on november 23, the basilica bleu turned one year old!
thank you, from the bottom of my soul, to everyone who reads this.
im gonna be taking some time off from posting (prolly until the coming holiday season), so in the way of tiding yous over - and commemorating the anniversary at the same time - i hereby unveil the new 'greatest posts' (as per my own opinion and/or a high number of comments on a given post) column, on the right.
(i plan to fix the header font in due time. for now it was enough to set up the links, which was a laborious task i am glad to be done with.)
this past weekend, a bunch of us drove down to a city for which a beautiful neil young song - to which i cannot find an audio link - is eponymously-named. (to say nothing of the songs, like elton's philadelphia freedom and boyz II men's motown philly, which do not hail from that soundtrack.)
(the city also gets a lot of airplay from diane keaton's mary wilkie in manhattan; you can even hear one of those quotes.)
anyhoo, i dont know why im making such a big deal about pop culture references to this city of cheesesteaky love; we didnt see nearly enough of it for me to pontificate about its value as a metropolis. (thusly, not only was the city never the main focus of this post, but it's hardly even an auxiliary topic. [i just like linking to shite; it's half the fun of blogging. {the other half being the discount at circuit city.}])
(meanwhile, i just used double-embedded parens. aw yeah!)
i will say philly seems like a pretty city, oozing with historical-looking dons.
anyhoo deux, yeah, we went down to see and cheer bramalon in the maradon, and that is what we did:
clip courtesy of gold lion films
the badass finished in 3:41:47, which is like 8.5 minutes per mile, which is pretty effing classy.
and now, at long last, without further ado, here's the main pt of the post:
it was foolish of me to break character and get even moderately interested in seeing a bond movie. we saw 'casino royale' on sat. night, after supping at tgi friday's (home of the never-meant-to-exist deep-fried macaroni and cheese balls). god is this movie bad. it is a royale bore, is what it is. the plot centers on this huge poker game for crying out loud.
IM SO SICK OF POKER. enough with effing poker already!
fortunately, i slept through almost the whole movie. (everyone who was with me - save publicadcampaign, but including bond-obsessed gold lion - hated it too, so you cant say i cant legitimately diss it just cuz i slept through it. had i had to consciously suffer through it, i would have disliked it even more intensely.)
so i got to thinking about this whole 'bond' movie franchise. namely, i realized what an utter hoax/con job it is.
the fact is, bond movies ceased to be original or even interesting decades ago. they're basically the same movie made over and over again, with (very) slight plot and character twists. (thusly, the whole thing would be more appropriate as a law & order-type tv series.) but the powers that be that produce these films 'get away' with it, b/c they cleverly do not attach numerals - roman or otherwise - to the titles.
think about it. by the time police academy 6, or friday the thirteenth 15, or star trek whathaveyou came out, most people saw the unwieldy number attached and it crystalized this thought: hey, can 6 effing police academy movies really all be interesting? isn't it enough with this franchise?
well, imagine the bond movies were given numbers. we'd be on, like, bond 40. (btw, im not bothering to verify any of these numbers with links b/c you get my pt and i dont really care to extend the manhours i've put into this current, admittedly unweildy post.)
no doubt that anyone with half a brain, or just a modicum of integrity, would see 'james bond 40' on a marquee and realize that seeing another bond movie is just a total waste of time.
(this is not a comment on the brain-size or integrity of myself or my friends, since no number is attached to 'casino royale.')
so, next time you get a hankerin to see a bond movie, pretend its sequential number is attached, as it should be. that'll show ya.
this morning at work, i tried to make some quaker instant oatmeal (banana bread flavor, specifically). after adding water, i guess i left it in the microwave too long - the directions said 1 to 2 min; i gave it 2 - because half of the 'oatmeal' exploded all over the microwave, and the half that remained was a thick paste that would make good caulk, not breakfast.
reading this over, the bottom line is clearly that this sounded funnier in my head than it looks on the screen. whatevs. here's a photo of a three-week old kitten i saw in the deli across the street from my apt. last week, bound to make this post a worthwhile experience.
one more key thought on the dems' midterm triumph. some friends have been saying that this thumping kind of makes up for kerry's dicing in '04. while i agree it's kind of a balm on that wound, c'mon - it hardly makes up for it. id draw an analogy to the 2006 boston massacre of august, in which the yanks swept the sox in a five game set at fenway, ostensibly killing their chances at the playoffs. that was sweet, but it was hardly total revenge for the epic, historical 2004 yankee collapse, in which the yankees blew a 3-0 lead to lose a seven game series - something which has never been done by another team, in baseball or any other sport. having both houses of congress is nice; having kerry in the oval office, despite the fact that he's a massive tool, would have been nicer.
anyway, kerry's dicing isn't even my most painful election memory. just as the 2004 yanks are the most painful yankee memory for me - worse than the game 7 loss to the diamondbacks in '01, worse than this year's loss to the tigers - gore losing in 2000 is my worst election memory. the protracted, agonizing way in which he lost, coupled with my thirst for a liberal, environmental president to follow eight years of being accustomed to a democrat in the white house, made that loss nothing short of torture, even not knowing how bad bush would get. it was like having my pacifier taken away. kerry was like a kick in the groin; gore was like murder, pure and true.
finally, i leave you with another great way to sum up rumsfeld's ouster, courtesy of like-love, who got it from a colleague, who got it from whoknowswho:
today, a good friend of mine, Palm L.O. Hedcatt - who is also the basilica's resident political pundit - had this to say about the democrats' triumph in yesterday's election:
Dude I am SO psyched. There's a 7k vote cushion in VA which shouldHOPEFULLY DEFINITELY survive any recount. We did it, baby! I can't waitto give myself an abortion while eating a plate of stem cells andturning guantanamo into a gay marriage chapel for illegal immigrants!!
my name is bean, my card is american express, and i approve this message!
when asked to assess-via-haiku today's 'resignation' of Donald Rumsfeld, Hedcatt had this to say:
don you dirty rat consider yourself tot diced go blow yourself (up)
what i have to say is: doesn't don look like a snapping turtle? id love to put my finger near his mouth, then yank it back - narrowly avoiding his chomp, then repeat the action dozens of times, then feed him some smelly turtle food. i dunno - that just seems like it would be fun.
then id drop him in the middle of iraq in a soldier's uniform, to see how he liked those apples.
here's why i love the shuffle songs feature on my ipod - yesterday, the following songs came on in a row: father & son, cat stevens; dear mama, tupac; and daugters, john mayer. ok, i made the last one up - i have no john mayer on my pod - but the first two did happen. that wily shuffle; it's full o' cute surprises!
i am now holding out hope that i will one day be graced with a permutation of father & son, dear mama, the dead's uncle john's band and bill withers's grandma's hands playing consecutively. what can i say; the shuffle leads me on like a vegas slot that just showed me two cherries and a yarmulke. and in the way of reaching for the superduper jackpot, i am considering adding the following tracks to the pod: danzig's mother, sister sledge's we are family, floyd's mother, peebo bryson's sleeping with my cousin, madonna's papa don't preach, dylan's oh, sister, tim mcgraw's the ass of a stepmom, fleetwood mac's oh daddy, the nixons's sister, and frank sinatra's lesser-known a squirrel ate my parents (they never tasted that good). man there's a lot of great family songs.
a lot of people are up in arms over this comment john kerry made at a dems rally in pasadena on monday: 'You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.'
the furor has forced kerry to backtrack; he now says that he effed up a joke his aides penned, which was supposed to be: 'Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.'
as per ewge, i have some thoughts.
odie.while it kinda sounds like kerry is making up a b.s. explanation to save himself after the fact, it's eminently believable that he could brutalize a phrase that much, as he has a nice track record of doing just that. in a debate during the notorious 2004 campaign, in reference to bush and iraq, kerry butchered the pottery barn rule, which refers to ill-advisedly conquering a country one must then squander incalculable resources on: You break it, you own it.
kerry, with the prime-time, national spotlight on him, conveyed this as, 'Secretary of State Colin Powell told this president the Pottery Barn rule: If you break it, you fix it. Now, if you break it, you made a mistake. It's the wrong thing to do. But you own it.'
i mean, the dude is just a clod, pure and true. he can snatch diced from the jaws of classy like no other.
nermal. but here's the thing; does it really matter if kerry botched the joke? isnt what he ended up saying - intentional or not - in essence quite true? isnt it, for the most part, the poor young men and women who either failed or were failed by our education system who are fighting this war? sure, there are many bright kids in the army who are there so that they CAN get a good, free education, and a salary, and conversely, there are many kids who do work hard and are still forced, because of socio-economic reasons, to serve. but fact remains that the majority of the rank and file members of the military are there because - for whatever reason - they did not succeed in the 'formal' education tract we have in this country (ok grades in high school, leading to college), and were thusly left without the option of college or a job, and so were pigeonholed into joining the armed forces. as i see it, kerry's quote amounted to: 'if you are born into disadvantaged circumstances, succeeding in your education is your best ticket out of being funneled into the army' - the implication or essence being 'it is our disadvantaged youths who are fighting this war.'
i mean, there's a reason army recruiters go into poor, disadvantaged neighborhoods to ply their deadly trade. they're looking for targets who do not have the option of college - again, for whatever reason - and they know where to find them. kerry wasn't saying 'if you're dumb, you join the military.' he was saying 'do what you can to avoid the military - namely, get to college.' those are two different concepts.
and so, i think this backlash against kerry is a gestalt case of 'thou dost protest too much.' we all KNOW, deep down, that we are all complicit in sending naive, poor kids far away to die for no earhtly reason, and inside, it's killing us. so when kerry said that aloud, he touched a nerve. not the nerve of 'we want to support our troops' mind you; it was the nerve of 'we know we're accomplices in killing our troops if we're doing anything but working to get them home immediately.' we want to repress this truth inside of us; we dont want to be reminded of it. we are depressed, not faithful citizens as a result of this war, and this uproar over kerry betrays that. we stand by while the president and his hawks lead lambs to the slaughter.
but no one wants to hear this truth. it cuts to the quick.
if only kerry had had these newfound stones two years ago. he prolly still would have lost, as that's his m.o., but at least people would have gotten a sense that he was genuine - something most people assuredly did not feel.
garfield. not for nuthin, but doesnt john kerry look like a tiki head? when i google-imaged tiki heads to prove this theory, i came up with tiki head tissue holders:
the best part about this is that it's fun to think of john kerry sobbing on election day '04, then grabbing tissues out of one of these, to cry into. i mean, THAT's a good joke!
on november 23, the basilica bleu turned one year old! 
