Island Passage

'Race to Witch Mountain' Theatrical Trailer @ Yahoo! Video

This week marks the kickoff of the Holiday shopping season, so from the wonderful Unplug the Christmas Machine : The Ten Hidden Gift-Giving Rules: Give a gift to everyone you expect to get a gift from. If someone gives you a gift unexpectedly, reciprocate that year. (Some people have pre-wrapped generic gifts for just this event.) When you add a name to your gift list, give that person a gift every year thereafter. The amount of money you spend on a gift determines how much you care about the recipient. Gifts exchanged between adults should be roughly equal in value. The presents that you give someone should be fairly consistent in value over the years. If you give a gift to a person in a certain category (for example, a co-worker or neighbor), give a gift of roughly equal value to everyone in that category. Women should give gifts to their close women friends. Men should not give gifts to their close men friends—unless those gifts are alcoholic. Whenever the above rules cause you any ...

Now that the Republican Party is looking for it's next standard bearer, we all have been compiling lists of what qualities the ideal candidate will have, and what priority we should impose on those qualities. Let me state that whoever leads the party and whoever becomes the candidate in 2012 must be, in the words of Joe Biden, "...articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking." She aces "bright," "clean," and "nice-looking;" but much as I love Governor Palin, she did not demonstrate "articulate" during the recent campaign. Why is this so important? I think that while we have seen that George W. Bush has been an effective administrator in protecting the country for the last 8 years, his inability to communicate his plans and directions ceded to his opponents the marketplace of ideas and opinions. So his accomplishments (no attacks on the order of 9/11, forstalling a depression in 2002, etc.) became not victories, but clubs used ...

Michael Moore told Larry King this : In an interview Wednesday with CNN's Larry King, Moore criticized the automakers for ignoring the desires of consumers, building instead bigger, more profitable cars as foreign automakers pursued both SUVs and more fuel-efficient sedans and compacts. Moore suggested that Congress demand change in exchange for the money, including a call to help rebuild mass transit in the country. "President-Elect Obama has to say to them, yes, we're going to use this money to save these jobs, but we're not going to build these gas-guzzling, unsafe vehicles any longer," Moore said. "We're going to put the companies into some sort of receivership and we, the government, are going to hold the reins on these companies. They're to build mass transit. They're to build hybrid cars. They're to build cars that use little or no gasoline." What would such a Congress-mandated car look like? Why, the Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Editio...

Daniel Henninger writes in his November 20th "Wonder Land" column about the link between Christmas (or the lack of it) and the current economic meltdown: What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward. Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas." It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious poli...

I love the sound of it. Oogedy-Boogedy! Oogedy-Boogedy! Oogedy-Boogedy! Oogedy-Boogedy! UPDATE: Oogedy-Boogedy!! MORE UPDATE: I was amused by the controversy over the idea that Christians should vote like we are told and drop the "Oogedy-Boogedy" stuff. As I pointed out last month : Many critics stand ready to mock Palin’s Christianity. Fair enough. Will they also mock Obama’s and Biden’s? Christianity is a miracle religion. Absent belief in the miraculous, there is nothing left of Christianity worth the name. I don't ask that my political allies believe in the miraculous, I just don't what them to expect me to deny it.

If you want a big, overbearing, orchestral movie score, John Williams is the man. I kid! I kid because I love his work. But not as much as this: UPDATE: Just to be clear, the video is of a chap lip-synching to an acappella quartet. The quartet is called "Moosebutter," they approved of this video. For more Moosebutter, check out www.moosebutter.com .

Back in mid-October, Ben Smith published an email that really shocked me . It was about focus group results from a test of a McCain ad: Yes, they believed the charges against Obama. Yes, they actually think he's too liberal, consorts with bad people and WON'T BE A GOOD PRESIDENT...but they STILL don't give a f***. They said right out, "He won't do anything better than McCain" but they're STILL voting for Obama. The two most unreal moments of my professional life of watching focus groups: 54 year-old white male, voted Kerry '04, Bush '00, Dole '96, hunter, NASCAR fan...hard for Obama said: "I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President." The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but s...

I have, in the last few weeks, enjoyed watching several of the Republicans who were in the Presidential campaign. Some have retreated to their tents to sulk, some to their caves to lick their wounds, and some have started laying foundation for future campaigns. The king of this last group is that Energizer Bunny of Conservative Ideas, Newt Gingrich. Newt writes books, founds think tanks, and turns up on the news talkers as frequently as most candidates inhale. But now Newt is being joined in his Long March by Huck. Mike Huckabee now has an interview show of Fox and had released a new book: Do The Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America. Time magazine reviews the book : Many conservative Christian leaders, who never backed Huckabee despite their holding very similar stances on social issues, are spared neither the rod nor the lash. Huckabee writes of Gary Bauer, the conservative Christian leader and former presidential candidate, as having an ...

So I am fooling around with the look of the blog. So far: meh. If anyone wants to point me to a cool template (minimalist, lots of white space, focusing on the posts rather than the graphic of Ratatouille in the heading), post the link in the comments.

HERE DEAD WE LIE Here dead we lie Because we did not choose To live and shame the land From which we sprung. Life, to be sure, Is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, And we were young. A E Housman

From Ace, this link to an article in the Seattle PI documenting the sudden fashionability of American flags in Seattle: With newfound patriotism, Seattleites want to wave the flag, hang it from their homes and stick it on their cars. "The thing that's kind of astounding to me is I never ever would have cared to own a flag," said Rosemary Garner, 42. "This is the first day in my life I actually feel this funny sense of pride about my country. It's a very foreign feeling, but it's a good one." "It's just a rare feeling to feel that type of, I don't know, national connection," said Noah Kriegsmann, a 33-year-old builder from West Seattle. He feels that Obama's win will help America's standing in the world, and he bought a flag to fly on his truck, though he admitted it felt strange to see the flag in his hand. "I have just historically felt shame for what the symbol of this country is internationally. Being in som...

A eye-opening, jaw-dropping, election-day article that atriculates a lot of what I've been thinking and feeling: On Polling: With polling, the collective delusion is the belief that the product of polling is the data. Remember, polls are a product that is sold like any other product. That stupid little chart that appears in the corner of every USA Today was not made for the purpose of 'research' and 'data'. It was made just to show a stupid little graph on the paper because USA Today knows that little graphs and charts 'sell' the paper more. Just because information is displayed in a chart or a graph does not make it 'scientific' or a real 'analysis'. But the product was to make the reader FEEL like it was and to sell more papers. The product of polls can and often are the readers. This became much more popular ever since polls became 'news items' themselves (before, polls were only supplements to news tories).... One thing that is ve...