Pops' Bucket, Now With 50% Less Hurricane!
Sorry, no Movies I Have No Intention of Seeing review today. There are two reasons:

1) The only movie out worth commenting on is The Constant Gardner with Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. I'm about 99% sure I would have nothing to say about this movie other than to go on and on about how hot Rachel Weisz is. And she is. Hot, I mean. H-O-T. When she was in The Shape of Things: hot. About a Boy, Enemy at the Gates? Hot and hot again. I've never even seen either of The Mummy movies, but I'm going to go way out on a limb and guess: hot. Stupid, but hot. Lots of running and sweating in light, clingy clothes... mmmm...

Something like this:



See? I could go on like that for ages. Nobody wants that.

OK, I'll admit it, I'd even take a run at Ralph Fiennes too. Or at least I would if he would stop insisting that we all mispronounce his first name. Pretension is such a turn off.*

2) My confidence in the feature has been completely destroyed by one petty and snide remark made by the otherwise always-pleasant Rita. She said in a comment on her blog:

"As if it's any dumber than the weekly Movies I Have No Intention of Seeing posts, which, incidentally, I never read, so maybe I shouldn't judge. "

You all caught that, right? Never read. This is after I was forced to resume the regular feature because another reader had insisted because O, how he loved them so.

How am I supposed to pander to you people if you can't get your shit together and develop a monolithic and simplistic taste that can be satisfied with little to no effort on my part? Instead I get these judgments that are to my sense of self-worth as giant asteroids are (were) to dinosaurs.

Just so you know, Rita then when on to suggest that all of you are stupid and lame.

In fairness, I should point out that she may not have used those words exactly. And she was defending herself because I made fun of her posts about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

See, and now Rita is forgiven because all the Buffy dorks who read this are flocking to her blog to get them a Buffy fix. In my many years of close observation of Buffy watchers in the wild, no amount of name-calling is enough to break the concrete nerd-bond between them. It's also got some kind of weird overlap connection to The Amazing Race, but I haven't figured that one out yet. The only obvious commonality between the two shows that I've firmly established thus far is that they are both solid members of the Things I Don't Watch category. But if that were the causal link, then you'd all also be obsessed with CSI (any of them), Law & Order (any of them) and the entire combined programming schedules of UPN and the WB.

In case you haven't guessed yet, all this rambling is simply me trying to avoid writing about New Orleans some more. Not only is there all the flooding and the disastrous (non-)relief effort thus far, but now apparently shit is randomly exploding.

So New Orleans is now a city that is both underwater and on fire. That's a pretty seriously bad week right there. It's an All-Time Bad-Week Historic Contender, right up there with Pompeii (79 AD, volcano), London (1666, plague and fire) and Bedford, NY (2005, Martha Stewart post-prison bender).

I would like to point out that while none of the associated politicians in executive positions for New Orleans have managed to do anything dramatically helpful, they sure have ratched up the rhetoric.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin: "I need reinforcements. I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man... Now get off your asses and fix this. Let's do something and let's fix the biggest goddam crisis in the history of this country... We authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq, lickety split. After 9/11 we gave the president unauthorized powers, lickety split to help New York and other places... You mean to tell me that a place where most of your oil is coming through... that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need... I keep hearing this is coming, that is coming. My answer to that is BS. Where is the beef? There is no beef in this city."

This is the guy I feel for the most. He's been handed the World's Largest Bag Of Shit and has (so far) been asked to carry it all by himself. For that reason alone, I think we can forgive him for the 25-year-old pop-culture reference. Dude deserves some slack.

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco (I suspect reacting to lame-ass criticism over the last few days that as a chick in charge, she wasn't "tough enough"): "These troops are battle-tested. They have M-16s and are locked and loaded... These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will."

Way to overcompensate, Kathleen.

President George Bush: "The results are not acceptable. I'm heading down there right now. I'm looking forward to talking to the people on the ground."

First: nice work getting out in front and admitting things aren't all ship-shape. Completely out of character (see: Iraq), actually non-maddening. The second part where he wants to talk to "people on the ground"? That's a lie. From everything I've been reading, if the people stranded there get within 100 yards of George Bush or any figure of authority... you know how in zombie movies when the zombies finally grab one of the survivors and immediately devour him/her in a very messy, impolite, zombie-type manner? Yeah, like that. Antipathy is so bad that (according to the article linked above) the police have barricaded themselves inside their headquarters for their own safety.

I don't know about you people, but I'm never leaving my house again. This planet isn't safe. First the asteroid and the dinosaurs and now this.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 8.2


Pops


*= and yet still, somehow, I am married.
- posted by Pops @ 9:54 AM