nancynall.com » Take two.
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Take two.

I’ve had more con­fer­ence calls in the last week than in the pre­vi­ous (mum­ble) years of my life, which is to say: Two. And they weren’t even for busi­ness. After fail­ing to learn our les­son last year, our lit­tle troupe of Mickey-and-Judy ama­teurs is enter­ing another 48-hour film chal­lenge. This one. Pos­si­ble gen­res: Buddy Film, Com­edy, Detective/cop, Drama, Fan­tasy, Film de Femme, Hol­i­day Film, Hor­ror, Mock­u­men­tary, Musi­cal or West­ern, Romance, Sci Fi, Super­hero, Thriller/Suspense. Lord save us. If we don’t like any of these, we can reject them for one from the wild-card pool, which con­tains such agony as Mar­tial Arts/Stoner, Silent, Tragedy. And so on.

Well, it is a chal­lenge, after all.

For those who care, I’ll be tweet­ing the expe­ri­ence, with pic­tures when I can, which will update my Face­book sta­tus. It starts at 7 p.m. July 24 and ends 48 hours later.

Lately I’ve been think­ing about the Mock­u­men­tary idea, prob­a­bly because “Bruno” is all up in my grill wher­ever I look. The New York Times has a story this morn­ing about male shav­ing, and reports that Sacha Baron Cohen had to endure “repeated waxathons” to get hair­less enough to play his gay Aus­trian char­ac­ter. We know what his nat­ural state is, so I hope he had Jackson-strength drugs to help him get through.

The story ref­er­ences the Gillette videos we dis­cussed here a few days back; once again, NN.c com­menters surf the wave first. I didn’t watch the one on male armpits, and it’s a good thing, too, because I don’t care what funny rea­son they give (“an empty sta­ble smells bet­ter than a full one”), a man with shaved armpits is an abom­i­na­tion to women. Men should be men.

We don’t have a Sacha Baron Cohen for our movie. But we do have a female ven­tril­o­quist who can sing and has 22 dum­mies. I’m hop­ing we draw Hor­ror. Noth­ing like a singing ven­tril­o­quist dummy for max­i­mum creeps.

A lot of blog­gage today, so let’s hop to it:

Not long ago a jour­nal­ist of very close acquain­tance, ahem, had to par­tic­i­pate in the destruc­tion of many, many copies of one of the sec­tions he helps pro­duce, because some­how a photo slipped through, in which an extremely sharp-eyed reader might notice that one of the peo­ple in the photo was wear­ing a T-shirt that read “Go Straight Edge or go fuck your­self.” They don’t do that in Nashville, evi­dently.

I posted this on my Face­book yes­ter­day. It’s a story about the lat­est Lit­tle Pho­to­shop of Hor­rors, a pic­ture essay in the New York Times Mag­a­zine that turns out to have been sub­stan­tially tin­kered with. This has hap­pened before, and it will hap­pen again, and for the life of me I don’t under­stand why, but then, I never under­stood pho­tog­ra­phers.

Short ver­sion: Pho­tog­ra­pher Edgar Mar­tins has an assign­ment — to travel the coun­try and doc­u­ment the sub­prime melt­down. So he sets out, and finds some lovely pic­tures (which you can’t see, because the NYT yanked them all off the web­site), but he can­not resist tin­ker­ing with them. Now he and the paper stand embar­rassed if not dis­graced, hav­ing handed their ene­mies a big fat stick to beat them with. And for what? Some sym­me­try. Like I said, I never under­stood pho­tog­ra­phers.* *Although I do appre­ci­ate them.

Think of an Amer­i­can vis­it­ing France who believes that if he just speaks louder, he will be speak­ing French. — the sub­lime Dahlia Lith­wick on Sarah Palin.

Man on dog? A Fox News host tries to explain how Amer­i­cans “marry other species.” I see so many of these Fox & Friends clips on Gawker, I’m start­ing to think they’re angling for the pub­lic­ity. Funny.

Posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 10:01 am in Uncategorized. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


33 responses to
“Take two.”

  1. LAMary said on July 9th, 2009 at 11:01 am

    Between Sarah Palin and the idiot Fox guy, my head hurts and it’s only eight am.

  2. Sue said on July 9th, 2009 at 11:20 am

    1. Con­nie, if you haven’t left for ALA yet, can you tell us if you’re going to attend the panel dis­cus­sion on the West Bend Library con­tro­versy? Appar­ently the founder of West Bend Cit­i­zens for Safe Libraries is angry at not being allowed to par­tic­i­pate, say­ing that City employ­ees who are par­tic­i­pat­ing in the dis­cus­sion are being “paid to trash talk the City”.
    2. Are any of our con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­tors plan­ning on “Call­ing in Con­ser­v­a­tive” on July 30? What kind of impact do you expect? http://​www​.tea​party​na​tion​.com/

  3. Connie said on July 9th, 2009 at 11:23 am

    Sue, I have it on my sched­ule, which doesn’t always mean I will get there. The only one I never never miss is the panel of sci­ence fic­tion authors, com­plete with free books.

  4. crinoidgirl said on July 9th, 2009 at 11:29 am

    A quote from Sarah Palin’s inter­view in Runner’s World:

    “What has run­ning taught you about pol­i­tics?

    Same thing it’s taught me about life: You have to have deter­mi­na­tion and set goals, and you don’t com­plain when something’s hurt­ing because no one wants to hear it. You get bummed and burned out some­times in run­ning and in pol­i­tics, but if you’re in for the long haul and you’re in it because you know that it is a good thing, then you get out there and you do it any­way.”

    http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-243-410–13221-4-1X2X3X4-5,00.html

    So much for stick­ing with your prin­ci­ples.

  5. jeff borden said on July 9th, 2009 at 11:34 am

    It looks like the Sarah Palin Stupid-a-Thon will con­tinue ad nau­seum. I can’t even sign onto my Yahoo account with­out see­ing a head­line that a poll shows she remains a viable pres­i­den­tial con­tender and that the Iowa GOP wants her to come call­ing.

    Mother of God, how stu­pid are we as a nation when a large seg­ment of peo­ple believe this inar­tic­u­late diva in fish­ing bibs could be a world leader? I wouldn’t let her plan a two-car parade. I know Amer­i­cans hate “elit­ists” and “elit­ism,” except in our ath­letes, I guess, but does that mean so many of our fel­low cit­i­zens want to embrace some­one who is beyond mediocre? Palin needs a steplad­der just to reach “aver­age.”

    Steve Chap­man, a Tri­bune colum­nist with a lib­er­tar­ian bent, lays out his premise that it’s all about the sex appeal and noth­ing else. He dis­cusses a poll that shows Palin’s favor­a­bil­ity among men is seven points higher than among women and com­ments on her recent photo shoot for Runner’s World, where she is wear­ing short shorts and a big smile. There’s noth­ing new about this, of course, which is why funny-looking guys with great minds such as Paul Tsongas and Paul Simon never got any trac­tion while pretty boys of much less heft such as John Edwards did.

    I’ll repeat what I’ve said before. A pox on John McCain for the cyn­i­cism and self­ish­ness that led him to give this not-ready-for-prime-time player a national spot­light.

  6. Jean S said on July 9th, 2009 at 11:48 am

    On the NYT photos…huh, I thought some­thing was off. They were sus­pi­ciously beau­ti­ful, in a creepy sort of way.

  7. basset said on July 9th, 2009 at 12:22 pm

    I have never been able to get my head around the con­cept of recre­ational run­ning… it’s bor­ing, it hurts, I don’t want no part of it.

  8. MarkH said on July 9th, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    Jeff, I dis­agree with your take on McCain and the VP choice. He didn’t have the strength to be that cal­cu­lat­ing and push it home. Am I wrong, or isn’t it com­mon knowl­edge that he very much wanted Leiber­man for the ticket, and the hard con­ser­v­a­tive party base said, “no eff­ing way. You do that and we’ll aban­don you”? McCain knew he needed them (maybe), but didn’t fight very hard in the back room, gave up and left the VP nod to his han­dlers. They needed some excite­ment to counter the Obama steam­roller, enter Palin. Trou­ble is, as with GHWB and Dan Quayle, no one was inter­ested in the vet­ting process; she was a bright new pop­ulist star. And, as with GHWB, he ends up ask­ing “what have you peo­ple done to me?” McCain is just guilty of not car­ing enough to take con­trol and make a wise VP choice when he could eas­ily have done so. Just my $.02.

  9. 4dbirds said on July 9th, 2009 at 12:32 pm

    I’ll laugh if any of my co-workers call in con­ser­v­a­tive. Every sin­gle job at this com­pany exists because of gov­ern­ment dol­lars to con­duct research. Every.single.one

  10. jeff borden said on July 9th, 2009 at 1:01 pm

    MarkH,

    Duly noted. I under­stand the dif­fi­cul­ties McCain faced because so much of the GOP base did not trust him. And I know after eight years of Bush that he was fac­ing a bru­tal swim up a very swift stream. Still, if he is going to be man enough to be pres­i­dent, should he not have cho­sen some­one he believed in? It doesn’t speak well of his strength of char­ac­ter that he would allow pro­fes­sional pin­heads like Bill Kris­tol such a large say in his choice.

    Still, I under­stand the deci­sion strate­gi­cally. She def­i­nitely ener­gized the cam­paign and ral­lied the base. But I can­not under­stand how a man who has built his entire pub­lic career on hon­esty, integrity, and who chose the phrase “Coun­try First” as his cam­paign slo­gan, could foist so petty and unpre­pared a vice-presidential can­di­date upon us.

    Had he wanted to break the wall and have a woman on the ticket, why not Olympia Snowe or Kay Bai­ley Hutchin­son? They aren’t as pho­to­genic but they are accom­plished.

  11. MarkH said on July 9th, 2009 at 1:32 pm

    Agree com­pletely, Jeff. McCain showed no stones in the whole process, that’s my point. That’s what he should be chas­tised for. Who knows what would have hap­pened oth­er­wise, given your inter­est­ing alter­na­tives. But the Palin choice cer­tainly brought nail­guns to his cof­fin.

  12. deb said on July 9th, 2009 at 1:48 pm

    thanks for the dahlia lith­wick link, nance. that pretty much sums up my feel­ings on palin quite nicely.

    i often won­der, would she be any­where near as attrac­tive (no pun intended) to the right if looked like, say, bella abzug? i think not. looks can trump a lot of stuff you’d rather not think about. i don’t deride palin for being beau­ti­ful. i deride her because she’s an intel­lec­tual light­weight, and i hon­estly believe her beauty keeps some peo­ple from see­ing that.

  13. Jeff Borden said on July 9th, 2009 at 2:15 pm

    Deb,

    You make an excel­lent point. I teach pub­lic speak­ing and one of the more unfor­tu­nate things we learn is that looks mat­ter to a ridicu­lous extent in how we per­ceive oth­ers. A great-looking speaker mouthing plat­i­tudes will sway more peo­ple than a homely speaker speak­ing truth to power.

    If Sarah Palin had taken the time to immerse her­self in the minu­tiae and com­plex­ity of the many issues we con­front, domes­ti­cally and inter­na­tion­ally, she could use her sex appeal AND her intel­lect to become a potent polit­i­cal force. Appar­ently, she is sim­ply too lazy to under­take such a mis­sion.

    Worse, she’s just a big liar. Even the rea­sons given for her res­ig­na­tion are falling apart like tis­sues in the rain. The state spent $268,000, not the mil­lions she cited, to respond to the ethics com­plaints against her. And the Anchor­age Daily News is report­ing that the money was NOT com­ing from funds that might’ve been used for more cops, schools and roads. It’s money that already was bud­geted.

    And if I hear one more com­men­ta­tor talk about her lowly eco­nomic sta­tus, I’m going to hurl. The Palin house­hold makes more money than the vast major­ity of Amer­i­cans. Now that she can really cash in, she’s going to be mil­lion­aire many times over. Noth­ing wrong with that, but it’s a stretch to keep sug­gest­ing that she’s some kind of ordi­nary Amer­i­can.

  14. Dexter said on July 9th, 2009 at 2:29 pm

    OK…Connie’s off to Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion in Chicago…at first I thought she meant
    ALA Acad­emy of Lin­guis­tic Aware­ness (fic­tional)

  15. paddyo' said on July 9th, 2009 at 3:06 pm

    That’s IT, Deb — Sarah Palin’s next gig HAS to be as the lat­est Pan­tene sham­poo model.
    With apolo­gies to the brand’s ’80s spokes/hair model Kelly LeBrock:

    “Don’t hate me because I’m beau­ti­ful …”

  16. Sue said on July 9th, 2009 at 3:11 pm

    … not when there are so many other rea­sons…

  17. jeff borden said on July 9th, 2009 at 3:28 pm

    I thought it was Ruhla Lenska (sp??) the alleged inter­na­tional film star who said that!

  18. LAMary said on July 9th, 2009 at 3:52 pm

    It wasn’t Rula Lenska. She was the Alberto VO5 Hair­spray lady with the vague accent and the inter­na­tional film career no one had ever heard of.

  19. Scout said on July 9th, 2009 at 4:34 pm

    I don’t think McCain went with Palin for the win, but rather for a less humil­i­at­ing 2nd place fin­ish. He knew Obama was going to win and he sensed he was about to be extremely embar­rassed by how wide the mar­gin of defeat. So he was talked into allow­ing this flash in the pan on the ticket to at least secure the loony toons evan­gel­i­cal base and save some face. Iron­i­cally it back­fired even from that stand­point because while he didn’t get com­pletely swept by a land­slide, he ended up with her stuck like a booger to his legacy. He is prob­a­bly aware that the plan didn’t quite pan out.

    Lithwick’s piece is dead on. It is the com­plete inar­tic­u­la­tion of Palin that is so dif­fi­cult to artic­u­late, and Lith­wick nailed it.

  20. brian stouder said on July 9th, 2009 at 4:43 pm

    Fer­GIT “Rula” -

    Carfagna RULES!!

    http://​www​.tele​graph​.co​.uk/​n​e​w​s​/​w​o​r​l​d​n​e​w​s​/​e​u​r​o​p​e​/​i​t​a​l​y​/​5​7​6​0​1​2​0​/​S​i​l​v​i​o​-​B​e​r​l​u​s​c​o​n​i​-​p​i​c​k​s​-​f​o​r​m​e​r​-​t​o​p​l​e​s​s​-​m​o​d​e​l​-​M​a​r​a​-​C​a​r​f​a​g​n​a​-​a​s​-​G​8​-​e​s​c​o​r​t.html

    The Ital­ian prime min­is­ter has asked a for­mer top­less model turned gov­ern­ment min­is­ter to stand in for his estranged wife.

    The 72-year-old pre­mier has cho­sen Mara Carfagna – now Italy’s equal oppor­tu­ni­ties min­is­ter – to take care of the likes of Michelle Obama and Sarah Brown.

    Miss Carfagna, 33, is an ex-glamour girl whose sul­try looks and port­fo­lio of lin­gerie cal­en­dars earned her the title of the world’s sex­i­est gov­ern­ment min­is­ter from men’s mag­a­zine Maxim.

    I sec­ond the motion!

  21. Catherine said on July 9th, 2009 at 6:09 pm

    Dahlia Lithwick’s piece is very elo­quent about Sarah Palin, but my take-away image is Scout’s: “…stuck like a booger to [McCain's] legacy.”

  22. moe99 said on July 9th, 2009 at 6:43 pm

    I find the inten­sity level from all these adul­tery sto­ries to increas­ing as we’ve moved up to homicide/suicide and bribery and tax eva­sion. One won­ders how it could get much worse….

  23. ROgirl said on July 9th, 2009 at 7:46 pm

    What­ever justification/rationalization McCain made when he decided to ask Palin to be his VP, he has to real­ize now that she would have been a nuclear dis­as­ter if he had won. Her good looks give her a free pass on the first view peo­ple get, and extends some good will to her beyond the intro­duc­tory con­sid­er­a­tion she receives. But she doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and if McCain and his peo­ple knew that to be the case and thought that enough peo­ple wouldn’t or couldn’t see the truth, then they should be exco­ri­ated for mak­ing such a cyn­i­cal choice.

    He fired up the base and every­one else real­ized that the idea of Sarah Palin poten­tially becom­ing pres­i­dent scared them shit­less.

  24. basset said on July 9th, 2009 at 8:53 pm

    Mean­while… the Gan­nett paper in Nashville, same one that “don’t do that,” laid off 31 more today, includ­ing sev­eral who’d been there over thirty years:

    http://​www​.nashville​post​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​2​0​0​9​/​7​/​9​/​i​t​e​n​n​e​s​s​e​a​n​i​_​f​o​l​l​o​w​s​_​t​h​r​o​u​g​h​_​o​n​_​j​o​b_cuts

  25. Jolene said on July 9th, 2009 at 9:33 pm

    A lit­tle humor: The prez got caught lookin’.

  26. Dexter said on July 9th, 2009 at 9:40 pm

    Fuck­ing awe­some photo, Jolene! Look at that old houn’dog Sarkozy a-smirkin’!

    ~~~~~~~

    This new artist , Nicole Atkins, seems to really “have what it takes”….give her a lis­ten :

    http://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​m​u​b​z​H​d​U​R​y​O​8​&​a​m​p​;​f​e​a​t​u​r​e​=​c​hannel

  27. MarkH said on July 9th, 2009 at 9:43 pm

    And why the ster­ile photo cap­tion, espe­cially when Sarkozy is CLEARLY enjoy­ing te whole thing?

    EDIT: What, Dex­ter, like Nicholas is the ONLY “houn’dog” there?? BTW, you beat me by three min­utes.

  28. basset said on July 9th, 2009 at 9:54 pm

    Looks like a nor­mal level of lech­ery to me… but the Aus­tralians had the bet­ter cap­tion:

    http://​www​.news​.com​.au/​d​a​i​l​y​t​e​l​e​g​r​a​p​h​/​s​t​o​r​y​/​0​,​2​2​0​4​9​,​2​5​7​6​0​2​5​2​-​5​0​0​1​0​2​1​,​0​0.html

  29. Jolene said on July 9th, 2009 at 9:55 pm

    Well, this photo was on the Reuters site, Mark, but I sus­pect oth­ers will be less cir­cum­spect in what they say about it. TMZ has it up already, and it’s def­i­nitely Let­ter­man bait. I love the thought of Obama slap­ping his fore­head when this was shown to him, as I’m sure it was.

    Of course, we already knew that the prez appre­ci­ates what a woman can do w/ her hips.

  30. Jolene said on July 9th, 2009 at 9:58 pm

    bas­set, that cap­tion is hilar­i­ous. I sus­pect it’s the first of many to come.

  31. MarkH said on July 9th, 2009 at 10:33 pm

    You can quit laugh­ing, Dex­ter. After my post, on the way home, I got it. (sigh) :)

  32. Dexter said on July 10th, 2009 at 2:25 am

    I just caught Lance and Levi at break­fast via Twitter…blood dop­ing offi­cers checked them…Lance said “…good thing”…Levi Leipheimer wanted to know how the Ver­sus cov­er­age was and I told him about the “Heidi moment ” Wed. when , with 300 yards to go and Thomas Voeck­ler sprint­ing for a stage 5 win, Ver­sus went to a 3 minute com­mer­cial.
    Yes, I am a Tour de France NUT! I fuck­ing love tweet­ing these guys, too. No direct responses to me, but I betcha they read my tweets.
    Lance Armstrong’s tweet:
    “lancearm­stron­gAt break­fast. UCI anti­dop­ing inspec­tors just walked in. Blood con­trol for Levi, klodi, alberto, and myself. This is a good thing..”

  33. moe99 said on July 10th, 2009 at 10:36 am

    http://​crook​san​dliars​.com/​l​o​g​a​n​-​m​u​r​p​h​y​/​d​e​n​n​i​s​-​k​u​c​i​n​i​c​h​-​p​u​m​m​e​l​s​-​doctor

    That is some fine cross exam­i­na­tion there.

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