Things that amuse me tonight.
Clement Greenberg the painter said, “More blue is bluer than less blue”. Of course it is. It is damn obvious too but no one ever verbalized it before him. If you want to increase the impact on the viewer of blue in a painting add more blue! How could everyone have overlooked this for years. They were too busy painting cherubs.
Ricardo Montalban is the greatest actor ever. I make this statement because of one line in one movie. Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Kahn. You know the scene. It’s where Khan is moving in to blast the Enterprise into the next world but that ever tricky Captain Kirk has some magic up his sleeve. Kirk hacks into Kahn’s ship and turns the shields off. This leads to the single greatest acting moment ever when Khan’s second hand man turns to him and says, “Khan the shields are lowering”. This makes Ricardo turn to his guy with a look on his face of total surprise mixed with “is this kid half a retard?” and says the greatest line ever uttered in a movie. “Raise them!” The delivery is perfection. The obviousness of the line is what makes it great. It’s so obvious that no one would ever think to say it let alone write it into a movie. But Ricardo says it brilliantly. He says it like his number two told him, “I just wet my pants” and he has to respond, “Go change your friggin pants then, idiot”. The stuff of legend.
It’s hip to say that The Simpsons isn’t as good as it once was but I’m not hip and tonight’s episode was especially good. I loved the line where Homer threatened to kill Bart and then bury him in a shallow grave and then dig him up again because, “That’s the beauty of a shallow grave”. Heh heh, who knew it had such beauty?
I painted a little picture of a thumb that amuses me. I think I’ll post it.
I’m going to end with one thing that doesn’t amuse me. You know all the talk we have been hearing for the last four years or so about a “dirty bomb”? That the terrorists are going to put radioactive material into a bomb and set it off? It turns out that a dirty bomb doesn’t even really work well. Radiation doesn’t spread very effectively that way and it is fairly easy to clean up. The bomb will still kill you but the radiation won’t. The military even ran some tests and couldn’t get it to be an effective weapon. Sill the politicians and the media scare us with this threat weekly. Lied to again. Look it up yourself.
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