Chick Flick - Guy Movie Rating Guide

In the case of couples who often attend the cinema, it becomes apparent that they should develop some concept of reciprocity unless one is content to have a gender-atypical or androgynous boy friend or girl friend.  Ask yourself, ladies: are you really that into Clay Aiken? Since we have rough sex-typing in movies, this should be worked out in some kind of sharing relationship. Also, one's willingness to mutally accomodate the other person increases the mutual stock of good will.

I occasionally like a chick flick such as American Beauty. Yes. I know that reduces my Gal Pal Quota. I'll even watch some guy movies; even with pleasure. But the charms of Die Hard and that television perennial, The Dirty Dozen, escape me.

Anyway, I propose a scale, with a few examples:

Chick Flicks (CF)  -- high score end

10 -- The Bridges of Madison County, The Devil Wears Prada, Chicago

9 -- American Beauty, The Blue Lagoon, La Vie en Rose, The Other Boelyn Girl

8 -- Sex in the City (some nudity keeps the score down), Dirty Dancing, The Holiday, Julie and Julia

7 -- Sixteen Candles, Bring It On, Bend It Like Beckham, In Her Shoes, Dreamgirls, Midnight in Paris

6 -- She's the Man, The Kingdom of Heaven, Erin Brockovitch, Dance With Me, Failure to Launch, Pride and Prejudice (my favorite!), Bridesmaids

5 -- The Unforgiven, Juno, Wedding Crashers, The Sweetest Thing

4 -- Knocked Up, The Bucket List, Borat

3 -- Dirty Harry, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Borat

2 -- The Boondock Saints (Yes! I watched that turkey!), There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men

1 -- Die Hard, The Dirty Dozen, Jackass: The Movie, Rambo

Guy Movies (GM) -- low score end

Or, look at it this way: a movie's GM score = 11 - CF

I propose, that long term, a thoughtful couple should try to keep GM = CF

Katrina

It happened six years ago.  Almost to the date that Hurricane Irene was moving on the coast.

I got through Irene okay.  We were just outside of Irene's edge.  Best wishes to everyone with this one!

Ratatouille Niçoise

Here is a nice recipe for Ratatouille made in the mode of Nice that is easy to prepare. It's flavorful and has sufficient garlic to please most palates.


First the ingredients:

2 aubergines (egg plants)
2 zucchinis
2 large onions, preferably red ones
3 Roma tomatoes
2 green peppers
6 basil leaves
6 cloves of garlic
olive oil
pepper
salt
thyme
capers, as you please

First, heat the olive oil in a large skillet.  Chop the garlic and onion.  Add them and sauté until the onion is transparent.


In the while, slice the zucchini and peel and cube the aubergine.  Flour the pieces of zucchini and aubergine lightly.  Add the zucchini, eggplant and green peppers to the skillet, cover and cook slowly about one hour.  Add the Italian tomatoes and simmer, uncovered, until the mixture thickens.  Season with salt and pepper.  Add the capers during the last fifteen minutes of cooking.

You can serve it hot or cold with a baguette and whatever wine pleases you.  (Do have a glass of wine with it; and the cook gets a bonus glass of wine while preparing the ratatouille.  It's a Niçoise custom.)

You might get 5 to 6 servings out of this if you are not cooking for teenage boys or police.

Salut! Bon appetit!

Good and Bad Religious Types

There's an upside and a downside to having a member of the family who is religious.  In general, if the person is sincere and practices her religiosity privately, that's okay.  My Tante Linda is  like that.  Oh, she'll do Mass three or four days a week, and loves those novenas, and you can count on her to do the Nine Church Visitations on Good Friday.  Oh, and there's her buds that she hangs out with: St. Thérèse, St. Clara, St. Bernadette, and so forth.  Also, she has some small religious statues around her pad that looked kind of cool, if you're a kid and not an art critic.

But sometimes religiosity can be oppressive.  Consider my eldest sister Heather.  Since I'm #5 in a sibship of five, you can logically expect that there would be some trickle down effect in bosiness.  Specifically, my eldest sister would be inclined to be bossy to me and my brother Mike (#4).  However, she had a particularly domineering personality; later on, we nicknamed her The Mother Superior.  Specifically, here are some examples.  When we were preschoolers or of early primary grades, she would do things organize the two of us for mandatory prayers when the mood struck her. 

I remember a painful episode.  I was seven, absorbed in watching She-Ra on television, when she announced that it's time for the afternoon devotions to the Blessed Mother! 

I said, "No, I wanna watch She-Ra!"

"Mom!  Angel is misbehaving."  And my poor Mom would have to drop what she was doing and mediate between her two daughters.  I wondered sometimes whether she was sorry she wasn't as consistent on birth control though she was disinclined to listen to the Pope de jour, whoever he was back then.

Anyway, Mom finally got the picture, and straightened her out: Heather was not the family's moral compass.  But Heather never got the memo: there was a string of disputes: my watching Sweet Valley High, my swimsuit (immodest, said Heather; but Mom bought it because I wanted it), my shorts, my friends, my music (devilish!), and so forth.  She missed my running track.  I slipped that one past her.

In a way, my family developed a unique dynamic: instead of the typical pattern in which the daughter or son rebelled against the conservative parent, ours morphed into the younger two siblings rebelling against the oldest sister, with our mother swerving as a buffer. 

It did have a good side.  I learned that I could trust and confide in Mom. Even when it came to girl things.  Thank God, whoever she is.

Mike also liked She-Ra.  I think I now know why.

I'm also a big fan of the newspaper funnies, especially Zits, Luann, and Baldo.  Will Brad be extricated from the clutches of Ann Eiffel only with this assistance of his sister; and how will Baldo cope with his cute, bespectaled girlfriend?

Conceptual Art

This form of modern art was defined by Sol LeWitt as follows:

"In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."

Conceptual art raises some compelling philosophical questions about the scope of art, and has provided some provocative and entertaining examples to startle the public:

Yves Klein (1957) released 1001 blue balloons released from Galerie Iris Clert.

Piero Manzoni (1962) created The Base of the World, thereby exhibiting the entire planet as his artwork.

Christo (1962ff) has made a career out of wrapping buildings, islands, and landscapes.

Martin Creed (2001) had a room in which the lights repeatedly went off and on. (Or was it on and off?)

Jacek Tylecki (2008) employed a circular container labeled "Give if you can, take if you have to), in which passersby leave or remove objects as they see fit.

The local art scene had a few avant garde artists who tried their hands at Conceptual Art: Buford Thomas conceived of River Root Contamination, in which he deliberately poured a liter of Barq's Root Beer into the Mississippi, and wrote a narrative of his action. Thelma Fitzgerald made a pyramid of energy drink cans on the lawn of a local museum. Clayton Bulwer filled the lobby of a downtown office building with cow patties, and called his masterwork "Public Cow Shit."

Now Norah Arceneaux had toiled with limited success using the traditional media of expression: oils, watercolor, sculpture, and so forth. As it was time to pay off her student loan for art school, she decided to go a different pathway. It so happened that she experienced the normal problem of less-than-genteel poverty: frayed or worn garments. Specifically, her panties were tired, past the prime of wear and an embarassment that caused anxiety lest she need an appearance at a hospital emergency room.

However, she got an inspiration: combine art and clothing. This came from the well-documented phenomenon of Japan's used panty machines, which struck her as ishy to the max.

She worked it out as follows: The concept she developed was Worn Panties Revealed. She wrote that her art consisted in wearing a different pair of panties each day for the entire day, signing each at day's end, and offering it as a work of art. Her sister provided some initial artistic media (although unknown to her), and she had each one properly framed and exhibited in a local art gallery. Her friend and classmate from art school wrote a favorable narrative of art criticism which specifically stated:

"Ms. Norah Arceneaux has successfully employed a new medium in deconstructing the ordinary tensions inherent in modern life through her deliberate choice in wearing a different pair of panties each day to symbolize a momentary contradiction. Clearly, this is a young artist who has the cheek enough to bear new ground in a continuing dialogue with the viewer. It is strongly encouraged that you view some of Ms. Arceneaux's works at the Galerie Museé."

Soon Worn Panties Revealed generated a lot of buzz in the major art scenes: San Francisco, Seattle, Santa Fé, New York, Savannah, and Cleveland.

Each day she selected an individual theme panty: sometimes bikini briefs, sometimes standard panties, sometimes French cut models, a racy thong now and then (The artistic muse dictated that she bear the lack of comfort attendant to wearing one), and on rare occasions, a pair of granny panties as an ironic statement. Irony is always noticed in the art world, as is tongue-in-cheek humor.  Mood-expressive color and embellishments rounded the range of artistic statements; clearly there was an excellent fit between the artist and her medium! To emphasize the art behind her Panty de Jour, Norah composed a brief note as manifesto, as these examples illustrate:

December 28th's panty was ebony black to represent the discontentof the days being short and the disappointments of the year. 

March 14th's panty was a confection of ebony silk trimmed in white lace:  "This artifact was donned to symbolize the melding of romanticism and optimism for the future, despite the future's essential uncertainty."

March 17th's panty was opaque grannies of lime green colour (sic) to honor the Hibernian spirit.

March 20th's pink panty called for this statement: "I tried to express the tension between innocence and longing in a demure hint of uncertainty that is so characteristic of modern civilization."

April 15th was an occasion to hang an empty frame:  "This is to symbolize today being Income Tax day.  The lack of substantitive covering of the derriere is a representation and protest of the effects of taxation on artistic expression."

May 3rd had her wearing transparent grannies.  She provided a terse statement, "I felt particularly vulnerable at the moment."

July 7th:  A red thong.  "I finally got up enough nerve to wear this; or I will until I've had it with the strap."

While her earlier works went cheaply, as the series' popularity grew, the selling prices continued to climb.

Norah contemplated a single magnum opus as a summary statement: bra wall. However, she was dissuaded from doing so as this work would have been too derivative.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm keeping a wary eye on Irene; and will retreat if there's any possible danger.  I may have a shallow learning curve, but one experience like Katrina is enough!  If there's any word to evacuate, I'm so out of here it is not funny!

I Got a FARK Link Published!

As a Farkette (follower/ occasional contributor to FARK), I've been trying to get another link.  Finally I got one; here it is:

[Politics] Tennessee legislator who complained about satirical Obama mints now has his own mints: Joe Armstrong Strong Arm Censored Mints

(published 8/6/2011)

The original link is here:

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/aug/06/disappointmints-brouhaha-boosts-sales-for-new/

The gist of the article is that a Tennessee state legislator complained about the mints and the University of Tennessee bookstore pulled them from the shelves.  The mint company, in turn, satirized the legislator. 

I'll dedicate this picture both to the legislator and to the mint company.:

Geaux Tigers!

Where Godwin's Law and Rule 34 Converge

This is an enigmatic genre of magazine cover for men's magazines that seemed to be popular at one time, possibly the 1960's:  It features underdressed females fighting with, being mistreated by, or being threatened with ravishment by Nazis.  Or, alternatively, a buxom Ayran female wearing lingerie and a Nazi armband whipping an American soldier, often in a dungeon setting.  The Nazi symbols tended to be recurrent, to the exclusion of other classes of villains.

This leads to some questions:

1)  Is this proof that Godwin's Law predated the internet?  [Godwin's Law --  "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1 (100%)."]

2)  Is this another example of Rule 34 in action?  [Rule 34 states that, if it exists, there must be porn of it.  These illustrations, while not seen today as pornish, were probably borderline at that time.]

However, P. J. O'Rourke suggested an exception:

"No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal."  [Give War a Chance]

Likewise, I cannot conceive of some warped fantasy of being tied up and whipped by someone dressed as a conservative.  Anyway, what distinctive garb signals liberal or conservative status?    Well, one idea.  Dave Barry wrote about horrible Republican pants; patterned pants that men wear on golf courses.

Also, there seems to a lack of porn involving Italian Fascist, Falangist, Vichy French, Imperial Austro-Hungarian, or even Peronist motifs.  [Do you need to snicker?]  Rule 34 still needs verification.

Why are the Nazis doing this?  Weird.

Sometimes buxom women strike back.