In the wake of Mel Gibson's recent legal troubles, I think it may be time to take a fresh look at his prior achievements.

I'm talking, of course, about the torture montage from "Passion of the Christ," which has been recently recast to the dulcet strains of "Sometimes When We Touch," by Dan Hill.

You can't just watch this video - YouTube requires you ( Read more... )

There hasn't been a lot of it lately. Intensifying war in southern Lebanon. Three soldiers in Iraq threatening to murder a fourth if he told anyone that they had already murdered three Iraqis.

But I feel a little bit cheered by the news coming from Kansas, of all places. From today's New York Times:

"Kansas voters on Tuesday handed power back to ( Read more... )

It took a while, but I have finally found this summer's musical obsession: Peaches.

Peaches was perhaps best described by the Village Voice, which called her an "electroslut." Okay, to be fair, they called her a "no-talent electroslut." But would Iggy Pop fight zombies with a no-talent? On second thought, don't answer that question.

Now, I freely ( Read more... )

I went to vote in the Democratic primary yesterday - though I briefly contemplated voting in the Republican primary, just to do my part to keep Ralph Reed out of the race in November. Luckily, my vote wasn't needed on that score.

It's been a strange campaign season here, between the near-weekly court reversals on Georgia's bullshit voter ID law and ( Read more... )

I've read the reports saying that the Iraq War has actually increased the likelihood of future terrorist attacks. But now, there's a new twist on that story, one that scares the hell out of me personally: the Southern Poverty Law Center has just released a report detailing the influx of white supremacists into the U.S. military.

The government ( Read more... )

I bought a new hat on my vacation earlier this spring. It's a sky-blue porkpie hat with a thin ribbon band; in other words, it's the kind of hat more usually seen on the wispy bald head of an elderly man ( Read more... )

I did my very first all-day meditation on Saturday, and it was interesting in a boring kind of way. Basically, we started at about 8:30 a.m. and ended at about 5 p.m.; we took regular breaks (including an hour for lunch) so I was actually meditating for about six-and-a-half hours of that ( Read more... )

Many thanks to Dick Umbrage, who recommended Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang to me. It's a great read, tracing the development of hip-hop from its beginnings as a teenage fad confined to a seven-square-mile area of the Bronx to its present status as an international cultural - and marketing - phenomenon.

( Read more... )

So, Karl Zinsmeister - Bush's new domestic policy advisor - is a rabid conservative. No surprise there. But apparently he's also a complete fucking freak.

Here's a little quote from our boy Zin (from a PBS interview). The topic, so beloved to conservatives, is sex:

"It's something -- it's intense; it's fire. It drives people to insanity. . . . People ( Read more... )

So I've never seen an on-line graphic novel before, but a really good one just got started: Shooting War, by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman. It's the story of a videoblogger sent to cover the Iraq war in 2011 (when President McCain's numbers are at an all-time low).

It reminds me a little of a more focused Transmetropolitan, actually, only without  ( Read more... )