SSO: "Senator Santorum's office."
Willis: "Hello there... took me awhile to get through. Guess you're pretty busy what with all this going on."
SSO: "Yes."
Willis: "Well I just wanted you to know that my wife and I are big supporters of the Senator, but we have just one question..."
SSO: "Yes?"
Willis: "Does oral sex between a husband and wife, when they're both consenting... does that constitute sodomy?"
The best way to play this game is by doing what others aren’t. If someone has already assumed the position of tribe leader, stay back and do nothing. You won’t get the lead role for the time being, but you can save yourself from being voted out. If no one has been crowned leader, seize it! And make sure no other player tries to usurp your power or topple you by voting out the threats and psyching players back beneath your finger. You’ll have control over the others and net the win.
We met up with several Australian bloggers later in the evening. I'm missing one here, but with Tom of aftergrog.blogspot.com and Alan of alananderson.blogspot.com and a third gentlemen whose name (and blog) escapes me. I'm hoping Tim can stick it in a comment if he gets to my blog today. But they all claimed to have read my blog -- and if they hadn't I wish I could have lied as convincingly -- and we just mused about how much the Blogosphere brings the world together -- we've got friends all over the planet now and I, who was never promethian about the internet, can't say enough good things about this.
One cool thing, of course, was getting to remind Tim to check out my friend Adam Bonin's blog -- Throwing Things -- (bad connection here in the lobby, so no links 'cuz I cannot I'm not surfing to check the links). What was cool, of course, was that Tim (who didn't know Adam and I are friends) said, more or less: "that's one of the greatest blogs there is. I need to read it more. He's practically the only fellow doing something different in the Blogosphere."
The problems with "Confidence," which opens today nationwide, are summed up by Mr. Burns's performance, which is difficult to distinguish from any of his other performances, except that his hair is shorter. The conviction of his own infinite charm and intelligence is apparently so strong that he need never manifest the slightest vulnerability, doubt or complicated emotion — anything, in other words, that might be called acting. He is so glib and lazy as to make Ben Affleck look like the young Dustin Hoffman.
As for the older Mr. Hoffman, he seems to be angling for a place in the middle-aged hambone pantheon along with Christopher Walken and Al Pacino. His antic, gum-chewing turn is pure throwaway shtick, but it shows up Mr. Burns, who in their scenes together stands around flat-footed, basking in his own cocky cuteness, which he, and the movie, persist in mistaking for style.
Me: I'm so immobilized by this arm injury. I should probably watch King Gimp for some pointers on getting around.
Jen: King Gimp? You're not even the Duke of gimp!
ten minutes later
Jen: Hell, you're not even the Dauphin Gimp.
Now, although Peacock net programming execs say the sitcom's 13 remaining episodes have been postponed until this summer, Just Shoot Me has apparently just shot its wad. Its time slot has been replaced with specials for the upcoming sweeps month, including The Most Outrageous Game Show Moments airing May 6. Just Shoot Me's current contract expires at the end of this season.
(emphasis added)
So long, Madonna.
Okay, technically speaking, she's still alive. But for all pop-cultural intents and purposes, the former Material Girl officially immaterializes tonight, when she guest stars on Will & Grace (Global, NBC, 9 p.m.). . . .
Tonight's episode, which deliberately falls on the first night of the spring sweeps period, will be followed by a special Will & Grace "guest star clip show," featuring past appearances from, among others, Glenn Close, Cher and Demi Moore.
Did you get that? Madonna's name is now on a list with Glenn Close, Cher and Demi Moore. This is not dissimilar to being on a list with Boy George and Emilio Estevez.
Who's that girl? No, more like what happened to that girl?
Buster: Yeah, Soriano. When I started covering baseball he was like twelve, thirteen years old. I’ve had the experience of going through a number of different situations in seeing how players handle things. Let me give you an example. Randy Keisler was pitching for the Yankees [This was in 2001] and he had a bad game, and he was very emotional, and he basically ripped Stottlemyre and Torre saying, ‘They didn’t have faith in me.’ It’s my job as a reporter to ask the player his opinion. It’s not my job to protect him from his own opinion. I remember sitting there, listening to this and thinking, oh you dumb schmuck. But, hey, you know, you are supposed to report what the player is feeling. And there are times, as I get older, you definitely develop an instinct for, this is what you should say, this is what would probably be best, but you can’t inject yourself that way.
BB: That kind of outburst was rare on the David Cone Yankees.
Buster: I think that Cone clearly was a guy who always knew how to deal with the press. Think of the players involved. Jeter is very savvy. He’s intentionally boring, I think. He tones down his opinions because he knows how dangerous is can be for a player like him to go too far out on a limb. He’s careful. O’Neill was great if the team played bad, because he would just indict himself. But if they played well, he would he would run away from you because he was superstitious and thought if he said anything, he’d blow it.
If CANCUN succeeds, which it unfortunately seems to have an excellent change of doing, "it could cause a seismic shift in the ways teen movies are made, just as the runaway success of AMERICAN IDOL and SURVIVOR has revolutionized the look - and economics - of network television," [the LA Times' Patrick] Goldstein wrote.
Hey, that would be terrific. Fewer plots, less writing, less acting, less cost to the producers, and a lot more assholes on the screen. If only D. W. Griffith and Ernst Lubitsch were around to share in this moment of industry pride.
(a) team up to combat a ruthless international crime syndicate?
(b) deliver a withering critique of America's obsession with body image?
(c) help train a crusty old boxer for one last fight?, or
(d) argue at first, but end up learning valuable life lessons from each other?
Ferrell, the former "Saturday Night Live" cast member who finished in 3:56:12, enjoyed his third marathon.
"It's truly an amazing event," he said. "The crowds couldn't have been nicer. It's almost a bit of a blur. I just want to apologize to all the people I passed gas in front of, but that just comes with the territory, I guess."
''It's truly an amazing event. Along with the history and everything, it's a bit of a blur,'' Ferrell said. ''Heartbreak Hill felt like a lovely summer day ... and then you get hit over the head with a hammer.''
Checkpoints
5k - 0:27:17
10k - 0:55:38
15k - 1:23:09
20k - 1:51:36
Half - 1:57:50
25k - 2:20:17
30k - 2:49:09
35k - 3:17:33
40k - 3:44:34
Official Time - 3:56:12
6. The minor characters, such as Bad Jack Crawley, such a bad man that Bob Dylan wrote a song to keep him in jail.
7. Homer: 'Operator, give me the number for 911!'
42. Bart's one trophy. Inscribed 'Everybody Gets A Trophy Day.'
59. Homer: Donut?
Lisa: 'No, thanks. Do you have any fruit?
Homer: [offers some of the donut he's eating] This has purple stuff inside. Purple is a fruit.
129-134. The five most emancipated sayings of the Malibu Stacy dolls (as collected by Smithers and Lisa) - 'I wish they taught shopping in school'; 'Let's bake some cookies for the boys'; 'Don't ask me - I'm just a girl'; Now let's forget our troubles with a big bowl of strawberry ice-cream'; 'Thinking too much gives you wrinkles' and 'My name is Malibu Stacy but you can call me (wolf-whistle).'
Frank Booth: What kind of beer you drink, neighbor?
Jeffrey Beaumont: Heineken.
Frank Booth: Heineken? F*ck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!
Mr. Pacino's more or less recent body of work — from "Sea of Love," the 1989 crime melodrama that marked his comeback as a movie star, through "People I Know" — may look, at first glance, like the usual screen actor's grab bag: high-concept studio pictures and quirky indie projects, genre exercises and improbable stunts, interesting mediocrities and a handful of rough gems. But there is also, beneath the surface diversity, a strange consistency, almost as if the individual roles were episodes in a single ongoing performance. Again and again, Mr. Pacino has chosen to explore the inner condition and outward behavior of a middle-aged man who lives haunted by the after-effects of a calamitous, generally self-inflicted defeat, someone who has survived his own moral or material failure and now must struggle to evade its deathly shadow. Sometimes these men find redemption, sometimes destruction. Occasionally they fumble toward love, though more typically it has long since slipped from their grasp. Their principal relationships tend to be with younger men (and occasionally, as with Hilary Swank's worshipful young cop in "Insomnia," with women) for whom the old-timers serve variously (sometimes simultaneously) as mentors, tormentors, confessors and role models.
But they are all, somehow, variations on a theme. Mr. Pacino has become, deliberately or not, our foremost cinematic embodiment of male midlife decay, exposing souls that have been betrayed, corrupted, worn down and otherwise damaged by weakness, hubris or the sheer ferocity of their own personalities.
