Edwards has regained second place. At which no sane person
should be surprised.
Thompson has moved past Giuliani; sorry, Fred, but I think that's
what happens when you decide to go on Jay Leno's show, instead
of keepin' it real
with the rest of us in Durham, NH.
I took a jaunt onto campus this afternoon. In preparation for
tomorrow night's debate, Fox News has parked their satellite truck
in front of the Dairy
Bar, and their banners now embellish the front of the Whittemore Center Arena.
Not that it matters. Just wanted to use the word "embellish."
I enjoy (for a sufficiently elastic definition of "enjoy")
looking at Congressional voting record report cards. Shorn
of all political rhetoric, votes are (literally) what count.
But you might not want to bother with The
Top Ten Worst Tax Votes over at the Club for Growth, which ranks your
state's Senators and mine.
It doesn't show much other than straight party-line (and, I suspect,
largely symbolic) votes; only three
senators (Maine's Snowe and Collins, Nebraska's Nelson)
fell in the broad range
between 21% and 88%. One anomalous Republican (Voinovich of Ohio)
scored 10%. But unless you live in Ohio, Nebraska, or Maine, it doesn't
say much besides: Republicans pretty much vote like Republicans, Democrats like
Democrats.
John Tierney announces the results of his
Talk-to-the-Prime-Designer Contest.
I was recently reminded of one of my favorite poems
…
Space is deep
Space is dark
It's hard to find
A place to park
Burma Shave
By the way, if you'd like some humbling perspective on the above link:
Voyager 1 is
coming up on its 30-year anniversary tomorrow, launched on
September 5, 1977. It has been winding its way out of our solar system
since then. It's currently
(as far as we know) the most distant artificial object from
Earth, about 9.6 billion miles away, or 103.77 Astronomical
Units. That sounds like a long way, but works out to be merely
0.00164 light years, extremely negligible in comparison to
interstellar distances.
Something to remember when those candidates promise "universal" health
care: the universe is a real big place.
Back in 1984, we Americans were patting ourselves on the back for
avoiding the bleak fate predicted in George Orwell's 1984.
Apple even made a famous Super Bowl
ad about it; the biggest threat to our liberties
was overuse of IBM PCs and compatibles.
But in East Germany, they were living 1984. A corrupt and bankrupt state
spent enormous resources seeking out and punishing disloyalty in all
imaginable forms.
This movie revolves around three main characters caught up in that:
Georg Dreyman, a
regime-favored playwright; his girlfriend/actress Christa; and Wiesler, the Stasi
functionary assigned to dig up dirt on Dreyman.
I watch a lot of by-the-numbers movies; given the premise and the genre,
you can pretty much guess the broad outlines of how the movie will
proceed. I don't mind that much, because even predictable movies can be
enjoyable.
But The Lives of Others is completely detached from formula;
there are multiple unpredictable twists in plot and character. It's
impeccably acted and intelligently shot. It's a tad long at 137 minutes,
but it doesn't feel padded; everything's in place for a reason.
I won't go into further details; I recommend you see this movie knowing
as little as possible about what happens. As I type, it's number 70 on
IMDB's top-250 movies of all time; usually when a recent movie shows up
on that list, I scoff. In this case, however, I'm saying: "Yeah, maybe."
It received the Oscar for last year's best foreign movie.
I note that Ulrich Mühe, the actor who played Wiesler,
passed away last month. That's a shame.
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