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I don't generally make it a habit of enjoying the marital misfortunes of others, but how apropos that the director and female star of probably the worst movie ever made about marriage ("Revolutionary Road") would themselves get divorced. I'm just glad we never had to watch them yell at each other for two hours.
]]>I'm not actually suggesting that the White House is directly meddling in internal Israeli politics, but it's clear to everyone -- at the White House, at the State Department, at Goldblog -- that no progress will be made on any front if Avigdor Lieberman's far-right party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and Eli Yishai's fundamentalist Shas Party, remain in Netanyahu's surpassingly fragile coalition.So what is the goal? The goal is force a rupture in the governing coalition that will make it necessary for Netanyahu to take on Livni's centrist Kadima Party (he has already tried to do this, but too much on his terms) and form a broad, 68-seat majority in Knesset that does not have to rely on gangsters, messianists and medievalists for votes.
It's a terrible thing to see the U.S. and Israel at odds. But it's not "Obama vs. Israel." It's "Obama vs. Bibi." If you're anti-Bibi you're not any more anti-Israel then you'd be anti-American if you were anti-Obama. ]]>
Not believable, for several reasons. One, Ruben Amaro denies the assertion, right there in the story, and calls it a "lie." Two, it would make no sense- the only reason to trade Howard is if you can't afford him, and Pujols is even more expensive. And three, it just doesn't make sense for either team. The Cardinals like having Pujols, and the Phillies like having Howard.
It's not going to happen, period. But I'm sure it'll still be Topic A on sports talk all week.
"In the end, though, it is not the details that do this film in; it's the setup. Greengrass shows us very well that it was stupid to allow the looting, that de-Baathification and dismantling the Army were bad ideas, and that all of it led to the insurgency. But then he tells us that we still might have accomplished the mission had one man—one rogue, truth-seeking officer—tracked down a little black notebook whisked away by a Saddam loyalist. In other words, Paul Greengrass compresses the complexity so painstakingly assembled by Chandrasekaran into one notebook that contains one secret that reveals the one important source that only one journalist discovered after speaking to one evil administration official. But in the real Iraq, there were many secrets, many heroes, many villains and accomplices (witting and unwitting), and plenty of good and bad journalism.... In the end, the film felt like a stylized revenge fantasy—a poor man's Inglourious Basterds."Another big moment in the movie that rang totally false: at the end, Matt Damon's hero runs up to Greg Kinnear's Bushie villain and yells at him, as the Judith Miller stand-in and a few other journalists stand around and stare from far away. Bullshit. I know journalists- they love conflict. If a soldier ran over to, say, Scooter Libby in 2003 and started pointing his finger at his chest and yelling at him, every reporter in the room would have run right over, notebooks in hand.
I love stealing from Walmart! My swipe of choice has been bite-sized candy! I could easily steal a $3 DVD of Daylight or travel size shampoos, but who really gets a thrill doing that!? I go for the 10-pack of Almond Joys! Carefully, I open the pack, steal about 6 bars and reseal the 10-pack! It is exciting and gives me the feeling that I am "sticking it to "The Man"". Sometimes, I get real ballsy and eat a couple bars while perusing the aisles! Have you ever stolen something? And I am not talking a lame piece of Bubble Yum from the 7-11!OMG! I don't know! You're not actually sticking it to The Man when you do that! You're actually fucking over the poor asshole who gets paid ten cents a day to stock the shelves! The Man doesn't give a shit if you steal Tic Tacs! He's just happy to now have an excuse to fire Paco and call INS on him! So maybe you should stop!
First, it appears the comments aren't working. Not sure what happened; I was getting tons of spam so perhaps my providers blocked all of them, although I wasn't told that directly. I'll look into it and try to get that fixed.
Secondly, you may have noticed a sort of slowing in the frequency of posts here of late. I've been doing this blog, it's hard to believe, for almost eight years, and I've written multiple posts most of those days.
But of late things have started to change- in the world and in my life. Noah is finally home now, at the same time that I'm getting new, additional responsibilities at work. Not to mention, I keep hearing that in the age of Facebook and Twitter, blogging is going away- it's now the stodgy old medium, embraced by the dinosaurs.
This blog is going to continue, no question about it, although expect it to change and evolve in the coming months. There will be times (such as the last two days) when the inspiration will strike me, and I'll throw out 10-15 posts in 24 hours. But that's going to be the exception rather than the rule; I may go post-free for a few days at a time sometimes.
So here's how I expect things to work going forward: I post to Twitter frequently, at Twitter.com/StephenSilver. If you're not on Twitter, click my name on Facebook instead; my statuses there and my tweets are one and the same. If you're interested in seeing my writing more frequently, that's the place to go.
Most posts here will continue to be the usual stuff: post-length expansions of my tweets, funny quotes and YouTube clips, in addition to links to my movie reviews, occasional CTPG/E-Gear/Week in Retail Crime articles, other published writings, and (of course) the Noah blog posts, which people seem to really like. That'll all be there; I just can't promise it'll be there as frequently as before.
I care a lot about this blog, and have greatly enjoyed writing it for the last few years; I was doing this back in 2002 when no one would pay me a penny to actually write. I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read it, and just wanted to fill you in on what's going on around here.