TTCI Expanded

The Top 100 Conservative Idiots Special Edition. Link will revert to the normal TTCI shortly.

Screw You George Will

Molly Ivins has a nice little piece on why it's fashionable, but maliciously unfair, to call the French "cheese eating surrender monkeys" over their refusal to toe the line on Iraq.

George Will saw fit to include in his latest Newsweek column this joke: "How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris? No one knows, it's never been tried." That was certainly amusing. One million, four hundred thousand French soldiers were killed during World War I. As a result, there weren't many Frenchmen left to fight in World War II. Nevertheless, 100,000 French soldiers lost their lives trying to stop Hitler.

On behalf of every one of those 100,000 men, I would like to thank Mr. Will for his clever joke. They were out-manned, out-gunned, out-generaled and, above all, out-tanked. They got slaughtered, but they stood and they fought. Ha-ha, how funny. In the few places where they had tanks, they held splendidly.

Relying on the Maginot Line was one of the great military follies of modern history, but it does not reflect on the courage of those who died for France in 1940. For eighteen months after that execrable defeat, the United States continued to have cordial diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany.

I still like french fries.

The future of product placement is now.

Alias is at the vanguard of the new model of product placement -- turning segments of a show into outright commercials, thereby getting around Tivo-nation and channel flippers. Last night wasn't the first time a Ford Focus was prominently displayed in an episode; however, it is the first time I can recall dialogue like, "What is she driving?" "A Ford Focus." "What model?" "The FX50 [or whatever, I don't know Focus model numbers]." "What color?" "Uh ... blue. Why do you need to know that?" "Well, I was thinking about getting one..."

Surprisingly, as blatant and comical as it was to have the CIA's top spies fawning over the Focus (it's a long way from Bond's cars), I actually didn't mind it that much. I never once felt like Alias was art. It's pretty much the best network TV has to offer by way of utterly artless, mindless fun. Same as 24. I kinda like well done commercials, 30-second snippets of humor in service of capitalism. The one with guy who puts his dog on his head to get a beer, the dog that turns the A/C on, any commercial with a chimp or monkey that doesn't also feature Carrot Top, I can be amused by that. If shows like Alias are able to make their integrated commercials of the same quality as the better commericials, then fine. Drop the pretense altogether that the show is anything but a product to deliver the real product, consumers, to advertisers. It's almost refreshing honesty. Of course, when the same approach is taken with children who don't know how to differentiate between the show and the commercial and we end up with a nation of Coke-sipping, Levis-wearing zomboids we'll have only my complacency to blame.

The Station Fire

86 Dead (And Counting) at W. Warwick Club

Unbelievable. 86 and the Governor is saying workers can see more bodies inside, but can't get to them yet. The news here in Rhode Island has been about nothing else. When I got to work this morning they were saying 39 had died and the number has been creeping up steadily all day. It seems like it was only a few days ago something similar happened in Chicago ... makes me want to think twice before heading out to one of those overstuffed clubs again.

Thoughts That Cross My Mind During the Workday, Part One.

I have a feeling I could create the world's funniest joke if I could somehow distill chibi beer chan and the phrase "that's what I call my kung pow chicken" into one cohesive joke entity. I'm not talking about simply grafting the .wav file onto the picture, which would be pretty damn cool in and of itself, but if I could breed the two memes, I think the offspring would have devastating hilarity.