Via Townhall, we learn that Dr. Professor Mike’s imaginary feminist foes, hippie neighbors, Marxist colleagues and lesbian detractors have all snagged dates for New Years Eve, leaving Dr. Mike to spend the evening alone with a Hungry Man dinner and a flock of Glocks. But he’s put the time to good use, working up a list of New Years Resolutions that go beyond the usual (eat fewer carbs, get back to the gym, become the biggest asshole in the Tarheel State):

Lately, liberals (read: statists) have been giving me a hard time about my opposition to a gun control initiative that would limit gun purchases to one per month per owner. Since I a) don’t like the government telling me how many guns I can own, and b) just hate having liberals…

(read: the voices in Dr. Mike’s head)

…mad at me, I’ve come up with a solution. It takes the form of a New Year’s resolution sure to make everyone happy (myself especially).

I hereby resolve to help the cause of gun control in America by purchasing only one gun per month in 2008. Naturally, I am providing a list of those guns below with pretty pictures you can access with a click of the mouse. I hope you enjoy the following selections:

…This is a great little gun to purchase if you are having trouble finding a gun that will fit inside the fanny pack you use when you are jogging. Of course, I don’t use a fanny pack when I am jogging

Mike likes his fanny exposed and accessible, the better to taunt his enemies.

This year I plan to adopt a nineteen year old girl who still has two years of college left…

Wow, here I was all set for an orgy of unrelieved firearms fetishism, and Mike mixes it up with a premise from Victorian pornography. Well played, Doctor.

My friend Barry Whitehead shoots a Sig 9mm with a 3.9-inch barrel. The gun is so accurate that I can hardly imagine the 4.4-inch barrel version to be better … This is a good side arm for hog hunters. I plan to buy the version with the four-inch barrel.

Mike seems uncomfortable with anything longer than 4 inches.

See? Who needs a penis?

This is a pretty gun. I would like to have about 72 of these – 36 in .357 and 36 in .45 Colt – sitting around the house. Fresh out of the box and never fired, of course. That would be heaven.

72 virgin guns. In heaven. Get it? (Look carefully — Dr. Mike’s playing a very subtle game here.)

I’ve been told that the 7mm Rem. Mag. is the best Elk round available.

It’s also effective against Rotarians and Oddfellows.

If I’m ever attacked by a an Elk out here on the East Coast I’ll be more than ready. If that doesn’t happen, I guess I’m due for a road trip to Colorado.

Where he’ll snipe an Elk in a petting zoo, then place a .32 snubnose revolver near it’s hoof to make it look like the Elk shot first.

This is a good first gun for anyone.

We like to call it a “nursing gun.”

I’ve been thinking about getting a new shotgun for quail hunting. I feel more comfortable with an over/under than with a semi-auto. After all, I occasionally hunt with a 78 year old lawyer. One can never be too careful.

Because it’s harder to ambush the elderly now. Since the Cheney thing, they’re on their guard and will occasionally shoot back.

I have decided to reward myself with this beauty for a Christmas gift. The 16-gauge with 26-inch barrels should do the trick for pheasant hunting. My only problem is that I cannot decide between a) the Color Case, b) the Bone Charcoal, or c) the Blue receiver

He agonizes the same way in the shoe department, too.

With Dr. Mike | 34 Comments »

Spending New Year’s in the Pacific Northwest, as witnessed by the fact that the view from the kitchen window isn’t the kitchen window of the middle aged Russian woman next door who spends most of her time chopping onions and bellowing into the phone trapped under her chin like a sorely tempted sinner trying to shout down the devil perched on her shoulder.

In other, happier news, I spoke to s.z. yesterday, and her New Years Resolution is to get back to more regular blogging, as soon as she recovers from a minor but painful show-shoveling injury. So let me take this opportunity to pass along her heartfelt thanks to everyone who contributed to the upkeep of the Island of Misfit Animals that’s taken over her house.

And let me offer my own appreciation to the many loyal and tolerant readers who’ve stuck with Wo’C during the frequent periods of light posting. S.z and I are aiming to provide markedly improved customer service in 2008, just as soon as we conclude our outsourcingstaffing agreement with Channarayapatra & Vijayagopalan of ThiruvananthapurammMuncie, Indiana, Purveyors of Fine Snark since 1813.

Happy Holidays | 7 Comments »

Doug Giles, Pastor of Our Lady of Sorry Your Room is Near the Ice Machine, has a new column up at Townhall. Why don’t we start an office pool on how long he can go before making a Rosie O’Donnell is Fat joke, shall we?

The thought of having to choose between Huckabee and Hillary (or whomever the Left tosses up) come November 2008 is about as appealing to me as the option of watching Rosie O’Donnell river dance naked at 11:00 PM verses watching Rosie O’Donnell river dance naked at 11:15 PM.

The first paragraph? Forget it. Bet’s off. He clearly took a dive.

I know as an evangelical I’m supposed to get all giddy and stuff that we have an “on fire” brother do-si-doing up to be the next Commander in Chief, but elated I am not. The main reason being?

Because you’re too busy with your Conversational Yoda classes?

No, wait. I forget that Doug is a man of the cloth, so his concerns naturally stem from the eternal struggle between Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill…

Now, why do I hypothetically think Mike would morph into Neville Chamberlain if ever to interface with crazy Islamic bastards who like blowing stuff up? … I think he’s naïve, and I’m definitely not getting that Churchill feeling from him.

It’s getting a little sad the way our Home Front Warriors in the War on Terror have begun sneaking around the GOP candidates and surreptitiously squeezing them like a housewife in a Charmin commercial, hoping to feel subcutaneous pockets of Churchillian courage, softness, and absorbency. If I were a Republican Presidential aspirant tramping through Iowa, I’d augment my Secret Service detail with Mr. Whipple.

As a Christian, I’m glad Huckabee is a believer and is anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage; however, my brethren, that’s not enough for moi. In this upcoming election my main issue is our nation’s right to life, and Huckabee, well . . . he just ain’t convincing me.

I used to think there is just no pleasing people like Doug. They demand a government administered on biblical principles, and they get the Bush Administration, anti-Roe judges, abstinence-only sex ed, federal funds for religious charities, and, as the late night commercials are prone to ejaculate, so much more!

And yet, they feel hollow and unfulfilled. Then they get both an ordained Baptist minister and a former missionary running for president, and still, it’s not enough. Because the last person fundamentalist Christians want running their theocracy is Christ, with his tolerance for taxes, his pity for the poor and his rejection of violence. American evangelicals don’t want that wimp from the New Testament, they want his old man, the god who told Saul, “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” These are the people who went to This Boy’s Life, and rooted for Robert De Niro. They’re not interested in electoral, legislative or judicial victories, they don’t want to win the cultural war through example and moral suasion. They want a man on horseback who will spread the faith by the sword. A guy like Mohammed, say. Just with less melanin, and shoulders you could land a 747 on.

Oh Lord | 15 Comments »

s.z. and I know how tough it can be to attract the attention of today’s discerning book buyer. And it’s an especially taxing ordeal for wingnut authors, because they’re all competing for the same book buyer — the rabidly right wing bulk-and-pulp plutocrat. (On the bright side, at least they’re not forced to compete for readers.) But because every week brings another fact free, dolphin unsafe, cut-n-paste tome elbowing for space in warehouses and remainder tables and the receiving docks of cardboard box factories, it’s no longer enough to hike up your skirt, flash a bit of thigh sagging over a stocking top like a condom loaded with oatmeal, and wink saucily at Richard Mellon Scaife. Nowadays, you must marshal the forces of Citizen Journalism!

Via Instaputz we see the beginnings of a massive grassroots campaign to Google Bomb Liberal Fascism back to the Stone Age, from whence it came. Will World O’ Crap rise to the challenge?

Just call us Curtis LeMay.

Now a word from our sponsor | 6 Comments »

One Magic Christmas (1985)
Directed by: Philip Borsos
Written by: Philip Borsos, Barry Healey, Thomas Meehan
A co-production of Walt Disney Pictures and Telefilm Canada

Suggested tagline: Merry Christmas…or else!

We open on a pitch black screen. Not the faintest glimmer of a distant star relieves the smothering cloak of darkness, and we begin to feel the cold grasp the hoary netherworld dragging us down into a pitiless void. But don’t get used to it, because pretty soon they’re going to remember to take the lens cap off and then things are really going to start to suck.

Gradually, a sliver of light appears; it’s the moon, hanging low in an inky sky as black, clouds drift across its face. And what happened next? Well, in Whoville they say that my heart grew three sizes that day at the thought that the Netflix screwed up and accidentally sent me The Howling instead.

But no. We pan down and find Harry Dean Stanton in a tree, sporting a Stetson and a cowboy’s duster, and playing O Tannenbaum on a harmonica. Sadly, his frontier ensemble is not accessorized by a noose.

Suddenly, the moon borrowed from a werewolf movie calls down to Harry Dean and says, “It’s Nicholas! Tonight is the night when I give the Christmas angels their assignments!” So according to One Magic Christmas, St. Nick uses the moon as a public address system, and for some reason has an accent like Apu from The Simpsons. But more important is the news that Harry Dean, with his shabby overcoat, unshaven face, and sunken, bloodshot eyes shaded by a hatbrim, is a Christmas angel, even though when he appeared in Bethlehem upon the first Noel, and found the Christ child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, it triggered an Amber Alert.

Anyway, Harry Dean draws the Mary Steenburgen file. “It’s a most difficult case,” Kris Kringle tells his creepy cherub, because, “she never says ‘Merry Christmas.’” And if they don’t help her to find the spirit of the season before Christmas Eve, Bill O’Reilly is going to have her killed.

Cut to a mall, where Harry Dean hangs around the line of kids waiting to see Santa, reveling in their innocent joy, while giving the police a new lead in the Jon Benet Ramsey case. Enter Mary Steenburgen. She’s rushing through the mall to buy socks, yet still isn’t too busy to ruin Christmas for her two small children by refusing to let them visit with Santa. But her husband Jack points out that it only costs $4.50, and since Mary is our protagonist and really needs to be likable, she agrees that as soon as her deadbeat husband gets a job, then he can perch his spawn on some stranger’s rented lap for two minutes. Even Mary seems to realize that came out a bit harsh, and she tries to defuse the situation by strongly hinting to her six-year old daughter, Abbie, that the whole Santa thing is a myth. She’s hastily contradicted by her son and husband, and Mary spends the rest of their time at the mall sulking that they never support her when she wants to do something as a family, like spoil a holiday.

But why isn’t Mary suffused with the spirit of Christmas? Well, she’s the sole breadwinner, husband Jack having been fired by Mr. Potter back in July, and instead of looking for a new job he spends all his time in the basement building bicycles for poor children. And since they apparently live in the town Tennessee Ernie Ford sang about in “16 Tons,” the Company owns their house and is kicking them out. But her biggest problem, although she doesn’t realize it yet, is her refusal to say “Merry Christmas.”

Back home, Jack wants to work on his Bikes for Tots, while Mary snaps that they need to start packing so all their stuff will be neatly arranged in boxes when the Pinkerton men arrive to toss it into the gutter and club the family senseless with axe handles. As it turns out, Jack is a velocipede genius, and could make a fortune selling his technologically advanced designs (even now, his work in streamers and banana seats is considered revolutionary) if he just had $5000 to open his own shop. But he’s too busy building bikes for the local Dickensian urchins and raising funds to buy the town a community Christmas tree. What a swell guy Jack is – the sort of caring, selfless person who really deserves a yuletide miracle. If only a Christmas angel would appear and magically arrange for Jack to realize his dream and save his family. We cut expectantly to the angel Harry Dean, but at the moment he’s preoccupied, staring hungrily at a group of adolescent boys.

Mr. Potter arrives to show around the new tenants and to rub in the impending eviction. Mary is so depressed by their imminent homelessness that when next we see her, she’s in the shower, wet, glistening, and dancing and singing along to “Stop! In the Name of Love.” Thanks, Disney, like I wasn’t having a crappy enough holiday season. Anyway, the viewer enjoys a small measure of revenge when Mary goes to her job as a checker at one of those moribund Mom and Pop grocery stores. It’s the kind of place that smells of old cabbage and sour milk, where an 80-year old woman will dump a Cup O’ Noodles, a bag of frozen okra, and a can of off-brand cat food on the conveyor belt, then spend ten minutes laboriously writing a check that will later be returned for insufficient funds while the patrons lined up behind her slowly sink into a fugue state. And that’s a good day. That’s a day you go home and brag to the family about.

But this is no ordinary day at work, for today Mary is being Stalked by an Angel, and instead of the usual drudgery, she gets yelled at by a customer, a seedy bum in one of those weird earflap hats, whose stubbled face, shifty eyes, and furtive demeanor is so creepy and unsettling that it’s hard to believe he doesn’t work for Santa.

That night, daughter Abbie asks Jack if there are really angels, besides the one in the cowboy hat and smelly overcoat who hangs around her elementary school. Because her mom says there isn’t. But Jack believes in angels. What’s more, he believes they’re part of a post mortem employment program, and whenever anyone dies, “they go up to Heaven and become an angel. A guardian angel, a Christmas angel – all kinds.” Some are even ground up to become Angel Food Cakes, which are used as feed for other angels, leading to periodic outbreaks of seraphic spongiform encephalopathy.

That night, after the children have gone to bed, Mary and Jack sit down to dinner and an argument. Jack wants to dip into their last five grand (the exact amount he’d need to open his bike shop! Hmmmm…) and buy presents for Abbie and Cal; Mary, on the other hand, think he’s an idiot for squandering their meager savings on crap from Taiwan, and can’t believe she helped to propagate his obviously substandard genes. But the kids are eavesdropping, and Abbie decides to help by writing a letter to Santa demanding to know if he’s real, and if he is, would he stage an intervention?

Later, things are tense in bed, but Mary grudgingly tries to entice Jack into a bout of make-up sex because it’s free and they haven’t paid the cable bill.

Meanwhile, Abbie sneaks out of the house to post her letter, but is accosted at the mailbox by Harry Dean, who tells her he’s an angel, then describes his death in excruciating detail while snow gently falls and the adorable moppet’s core temperature drops. It’s a weird, depressing scene, but it does have a happy ending when Social Services later present Abbie with a new doll so she can point out where the angel touched her.

The next night, Abbie hugs her anatomically correct toy and sighs, “Mom will never like Christmas.” Suddenly, the Angel Harry Dean appears in her bedroom (feel free to scream) and in a voice full of whispered menace, tells the child, “Your mom still hasn’t found the Christmas spirit.” But she will, because he’s about to give her a present that “only angels and little children can give.” Presumably it involves broken kneecaps, or a severed horse head.

At that same moment, Mary and Jack leave their children to the mercy of pervy seraphs and take a walk. Mary pauses to sing an a cappella version “Lost in the Stars,” while Jack sensibly decides to leave her there and take another lap around the block. Suddenly, the angel Harry Dean materializes at the mailbox and drawls, “Don’t sound like you have the Christmas spirit,” making it sound like the kind of threat that’s usually punctuated with the word, “Draw!” As she reaches for her mace, the angel turns off every Christmas light on the block, magically making Canada look even more bleak and depressing than usual.

It’s the day before Christmas, and Mary has to pull a double shift at the Edvard MunchMart, while Jack has to go be a pawn in the sinister game of a rogue cherub. On her way to work, Mary pulls into a gas station, where she watches Mr. Earflaps try to sell his car to the mechanic for 50 bucks so he can buy his boy a present. The pump jockey turns him down, but the earflapped fellow is still filled to the brim with the Christmas spirit, so he abandons his son at the Greyhound terminal and goes to rob a bank.

Jack leaves the kids in the car and runs into the bank to withdraw some cash for toys, while the angel follows him. Meanwhile, Abbie runs into the super market to rat out her dad for buying a Christmas tree, causing Mary to freak out in front of the clinically depressed patrons and get fired. She dumps Abbie back in the car and runs into the bank just as Earflaps takes a hostage and starts to flee with his loot. Jack decides to interrupt the gunman’s desperate escape by telling him all about the true meaning of Christmas, and Earflaps shoots him dead right in front of Mary. Then he steals Jack’s car with the two kids still inside. Hey Mary, starting to feel that Christmas Spirit yet?

Mary jumps into the back of a police cruiser and they set off in hot pursuit, while the soundtrack tries to turn O Tannenbaum into pulse-pounding chase music. Earflaps runs a roadblock and plunges off a bridge and into the icy river below, killing everyone in the car. Suddenly, Daddy going slightly over budget on a Christmas tree isn’t Mary’s biggest problem. But you know what they say: God works in depressing ways.

Cut to Mary, standing alone in her bathroom, widowed, childless, jobless. Perhaps turning on the shower and belting something by the Supremes would help…Oh and hey, the bank robber’s 8-year old son is sitting alone in a bus station on Christmas Eve, waiting for his daddy who will never ever come…I bet right about now you’re wishing you’d switched over to CBS to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas again, huh?

But wait! It turns out that Harry Dean, after arranging for the kids to plunge into a frozen river and drown, pulled them out just before they died, so Mary is only jobless, soon to be homeless, and widowed. It’s a Christmas Miracle!

Mary sits her reanimated kids down for a talk. “You know how sometimes bad things happen?…Well, this is about a bad thing that happened to your father.”

Abbie adorably lisps, “What bad thing, Mommy?”

“Well,” Mary replies, “His agent sent him this script, then…”

Okay, not really. She just breaks the news that the man who kidnapped and took them on a terrifying high speed chase which culminated in a violent crash and a near-death experience also shot their father. “Your dad got killed,” she says, helplessly.

Her son Cal chirps, “You mean dad’s in the hospital?”

Well. Yeah. In drawer. In the basement. Man, she was right about Jack’s seed doing the gene pool no favors. Is it too late to take back her ova? But the kids are adamant; Dad’s got to come back! It’s Christmas! With exquisite sadness, Mary tells her children that Dad can never come back, barely concealing her glee that they’re all finally on the same page as regards the holidays.

But a stubborn Abbie races off to confront the angel, while Mary, who’s had kind of a stressful day already, gets to top it off by running aimlessly around in the snow, trying to find her daughter before Abbie finds the magical pedophile.

Unfortunately, Abbie meets up with Harry Dean, and demands her dad back. But the angel says he can’t help her, and offers to transfer her to the Saint Nicholas Department, prompting Abbie to utter the one line that I’m pretty sure none of the screenwriters ever wanted on their resume: “We gotta go to the North Pole to see Santa so he can make my dad not dead!”

Harry Dean drops Abbie off at the North Pole, but Santa refuses to help, and passes the buck to her mom, which is pretty much the way it is anytime you call Technical Support (and suddenly it makes sense that Santa Claus sounds like he’s from Mumbai). The jolly old elf takes Abbie into his workshop, which, contrary to expectations, isn’t a warm, cottage-like affair decorated with whimsical wood carvings and staffed by joyful, rosy-cheeked dwarves. It’s a sooty, steam-powered factory that makes the seething industrial underworld in Metropolis look like Candyland.

Abbie spots the recently deceased janitor from her school, and learns that when we pass away, we don’t go to heaven or hell, we get sent to work for pennies a day in Santa’s maquiladora. At least, until the dead get underbid by Chinese slave labor.

Santa digs out an old letter Mary wrote to him when she was little, and gives it to Abbie to flaunt in her mother’s face. Mary is so astonished by this piece of blackmail that she immediately goes to mail the letter Abbie wrote earlier to Santa Claus. Apparently, that was just the sort of repentance the Angel Harry Dean was looking for, because he turns all the Christmas lights back on, and suddenly Jack isn’t dead anymore and we’re back at the night before Christmas Eve again, in a moment that’s a sort of cinematic hobo stew of A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Back to the Future III.

The next day, Mary intercepts Earflaps at the service station and buys some random crap off the guy who murdered her husband and abducted her children, giving him the cash he needs to buy a present for his boy. It just goes to prove that anyone can enjoy a Christmas miracle, so long as they shoot the right person.

That night, the town celebrates Christmas Eve by lighting the town tree. Meanwhile, Harry Dean has been promoted to Angel of Death, and hangs around the festivities waiting for someone to slip on a patch of black ice and crack their head open.

From all of us, to all of you…Merry Christmas!

No. Seriously. Merry Christmas!

You better say it with me, or Santa’s going to have your entire family killed.

Movies | 17 Comments »

Just a reminder that World O’ Crap’s Annual Christmas Movie Review will be posted Christmas morning.  In the meantime, here’s a classic bit of Americana in the form of the Coca-Cola’s iconic Santa Claus, first drawn by Michigan illustrator Haddon Sundblom in 1931:

Sundblom continued working in the Kringle medium for another four decades, and we leave you for the moment with one of his last Santas, a taut and jolly young elf who graced the cover of Playboy magazine in 1972:

Make Love, Not War on Christmas.

See you tomorrow.  And if anyone’s looking for a way to dispose of those last few holiday season pennies, you could do worse than to click on the PayPal link to the left and contribute to s.z.’s Home Game version of Daktari!

Happy Holidays | 6 Comments »

I haven’t had time to check my email for a while, but when I did I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had received a monetary donation from Alaina, which I will use to help feed my Island of Misfit kittens. 

See, all the perfect foster kittens have been adopted, and I am left with Wobbly, the kitten with cerebellar damage due to in utero exposure to feline distemper; Leaky, the adorable flame point Siamese who dribbles urine constantly due to some internal plumbing issue that would cost a zillion dollars to correct; Raymond, a beautiful silver tabby whom everyone loves, but who hates everyone, due to his being raised in the feral lifestyle a little too long; Cubby, a nice black kitten who freaks out at Petsmart, leading people to believe that he too is semi-feral, even though he’s the most cuddly kitten in the world at my house; and Tribble, a really sweet orange tabby kitten whose leg was broken when Bridget, a dog I was fostering for a couple of days, grabbed Tribble like a rat and crunched down on him.

I am also fostering JessieCat, who for some reason never got adopted at Petsmart, and who needed a break from being gawked at all the time, and Noelle, a really pretty dilute tortoiseshell who was rececently rescued from kitty death row, and who conveniently starting sneezing so she wouldn’t have to stay at Petsmart either.  I may soon be getting a mother cat and her 7 newborn kittens unless I can find some other sucker to foster them.  So, thanks Alaina! 

But enough about me and my growing cat army, and about Alaina and her kindness.  We’re here to talk about the email I received from the First Lady herself!  In case you’re not on Laura’s exclusive email list, here’s a copy of the missive.  (I can’t get an image of the calendar here without waking the formatting go crazy, but you can go to Republican • National • Committee to see the cover.)

Dear Republican As a strong supporter of our President and our Party, I wanted to make sure you had the first opportunity to have an official 2008 RNC calendar featuring President Bush.

The images in the calendar span the entire seven years of George’s Presidency.  I hope they will remind you of what’s great about our country and how high the stakes are for America in the upcoming elections.

While I’m sure the images will indeed remind of how stakes are for the upcoming elections (could we, as a nation, or a world, survive 7 years of another George Bush???), I don’t think they will necessarily remind me what’s great about our country, unless stupidity is now seen as a virtue.  But I do like the calendar photo and how Laura strategically placed the dog between her and George so she wouldn’t have any accidental contact with her husband.

Anyway, as Laura thoughtfully points out about 5 times in the email, I am one of the priviledged few who can get this calendar for merely donating $25 to the GOP.  At last, I am a GOP mover and shaker.

But wait, there’s more! Sue Gizardo of the RNC emailed to tell me about some “Last Minute Gifts for Your Favorite Republican.”  Gee, and just when I had decided that Rush Limbaugh was getting blue babies again this year

Dear Republican,The RNC has a special opportunity available only to our Party’s most dedicated supporters this Holiday season.

It always gives me a happy glow inside when I realize that my efforts to bring down the RNC via mockery have been noted and appreciated.  I assume my invitation to the White House Christmas party is in the mail.

There are still a few limited edition 2008 RNC Calendars and Max the Elephant plush stuffed toys available for purchase.

Next year, maybe Max can be President and featured on the calendar, and George the Bush can be a plush stuffed toy.

Max makes a great stocking stuffer for your children or grandchildren.  And the 2008 Calendar, featuring President Bush, Mrs. Bush and Vice President Cheney, is a great gift for any of your friends, family or co-workers — or get both for yourself.

And the 2008 calender, featuring VP Cheney, can be used to punish naughty children, now that coal is so hard to fime.  (“Billy, stop picking on your sister or Santa will put a Dick Cheney calender in your stocking.”  “No, Mom, not that!  I’ll be good.  I promise!”)

But time is running out.

So true. And I have the feeling that if I support the RNC with my donations, time will run out a little sooner for us all.

I hope you will take advantage of this special offer.  Your contribution will help elect a new Republican President and Congress in 2008.  Thank you for your continuing commitment to our Party and our cause.  Happy Holidays!

Because if ever a Party deseved to be committed, it’s this one.  And hey, did you notice that Sue is part of the War on Christmas, along with Petsmart and the Satanists!  What kind of an outfit IS this RNC anyway?  But Happy Holidays to you too, Sue.  And Merry War on Christmas to the rest of you.

Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

Over at Townhall, (“Where America Comes to Froth”) Janet “Mad at my Mop” Crouse has been exposed to comedy, and is now frantically downing prophylactic fistfuls of Cipro:

Since my husband is facing a few days of enforced rest, I bought a couple of “two thumbs up” funny movies to keep him entertained and to distract us, two intense policy wonks, from the current political campaigns.

I generally avoid the company of intense policy wonks, but even I have to admit: they do know comedy.

We also watched a couple of episodes of Comedy Central on Television. Any true wit or humor is buried under far too many layers of crude language, potty humor and infantile behavior. The characters are too overdrawn and the slapstick too pervasive.

The zanni were impertinent, that Pantalone fellow was an insult to self-made millionaires like Mitt Romney and George W. Bush, and I’m pretty sure Capitano didn’t really support the troops.

The ultimate incongruity is having a clean-cut, beautiful girl engage in the coarseness and become part of the vulgarity.

Don’t laugh at the pretty girl with the bouncing and behaving hair — it’s a sign of poor breeding.  Gentlemen only guffaw at unattractive girls with poor grooming.

To put it bluntly, both the movies and the comedy routines reveal the bankruptcy of the amoral modern liberal ideology ––

When will Hollywood finally make a laugh-a-minute, rib-tickling comedy about the efficacy of upper bracket tax cuts?

–the chaotic, absurd, impotent, libertine worldview of the Hollywood left.

Heh.  She said “impotent.” 

Some authors describe that worldview as “moral indeterminacy” and lament the “apolitical utopianism.”

Other authors describe that wordview as “panoptical beige,” or “vehicular onanism,” but we’ve had most of them put down.

Sadly, that worldview permeates American culture.

Time to call Rug Doctor.

When presidential candidates try to explain the connection between morality and politics, that culture is the audience. The people who laugh at today’s comedies probably are not capable of understanding the importance of faith and morals in shaping history and enabling civil society to function effectively.

Anyone who saw Knocked Up should be legally denied suffrage.  It’s a scandal what statesmen like Mike Huckabee and Rudy Giuliani have to endure from the culture that is the audience; Pericles didn’t have to put up with that crap!  And just imagine if Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata today, with Laura Bush and Lynn Cheney trying to stop the Iraq War by withholding sex from George and Dick.  People wouldn’t laugh, they’d vomit!  And then they’d laugh at that, because puke is funny!

No wonder Victor Davis Hanson is always in such a bad mood.

Liberalism is impotent in the face of the challenges of reality.

Heh.  She said “impotent” again.  I’m beginning to think that not all the problems in the Crouse marriage can be traced to the string- versus sponge-mop controversy.

For instance, one challenge is when an adolescent — previously preoccupied with sex and the excitement of the chase — starts to look for genuine love and runs smack into the demands for fidelity and love’s inherent territoriality. Amoral modern liberals have no clue how to meet the demands of love.

Especially when love demands two million in unmarked bills and a helicopter, or it’ll start tossing out bodies at 10 minute intervals!

How can a person with a deep-rooted history of self-indulgence, who lives without restraint or accountability, possibly know what is the right thing to do, much less have the courage and character to do the right thing?

Only sexually repressed, misogynistic moral scolds in arranged marriages can possibly know true love.  That’s why every other romantic comedy these days seems to star a Wahabbist.

One valuable aspect of movies is that effective storytelling boils down to presenting a collection of events that allows us to see the individuals’ personalities and character.

Perhaps one day, other art forms such as drama or literature might adopt this valuable technique.

The various events constitute a thread running through their lives that gives identity and a unique persona to the individuals. Each moment contributes to the whole and plays a role in shaping the entire lifetime.

Except in Three Days of the Condor, because we don’t see his entire lifetime, just three days of it.

Ironically, in order to produce drama, the playwright has to address reality and its consequences.

That is ironic.  If only we could harness irony, and use it also as a valuable aspect of effective storytelling. Then we’d have two of them!

In that sense, life is like a tree, and our roots are our history.

“…Take, for instance, the history of my marriage.  I started out dreaming of a lodgepole pine, but wound up settling for a bonsai tree.  By the way, have I said ‘impotent,’ lately?”

The consequences of the past are carved into our psyche.

Unless you’re Charles Manson, in which case it’s carved into your forehead.

For instance, when a tree is cut, the rings of the trunk reveal the good and bad years — all the events of its lifetime are incorporated into the trunk of that tree.  Similarly, all of the past is there in a person’s life; the accumulated experiences mold and shape the personality and the character.

So if you’re confused about your own past experiences, and where life has led you, take a chainsaw and — no, wait…

When those experiences are negative and harmful to the person’s development, we speak of that person as “carrying baggage.” Sadly, many of today’s young people are carrying an awful lot of baggage at a very early age.

[Note to Editor:  The tree analogy wasn't working out, so I'm switching to luggage.  I don't think anyone will notice...]

So, how can today’s presidential candidates communicate the importance of faith and morality for civil society in a culture that has repudiated the basic Judeo-Christian values?

What would be the point?  If society has repudiated those values, then they’re clearly not important to the people whose votes you’re seeking.  Try talking about something they care about, and lay off the hot button moral issues, like whether beautiful women should be allowed to tell dirty jokes.

How can the candidates bring reality and common sense, much less character and integrity, into the chaotic state of modern thought and behavior?

They can’t.  They’re politicians.  If they were interested in character and integrity, they would have gone into another line of work.

If the conservatives win the 2008 presidential election, it will be as much a matter of the liberals losing as conservatives winning.

That’s the spirit.

In hindsight, the vaunted genius of Karl Rove in the two Bush victories is now questioned. Political analysts are reevaluating Rove’s vaunted brilliance.

They’re thinking of downgrading it from “vaunted” to “impotent.”

Politics, like life, is full of contradictions.

And raisins. 

The liberals, for all their so-called respect for privacy, rely heavily on opposition research. Note Hillary’s information about Obama’s 3rd grade essay about wanting to be President!

The bitch!  She read his book!  It wasn’t fair when Patton did it to Rommel, and it isn’t fair now. 

The concept of privacy appeals to modern people whose narcissism and self-indulgence requires a veil of privacy behind which to hide and avoid accountability.

That’s why Janet parades around nude in front of the bay window; she’s teaching the liberals in the neighborhood a valuable lesson about responsibility.

Can a moral leader appeal to today’s amoral public?

We’re electing a political, not a moral leader, Janet.  Can’t you just wait for the Rapture or something?  If Jesus shows up and finds out you’ve already hired somebody else, he’s not going to be happy.

Probably not, unless reality intervenes.

Yep, in a crisis, first responders are fine and all, but what people really crave is someone to show up and lecture them about their moral failings.  Gives them something to think about besides how much that pressure bandage hurts.

The British rejected Churchill’s warnings until Hitler’s invasion of Poland created a climate where realistic leadership was necessary. Then it became a fight for survival. Likewise, the American public won’t embrace a moral leader without necessity demanding a “savior.” Until such a time that a savior is needed, the public won’t turn to a moral leader.

Again, I really thought the position had been filled.  We’re going to get in trouble with HR if we keep interviewing.

There is hope, however, because the chaotic state of modern leadership provides that possibility —

Translation:  Bush and Cheney have fucked up the world so badly that at last there’s real hope for Armageddon.

– even though those willing to accept the boundaries of morality have never been, and probably never will be, a majority.

That doesn’t mean a commited minority can’t oppress the majority.  I hear it worked great in South Africa.

Wingnuts | 25 Comments »

Dateline: Downtown Los Angeles!
School: Public School
Why: I Work There and it’s the Holidays!!
Who: Ponch!!!!!!!!

How: Every year at this time, just to spite Bill O’Reilly, the various law enforcement departments of the city, state and federal branches decide to get together and do a fun Christmas themed thingy for the children of a school in a low income area. Well. Let’s be honest. They have been doing it for the past several years for my school, only. And now the other schools have been complaining about being left out of the reindeer games, so this was our last year with the Extra Special Christmas Special: Secret Service Santa. And this year WAS extra special, for we had a very special guest star: ERIK ESTRADA!

At first, I was feeling kinda disappointed with this year’s War On Christmas event at our public school in the bluer than blue city of Los Angeles; Big Bad Agent Elf wasn’t on hand to arrest and frog march the Grinch off to AbuWhosville Ghraib, plus the Grinch wasn’t his former furry self! He was wearing a lime green sweatsuit! And he didn’t even have a water gun! Just a lame plastic Candy Cane that my first grade toughs promised to make him eat if he tried to steal their presents.And then….came the announcement, “We have here with us, a special guest. He used to be in the CHP, and patroled around our neighborhood…”. Right away I’m thinking it’s a CHP guy ready to retire and is doing the SS Santa thing one last time. But I was wrong. “You teachers who grew up in the 70′s and 80′s might remember him…” ZOMG! I grew up in the 70′s and 80′s! And I had a HUGE crush on a guy who wore a CHP uniform! Oh no, it couldn’t be! “Everyone give a big “Merry Christmas” to TV’s Ponch! Erik Estrada!!!!”

At this point, things got a bit chaotic. Female teachers trampled over their young charges to have their picture’s taken with the former Latino pin-up/real estate spokesguy/telenovela star. I, however, remained cool. I had no desire to have my picture taken with the bronzed Aztec God that is Erik Estrada. I had dribbled cranberry juice on my white school logo-ed sweatshirt that morning and I looked a mess! No way would I let Erik see me like that!

For a brief moment on December 13, 2007…I was 12 years old again. It was truly a Christmas Miracle. An SCTV-like Christmas Miracle, but a Miracle all the same.

Happy Holidays | 5 Comments »

Thanks to everyone who has summoned the courage to face your demons, plunge to the depths of your tormented soul, and bring up a bunch of crappy films for our sequel to . Please keep them coming — add your bad memories, suspected fever dreams, and other suggested turkeys to this thread.
Speaking of which, distinguished commenter preznit giv me turkee has implied that the original volume could have benefited from an index. So, in the spirit of holiday giving, we present, for the first time ever, Better Living Through Bad Movies: The Uncut Table of Contents, which was only released in Europe, and which until now has solely been available in samizdat.
Marital Success and Thinner Thighs the Hollywood Way
Indecent Proposal
The Story of Us
Eyes Wide Shut

It’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine But You’re All Dead
Judge Dredd
The Postman
Waterworld
Battlefield Earth

Coping with Grief: The Five Stages of Bad Sequels
Highlander II: The Quickening
Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows
Speed 2: Cruise Control
Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
Batman & Robin

What I Did for Love
Autumn in New York
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
The Chosen One: Legend of the Raven
Coyote Ugly

Deviled Ham: Torments of the Damned, or Just Overacting?
The Devil’s Rain
Omega Code
The Ninth Gate

Chick Flicks versus Ick Flicks
Armageddon
Beaches

MSNTV: (Mars, Space & ‘Nowledge Television)
Mission to Mars
Red Planet
Dune

Sex, Lies and Direct-to-Videotape: The Rise and Fall of the Erotic Thriller
Body Chemistry
Body of Evidence
Color of Night

Satan: A Career Retrospective
Satan’s Cheerleaders
The Final Conflict: Omen III
End of Days

Ziggy Stardust, Action Hero!
Gymkata
Never Too Young To Die
Megaforce

Bionic Booty: Hollywood’s Enduring Love Affair with Man-on-Machine Miscegenation
The Colossus of New York
Saturn 3
Bicentennial Man

Weird Sex or: Making the Beast with Two Backs with the Beast with Two Backs
The Deadly and the Beautiful
Mars Needs Women (with bonus Mars Needs Women: The Musical!)
The Bride
Humanoids from the Deep

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Scientist
The Ape Man
Mesa of Lost Women
Konga
Hollow Man

Bats Entertainment!
The Devil Bat
Bats

Teenage Wasteland
Teenage Devil Doll
Because They’re Young
Disturbing Behavior
Star Wars: Attack of the Clones

Live Fast, Die Young, and Leave a Bad-Looking Movie
Gone in 60 Seconds
Days of Thunder
Redline 7000
Murdercycle

The Space-Crap Continuum
Red Dawn (the Special Edition)

The Book | 17 Comments »