Seen in downtown Baltimore:
Part of an apartmentwarming package Leah found when she moved:
Seen on a wall ad above a urinal in a restaurant in Timonium:
Seen in a Pastablitz in Ellicott City (Contrast enhanced):
And now, here’s a picture which taken out of context, looks like a prominent political figure having an orgasm.
New York Times Collumnist David Brooks has said, “Obama‘s problem is he doesn‘t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee‘s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there.” That is, it’s just not fair to us working-class stiffs that Obama is getting away with seeming like a Normal Folksy Person, when he really wouldn’t be caught dead in a Family Style Restaurant.
Mr. Brooks: When trying to score cheap political points by insinuating that a candidate is too much of an elitist to go to a Good Old Fashioned Normal Working Class Person’s Favorite Family Restaurant, you may want to try harder not to reveal that you yourself are too much of an elitist to even know which Good Old Fashioned Normal Working Class Person’s Favorite Family Restaurant has a salad bar.
In other news, Obama has been accused of “plagiarism” because a speech he gave about the price of oil had a similar message to a speech given by Mario Cuomo back in the 1980s. I suspect the person responsible for making this claim is my sister’s computer science professor, who recently accused my sister of “the most blatant case of plagarism” she’d ever seen, because she quoted a source, giving proper credit and citation (The source in question was Wikipedia), because “Even if you cite the source and put it in quotation marks, you still have to change the wording.”
‘Sides, I don’t see President Bush being accused of plagarising President Clinton, or Clinton plagarising Bush, or Bush plagarising Regan, or Regan plagarising Carter, or Carter plagarising Ford. And yet, I’m fairly certain all of them delivered a speech whose message was “The state of our union is strong,” many of them several times.
Today’s IT can’t be safely scaled down to fit the width of this column of text, so go ahead and click on it to enlarge.
It seems that I have become invisible to telemarketers. In the worst way possible.
So close as I can tell, Hollywood doesn’t really like doing superhero movies. Back when I reviewed Transformers, and, for that matter, back when I reviewed Knight Rider, I pointed out that the Transformers and KITT both came off more as props than as characters. What Hollywood is interested in is characters and situations, and superheroism is really just a category of special effect. Consider a movie about two former lovers who meet again in the midst of dangerous circumstances, and there’s a corporate sellout who is antagonistic. This movie has special effects. Now, if those special effects are a dude in tights flying, the movie is Superman Returns. If the effects are a tornado, it’s Twister. Okay, that’s not the best example, but you get the idea. Far as Hollywood is concerned, superheroism isn’t what the story is about; it’s just a framing device for the special effects. (Now, this can be contrasted with the martial arts genre, as I’ve also seen The Forbidden Kingdom recently. There’s a movie where being capable of chi-magic is not simply a prop, but is really what the story is all about. Now, I thought it felt a bit silly, but maybe that’s just because I’ve been trained by Hollywood) They don’t want you to think in terms of “It’s a movie about a giant monster” or “It’s a movie about giant robots” or “It’s a show about a talking car.” Cloverfield was a movie about young, frightened people surviving a disaster in New York, and it had a giant monster in it. Transformers is a movie about a dorky boy and a hot girl surviving a disaster in middle America, and it has giant robots in it. Knight Rider is a story about a reckless womanizer learning responsibility while protecting a former lover from evil mercenaries, and it’s got a talking car in it.
Iron Man is a story about a hard-drinking, womanizing arms-manufacturer, who is forced to come to terms with the fact that there are indeed negative repercussions to selling dearly weapons after he is gravely wounded. And it’s got a flying armored war-suit in it.
Iron Man
2008, Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges
Anyway, hit the jump for the spoilers, but even if you don’t, if you’ve somehow managed to avoid knowing this: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STAY UNTIL THE END OF THE CREDITS.