Sentential Links #54

At last, it's that time again for a short hop around Blogistan, or at least my little sector of it.

:: The more naive members of the environmental sector have been suckered into this line of thinking, too -- especially the college kids, who imagine we can just divert x-amount of acreage from Cheez Doodle production and re-direct it to crops devoted to making liquid fuels for Honda Elements. They need to get some alt.brains.

:: The media is guilty of publishing stories which might harm the political interests of the President, not which could harm the national security of the United States. But Bush supporters recognize no such distinction. Harming the "Commander-in-Chief in a time of war" is, to them, synonymous with treason. Hence, we have calls for the imprisonment of our national media for reporting stories which tell terrorists nothing of significance which they did not already know, but which instead, merely provoke long-overdue democratic debates about whether we want to be a country in which we place blind trust in the administration to act in total secrecy.

:: No one has challenged these stories or other similar ones on any major point of fact; to the contrary, the reporting is widely viewed as being entirely correct on the main issues, and further revelations have confirmed their accuracy. So the crime -- and remember that Barone and others are speaking of crimes here -- is that the press is reporting stories contrary to the administration's wishes.

:: This ought to finally convince the liberals and the MSM of the dire threat that Saddam presented in the fall of 2002. (I'm convinced!)

:: Let’s clear this up once and for all: cowboys are gay. Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay. Hobbits, on the other hand, just like going on extended backpacking holidays with their live-in male gardeners, during which they exchange soulful and significant glances and cry and hug and say “oh, Sam!” in a way which, if they were cowboys, would be totally gay, but, seeing as they are hobbits, just totally isn’t. Then the gardener marries the girl from scene 2 who didn’t get any lines, and then Frodo, the confirmed bachelor, goes on a permanent boating holiday with a bunch of “elves”. Dead butch behavior if you ask me.

:: Talking on a cell phone while driving is like mixing Valium and Jack Daniels – not a good idea. (I don't even own a cell phone, and I've already decided that text messaging was invented by the f***ing Devil. Seriously, folks -- nothing is so important that you have to sit there typing on this tiny-assed keyboard to someone else to say it, and it's certainly not important enough to do while walking in public.)

:: On reading the WEST WING Scriptbooks, you come to realise that the legends about Aaron Sorkin are true. Specifically, the one about directors having to lean on the actors to speak faster. (I was crushed the other day to discover that for some reason, the interactive tour of the West Wing White House set on the Season Two DVD doesn't work on my player. Dammit!)

:: What is with JKR? Does she get so lonely writing away in her study that she feels the need to pop out on occasion wailing "Death, Death!" (Well, it's kind of like what the big comic book companies used to do -- whenever there'd be a Big Massive Storyline in the offing, they'd preface it by assuring us of the forthcoming tale's gravitas by promising that characters would die. It got to the point where the most effective deaths in comics weren't presaged at all, like when Detective Jean DeWolff was bumped off in Spiderman.)

:: Every day is like a kid’s drawing, offered to you with a strange mixture of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of them are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others barely more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some of them you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so often seem hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.

All for this week.