Merry Christmas!

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels.  The winning council entry for the week was "Talking Past Each Other" by Right Planet, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Ben Stein's post "God Help Us" over at The American Spectator.  Congrats!

My review of Brave

I finally got a chance to see Brave on DVD, and I have to say it was one of the best Pixar movies I've ever seen...  not just in terms of the animation, which was of course spectacular, but all the attention put into getting the story and characters just right.  And what a cast of voice actors... you might recognize a few of them, but even the ones you don't are perfectly cast.  It was a well-crafted movie from top to bottom... I'd put it right up there with some of my other favorites like Up and The Incredibles.

Brave is about Merida, a very headstrong princess in ancient Scotland... her mother is constantly coaching her on how to act like a proper princess, but Merida would much rather be riding her horse through the forest practicing shots with her bow and arrows.  Her parents try to arrange for her to marry one of three potential suitors from rival clans, but Merida wants none of this.  After fighting with her mother about it, Merida races off into the forest and finds a witch who she convinces to do a spell for her, a spell that will change her fate... it does change her fate, but not in the way she expects, and she spends the rest of the movie trying to undo the awful curse that she inadvertently puts on her mother.

Billy Connolly provides the voice for Merida's father, King Fergus... Connolly's silliness comes through at times, but the movie hardly makes her father out to be a buffoon as so many movies unfortunately do with fathers these days.  You know right from the opening scene what kind of man Fergus is when he bravely defends his family from the demon bear Mor'du, losing one of his legs to the bear in the process.  And the conflict between Merida and her mother is not overblown to the point of making her mother (brilliantly voiced by Emma Thompson) into a one-dimensional character... you can see both sides of it.

I also enjoyed watching the movie again with commentary from the writers and directors... it was very interesting to hear them talking about all the various story ideas they tried out before settling on the scenes that made it into the final version of the movie.  I found myself really hoping these people get together again to work on something else very soon.

There was a short film included on the DVD that explained the backstory of how Mor'du became Mor'du, but all that information is in the movie anyway, so it seemed a bit unnecessary... but there was another short film included called La Luna, which was utterly adorable.  La Luna has nothing at all to do with Brave, but it's still worth watching if you get a chance to see it.

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels.  The winning council entry for the week was "Boehner and Cantor’s ‘War on Conservatives’ Causes Exodus of Conservatives from the GOP" by VA Right, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Arsen Ostrovsky's post "Rejection and terror: Same old Palestinian choices" over at The Commentator.  Congrats!

The End Is Nigh!

Lots of people are freaking out because December 21, 2012 is supposedly the date that corresponds to the end of the Mayan calendar... but if you take leap years into account the world should have already ended several months ago, so I don't really expect the world to end tomorrow.

That's not to say I'm optimistic, though... after all, Obama will still be president tomorrow, the media will still be full of lying assholes, and most of the voting public will still be stupid and/or crazy.

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels.  The winning council entry for the week was "‘Palestine’ – A Celebration At The Funeral" by Joshuapundit, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Victor Davis Hanson's post "Waiting for the GOP’s Populist Turn" over at Defining Ideas.   Congrats!

And the band played on...

I've had this song stuck in my head all day for some reason:

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels.  The winning council entry for the week was "The Next Islamist Domino – Jordan" by Joshuapundit, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Daniel Greenfield's post "War is the Answer" over at Sultan Knish.  Congrats!

Where have the 2004 voters gone?

I don't remember any Republican in 2004 telling me that it would be the end of America if John Kerry won the election.  2012 was another story... it seemed like I was being told every single day that it was the most important election in our nation's history.  Yet Mitt Romney still fell short of Bush's vote tally by about two million votes, despite the stakes being much higher this time than they were back in 2004.  Where the heck did all those Republican voters go?  How on earth does someone show up to vote against John Kerry but stays home when a president with a record worse than Jimmy Carter's is asking for a mulligan?

Republicans already have enough of an uphill battle winning over all the stupid and/or crazy voters out there... why make it any harder?  If you watched Romney wiping the floor with Obama in that first debate and came out of it thinking there was no difference between those two men, then you need to get your head examined (preferably by someone other than Dr. Ron Paul).

Conservatives need to stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, or we'll be out of power for the next 40 years.  I'm not saying we should nominate nothing but squishy moderates, I'm just saying we shouldn't be so quick to tar everyone with the RINO brush.  We can't let ourselves get as hysterical as some of the freaks on the other side, and then let that hysteria turn into apathy if we don't get our way on everything... we can't afford apathy in the face of political zealots who are quite happy to destroy the country so long as the GOP gets blamed for it.

Update:  Hmmm... Ramesh Ponnuru has an interesting take on the so-called "purge of conservatives" from committees in the House that has so many people calling for John Boehner's head.