PAUL KRUGMAN: Hired Gun Fetish (The New York Times)
Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it's a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we've learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.
Tokyo dreaming (guardian.co.uk)
A growing number of Japanese workers can no longer afford homes of their own. But you won't find them sleeping on the streets, says Justin McCurry. For many of them, 24-hour internet cafes have become a refuge.
A free hand (guardian.co.uk)
After almost 60 years in the business, Quentin Blake is one of Britain's - perhaps the world's - best-loved illustrators. He tells Stuart Jeffries about working with Roald Dahl, the teacher who got him started, and the hardest job he ever had to do.
Richard Roeper: Shove looks like old-school roughhousing (suntimes.com)
We used to call it "checking him into the boards." When we were around junior high age and we'd be roughhousing, you'd give a buddy a friendly push into the lockers and say, in a hockey announcer's voice: "And he checks him into the boards!"
Joan Shim: Are you 'loving' your pet into an early grave? (cnn.com)
"We are seeing so many overweight dogs and cats, and it's sad because their weight levels are completely manageable with diet changes," says Dr. Kristine Yee, a veterinarian at California Animal Hospital in Los Angeles.
Purple Gene's review of the movie "Into the Wild".
Written, Produced and Directed by Sean Penn.
From the book "Into The Wild" (1996) written by Jon Krakauer.
Spicoli meets Grizzly Man
Sean Penn is an admirable human being….and still a punk! I can't help but see him as the clueless long haired slacker in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982). I also remember his coked out Daulton Lee in "The Falcon and the Snowman" (1985). Then the headline in the "National Enquirer" where he left his co-star and lover (Shanghai Surprise" (1986), Madonna "trussed up like a turkey" after a Thanksgiving spat. But Penn has taken on a strange biopic in "Into The Wild"….the true life store of Christopher McCandless…a young man who stubbornly and stupidly went into the Alaskan wilderness and starved to death.
What a Dumb Fuck
Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) grew up in Virginia and even at a young age was strong minded. His Mom, Billie (Marcia Gay Harden) and dad Walt (William Hurt - I would kill myself if William Hurt was my father) wanted Chris to be a lawyer…so he graduated from Emory University Phi Beta Kappa….but he gave his $24,000 savings away to charity and headed for Fairbanks, Alaska and then he wanted to "Walk into the Wild"…meaning the rugged Denali Wilderness…without proper training, equipment or back-up….and not unlike Timothy Treadwell ("Grizzly Man (2005) chose to defy everyone's advice (including many native Alaskans) and go it alone an unprepared.
Dead set on Suicide
Along his journey, Christopher meets Jim (Catherine Keener) and Rainey (Brian Dieker) two aged and amiable hippies living off the land. He also runs in to Wayne (Vince Vaughn), an inebriated but friendly farmer. Finally, before his fatal last stand, Chris befriends a very old and venerable man named Ron (Hal Holbrook) who tries unsuccessfully to dissuade from going it alone. Alas, against everyone's advice, McCandless puts on his backpack and heads north. He finds an abandoned school bus and this turns out to be the place where he finds god and pitifully starves to death.
Wise Man or a Fool?
Unfortunately for me, despite the sensational scenery, the stark soundtrack (Eddie Vetter - Pearl Jam) and the quite admirable acting and direction, I just couldn't help but keep mumbling to myself (as I did in "Grizzly Man") what an arrogant asshole…what an absolute idiot….and I found myself rooting for his demise ! I knew guys like this back in my free-love, far out and groovy hippie days…I didn't like guys like this then…and I still don't.
Purple Gene gives "Into The Wild" 6 pathetic soaring vultures out of 10 for being patently predictable yet profoundly empty in the end.
PS…Roger Ebert gave "Into The Wild" 4 stars out of 4 because he said when he was young he had an intrepid fool living next door to him who also disappeared and died on some foolhardy adventure….Irony or Honor ?
CBS starts the night with a 2-hour '60 Minutes', followed by a FRESH'Cold Case', then a FRESH'Shark'.
NBC fills the night with LIVE'Football Night In America', then pads the left coast with local crap.
ABC begins the night with a FRESH 2-hour 'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition', followed by a FRESH'Desperate Housewives', then a FRESH'Brothers & Sisters'.
The CW offers 'CW Now', 'Online Nation', a RERUN'Gossip Girl', and a RERUN'America's Next Top Model'.
Faux has a RERUN'King Of The Hill', followed by a RERUN'Simpsons', then a FRESH'Simpsons', followed by the SEASON PREMIERE'King Of The Hill', then a FRESH'Family Guy', followed by the SEASON PREMIERE'American Dad'.
MY has has 'Married...With Children', another 'Married With Children', then the movie 'The Suspect'.
AMC offers the movie 'Heartbreak Ridge', followed by the movie 'The Great Raid', then the movie 'Wyatt Earp'.
BBC -
[12:00 PM] Doctor Who - Ep 4 The Girl In The Fireplace;
[1:00 PM] Ultimate Force - Episode 1;
[2:00 PM] Top Gear - Episode 7;
[3:00 PM] Torchwood - Ep 2 Day One;
[4:00 PM] Torchwood - Ep 3 Ghost Machine;
[5:00 PM] Torchwood - Ep 4 Cyberwoman;
[6:00 PM] Wild at Heart - Episode 4;
[7:00 PM] Wild at Heart - Episode 5;
[8:00 PM] Ethan Frome;
[10:00 PM] Love Me, Love My Doll;
[11:00 PM] Ethan Frome;
[1:00 AM] Love Me, Love My Doll;
[2:00 AM] Wild at Heart - Episode 5;
[3:00 AM] Changing Rooms - Ep. 5 West Norwood;
[3:30 AM] Changing Rooms - Ep. 6 Cardington;
[4:00 AM] Bargain Hunt - Ep. 21 Carmarthen 27;
[4:30 AM] Bargain Hunt - Ep. 10 Detling 24;
[5:00 AM] Cash in the Attic - Ep. 13 Fry;
[5:30 AM] Cash in the Attic - Ep. 14 Davies;
[6:00 AM] BBC World News. (ALL TIMES EDT)
Bravo has all 'Law & Order: Criminal Intent' all night.
Comedy Central has the movie 'Office Space', followed by the movie 'Zoolander', 'South Park', and another 'South Park'.
FX has the movie 'The Day After Tomorrow', followed by the movie 'Hide And Seek', then 'Damages'.
History has 'Mega Disasters', 'Alaska: Dangerous Territory', and 'Ice Road Truckers'.
IFC -
[07:30 AM] Action Indies: Extraordinary Location Scouts - Presented by Land Rover;
[08:00 AM] The Henry Rollins Show #316: Russell Simmons/The Good, the Bad and The Queen;
[08:30 AM] The Henry Rollins Show #310: Iraq War Veterans/Bob Mould;
[09:00 AM] The Henry Rollins Show #311: Gene Simmons/Queens of The Stone Age;
[09:30 AM] The Henry Rollins Show #315: Christopher Walken/Shane Macgowan;
[10:00 AM] The Henry Rollins Show #313: Larry Flynt/Placebo;
[10:30 AM] The Henry Rollins Show #309: Don Cheadle/Rufus Wainwright;
[11:00 AM] Only the Strong Survive;
[12:40 PM] Dinner Rush;
[02:20 PM] Festival Express;
[03:50 PM] Mondays in the Sun;
[05:45 PM] Only the Strong Survive;
[07:25 PM] Festival Express;
[09:00 PM] Wonderland;
[10:45 PM] Sid and Nancy;
[12:45 AM] American Pimp;
[02:15 AM] Wonderland;
[04:05 AM] Action Indies: Extraordinary Location Scouts - Presented by Land Rover;
[04:35 AM] American Pimp. (ALL TIMES EDT)
SciFi has the movie 'Stephen King's Storm Of The Century', followed by more 'Stephen King's Storm Of The Century'.
Sundance -
[05:00 AM] Murder on a Sunday Morning;
[07:00 AM] The Galindez File;
[09:00 AM] Shakespeare Behind Bars;
[11:00 AM] In Short: Conflict;
[12:00 PM] Lorenzo's Oil;
[02:00 PM] Raving;
[03:00 PM] Cities;
[03:00 PM] Clear Cut: The Story of Philomath, Oregon;
[05:00 PM] Cities;
[05:00 PM] El Inmortal;
[06:00 PM] Household Saints;
[09:00 PM] Ray LaMontagne, The Zutons, Shawn Colvin & Nerina Pallot;
[10:00 PM] Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels;
[12:00 AM] Ab-Normal Beauty;
[02:00 AM] Episode 6;
[03:00 AM] Episode 5: The Collection;
[03:00 AM] Stars by Helmut Newton;
[04:00 AM] Gridlock'd. (ALL TIMES EDT)
Actress Jessica Lange and companion actor Sam Shepard attend the New York Film Festival opening night premiere of 'The Darjeeling Limited' at Avery Fisher Hall, Friday, Sept. 28, 2007 in New York.
Photo by Evan Agostini
Hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas put on a benefit concert in Mexico Friday night to raise money for local children who can't afford a decent education.
"It feels good to be able to help the youth because at one point in time we were teenagers that loved getting involved with the arts and there weren't really that many programs in East L.A., where I'm from," Will.i.am, the band's front man, said at a news conference before the show at Mexico City's National Auditorium.
"Being in Mexico is special to all of us, being from Southern California," singer Fergie added. "They call Will a "blaxican" because he grew up with all Mexican friends and family. Taboo, of course, being of Mexican heritage. My great-grandmother is from Guanajuato (Mexico), and (Apl.de.ap) just loves the Spanish women, the Mexican women."
Hosts Courteney Cox, left, and her husband David Arquette pose at a fundraising party, 'CelEBration on the Pier,' to benefit the EB Medical Research Foundation, on the Santa Monica, Calif., Pier Saturday, Sept. 29, 2007. EB, or Epidermolysis Bullosa, is a rare genetic disease where the skin blisters at the slightest touch.
Photo by Reed Saxon
Television's "Desperate Housewives" star James Denton lent his celebrity to Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards on Saturday as part of an effort to woo young voters.
Denton, who plays the sexy plumber Mike Delfino on ABC's popular show, joined Edwards' eldest daughter, Cate, on the campaign trail. They met with Edwards' student supporters and signed autographs at a homecoming tailgate party at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
Denton, wearing a casual sweater and jeans, drew dozens of revellers - mostly women - from the hot dog-eating, beer drinking and party games taking place in a packed parking lot. He patiently posed as women young to old, and the occasional male, got their picture taken beside the star.
He told reporters that he had supported the former North Carolina senator when Edwards ran for president in 2004 and became Senatpr John Kerry's running mate, but wanted to do more for the Democratic party this time.
A mural believed to have been lost nearly 50 years ago will be the centerpiece of a new exhibit marking 50 years since the death of Mexican artist Diego Rivera.
The exhibit, which opens Friday at Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes, features 170 works of art, including 23 murals and dozens of sketches, outlines and drawings done in Mexico and the United States.
It will also return to public viewing the 1954 mural "Glorious Victory," which was believed lost for decades before it turned up in 2000 in a storage room of a Moscow museum. The two-sided mural depicts U.S. abuses against the Guatemalan people on one side, and has an unfinished section on the other that art experts believe was to show exploitation of workers in U.S. factories.
Beyond its cluster of office towers, Tulsa is a city built close to the ground, a broad clash of neighborhoods you can tell apart by how the grass grows, bright and trim as a putting green in the richer sections, pale and shaggy in the poorer spots.
Tulsa native S.E. Hinton, a cult figure for 40 years since the publication of "The Outsiders," knows the difference between the wild and the well-kept lawn. Her million-selling book not only helped establish the young adult novel but remains a classic story of gangs at knife's edge.
Once a teen sensation who wrote her most famous book while still in high school, Hinton is now 59, a dry-witted, sad-eyed woman wearing jeans and sneakers for a recent interview. As a child, she dreamed of writing a book she wanted to read, a novel that told the truth about how kids think. Forty years later, a lot of young people still think she succeeded.
"I get letters from all over the world, saying, `It changed my life.' Who am I to change somebody's life? It's not me. It's in the book," she says. "If people want to find me, they can. They'll see a middle-aged woman wandering around the grocery store, looking to see what to buy for dinner."
Actresses Heather Graham (L) and Molly Shannon arrive at the New York Film Festival opening night premiere of "The Darjeeling Limited" in New York September 28, 2007.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
The broadcast networks have stepped up the stockpiling of scripted series in face of a potential writers strike after their union's contract expires at the end of next month.
ABC and NBC both handed out series orders Wednesday, three months ahead of the kickoff of the official pilot season in January.
ABC has given a six-episode order to the sci-fi drama "Section 8," while NBC has given the green light the drama "The Philanthropist."
That follows series orders by NBC to the anthology "Fear Itself" and by CBS to "Eleventh Hour," and a series commitment by Fox to "Queen B" -- all in the past week.
Actress Michelle Rodriguez violated probation again in a drunken driving case by failing to complete her community service and not following an alcohol education program, prosecutors said.
Rodriguez went to court Friday to answer to the latest claims by the city attorney's office, which said the former "Lost" actress submitted a document stating she performed community service on Sept. 25, 2006, but later admitted she was actually in New York City that day.
The document was required as part of the 30 days of community service Rodriguez was ordered to serve for violating probation in a 2003 drunken driving case, according to court papers filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
If she is found to have violated terms of her probation, Rodriguez could face between 477 to 537 days in county jail and a $2,000 fine.
A member of the gay community holds a leaflet that reads "Do you discriminate?", as residents look on during the the Gay Pride Parade in Montevideo September 28, 2007.
Photo by Andres Stapff
A Phoenix man who was expected to plead guilty for trying to extort more than $1 million from actor Tom Cruise for stolen wedding photos, was found dead in his home from an apparent suicide, police said on Saturday.
David Hans Schmidt, dubbed the "Sultan of Sleaze" for peddling celebrity porn, was discovered by officers responding to a call at his central Phoenix home on Friday afternoon, investigators said. He was 47.
Investigators discovered Schmidt after a monitoring device, which had been placed on him following his arrest, had not registered movement for "some time," said Sgt. Andy Hill, a Phoenix police spokesman.
Schmidt is best known for arranging deals to sell celebrity sex tapes and nude photos. His reported victims include celebrity socialite Paris Hilton, Olympic skater Tonya Harding and Gennifer Flowers, who claimed to have had an affair with former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
India's official entry to the Oscars in the best foreign film category has run into a legal tangle with the director of a film which came a close second during selection alleging a bias in a court complaint.
Bhavna Talwar, the director of "Dharm," or religion, said in her complaint in the Bombay High Court her film was dumped by the selectors in favor of superstar Amitabh Bachchan-starrer "Eklavya: The Royal Guard" because some members of the jury were known to the film's director and producer.
The chairman of the selection committee which nominates India's entry to the Oscars said the Film Federation of India (FFI), which appointed the committee, will reply to the court by the next date of hearing.
A member of Slovakian troupe Argolla + Antiagni perform during the International Youth Open Theatre festival in Macedonia's capital Skopje, late September 29, 2007.
Photo by Ognen Teofilovski
Fallen pop princess Britney Spears has been called many things this year as she has bounced in and out of rehab, attacked paparazzi with an umbrella and shaken her stuff on MTV's Video Music Awards.
No doubt, Spears has been a real piece of work. Now, she is more than 50 pieces of art at a Hollywood gallery.
Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbatos -- makers of the documentary "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" about former televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker Messner as well as other films exploring fame -- gathered paintings, sculpture and other work for "Just Britney," which opened at their gallery on Friday.
Pieces range from a portrait of the 25-year-old singer, "Gum Blond XLVIII" by Jason Kronenwald, made of chewed bubble gum, to the 6-foot by 10-foot (1.8 by 3.0-metre) "Snake Charmer" by Jamie Boling, based on a paparazzi photo of Britney exiting a car with her skirt hiked up and no panties on.
Japanese researchers have succeeded in producing see-through frogs, letting them observe organs, blood vessels and eggs under the skin without performing dissections.
"You can see through the skin how organs grow, how cancer starts and develops," said the lead researcher Masayuki Sumida, professor at the Institute for Amphibian Biology of state-run Hiroshima University.
"You can watch organs of the same frog over its entire life as you don't have to dissect it. The researcher can also observe how toxins affect bones, livers and other organs at lower costs," he told AFP.
Sumida said his team, which announced the research last week at an academic conference, had created the first transparent four-legged creature, although some small fish are also see-through.
Chinese Leopard cubs (Panthera pardus japonensis) peer out off a basket during a name giving ceremony at the 'Tierpark Hagenbeck' zoo in Hamburg September 28, 2007. The two female cubs Li Mei and Jiao and their brother Tschingis where born at the Zoo on August 24, 2007.
Photo by Christian Charisius
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