Green Party Candidate Arrested at Presidential Debate. Again.

2012-10-17, 8:28 pm
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness

So Jill Stein and running-mate Cheri Honkala were arrested outside of last night's debate.

Much the same thing happened to Ralph Nader in 2000. He sued the Commission on Presidential Debates; they settled. Back then I was naïve enough to think this was going to make a difference and this would bring down the CPD, or at least force major reforms. But nope, here we go again.

There are differences. Nader had a ticket; Stein didn't. Stein blocked traffic; Nader didn't. And I'm not sure if Stein's arrest was instigated by the CPD or if the county police acted independently. Could be that Stein and Honkala wanted to get arrested to get some press -- but even if that's the case, it's not justification for handcuffing them to a chair for eight hours, as they have alleged. That sounds to me like a wildly disproportionate response and another potential lawsuit.

Unfortunately I'm not seeing much coverage of the story, and many of the reports get details wrong -- CNN refers to the CPD as "nonpartisan" -- it's bipartisan; there's a difference -- and the Washington Post refers to Perot participating in the 1992 debates under guidelines that were not implemented until 2000.

Would sure be nice if people like Stein and Johnson and Nader and Buchanan and, yes, Perot were allowed into presidential debates. But the CPD exists for the express purpose of keeping people like them out.

The Two Lying Bastards Show, Season 14, Episode 2

2012-10-16, 9:52 pm
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness, TV

All right, I missed the season premier and the All-Sidekick Special. But I caught this one.

On the whole I think Obama pulled this one out but they both did pretty well. Romney was at his best when he was criticizing Obama's record, his failures and broken promises -- and I think that speaks to the fundamental weakness of each campaign. Obama has failed to be the President he promised to be four years ago, but on the other hand, Romney is essentially running the same campaign John Kerry was eight years ago -- nobody's voting for him, they're voting against the incumbent.

Today's top story was Secretary Clinton's mea culpa on the attack in Benghazi. This was an opening for Romney; to my mind the Administration has bungled its narrative on the attack over the past few weeks, sticking to the "spontaneous attack over a YouTube video" story well after it became clear it was a coordinated terrorist strike.

Romney fucked that up.

The bit where he claimed Obama didn't refer to it as a "terrorist attack" on day one, and Crowley checked the transcript and confirmed that he had? That was the strongest audience reaction of the night, and we'll be seeing it in the highlight reel. Romney's best line of attack on foreign policy is effectively neutralized.

(The Republican talking point now appears to be that Crowley lied and Obama never used the phrase "terrorist attack". Per the transcript, the actual phrase he used was "acts of terror" -- claiming that the two phrases are not equivalent is absurd hairsplitting.)

Crowley was great, too; she gave the candidates rope when it was appropriate and reined them in when it was appropriate to do that. I only heard a bit of the first debate, but what I heard was consistent with what everyone said about Lehrer afterward: he was a moderator in name only and the debate was completely out of his control. Crowley owned it.

On the whole I'm still not happy with Obama. (And that he's got the balls to go up there and criticize Romney for supporting China in conducting surveillance on its own citizens, even as he's ramped up domestic surveillance beyond even Bush Administration levels...) I'm leaning Stein at this point. But I still prefer Obama to the alternative and hope he wins. If I were in a swing state, I might bite the bullet and vote for him -- but I'm not. There's a single poll showing Obama running within the margin of error in Arizona; the New York Times explains why it's best taken with a grain of salt (tl;dr the sample is too small and if Arizona were to go blue it would be part of a nationwide surge in Obama's favor).

All in all, a decent episode but I'm not sure it was good enough for me to stick around for the finale. Not nearly as good as the new episode of Walking Dead the other night.

From Straight to Bizarre

2012-10-15, 10:13 pm
Categories: Movies, Music

The trailer for the documentary about Zappa's independent labels. You can get it on Amazon but I'm not convinced it's legit. Seeing as how it refers to itself as a DVD-ROM and is listed under Books. Not sure where you can find a legitimate copy; if anyone does, be sure to let me know and I'll update this post.

ParaNorman

2012-10-15, 9:55 pm
Categories: Cartoons, Games, Movies, Status Updates

It was a busy weekend! I had a friend in from out of town, then had my cousins over for cartoons and games, then had more friends out of town and went drinkin' with them.

Caught a couple movies, too, including ParaNorman at the cheap theater. I liked it!

First of all: it's a kids' movie that does shit you're not supposed to do in a kids' movie. My favorite gag involved the rather gruesome image of the ghost of a dog who had been hit by a car. It's funnier than it sounds.

The flick does some fun things with genre conventions, has the usual kids' movie message that it's okay to be different, adds the rather more complex message that bullying is caused by fear and begets more bullying -- but mostly it's just a damn pretty, weird, creepy, funny, unconventional kids' horror movie, from a couple of directors whose resumés include Flushed Away, Coraline, and Corpse Bride.

Playing: Oh so very many things. This weekend we threw down on Scott Pilgrim, Gears of War, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (purchased used -- my boycott remains unbroken), and most recently Batman: Arkham City, which my cousin loaned me. I was going to buy the PC version to use with my sweet PC graphics card, but on finding out it had SecuROM I decided not to pay for it and just borrow the Xbox version instead -- you listening, Square Enix? Of course you're not.

Forum Musiques

2012-10-14, 8:57 pm
Categories: Music, TV

French TV, 1968. Audio cleaned up by uploader TooleMan87. Which may be why he's disabled embedding -- click on over to YouTube to give it a watch and listen. It's got a nice rendition of Teddy Bears' Picnic.

When The Lie's So Big

2012-10-13, 11:59 pm
Categories: Music

More Zappa vs. Robertson.

(Perhaps appropriately: there is a small lie in the timestamp of this post. I juuuust missed midnight and, rather than break my streak, I've artificially set this timestamp to 11:59.)

Live at the Fillmore East

2012-10-12, 11:55 pm
Categories: Music

John Lennon's birthday was the 9th; he would have been 72. Here he is with Frank, singing Scumbag. Poor quality, but...it's John Lennon and Frank Zappa.

Shaving Needs

2012-10-12, 4:17 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

Longtime readers will remember these chilling before-and-after images from some 11 years ago:

Bearded Thad A Clean-Shaven Thad

I can't do that anymore. The beard. My skin's gotten more sensitive, and if I go even a day without shaving now I start to break out.

The rub is, shaving irritates my skin too. Particularly under my chin.

Recently I ran out of cartridges for whatever-the-hell Gillette-or-maybe-it-was-Schick razor with too many blades I was using. And, at the suggestion of Brontoforumgoer Shinra, I tried this new combination:

A safety razor with roughly 9 months' worth of blades and a soap/bowl/brush set. As Shinra notes, it's a bit much to pay upfront (upwards of $65) but it'll pay for itself over time in the rock-bottom prices of safety razors. It's basically the opposite of the standard razor/blade sales model; in this case it's the razor that costs all the money and the blades that they're practically giving away.

It took a bit of getting used to (there are tutorials on the Internet, mostly video but some text -- the gist is, wet the brush thoroughly, run it around the soap in circles until it works up a lather, lather your face, swipe with one side of the razor, swipe the next spot with the other side, rinse, repeat; Geothermal has a more thorough rundown in the thread I just linked) but now I'd say I'm getting at least as good a shave I did with the Five-Blade Monstrosity I was previously using, and less irritation under my chin.

Of the different blades I've tried so far, the ones that have worked best for me have been the Merkur that came with the razor and the Blue bird (sic). The Gillette and Shark, on the other hand, nicked the hell out of my face the first couple of days I used them -- I'm not sure if that's actually the fault of the blades themselves or just that I wasn't used to the safety razor thing yet (and was shaving without my contact lenses in), but at any rate I had much better luck with the pack-in razor and the Blue bird. I mean, I guess if I were to compare things that are likely to rip my face up, I would expect a shark to be much more dangerous than a bluebird in that regard.

Roelof Kiers Documentary, Part 5

2012-10-11, 9:42 pm
Categories: Music, TV

El finito. It shouldn't need repeating at this point, but yeah, still NSFW.

He starts off talking about his instinct for visuals matching his music -- as I've noted before, it's always interested me that, as much as he hated MTV, he loved the principle of music videos.

Then there's another bit with Miss Lucy, a song called The Groupie Routine -- and finally a fantastic cover of Happy Together.

Which is actually the single clip that led to me digging up this entire documentary and posting it over the past 5 days.

Hope you enjoyed. Thank you and goodnight, everybody.