Hoosier brother?

So, first I see the headline - "T. Norbu, Dalai Lama’s Brother, Dies at 86" - and I'm thinking: It would be hard enough to have a famous sibling on the order of Bill Clinton, or even, um, Hilary Duff. But your younger brother is the Dalai Lama? That would pretty much suck every time you went home for a visit with mom and dad, wouldn't it? (How many Nobel Peace Prizes did you win this year, junior?)

But no. Turns out this Norbu dude was considered to be a reincarnated saint, so I guess he could hold his own at the family reunion.

I'm also assuming he's the only reincarnated saint ever to have died in Bloomington, Indiana.

Taxicab confession

One clear lesson that I'll take away from this weekend's travels is that big-city cab drivers hate Barack Obama. I don't want to overgeneralize, but now that I've experienced their clear-eyed arguments in two separate instances, I feel I can mark it down.

In February in Chicago, the dude behind the wheel was ranting about his intimate, personal third-hand knowledge of Obama's use of crack and interest in gay sex. (For proof, he directed us to a YouTube video of some mouth-breather talking about the times he used crack and had gay sex with the senator.)

Last night after our flight back to the left coast, we were treated to some equally well thought-out rhetoric about why nobody in their right mind would vote for Obama. The only good news about the trip was that we live five miles from the airport - so it was a mercifully short drive - and that I had exact change, so we got out of there without having to give the guy a tip. (And I always tip cab drivers - once I even tipped a guy after he picked us up, had to detour to get gas while we waited in the cab, left the meter running anyway, and then had to drop us off at a subway because the traffic was so bad.)

If I understood him correctly, the primary reasons for our driver's virulent anti-Obamaness were that (1) the driver's sister lives in Canada, where she pays 40 percent income tax, (2) Bill Clinton frequently had sex with interns while the terrorists were plotting the 9-11 attacks and (3) "hundreds of thousands" of Muslims live in the U.S. All of which was pretty convincing until the guy started swearing at us.

I generally don't like talking politics even with people I know, let alone borderline insane strangers. So when Obamahater started asking us questions about the election, that little voice was telling me: "Ignore. Tune out. Don't listen. Don't engage. Don't..." But I had just finished reading David Sedaris' "When You Are Engulfed in Flames," which includes a short story about a taxi ride during which Sedaris bitched out the cab driver for his making homophobic comments and bragging about his own, very hetero, sexual conquests. Afterwards, Sedaris wrote, he felt bad about yelling at the guy. So that was stuck in my head - I figured I'd learn from Sedaris' experience. But last night, ignoring the guy definitely would have been the way to go.

(By the way, "When You Are Engulfed" was a riot - many laughs per page. And maybe better to read in the privacy of your own home; apparently, I drew a few stares on the airplane because I was laughing so loud.)

Aside from the taxi politics, the other important knowledge I picked up - and this was thanks, indirectly, to a crossword puzzle in the latest Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine - was this: Tulsa is "a slut" backwards. If I lived there, that would really really bother me. Anyway, if that's not t-shirt worthy...

By dint of their stupidity

I won't get into critiquing Palin's speech, even though it made me think I was listening to an overachieving 11th grader with a Minnesohhta accent run for class president.

I'll just get right to favorite moment from last night's convention coverage. It was during the orgy of useless post-speech interviews, when Keith Olbermann struck a blow for English usage. After a reporter had just interviewed Arizona senator Jon Kyl (a very efficiently spelled name, don't you think?), and the senator said something about proving the "pundints" wrong.

When the reporter tossed it back to Olbermann, he told the viewing audience that there was something he wanted to correct, once and for all, because he was tired of hearing it mispronounced. (The other offender last night - whom Olbermann didn't mention specifically -was Palin.) With fantastically appropriate indignation, Keith said: "It's pundit, p-u-n-d-i-t, not pundint."

Somewhere, one of the Merriam brothers or that Webster guy is smiling.

Not my type(face) of movie

Is it just me, or does this new flick (warning: audio, but there's a "sound off" button at bottom right) seem like sort of a cheap - and three-month-late - faux imitation knock-off of the Sex and the City movie? Apparently, The Women is a remake of some pre-WWII thrill ride, but whatever. If they wanted to avoid the comparisons, they coulda built the story around three women. Or five. Anyway, I reaaaaally don't care; just asking.

What I do find interesting is that I look at the typeface for the movie title and I think the following: Hmph. I wonder how much the makers of alli (sorry, don't know how to make that long-vowel symbol over the "i") paid the movie's producers to use a font that would be a subliminal cue to think about their weight-loss drug. Cause it looks kinda the same to me.

In a world...

Big day for movie-related posts, apparently.

This is sucky news: Don LaFontaine, whose ridiculously awesome voice gave gravitas to craploads (that's an approximate number) of movie trailers, is headed to the big sound booth in the sky.

If you're as strange as I am, here's a video worth watching about the Don of Voiceovers.

I should have Coen

In the category of "Interesting reviews using literary references I don't understand of potentially strange but entertaining movies I'd like to see," I give you this gem from the New York Times.

Looks like a winner.

(One of the cool cinefile references I did understand was to the MacGuffin, but if you need an assist with that one, I am glad to oblige.)

Dangerous reading materials

Is broadcast journalism's steep decline getting steeper?

Well, this weekend, I caught part of a broadcast of NBC Nightly News -- that's the national one, slim -- in which a reporter (again, this is a national broadcast) covered the Hurricane Gustav story in part by interviewing Louisianans who were fleeing in advance of the storm.

Did I mention this is on a national broadcast?

In place of actual news, this reporter (standing in front of a line of cars who were successfully driving out of town) spent most of his 60-second report "interviewing" two families whose plans to get out of town were temporarily thwarted. One because they ran out of gas (!) and the other because they lost a tire from their trailer (!!). Now, I concede that (a) a blown tire or empty gas tank could happen to anyone, and (b) the New Orleans exodus itself was clearly a national news story, but that doesn't mean that two carsful of people with bad luck was a national news story.

Unless I miss my guess, the only reason they wound up on the (national!) national news was that they had stopped moving long enough for him to ask them some dumb questions.

I submit that this trend toward horribleness is accelerating thanks to poorly trained news producers who do this kind of faux reportage at the local level, are conditioned to believe it's acceptable, and get promoted to national without learning the difference between news and, well, asking people stupid questions while relevant information floats by undisturbed.

Want more bad local news? Check out this coverage of a no-injury shooting in Los Angeles over the weekend. Describing the shooter, the report reads: "He was carrying five loaded semi-automatic pistols with laser sights and multiple loaded ammunition magazines...."

Now, click the video link and watch just the first 12 seconds as our intrepid local news reader seemed to think the phrase "ammunition magazines" refers to periodicals about guns.

She'll see you on the CBS Evening News in a few months.