Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Happy Halloween!

Posted by jwb at 11:41 AM  · 3 Comments   

Monday, October 29, 2007

Free tacos!


Congrats to the Bosox for winning the World Series and to fellow uni-baller Mike Lowell for winning the MVP.

After the game, we could hear the crowd celebrating (others might call it rioting, but what's a few broken windows between friends?) in JP. They sounded quite happy. And don't forget: Thanks to Jacoby Ellsbury, Taco Bell is buying America a taco tomorrow.

Susan asked me this afternoon whether I really hate the Dutch. (The answer, of course, is no. We love the Dutch and their naughty, naughty ways.) This reminds me that I probably ought to do more footnoteing (Is that a word?) when using old movie quotes for titles, lest our readers get the wrong idea.

According to these guys, Daniel Craig has signed on for four more Bond films, after Bond 22. Good news, methinks. Other will differ, of course. I'm sure there are still some haters out there. (I'll just say that it wasn't his fault that the poker scenes in CR were interminable.)

More later, maybe.

Posted by jwb at 1:16 PM  · 2 Comments   

Friday, October 26, 2007


Yikes! I don't really like those kind of games. The tension gives me heart palpatations. More blowouts please. Jenn e-mailed the attached photo--good seats, crap camera--of Manny Ramirez's posterior.

Gawker has a rather stupid and uninformed item today about the Sage of Monkton, Robert Parker. A woman who used to work for Parker in Bordeaux has a book out in France accusing Parker of all sorts of dastardly things. While Parker is no angel--I'll admit that I rather like him and am a subscriber to The Wine Advocate--the central issue here involves the "used to" in the previous sentence. Ms. Agostini no longer works for Parker because she is a crook and he fired her when he found out what she was up to. This is all discussed in semi-recent biography of Parker, The Emperor of Wine. I'm not quite sure why I'm mentioning this other than it pissed me off. Damn bloggers!

That's all for now. We'll try to bait Marty into defending the honor of his homeland again next week.

Posted by jwb at 12:53 PM  · 2 Comments   

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Shut up or I'm going to punch you in the throat*


How about those Red Sox? Somewhere around the fifth inning, I started to feel sorry for the Rockies--they ran into a buzzsaw. I suppose we'll find out tonight if they'll be able to shake off those cobwebs or the Sox are going to keep beating them senseless. Jenn is going to tonight's game. Look for her on the teevee if you're watching from home--behind first base about 16 rows back. I will be home watching with Buzzy--where it's warm, the beer is plentiful, and there are no lines for the bathroom.

Marty was a little peeved (in comments) at what he took to be my suggestion that Canadians aren't funny--in the context of my opining that Seth Rogen wasn't funny on SNL (or, for that matter, in Knocked Up--made watchable for me only by the presence of the lovely Katherine Heigl and the actually funny Paul Rudd). I will note, in my defense, that I do think Canadians are funny--some of them anyway. The many Austin Powers quotes--written by Canadian Mike Myers--on this site ought to be testament to that.

Also, Myers new movie, The Love Guru, looks like it might be quite funny. On the plus side, it was written by and stars Myers himself. Its also features the awesome Romany Malco (who, despite the fact that he has a funny name, is not Canadian), Justin Timberlake (playing a villainous French hockey player named Jacques), and Mini Me. On the minus side, it's got Jessica Alba, who, while undeniably fetching, is, as we have mentioned before, a terrible actress. Overall, I think we've got the potential for some really high-quality Canadian comedy here.

While we're on the topic--of Canadians, not bad actresses--Marty also points out that the recently departed Lois Maxwell--known to immature boys and men everywhere as Ms. Moneypenny--was Canadian. He points us to this very nice piece by Canadian journalist Mark Steyn. The piece reminds me why I used to read and enjoy Steyn's stuff (mainly in The New Criterion)--before he became a rather shameless apologist for the most vicious and appalling stuff done in the name of the GWOT (TM).**

RIP Viva Laughlin. I watched about 12 seconds of it the first week and it was pretty bad. Still, more Madchen Amick please. (This may have to do for now.)

*Just found this site with memorable quotations from often brilliant "The Office"--from whence the title of today's post comes (in which Dwight is threatening the smartass pizza delivery kid).

**"Global War on Terror", for the uninitiated.

Posted by jwb at 3:16 PM  · 3 Comments   

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Happy Islamofascism Awareness Week

Celebrate appropriately. More anon.

Posted by jwb at 6:08 AM  · 3 Comments   

Friday, October 19, 2007

Hints from jwbblog

As an ocasional (though probably not-to-be-repeated) service, we offer the following bits of advice:

How to wash your hands. I'm a bit of a germophobe and wash my hands quite frequently. Though, it seems, I haven't been doing it properly.

How to unsubscribe from all those annoying catalogs clogging up your mailbox--and giving the mailman a hernia. You'd think one J Crew catalog would be plenty. For some reason, they think we need three. Problem solved.

How to get a look at your DHS travel dossier. Does Dick Cheney think you're an "Islamofascist"? I have no idea and Dick's obsessed with secrecy, so you're unlikely to ever find out. However, if you'd like to find out what the Department of Homeland Security--sounds much better in the original German--knows about your travels, you're in luck.

How to become editor of a famous conservative magazine. The short answer, you'll be shocked to learn, is to have a famous, well-connected father.

That is all.

Posted by jwb at 7:58 AM  · 5 Comments   

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.

Pontificating about things we have neither read nor seen is one of our favorite activities here. (The others are cursing and being ironic.) Just in time for Christmas--or my birthday, if you're keeping track of such things--is How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read. This guy is an absolute genius. It's officially at the top of my list of books I plan to not read.

Have you ever wondered why philosophers are so scruffy? Well, neither have I. But the answer is here, in case you are now curious.

As part of our bachelor weekend, Buzzy and I saw several excellent films. (Jenn was in Vegas celebrating the Krusser's impending nuptials.)

The first, on Friday night, was The Lives of Others, which won an Oscar last year for Best Film in some inscrutable language other than English. It is about a Stasi officer in mid-1980s East Berlin who is assigned to spy on a playwright and his actress girlfriend by a thuggish government official who wants to get some dirt on the playwright so he can lock him up and shag his girlfriend. Over time, Wiesler, the Stasi officer, develops some sympathy for the couple and take some steps to protect them, at considerable risk to his future employment prospects, if not his life. I won't ruin the story for you, but it's as deeply affecting and suspenseful a movie--sorry, film (it's got subtitles!)--as I've seen in a long time. It stars the ruggedly handsome Sebastian Koch as the playwright and the fetching Martina Gedeck as the actress. Sadly, Ulrich Muhe, who's close to brilliant as Wiesler, died from stomach cancer not long after the completion of the movie. Highly recommended, as they say.

Sunday night while waiting for Jenn to fly in from Sin City, we watched Paul Verhoeven's Black Book. I'll have to admit that, while I really wanted to see this movie, I didn't have especially high expectations. It was directed, after all, by the auteur who's responsible for such aesthetic atrocities as Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Starship Troopers. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Black Book is a really darned good movie. It stars Dutch hottie Carice van Houten as a young Jewish women on the run from the Nazis (and, later, because of a misunderstanding, the resistance), and involves several inspired plot twists. It also stars the aforementioned, ruggedly handsome Sebastian Koch as the (mostly) goodhearted Nazi she falls in love with and a whole bunch of Dutch actors I was heretofore unfamilar with but who are uniformly excellent. I gather from from reading about on the interwebs--It's a series of tubes!--that Sebastian Koch and Carice van Houten are an item off stage as well. Anyway, also highly recommended.

That is all.

Posted by jwb at 11:18 AM  · 4 Comments   

Friday, October 12, 2007

I'm here to educate you about the single biggest threat to our planet

Congratulations to Al Gore for winning the Nobel Prize for has brave battle against the Manbearpig. (Or is it Pigbearman.) (Don't click through unless you find "South Park" funny.)

On a serious note, should I feel any shame for knowing absolutely nothing about Doris Lessing? Raphy, help us out here. (Well, here's something: it seems that she's a Brit and she's kind of crabby.)

Apropos of yesterday's musings, it turns out that Stephen Fry (better know to watchers of public television as Jeeves to Greg House's Bertie Wooster) has his own blog, though he seems a little vague on the concept.

I was going to make some comments about a bunch of stuff from today's Times, but life's too short. I'll just say that I'm glad I didn't have a movie coming out this week. A.O. and company are really grumpy. (In sharp contrast, the ordinarily really grumpy Michiko is in a really good mood.)

Posted by jwb at 11:58 AM  · 3 Comments   

Thursday, October 11, 2007

If you ask me, Jeeves, art is responsible for most of the trouble in the world*


A thousand pardons for the lack of bloggering this week. Been really busy waxing maple leaves.

In our house, we really like "House"--the show in which Bertie Wooster plays a misanthropic American doctor. However, I worry that it has become a wee bit predictable. Tom Watson, from NewCritics (an excellent blog, btw), has crystalized my thinking in the following (with a few amendments by yours truly): "strange accident/incident/collapse…a tough diagnosis…the first treatment…cardiac arrest and bodies flopping around like beached fish in distress…much angst…strange procedure…crash number two….angry family/friend/lover showdown usually involving hospital administrator [in low-cut blouse]…cure or death…pensive House looking into middle distance [or playing guitar]." Also, the weird sexual tension between House and Cutty is growing tiresome.

If one is going to name a movie after a Metro stop--for the uninitiated, the "Metro" is the subway in DC, much as the "T" is the subway in Boston and, as I understand it, the "FU" is the subway in NYC--this is not one of the better options. But perhaps others will differ.

I've been fascinated on occasion by various forms of "goldenageism"--in which one is given the impressesion by someone who doesn't really know what they're talking about that the grass was always greener in the past than it is in the present. Anyway, from this guy, we have a new variant--the SNL Fallacy: "The SNL Fallacy is when people look back in time at something, just see the highlights (since the lowlights and filler inherently fade away and are forgotten), and see that time period as superior to the current one. People always claim that Saturday Night Live "used to be better." And they've been saying that ever since shortly after the show started. But that's because what sticks out in their head is Eddie Murphy doing "Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood" and not the rest of the filler sketches that were on that night." So true. Also, Seth Rogen--not very funny, but, then, he's Canadian.

More anon.

*Here's the full exchange:
Wooster: "If you ask me Jeeves, art is responsible for most of the trouble in the world."
Jeeves: "It's an interesting theory, Sir. Would you care to expatiate upon it?"
Wooster: "As a matter of fact, no Jeeves. No The thought just occures to me, you know, as thoughts do."

Posted by jwb at 6:09 AM  · 7 Comments   

Friday, October 05, 2007

Happy Birthday, Buzzy


Buzzy will be a year old tomorrow. (He wasn't real thrilled about the hat.)

Posted by jwb at 11:55 AM  · 2 Comments   

I am impervious to pain

Famous Canadian Conrad Black is an asshole, but apparently he has a sense of humour. Via Gawker, he instructs us on how to wax a maple leaf--which is not nearly as kinky as it sounds. Gawker says: "this kind of dry, self-deprecating humor will serve Black well in the slammer." Or maybe not.

Speaking of assholes, President Asshole is happy to spend a trillion dollars on endless war but has some sort of moral objection to spending $30 billion to provide health insurance for poor kids. The moral calculus in which that makes sense is completely obscure to me.

Can I say here that I have absolutely no interest--not even a little--in a Britney Spears sex tape? Just wanted to get that off my chest.

I'm starting to pity Steve Speilberg and company. The making of the new Indy movie is turning into a huge shitshow. Leaked plot points, stolen photos from the set, Shia LaBoeuf--this thing is starting to smell like a disaster. (I'm kidding about Shia LaBoeuf--he's actually a pretty good actor.) Discuss amongst yourselves.

Posted by jwb at 6:42 AM  · 3 Comments