R.I.P. LYNNE THIGPEN
It's been a bad couple of weeks for PBS kids' shows personalities... first Fred Rogers dies from cancer, and now
Lynne Thigpen, best know, to me, as being the "Chief" of the ACME Detective agency on the kiddy geography game show (based, loosely, on the old Broderbund computer games)
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and, later,
Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego (similar, except for history), dies from an unknown cause. (Yes, I did watch that show, even if I was already a little old for it, at about 14 or 15 years old, when it started in 1989.) I thought she brought an air of dignity to an otherwise silly role by playing it fairly straight. Of course, you saw her
all over the place outside of Carmen Sandiego; she was crime analyst Ella Farmer on the CBS cop drama
The District (which I watch ocassionally) and she's appearing onscreen in the upcoming Adam Sandler/Jack Nicholson flick
Anger Management as a judge (you see her in the trailer). She also played a judge in a few episodes of
Law & Order, and she was the voice of the judge in the episode of
King of the Hill wherein Hank Hill tries to prove that he never rented a pornographic movie the video store's computer says he rented and never returned. ((note: paraphrasing from memory) "Let the records show that Mr. Hill knows his pornography."). In 1997, she won a Tony Award for a role in "An American Daughter" (though, obviously, I'm getting that from articles, never having seen a play in New York...)
In honour of Ms. Thigpen:
Five are the senses you need,
For keeping crooks on the run.
Three rounds to fight against greed,
To be sure
Justice has
won!
(For = four, to = two, won = one.)
EDIT: Just adding something to see if it makes it show up when I check the archives.
NEED PROOF?
Rush Limbaugh's Web site has 3 satellite images from an Ikonos commercial satellite with one-metre resolution of the
Salman Pak facility 25 km south of Baghdad, which, according to Iraqi defectors, is used to train terrorists. It includes the fuselage of a Boeing 707, which is easily visible in
one of the photos, with the tail broken off down and to the right for some reason (testing a bomb, perhaps)?
It's visual confirmation for all to see of the terrorist training camp former Iraqi army captain (now a defector) Sadah Khodada talked about in
an interview with PBS's Frontline and The New York Times in October 2001.
And the camp has a 707 that they train on?
Yes, there's a real whole 707 plane, a whole real plane, standing in the middle of the training area in this camp.
And they train people on how to get access to the cabin, to the crew?
Yes.
And how to take over the plane using weapons? How?
They will get trained on how to get weapons inside the plane. If there is a security weakness that they know of, they will prefer to get weapons. But I am sure that, before the attack of September 11, those people made a very thorough study. And they learned that getting weapons into the plane might not be a very good idea. But in this camp, I saw them getting trained on this kind of situations where security will not allow you to get weapons into the plane -- then what you need to do is to use all available methods and very advanced terrorizing method.
These methods are used to terrorize the passengers and the crew of the plane. They are even trained how to use utensils for food, like forks and knives provided in the plane. ... They are trained how to plant horror within the passengers by doing such actions. Even pens and pencils can be used for that purpose they were trained. They can do it, and they can overcome any plane because they are very well physically trained, and they are very strong, and they can do it. They can overtake a plane in a very efficient manner. ...
Whether or not there's a direct link to the 9/11 attacks is actually pretty moot to me, since I'm of the opinion that pretty much the entire Arab world needs an enema, and take out Iraq and some of the other regimes will fall like a house of cards, while there will be civil war in other countries (not an ideal outcome, but better than the status quo, if that's the form the enema takes in those countries).
"POLICE: ELIZABETH [Smart] 'PSYCHOLOGICALLY DAMAGED'"
Well, duh! I should point out that that isn't the headline on the actual article, but rather the headline as it appears on the "Top Stories" portion of the
Netscape home page. Weirdly, the term "psychologically damaged" doesn't actually appear in the article, the closest I could find being this...
"There is clearly a psychological impact that occurred at some point,'' Salt Lake Police Chief Rick Dinse said Thursday. ``There is no question that she was psychologically affected.''
If a copywriter is putting something in quotes in a headline, he shoudn't add words...
This is as good news as one can hope for this long after a kidnapping, though obviously the girl has gone through some form of severe abuse, at least in the form of
cult brainwashing (I won't speculate what else, if anything), and she'll be in therapy for years.
I caught a bit of the
"live" (the channel on which I saw it aired it on tape delay) special episode of The John Walsh Show, and, unlike the fake happiness of a lot of the people in the news media who are really only happy that they have a new big story to cover (since the war keeps on getting delayed), you can tell that John Walsh was sincerely very happy that the kid was found, since it's the happy ending he was denied with is own son, Adam, 2 decades ago.
There's nothing else I can say about this, really, until some more details are released.
Well, it's official.Quebec voters go to the polls on April 14th. I, for one, will be voting
ADQ (L�Action d�mocratique du Qu�bec... cough, cough.. how about a little English on that Website?) for their (relatively) right-wing policies, even if Dumont got wussy, as I've said before, and dropped the Flat Tax proposal, but I'm no bandwagon-jumper (not that that bandwagon hasn't lost a wheel or two since last year) as I voted ADQ in 1998 (I think I was one of the few Anglophones that did). But all you English-speaking
(Quebec) Liberal voters needn't worry about them "losing my vote" (in quotation marks because, since I didn't vote for them last time, my vote isn't theirs to lose), as I'm in a safe Liberal riding (Vaudreuil), so my vote will add to the overall provincial percentage of the ADQ and nothing more. I don't know how much I'll talk about this... possibly more than I would talk about it otherwise since I'm really bored waiting for the war to start (
as is Mark Steyn).
One fun little thing I noticed browsing the links in the article I linked to at the beginning of this post...
the Bloc Pot Party (pro-marijuana) gets full props from me for having a fully bilingual site... and then gets even more props from me for having
an amusing pic of Kerropi (the Japanese frog character from the
Sanrio (Hello Kitty) empire) smoking a joint. I thought I might have voted for them in 1994, the first provincial election where I was old enough to vote, but they say on their site that they've only been around since 1998. Maybe I was hoodwinked into voting Liberal that time, or was the Equality Party still around? (I honestly don't remember who I voted for in 1994.) Anyhow, I'm not voting for the Bloc Pot, but, should any Bloc Potters doing a
Google vanity search read this, I do fully support your legalization agenda even if I have no interest in toking up myself (at least no interest in smoking it... I might try a brownie once or twice out of curiousity).
Also, I finished
Golden Sun for the Gameboy Advance, and, I pondered doing a review of it. I don't think I will, but it is a great brand new "old school" Super Nintendo-esque RPG with very little in the way of offering anything new, other than collecting the Pok�mon-esque "Djinn"s for super abilities in battle, but it re-does everything perfectly, and the graphics are as lush as the GBA allows. The only real problem for me is that there is no real ending... only the start of the journey towards a new continent and the final conclusion, which I already have on preorder at Compucentre (the sequel is released in English next week).
****1/2/***** (loses half-a-star for not having an ending).
Also, speaking of
Yokohama Shopping Log (
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou a.k.a.
Quiet Country Caf�), there's a brand new English-language message board, the only one that I know of (guestbooks don't count), dedicated to this series called
Caf� Alpha. This is a wonderful manga series by Hitoshi Ashinano, that inspired 2 equally wonderful "Original Video Animation" series (2 old episodes + 2 new episodes), all of which should be licensed and translated in North America but aren't.
I have to say though, really, by trying to appease the anti-war pussies at the United Nation, Bush & company have really blown any chance of getting this war over with this month, since the new ultimatum is St. Patrick's Day (March 17th, for those of you in Rio Linda), and, according to one of my calendars (not my
Yokohama Shopping Log calendar), the full moon is March 18th, so they'll really have to wait for the new moon, 2 weeks later, to attack. But, whenever it comes, it shall be quick and bloodless, even for the Iraqis, though I'm fully expecting Indymedia.org and company to parrot the Iraqi propaganda of phony mass civilian casualties, as they always do. Expect a dozen reprises of the Jenin incident, where there wasn't a massacre but that didn't stop the leftists from pretending there was.
Sorry that posts have been sporadic lately... I've been worried about several different things, especially regarding financial matters, so I just haven't felt like discussing political matters as much lately. In regards to the war... wake me when it starts, I've had enough of the discussions and the protests are just becoming boring. I like
this Website, a "blacklist" of celebrities that have been speaking out against the war or against Bush in general (plus a "whitelist" of celebrities that support Bush), so I no longer need to keep track of whom said what.
Locally, as for Bernard Landry raising the spectre of Quebec separatism as a platform issue in his campaign... well, duh! He's PQ... that's what they do! I hope he does talk about separatism, so that they lose some voters among the decent, intelligent, non-inbred portion of the French Quebec community. I'll take the (provincial) Liberals, though I'll be voting Action D�mocratique, even if Mario got wussy and dropped his flat tax proposal.
Also, I'm annoyed and pissed that Montreal has banned most pesticide and much of the herbicide spraying, because of a few idiot Luddite activists with a "junk science" agenda. Chemicals are great and represent progress and, gasp!, most chemical companies that produce pesticides and herbicides aren't intentionally trying to give their customers cancer! Of course, with genetically modified plants, we won't need to use as many pesticides and herbicides on plants, but, of course, the Luddites are against that too. Fuck them, I say, unfortunately, Montreal city council disagrees, so now most Augusts will feature even more mosquitoes and ragweed pollen, but, of course, the health of a few kids with cancer due, allegedly, to pesticides and herbicides is more important than the health of the mass number of us allergy sufferers (because those of us with particulalrly bad hay fever support the mass use of herbicides on weedy fields, but that means we are in favour of chemicals and, thus, hate children, so our side doesn't count).
I'll try and blog more this week.
SPIDER
Yesterday, I saw the new David Cronenberg movie,
Spider, a Cronenberg movie without all the usual weird prosthetics. Hmm... there's not much I can say about this movie without giving a lot away, so I will... be warned.
Dennis "Spider" Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) has just been released from an insane asylum and travels to a half-way house (facing one of those imposing gas-storage tanks you see all over Britain) run by the authoritarian Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave). He's schizophrenic, and 90% of his dialogue is him mumbling either incoherently or barely coherently. He's insane to the point of obsessively keeping a diary in which he writes everything in a weird code of letters and other non-letter symbols (well, at least he updates his diary a little more regularly than I do this blog...). He decides to visit his home and other important places from his childhood in east London, and, from then, most of the movie is told in flashbacks to his childhood, with him standing around in the background as "events" from his childhood play out before him. His doting mother, Mrs. Cleg (Miranda RIchardson) is the centre of his world, while he seems to resent his plumber father Bill Cleg (Gabriel Byrne), who always seems to be at the bar rather than home. "Spider" hates going to the bar, especially since the hookers hang out there. One of the hookers, Yvonne, is seeing his father behind his mother's back. Meanwhile, in the present, "Spider" starts seeing Mrs. Wilkinson as an older version of Yvonne... is she hiding something from him? One day, Mrs. Cleg catches Bill having sex with Yvonne in his shed, so Bill just kills his wife and then acts as if nothing had happened, with the hooker Yvonne assuming the role of "Spider"'s mother. Or did anything happen? I think the key to understanding this movie is that only the flashbacks where the young "Spider" is present actually happened; "Spider" couldn't possibly know exactly what his father does when "Spider"'s not around, so, many of the flashbacks are just delusions. I thought the shots of the gas-storage tanks were foreshadowing that it would explode in the end... I was about half-correct in that it was indeed foreshadowing something, but not in the way I expected.
The movie is very dark and very atmospheric and very well-acted, I must say. Blues and institutional greens dominate throughout the film, but the colour scheme seemed to be due to wardrobe and set-design and lighting, not those artificial-looking post-production computer-added colour effects I find overused and sometimes hideous in films like
Traffic and
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, so definetely props for acheiving a consistent colour scheme the proper way. One thing about this movie was that you never quite see the point exactly where "Spider"'s mind snapped and he became schizophrenic, and that's a minor complaint, the schizophrenia itself was very well-handled. It's a very good film, but the opposite of a feel-good movie, and, as such, I don't think I'll watch this again for a long time.
****/*****
