Two exciting stories over the weekend

Greetings all, sit and listen to thrilling accounts of neat events you may have missed over the weekend:

First off, thousands of Edmonton Oiler fans packed Rexall Place to forget about the team's recent woes in the regular season to catch the annual Skills Competition. I didn't go, but I heard it was pretty entertaining. There was a bit of an odd moment though, and I'm seeing it didn't get well reported in the media, but everybody I know was talking about it: an old man (probably suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's) actually managed to accidentally wander onto the ice during the Fastest Skate competition. It took the Oilers players sixteen minutes to catch him.

Secondly, and this is admittedly a long way from Edmonton, but there was a bit of a tense moment in a Chicago jury selection process when a woman tried to appeal to be removed from jury duty for reasons of bias. "Your Honor," she told the [American spelling] judge, "I'm prejudiced against the defendant: I can't consider myself a neutral open-minded arbiter of the case! As soon as I looked at him and saw that evil sneer and those beady eyes, I just knew he had to be guilty." The judge however, would have none of it: "sit down ma'am, you aren't going to be excused: that's the President."

Responsibility

Found in an old article about Silvio Berlusconi:

All eyes are on Gianfranco Fini, the suave former neo-Fascist and co-founder of the ruling People of Liberty party who, as Speaker of the Lower House, has quietly carved out a reputation for responsible and sober leadership.

Suave neo-fascists are the responsible ones? How does Italy define irresponsible?

Oh yeah, I forgot.

For @dominianpundit

(click the link)

Avatarded

I have reluctantly gone to see Avatar, in much the same way that I reluctantly went to see Cameron's previous epic smash Titanic. Only this time it wasn't in the company of two girls, but rather two guys. Still, it beat watching Holmes and crying endlessly to myself.

I haven't written much about Avatar besides promoting the title of this post as "new word of 2010". Basically the film is trying to tell you that capitalism and white people are evil: its a $300 million strawman that plays out like a bad sci-fi version of Dances With Wolves (which was similarly terrible).

Fortunately there is one reason to see Avatar: you're pissing off the hell out of this faggot.

More earthquake news...

Dominican Republic was hit with an earthquake soon after Haiti.

Not as much destruction though, because its a richer and more modern country. Wait, how does that work?

Putting a serious dent into my Dominican Republic travel plans

Fierce Earthquake Rocks Haiti:

Haiti's strongest earthquake in more than two centuries rocked the Caribbean nation on Tuesday, causing dozens of buildings to collapse and raising fears that many people have died, officials and witnesses said.

Witnesses reported seeing dead bodies lying on the street and hearing cries for help in the impoverished and crowded capital of Port-au-Prince, located just 10 miles northwest of the earthquake's epicenter, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Yes, Minister quotes

I agree with the commenters, the quotes do lose something out of context. On the other hand, this is a long run of the highly underrated theme song to "Open Government", the debut episode of the series.

God-hating Mohammed, Prophet of Satan, founder of the fake Muslim religion sure ain't going to like this...

Hillbuzz tackles the derka-derka crowd's terrorism issues and comes up with a solution: blow up every mosque on the planet...

But, we’ve been told that in Islam, it’s taught their sacred sites will never be destroyed, because Allah loves them all so much. Taking out their mosques and the shrines in Mecca and Medina should definitely rattle them – since their Koran swears to them this would never happen. So, once it happens, the Koran will be proved fallible. If the Koran’s wrong about one thing, even the most zealous of these murderers has to see the Koran could be wrong about other things too — and those promises of scores of virgins as rewards for martyrdom might not be true either.

Probably the biggest impediment to the plan is that going into these mosques and detonating them would likely require the task of suicide bombers...and lets be serious, the same well-adjusted normal people who would be in favour of this plan aren't really so mad at the universe that they'd volunteer to be the one to go and do it. The trouble with fighting a death cult is that by definition the people fighting it aren't interested in dying.

Still, reading the post over reminds me a lot of Sir Humphrey Appleby's comments to Sir Arnold about Minister Hacker's proposal to require civil servants to reduce their budgets by 5% in order to qualify for the Honours List:

"Well I can't find any effective arguments against it."

...

"It's intolerable, but, um, irresistible."

Greatest Film Directors I've never seen

(as compiled from this site and this site)

Alfred Hitchcock
John Cassavetes
D.W. Griffith
Billy Wilder
Orson Welles
Jean Renoir
Jean-Luc Godard
Francis Ford Coppola
John Ford
Howard Hawks
Francois Truffaut
Sergei Eisenstein
Buster Keaton
Charlie Chaplin
Fritz Lang
Federico Fellini
John Huston
Woody Allen
Martin Scorsese
Akira Kurosawa
Luis Bunuel
Ernst Lubitsch
Ingmar Bergman
David Lynch
Joel and Ethan Coen
Terrence Malick
Abbas Kiarostami
Errol Morris
Hayao Miyazaki
David Cronenberg
Terence Davies
Lukas Moodysson
Lynne Ramsay
Bela Tarr
Wong Kar-wai
Pedro Almodovar
Todd Haynes
Quentin Tarantino
Tsai Ming-Liang
Aki Kaurismaki
Michael Winterbottom
Thomas Anderson
Michael Haneke
Walter Salles
Alexander Payne
Aleksandr Sokurov
Ang Lee
Michael Moore
Takeshi Kitano
Gaspar Noé
Pavel Pawlikowski
David O Russell
Samira Makhmalbaf
Lars von Trier
Takashi Miike
Gus Van Sant

And no, I still don't want to go see Welcome to Sarajevo.