Daniel Day-Lewis is awesome

I have a thesis about movies. It is as follows: Daniel Day-Lewis is good in everything. As a corollary: Daniel Day-Lewis only appears in good movies. Even the ones that aren't that great are raised up out of the muck by Day-Lewis's appearance in them. He's great for your 19th Century literary adaptations having starred in The Age of Innocence, The Last of the Mohicans, A Room With a View. He elevates mediocre prestige pictures (like the above literary adaptations and Gangs of New York which should have just not had Cameron Diaz or Leonardo DiCaprio in it at all) with stellar performances. He shows up in little art house pictures like The Ballad of Jack and Rose and The Name of the Father and he will break your heart. And friends, I firmly believe that he is going to melt your face off with this one:



Ladies and Gentlemen, I submit to you that There Will Be Blood!

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Badass Popes

If you step to any of these Holy Pontiffs you will get iced.

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November 19, 1863

I was gonna do this, but Brad DeLong beat me to it.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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Something that I've been kicking around

I'm a fan of the blogs of economists Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong. Krugman teaches at Princeton and writes for the New York Times Op/Ed page while DeLong teaches at Berkeley and is a formal Clinton administration Treasury official. Both are illuminating and at ease writing about technical economic matters, politics, and culture. I've been trying to read more mainstream economic writing in the last year or so and both of these blogs are invaluable educational resources from well respected and reputable economic scholars.

All of this introduction is preamble to the following observation: both are extremely shrill in their opposition to the Bush administration. I mean, Professor DeLong even maintains Shrillblog, a roundup of "shrill" anti-Bush writing on the web.

My question is: why?

Neither of these guys is in any danger of voting for the Green Party candidate for any office. I doubt if either have ever attended any kind of demonstration or ever carried a picket sign. Both are pro-free markets, pro-free trade. Krugman is one of the centrist neo-liberal thinkers for whom the Washington Monthly coined the term "neo-liberal" in the late '80s/early '90s to distinguish them from actual left-liberals. These guys are the dictionary definition of "sensible" "establishment" figures. But to read their political writing you'd think that they were editors for the Socialist Workers newsletter. They hate this president and his party. Professor DeLong often ends posts with the phrase, "Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now." Krugman is one of the few mainstream media figures willing to use words like "lie" and "illegal" when describing the action of the Bush White House.

I'm interested in the sheer divisive power of the President. If middle of the road, pro-market moderate economists are driven to "shrill unholy madness" in DeLong's memorable phrase, then we are truly witness to one of the sorriest White Houses in years.

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Embarrasingly sexist comment of the evening.

If more anthropologists were as attractive as that lady on Bones then I might have stayed in the field. Also, in the defense of anthropologists everywhere, in my experience they are not socially retarded super-nerds like the ones on the show. In fact, anthropologists are a friendly beer-drinking sort of people who are among the most well adjusted folks whose occupation ends in "-ologist."
Also, this is what my lack of money and late-arriving Netflix has wrought: I watching Bones...which is not a good show.

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