Leftpedal
email: leftpedal AT gmail.com
(shortlisted links to come. maybe.)
My head hurts...
from all this weirdly serious posturing and talk of NUCLEAR war over Poland and South Ossettia & Georgia. WTF? I guess it’s enough to make me say something on this damned website 2 days in a row. Who are these people?I'm not pro-Russia, but
Why doesn’t the President of Georgia go on Charlie Rose instead of Larry King? Oh, right, there’d be hard questions. I just don’t want a provocation or thought of nuclear war with Russia… who, by the way, I thought was an ally, not an “ally.”deep thought
The US can send humanitarian aid to Georgia (the one on the other side of the world, natch) in a matter of a few days and risking even greater tensions with Russia, but we couldn’t get aid to Louisiana and Mississippi for weeks after Katrina.CHARLIE ROSE!
Put this on during the nightly “news hour” on network tv. Talking. About real stuff. Normal talking. Informed normal talking.Tom Delay...
Unless Tom DeLay proves me wrong, he is a Nazi.it's about time
The 15 Most Awesome Celebrity Mullets Everbiofuels not so good, maybe
Thoughts on the food crisis: “It takes 528 pounds of corn to fill the tank of one SUV. The same amount could feed one person for a year.” Read a few more points here.wow, what a democracy
“[S]ince 1945, the U.S. ranks 139th of 172 countries in the world when it comes to voter turnout”our quest to watch all the Tommy Lee Jones movies
This is honorable, right?
My girlfriend and I are watching lots and lots of Tommy Lee Jones movies, whatever’s available on Netflix. We might not watch all of them, but we’re watching a lot of them. We might have to throw some different stuff in between in the queue, but here’s where we’ve been so far.
Why, you ask? I have no idea. Reviews may come later, but of the ones we’ve already watched, there were 2 I’d previously never heard of: The Eyes of Laura Mars and Blue Sky. We watched Laura Mars a while back, and not part of the current marathon, but it was pretty good. TLJ pretty artsy. Blue Sky we watched last night. Neither of us felt that Jessica Lange deserved her Academy Award, but this was a pretty good, yet disturbing movie. Definitely a TLJ classic that would not be on most people’s radar (I had never heard of it, actually, either).
Best so far? Overall movie: Coal Miner’s Daughter. (Yeah, I know, NCfOM was good, but it was a Coen movie. It was their movie, not TLJ’s movie. They used him for their own purposes. It was Lebowski, just not funny.)
Best TLJ performance? Well, Tommy Lee is Tommy Lee in almost every movie, however nuanced the TLJ performance. But why would you want to see a TLJ movie where he didn’t give you what you wanted? He was totally different in Laura Mars and JFK, though. But he was the vulnerable TLJ in Elah. The hard ass, but soft sided TLJ in Double Jeopardy. Sad TLJ in Blue Sky. Hard assed in The Fugitive; hard assed with humor in Marshalls. Director and dreamer TLJ in Melquiades. Dolittle TLJ in Coal Miner.
Anyway:
Tommy Lee Jones movies we’ve watched, to date, in our TLJ marathon:
No Country for Old Men
The Eyes of Laura Mars
In the Valley of Elah
The Fugitive
Coal Miner’s Daughter
U.S. Marshalls
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
JFK
Double Jeopardy
Blue Sky
Upcoming (the first 10 are the top 10 of the queue, others are down a bit):
The Package (*currently at home)
Blown Away
Broken Vows
Rules of Engagement
The Client
Heaven & Earth
Black Moon Rising
Stormy Monday
Nate & Hayes
Barn Burning
Natural Born Killers
Fire Birds
The Big Town
Yuri Nosenko
Back Roads
Apple of politics? No.
Please stop. McCain is not “cool.” He’s not “maverick.” Now the media is putting the meme out there that he’s like the “Apple of American politics.” Good grief.No. He’s not. Stop it.
I’m really going to cringe when someone says that McCain is trying to rebrand the Republican party.
Where are the dunkers? Indeed.
See also: a 10-min 1942 piece that explains just how to dunk a donut.