Tag: media

In which I write in praise of Justin Bieber:

Justin Bieber, pop icon and every teeny bopper’s dreamboat, has given the pro-life lobby a totally unexpected and extraordinary coup: he has told Rolling Stone magazine that he thinks abortion is “like killing a baby”. The 16-year-old, a committed Christian, has actually come out and said that an embryo is a human being. Gasp! Gulp! From Montreal to Manchester, this is the most important person in a teenage girl’s universe.

It is always dangerous to place much credence in anything that any celebrity says or does, especially a young one. Michelle Malkin’s foolishly premature praise of Charlotte Church springs to mind, by way of example. Regardless, it is courageous of Bieber to so openly take a stand against the dogma of Hollywood at such a young age and so early in his career.

On a totally unrelated but apparently more predictable note, Abe produced a timely comment: “DRAT! How could I have forgotten the Merlot, Ritz crackers, and canned cheese spread for Vox?! It’s all he ever eats, anyway!” :-p

The reason SB and I thought this was so funny was that at the very moment I read the comment, I happened to be enjoying a lunch that consisted of a 2001 Gran Riserva, spiced Valaisian sausage, and parmigiano reggiano. Ecco la dolce vita….

I dare you to watch this without laughing. Ironically, CBS’s Serene Branson still manages to make a more coherent case than the average Fox News contributor in this brief and intriguingly esoteric commentary.

Our favorite mommybloggger goes full-media whore and joins CNN. This comment – from one of her readers, no less – cracked me up.

Ms Loesch needs to work on her game… Her scattered appearances on FOX were pretty embarrassing; she may be right on the issues but came across as in over her head- and out of her league. Her posts here at BH are ok; nothing cutting edge or particularly enlightening.

Dana Loesch is pretty, but not Fox News pretty. She’s conservative, but without any intellectual foundation. And she’s stupid. This spell as the token conservative fall girl should end well… at least for those of us with sadistic streaks.

The New York Times issues one:

Correction: February 6, 2011

An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor. No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig.

Well, glad they cleared THAT one up.

Look, it was never a mystery. I have not seen one second of The Sopranos, but when I heard it was coming to an end, I knew that Tony would be whacked. I knew he would be whacked because he HAD to be whacked. Any half-skilled dramatist – and by all accounts, David Chase is a highly skilled one – knows that a drama has to end in death, redemption, or the completion of an odyssey. Since there is no secular redemption other than a wedding (or its extra-marital substitute) and I assumed that no HBO series would end in Christian repentance, and because Tony Soprano was an overt antihero, (therefore precluding the odyssey), there simply was no other dramatically possible option.

And no one who has ever seen The Godfather should fail to grasp the metaphorical significance of someone walking into a bathroom at a restaurant. Especially not in a television series about the Mafia. I would give no more credence to the idea that the fade to black at the end – which ended on the word “stop” – meant that the lead character got arrested than it meant he left his wife, moved to Las Vegas, and became a poledancer at a gay club.

It’s certainly an unusual take on the usual reviewer’s formula. And significantly more insightful:

Blue Valentine is an exploration of a modern marriage in the process of disintegrating, told via alternating scenes between the couple’s sordid present and their romantically heady past of five or six years ago. The flashback scenes aren’t labeled as such; the viewer knows they are flashbacks by the youthful hairline of Ryan Gosling’s character, Dean, and by the fact that there’s no kid around. The effect of the flashbacks is like a prolonged near-death experience, where the characters’ dying relationship is punctuated by gauzy vignettes of happier times.

Although the theater was filled with SWPL women probably on a bender from Glee house parties, don’t mistake this film for a chick flic. There’s too much truth told in the portrayal of a relationship hitting the skids for this to be anything resembling the typical sappy romance movie. For one, there’s no happy ending. Women’s faces after a manipulative cheese-fest chick flic show the telltale signs of throat-lumped weepiness: the glisten of fresh tears on cheeks. But the crowd of women filing out of the theater after Blue Valentine had only the vacant-eyed look of a shellshocked soldier who has just seen his buddy catch shrapnel. Or, in this case, catch a little too much reality.

Quite simply, there hasn’t been a movie in our lifetimes which depicts the fall of a man from charming nascent alpha to inept needy beta, and the loathing that this engenders in his lover, better than Blue Valentine.

There are apparently “spoilers” in the review, although since I assume most of the readers of this blog are about as likely to see Blue Valentine as I am to win the Powerball lottery, (never having purchased a lottery ticket in my life), there is no reason not to read it. And it’s interesting to learn that Hollywood, in at least this one instance, has abandoned the Disney Snowflake formula in favor of a more realistic Game-like perspective.

One uncomfortable observation that men would do well to accept is that even with the best will in the world, when a man makes a habit of automatically deferring to a woman’s wishes, it tends to cause her to develop contempt for him. It’s simply how they are wired; it can be astonishing to see how quickly a woman develops a prickly queen bee attitude towards others as soon as she has her social status upgraded for one reason or another. Also, because women are dynamic, (which is admittedly part of their charm), they can’t necessarily articulate what they happen to want at any given moment, so the gamma’s plea of “tell me what you want and I’ll do it” not only sounds craven and off-putting to them, it’s not even relevant. The correct thing is to simply do whatever it is that you do and understand that a woman will be with you as long as she chooses, all promises and vows notwithstanding.

Men should pay very little attention to what a woman says. That’s just a snapshot of her emotional state at the moment, which, for good or for ill, is guaranteed to change. In the end, it is only what she has done in the past that is informative and what she decides to do now and in the future that matters. And if she doesn’t want to be with you, why would you want her to stick around anyhow? There are literally three billion other members of the opposite sex out there, after all, and the chances are pretty high that at least one of them will appreciate you considerably more than a woman who has gradually come to dislike or even loathe you.

Alas, the noble radio show has gone the way of the Afghan warlords’ union:

As John Hinderaker reported earlier on Power Line, the six year run of our volunteer participation at The Patriot has come to an end. I won’t go into all of the details behind the move, John does a good job of that in his summary. I will say that it did come as a surprise when we were informed earlier this week that our time slot was going to be immediately turned over to more, shall we say, revenue generating friendly programming.

It’s too bad sufficient revenue couldn’t have been raised from our program alone. From my perspective as a radio listener, it was at least the equal of what the competing talk stations were putting up during that time. In terms of the quality of national guests and commentary featured, no shows on other local stations came close to providing it.

I enjoyed my phoned-in visits to the show, although I think the Fraters guys tended to view my libertarian extremism with far more delight than the Powerline guys did. (I’m not sure the latter ever got over my brutal depantsing of Michelle Malkin in their own house.) But I appreciated their willingness to host my non-debate with PZ Myers and I always considered it to be a very entertaining and intelligent show that routinely operated at a much higher level than most of the superficial chatter that passes for talk radio these days. Of course, it was the way in which they took politics seriously that ultimately deprived them of a sufficiently large audience since most Minnesotans want to hear about sports and celebrities, not politics and world events. But it was a solid six-year run, and I congratulate Brian, Chad, JB, King, Mitch, Ed, John, and Scott for their impressive accomplishment.

And let’s face it, NARN without Chad the Elder was like the United Front without Massoud.