Peter Krupa

It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a movie as much as I enjoyed Wall-E. And at the risk of hyperbole, I think someday, a decade or two from now, people will look back at this movie as a cultural turning point. How can I say this… Wall-E feels like it was made by a different generation. By a generation that grew up tinkering with computers and treasuring a past it never experienced. Not to get all Obama-y, but Wall-E somehow felt like the Babyboomers had been locked out of the studio. I’d be curious to hear what other people thought.

If you haven’t been following the Betancourt/Colombian military/FARC/dramatic Hollywood rescue saga, Simon Romero has an excellent round-up in the New York Times this morning. The official version is that the Colombian military tricked the FARC into putting their prize hostages onto two “international mission”-looking helicopters that appeared to be of Venezuelan origin. In reality, they were Colombian military. The operation rescued a handful of high-profile hostages and made the FARC look ridiculous.

The thing is, it’s all just a little too perfect. Uribe is coming off as a national hero just at the moment when he must decide whether to make the legally-sketchy move of running for a third term. Some Swedish radio station is saying that the “rescue” was really a ransom, paid by the U.S., of $20 million. While I’m not inclined to believe Swedish radio stations per se, it seems really likely that something “extra” is going on.

Either that, or Colombians are just total bad-asses. Which, you know, is also kind of true.

Here’s a great, inadvertent example of why newspapers are going out of business. Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, publishes a profile in a recent issue of Portfolio on god-like media blogger Jim Romenesko. He concludes, rather presumptively, about a third of the way into the piece:

Newspaper publishers assumed that even if the printing press disappeared, the internet would still have an insatiable need for their basic product - verified facts, hierarchically arranged by importance. But Romenesko’s rapid growth showed that even newsrooms are part of the emerging market for an unprocessed sprawl of information, delivered immediately and with as few filters as possible between the fingertips of one laptop user and the eyeballs of another. In short, it’s not technology per se that’s killing newspapers; it’s plummeting demand for quality information.

The arrogance of this paragraph is toe-curling, this idea that the only place one can get “quality information” is from newspapers, and you poor, stupid pleebs on the Interwebs just don’t even realize you need an editor to wipe your ass and tell you what to read. People like Raines are seriously out of touch.

In one of the creepiest videos I’ve seen in some time, Christopher Hitchens gets waterboarded in what looks like a garage in Naperville, Illinois. He lasts about 15 seconds. In the post-op interview, some days later, he is visibly shaken, and says he has begun having nightmares. Kudos to Hitch - more pundits should try out the things they gab about. Politicians too.

NB - I’m presently reading Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. The brutality and incompetence of the whole thing is at once embarrassing and scary, as well as (in post-9/11 retrospect) not at all surprising.

Maybe it’s because I work from home now, so I no longer have to be out in it, but the afternoon rain has become one of my favorite parts of the day. The clouds come in and a cool breeze kicks up and the rain comes roaring down on all the tin roofs, straight down, like it’s heavier than other rain. I always imagine that the jungle is still covering the Central Valley, or I think of the Ticos in the countryside taking shelter from the aguacero to drink afternoon coffee and watch it come down.

When you live in a foreign country, you become hyper-sensitive to the preoccupations and foibles and absurdities of your adopted land. Then one day you inadvertently turn that sensitivity on your own culture, looking it square in its lazy-eyed, slack-jawed, moon-shaped face, and you wonder what in the hell is going on.

More to the point, I just had the misfortune to watch a few minutes of an episode of 24. Keep in mind that there hasn’t been a single terrorist attack on American soil (nor a conviction for the planning thereof) for almost seven years, and before that it was another seven years. Yet for some reason, there exists a TV show - a hugely (or formerly hugely?) popular TV show - completely dedicated to the machinations of shady brown men with names like “Ahmed” and “Yusef” who, like an indiscriminate alligator in some one-off horror flick, want to hurt white people living in the suburbs.

A woman on the show literally just called 911 and said, “A terrorist is holding my son hostage.”

A terrorist! A terrorist? As if the 911 operator is going to say, “Of course! A terrorist! Happens all the time!”

Seriously, is this what people in the United States are thinking about? Terrorists hurting their families? For fuck’s sake, this is the lamest terrorist threat in the history of terrorist threats, even below bee-swarms, lightning strikes, nail gun accidents, dehydration, etc. etc.

And yet we have politicians making campaign ads about jihad (”this century’s nightmare“) and idiots in West Virginia who won’t vote for Obama because they think he’s a Muslim! Any more of this and I will respectfully resign.

Working class; Reagan Democrats; the Racist Vote. I’m sorry, but who, in the history of the United States, has ever claimed electability because they were ahead in the polls in West Fucking Virginia? Unless, of course, they were running against a black man?

Hillary! Please. Stop.

From the New Yorker:

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.

Philly cops pull over two dudes and beat the living shit out of them. A friend of mine saw something similar happen close to his house the other day - in Costa Rica. Eh, Costa Rica, Philly, I guess they’re both developing countries.