BillSaysThis

1. Salisbury Steak or Chopped Beef?
2. Half and Half or Skim Milk?
3. Screaming Eagles or Golden Eagles?
4. Broken Leg or Broken Shoulder?
5. Neck or Ear?
6. Southside Johnny or Miami Steve?
7. Britney Spears or Christina Agilera?
8. Uncle Junior or Heshy?
9. Omen or Exorcist?
10. The Shield or The Wire?

Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant. Romantic Comedy. Above average script, some good laughs and sweetness. 2002’s Two Weeks Notice. Marc Lawrence seems to be Bullock’s personal writer these days and gets his first directorial opportunity here too. A little incongruity the way Bullock’s activist lawyer just agrees to be chief counsel to Grant’s real estate developer or that he’d hire her even with a Harvard Law School degree but otherwise fine.

Recommended

What a great way to spend a Saturday! The extra scenes were like gems except for Faramir’s flashback to the day his father sent Boromir off to Elrond’s council. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Extended Edition was a bargain at $9.50 compared to so many other films that come out these days. Peter Jackson just has the magic touch and might even convince me to see King Kong.

Can I wait for Thursday when we see Return of the King? Barely! I have a feeling it’ll put the battle scenes from Gladiator and Braveheart to shame.

Absolutely recommended

The Sweet One wrote her own version of A Few Of My Favorite Things today, she’s so wonderful, definitely my favorite thing.

I like this: Lauren Hill was at the Vatican to tape a Christmas concert for broadcast and instead of being a good girl she ripped the audience of Cardinals and Bishops a new one over their hypocrisy and corruption.

As it turns 100, why not have some fun yourself by building your own model in cardboard?

I’m sure you read it elsewhere but seems almost unbelievable after all this time, so I’ll repeat it here: they got Hussein hiding in a hole! And man does he look nasty.

I’ve been using Ian Mead’s UltaEdit text editor for several years now to take care of the various websites and other text files around here. But special thanks to Ian and his associate Troy for their help over the last few days, including late night and Saturday communications, trying and finally succeeding in solving a perplexing problem that popped out of nowhere. Very cool considering I’ve given them only about $30 in license fees over the years!

Nice to see someone say this in a thoughtful way: Discrimination is not always bad.

Even the FCC has taken notice of the South Park Shit episode, in which the bad boys of animation go postal on the commission’s decision over when curse words are acceptable on TV, but this is only brought to light when rich ditz Nicole Richie lets her potty mouth flow on the recent Billboard Music Awards broadcast. “Have you ever tried to get cow [expletive] out of a Prada purse?” Richie said. “It’s not so [expletive] simple.” But apparently Fox wasn’t fast (or concerned) enough to bleep out all the expletives when it was shown live to the East Coast audience. I have to admit to a certain level of distate for such language on television even though I’m quick enough to use the same vocabulary in conversation.

Twisting turning turvsy slipping

Action heroes carry tiny babies

Black curly hair flops over an arm

Wonderful tears dripping down her

Cheek while both mothers argue over

Who will cook the corn and coo at the child

Though mortars explode about 25 feet away.

On the other side of the screen naked

Tree branches sway back from the explosive

Force and a dozen black birds jump into the sky,

Startled by the off-center noise. The babies raised

Their heads up as one and gave the crows an evil eye.

No one says a word as a skinny woman with a

Black rifle creeps into the scene, pulling her arm

Then her a leg, the other arm, then the mothers

Gasped as they realized the gun was melted

On the arm and not held in it, slathered in thick

Red blood. No number of kisses under the mistletoe

Will erase the vision of that particular sugarplum.

“Fly me to the moon

Let me sing among those stars

Let me see what Spring is like

On Jupiter and Mars”

Don’t twist don’t shout don’t turn away

Keep your head inside a camo-covered

Helmet and listen for more than Dragonflies

If you want to cash your next paycheck at home

More than you want to see the tears stream down

Your wife’s cheeks, looking on from above. How many

kisses will it take to erase that sugarplum vision?

Watch where the deeper curves want to

Take the free radicals after listening to a holiday

Guest pass out spiritual gifts. The headaches will

Start when the whistle blows, when the babies scream

No matter what the soldiers do and even though

Resistance tends to bar amazement, even tears cannot

Tear apart the soft electric underbelly that seethes

Under the stag staged confetti grace.

I should have something more interesting to say but staring into the Great Black Abyss last night put me off my game.

Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter

Wow!

Adtunes.com: subscribed!

Will Seattle go Humpty Dumpty?

One of the later World War II movies, I suppose, Captain Newman, M.D. was made in 1963 and reflects then-current sensibilities. Gregory Peck (who died earlier this year) plays a psychiatrist towards the end of the war, running a mental ward on an Arizona Air Corps hospital base where soldiers are shipped for up to six weeks of diagnosis and treatment before being sent back to action, discharged or sent for longer term care. His base commander, played by Barney Miller’s James Gregory, barely acknowledges the head shrinker as a fellow physician and his finagler/orderly Tony Curtis believes he can pick up the necessary skills by reading Freud and a few other books.

This film, essentially a series of sketches, sadly marked the beginning of the end for Peck as an actor, or so it seems to me from a perusal of his IMDB page. He was coming off a string of great movies–he won the Oscar for Best Actor for his Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, the film he made just prior to Newman–but afterwards came mosty dreck. And Peck did no one any favors this outing by playing the M.D. with his laconic, nearly invisible emotional style.

Most of the roles are fairly cardboard, the writers seemingly attempting to show that war has more horrors than just death and splintered limbs by putting a variety of neuroses on display; when that wasn’t enough to fill their film budget, a squad of Italian POWs were tossed in for a bit more comic relief. Eddie Albert is a respected mission planner who can’t accept that he’s sent many young men off to their deaths. Robert Duvall is a WASPy husband ashamed into muteness by his fear. Angie Dickinson is the (gorgeous) young nurse who’s behind the great doctor, in contrast to Jane Withers (just saw her on an episode of M*A*S*H too) portraying the ‘plain’, put-upon nurse. We even get Larry Storch, Dick Sargent and Bobby Darin in supporting roles; Darin shows he could really act, or at least as much as anyone in this melodrama, getting nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Not recommended

Elliot Spitzer, as I’ve said before, is one tough dude: Spitzer Threatens to Sue U.S. Regulator Over Loan Exemption

Voter data, get your voter data here!

Though one wonders if voting will even be meaningful (if it is today) in the future.

Per RemotePatrol, Gen. Wesley Clark drops and gives The Daily Show twenty. Jon Stewart is clearly emerging as one of the smartest political comedians of our times and I imagine this interview will be as insightful as any Clark gives over the next few months.

Seems like something to love: Smart Plug May Banish Cable Clutter