars.


Who could have imagined that a building that looks like a giant reflector oven would fry things?


I have driven in Vegas and have had the sun reflect off one of these Revere-Ware buildings and blind me for about a dozen stoplights. Vegas is hot enough, the sun beats down "like a heat lamp gone ape." Do we really need to focus this solar-storm on our sunbathers and Priuses?


People from moderate climates can't understand that special southwest sun.
My first initiation was during my exploratory visit in 1973. I was told to go out and cool off the car before we went driving. The hose was lying in the sun and when I turned on the water I noticed this bubble in the hose at the nozzle. I was amazed, as I watched this bubble balloon to the size of a watermelon and become strangely translucent. I turned off the faucet and watched the bubble go down as I opened the hot nozzle using my shirt as a potholder. The water that came out was hot enough to brew tea. I let the water run a minute and then started to hose off the car in an attempt to make the interior temperature down to 99 degrees. As I was hosing it down I noticed the windshield is cracking in a dozen directions.

Occasionally, someone would leave a shiny object like a makeup compact mirror on the seat and that would ignite the dried out roof lining and cause the whole car to burn up. The other hazard was the seat belt buckles that could brand you like a steer.


In New Mexico visitors would go out in the desert after being warned of our unique solar abilities. These visitors would tell me "I'm already tanned". The locals knew you didn't go out in the sun between 10am and 3pm. These solar babies wouldn't listen and would come back looking like a walking Virginia Ham.

They should have asked the locals who have been fighting the sun with Reynolds Wrap and window tinting as dark as a beer bottle for decades. But, as the misguided eco-nuts think "so what if the swimmers are being immolated and the Priusis are melting, we saved a kilowatt." Then again, people who live where the temperature routinely is above 110 degrees
(a place formally inhabited by rattle snakes and scorpions) should expect an occasional spontaneous combustion.

My Latest Hero

What a great story. I have read many accounts of those special people who single-handedly cross oceans.










The most limiting factor is the the loneliness that makes most single-handers daffy.










The southern route around the horn versus going through the Suez Canal and dodging pirates. It's a hard call. The Roaring-Forties and the Southern Ocean versus the Muslim-Brotherhood navy.

I can't wait for the book.