Issue 71

News: Election 08
As you may know, next year will be a presidential election. This will be the first presidential election in which neither an incumbent president nor vice president will be running since 1928, since Bush's two terms will have run out and Cheney has (thankfully) refused to run for presidential office. More importantly, it will be the first election in which I will vote (since I will turn 18 in a few months). As one can imagine, I will vote Democrat (unless the Republican and Democratic parties switch agendae and the Democrats become the more theocratic party). Currently, my family is supporting Barack Obama, for some obvious reasons, like he's a Democrat from Illinois, although some people in my class don't support him, saying that he's too young to have enough experience (my current teacher, who does not support Bush has been saying this) and some students have been disapproving of him because he smokes (which seems to be an extremely stupid reason to disapprove, since the fact that he smokes has nothing to do with whether he can do a better job of running the country than Bush has done, and I believe he can do better, even though I also believe a monkey can do a better job running the country than Bush has done.) Of Course, I do not have much else to say at this time since the election is currently 618 days away.

Band Name: Square Circles. A contradiction in terms.

Film Review: Die Mommie Die. Based on the off-Broadway play by Charles Busch, who also plays Angela Arden in the film, this confirms my suspicion that limited-release films are often better than wide-release films. Ex-singer Angela Arden poisons her husband and when her daughter finds out, she teams up with her brother, and her maid to find a way to help her confess to the crime.

How to Murder Your Wife. Jack Lemmon plays a Hugh Hefner-like playboy comic strip writer named Stanley Ford who lives in a New York Penthouse and learns that he married a woman who can't speak English. With this change, the focus in the strip changes from espionage to married life. Later, he decides to shift the comic strip back to espionage by killing off his main character's wife whilst killing off his own wife in the same ways as described in the strip. Ultimately, his attempts to kill her are unsuccessful, and thwarted when she leaves him. He is arrested for her murder and his comic strips are used as evidence against him. The film's novel twist comes as he decides to claim he actually did kill her and after an interview with his attourney, he gets off on justifiable homicide. Immediately afterwards, she comes back to him.

Quote: "You don't want Teenagers having sex and you don't want them playing Dungeons and Dragons, either? Isn't that like saying you don't want them to get sick but would hate for them to get vaccinations?"
_______Fred MacIntire, Something Positive: 10/08/06

Link: And now for Something Positive.

Issue 70

News: Medicinal Marijuana.
Fairly recently, I had dinner at Bennigan's with a married couple who are friends of my parents. The husband is an arch-conservative, so much so that, in 2000's election, he did not vote for Chimpy del Führerdente (read: pResident Bush, with sections of names recalling A chimp, Hitler, and Castro), but actually voted for Pat Buchanan (No, they are not from Florida if anyone asks, but from Chicago, like my parents and I are). He actually mentioned that he "read everything on [my] blog" and particularly mentioned my occasional references to Marijuana and my pro-legalisation stance. I did not ask him about his opinion on my frequent writings on religion on the blog. He said that Marijuana is dangerous stuff, especially when driving (with that said, while I do firmly believe Marijuana should be legalised, I don't think that legalisation should extend to being on pot while driving.) What he also said was that he believed that it is an uphill battle trying to keep America pot-free and that it might as well be legalised. After this, my mother mentioned that she mentioned that she was considered for becoming one of a few people in Illinois to get access to Medicinal Marijuana, if it were to be legalised here, which it wasn't, and she declined because she can't stand smoke, an intolerance which has continued to me. With this in mind, I decided to look up information on medicinal marijuana and I found that every time that marijuana's effects on various illnesses, it has been shown to be superior to most commercially available drugs in some illnesses, such as illness due to Chemotherapy, and glaucoma. Since the first post-criminalisation studies on medicinal marijuana came to light, it was legalised by several states, although the federal government has yet to legalise it, thinking it will pave the way to harder drugs being legalised, even if ending the War on Drugs which eventually came with criminalisation could benefit both major parties: Republicans could cut taxes and Democrats can put the money to better use.

Band Name of the Day: "Pretty Dumb, Asinine". More of an album title, but it came from the dumblaws site I will link to below.

Series Idea of the Day: A humanoid alien who has worked in the Earth studies department of an interstellar college goes to Earth as a college student. One defining feature is his "Addiction" to opium, which he only uses to lower his IQ (down to 155) and help him speak English.

Film review of the Day: Mighty Aphrodite. Woody Allen's film about a writer who adopts an intelligent child and becomes obsessed with his birth mother who turns out to be a porn star with very little intellect and a Mickey Mouse voice. Of all the films I have seen of Woody Allen, this displaces Manhattan by far as his best R-rated film.

Quote of the Day: "Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?"
_____Voltaire, Letter 160 to Frederick the Great (April 6, 1767).

Link of the Day: Some of the stupidest laws on the planet.

Issue 69

News/Film Review/Film Idea: Cyber-Seduction: The Musical.
Recently, I found out about a film called Cyber-Seduction: His Secret Life. It was a film made for Lifetime television in 2005, which actually manages to break the seemingly sancrosanct formula of "wife, after years of being beaten to a pulp by her husband, leaves him". After managing to obtain a copy, I viewed it and found it to be the relative Reefer Madness of our time, and thus, perfect musical satire material. What will follow may seem like a work of satire, but in fact, the creators are dead serious. In the movie, a 16-year old boy named Justin (played by Jeremy Sumpter) is a great student and his school's star swimmer. One day after making all-state, he goes onto a chat room and finds a link to a webcam run by a student named Monica which leads him on the down slope to pornography and with outsuits like "belly shirt" and "sweater" (FYI: The "porno" in the film consists of women in no scantier clothing than the underwear Susan Sarandon wore in the "Touch-a touch-a touch me" number from Rocky Horror, and doing behavior no more sexual than blowing a kiss.) At one point, his mother (played by Kelly Lynch) looks at her son looking at "porn" through an ajar section of the door (he could have just closed the door) and while doing nothing at first (on the father's advice), when she sees how it is ruining his life (a telltale sign being that he gets third in his next swim meet by half of a body length, and having a fantasty consisting of women in sarongs swimming around him) and seeing how his younger brother gets into it after watching him, she slowly cuts off the Internet supply for the entire house, afterwards he looks at Monica's webcam on the school computer, even when she's sitting two seats away from him. After watching it, I came up with the idea that the film would make a great musical satirizing the film, and the anti-pornography movement in general, especially noting several of the idiosynchracies of the film in the lyrics of the songs, including a song about Justin's addiction to Red Bull climaxing in him chugging an entire can of it and the mother singing a lament about her son only winning third place in the meet.

Band Name of the Day: She Likes Cloth. From a recent Homestarrunner.com cartoon.

Quote of the Day: "Men are equal; it is not birth
But virtue that makes the difference."
________Voltaire, Eriphile (2.1), Mahomet (1.4)

Link of the Day: A More thorough review of Cyber-Seduction.

Issue 68

News: Resolution: What ever happened to... some of the stories previously featured on my blog.
Sox WIn (Issue 19)- The Bears are going to the super bowl today.
Wot??!!&,:;%${} is finally finished (Issue 30)- It hasn't been performed yet.
South Dakota to Challenge Roe v. Wade? (Issue 31)- Defeated in November '
06, while a similar law in Mississippi at the same time was defeated earlier in the year.
Once again My ego gets in the way. (Issue 32) - I do not plan to do the same thing to the TAFFYs that I did last year.
US CONGRESS TO CHANGE THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE? (Issue 37)- As you could have guessed, that wasn't even real.
The Death Penalty (Issue 52)- Ex-Gov. Ryan is still free until he can get the outcome of his appeal.
Ted "The Elephant Pastor" Haggard in sex scandal. (Issue 57)- Ted Haggard still out of his church, and has just decided to leave Colorado Springs and get a psychology degree.
AFA up in arms about Ellison's oath (Issue 61)- Keith Ellison performed his oath on a Koran once owned by none other than Thomas Jefferson.

Band Name of the Day: HumbertThe Happy Housewife. In the 1997 film version of Lolita (which will be reviewed eventually), Humbert describes himself as both "The willing corrupter of an innocent and Humbert the Happy Housewife."

Film Reviews: The Handmaid's Tale- A woman from Canada is captured by the Christian fundamentalist Republic of Gilead (Read: The U.S. of A) and forced to become a handmaid (the State's breed Mare) for a commander named Fred, thus gaining the name "Offred". One particularly memorable scene is one wherein one handmaid in training confesses to having had an abortion because she was raped, with the rest of the handmaidens in training berating her and calling her a "Harlot" because she let somebody rape her. If we are not careful, as I have stated before, I feel that this may become a very accurate depiction of life in America in a few years.

Elmer Gantry - Back in the days of Prohibition, when Jack Chick wouldn't seem as much like an nutcase, there were hundreds of Evangelists spreading revival across the land. This is the story of an obnoxious college athelete who discovers the power that comes with becoming an Evangelist and thus becomes one, drinking and having sex on Saturday and speaking out against those very same things at his Sunday revivals. The film follows his rise and the rises and falls of those people around him who work with him.

Quote of the Day: "I was very anti-Burger King, until me had the flame-broiled Whopper, and it was amazing."
_________Ali G, Da Ali G show episode 12.

Link of the Day: Here's a blog about how a guy trades several things from a paperclip all the way up to a house in less than a year.