I doubt many Academy Award nominees have written songs defending capitalism. That makes composer Danny Elfman the exception. His original score for Big Fish is up for an Oscar tonight. Prior to becoming one of Hollywood’s hottest soundtrack men – his credits include Batman, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Good Will Hunting, Spiderman, and Men in […]
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Hey, why don’t I get invited to the parties Randy gets invited to?
In case you check blogs before you check the new this morning:
Aristide resigned.
A nonapology apology by Rep. Corrine Brown:
Rep. Corrine Brown, who assailed United States policy toward Haiti as a “racist” policy concocted by a “bunch of white men” and later told a Mexican-American Assistant Secretary of State that “you all (non-black people) look alike to me”: “I sincerely did not mean to offend Secretary Noriega or anyone in the room. Rather, my […]
The Night Before:
So while in LA for the Southern California leg of my book tour, my wife and I attended the Second Annual “Night Before Party” at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was an amazing scene, and hard to believe that so many A-list celebrities ever attended the same event. The pool had been covered up, and […]
Geek heresy:
May I confess something slightly embarrassing? I’m not, deep in my heart, convinced that Return of the King and Peter Jackson deserve to win tonight. Oh, I want them to win, mind you. It would be a gross injustice and blot on the Oscars’ (anyways-spotty) record if the Lord of the Rings trilogy failed to […]
Saudi Embassy Denies “No Jews, Please” Policy: Saudi Arabia is encouraging visitors to tour the country in order to better understand the Kingdom’s society and culture. While everyone who enters the country must have a valid passport and appropriate visa, it is not the policy of the Kingdom to deny the issuance of visas on […]
Night of the Living Constitution:
Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber has the plot outline. Dawn of the Dead meets Griswold v. Connecticut.
Foolishness of the Israeli Left:
This piece in Ha’aretz by Yoel Marcus shows why the Israeli left has been discredited among the Jewish voting public in Israel. Two things stand out. First, Marcus’s callousness toward the victims of Palestinian terror, dressed up as paternalistic concern that their suffering is being “exploited” for political reasons. Second, the following nonsensical line: “There […]
Lawsuit over anti-Catholic sculpture:
In January, I blogged this: Washburn University, a public university in Kansas, is displaying an anti-Catholic sculpture. The sculpture apparently “depicts a Catholic bishop with a grotesque facial expression wearing a phallus on his head that is shaped like a bishop’s miter” (a photo is visible in this news story, and apparently it’s not clear […]
Law and neuroeconomics:
My colleagues Vernon Smith, Kevin McCabe, and Terence Chorvat have written a paper with the following abstract: “As legal scholarship has come to rely more on economic analysis, the foundational questions of economics have become important questions for legal analysis as well. One of the key foundational elements of modern economics is the assumption of […]
The only time you’re likely to see “Mel Gibson” and “JS Bach” used in the same sentence:
Edward Rothstein, in today’s New York Times, has what is for my money the most intelligent and well-reasoned discussion of the whole Passion brouhaha — a comparison between Gibson’s oddly medieval conception of the death of Christ and Bach’s setting of the same story in the St. Matthew and St. John Passions. Worth reading.
Obsession songs:
When the blogging world was discussing the theme of songs dealing with romantic obsession, I didn’t think to mention one of my favorite songs of all-time, “Everywhere That I’m Not” by Translator, an obscure new wave band circa 1980, perhaps the first “alternative” band I listened to. Sample lyric (from memory):I thought I saw you,Out […]
Software warfare:
The Washington Post reports: In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a new memoir by a Reagan White House […]
No Jewish People need apply:
Reader Allen Cogbill writes: A [WorldNetDaily article] today notes that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is now, for the first time, issuing tourist visas — but don’t apply if your Jewish, or even if you have a passport with an Israeli arrival/departure stamp (which could exclude lots of Christians who travel to the ‘Holy land’). […]