The Coffeespy

The Scottish Right (pictured left) comments on Time Magazine’s Joe Klein.  Apparently, Klein believes leftist bloggers have become little more than bullies because the right-wing media has forced them to. 

Klein’s piece is an audacious piece of writing boldly categorized as analysis, almost as a dare (as in, I dare you to write this article and call it analysis). 

The Scottish Right, however, calls it another way:

I enjoyed Primary Colors immensely, but to argue that the anger and savage content on the left-wing side of the blogosphere is the responsibility of conservatives in the media and the Bush Administration is nothing short of absurd. 

Well, I think even the Scottish Right has missed a very important point.  The Coffeespy isn’t a lefty blog and we take our bullying here very seriously.  In fact, if we don’t bully at least one person each week, we’ve missed our organizational benchmark.  I take exception to Mr. Klein completely ignoring the fact that lefty blogs, while bullies, aren’t even good at it!  Anyone can call someone a neanderthal or racist swine or make Nazi references.  That’s child’s play.  Now linking the Creation Museum with Conan the Pimp?  That’s freaking art!

This week, with the Superhero Sidekick ‘08 features, we’ve bullied a total of four politicians, two from each of the major parties.  If you count Captain America’s explosive vomiting, we’ve also bullied a Spanish language television network, too!  Next week, we plan to branch out and outright insult some third-party candidates.

So do your homework, Mr. Klein.  You haven’t seen bullying until you’ve seen Mike Rogers and Cobra Commander side by side in a name-calling extravaganza for the ages.

I feel I must prepare you.  It would be cruelly painful and potentially render me medically culpable if your brain explodes by what you are about to read, so here’s the warm-up:

Ok, so if you can wrap your mind around hyper-intelligence apes racing dinosaurs like they were down at the harness track, you may possibly be ready for the next item.

Brace yourselves.  The last man on earth yet to see Star Wars has finally done so!  While the very concept that someone has been such a shut-in for the past 30 years is somewhat unbelievable and provokes a profound feeling of pity at the necessary lack of social contact, the unpossible statements he makes leaves a man wheezing for the air of reality.  From Wired:

It was a movie made a long time ago, in a galaxy apparently lacking even one competent screenwriter. I’ve heard dialog that clanked before, but I haven’t seen writing this lame since Deep Throat (another flick with some pretty good special effects).

No wonder Guinness bailed out after the first movie. When you’ve played Col. Nicholson in Bridge on the River Kwai and Prince Feisal in Lawrence of Arabia, donning the threadbare cosset of a washed-up Jedi knight and swapping sophmoric banalities with third-rate actors must have been a severe shock to the system.

Sometimes, no paycheck is big enough.

Gah!  *Cough*Wheeze*  Can’t breathe…

That’s right, fearless reader!  It won’t be DC or Marvel comics bringing you the ultimate cross-over event of the year.  It won’t be Image or an indy, either.  Brace yourselves for the cross-over event of the century!

Humans meet dinosaurs, courtesy of the Creation Museum!  So says Instapundit:

THE CREATION MUSEUM: “Like most natural history museums, this one has exhibits showing dinosaurs roaming the earth. Except here, the giant reptiles share the forest with Adam and Eve. That, of course, is contradicted by science, but that’s the point of the $25 million Creation Museum rising fast in rural Kentucky.”

Hmm, I guess I’ve forgotten the part of Genesis where Adam kicks the ass of a bunch of velociraptors. It would have to be pre-apple, of course.

A preview of the Creation Museum’s exhibit can be found here. 

We know from previous experience what happens when beings are ripped out of their own time and dumped in another: glorious mayhem!  Evolution may have science behind it, but this creation stuff has summer blockbuster written all over it.  Think about it, when’s the last time you heard of a big draw movie titled “The Day the Tadpole Went Flipperless” or “Monkeys to Men II: Rise of the Neanderthal”?  NEVER, and with good reason.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes, however?  Big!  Jurassic Park?  Big!  Encino Man?  Well, was that really the premise’s fault or Paulie Shore’s? 

Anyway, it’s important to remember exactly what kind of bad can happen when you cross the timelines.  In addition to the obvious things like dinosaur conquerors:

We can also do a case study.  Take Conan for example.  Conan is hurled through time and space in order to do something worthwhile like take on the Superskrull:

This leads to the inevitable confrontation between himself and other superheroes:

When he realizes he’s out of his league, Conan decides to take out some street level crime:

Only to upgrade his arsenal and accept the culture:

Finally becoming that which he had grown to hate:

Now is this what you want to see?  It’s tragedy waiting to happen, I tell you.  If you doubt it, I give you the sworn testimony of two actual doctors:

Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.

Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?

Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.

There you have it.

Did you hear about Chris Newsom and Channon Christian on the news?  Likely not.  In fact, even if you were plugged into the local news, the only story I was able to find simply stated it was a carjacking, murder, and rape of a couple of college students.  From WBIR news:

Two of the suspects in the murders of a young Knoxville couple appeared in a Knoxville criminal courtroom Thursday morning.

It was the first local appearance for Vanessa Coleman, the only woman charged in the crimes.  Coleman faces a number of state charges related to the carjacking, rape, and murders of Channon Christian and Chris Newsom.

Well, these crimes happen all the time and probably don’t deserve national attention, right?

How about we look into the rest of the story.

The couple were taken with their car during a date.  They were driven to a residence and brought into the house by four men and a woman.  During the first day, Chris was beaten, repeatedly sodomized in front of Channon, stabbed, had his genitals removed, and finally shot in the head.  During this, he was forced to watch Channon get gang-raped repeatedly.

The body of Chris Newsome was rolled into some blankets, placed on some train tracks, and finally set on fire.  This occurred over about a 24 hour period.  The tale of Channon draws out over three days.

Repeatedly gang-raped and forced to watch the torture and murder of Chris, Channon was kept alive for three days in the residence.  In addition to the rapes, she was forced to drink bleach in an attempt to destroy evidence and had her breasts cut off.  Her captors then poured bleach into her open chest wounds for reasons unknown.  On the third day she died.  Her captors dismembered her for easier disposal and left her in their trash bins.

The only reason Channon was ever found was because her parents took to driving around Knoxville and located her car at the residence (Note: This information was read on-air by DC101 and I have been unable to verify from any other source).  They called police who arrived and discovered her body in the trash.  Four males and a female were ultimately arrested for this crime.

Channon and Chris were white.  Their five attackers were black.  Reverse those races and speculate how much media attention this would have received.  I’m fairly certain it would have been more than a four or five paragraph generalization of the horrific events the pair were forced to endure.  I’m fairly certain we’d have some national media attention, the term ‘hate crime’ thrown around in animated letters across the screen, and the usual suspects arriving to hold press conferences on the victims’ families’ lawns.

Welcome to the new equality.  I apologize if I interrupted the latest update on Don Imus.

• CRO has a blistering commentary on the episode.
• Flopping Aces calls it what it is: a hate crime.
• And slightly out of left field… Charlie Daniels.

Ever since Neil Gaiman wrote the Sandman series of comic books, I have avoided him like mumbling bums outside a 7-11.  I couldn’t stand the comics and never saw what anyone of substance would like about them.  They reminded me of the graphic equivalent to Anne Rice novels.  A bunch of dark, overly-emotional characters running around trying to shock the reader with child sex scenes (Anne Rice, that is) or quirky dialogue (Sandman, that is) just didn’t do it for me.

So when those people who liked Sandman said, “You have to read American Gods,” I just nodded and avoided the confrontation.

Then I got bored and actually started reading it.  About fifty or so pages in I was hooked.  It’s not Atlas Shrugged or Animal Farm, but by the time I finished reading it, I was wishing there were more books to follow with the same characters in the same world.  That’s how I judge a book overall, really.  If the writer gets in my head and makes me want more, then the writer has succeeded.

American Gods is the story of a guy named Shadow (which initially was a big turnoff, how lame) who falls in with a bunch of ignored gods.  Shadow is hired on as an enforcer for Mr. Wednesday (Odin) but finds out he’s part of a much larger plot.

There’s a twist near the end, but you see it coming before the reveal.  Still it’s an interesting turn of events.

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being anything with Fabio on the cover and 10 being Beowulf, I’d put American Gods at about a 6.  I’ll read and enjoy most things 4 or above, so take that into account.  Anne Rice lives at 3.  Chuck Palahniuk and Tolkein live at 8.  Robert Howard at 7.  Robert Jordan lived at 7 but he’s moved to 5 and might even move further down the street if he doesn’t stop with the 700 page monstrosities involving braid tugging for half a tome…

It didn’t take long to happen at all.  Within a day of the ‘potentially habitable planet’ being discovered the Internet was rife with comments like those from “the atheist network“:

• …just to watch the godies try to explain why god didn’t mention that lil’ fact.
• At the point where we find life on other planets is the point where religion diminishes.

I remember a point in my life where I thought atheists were brave and rational.  They were atheists in the face of an overwhelmingly religious world and they had the rhetoric to back up their views.  Now, atheism seems to be a degenerate pack of kids who would rather shred up a skate park rather than foster even a small spark of original thought.

The fact of the matter is, if new life is found anywhere it will simply be absorbed into the religious school of thought.  Where atheists attempt to shout down Christians as closed-minded caveman thinkers, here is what I found on Christian-themed blogs about the new discovery.  From Ian O’Corrain (whom I’ll forgive for linking to HuffPost):

This article just appeared in the online version of Time. We are at the point now of finding earth-like planets elsewhere in the universe. That’s some pretty damn exciting news. For theologians, we may need to make some adjustments to our doctrine of creation!

What?  Adapt belief in the face of new information?  No way!  The ‘new atheism’ as described earlier seems to believe religion is the anti-science.  That’s a mental shortcut, of course.  The passage above is filled with excitement.  And Ian is not alone.  From The Reformed Pastor:

I never doubted that this day would come, and I don’t doubt that life beyond Earth will one day be found, maybe in my lifetime, maybe not (whether it will be sentient life or not is another matter, of course). The idea that the God who is Creator would restrict His bringing forth of life to just one planet in the universe has always struck me as extremely unlikely. I can’t wait for the next development.

Eagerness at the prospect?  From a Pastor?  How odd, or is it… from the Wittenburg Community Church blog:

Afterall who wouldn’t love to visit a new planet and see amazing sights that no human eye has beheld?  I certainly would.  Even if I never get to leave spaceship earth, I know that as a child of God I will eventually get to see a new earth, a renewed earth.

While that message is certainly chock full of faith and belief, the underlying excitement is felt by both the religious and scientific community.  Now I have to ask, which one is acting exclusionary here?  Both have the same hopes and level of enthusiasm, but they have different reasons.  I don’t believe one has any more validity over the other when you consider them both in the context of peace of mind.

It reminds me of a favorite poem by Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004):

If There Is No God

If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother’s keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying that there is no God.

Secularists would do well to take note that they still have responsibilities as part of humanity, even if there is no God.

So you should benefit from some Oregonian wisdom.  Head over to Skalduggery and read about men without chests, cowardice, and virtues.  A bit from the Skald:

Our culture progresses into idiocy for lack of that central organ in man, the chest, which is atrophied by the very cowards who cut their own hearts out. Lewis reminds us that “the head rules the belly through the chest.” The head representing our reason, the belly our appetites, and the chest – “The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal” (Lewis, 1943).

From another author I respect on the subject of manhood:

We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.

-Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

For the 700th time this year, I’ll recommend Throwaway Dads.  Not only does it explain why children need fathers, it explains how the United States has allowed the banner of equality, not to be confused with actual equality, to overrun a man’s default state and teach him he’s wrong for being who he is.

You have to read it to believe it.  I can’t think of anything clever to say…

I’d seen several of Akira Kurosawa’s films over the years, but after signing up with NetFlix I got to see more of his films than Toshiro Mifune could shake a katana at.  With the exception of Throne of Blood (Kumonosu jô), they were all time well spent.  There was a definite surprise for me when I found a non-samurai movie in the mix and, even better, it surpassed half the crap pouring out of Hollywood today (suck it, Hostel).

And so, without any critical explanation, I submit to you the top 5 best Kurosawa movies according to the Coffeespy:

1. The Seven Samurai - Cliche as it is to say, it’s the best.
2. Stray Dog - A film noir cop drama that I can’t recommend highly enough to black and white fans.  You won’t believe this movie is from 1949.
3. Yojimbo/Sanjuro - Yes, that’s two movies, but they’re both about Toshiro Mifune being a badass so they tie at 3. 
4. Kagemusha - It’s a later film but the use of color and small sets… ok, I said I wouldn’t get critical.  There’s lots of samurai battles, man.
5. Rashômon - Wow.  Who’da thought a spiffy plot could make a movie interesting, eh?

Each film had a digital special effects budget the size of Joel Schumacher’s talent, which is to say none at all (I’ll never forgive you, Joel.  Batnipples… really.).  The movies are really simply Kurosawa’s raw talent and, in the case of Toshiro Mifune, his awesome presence.  If you have NetFlix, add ‘em to your cue.

That’s right, in front of the television.  I watch two shows with regularity: Heroes and the Shield.  And Heroes is back on track, finally.

USA Today has a decent round-up of where we left off for those who can’t remember.  Also, iTunes has all the episodes on-line.  I’ve heard NBC does, but every time I go to their web site they’re missing 6-8 episodes.