Moe Lane

…on Blu-Ray, and it was very good.  It’s based on the Discworld book by the same name by Terry Pratchett, and it turned out to be a reasonably good adaptation of the novel*; the characters (and actors) were engaging, the quasi-Victorian sets were excellent and the original book’s themes about technology, innovation, and how both can be pretty cool came across pretty well.  I liked it: check it out.  If you’re a Terry Pratchett fan, you should like this.

And if you’re not a Terry Pratchett fan already… well.  There are a lot of people out there with your condition, and many of them go on to live reasonably full and meaningful lives.  So, you shouldn’t give up hope, or anything.

Moe Lane (more…)

…brought to you courtesy of the NY Post.

I know, I know: a letdown from the last one.  Such is life.

I would commemorate it with a song, but the only song that I know about Christopher Columbus is so incredibly filthy that I am risking my reputation slightly by even admitting that I know that the aforementioned song even exists, let alone has lyrics that I may or may not have some passing familiarity with.

So, there’s that.

Moe Lane

PS: On the bright side: it’s a holiday where the kids have to go to school but the adults have a reasonable chance to avoid having to go to work.

PPS: I am exceptionally happy not to be an illiterate barley* farmer in Ireland, by the way. So there’s that, as well.

*Potatoes are a New World crop.

Mean of me to note the bad spelling in this let’s-just-screenshot-this-now Craigslist post from NY’s Working Families Party advertising for… well, it’s actually a bit hard to figure out just what open job position WFP is advertising for.  Many people are assuming (or at least speculating) that it’s for warm bodies for the Occupy Wall Street protests themselves, but I’m not buying that: when you can get people to defecate on police cars for free, why pay them?

No, what’s actually happening here is just another example of the Democratic establishment* working to consolidate its control over the OWS leadership in order to keep pushing it in more acceptable directions (i.e., directions more in line with the desires of the Democratic establishment).  In other words, it’s in line with the DCCC doing fundraising off of OWS, or former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s bid for regaining relevance in a world where she’s routinely (and deservedly) ignored.  And it’ll probably work, at that: by all accounts, the movement is trapped in precisely the sort of free-falling organizational nightmare that can be easily exploited by well-heeled outsiders who at least look like they know what they’re doing. (more…)

(Via Instapundit) Mr. Yoo is cruel, yet accurate, in his assessment of the almost-competent GWOT strategy of Barack Obama.

Let’s give partial credit where it is due.  Apparently the Obama administration argues that al-Awlaki was a legitimate target because he is a member of an enemy engaged in hostile conduct against the United States.  At least Obama has figured out that the war on terrorism is in fact a war, and that it is not limited just to Afghanistan.  We should be thankful that Obama officials have quietly put aside the arguments they made during the Bush years that any terrorist outside the Afghani battlefield was a criminal suspect who deserved his day in federal court.  By my lights, I would rather the Obama folks be hypocrites in favor of protecting the national security than principled fools (which they are free to be in the faculty lounges both before and after their time in government).

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Via The Truth About Guns (via Instapundit) comes this gem from Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu’s bipartisan press conference requesting that Attorney General Eric Holder come clean about his involvement in Operation Fast & Furious:

Every time there’s a shooting or there’s a crime committed on American soil, the first question shouldn’t be, “My God, were these the guns that our own government gave these criminals?“

Arizona law enforcement is, shall we say, personally interested in this sort of thing.  Which is why they’re calling for an independent special counsel on Operation Fast & Furious.

Moe Lane

Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies, “Weird Al” Yankovic

Now that is how a filk should look.

…break it down into its component parts, and FIX THE PARTS THAT DO NOT SCAN.

Via AoSHQ. As God is my witness, I have to find a way to convince people to RUN THIS STUFF PAST ME FIRST BEFORE THEY GO INTO PRODUCTION.

(pause)

Sorry. I’m feeling much better now.

Moe Lane

PS: The last line’s perfect, by the way.

(H/T: Instapundit) The Economist has the right idea about the problem that the Left is having right now:

The other reason to doubt whether Occupy Wall Street will become a tea-party movement of the left is its fixation on protest. But Zuccotti Park is not Tahrir Square and America is not Egypt. It is not even France. In France street demos are tolerated, sometimes glorified, as a way to blow off steam and win the attention of deputies who neglect voters or forget their election promises.

America is different. It is, indeed, the sort of democracy that some people in Tahrir Square lost their lives asking for. With endless elections and permanent campaigns, it is exquisitely sensitive to voters’ wants.

[snip]

The tea-partiers grasped all this. They, too, took to the streets. Some strutted about in tricorn hats. But at the same time they learned their way around the machinery of elections and how to scare the bejesus out of any candidate they did not like.

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…for no damn reason at all except that this is my site and it amuses me to show it to you.

Although they have a version of this available at the Toys R Us. I came pretty close to buying it… for my kids, of course. (more…)

I’ve just been resisting doing it, because I didn’t want to kill my readers’ sense of wonder.  Still, I’m going to have to, so here goes: that “Gordon Ramsay’s dwarf porn double Percy Foster dies in badger den” story?

Total fake.

(pause)

I’m sorry.

Moe Lane

ack when REAGAN was governor, that verb would have been ‘promises.’

I originally blogged about this speech by Rep. Tom McClintock (R, CA) to the Council for National Policy over at AoSHQ*, but it is simply too good not to share.  Tom’s in full Post-Apocalypse Survival mode in this speech, and you will not find a dull word in it:

I want to welcome this groundbreaking scientific expedition to the savage lands of the Left Coast. You are here in California to answer an important theoretical question and now you have your answer.

Yes, this is what Barack Obama’s second term would look like.

Study it. Fear it. And then go home and make sure that it never happens to the rest of the country.

And that’s just the intro.  The rest of the three-page speech is just like the above.
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