The Enchanted Porkfist

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April 29, 2009

Reconsidering Earth.

I love a good animal story like a raccoon loves mauling chickens, so I was seriously considering putting my hatred of the modern moviegoing experience on hold so as to check out Earth, the Disney-released re-packaging of the BBC's Planet Earth.

I was, that is, until I saw Lindy West tear this movie a new cloaca in The Stranger:

The Brits released Earth as a big-screen feature in 2007—the show's most spectacular moments, plus additional footage, pared down into one 90-minute film—and now, in conjunction with Disney, it's being released in the U.S. on Earth Day with new narration by James Earl Jones ("Is that Morgan Freeman?" someone near me whispered).

Too bad it totally sucks starving-to-extinction polar-bear bootyhole! There are enjoyable aspects to Earth, things I'm happy to get to see on the big screen: the trip over Angel Falls, massive caribou herds, the aurora australis, the tops of the fucking Himalayas, that leaping shark, my old friend the dainty baboon... but the feature-length restructuring is an embarrassing, ham-fisted failure. It shies away from graphic death (remember when that chimpanzee eats that other chimpanzee's brain?) in favor of shoehorned emotion and anthropomorphized cutesiness. But the worst offender is the narration, which replaces the TV series' light touch and unobtrusive good humor with folksy chuckles and dishonest, unscientific babble.

A mother polar bear emerges from her den: "It's fresh powder conditions up here... she can't help but enjoy the slopes!" Baby polar bears walk around: "Unlike humans, polar-bear cubs don't always listen to their moms." A lynx hunts in a snowy forest: "Those that live here are so hard to glimpse, they're like spirits!" The birds of paradise perform their mind-altering mating display, now backed by a JAZZY SOUNDTRACK: "Get down, baby!" says James Earl Jones. How humiliating.

"Earth: Sucking the Dignity out of Animal Stories" (Lindy West, The Stranger)

Thanks for saving me and the fine lady $28.50 (or however much it costs to listen to popcorn-munchers and cell-phone-talkers these days), Ms. Lindy West.

April 28, 2009

Making the wall a better place.

Artist Phil Lumbang tackled the wall in front of our house this weekend, and he did a spectacular job.

Here's a video I made about the outdoor painting he does here in L.A., and a time-lapse sequence of this latest creation.

We are stoked.

April 25, 2009

Hummer meets bikes. Hello, LAPD?

We bicyclists usually think we've got the LAPD on our side when it comes to angry drivers who don't feel like sharing the road. Often we're right. Sometimes we're wrong.

Cross-posted from Homegrown Evolution:

In the early morning hours on Friday in downtown Los Angeles a group of around a dozen cyclists were involved in a hit and run incident with a Hummer driver that resulted in minor injuries and three demolished bikes.

The driver was pulled over several blocks away by the LAPD only to be let go. Officer Cho came back to speak to the group of cyclists stating, "Get everyone together because I don’t want to say this twice. If anyone says anything I’m gonna walk away and I’m not going to talk to you guys. Based on the evidence right now it looks like the cyclist hit the car, not that the car hit the cyclist." He added, “if it had been me with my family in that car, I’d have done the same thing, and I carry a gun in my car.”

Read the rest of the ugly details on Westside BikeSIDE!

Gary Rides Bikes also has the scoop.

April 15, 2009

It's all in the score.

Via The American Caliban.

April 12, 2009

Street seen.

It's been a rough day.

But you can always count on your dog to watch out for you.

Some primers on rational thought.

Andrew Sullivan pointed to this animated video about open-mindedness. It's an effective challenge to preconceptions of all flavors, and it's fun to watch.

Here are two more excellent videos about reason by the same author. The first is about the fallibility of anecdotal evidence; the second looks at the flawed thinking that flows from misunderstanding numbers.

All three provide very effective intellectual ammunition against the crazybonkers thinking that surrounds us every day.

April 11, 2009

"Speaking crazy to power."

Jon Stewart reminds the other side: Calm the fuck down, guys—it's normal to feel this way when you're in the minority.

April 9, 2009

Israel's very own George W. Bush.

Roger Cohen looks at the continuing danger of leaders who cynically invoke phony threats to advance their own ideology:

I don’t buy the view that, as [Israeli prime minister] Netanyahu told [Atlantic writer Jeffrey] Goldberg, Iran is “a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest.” Every scrap of evidence suggests that, on the contrary, self-interest and survival drive the mullahs.

Yet Netanyahu insists (too much) that Iran is “a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” Huh?

On that ocular theme again, Netanyahu says Iran’s “composite leadership” has “elements of wide-eyed fanaticism that do not exist in any other would-be nuclear power in the world.” No, they exist in an actual nuclear power, Pakistan.

Israel’s nuclear warheads, whose function is presumably deterrence of precisely powers like Iran, go unmentioned, of course...

What’s going on here? Israel, as it has for nearly two decades, is trying to lock in American support and avoid any disadvantageous change in the Middle Eastern balance of power, now overwhelmingly tilted in Jerusalem’s favor, by portraying Iran as a monstrous pariah state bent on imminent nuclear war.

A semblance of power balance is often the precondition for peace. Iran was left out of the Madrid and Oslo processes, with disastrous results. But that’s a discussion for another day.

What’s critical right now is that Obama view Netanyahu’s fear-mongering with an appropriate skepticism, rein him in, and pursue his regime-recognizing opening toward Tehran, as he did Wednesday by saying America would join nuclear talks for the first time...

The core strategic shift of Obama’s presidency has been away from the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the war on terror toward a rapprochement with the Muslim world as the basis for isolating terrorists.

That’s unsustainable if America or Israel find themselves at war with Muslim Persians as well as Muslim Arabs, and if Netanyahu’s intense-eyed attempt to suck America into a perpetuation of war-on-terror thinking prevails.

"Israel Cries Wolf" (Roger Cohen, NY Times)

How to deal with the media, in one easy lesson.

I'd like to see Dick Cheney try this the next time some journalist asks him about his various war crimes.

I especially hope he emulates the jumping-around part.

Via the fine lady.

An ode to the importance of music in our lives.