You know what I hate about blogs?

Blog triumphalists. Talking Points Memo did a great job digging into US Attorney purges amid widespread media apathy, but generally blogs, even excellent ones, are little more than opinions on news of the day. News reported by reporters and disseminated by the major media outlets. Both sides love to knock the "MSM", but without the mainstream press -- and the resources it brings to bear --the blogosphere would be nothing more than a couple of tennis players playing without a ball.

How do we know if the surge is working or not working? Why did Bush cut a deal with North Korea? What's happening at Walter Reed Hospital? What's going on in Pakistan, China, France, Darfur, and Argentina? Not from some dude pounding away on his keyboard in a basement in Spokane.

Nuggets from the inbox

Another sign that the end is nigh? (Breast-men should avoid clicking on the link; others, please scroll down for the picture.)

Dept. of Really Bad Game

In another e-mail sent in January, Shipman wrote Oefelein at his NASA e-mail address: "I love you and I am head-over-heals IN love with you." Oefelein responded the next day from his office e-mail: "You must really have me around your finger that I can't even function without you here."

Jesus. Oefelein's chances to be the Maxim Man of the Year just went up in smoke.

Also:

Oefelein told investigators that when he broke off his romantic relationship with Nowak in January, she "seemed a little disappointed, but she seemed to be accepting of that."

Oefelein and Nowak still agreed to be gym partners and train for a bicycle race together, he said. Nowak still called Oefelein daily and left friendly messages, he said, but "I wasn't always receptive to the phone call."

Not a good idea to be workout partners with someone you just dumped, astronaut.

lagging commentary on Oscar telecast

You know that disorienting sense that the world's coming off its axis, that somehow you've been transplanted into a bizarre alternate universe where everything is just a little off? I get that once in awhile, maybe once a year. Usually it comes the day after the Oscars, when I become mystified by the bizarre assessments of the telecast from the nation's most renowned TV critics, wondering if we watched the same event. Take Tom Shales, the Washington Post's longtime TV critic. By virtue of his position and reputation, Shales is respected and influential, so I figure I should see what he has to say. Shales apparently watched a different show altogether:

"Ellen DeGeneres, doing a crisp and unpretentious job in her first gig as an Oscar host...

"Crisp"? I like Ellen, but she was flailing, telling jokes that wouldn't rouse the crowd at a Rotary Club luncheon.

"Time was wasted throughout the evening on a number of cutesy gimmicks that laid enormous eggs -- among them the avant-garde Pilobolus Dance Theatre, whose members posed behind a white screen and acted out the titles of film...

What? While I'm an avowed hater of interpretive dance numbers, this was easily the best "performance" innovation from the Academy in a long while. The Little Miss Sunshine and Snakes on a Plane bits were particularly good.

"As the third hour of the show approached, the stage was taken over by the cast of "Dreamgirls" for a medley of songs from the film. It was fine..."

You mean that little glass-shattering contest pitting Beyonce and Jennifer Hudson? This dreadful medley was "fine"?

"More time was wasted with a lame piece of "special material" -- a song about how comics don't win Oscars, performed by the usually hilarious Will Ferrell, the semi-talented John C. Reilly and hack Jack Black. The song wasn't funny and went on, yes, too long..."

John C. Reilly "semi-talented"? Sez who? And Jack Black, the unstoppable comic dynamo, is really...a "hack"? I'm beginning to have an idea of who the hack is, and it's not any of the three guys who staged this fairly hilarious number (by Oscar standards anyway).

Naturally, Shales didn't mention the real travesties: the needless montages (yet again), the exasperatingly pointless Chris Connelly backstage interludes (which added a good ten minutes to the show). To be fair, he at least took a shot at the night's nadir: Celine Dion, totally trashing Ennio Morricone's good name.

See, this wouldn't be a big deal if people like Tom Shales weren't actually influential. But last year, the bad reviews from idiots like Tom Shales doomed Jon Stewart's chances for another hosting gig, in spite that show being the funniest one in memory. To be fair, Shales probably isn't an idiot so much as he is a fuddy-duddy fiftysomething whose taste is seriously out of touch with younger viewers who live-blogged this thing. He's speaking to his crowd, Better Home & Gardens subscribers who guffaw at Don Rickles jokes in their La-Z chairs. Nothing wrong with being a mouthpiece for a niche group, but come on. The dude's opinion shouldn't carry *that* much weight. Well, one positive effect of the blogosphere: Tom Shales is now an endangered species, his influence diminishing every year.

As for the awards itself, hooray for Marty, boo on the Lubezski loss, and a tip of the hat for Leo, the king of the world, apparently. And goddammit, it really looked like both Peter O'Toole and Little Miss Sunshine were gonna take it home, which would've made me $400 dollars richer. Oh well. At least a really good movie nabbed the Best Picture this year.

More like this please

This is how it's done.

This is how not to do it. Stop whining and just plant a fist on this asswipe's kisser. Why is this so hard to understand?

Update: just saw Atrios' nearly exact same headline for the same story. No intent to rip him off, but this post was kind of an unconscious homage to Atrios anyway.

The wacky world of YouTube

While watching that interminable "movie" that comes on after you finish a stage of Medal of Honor or Final Fantasy IX on PS2, does your mind ever start to wander, perhaps arriving at the thought that maybe Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times would kick ass if it were remade as a CGI short? Me neither, but probably because I don't even own a video game console. Luckily for humankind, though, some anonymous genius thought of this great idea and came up with this masterpiece:



Coming soon: a tentacle-Hentai reimagining of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates.

Best movie scenes

For the fourteen loyal P&B readers who don't visit Mike D'Angelo's blog, please stop by, won't you? He just finished a countdown of the best movies of the year, at least according to a selected number of movie nerds. While those results may not be of much interest to non-nerds (though I will always maintain that the Skandies is the best and most interesting of all movie surveys/awards), Mike's posts include clips of the year's best scenes (as voted on by said movie nerds -- the idea is that these are the year's best scenes that can be seen completely divorced from context). So you'll get to see some awesome clips, everything from Children of Men's miraculous "automobile ambush" trick-shot (voted #1 scene of the year) to Borat wrestling in the nude to this hilarious bit from Talledega Nights, a scene I hadn't seen before. My favorite scene of the year is here as well. Good stuff.

Also, if you have a Tradesports/Intrade account, check out the low, low prices on Peter O'Toole. Definitely worth a flyer. You'll also find good prices for Little Miss Sunshine for picture and Scorsese (who's a lock but not priced like one) for director. Alan Arkin might be worth a gamble as well. Make sure you buy me a beer if you score big, but take these tips at your own risk.