The sum total of my thoughts on Mel Gibson’s new movie are this:

1) He has every right to make it, and by so doing, has to accept whatever consequences that, good and bad, go with it, and;

2) His father is a total freakin’ whack job.

In the bizarre interview, (Hutton) Gibson also said Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan should be lynched and called for the government to be overthrown. …He said the Germans did not have enough gas to cremate 6 million people and that the concentration camps were just “work camps.” “It’s all – maybe not all fiction – but most of it is,” he said.”

You could be forgiven for averting your eyes from any and all “Sex and the City” stories in these days leading up to the final episode, but I enjoyed this Salon take on its most overlooked character. You’ll have to sit through a GE ad, but I thought “Let us now praise Charlotte York Goldenblatt” was worth the time.

…I wrote a letter to Romenesko today, which references a couple of other things. Journalism, blogging, the usual. Go here if you’re interested.

What I Love About the Internet, part six jillion: Finding other people who share my belief that Peggy Noonan is a nutjob. From an online chat at the WashPost yesterday:

St. Louis, Mo.: Will enchanted dolphins arrive in time to save President Bush’s drowning Presidency like they saved Elian?

Peggy Noonan: Maybe. And maybe he won’t need saving. And maybe the Democrats will. And maybe by the election you’ll need saving, and perhaps some of Bush’s decisions made in connection to the war on terror will save you. It’s all the maybes that keep us getting up in the morning with a sense of excitement and anticipation, don’t you think?

TBogg has a bit more.

One thing about these screenwriting courses: It’s sure given me a new appreciation of movies. This hasn’t, as film/video teachers so often promise, ruined them for me. Alan studied music when he was young, and I just listened to it. Of course he hears music entirely differently than I do, and sees shapes and forms within it that I never will. Same with movies.

One thing that’s interesting about the class is the handouts — the teacher’s a working scriptwriter with access to early script drafts of familiar movies, and we study them every week. “The Truman Show,” for instance, started out with Truman a dull, overweight crybaby who lives in New York City. His obsession with the girl who gave him his first kiss leads him to hire prostitutes to wear her sweater while they have sex. If you remember the final product, in which Truman is of normal weight, smarter, not given to tears and living in the creepy Cleaveresque town of Seahaven, where there are no prostitutes, it’s possible to have hope for one’s own script. You see that as long as you’re willing to write the thing again, there’s always hope.

But lately we’re talking about pace. It’s amazing, when you break it down, to see how fast screen stories move, even if they don’t seem to, and how relentlessly a writer has to flog the story along from the very first page. Last night we watched the first act of “The Graduate” — that is: the party, the “Mrs. Robinson you’re trying to seduce me” stuff and the scuba-gear-in-the-pool scene — with our newer eyes, and boy, does it crackle. Not a wasted line. Hell, not a wasted word.

So then I came home, and guess what was starting on cable? “The Fugitive.” I’d seen it before, and thought it was a top-drawer action movie, but watching it again, it’s so much more. It’s a textbook case in how to craft that rarest of birds, the action movie with a brain. Every scene raises the stakes. Every location is significant. Every line is true to its speaker’s character. Every scene has a beginning, middle and end that flows logically into the next. And, of course, it has Tommy Lee Jones, with whom it’s hard to go very far wrong.

“The Fugitive,” in fact, is a great example of a movie greater than the sum of its parts — great direction of great actors speaking great lines from a great script, and presto: Greatness.

Just a quick entry before I trot off for a half day of training in Final Cut Pro video editing — yo, just another sausage for the mixed grill of my unimpressive resume — but I saw this and had to say one quick prayer of thanksgiving:

Thank God I don’t work in television.

I want it on the record: I defended “Cathy” longer than just about anybody. It was certainly easy to see why people hated the strip, though. Couldn’t Cathy, after 30 years or so, get anything right? Technology flummoxed her. Weight loss was ever-elusive. Her boyfriend problems suggested frontal-lobe damage, or an utter lack of memory. But hey — it’s a comic strip. How many times has Dagwood flattened the mailman? You know.

The strip’s popularity has been skidding for years. Younger women find her contemptible and older women — to whom the strip was originally pitched, back when they were single and out there — have moved on, for crying out loud. My husband the features editor watched it plummet in our readership surveys, and I think my own paper dropped it awhile ago. I defended “Cathy” because I thought her dealing-with-the-saleslady strips approached a certain Zen truth about clothing and shopping, but even those have faltered, and really? I don’t even read the strip anymore. The moral of the story is: We can’t all be Lynn Johnston.

So I, like millions of other former readers, could easily have missed a major turning point for the whole strip, which passed Saturday: Irving proposed marriage, and Cathy accepted.

Eric Zorn has the whole scoop.

Sorry for the lack of activity around here the last few days. “Would you please stop telling the whole internet when you’re going to be out of town? It’s foolish,” my friends tell me, and they’re probably right. But now I’m back, and the truth can be told: We were in Toronto, the last KWF trip of the year. We were there for fact-finding, eye-opening and, as always when KWF travels, many toasts to international friendship.

Yes, even with Canada. Because it turns out — it really is a different country! Not America Junior, as Homer Simpson calls it. (For that it would have to have many more handguns.) If liberals could have their dream country, could pick it out of a catalog or custom-build it on the internet, it would be a lot like Canada (minus the hockey). Universal health care, much back-patting on its proud multicultural heritage, respect for authority and the sort of primness that made a few anti-Quebec japes by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog front-page news across the country. (More on that in a minute.) Bathroom posters give five good reasons to wash your mitts after a pee. Every trash container has three mouths, so you can do your part for recycling. “If a politician discussed his relationship with Jesus, people would be baffled,” the locals tell you. For the first 24 hours, you can’t believe your eyes: I love this place! Everything I’ve been saying is true! It really works when you do it this way! Then it starts to drive you crazy. Me, anyway.

Oh, but I’m oversimplifying to a preposterous degree, but when you try to cram an entire country into a blog entry, well, that happens.

It is a beautiful place, Toronto. “New York as run by the Swiss,” one writer famously said, and that’s about right. You’ve got your culture, your architecture, your funky shopping, your expensive coffee, a whole city’s worth of walkways underground, so you can walk around downtown when it’s -11 (Celsius) and not freeze your ass off. There’s a Chinatown, great restaurants, sports, an excellent, intelligent newspaper. Am I leaving anything out? An international film festival. Taxi drivers who don’t try to kill you. Drivers who, generally, respect traffic lights. This I liked.

What I didn’t: The Canadosity. This really is a country that couldn’t get behind the American Revolution. Its constitution promises not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but “peace, order and good government.” It seemed to be best summed up by the Conan O’Brien business. The American TV star was in Quebec and Toronto for a week’s worth of shows, to try to drum up a little tourism in the wake of last spring’s SARS scare. He sent the guy with the rubber dog on his hand around some winter carnival in Quebec, where he yelled at passersby: “You’re in North America! Learn the language!” He stopped a couple and asked if they were separatists; when they said they were, he said, “Hear that? That’s the sound of no one giving a shit!” And so on.

Well.

You’d have thought Osama bin Laden had come to Washington, burst into the State of the Union speech and set fire to the American flag, before extinguishing the flames by peeing on it. At least, the media treated it that way. “Hateful and yes, racist,” huffed the Toronto Star, before indicating there may be a glimmer of hope: What is truly appalling, however, was the reaction of the audience at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre. Most members laughed wildly at the crude anti-French jokes.

I don’t mind a big, safe, non-war-mongering country full of beautiful cities, single-payer health care and even the accompanying high taxes. What got on my nerves was the smugness. I said before that if liberals could have the country of their dreams, it would be Canada. If conservatives could have theirs, it would be Iran by way of Texas. Because we smash these two groups together like pieces of flint, and don’t so much seek consensus between them as we do the appearance of consensus (while we shiv the other guy between the ribs), we strike the flames under the the messy, imperfect, rancid stew of a melting pot full of mixed metaphors we call these United States. The subways smell much worse, but it is mine.

Besides, they say all the same things about us, and they’re right, too.

But we had a great time. If I had a son who didn’t want to fight the next pointless war we get into, I’d be happy to visit him in Toronto. I’m just not sure I’d like to live there.

The U of M played a big part in the student movements of the 1960s, and every so often, when I see a reference to the Port Huron Statement or some other landmark of that crazy time, I look around to see what remains in the same place, 40 years later.

The answer: Hard to say. Of course, I don’t always know what to look for.

But things pop up now and again. Like this week: SDS founder hopes for new revival on campus, quoth the Daily, over a story about a meeting to reorganize the venerable Students for a Democratic Society. In the marvelously clueless deadpan of college journalism, we learn: Despite scant attendence, participants discussed ways to solve problems ranging from fascism to the economy to business conglomerates.

Yeah, well, good luck.

And while I find it interesting that the founder still lives in Ann Arbor, if you were trying to form an “association of comradeship” for 20-year-olds, wouldn’t you try to find a better spokesperson for the power to effect change than this?

I haven’t been watching much TV news in the last few years, but I couldn’t help but see the video of that poor little girl in Florida being led away by Mr. Creepy. I wondered why she went so willingly, then reminded myself this is no mystery. We raise children, and especially girls, to be obedient to adults. Ninety-nine percent of the time, this is good. Sometimes, it isn’t.

Today, riding home on the bus, a staggering drunk boarded at a park-and-ride lot. Everyone else got off, making us the only two riders. He weaved back to his seat, sat and said “Shit! I need a transfer.” He got back up and weaved back to the driver, shoving a palm in her face. I noticed his coat was split all the way up the back seam, exposing the lining. Also, he was so redolent of his intoxicant of choice I felt it at the back of my throat. He weaved back, only this time he plopped down next to me. “Lady,” he started to say, warming up for a panhandle.

“NO!” I barked, with about 2,000 percent more vehemence than I felt. “You are NOT sitting here.” The driver actually took her foot off the accelerator; was she going to have a Situation? I waved her an all-clear in the mirror and she drove on. The drunk, looking stunned, went back to his original seat and put his head in his hands.

This is the second time this has happened to me in recent years. The last time, a drunk on a bicycle acted squirrelly on a bike path, then raced ahead about 100 yards and stopped, seemingly to wait for me. As we came abreast, I pointed a finger at him and snarled, “If you TOUCH me, I will HURT you.” He, too, looked as if I’d lashed him with a whip. When we passed again, he actually left the path and rode his bike up against a line of trees, averting his eyes as though I was the alpha bitch and he, just a cowering cur.

Where did this Inner Xena come from? When I was 23, a man sat down next to me on a bus and practically jerked himself off, and I sat there like a lox. When I was a teen-ager, creepy guys shouted things from cars all the time, and I put my head down and walked on by.

A lot is different now. The bloom is long-gone from my rose; this just doesn’t happen very often. And I know that while assertiveness is the recommended response to unwelcome attention, I don’t know that finger-waving, driver-startling assertiveness is the right idea — I worry that someday this anger is going to be met by more of it. Either that, or I’ll start resembling the crazy old ladies with the bulging tote bags whose eye everyone else avoids on these very same buses.

But mostly I wonder: How can I teach Kate to take care of herself like this? How can I teach her to recognize dangerous aggression, separate it from garden-variety assertiveness and react instinctively to it, without turning her into a fear-ridden little mouse who walks everywhere with her keys sticking out from her clenched fist? I want to let her walk home alone from a friend’s house at 11 without fearing she can be abducted by a stranger who simply takes her by the arm and walks off with her.

Gavin de Becker wrote an excellent book on this very subject, which I read back when Kate was a wriggling infant. Now that she’s out in the world, I think I need to read it again.