Kitsap

Being smart doesn’t make you good.

I just met a remarkable woman on Bus #34 from Bangor Washington to the Kitsap Mall.  She’s the driver and she gave me, in addition to timely and accurate directions to the Seattle ferry, a brilliant insight into the religious mind.

The Social Network

So a few of the big November Oscar-bait releases are starting to trickle into Japan.  It'll be nice to see movies on time again when I move back to the States; on the other hand, I have not once in three and a half years heard a sound out of any audience member in a Japanese movie theater.  If someone was stabbed I think they'd rather bleed out than disturb the other audience members.  I love this country.

My New Band

Paris, Je T'aime

Ah, Paris, J'tamie: a love letter to Paris.  Only people in long-distance relationships write love letters.  The movie is a collection of 18 short films: all are set in Paris, virtually all are by non-French directors.

Between American or British tourists (Steve Buscemi), backpackers (Elijah Wood), ex-pats (Nick Nolte), movie stars (Maggie Gyllenhaal), actors (Bob Hoskins) honeymooners (Emily Mortimer) apprentice artists (some Gus Van Sant-directed moppet) and the ghost of Oscar Wilde (Oscar Wilde!) the actual French people in this Paris are a distinct minority, and most of the non-tourist characters are immigrant Arabs, Africans and Asians.

Nichi Vendola

"The worst of Italy is inside that building," Vendola said outside the prime minister's palace. "And the best of Italy is outside."

From a New York Times profile of the Italian opposition leader which poses the eternal conundrum of politics: if it's a business for crooks and liars, why do you want in?

My New Band

Admirals

Check out this at one of my favorite naval blogs.  It's a typical daily schedule for your typical admiral on staff duty in the U.S. Navy.  Do you know how many flag officers it takes to run the U.S. Navy?  You can go to the Naval Register to find out: a search just for active duty two-star admirals returns 73 names.  The total number of admirals exceeds the number of warships in the fleet.

Secretary Gates wants to cut "more than a hundred general-officer and flag-officer positions out of the roughly 900 currently on the books."  Meanwhile, the US Naval Institute blog is filled with multiple entries on leadership at the highest levels of the Navy and the lack thereof.

The thing about leadership is that it's one of those less-is-more kind of things.

50 People in Karbala

That's the number of people who were killed by twin suicide bombs in Karbala, where pilgrims had gathered to commemorate the death of Imam Hussein, the Prophet's nephew and son-in-law, and also neither the first nor the last person to be killed in a massacre of a religious sect in the Holy Land, which has quite a few more holes since the invention of high explosives.  The Christian Science Monitor's Dan Murphy wrote an article comparing the recent surge in attacks to the one four years ago in 2006:

My New Band

Tim Pawlenty

I remember hearing an offhand comment from either Ken Rudin or Ron Elving on their podcast about Tuscon and Sarah Palin: "No one was asking Tim Pawlenty what he thought.  It was just her."  Well, that's a damned shame, because Tim Pawlenty is pretty awesome.  Jon Stewart interviewed him last week:

My New Band

And They Called Him 'Zbig'

I want every one of my favorite naval bloggers to watch this interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski.  I know, I know, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that Peanut Farmer's lefty National Security Advisor?  Am I aware that the naval bloggers I read range from conservative to more conservative?

Sure, but check out the three minute excerpt below where Brzezinski shares his worries about the People's Liberation Army interfering in Chinese politics.

The Evacuation from Dunkirk to Dover

I just finished the section of Songs of the Damned where Hunter Thompson is writing about his time in Saigon right before the American evacuation.  He interviewed Loren Jenkins, the Newsweek bureau chief in Saigon in '75, who'd just been to a the nuts-and-bolts planning session for getting people out of the city that really highlights how difficult it is to get people out of a war zone:

Pete Postlethwaite

Yesterday I had bits of my skull pulled out by a military dentist wielding pliers and realized that the Bright Eyes song ‘Light Pollution’ isn’t an ode to socialism, like I thought, but rather an allegory for the failure of radical politics in America.

Oh, and Pete Postlethwaite died.

The Mostly Unwatchable Movie About Ethan Green

So I just forced myself to sit through a 2005 movie called "The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green." I hate to say anything bad about a movie that features Richard Diehle sneaking into the Republican National Committee in drag queen-meets-construction worker pastiche in order to sabotage George W. Bush's reelection, but...