OMG! Fraggles movie! Greenlighted by the Weinstein brothers!
Jim Henson’s gang of Muppets will make a return to the big screen thanks to a revival by The Weinstein Co. of 1980s TV series Fraggle Rock in a live-action musical film.
Spurred in part by strong DVD sales of the first three seasons, the film will once more mix people with puppets and take the five core Fraggle characters - Gobo, Wembley, Mokey, Boober and Red - outside Fraggle Rock and into the human world, where they are mistaken for aliens.
The screenplay will be written by director Cory Edwards, with siblings Lisa and Brian Henson, the CEOs of Jim Henson Co., joining the project as producers.
Screw politics. This is enough to keep me happy for days.
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Think that Obama sun/bright, hypnotizing light/Eye of Sauron (dear Lord, I just noticed two seconds ago that its a giant “O”) illustration glued to the back bumper of that Subaru going 35 miles per hour in a 55 zone while its dreadlocked and patchouli-scented driver contemplates the inner workings of the Universe is creepy?
Well, back in 1964, you might have been staring at the giant jaundice-tinted face of Barry Goldwater, and the election cycle before that, Humphrey was stealing his color scheme from Monopoly “Chance” cards.
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He may have found a new respect for the minature cloisonne flag lapel pin and the similarly miniature group of voters that list patriotic jewelry-wearing as a pre-requisite for high political office, but something tells me that Barack Obama is going to have to put in a lot of extra hours in stinky shoes to really recapture America’s heartland. He can pay lip service to whatever national symbol he likes, but people who can’t see are now beating Obama’s bowling score. By a lot.
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Apparently, the Chinese, in their all-out effort to hold onto Tibet (for reasons I do not understand, but I’m eager to be educated on the subject), “passed” decreed that Lamas in Tibet have to get permission from the Chinese government to be reincarnated.
Yes, you really did just read that sentence.
I could go off for a while about how the repression of the Tibetans is brutal and how the Olympics being handed to Beijing was a horrendous move, but it’s Friday and I have an excellent weekend ahead and I’d hate to get in a bad mood over this, so I’ll just leave it where it’s at. After the weekend, I will gladly eviscerate in detail the Myanmar government, who earned a special place in hell with their response to the awful cyclone that devasted that nation this week.
In the meantime, feel free to belittle, mock, and generally disrespect the brain-dead Communists who operate out of Beijing. Really, now, unless they’ve got the abilities of the Silver Surfer or something, this is just another example of stupid people committing stupid acts.
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Israel should just forget about international opinion, the diplomatic process, and the relative pros and cons of all-out warfare and kick Skippy’s Members Only jacket-wearing ass back to whatever pre-literate century he crawled out of.
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Speaker Pelosi will support either a revote or a count of the delegates in Florida and Michigan which favors Weinstein’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, and Harvey Weinstein will agree to leave Project Runway on Bravo where it belongs and not move it to Lifetime where it’ll get buried between reruns of Designing Women and those shows where they teach you about the dangers of sending flowers to strange men.
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I have to be brutally honest. I find Barbara Walters fascinating. I know she has sordid history, and she’s probably not very nice in person, or whatever, but there’s something about a woman with that much history, that much connection to historical events, and that much in charge of casting my dream job, that its impossible to totally tune out her book tour, which is why, instead of watching the results roll in from the primaries yesterday, I spent it catching up on Barbara’s interview on Oprah and seeking out gossip about her interview with Charlie Gibson, and listening to her rag on Star Jones. And watching Dancing With the Stars (MARIO??…WTF?!).
And in the process, I may have missed Hillary Clinton’s Custer-esque last stand. I noticed, around eleven, that without an announcement from the networks, she was making a speech — presumably so that she didn’t look like a loser when the eleven o’clock locals b-rolled footage of her at her campaign headquarters — and thanking supporters for a win, even though it doesn’t appear that she actually, you know, won.
Barack Obama took a big step toward the Democratic presidential nomination with an easy victory in North Carolina, and Hillary Clinton narrowly won Indiana and loaned $6.4 million (3.27 million pounds) out of her own pocket to help keep her struggling campaign alive.
The outcome of Tuesday’s primaries helped Obama widen his lead over Clinton in the gruelling Democratic duel for the right to face Republican John McCain in November’s presidential election with just six nominating contests remaining.
By all accounts, she did better than she was expected to do: she won Indiana, which was threatening to go to Barack by a wide margin only two weeks ago. She didn’t, however, win it by the four to five points she would have needed to mark a clear victory. Instead, she was stuck in a nail-biter as Barack took an early and sound (nearly 15 point) primary win down south — something he desperately needed to convince the Democratic heirarchy that he could succeed in states where people weren’t bussed to the caucuses and rewarded for their efforts with Dunkin Donuts, and to prove that the Jeremiah Wright fiasco is something short attention span Americans have already forgotten. She eked it out in the end, and with all the key demographics — union workers, white men and old people — in line, but in such a way that she appeared almost like King Kong desperately clinging to the top of the Empire State Building as the B-52s dropped traquilizer bombs on his head. She seems…finished. Over. Kaput.
It may or may not be a good thing. Obama can’t keep the party coalition together, and its a lot to ask of core Democratic voters who have been slowly flowing away from him over the last couple of months, to abandon their last vestiges of hope for a Democratic Presidency and cling to an untried, inexperienced and potentially divisive candidate, but the DNC would be hard-pressed to deny him, and the legion of adoring supporters he represents what is rightfully theirs. Hillary has the steadily-increasing popular vote, the Clinton commitment to not give in until, as Quin Hillyer likes to say, they are dead, buried, and 200 feet underground with rocks on top of them and a zombie guard (I added the last part), and probably the best chance at beating John McCain (especially if a third party joins the fray), but she started looking viable just too little too late. By then, Obama was already on the cover and the locker-size centerfold of Teen Bop.
Which is fine. Obama’s the weaker candidate overall, Hillary’s voters are in McCain’s core demograhic of squishy middlers, and four years out, she can try again, if she’s not stupid enough to take the Vice President slot.
And she can always go on Barbara Walters to cry about it.
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But its still, frankly, the most implausible and ridiculous thing to come out of Hillary Clinton’s mouth this entire election season, including that thing about “gifting” American with universal pre-K.
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Back in the 1980s, I was blissfully listening to a lenghty mixtape that featured both Big Bird and Morrissey as Tipper Gore attempted to rid the world of the evils of Twisted Sister, but even then, I was aware of how angrily Democrats approached the exercise of freedom and capitalism. The fact that parents were forgoing parenting to hang out with fellow Wall Street shoulder pad afficionados mattered not — only that people like Dee Snider were writing the songs that made the whole world want to smoke crack and kill things. The notion of personal responsibility and the operation of market forces have never played a crucial role in liberal thought, but in this particular instance, it took a back seat even to that sort of nanny-state save-you-from-yourself parentage that Gores specialize in.
And no one has really come close to suggesting that degree of governmental prior restraint on your power to buy…until we were blessed with Obama, who happened to be campaigning at the same time Grand Theft Auto IV debuted.
I’ll be honest, I’ve grown to hate video games, which I feel is any child’s natural reaction to their parent once they reach adulthood, but even I can see the value in GTA IV. Where else are youth going to learn firsthand that pedestrians leave bloodsmears on cars when you hit them, or that when you’re wanted by the police, your wanted level doesn’t go down if you hide out in a back alley for a couple of minutes of game play. I am an American, and its my God-given right to play multi-player RPG games where you can hook up with prostitutes. American children may not be reading at any level comparable to their Beligan counterparts, but I would challenge Mr. Obama to look beyond violent computer games and more closely at the effect teachers unions are having on public schools, the latchkey culture we’ve built for our children by encouraging materialism in our adults, or heck, even our national love affair with cheap fast food, which seems to only increase as the prices of healthy foods increase. But I know thats worthless. Its so much easier to make millions of consenting adults show proper identification when purchasing Banjo Kazooie.
Dare him to try this with rap music.
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I haven’t done this in, like, forver, but then again, I’m also the one who managed to lose her entire identity in a job, so I’m not holding it against myself, but it appears — from the ten or so fashion magazines that get delivered on a regular basis — that the entire fashion world has gone mad over “gladitor sandals.” Now, not one to want to look like Russel Crowe in his pre-intellectual, blockbuster-making years, I’ve been avoiding it. Thats not to say that it hasn’t found me, and today, I blew a whole eight bucks on a pair of gold ones at the Gap that marginally resemble these $500 ones from Tod’s.
Next step? I think maybe this dress in charcoal with an electric blue cardigan (15% off if I fill out a survey on my last Gap experience) in a size too small, and my fake Wayfarers. I could forget to wash my hair for days and still look into it. Or some seriously vintage roll-bottom jean shorts…
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So yesterday was not a good day if you belonged to the Labour party in England. Yes, they happen to be the leftist, anti-civil liberties, anti-personal responsibility party (and they also happen to be in control of the office of Prime Minister), but they fell two days ago in a brilliant bloodbath, losing over three hundred council seats, and had only 20 or so percent of the vote to the conservatives 40% and the New Democrats’ 25%. They lost everywhere, basically, including the mayorship of the city of London, which hasn’t had a conservative leader for almost five decades…until now.
Fed up with insane, rampant hippie environmentalism, which taxed taxes, taxed taxes on taxes, and managed, finally, to tax forays into London’s city center (a full 8 pound charge), the people voted in this guy, who once rode his bicycle while talking on a mobile phone, penned an automotive column for the British version of GQ and ran the Top Gear track in a moderately priced car at a slightly slower pace than that dude who does Hell’s Kitchen on the Fox Network.
At least he has fabulous hair. And he’s not Ken Livingstone, who the Top Gear folks not only would not allow to run their track, but may or may not have actually threatend to kidnap and set on fire.
Good work, Londoners. At some point in the next year and a half, you will be called to choose a Prime Minister, and I sincerely hope you vote for David Cameron. After all, he could probably kick ass on the track, too.
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Yesterday was May Day, and as any good Communist (or Catholic) knows, that means it was World Workers Day, and prime time for a host of large-scale events celebrating a world where we all join hands, trade crops, and apparently, destroy our own national borders. In Chicago, as in sanctuary cities elsewhere, illegal immigrants and their supporters took to the streets to celebrate being outside the long arm of law enforcement, to pubicize their having infiltrated our “airtight” southern border in order to be employed in low wage jobs, and to encourage us to submit to their authority and allow them to have most of our Southwestern United States back.
This sounds ridiculous — especially the part about wanting to make part of Mexico the very chunk of our country they are scrambling over the border to inhabit (there’s a reason they’re leaving Mexico, after all) — and it kind of is, especially when you allow elected officials to make speeches in support of it.
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Nevermind actually finding ways to increase supply, expand refining capacity, or allowing drilling for more oil in regions that aren’t war zones or ready to erupt…the solution is to tax our way to lower gas prices!
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Except, you know, this place is more equipped for “cocktail parties and fundraising dinners”. But they do have memorabilia!
First we see a dangling press pass and a cassette audio tape: the very press pass worn in 2004 by a reporter for the Hattiesburg American whose tape of an off-the-record talk by Antonin Scalia was briefly confiscated by cops. That’s the tape, right there. The actual mouse pad used by Peter Jennings is down the case from a red sweater that Helen Thomas wore to a presidential press conference, across from a notebook jotted in by the Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff during the Lewinsky scandal. A TV screen hovering above a door from the Watergate office building shows footage of Walter Cronkite.
An old typewriter is identified as the real typewriter used by Al Neuharth, founder–coincidentally–of the Freedom Forum. Elsewhere is the tape recorder Susan Stamberg lugged around during the early days of NPR. An entire corner of the museum is given over to a shrine to the TV personality Edward R. Murrow: Behind a wall of glass sits the sacred desk, the passport, the war uniform, the trunk that was once opened by his hands, and upon which, perhaps, his bottom once rested. There’s also a teletype used by Walter Cronkite. The history of journalism culminates in the final display, which shows–you may now slit my throat–the slippers once worn by the blogger Wonkette. While she blogged.
We’re kind of put off that they don’t have the Rathergate memos, or at least the envelope they came in that Bill Burkett got while he was at the Houston Rodeo, from that man who worked for Lucy Ramirez. But, perhaps that’s too much to ask…
Anyway, no worries, in addition to Wonkette’s slippers, they apparently also have a nifty 75 foot high marble slab with the First Amendment etched on it. And we have to say, nothing illustrates how the Bush administration is destroying America’s freedoms like a multi-million dollar shrine built by journalists to glorify themselves.
The building’s one genuinely unique feature–no one else will do it again, now that it’s been done once–is on the exterior: a 75-foot-high slab of Tennessee marble projected from the building’s front. On it are etched, in letters several feet high, the 45 words of the First Amendment. Putting it there was an aggressive act, a lapel-grabber–thrust over the Avenue, it’s unignorable, literally in your face. Yet the Newseum staffers are inordinately proud of it. “If all we had of the building was that wall,” the museum’s director Charles Overby told a press preview the other day, “then the building would have still been worth it.”
Does he mean he’d be willing to spend $572 million on a large slab of marble?
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Is it true what they say about E.M.?
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"[An] amusing staple of the Right blogosphere" -- Salon.com
"A foxy fascist is still a fascist."
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"Fun writing with a twist of the conservative disease. But enjoyable all the same. Besides, we’re suckers for a nice pair of legs."--Got Detroit?
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Yes, absolutely, [its] cheap, trashy; Im well aware of that. But we live in the age of Paris Hilton, my dear, so what are you going to do? A show where you discuss Flaubert with people that call in? No, I dont think so.
"E.M., you are your own subculture. I would like to be part of that subculture, but I don't think its acceptable for me to wear that much pink."
"Hey E.M., I thought you said this was a porn site...?"
May 14, 2008 
Posted by E. M. Zanotti in Uncategorized 
1 Comment »
