The Dark Knight: The Jokers Gone Wild

I can't remember the last time I bought a movie ticket. One of the benefits of having a website that gets a lot of visitors is sometimes you get freebies. Like I've got a season pass to Fossil Rim Wildlife Center that I've never used.

Yesterday I got 2 tickets to the IMAX Theater in Dallas (Cinemark 17, LBJ Freeway at Webb Chapel Road), along with a big bucket of popcorn and 2 large Cokes.

The new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, is IMAX worthy. If you can, see it in an IMAX venue.

Before I say anything else about The Dark Knight, let me get this out of the way. Heath Ledger will win this year's Best Actor Academy Award. There, you heard it here first. Ledger's Joker is no Jack Nicholson. The Dark Knight Joker is a total psychopath, who calls himself an agent of chaos. Basically this Joker is a terrorist.

This Batman movie has a very strong post 9/11 angst about it. With the Joker being a sort of one man Al-Qaeda. At one point the Joker broadcasts video of himself performing an execution, ala those we've seen on our TVs courtesy of Muslim extremists.

There is a lot of very graphic violence in The Dark Knight. At one point the Joker rams a pencil into a victim's head. I don't know how this movie managed to be rated PG-13 rather than R.

The Dark Knight runs around 2 and 1/2 hours. Unlike many overly long movies, The Dark Knight did not wear out its welcome. I can not remember the last time I saw a movie this good.

I predict, along with Heath Ledger's Oscar for his pathetic, scary, creepy, funny psychopathic Joker, that The Dark Knight will be the biggest Hollywood Blockbuster in a long long long time and probably win an oodle of Academy Awards in addition to Heath Ledger's.

A Dark Knight Movie Trailer....with the Joker.....UPDATE: The video may no longer work. YouTube seems to be deleting all the Dark Knight Batman movie trailer videos.

Nuke The Muslim World & The Obama New Yorker Cover

A guy from Arlington, that's a town in Texas that abuses the perfectly fine concept of using the power of eminent domain to gain private property for the public good, like football stadiums. Like I was saying, this guy in Arlington, Edward Dufilho, sent a letter to the editor of Fort Worth's biggest, yet shrinking newspaper, the Star-Telegram.

Mr. Dufilho seems to have taken some umbrage over columnist Cal Thomas's repetitive yapping about the dire danger posed by the Muslim world and its terrorists. Apparently Mr. Thomas has no memory of worse, more dangerous times, you know, like World War II, for instance.

So, the guy from Arlington suggested that if the situation is as dire as Cal Thomas paints it, then the only sane thing for America to do is to unleash our nukes on the Muslim world and be done with them once and for all.

Now, there predictably will be those you did not get the point this Arlington guy was making and who will think he was actually suggesting launching nukes against the Muslim world, just like there were a disturbingly large number of people who did not get who was really being made fun of in that infamous New Yorker cover that has Obama in a turban and his wife packing heat and an Angela Davis doo, while burning the American flag and rapping knuckles.

There really are those out there, I've heard them on the radio, who think Obama is a secret agent, planted years ago, a Muslim, a hater of America. They're too stupid to realize you don't give your Manchurian Candidate a middle name that matches a Middle East dictator's name. Oh, I guess when Obama was named they couldn't have known, then, that a dictator named Hussein would take over Iraq. Regardless, those evil plotters wouldn't have named him Barack Hussein Obama, they would have given him a totally All-American name, like George Washington Lincoln.

I know a scary ignoramus who came here from an island in the Atlantic called Puerto Rico. A few weeks ago she asked me, as if she was telling me an important secret, if I knew Obama was a socco ( not sure how to spell that, it's Spanish ). Socco? Yes, half white, half black, she said. Yes, I said, I learned that years ago, along with the rest of America and America's made it pretty clear we don't care. Later she was shocked to learn John McCain had been a prisoner of war.

Below is the letter berating Cal Thomas......

Quit pulling your punches, Cal

I don’t know why Cal Thomas bothers to write new columns, because the subject is always the same.

We’re in a clash of civilizations! Us or them! Smoking gun! Mushroom cloud! Fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here, or some wingnut talking point.

If this is the death struggle Thomas is convinced it is, why the kid gloves?

All of his rants can be summed up in one word: extermination. Heck, boy. All we have to do is re-target the missiles, get somebody to attack an aircraft carrier and let fly!

I figure that just by ourselves we have more than enough nukes to incinerate every Muslim population center on the planet. The strain on our military would then be greatly reduced, as the only mission after the annihilation of more than 2 billion people would be just hunting down the survivors.

Do you think they’d see the light and become Christians rather than be massacred? You know we can’t trust ’em. Just ask the Spanish about all those Jews who “converted” just to save their skins, but practiced their religion in secret.

No, the only Christian thing to do is to wipe out every last man, woman and child who turns toward Mecca to worship. Of course, Mecca will no longer exist.

I know, I know. There are worries about the Russians and the Chinese, but I think if we divide the oil equally, they’ll come on board. We can count on them to take care of their own Muslim populations. You know what I mean.

As for Europe, I think we can agree it hasn’t been relevant for 50 years, so we, the Russians and the Chinese can offer them a choice: Deal with the Muslim population, or go back to burning coal.

Problem solved! I’m glad it’s finally out there, and boy howdy, do I feel better! I know there’s the small problem of rendering uninhabitable a significant portion of the planet, but that’s the beauty of the marketplace. I see vast opportunities in cleaning up the aftermath. Put in a good word for me on one of those no-bid contracts, won’t you?

— Edward Dufilho, Arlington

Voices From The Third Reich & Kirkland, Washington

A few weeks ago I blogged about a book I'd just finished, "Voices From The Third Reich," an oral history from survivors of the Hitler years.

This morning I was reading the Seattle P-I and saw the headline "In Kirkland, Nazi case brings up painful past." The story was yet another voice from the Third Reich.

The man you see in the photo is named Sreten Nesic. He was listening to the radio when he heard that a Bellevue man, Peter Egner, had been identified by the Justice Department as a member of a Nazi killing unit in Yugoslavia, created by the Nazis to arrest and execute Jews, Gypsies and Serbian resistance members.

The Yugoslav Nazi killing unit murdered around 17,000 people. The Nazi from Bellevue is accused of participating in the murder of 11,164. I've no idea how they came up with this precise number.

The man from Kirkland was 1 year old, living with his mom and dad in a village outside Belgrade, when his dad was arrested and taken to a concentration camp. His dad was murdered about a year later. His mother died of pneumonia a short time later, pneumonia contracted from traveling in the bitter cold, repeatedly bringing money to bribe officials to try and get her husband released.

When the money ran out, Nesic's dad was forced to dig his own grave. And then shot and killed. Nesic knows this because a second cousin, who survived the Nazis, was in the concentration camp and helped bury his father.

So, when Nesic heard on the radio that a Nazi member of the Yugoslav Death Unit, that had murdered his dad, was living in the town next to his, well, it brought back all the painful memories. And he got rightfully, righteously mad.

The Bellevue Nazi is now 86. The Nazi was living in an assisted living facility. Nesic is now 67. His dad was 25 when the Nazis arrested him. 26 when the Nazis murdered him.

You can read the entire Seattle P-I article here.

Chesapeake Facts May Not Be Ones We Need

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has one reporter who has never managed to annoy me, with either misinformation or by writing something ridiculous or by acting like a shill for the Chamber of Commerce and Fort Worth's Ruling Junta.

In other words there's this guy who writes for that paper, named Mitchell Schnurman, who rather pointedly takes on some of the little issues that many of us in the Fort Worth zone make note of, but which are not much examined by the local paper of record.

A couple weeks ago, Schnurman was appalled, as were many, by the bizarre turn of events that had Tarrant County College abandoning their ambitious, likely to have been quite an impressive addition to Fort Worth, that being a new college on the banks of the Trinity River, to buy Radio Shack's Corporate Headquarters, which Radio Shack built just a few years ago. This boondoggle is costing the taxpayers a lot of money.

In today's Star-Telegram, Schnurman takes on the Chesapeake Energy/Tracy Rowlett controversy. Chesapeake Energy has many people here shaking their heads in bewilderment at their bizarre ad campaign.

Here's a blurb of what Schnurman had to say....

"Capitalism is driven by self-interest, even in journalism, but is Chesapeake’s goal to enlighten the public or keep the gas flowing?

It may hope to accomplish both, but no one should doubt Job No. 1 in North Texas. Chesapeake is making billions by pumping natural gas, not producing news shows.

Rowlett says the Barnett Shale is the biggest story since the Stockyards a century ago. The natural gas play is boosting the local economy in a significant way and is an important piece of the energy puzzle. I’ll even buy Chesapeake’s argument that drilling is worth the "short-term inconveniences" of noise, construction and truck traffic (although that’s easy for me to say because no pipelines are being buried in my yard)."

Click here to read the entire column.

Schnurman's honest, opinionated, factual style is more what one would usually find in FW Weekly, than the Star-Telegram. Maybe none of the powers that be at the Star-Telegram and the Ruling Junta get around to reading what he writes, maybe that's how he is getting away with telling the truth...

Bravo's Project Runway 5 & CBS's Big Brother 10

I tried to make it all the way through the first episode of the new season of Project Runway, really I did. I made it as far as the point where the Top 3 and Bottom 3 were singled out.

But, unfortunately, Project Runway had not hooked me and I did not care who won that episode or who got the boot. So, I bailed. By this morning I don't even remember a single one of the dressmakers. Maybe I was too tired to be watching TV. I had had a long day of working at the computer and staring at a monitor.

I think what non-plussed me about this Project Runway show is that it is about making dresses, near as I can tell. I know for a fact I will live my entire life without ever making a dress. Or caring how one is made. Or knowing if one is fashionable. One of the reasons I find a similar Bravo show, Top Chef, interesting, is that it is about cooking food.

Cooking food. And eating it is something I actually do. So, at times I actually learn something from watching Top Chef.

But watching men and women, or semblances thereof, make dresses, was like watching someone knit. The only minor entertaining part of it was how goofy the dresses were and what they were made of.

The challenge was the group of dressmakers were let loose in a grocery store to find something to make a dress out of.

One of the dressmakers made his dress out of blue plastic cups. The judges liked that one. Another dressmaker made her dress out of black garbage bags. The judges didn't like that one. Only those two were retained in my memory.

Another thing I do remember is the Guest Judge. His name is Austin Scarlett. He was the winner from a previous season of Project Runway. I found him sort of scary. That's him in the photo. Actually I'm not totally certain he's a him, I guess I'm assuming that due to the "Austin" name.

Now, why did I mention Big Brother 10 in the title to this blog? Well, some cruel person calling himself "dvrgasm" commented on what I said about Big Brother, telling me...

"Sorry to tempt you, but it has just gotten started and it is already soooooo good. You are missing out..."

Well, despite the temptation I have continued, and, as God is my witness, will continue to resist the temptation to watch Big Brother.

DaFoWo Show & The Big Cheese Rodent Factory

Below is this week's DaFoWo Show. A Fort Worth Star-Telegram production. The show uses the Big Cheese Rodent Factory stinking story as humor fodder. My one longtime reader may remember me blogging about this a few weeks ago. There is also an amusing bit about Exorcism. DaFoWo had to use subtitles so we could understand one of the Texans being interviewed.

Chesapeake Energy: In The Pipeline---Fresh News From Dirty Ol' Town

Don Young, also known as the chief rouser of the group known as the Eastside Rabblerousers has taken to calling Fort Worth "Dirty ol' Town." I don't know if this is a reference to dirty politics, dirty gas drilling, dirty air, or what. Maybe it's a combo of all three. And more.

So, I just got email from Don Young, up to his usual Rabblerousing Duties. The subject line of the email was the same as the title of this posting, minus the Chesapeake Energy part.

The email contained several links to websites and blogs with articles about recent Chesapeake Energy and other gas driller's shenanigans and Monday night's protest in Fort Worth.

Here's a blurb from the West and Clear article about the Monday night Chesapeake Energy event at which Fort Worth protesters tried to be heard....

"The whole thing had this tense, antiseptic quality. Everyone seemed nervous and concerned about staying on message. Why? Why was everyone gripping it so tight?"

Read the entire West and Clear take on what sounded like a bizarre Chesapeake Energy event on Monday.

The July 9, 2008 edition of FW Weekly, Fort Worth's real newspaper, had an interesting article about the Chesapeake Energy/Tommy Lee Jones/Tracy Rowlett/Shale.TV controversies.

Here's the first paragraph from the FW Weekly article....

"For the past few months, North Texans have been listening to Oscar-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones spew about the wonders of the Barnett Shale natural gas drilling. Come fall, we might be hearing about similar wonders from beloved North Texas newsman Tracy Rowlett. Or, we might be hearing about the darker sides of the huge drilling boom."

Read the rest of the FW Weekly article here.

Another FW weekly blurb in their Blotch section, took on Tommy Lee Jones and his two-faced hypocrisy. Here's a Blurb from Blotch...

"...he stares at the camera and says with all the charm of a manic depressive serial killer, “Let’s get behind the Barnett Shale.” He spoke a different tune during a Parade magazine interview in 2006 when he described his high school summers spent working on oil rigs as “dirty, noisy, and dangerous.”

Read the rest of the Blotch here.

Meanwhile, the community newspaper of the community I sort of live in, Meadowbrook Today, had its own detailed take on Monday's Chesapeake Energy protests. Here's the blurb...

"Residents crowded into the Sycamore Community Center with questions for Chesapeake/Texas Midstream but the answers they received did not please all the attendees."

Click here to read all the Meadowbrook Today info about the battles with Chesapeake Energy and pipelines running through yards.

And then Wise County's wisest, and might I be a sexist pig and add, most beautiful Blogger, Texas Sharon, aka Bluedaze, blogged in her usual sharply pointed and well-aimed manner at that shooting fish in a barrel target known as Chesapeake Energy. Here's a Bluedaze blurb...

"The comments indicate that the Barnett Shale Honeymoon is over in Fort Worth. Residents are not thrilled with Tommy Lee Jones telling them to "Get Behind the Shale" or the propaganda thrown at them 24/7 from Chesapeake."

Read the rest of what Bluedaze had to say about Chesapeake Energy in her blog here.

Meanwhile, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, known to many as being the mouthpiece for Fort Worth's Ruling Junta, does not report much about Fort Worth's citizen's growing discontent over being the first urban zone in America to experiment with drilling thousands of gas holes and running hundreds of miles of gas pipes, piping odorless gas inside a city limits, under people's yards.

However, today the Star-Telegram did advise us that ozone levels are high and to stay inside if you have allergy or respiratory problems. I won't bother with a blurb or a link to the Star-Telegram.

Project Runway Tonight On Bravo

Awhile back I realized my favorite TV shows are all on Bravo. Top Chef and Flipping Out and Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List are my favorites. Top Chef is about cooking. Flipping Out is about an over the top guy with a severe case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, flipping expensive houses in Southern California. Kathy Griffin's show is about, well, Kathy Griffin. She's a funny vulgarian with a hilarious elderly mother.

Tonight is the first episode of Bravo's Project Runway's 5th season. I did not know til reading it this morning, in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, that Project Runway was the first of what has become a Bravo TV staple, that being several shows using the same formula, those being the aforementioned Project Runway and Top Chef, and also Sheer Genius.

Each of these shows starts with a short competition, the person who wins that usually wins immunity from being kicked off the show or some other advantage. After that the chefs, haircutters or clothesmakers get their big task for that week's episode. That's the interesting part, watching all the drama and comedy as they rush to get their tasks done. Then, usually, a bottom 3 is singled out, along with a top 3. One gets the boot, one gets the win.

I think there is a 4th Bravo show that follows this formula, but I can't remember what it is.

I've not watched Project Runway before, except for short bits during lunch. Watching weird people with serious personality disorders make clothes didn't seem very interesting to me, but that's what I thought about the haircutting Sheer Genius show and it turned out to be very funny. Tacoma Dumpster Diva, Lulu, claims Project Runway is one of her won't miss it shows. Lulu usually has good taste, though that has come into question of late, what with her declaration that the Golden Corral is her all time favorite buffet.

So, maybe I'll watch Project Runway tonight.

Heidi Klum is the host. She's a model. She is watchable, but she is paired with a co-host named Tim Gunn. He seems to be a bit of an odd duck with an unnatural interest in clothes. It'd be interesting to see Tim Gunn paired up with Flipping Out's Jeff Lewis.

All these type Bravo shows have guest judges. Project Runway has some sorta odd ones. Like Apolo Ohno and RuPaul and Sandra Bernhard. Brooke Shields I get, but an ice skater, a drag queen and Sandra Bernhard? I don't mean to be rude, she may be funny, but she is sort of hard on the eyes. Is she known for dressing well?

But, aside from any other reason I may have to watch Project Runway, the primary reason was provided by this morning's Star-Telegram, with its latest Texas connection to a tv show.

Here's the quote---

"There's only one Texan in it to win it. He's 28 year old Jerell of Houston, though he now lives in L.A., according to the network. Remember, it was Houstonian Chloe Dao who won PR's big prize on season two. Texas represent!"

Geez, that is so pathetic. Why do I keep reading this idiotic paper? Let alone pay for the privilege.

The Seven Regions Of Texas

This Blogspot Blogger thing has a serious malfunction this morning, in that it goofs up when I try to upload an image.

Well. The image that I can not upload is a map of Texas divided into 7 regions. Why would I want to show such a thing?

Well. Yesterday I finished the first stage in a huge expansion of my Eyes on Texas website. I've been sort of stuck with my Eyes, for the most part, only looking at the zone of Texas I primarily roam in, with short forays to Houston and Galveston and Amarillo and a few other places.

Some of the Regions of Texas are obvious, like the Gulf Coast Region. Others not so easy to see why its a special region.

The aforementioned Amarillo is in the Panhandle Plains Region. It's called that, I guess, because that rectangular shaped part of Texas that sticks up into Oklahoma and New Mexico sort of looks like the handle of pan.

Some of the Regions of Texas are less obvious, like where I live, in the D/FW Metroplex, this region is called Prairie & Lakes. Texas has only one natural lake, that being Caddo Lake. But Caddo Lake is not in the Prairie & Lakes Region.

To the east of my location there are a lot of pine trees, so it is called the Piney Woods Region. Sometimes this is called East Texas. The aforementioned only natural lake in Texas, Caddo Lake, is in the Piney Woods Region, not the Lakes Region.

The center of Texas, where Austin is, is called Hill Country, for obvious reasons, because, well, it is hilly down there.

Big Bend Country is sometimes called West Texas. It's called Big Bend Country because this is where Big Bend National Park is located. El Paso is also in Big Bend Country.

The South Texas Plains Region is where San Antonio is, and Laredo, on the Mexican border.

Texas is divided up into regions like this, I think, to make it easier to describe the state for tourism purposes. Looking at the map I realize I've actually been to every region of Texas, but just barely into the South Texas Plains Region, that being a visit to San Antonio at the north end of that region.

I need to explore Texas in more detail.

North Cascades Highway With The New York Times

A fellow Washington Exile living in Texas is always sending me things he thinks I'll find interesting that he finds in the New York Times. Usually I don't find these things at all interesting. This afternoon was an exception to the rule.

A New York Times correspondent, William Yardley, took a photographer, named Stuart Iselt, with him and traveled the North Cascades Highway, in Washington, from Sedro Woolley on the west side, to Twisp on the east. That is a screen shot, above, of the article in today's NY Times.

The North Cascades Highway opened in 1972. A northern pass across the Cascades had been in the planning for years. It was a major engineering feat. It connected the west side with an isolated part of Eastern Washington. This changed both sides. My side of the mountains, the west side, in the Skagit Valley, sort of boomed in the following years. My old hometown of Burlington got a huge regional mall, called, appropriately, The Cascade Mall, the design sort of replicating Cascade Mountain peaks, in sort of the same way Denver's new airport's look is inspired by the Rockies.

The New York Time's article consists of a very well done interactive map. Go here and start the tour. Click next to go to the next stop. At each stop there is a video that gives you a good idea of what that stop is like. The first stop on the tour is Sedro Woolley. Sedro Woolley is where my longtime fun friend, Tacomaite, Lulu's first husband grew up. I'll see Lulu in a few days. If I'm lucky my contact with her first husband will be limited. Like we who lived in the Skagit Valley often said, those Sedro sorts are difficult. Sedro Woolley is known for its Tarheels. I think that means hillbillies from North Carolina, but I'm not sure.

I remember going over North Cascades Pass the September before I moved to Texas. I doubt I will get that far north when I'm up in Tacoma for a month in about 5 days. But you never know.