With the British Army and the ANA in Helmand

More Leftovers

With some new stuff thrown in for good measure:

Slate has a piece on single-topic-blogs, which I must admit enjoy as a kind of guilty pleasure. My favourite: LATFH

Related: Carnivore? Keep Being Awesome!

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RIP MJ

Anyone remember this?



I love the WAAAOOH! scream.

Weird! Good music though.

...Come to think of it, that statement applies as much to the man himself as the videogame.

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A baked Kevin Smith gets poignant:

We have a symbiotic relationship, the fan base and I. In a weird way, they get to live vicariously through me, since I'm the tubby kid who made it good, who comes across less like an artist and more like your buddy who suddenly won the lottery of life. They see how I "handle" it, and they're into the fact that it would appear I'm the same person now as I was before I started making films. Plus, I inspire them, in that "If a guy like that can make it, then maybe I can, too" kinda way.

What I get from the fan base is unconditional support. They may not like all the flicks I do, but they'll give each one a shot—which is the most you can ask for from any audience. Contrary to what the haters think, the fan base doesn't lounge around like a giant caterpillar, taking hits off the hookah of my collective body of work; they're normal people with normal lives who just relate to what I write/say. And the relationship doesn't end at the theater: These are folks I play poker with. I spend my birthdays with them (onstage or at a home-made prom). I played hockey against and beside them just last week in Brantford, Ontario, at Walter Gretzky's 3rd Annual Street Hockey Tournament. It makes sense we'd all get along, as we share a common interest: Kevin Smith films. But, Jesus—you can only talk about those for so long. And when the "Then what'd Jason Lee say?" chatter dries up, you find they're more friends than fans.

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Neda may be dead, but she just won't go away

"Staged"?

Yeah, sure, Mahmood... in fact, it was probably staged by them non-existent gays, eh?

Related: Hitchens

There is nothing at all that any Western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran's internal affairs. The deep belief that everything—especially anything in English—is already and by definition an intervention is part of the very identity and ideology of the theocracy.

It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.

The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our uncultured "experts."

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Bill Murray is just great

Local reporter drops sly reference, reaps reward.

How cool would it be to tell your kids that you once talked to Carl Spackler at the U.S. open?

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Frank Sinatra Has A Cold

The hoodlum from hoboken was cool back when being cool was a character trait and not a lifestyle choice. They don't make like Frank Sinatra any more, and they don't write stuff this good very often either. You don't event need to be a fan of the Chairman of the Board to dig this article, an early example of the "new journalism".

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She's resigning to spend more time with her media consultant

Sara Palin has been in the news so much lately, I could not help but recall the amusing misadventures of a certain amateur Catholic theologian and part-time gynecologist!

One of the nastiest takedowns I have read in a long time:

Through the Looking Glass with Andrew Sullivan