Busy Week At the Salt Mines

Got no time for living, yeah, I'm working all the time. -- Rush

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Monty Python Accused of Parroting Earlier Work

Much earlier. But the 1600-year-old Philogelos: The Laugh Addict contains just the one-liner,

A man complains that a slave he was sold had died.
"When he was with me, he never did any such thing!"

not a fully developed sketch.

Other timeless gags from Philogelos, which surely ought to be online somewhere, but doesn't seem to be:

• Talkative barber to customer: “How shall I cut your hair?”
  Customer: “In silence.”
  
  
• An academic was on a sea voyage when a big storm blew up, causing his slaves to weep in terror. "Don’t cry," he consoled them, "I have freed you all in my will."


• Someone needled a well-known wit: "I had your wife, without paying a penny".
  He replied: "It's my duty as a husband to couple with such a monstrosity. What made you do it?"
  
  
• An Abderite sees a eunuch talking with a woman and asks him if she's his wife. The guy responds that a eunuch is unable to have a wife.
  "Ah, so she's your daughter? "
  
  
• A misogynist is attending to the burial of his wife, who has just died, when someone asks: "Who is it who rests in peace here?".
  He answers: "Me, now that I'm rid of her!"
  
  
• A young man says to his randy partner, 'Wife, what shall we do, eat or make love?'
  'Whichever you like,' she replies.
  'There's no bread.'

w/t: Slashdot

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Lest we forget what else the LA Times brought us ...

Barack, the Magic Negro.

I'd never read that March, 2008 article by David Ehrenstein before. I had assumed it was a mere puff piece on Obama. Instead, it was a patently offensive smear on all white people as closet racists. Speaking of the Magical Negro type in the movies and American culture:

He's there to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.

Listing inoffensive black actors such as Sidney Poitier and Morgan Freeman, Ehrenstein concludes that this pattern and the popularity of the type must mean that whites hunger for such a type to ease their guilt.

But the logic isn't there. Just because a series of similar characters appears in popular films doesn't mean there is a hunger for its type. As a counterpoint, consider the decision faced by the screenwriter, director, and others involved in the film. Should the character be black or white? Should they tailor the script to the actor, or pick the actor based on the script? In designing the film, should they have the character be aggressively sexual, and if so, how does that affect the plot?

It's a lot more complicated than some imaginary racialist conspiracy.

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Gateway Pundit: Obama Kooks Paint "Field of Hope" in Pennsylvania

I guess I'm stalking Gateway Pundit lately: Obama Kooks Paint "Field of Hope" in Pennsylvania

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The American Dream

Since well before the credit market crisis first hit, we've heard a lot about the American Dream. In the context of illegal immigration, the American Dream was expressed as coming to America to build a life for a family. Much of the discussion now focuses around home ownership, as if owing a mortgage is the pot of gold at our rainbow's other end.

But that isn't it at all, and the misguided effort to prematurely supply people with homes and mortgages outside their means I think is a direct result of misinterpreting the Dream.

Now Joe the Plumber has been supposedly pursuing the American Dream by wanting to own his own small business, making money rather than earning it.

All of these things -- supporting a family, owning a home, building a business -- are just stops along the way, and are neither necessary nor sufficient components of the satisfied Dream.

The American Dream is that anyone can start with little or nothing and become as wealthy, powerful, or successful in whatever endeavor desired, limited only by ability and willingness to work.

An essential part of the Dream is that there are no limits on it. Even more, the Dream seems hard to define precisely because no one gets to say what it is that we strive to achieve; that's our call.

It's different here because we don't rely on the government, charities, the god of luck, or anything else outside ourselves to fulfill the Dream.

American Idol captures the Dream and encases it in shiny clamshell plastic packaging, almost impenetrable but apparently worth the effort for those for whom fame beckons so strongly.

Barack Obama appeals to the American Dream, and in so doing reveals Martin L. King's other Dream to be one and the same with the American Dream: Dr. King dreamed that the American Dream would apply equally to all, regardless of skin color; Obama shows that it does.

Sarah Palin does, too, and her story resonates almost as strongly with her supporters as Obama's does with his.

The fundamental American myth, and one in which I believe, is upward mobility. We're limited only by innate sloth, folly, and poor discipline.

We've always idolized those who achieve on their own merits success in life, especially from humble beginnings: Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, and many others all started with the odds against them and are remembered for their journey as well as for their destination.

Now the barons of Wall Street and those of Silicon Valley are alternately idolized and demonized, in a budding national schizophrenia. Do we still believe the Dream, or does it somehow stop at $250,000?

And will the politicians stop pretending that they have anything at all to do with helping us to achieve it?

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Groups for Obama to Join ... or Not.

Barack Obama resigned his membership in Trinity United Church of Christ. Frank J wonders what groups he will leave next. Clearly some of his associations in the past have served him well at the time, but now are perhaps not generating the kind of support he'll need if he's going to defeat the Bob Barr in November. So I wonder what other groups he will now join?

• Not MENSA (too populist)
• Not Mothers Against Drunk Driving (too divisive)
• He will not join Code Pink (too hawkish)
• Will now boycott Pizza Hut (for not enough grease on their pizza)
• Will join La Raza, because he likes the sound of reuniting
  
• Will resign from the Senate for limiting their membership to 50
  
• Will join U.S. Government because even though they're not spending enough, he can Change that
  
• Will denounce the Red Cross for being too political
  
• Will join the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), because they're just nice people

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Bumper Sticker

I saw this today:

Welfare should be as hard to get as a builiding permit.

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In Theaters This Fall

Here is a movie trailer, like many others you'll see. Yet another Harrison Ford movie about the White House.

The problem with movie trailers is that like this one, they seem all nice and uncontroversial. All light and airy, somewhere between a romantic comedy and a Disney "Wacky Kid Detective" flick. Then you watch it, and they hit you over the head with their political message.

Do you think this one would be political? Because I hate that, and you can never tell from the trailer.

w/t Simon at Classical Values

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I Wanna Be a 'Raqstar.

Mike the Marine hits the target, capturing both the war-weary homesick irony and determined ass-kicking awesomeness that is the American fighting man. Click the title.
w/t Harvey.

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Iron Man

I was a comics nerd as a kid, before it was anything like cool. It was so uncool, in fact, that my nerdy next door neighbor friend and I were the only comics nerds in our school, along with 1598 kids who didn't know Iron Man from iron pyrite (whatever that is). As far as I know, anyway, because comics were too uncool to talk about.

Before going to see it this weekend, I pulled out my copy of Marvel's Son of Origins of Marvel Superheroes and flipped through it before giving it to my son to read before the show. I'd forgotten how campy the story was.

So Iron Man the movie gave me deja vu. The cave, Stark's hit-and-run sex life, Pepper's "Sometimes I even take out the trash" line -- almost every scene was like instant replay from somewhere.

But it was better than the comic book. Using terrorists instead of some Viet Nam leftover, or setting it as a period piece, allows much more modern relevance. Not only that, but it fits with the Bin Laden style of leveraging Western technology against its creators; in that, Marvel was prescient.

The best part of the movie was that Tony Stark didn't become a full-on liberal crusader for ending capitalism and saving the spotted owl. He just realizes his errors, and wants to correct them. Given Hollywood's typical stupidity, I was expecting a moonbat lecture on global warming; what I got was a good movie.

I didn't expect all the Audis, either.

I can't wait for the Avengers. If they play Captain America straight, and don't moonbat him up, people will line up around the block.

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