as others see us

Hugh Laurie, performing on the BBC show "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" c. 1990:



And that's what our friends think. Imagine what the casual acquaintances or the people we pissed off in traffic on the way to work think.

Another Fry and Laurie sketch, not about us:

gay-ay-ay-ay-ays in the military

A scene from the 1942 short "The Army Mascot"





This is not a common cartoon situation even in a Ralph Bakshi Cartoon. Someone in the Disney story department had getting drafted into that all-male army on their mind when they dreamed that up.

two thoughts...

My first thought is: you've got to be pretty starved and desperate to to want to feel up New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And my second thought is: I must be even less desirable than David Brooks as this sort of thing never happens to me.

loose moose

She hasn't actually resigned yet. She said she'd resign at the end of the month.

That gives her four weeks (half her vice presidential campaign) to come back and say that the people have begged her to stay and fight and that she's not going to be run off by the media elites.

It's not crazier than anything she's done already.

why lame movies happen

I don't follow baseball since it's mostly overweight guys in full-length pajamas standing around waiting for someone to hit a ball in 2 out of 10 attempts.

But I've enjoyed some baseball movies like "Bull Durham" and "The Natural".

Currently there is a kerfuffle in Hollywood over the canceling of a big-budget baseball movie just a few days before the start of filming. The Sony Studio head didn't like that the director had taken out the high-larious comedy scenes a writer had been manufactured for what was originally a true story.

She couldn't countenance a movie without this in it:

In [the original] script, one of the coaches watches [potential recruit] Hatteberg taking ground balls at a Little League field, his wife armed with a plastic laundry basket full of baseballs. She hits the balls to her husband off a tee, with their 4-year-old daughter backing him up down the line. One ball takes a bad hop and goes between Hatteberg's legs. When his daughter scoops it up, the coach quips: "Maybe we should sign her."

Apparently unaware that "Bad News Bears" has been made several times already. Or perhaps desperately wanting onto that bandwagon.

don't bother the rich people

It is possible to be convicted of first degree murder in this country and get a 15 year sentence. But if you make rich people poor you can get 150 years.

The dead can never have their lives restored to them, but it's conceivable the newly poor could be rich again someday.

I'm not saying Bernie Madoff doesn't deserve his punishment, but there's quite a paradox there in the punishment-fitting-the-crime department even if we dismiss the possibility of anyone's riches being restored.

I'm going to guess that the people most horrified at their losses are the ones who didn't really earn their money from scratch. Inheritance or by an over-paid job landed from connections rather than merit. These people know they don't have the skills to get back on top again and that's why they are horrified.

They do have the advantage of still being here to press for the criminal's punishment; something a murder victim can never do.

On the other hand, a dead person doesn't know he's dead anymore, but the new poor have a long stretch of poor to look forward to.

serendipity awkward

So I go to Amazon to look up a book and what do they happen to be promoting under their banner tribute to Michael Jackson?




-Magnificent Corpses: Searching Through Europe for St. Peter's Head, St. Claire's Heart, St. Stephen's Hand, and Other Saints' Relics

-Relics: The Shroud of Turin, the True Cross, the Blood of Januarius...History, Mysticism, and the Catholic Church

-Weird Europe: A Guide to Bizarre, Macabre, and Just Plain Weird Sights

-Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto

They say they are "Selected for You" but I wasn't signed in yet

the exact day in history...

... when it all started to go wrong.



The day that the President of the United States gave Michael Jackson an award for...

-decoding the human genome? No.
-ending communism? No.
-preventing a space shuttle disaster? No.
-rescuing kittens from trees? No.

It was for allowing a brief snippet of a song that he had already thoroughly cashed in on to be used in the background of a public service announcement.



I think this is the moment when Michael Jackson started believing that anything he did, no matter how small, was of monumental benefit to humanity and therefore he should do anything he wants and as much of it as possible.

farrah dead

You can't overstate how huge Farrah was in the 1970s. I can't explain it.

Certainly pretty girls have always been in ample supply in this country. Maybe it was a reaction to the flat-haired hippy look of the late 60s (which was a reaction to the bouffant look of the early 60s, which was a reaction to...). Maybe people were in the mood for something big and obvious again, I don't know. I remember trying to watch "Charlie's Angels" several times and not "getting it".

But EVERY girl in my high school HAD TO HAVE Farrah hair. There wasn't a pony tail, a bob, a flip or a page boy cut to be seen. It was as if a law had been passed. Somehow she represented a dream self-image that every girl wanted.

And many of them are still trapped in that look much as middle-aged women of the 60s adopted Jackie's pill box hats and continued to wear them even after she didn't.

I'm sure that when I'm 90 I will still see some of my female contemporaries with Farrah hair.

So good-bye Farrah. Farrah is gone but her hair lives on.

small ears

I don't know how I'm going to pay the mortgage on the farm with a corn harvest like this.

No, I did not mistakenly plant "miniature corn".

if donald duck sang "shout"

Lulu |MTV Music

No, really... close your eyes and try to tell me it isn't so.

I'm not previously familiar with Lulu. Apparently one of many one-named wonders from the UK.

fathers! lock up your daughters!

Adam Lambert reveals the crazy things that can happen when he's had a few drinks in him...

he'll never work in this town again

(photo Getty Images)

It occurs to me that if you were making a Hollywood movie about the Iran election, and one of the extras you hired for the big crowd scene jumped up in the middle of a shot wearing an "OHIO STATE" sweater, you'd fire the guy and then have to reshoot the the scene.

unbounded thoughtfulness

I think it's very considerate of the riot police in Tehran to write "POLICE" in English on their uniforms so that Americans across the seas looking at pictures of them will know they are police.

It's rather like the old "Mission:IMPOSSIBLE" show where the team would be in some non-english speaking country deep behind the Iron Curtain, but all the important signs were written so you could sort of read them. Like "PRIZON" and "GAZ" and "SEKRET DOCKUM3NT".

I'm not sure how that works out for the local population, however.



"Call the police! Some guys with nonsense written on their uniforms are attacking us!"

fox news shocked (shocked!) that crazy people believe things they heard on fox news