mother of the year!

one nice thing about celebrity...when you fuck up, it's hard to avoid being exposed for it.

take yesterday's news, Britney Spears. first she gets shit for driving around without having her kid in a car seat (a big no no) and then her nanny goes and drops the kid on his head!

maybe sculptor Daniel Edwards should have picked a better model for his pro-life statue...that kid will be dead within six months at this rate.

(and if anyone would like to see the side of that statue that didn't make the rounds, you know, the one with the head crowning, utter a small prayer and click here. not for the faint of heart or stomach.)

little miracles (or not)

so have you heard the one about the sleazy couple who pretended to have sextuplets so they could get people to give them handouts?

GRAIN VALLEY, Mo. - The library books on multiple births crowded the couple's coffee table. The bedroom-turned-nursery awaited the arrival of six newborns.

But in the end, authorities say Sarah and Kris Everson never had the sextuplets as claimed. All they had was what appears to be a big lie.

The couple's dramatic story had holes in it from the start — from their mysterious withholding of information for more than a month to the unanimous response of area hospitals that they hadn't helped deliver the newborns.

On Tuesday, authorities said the mystery had been solved — the entire tale was deemed a hoax aimed at tapping the generosity of others to pay the couple's mounting bills.

of course, these con artists are totally misunderstood:

Reached by phone late Tuesday, Sarah Everson offered no explanation. "I'm not talking to anybody right now," she said, "because nobody gets it."

hmmm....made up a bullshit lie to prey upon people's generosity...

...nope. sounds pretty straightforward to me.

the funny things people say when they are on drugs

my wife was prescribed percoset after her surgery last week. after we got home and she had taken her medication and was still a little woozy from the surgery, she asked me:

"do you think Mickey Mouse is a pussy because he doesn't wear a shirt and has buttons on his pants?"

how do you answer that question?

where ya been?

okay, so it's been a while. my wife was having surgery last week and with the Cleveland Indians getting off to a 6-1 start, there's been little time for blogging.

i love to write, but i'd rather hang out with my wife and son, if you don't mind.

see you later asshole!

so the news has come down that self-serving, corrupt, politician and overall prick Tom Delay is resigning from his house seat and not seeking re-election:

DeLay said he is stepping down because he wanted the race in his Houston-area district to focus on the issues people care about -- "not a campaign focused solely as a referendum on me."

don't let Tom fool you though--he's less interested in the campaign and more on making sure he isn't someone's bitch in the federal pokey for the next twenty to twenty-five years.

couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

movie of the day: Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

when i was an English student at Bowling Green State University, i was never much for allegory. to me, allegory was too direct in its methods, leaving little to the imagination and revealing itself as the pontification it so often comes across as.

if there were such a thing as a neutral point of view, i would probably have a disdain for Good Night, and Good Luck, as it is an obvious allegory of contemporary media coverage, cast in the historical context of the McCarthy hearings during the mid-50s.

but i don't have a neutral point of view.

the fact of the matter is that with the Bush administration's attempts to cast everything in terms of black and white (if you're not with us, you're with the terrorists, etc.) Good Night, and Good Luck is an important allegory to consider. the McCarthy hearings destroyed people both figuratively and literally (the film covers the suicide of a Murrow associate, Don Hollenbeck, who killed himself after being crucified by a columnist for the Hearst syndicate of newspapers) and the obvious message here is that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

the parallels between the McCarthy hearings and the rhetoric of the Bush administration are frighteningly congruous. McCarthy, like his modern day counterparts, would always attempt to bring the argument back on itself, often engaging in ad hominem attacks on his critics because it was obvious that his arguments didn't hold water. McCarthy made a mistake in attacking Murrow, who was respected by the American public for his coverage of World War II.

the one element that we find that Good Night, and Good Luck has not parallelled is Murrow himself. Murrow's politics did not make him confront McCarthy's witch hunts, but instead he was compelled by a need to do what he felt was right. as he explains to Sig Mickelson early in the film, there is no such thing as a neutral view point, that all news is editorializing to some degree. the problem is that today we lack a newsperson of Murrow's character. no one will step up and question this administration and do what is right.

the most amazing element of the film is that director George Clooney made a conscious decision to only use Joe McCarthy's actual televised appearances and hearings instead of casting an actor to play McCarthy. this is, of course, the most effective method of showing the fervor and lunacy of McCarthy's witch hunt, and it seems that it may be just as easy to slip Bush, Cheney, McClellan, Rumsfeld, Rice and all of the other zealots in there without ruining a thing. and that's a frightening thought. Five Stars (out of Five)