Category: In the News

Here’s a snippet from yesterday’s Achewood comic,

which pokes fun at the VP debates. These two panels convey actual

points from the debate, but the really funny stuff happens when John

Edwards (played by Achewood’s Renaissance Bear, Teodor) points out

fictitious votes in Congress made by Dick Cheney (played by Achewood’s

resident asshat, Pat):

Also enjoyable: Landover Baptist’s We Need Dick!:

Serves me right for procrastinating: I found this photo on a

file-swapping site that I frequent, saved it and planned to post it

this morning, only to find that Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing had beaten me

to the punch. General humour is my turf, Xeni! Stick to your

zero-G/fetish posts and no one gets hurt!

US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently spoke at Harvard and said the expected: that recent decisions protecting abortion rights,

upholding the legalization of assisted suicide and striking down

anti-sodomy laws represent a dangerous trend.

But he also said something unexpected: “I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.”

For a man who’s this close to saying “the missionary position — not just a good idea, it’s the law!” this is quite surprising.

Clearly the man hasn’t seen The Ice Storm, and he must’ve been a total Poindexter when he attended Harvard.

New York Times caption:

From Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail

(Truth be told, a lot of folks in the blogosphere are shaped more like the men in the photo.)

Bonus reading: Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety, in which the author talks about what people worry about when they worry about safety: “not risks,

however commonplace, involving their own behavior but risks, however

rare, involving some unexpected event.”

As long as they’ve got Arnie hashing out lines from his old action flicks, let’s remember The Running Man,

one of my favourites. Richard Dawson played an especially memorable

villian because he played it by doing what he does best: being a smarmy

game show host.

(For those of you who are too young to remember, Dawson was the original host of the American TV game show Family Feud.)

“Who loves you…and who do you love?! It’s time to start…running!”

What you may not remember is that Dawson’s character’s name in The Running Man

is “Killian”. “Killian” also happens to be the name of President Bush’s

commanding officer back in the early 1970s — the one who purportedly

wrote the memos that are now believed to be possible forgeries.

Another interesting coincidence: Like the running men Bush and Kerry,

the veracity of reports on Running Man Arnie’s character’s military

service is called into question. The official story is that Arnie’s

character is “The Butcher of Bakersfield”, a US Army helicopter pilot

who shot at innocent civilians. In reality, he defied orders to shoot

at a food riot in progress, saying that they were just innocent people

trying to eat.

Surely some speechwriter is going over The Running Man right now,

looking for the appropriate Arnie one-liners for the governator to use.

Perhaps Arnie’s worst one-liner, “Killian! Here is Sub-Zero. Now just

plain zero!”, might be a good starting point.

Other interesting tidbits about The Running Man:

• With Arnie now in office, this movie now features two future governors: Arnie and Jesse “The Body” Ventura, who would go on to become the governor of Minnesota.
• The movie was eerily prescient, predicting “extreme” game shows such as American Gladiators.
• In the movie, a good chunk of the government’s work involves

  keeping the population misinformed and entertained. I loved Dawson’s

  line as he gets on the phone: “Get me the Justice Department…

  Entertainment Division”.