Prison chase

What comedian Benny Hill taught us is that footage of almost any chase can be made funny by speeding it up and adding the tune Yakety Sax as the sound track. Here the theory is applied to a chase within a prison as captured by the closed circuit surveillance cameras. (Via Boing Boing.)

I just love the tune Yakety Sax. It never fails to cheer me up and put me in a good mood.

Palin fan biopic maintains the pace

Tbogg does the math to contrast the pathetic ticket sales of the Palin fan biopic The Undefeated with the spin by Fox News that the “Palin Film Opens Strong, Theaters Packed.” (One wag noted about the film’s title, it is easy to be undefeated if you keep quitting halfway through everything.)

Meanwhile Stephen Colbert gives his take on the film.

Daniel Radcliffe appeared on The Daily Show. I realized that I had never seen him except in the Harry Potter films. Given his massive success at a young age, he could easily have turned into a brat, but he comes across as quite an unassuming, self-deprecating young man.

Livening up the fourth

Over at National Review Online, Dennis Prager has come up with an exciting new ritual to liven up that dull holiday known as the fourth of July that he hopes will instill in young people a better understanding of the true meaning of the event. He says he based it on the Passover seder and we know that there is nothing that children like to do on a holiday more than engage in solemn quasi-religious rituals instead of running around outside eating hot dogs and watching parades and fireworks. Here’s a sample of Prager’s ritual (I am not making this up):

Host holds up each symbolic item as he explains its symbolic meaning.

  • We drink iced tea to remember the Boston Tea Party. “No taxation without representation” was the patriots’ chant as they dumped British tea into the Boston Harbor.
  • We eat a salty pretzel to remember the tears shed by the families who lost loved ones in the struggle for freedom in the Revolutionary War and all the wars of freedom that followed.
  • We ring a bell to recall the Liberty Bell, which was rung to announce the surrender of the king’s army. On the Bell are inscribed these words from the Book of Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”
  • We eat strawberries and blueberries dipped in whipped cream to celebrate the red, white, and blue of our flag.

Once this gem hit the internet, there was much merriment in the land, courtesy of Tbogg and James Wolcott.

The Daily Show on CNN’s coverage of Monday’s ‘debate’

I do not, of course, waste my time watching these ridiculous ‘debates’. Anyone who has taken part in actual debates will dismiss the idea that these events come anywhere close to the real thing. What they remind me of are circuses with a self-important host pacing the floor like a ringmaster and the ‘contestants’ (which is what they are, not candidates) waiting like animals to do their well-rehearsed tricks.

Some blog accounts of Monday’s event said that the contestants had been asked questions like ‘Coke or Pepsi?’ I assumed that the writers were being funny, parodying the triviality of the whole thing. It was only when I watched the above clip that I realized that this had actually happened. Why didn’t at least one contestant refuse to answer on the grounds that such questions were silly and beneath them? I am waiting for the day when one of the contestants tells the smug, overweening TV personalities that run these things (they are not journalists) to get serious or go to hell.

I find it hard to comprehend that we have sunk so low, that we have trivialized to such an extent such an important aspect of civic life as selecting the people who get to govern us. We have ceased to be a serious people and deserve the rotten governments that result.