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Extra bits and links

Jan 04 2008
Love0

Patton Oswalt on alcohol and flying

By Asides, Food & Drink

And while we are on the sub­ject of drink­ing, here’s Patton Oswalt:

Southwest Airlines.
No more. I’m done. That’s it.
“Ladies and gen­tle­men, there’s a pas­sanger with a young child who would like to be able to sit with her. As we are a very crowded flight, if there are two pas­sen­gers who’d be will­ing to move so they could sit together –”
“Ma’am? We’ll move.”
“That was so nice of you guys. I can offer you free alco­hol­ic bever­ages for the dur­a­tion of the flight.”
The two guys who moved (FOR THE ENTIRE THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTE FLIGHT): “Aw yeah! Fuck yeah, ma-hun! Free booze! Par-tay! (etc. etc.)
Everyone else (FOR THE ENTIRE THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTE FLIGHT): “What the FUCK?! Why’nint that cunt SAY we’d get free fuck­ing drinks?! No fair! Bullshit!”
If you’re HAPPY about get­ting free beer and cheap blen­ded whis­key for thirty-eight minutes, or SAD about NOT get­ting free beer and cheap blen­ded whis­key for thirty-eight minutes, you need to die. In a plane crash. And I get to fuck your eyes while we’re crashing.

Once upon a time I might have been one of those people and now, I think, I see them all the time.

Dec 11 2007
Love0

The Death of Mr Fiscuteanu

By Asides, Cinema

Ion Fiscuteanu, a Romanian stage and film act­or known to inter­na­tion­al audi­ences for his role in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, died early Saturday in Bucharest. He was 70.

“He was a strong char­ac­ter with strong ideas,” Mr. Puiu said of Mr. Fiscuteanu. “Every day he told me how much he hates Bucharest, how much he hates his char­ac­ter, how much he hates play­ing this char­ac­ter, but he accep­ted it and had to go to the end.”

The Death of Mr Lazarescu was my favour­ite film of 2006. It did not get a com­mer­cial release and is unavail­able on loc­al release DVD (even from Aro St). And yet you can buy a Transformers Special Edition Box Set – there is no justice in this world.

Nov 23 2007
Love0

By Asides, Current Events, Literature

Screenwriter Ronan Bennett cri­ti­cises Martin Amis for his ques­tion­able pos­i­tion­ing on present day inter-cultural rela­tions (and oth­er com­ment­at­ors for essen­tially giv­ing him a free pass):

As a nov­el­ist, Amis is free to do whatever he wants with his char­ac­ters, but the hijack­ers’ steps on the road to 9/11 repay invest­ig­a­tion. Reducing the motiv­a­tion of the enemy to blood­lust leads nowhere, as the exper­i­ence of the British in Ireland proved. The res­ult will be wrong and it will be cliché. It may be, giv­en Amis’s spec­tac­u­lar powers, flam­boy­ant, but that will only make it flam­boy­ant cliché. Horrorism. Death cult. Thanatoid. Striking words but poor sub­sti­tutes for under­stand­ing, reas­on and real knowledge.

I am a big fan of Amis’ writ­ing but I con­fess to being uncom­fort­able with some of the pos­i­tions he is tak­ing at the moment.

Nov 13 2007
Love0

By Asides

Russell Brand on his exper­i­ence at sex addic­tion rehab:

In that situ­ation, how­ever, ali­en­ated from my nor­mal sur­round­ings, I real­ised that the out­er sur­face of what I thought was my unique, indi­vidu­al iden­tity was just a set of routines. We all have an essen­tial self, but if you spend every day chop­ping up meat on a slab, and selling it by the pound, soon you’ll find you’ve become a butcher. And if you don’t want to become a butcher (and why would you?), you’re going to have to cut right through to the bare bones of your own char­ac­ter in the hope of find­ing out who you really are. Which bloody hurts.

(via The Guardian)

Oct 20 2007
Love0

By Asides, Current Events

Of course it’s about oil (Jim Holt in the London Review of Books):

It has been estim­ated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a fur­ther 220 bil­lion bar­rels of undis­covered oil; anoth­er study puts the fig­ure at 300 bil­lion. If these estim­ates are any­where close to the mark, US forces are now sit­ting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low pro­duc­tion costs, would be of the order of $30 tril­lion at today’s prices. For pur­poses of com­par­is­on, the pro­jec­ted total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

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