No Dress Rehearsal

Happy New Year to all of you in blogland. Here’s to hoping that your 2006 is better than your 2005. My 2005 certainly had its share of highs and lows, but today if no other is a day for optimism.

My wife and I saw Planes, Trains and Automobiles today. Instead of watching it edited and with commercials on TBS, we rented the DVD. To paraphrase the film — the fucking movie is not the fucking same without the fucking car rental scene.

Earlier in the day, we actually went to a theatre for another movie. It was one of my wife’s picks, definitely wouldn’t have been one of my own — Rumor Has It… starring Jennifer Aniston (who, sadly, is getting a bit long in the tooth) and the thespian for the ages, Mark Ruffalo. What a tour de force Ruffalo turned in. Wanker. Ruffalo aside, the movie was not as bad as I had expected, nor as bad as Carrie Rickey’s review in the Philadelphia Inquirer had portended. However, I do agree with Ms Rickey’s assessment with regard to to three of the supporting players: Shirley MacLaine, Kevin Costner and (the always terriffic) Kathy Bates. She writes: “In a film about as funny as ground chuck, these three are the Hamburger Helpers.” MacLaine and Costner, and to a small extent (due to her very small role) Bates, turned a one-star film into a two- or two-and-a-half star film. I must also say, I am not typically into blondes but there’s just something about Mena Suvari. Yum. It was probably her performance in American Beauty (an excellent film, and, as it turns out a variety of rose — took me 6 years to “get” that) that did it for me, not so much this film, to be honest.

Turning my gaze to politics, now. Is it any wonder that I have ADD? (Not to mention it took three hours to get these few paragraphs churned out). When I first saw this headline — Is Bush Worship A Cult? — on Pensito Review, I thought it was a joke. Apparently not, and the argument is rather convincing. I consider myself a pretty tolerant person of a wide variety of philosophies, but I wust say that a whole wide range of negative feelings come out when I hear a Bush or one of his sycophants is on the TV — hell, even the W’04 bumper sticker pisses me off. Those are some scary people. How, in light of everything that has come out about Mr Bush’s administration — from the illegitimate war in Iraq to the cronyism to the torture to the outing of a secret CIA operative — do people still support him? I saw another bumper sticker on the road the other day. It read: Support Our Troops And President Bush. Aren’t those two things mutually exclusive concepts? And check this out. To paraphrase George Carlin: You know what they ought to do with these churches? Tax them. If they’re so interested in politics, government and public policy let them pay the fucking admission price like everybody else. Oh, and while I’m railing against churches, check this and this church sign out. Is it any wonder that Christians are getting a bad rep? In fairness, though, not all of them are complete wackadoos. If you haven’t already, please check out ChurchSignGenerator.com, where all of the church sign links came from. It’s an excellent site and a good laugh.

Finally, in the world of sport, my Philadelphia Eagles mercifully ended their 2005 campaign today with a loss to the visiting Washington Redskins. To go from Super Bowl contenders one year to 6-10 the very next is disappointing at the very least. I am not your “typical” Philly fan in that I am not calling for the head of (coach) Andy Reid, or (quarterback) Donovan McNabb. Fans in other cities pale in comparison to Philly in terms of our ability to turn on our sports teams. We are also well known for booing Santa Claus, but I digress.

Well that’s it for now. Bed, and sleep, are calling.