Well, although U.S. Air’s computer reservation problems made national news, but it didn’t deter or delay my travel plans that much, and the New York Theatre WeekendTM was a very pleasureable success.
Below the fold are my "reviews"….
Harry Potter – Nude!
Nice to see actors buck the sterotypes that made them famous:
On stage in London’s West End and stripped of his cinematic magic (and for a while his clothes), Daniel Radcliffe of “Harry Potter” fame proves he’s no-one trick pony. Last night’s much-anticipated revival of Peter Shaffer’s “Equus” showed off a darker, more mature Radcliffe. Gone was the bespectacled schoolboy wizard, replaced by Radcliffe’s portrayal of a disturbed 17-year-old, Alan Strang, who’s committed to a psychiatric hospital for unexplainably blinding six horses with a metal pick. As an estranged and volatile loner, Radcliffe, 17 in real life, deftly reflects the raw passion and erotic energy of Shaffer’s script.
The critics were impressed.
Right-Wing Noise Machine Still Attacking Gore
The right-wing noise machine really is a remarkable thing to behold. Al Gore wins an Oscar, gets some well-deserved recognition for his efforts, and within hours the Republican noise machine is already in full smear mode, trying to undercut Gore’s message by attacking him personally.
It began this morning when a group that no one has ever heard of–the Tennessee Center for Policy Research–issued a press release claiming that Al Gore’s utility bills reveal that his house in Nashville uses 20 times more energy than the average American household. This, according to the group, makes Al Gore an enormous hypocrite.
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At the heart of all this nonsense is the bizarre notion that somehow the wisdom and importance of Gore’s message about global climate change would be called into question if it could be shown that Gore doesn’t always practice what he preaches. Putting aside the fact that the case against Gore is incredibly weak, why does any of this matter? If Gore were to leave his backdoor open all winter, thereby wasting thousands of kilowatts of energy, would that somehow make his slide show less convincing? If it were demonstrated that Gore’s house is not as energy efficient as it could be, would that somehow render his tireless efforts to bring attention to this important issue less meaningful? Of course not. This entire line of attack is just a meaningless sideshow, an effort to distract the American people from the substance of the issue itself.
This Shouldn’t Happen In The Most Advanced Country On Earth
We really need to overhaul health care big time:
Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.
A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.
If his mother had been insured.
If his family had not lost its Medicaid.
If Medicaid dentists weren’t so hard to find.
If his mother hadn’t been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.
By the time Deamonte’s own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George’s County boy died.
Deamonte’s death and the ultimate cost of his care, which could total more than $250,000, underscore an often-overlooked concern in the debate over universal health coverage: dental care.
Some poor children have no dental coverage at all….
A Reminder
Just a reminder: Daylight Saving Time lasts longer this year. Is your computer ready for that?
Troops Unprepared
How can people who "support the troops" allow this to happen?
Rushed by President Bush’s decision to reinforce Baghdad with thousands more U.S. troops, two Army combat brigades are skipping their usual session at the Army’s premier training range in California and instead are making final preparations at their home bases.
Some in Congress and others outside the Army are beginning to question the switch, which is not widely known. They wonder whether it means the Army is cutting corners in preparing soldiers for combat, since they are forgoing training in a desert setting that was designed specially to prepare them for the challenges of Iraq.
Light Blogging/Pillow Fight NYC 2007
There will be light blogging for the next several days due to the following:
(1) I may have jury duty tomorrow. (I’ll find out when I call the special number after 5:00 p.m. today) [POST 5 P.M. UPDATE: Yay!! No jury duty!!!]
(2) I’ll be in NYC for a long weekend. Gonna see some shows ["Wicked", "Spring Awakening", Jack Goes Boating" (with Phillip Seymour Hoffman), and "Curtains" (a new musical with David Hyde Pierce)]
I won’t be participating in any pillow fights, like the one they had in Union Square this past weekend.
Supreme Court Gives Gore’s Oscar To Bush
Heh:
In a stunning reversal for the former vice president, the Supreme Court ordered that Al Gore’s Academy Award be given to President Bush.
Just days after former Vice President Al Gore received an Academy Award for his global- warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Supreme Court handed Gore a stunning reversal, stripping him of his Oscar and awarding it to President George W. Bush instead.
For Gore, who basked in the adulation of his Hollywood audience Sunday night, the high court’s decision to give his Oscar to President Bush was a cruel twist of fate, to say the least. But in a 5-4 decision handed down Tuesday morning, the justices made it clear that they had taken the unprecedented step of stripping Gore of his Oscar because President Bush deserved it more.
“It is true that Al Gore has done a lot of talking about global warming,” wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority. “But President Bush has actually helped create global warming.”
If Jesus Talked Like Truman Capote
UPDATE: More Jesus fun — Virgin Mary appears on a cookie sheet.
Quote Of The Day
Laura Bush on Larry King Live:
And many parts of Iraq are stable now. But, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everybody.
One bombing a day? C’mon, Laura.
Here’s a list of incidents Iraq over the past week. By my count, there are 34 involving bombs. That’s five a day.
The Gore Smear
The rightwing noise machine has set its sites on Al Gore.
A group as sprung up overnight, calling itself the Tennessee Center for Policy Research (it is, despite its official sounding name, a rightwing organization founded by a member of the conservative thinktank, American Enterprise Institute). It issued a press release, picked up by Drudge Report, rightwing blogs, and Fox News, claiming that Al Gore’s utility bills for his house in Nashville show that he uses 20 times more energy than the average American household. This, according to the group, makes Al Gore an enormous hypocrite.
I’ll let Anonymous Liberal do the debunking:
This is a textbook example of the mindless swarming behavior that is so typical among right-wing partisan flacks. First, everyone on the right–from top to bottom–simply assumed that the content of this press release, which was put out by an organization none of them had ever heard of before, was factually accurate. Actually, that probably gives them too much credit. It’s not that they assumed it was accurate, it’s that they didn’t care. The press release was chalked full of truthiness, and that was good enough.
The press release claimed that Al Gore’s home in Nashville consumed 221,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity last year compared to a national average of 10,656 kWh per household. I have no idea whether the number cited for Gore’s house is correct, but let’s assume it is. The 10,656 number comes from data published by the Department of Energy. But it’s an average of all households nationwide (including apartment units and mobile homes) and across all climate regions. As it turns out, the region in which Gore lives–the East South Central–has the highest per household energy usage of any climate region in the country, a good 50% higher than the national average quoted in the press release (I assume this is due to the combination of cold winters and hot, muggy summers). So that’s misleading in and of itself.
Moreover, Gore lives in a large home (10,000 sq. ft.). If you look at the data, it’s clear that Gore’s energy usage per square foot (even assuming the 221,000 kWh number is accurate) is well within the average range for his climate region. So all this accusation boils down to is a claim that it is somehow "hypocritical" for Al Gore to live in a large house.
That’s awfully weak. Gore’s a former Senator and Vice President of the United States. Does he have to move into a studio apartment before he has the right to talk about climate change?
And more importantly, as Think Progress reports, even this watered-down hypocrisy charge entirely misses the point. What Al Gore wants people to do is reduce the carbon footprint of their residence as much as possible and then purchase carbon offsets to reduce the remaining footprint to zero. Gore has installed solar panels in his home, he uses fluorescent light bulbs and other energy saving technology, and he purchases his energy from Green Power Switch, a provider which utilizes solar and wind power. He then purchases carbon offsets to reduce his remaining carbon footprint to zero.
Could Gore use less overall energy if he and Tipper moved into a one-bedroom apartment? Of course. But he’s not asking people to move into smaller homes. He’s asking them to reduce their carbon footprints, which is exactly what he has done. He practices what he preaches.
Still, these sort of facts about Al Gore aren’t likely to deter the self-congratulatory right, now convinced they have "caught" Gore in an act of hypocrisy. This is how they operate.
’08 Matchups
Presidential race match-ups mean little at this early stage, but they do mean something. Zogby’s latest match-up poll of the top three GOP contenders (Guiliani, McCain, and Romney — in that order)vs. the top 3 Democratic contenders (Clinton, Obama, and Edwards — in that order) is interesting:
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Giuliani 47%, Clinton 40% |
Giuliani 40%, Obama 46% |
Giuliani 46%, Edwards 40% |
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McCain 47%, Clinton 39% |
McCain 40%, Obama 44% |
McCain 47%, Edwards 38% |
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Romney 35%, Clinton 45% |
Romney 29%, Obama 51% |
Romney 32%, Edwards 47% |
Things to note, assuming the election were held today:
(1) Romney would lose to any Democratic candidate.
(2) No GOP candidate can beat Obama.
Barack’s gotta be loving this poll.
Fourteen Years Ago Today….
I was helping sooty shaken people out of the World Trade Center, after it was bombed. My story here.
Gibson: People Who Think There’s Too Much Anna Nicole News Are “Iraq Snobs”
Fox News tool John Gibson is disgusted by Anderson Cooper’s “news-guy snobbery,” because the handsome
CNN anchor keeps reporting on stupid Iraq!Bravely defending the constant cable-news coverage of a fat drug-addict porno gal’s death, Gibson told his radio audience that Cooper is just trying to be a fancy snob with all this “U.S. troops killed every day” stuff, which is totally boring compared to a brain-damaged 800-pound heroin addict in awful clown make-up: “Oh, there’s a war on, there’s a war on. Maybe, just maybe, people are a little weary, Mr. Cooper, of your war coverage, and they’d like a little something else. Maybe that’s why they all thundered to this story.”
They thundered to this story? I love this: Gibson does Anna Nicole all-the-time coverage, and then insists that the people thundered to this story?
It’s kind of like going into a pizza joint and seeing that they only serve plain cheese pizza. "They love it", says Luigi, the pizza shop owner. "In fact, look around. That’s all people are eating here!"
Finding Jesus
People talk about "finding Jesus", but this time, he may have really been found. I mean, really:
New scientific evidence, including DNA analysis conducted at one of the world’s foremost molecular genetics laboratories, as well as studies by leading scholars, suggests a 2,000-year-old Jerusalem tomb could have once held the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.
According to writings found in the tomb, the tomb contained (at one time) the remains of Jesus, Mary, Matthew, Joseph and Mary Magdalene.
And a new character, too. No, no. Not Scrappy-doo. It’s Judah, the son of Jesus. Apparently, something in the tomb makes reference to this guy:
In addition to the "Judah son of Jesus" inscription, which is written in Aramaic on one of the ossuaries, another limestone burial box is labeled in Aramaic with "Jesus Son of Joseph." Another bears the Hebrew inscription "Maria," a Latin version of "Miriam," or, in English, "Mary." Yet another ossuary inscription, written in Hebrew, reads "Matia," the original Hebrew word for "Matthew." Only one of the inscriptions is written in Greek. It reads, "Mariamene e Mara," which can be translated as, "Mary known as the master."
Francois Bovon, professor of the history of religion at Harvard University, told Discovery News, "Mariamene, or Mariamne, probably was the actual name given to Mary Magdalene."
Now, there are certain obvious implications to the discovery of Jesus’ tomb, not the least of which is that, according to the Bible, Jesus was resurrected three days after his crucifixion. So a number of Christians are up in arms about this discovery.
However, the Discovery channel (which is broadcasting a special on this discovery) says "Not necessarily so":
It is a matter of Christian faith that Jesus of Nazareth was resurrected from the dead three days after his crucifixion circa 30 C.E. This is a central tenet of Christian theology, repeated in all four Gospels. The Lost Tomb of Jesus does not challenge this belief. In the Gospel of Matthew (28:12) it states that a rumor was circulating in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. This story holds that Jesus’ body was moved by his disciples from the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, where he was temporarily buried. Ostensibly, his remains were taken to a permanent family tomb. Though Matthew calls this rumor a lie circulated by the high priests, it appears in his Gospel as one of the stories surrounding Jesus’ disappearance from the initial tomb where he was buried. Even if Jesus’ body was moved from one tomb to another, however, that does not mean that he could not have been resurrected from the second tomb. Belief in the resurrection is based not on which tomb he was buried in, but on alleged sightings of Jesus that occurred after his burial and documented in the Gospels.
Ascension: It is also a matter of Christian faith that after his resurrection, Jesus ascended to heaven. Some Christians believe that this was a spiritual ascension, i.e., his mortal remains were left behind. Other Christians believe that he ascended with his body to heaven. If Jesus’ mortal remains have been found, this would contradict the idea of a physical ascension but not the idea of a spiritual ascension. The latter is consistent with Christian theology.
Still, I have a funny feeling that Christians aren’t going to be pleased with this discovery, or the documentary.
UPDATE: CNN has more:
Archaeologists and clergymen in the Holy Land derided claims in a new documentary produced by the Oscar-winning director James Cameron that contradict major Christian tenets.
"The Lost Tomb of Christ," which the Discovery Channel will run on March 4, argues that 10 ancient ossuaries — small caskets used to store bones — discovered in a suburb of Jerusalem in 1980 may have contained the bones of Jesus and his family, according to a press release issued by the Discovery Channel.
One of the caskets even bears the title, "Judah, son of Jesus," hinting that Jesus may have had a son. And the very fact that Jesus had an ossuary would contradict the Christian belief that he was resurrected and ascended to heaven.
Most Christians believe Jesus’ body spent three days at the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem’s Old City. The burial site identified in Cameron’s documentary is in a southern Jerusalem neighborhood nowhere near the church.
In 1996, when the BBC aired a short documentary on the same subject, archaeologists challenged the claims. Amos Kloner, the first archaeologist to examine the site, said the idea fails to hold up by archaeological standards but makes for profitable television.
"They just want to get money for it," Kloner said.
The claims have raised the ire of Christian leaders in the Holy Land.