men of good fortune, very often can't do a thing


beautiful vicious and deadly roses painting, damien hirst

* top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

"2. The White House Cabal

"Adding to George W. Bush's political woes, last Thursday Colin Powell's former chief of staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson made a devastating attack on the administration, and talked of his time inside the White House:

"'What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.

"'If you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.

"Wilkerson also placed the blame for Abu Ghraib squarely on the shoulders of the administration, called Condoleezza Rice 'part of the problem' (sorry, Dick Morris), said that the military is overstretched and demoralized, and made a painful comparison between George Bush 41 and George Bush 43, calling the former 'one of the finest presidents we have ever had,' while the latter is 'not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either.''

"Wow. With friends like these..."

* Oral history of the making of The Warriors. excerpt:

"Van Valkenburgh (played mercy): You think about the intensity of what is being filmed today, our stuff was balletic and abstract and there is only one bit of blood in the entire movie. It’s more like the Three Stooges than anything else.

"Hill (director): Everybody always talks about the fights - and it’s very stylized, it’s not brutally realistic - and my intention was to get laughs. I saw it with a big audience a lot of times and it got a lot of laughs, and the right kind of laughs. But that’s rarely commented on. The unfortunate things that happened after the release of the movie darkened the image, so the idea that there is a lot of humor in the movie got forgotten then. In one sense I think it remains forgotten, but not with its fans, so what the hell.

"Beck (played swan of the warriors): I remember hearing that in Paris it was playing like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. People were lining up for midnight showing as characters. This was within four or five years of it’s initial release. At that point I knew that this picture has got a different kind of thing going on now.

"Kelly (played Luther of the rogues): Adam Sandler told me a story about Eddie Vedder having the “Warriors, come out to play” chant on his answering machine for years."

* fm, by the mountain goats

* more than you'd probably want to know about your favorite major leaguers.